Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children

[Valley Oak]

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Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHbYJfwFgOU)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHbYJfwFgOU

Published on Aug 23, 2012

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Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. According to Bill Nye, aka "the science guy," if grownups want to "deny evolution and live in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them."

-- Transcript:
Denial of evolution is unique to the United States. I mean, we're the world's most advanced technological—I mean, you could say Japan—but generally, the United States is where most of the innovations still happens. People still move to the United States. And that's largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science. When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.

As my old professor, Carl Sagan, said, "When you're in love you want to tell the world." So, once in a while I get people that really—or that claim—they don't believe in evolution. And my response generally is "Well, why not? Really, why not?" Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.

It's just really hard a thing, it's really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it.

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[podfish]

.Denial of evolution is unique to the United States.i should really track my source for the following stuff down, but I'm a bit more lazy than usual right now.. i

anyway, I recently saw an article that describes a context that fits better with my own prejudices about how this works in the 'real world' of the population at large. The essence of it was, that it's not nearly as bad as it sounds and it's largely an effect of surveying. They claimed that if you press farther you get much more nuanced answers.

Apparently only a tiny number of people believe god opened his cage and let every single species out into Eden, then pulled the rib from Adam and voila' .. done with creation for all time. What you do find is that there really aren't a lot of followers of Dawkins and that ilk - that most won't accept a completely mechanistic undirected and random process. Unfortunately, that's what really created species, so most are wrong.

But the Wacco community is full of people who believe in spiritual forces that influence the world and creatures in it, so we're probably right in their with the rest of the U.S. and I've got to believe the world at large. Americans are overtly religious and personalize god, maybe more than is common in Europe but from what I can tell less so than in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

People assume there's divine attention on them all the time, kind of like a helicopter parent, and extend that to pretty much everything else. So when they've been given the impression that accepting evolution means denying that the big eye's on things, they refuse to say they accept it. But few will outright reject that there's something in common between the lineage of a hippo and a horse. More will take the view attributed to the wife of a bishop in England after hearing of Darwin's work: “Descended from the apes! My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.”