January 27, 2015 | David F. Coppedge

Bill Nye Admits to Propagating Evolution Via Emotional Stories

National Geographic gives Bill Nye the Science Guy an open mike to make unchallenged generalities, with feeling.

In a “Book Talk” segment, National Geographic writer Jane J. Lee let her bias known right in the headline and sub-heading: “Why Bill Nye Calls Evolution ‘Undeniable’ and Creationism ‘Inane’: Darwin’s theory explains so much of the world, from bumblebees to human origins, says the Science Guy.

Jane threw softball questions to Bill Nye about his new book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation.  She began by reviewing Nye’s debate with Ken Ham: but don’t expect equal time for Ham in this piece, nor any quotes from the hundreds of books in the Answers in Genesis bookstore at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where the debate was held last February (2/04/14). Instead, she let Nye trash creationism with emotional remarks like, “The inanity took my breath away.”

Emotionalism and storytelling is actually a running theme in Nye’s responses. He’s proud of it. Scientific facts are sorely lacking in the article; instead, evolution is portrayed in broad brush strokes as a fact beyond debate. Nye is so passionate about crushing this “inane” worldview, he doesn’t need facts. He needs to attack it with emotion.  Here are some examples with references to fallacies defined in the Baloney Detector:

  • This is the big concern of mine with respect to the organization Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham and all those guys: their relentless, built-in attempts to indoctrinate a generation of science students on a worldview that is obviously wrong. [fearmongering, bluffing, big lie, loaded words, ad hominem]
  • We can’t raise a generation of students who don’t understand the fundamental idea in all of life science, any more than you want to raise a generation of kids who don’t understand chemistry or physics or arithmetic. [analogy, association, half truth]
  • The inanity took my breath away. When you understand anything about astronomy or have just a rudimentary understanding of radioactivity, the Earth is patently not 6,000 years old. It’s silly. [ridicule, generalities, bluffing, ad hominem]
  • [Q] It’s been said that a good way of convincing people of something is to appeal to their emotions. What do you think? [A]  That’s my business! In the book, I purposely spend a lot of time in the first person. The reason is, we find stories compelling. Stories are how we remember things, how we organize things. [plain folks, suggestion, repetition, sidestepping, subversion]
  • When you say, “I feel,” it’s really hard for the reader to say, “No, you don’t.” Yes, I do. I did a lot of that in the book. [subversion, subjectivity]
  • Evolution fills me with reverence for our place within the cosmos, what I like to call “our place in space.” We’re the product of stardust, brought together by gravity—we’re at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself. That, to me, is astonishing. [personification, generalities, redherring, non-sequitur, reductionism, subjectivity]

There’s little scientific support for evolution in this interview. In fact, there’s none. It’s all emotion. It’s all generalities and assumptions, stated with feeling.

Another running theme is one Nye hammered in the debate with Ken Ham: we need to believe in evolution or else America will lose its scientific lead in the world:

But I think taxpayers will realize that you can’t remain competitive in the world, economically, without successful scientists and especially engineers—people who use science to solve problems and make things. I think people on both sides of the aisle will soon grasp that you can’t be successful and ignore science.  [non-sequitur, fear-mongering, red herring, equivocation, subjectivity, loaded words, association, big lie]

It’s historically inaccurate to say that doubting Darwinian evolution equates to “ignoring science” given the eminence of Victorian and 20th century scientists who knew a lot about evolution yet opposed it (Maxwell, Faraday, Pasteur, Lister, Carver, von Braun, Damadian, and dozens more). Nye also errs by calling evolution a “discovery” by Darwin and Wallace. Certainly those two discovered a lot of species, but evolutionary theory was more a proposal for a natural mechanism that they believed tied many disparate facts together; it was not a discovery. Yet Darwinism remains highly controversial today—not just among creationists.  A growing group of secular biologists are daring to defy it out of dissatisfaction with the neo-Darwinist consensus (see The Third Way website). Nye also confuses Darwinism (a biological theory), with astronomy and cosmology.

Ironically, some of the very things that fascinate Bill Nye about science are phenomena creationists use as evidence against evolution:

What we want everybody to experience in science education and science is the joy of discovery.

And I definitely experienced that when I was a little, little kid. I watched bees and watched bees and watched bees and just said, “What’s the deal? How can they possibly do this? Up and down, back and forth, hovering, filling up their pollen baskets.” Pollen looks like it weighs twice what they do, and they have tiny, tiny wings. Flight has always fascinated me.

Creationists have long argued that flight is an irreducibly complex function that defies Darwinian processes (see Flight: The Genius of Birds). Nye also stresses the importance of engineering—a design-focused enterprise. Speaking of flight, it was by watching birds that the Wright brothers were inspired to create a flying machine. That’s one in a long series of engineering achievements based on biomimetics, the imitation of nature’s designs. That tradition continues today as scientists build flying robots modeled after hummingbirds, dragonflies and bats.

We’ve gotta take care of this place,” Nye ends. “Those discoveries come from understanding evolution.” But if he were a consistent Darwinian, he would stand back while unguided, purposeless, aimless processes of nature let stuff happen. It takes ethics, morality, and the long view of things to take care of the world. Those require intelligent design.

The short interview ended with a long string of emotional comments, a few of them thoughtful, but most not any more informed or sophisticated than “you guys are poopy.”

There it is: Bill Nye the Scientism Guy confesses to storytelling! He admits it! He’s proud of it! We need to indoctrinate children with emotional stories, he says, so that they will be compliant lemmings, letting the government lead them down the primrose path to stop global warming and fracking without having to know anything about the evidence. Where is his concern about healthy skepticism of authority? With Nye, it’s (1) Darwin is fact, (2) creationism is silly, (3) trust me. He’s more for passion and advocacy than a stickler for facts, logic, or critical thinking. The guy is clueless about philosophy of science. He’s a bombastic apostle for his idols, Darwin and Sagan.

Exercise: Write a list of questions you would ask Bill Nye if you had the chance. Look for ones that show his assumptions to be self-contradictory or self-refuting. We gave you one clue in the paragraph above about “a consistent Darwinian.” Hone in, also, on his feelings of “the joy of science” and ask him how that evolved, if the goal of natural selection is passing on one’s genes.

Exercise: Are there any of the fallacies in the Baloney Detector that Bill Nye did not commit?  (This is a tough one.)

(Visited 345 times, 1 visits today)

Comments

  • ponder-this says:

    The Third Way link was absolutely fascinating. Darwin is dead? They gave up so easily. Glad to hear that the war is over, but surprised it ended so abruptly (and humorously, in my opinion).

  • dan says:

    I think it is fair to say that we have done such a good job at educating America on the ‘science’ of evolution that it has created the backlash against belief in the theory. Americans are not as dumb as our own scientists would like to believe. The repeated whine that we have failed to educate America is false. It is for just this reason that American citizens are able to understand the fallacies of the failed theory and support the creation ideas, at least on the fundamental basis that it takes more than chance and selection.

    As to Bill Nye, he debated better than any pro evolutionist I have ever heard. As much as I like Ken, pointing to the Book didn’t help the cause. I had hopes he would use the world of proofs that support the integrity of the Bible and draw his conclusions from that.

  • rockyway says:

    “Darwin’s theory explains so much of the world, from bumblebees to human origins, says the Science Guy.

    – It’s more accurate to say; Darwinist theory can be employed to explain much of the world. The fact a theory can be used to explain things doesn’t mean that the explanations are true. If the theory is wrong, then it doesn’t really explain anything… if by explanation we mean an accurate account of reality.

    “We can’t raise a generation of students who don’t understand the fundamental idea in all of life science…

    – When we study the biosphere what is paramount in importance is not a materialist ‘explanation’ for their origin… but the details and the data themselves. To listen to people like Nye you’d think Darwinist theory was more important than the biosphere.

    “We’re the product of stardust, brought together by gravity – we’re at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself. That, to me, is astonishing.

    – If all were merely matter in motion what would this ‘thing’ called astonishment be? Astonishment isn’t a prediction anyone would get from a study of matter. The fact Nye is astonished should tell him that his materialism is fallacious.

    – why is it stardust sounds so much better than dust.

    “What we want everybody to experience in science education and science is the joy of discovery.

    – The experience of joy, alone, should be enough to refute a materialist universe.

    “We’ve gotta take care of this place,” Nye ends.

    – Why? According to materialism, people are just dust held together by gravity, so why worry about it. (According to philosopher David Benatar, a more consistent thinker than Nye, it would be Better Never to Have Been.)

Leave a Reply