I have to admit that I know virtually nothing about Bill Nye the Science Guy, except that he had a science-oriented television show for kids, and that a lot of people liked him. I’ve never even seen his show. But there seems to be a lot of buzz around his new post on the CNN website and his Big Think video (below) dissing creationism. The video pulls no punches, and good for Nye!
The only thing that irritates me about all this is that the CNN post is on the—get this—”Belief” site. Why isn’t it on the “Science” site? What we have is not a controversy involving two beliefs; it’s a controversy between science and superstition.
Two quotes from Nye:
“I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that’s completely inconsistent with the world we observe, 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 engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.”
and his last sentences predict the demise of creationism:
“In another couple centuries I’m sure that worldview won’t even exist. There’s no evidence for it.”
But there hasn’t been any evidence for it since 1859. The persistence of creationism is not a matter of evidence, but of faith. The worldview won’t exist in a couple of centuries if religion goes away. If it doesn’t, creationism will still be around.
h/t: Hempenstein
My kids grew up on Bill Nye the Science Guy. The dude is most excellent.
subscribingomundo
Yes, seconding what gbjames said–Nye’s show was destination television for the most important chunk of my kids’ childhoods, and I think is one reason they find science fun and interesting–entertaining, even–rather than laborious and dull. And as an adult (sort of), I found the show hilarious. It had some of the anarchic flare of “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” but also taught sound scientific principles. It is great to see Nye speaking out like this. I think his many now-grown fans might take what he says to heart.
At the science site: people who already agree with you.
At the Belief site: some people you’d like to reach who don’t now agree with you.
Your complaint seems to me to be totally unfounded.
Yeah, I see your point!
It’s generated well over 10,000 comments. You can’t argue with success like that in terms of how many people it’s stirred up. And judged by the creationist comments, they have absolutely no intelligently designed response….
Literally the first creationist comment I read: “Science doesn’t know squat!” LOL
I wonder how the witless fool thinks that his comment got from his keyboard to the comment thread? Do you suppose that he thinks the knowledge that built the internet came from Genesis?
Those wacky creationists don’t know where they are in the space time continuum. If one genuinely believes science is worthless then they must emulate the Amish. The irony just flies way over their heads.
Even the Amish USE some technology, even though they may not personallly own it.
Bill Nye: STUD.
I watched Nye with my children as they grew up. His program was superb. I have seen other recent videos of Nye and he is still superb.
Carl Sagan was his mentor. Need I say more?
Cornell was a great place to be for planetary science and all kinds of science in the 70s (and likely still is). Nye took on the mantle of nerdy popular-science guy and took off with it – my kids loved his show.
Cornell still plots the daily drives of the MER rover Opportunity. Steve Squyres was the PI for MER. It has faculty who work with the imaging systems on Cassini. In fact just about every NASA deep space mission has at least one Cornell faculty memeber onboard. It is a beacon of rational light in a wilderness of rural conservatism that thinks beer and NASCAR are cultural highs called Central NY. You would never know NYC is just 4 hours away by car.
There are plenty of “hicks” in the Big Apple.
And Nye now serves as director of The Planetary Society, the grassroots science lobbying group founded by Sagan.
I think what we have is a conflict between scientifically sound/warranted belief and religious belief that has been refuted. So I have no problem with it being on the “beliefs” site.
There has been no new evidence for creationism since 1859 (and the old evidence has been debunked) but the evidence against it has been progressively mounting since then.
In particular, modern genetics was scientifically established (phase one in the the 1920s building on work of Mendel and DeVries in the 1860s) (phase two- DNA- in the early 1950s) after Darwin wrote. and is a far far stronger blow IMO to creationist views than Darwin’s original book. This has forced creationists to retreat into increasingly crazy irrational and desparate-sounding arguments. They are now boxed into a corner, not appearing even superficially sound.
Now with the mapping of the human genome, the only even SEMI-credible religious view is Francis Collins, essentially revisionist religion (or as JAC/WEIT would put it retrofitted religion). So I’m a tad more optimistic than JAC/WEIT.
The notion of “warranted” belief originated with Socrates, and was used extensively in a book by my father heavily opposed to by Alvin Plantinga, but has now become a favorite phrase of Plantinga!
I thought I would steal it back in the above post.
Reblogged this on emmageraln.
Bill Nye is a pretty good guy. Perhaps a bit self-promoting at times, but who isn’t, if you reside in the public media?
He was clever to say, “In a few centuries…” because if you say, “…in a decade or so…” then the religionists would respond with a redoubled call-to-arms, and put Bill Nye on a poster as enemy of god number one.
Instead, “in a few centuries..” puts it out there for ten or twenty generations ahead to worry about. We can all relax! Truth is, the velocity/volume of information is accelerating, and people are dropping religious affiliations and outlooks more and more. The less isolated the atheist position feels, the more people who will adopt it.
Personally, anecdotally, I feel all religions will revert to the level of horoscopes and astrology by 2020-2025, because of our ever-increasing amount of technology and communications.
2020-2025: I hope you’re right. I can’t wait for a couple of centuries. I’ll be dead 20 times over.
I personally think it will be a lot longer than that, and will have less to do with the technology and more to do with the communications.
Religions and the supernatural beliefs they spring from rely on a cultural consensus that believing in the supernatural/paranormal is the mark and identification of a good person — a wise, humble, sensitive, caring, insightful, thoughtful person. Increased communication entails increased diversity. When enough people challenge that assumption and argue against the special privileges granted spiritual claims, belief in belief will start to go down and religion will be marginalized.
So I’ll split the difference and say it will take a century, my guess. That’s assuming of course that religious fanatics don’t first successfully bring about nuclear Armageddon in their pious eagerness to cleanse the earth of the insufficiently godly.
Why take the negative “assuming of course”?
When calculators came out in my younger days, it was a major purchase, and few functions.
Those calculators are now available in the 99-cent stores, for 99 cents. Hard-disk-drives, twelve years ago, $200+ for one-third of one GB.
Tablets and other visual devices will decrease in costs. You already see cellphones in Africa. One tablet for every nine poor kids, and those kids will be developing their own information apart from their elders. That will break the cycle of indoctrination (IMHO).
The recent Arab revolutions show the penetration of communication devices (and technology) that no religious pogroms can reverse.
A good analogy would be fording a rushing river (<information). The "religion guy" is now up to his knees, and he must go forward. As soon as he's up to his waist, he'll be lifted up and away, and whether drown and dead, or simply absent, it is of little consequence (how much affect do Norse, Roman, and Aztec religions have upon us? Good literature??!).
One does not need to be in over one's head to be terminally affected by the force of a large volume of moving water, the river.
David Hume made a similar claim over two hundred years ago. He noted that reports of miracle workers and new religious movements happened at the edges of great empires, never in the sophisticated central cities of an empire. Eric Hoffer made a similar claim as recently as the 1950’s. Hume thought that as mass literacy and mass media spread, religious fervor would weaken. Adam Smith thought the same thing and argued that freedom of religion and press would weaken the threat of religious movements to the secular state.
Oh how wrong they were. The LDS church was perfectly in accord with the Hume/Smith model, it formed on the edge of an empire and got to the outer edges as fast as it could. But What about Scientology, The Truthers, Infowars, The Unification Church, Birthers, The Fellowship and The Family, Fox News, and many more?
I think Nye was right to say centuries. 2025 is way too early.
People are leaving US xianity at about 1% a year.
It’s down to 76% of the population, many of them just being box checkers.
At that rate, US xianity will fall below 50% somewhere in the 2030 to 2050 range.
That is assuming a social trend keeps going in a straight line, always a risky assumption. Cultural changes are just slow.
The retention rate of young people in the Southern Baptists is 30% by their own numbers.
I probably won’t be alive in 2030.
Surely the “Belief” site is the better place to post it. Readers of that site are the people who need to listen to what he has to say. Posting it on the “Science” site would just be preaching to the converted, so to speak.
Yes, I agree, as I did above. I retract my criticism!
Maybe the popularizers are not our host’s thing. Now that Sagan and Jules Bergman are gone, Bill Nye is really the reigning king. Presumably, Ira Flatow has a bigger audience these days thanks to NPR. Alan Alda has done great stuff. And the New Atheist leading lights – Coyne (heard of that guy?), Dawkins, give me a minute and another will come to me – are magnificent and their material is approachable but man oh man is there a disinformation campaign against those who focus on evolution and on taking down creationism and ID!
So I would add to Nye’s comments the shock not just at the lack of acceptance of evolution but in general that we only seem to have space for two or three science popularizers at a time. I guess the prior leads to the latter: there is demand for the MythBusters kind of “science,” but by and large what you see on the “science” segment of network news is really stories about technology and about medical research. That’s just where we are as a culture.
I do not know what to think of NPR. It may have been in 2010, but I have not forgotten that Ira Flatow was forced to apologize to the Catholic Church for comments made by his guests, comments that were merely statements of fact. Nor have I forgotten that Neal Conan had Don McElroy on his program, Talk of the Nation, earlier this year. The sole reason for including Mr. McElroy seems to have been to chastise critics for pointing out that Mr. McElroy’s ideas have no basis in reality. Mr Conan’s comment was that it is not nice to criticise religion.
I suspect that there is a huge amount of censorship at NPR. It is obvious that negative comments about religion will not be tolerated. I think this is very sad.
I can’t speak to science reporting, but NPR’s news coverage is certainly subject to censorship, internally or externally. They gave Bush et. al. a free pass on the Iraq lies, and they still won’t call torture torture when the US does it.
Bushco decided NPR was a commie bastion and replaced a large number of its management.
Of course, it immediately took a lurch towards the right and became rather bland and contentless.
I haven’t listened to it since.
Who is Bill Nye talking to? Delusion is not a choice. Nobody “wants” to be deluded and so therefore they are. The deluded people believe their viewpoint is right (by a combination of bad logic and plugging of the ears). If they believe they are right then Bill Nye’s message to them would sound (to them) like telling them to teach their kids wrong things.
If the deluded people really do think the facts support them, then Nye’s message is a challenge to them. They’ll expect to engage him on common ground.
The code word for “wants to be deluded” is “faith,” specifically religious faith. Believers who wave away bad logic, bad evidence, and bad reasoning and just plug their ears often do insist they want to trade the objective world for the one in their hearts. Only people who think these worlds should be consistent and you don’t need all that much ‘faith’ can be reached, I think.
But Bill Nye’s message is not a call to debate. In fact, he says whatever you think, that’s fine. But curiously he asks them to not teach their “knowledge” to their kids.
I could imagine religious people saying to the atheists “If you want to deny God, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. We need God-fearing voters.” Curiously, I have not heard any religious person say something like this. They don’t care about other people’s children?
It seems to be more a statement of his position than an actual attempt at dialogue with believers.
I could imagine religious people saying to the atheists “If you want to deny God, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. We need God-fearing voters.” Curiously, I have not heard any religious person say something like this.
I have. thousands of times, in fact.
you must not be getting out enough?
try visiting some religious blog sites, or religious conferences, or listen to the 700 club even once a week.
evangelicals demand this of atheists, and ANY others who don’t believe as they do, constantly.
Can you give me a quote. There must be link somewhere if that is as common as you say.
You live in another universe for sure.
They say and do things far worse all the time.
It’s illegal to prosyletize children in public schools but they do this all the time anyway. There is a nonprofit in my area called child evangelists whose sole activity is trying to convert other people’s kids in public schools. They are BTW, everywhere. It’s highly illegal, they know it, and they don’t care.
Xians don’t try to convert me anymore. They just threaten to kill me. Like a lot of scientists I’ve been getting death threats for over a decade.
I just attended a “Spectacular” the Child Evangelism Fellowship just put on in my area. Our local Freethought group attended (and filmed) the thing to find out more about the Good News Clubs in schools. We got some good footage and interviews.
Check out Katherine Stewart’s new book The Good News Club to find out a lot more about how they are seeking out our children for conversion.
That was brave of you.
I’ve heard of them before.
They are one of the more ugly hardcore fundie cults out there.
Among other things they are notorious for teaching chidren that genocide is OK.
I found out to my horror recently that there is a nonprofit Child Evangelist group in my area.
Of course they proselytize. I’m talking specifically of the sentiment a la Bill Nye, of giving up on the parents but telling the parents spare your children, not just evangelism per se.
Oh! Your point is that the evangelists don’t give up hope of converting the parents, too!
Well, that may be. But there is an entire industry of Xtians seeking to bring kids to Jeebus with or without their parents’ involvement.
My point is that there’s an illogical premise in Bill Nye’s message that I haven’t heard come from religious people. See my response to raven below.
You are still totally wrong. They don’t even bother telling the parents to spare their kids.
They just go after the kids and bypass the parents altogether which is a lot worse. Cornerstone church was in trouble for luring children into a van and events and baptizing them without their parents knowledge and permission. They’ve been banned from the public schools among other things.
I see you ignored the Child Evangelist Fellowship. They do the same thing and claim 40,000 volunteers.
They don’t often bother to criticize the parents for being atheists and not raising their children as fundie xians.
This is because they have far worse comments. Threatening to kill them, calling them satanists which is silly since satan is as real as Zeus, Thor, or their Sky Fairy god, and blaming them for hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and any and all mass murders.
Fundie xians are mostly xian Dominionists.
They don’t bother with statements like yours.
Under biblical law, being an atheist is a stoning to death penalty and they would just kill all the atheists. They say so often.
Xians learned a key lesson nearly 2 millennia ago. While it is hard to convert people, it works just as well and is much easier if you just kill them.
Rushdoony was a psycopath. He was also about the only theologican the fundies produced and the founder of xian Dominionism and Pat Robertson’s mentor.
You appear to be deaf. Sorry about that.
These creeps target the public schools however and whenever they can. They aren’t popular in some areas. Parents get really ticked off when strangers try to mess with their kid’s education and unbringing.
BTW DV, I haven’t seen any foundations for atheists who would try something like this, targeting grade school kids.
Yeah but.. their efforts to steer public education is more for a concern for their own children, isn’t it?
No.
That is an incredibly stupid comment.
If that was all they cared about, they wouldn’t be trying to convert other peoples kids. Which is not only illegal, but a good way to really tick off those other parents. Parents really don’t like other people messing with their kids.
It’s also illegal to try to force religion into the public schools, separation of church and state and all that. Doesn’t stop them and that is why there are frequent court cases against them which they usually lose.
If they don’t like secular public education, they can always homeschool or send their kids to private “xian” schools and many fundie parents do exactly that.
Exactly! They home-school their kids when they can’t force the school to teach their religion. They are concerned about what kind of education their own kids are going to get. They don’t care about your kids.
Come on, DV. Those are not mutually exclusive possibilities.
They (some of them) can homeschool/private their kids while simultaneously doing their (some of them) damnedest to push Jeebus into public schools.
Now you are simply lying. You’ve also ignored all the proof I posted.
The Child Evangelist foudation with their target of school children, Corverstone Baptist with their van and carnival, and hundreds of others at least all target children for proselytizatin, baptism, and conversion. They don’t target xian children because they’ve already got them.
We’re done here. I’ve got better things to do than play wack-a-mole with a lying troll.
Do you even know what a public school is?
It’s to educate our kids.
It is not to indoctrinate them in one religion or another. That isn’t even legal in the USA.
One more for the road although it seems DV’s inter-Universe internet connection has been lost. I wonder what color the sky is on his planet though.
Too bad we can’t trade his religionists for ours. Looks like that inter-dimensional portal wasn’t very stable.
Calm down dude.
I’m willing to be convinced by the evidence. So if I’m wrong show me the quotes I’m asking for. All I’m saying is that I have not heard religious people say: “If you want to deny God, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. We need God-fearing voters.”
What I’ve heard from religious people are variations of 2 themes:
1. Evangelist theme. You should all believe in God (you and your children).
2. Death to infidels theme. You don’t believe in God? Go to hell (you and your children).
I’ve not heard the theme of being fine with your disbelief combined with appeal to teach your children the opposite thing.
My whole point is that Bill Nye’s message has a illogical premise – that you can appeal by reasoning to a person to teach his/her children the opposite of what that person believes to be true. All I’m saying is that I’ve not heard religious people say something with this illogical premise. Show me the quotes that I’m wrong.
No you aren’t. Stop lying.
I get it. You have no quotes to show me.
Ann Druyan: Carl Sagan didn’t want to believe, he wanted to know.
There is a huge difference between believing things without evidence and knowing things with evidence.
To start with, one is religion and the other is science.
Nye is the current CEO of Planetary Society, which suits his background.
Nye was also part of the cast of Stargate Atlantis episode “Brain Storm” together with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Other than that, I don’t know much about him. He seems good in media, and he has dinged denialism in television before. (That time it was climate denial.)
Bill Nye did a more grownup version of his show, called The Eyes of Nye, several years ago; it had episodes on GMOs, climate change, astrobiology, and a bunch of others, including one on sex, which I got to participate in. He was really fun to meet and work with; I got to go up to the Tacoma Zoo and talk about animal mating behavior standing in front of the tamarins, penguins, etc. He and his crew also did some filming in my lab. The sex episode, along with one on addiction, is not readily available since apparently they were rated TV-PG instead of G. I don’t remember saying anything all that racy but there you go. The other episodes are online, though, if anyone wants to see them.
Whatever happened to that series?
and a bunch of others, including one on sex, which I got to participate in.
directly?
😉
I just saw a post go by on my phone (which doesn’t handle links well, so I didn’t get more info), that the Screaming Wackaloons on the “faith” side have destroyed Nye on Twitter.
Oh, nevermind. I was able to get the link after all. It was a HuffPo story about Twitter spreading false reports that Nye was dead.
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe had a good interview with Bill Nye last summer. Podcast 315, July 27, 2011.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=315
Download it here: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcast.aspx?mid=1
Bill Nye, the science guy, has turned legions of kids on to science in his day. He is a hero. Thanks Bill.
Hell…Astrology exists and there’s a crapload of ppl that believe it! lolz. Creationism will never disappear. Only the details of the invisible guy in the sky will change over time. The actual superstitious belief in the invisible guy in the sky will never disappear. Pun intended.
Ah, but people who believe in astrology today are a smaller crapload than they used to be, and might have been.
I’ll be happy when the superstitious are viewed as outside the mainstream, and the position vis a vis atheism is reversed.
And Nancy Reagan notwithstanding, belief in astrology doesn’t have much affect on public affairs or government policy.
And is ridiculed. Nancy is a continuing joke because of it. Imagine if a politician were a similar joke for being religious.
We Virgos don’t believe in that stuff.
Good job you’re not a Sagittarius.
/@
I suspect there is extra outrage expressed against Nye because he is a mainstream entertainer easily found on television — and a favorite of children. He’s a role model, and yet he’s not bowing his head respectfully in the direction of “faith.” He’s taking the battle into the light of public scrutiny.
Creationists like their villains more academic and aloof, and less likeable and approachable.
Nye is very succinct here, making the point that creationism undermines science and scientific thought in general. He’s gone off on climate change denialists in the recent past as well. But I doubt his video will make any creationist change his or her mind. Creationists already know that scientists claim to have all the evidence on their side. The creationists simply choose to ignore all that as part of the great conspiracy.
An argument with a creationist does not have to convince the creationist in order to be valuable. Videos like this are seen by large numbers of people who haven’t thought about the subject or who are puzzling their way through the insanity of religion and seeking a path out. For them this can be invaluable.
And every now and then a true believer starts recognizing that they are living a delusion. Many strong atheists are former fundies.
Does anybody else remember him as Speedwalker, a speedwalking Seattle superhero on Almost Live?
CNN has a follow-up on this. “Five Reactions” to Bill Nye. If it’s a storm, this must be the eye. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/28/your-take-5-reactions-to-bill-nyes-creationism-critique/?hpt=hp_c2
Heh, some of the ‘theistic evolutionist’ comments were great, coming from the “both are correct, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle” crowd.*
See? Religion is perfectly compatible with evolution! And science!
*(One of them must be really old — he is “a firsthand witness of the risen Christ.”)
My only quibble is an old one. @~1:10, “Your world just becomes fansastically complicated if you don’t believe in evolution. Of course, if one accepts the evidence, one therefore accepts evolution.
But I really liked how, @~1:50, he pauses after “And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live…” I expect he was searching for something to follow other than “in your fairytale world”.
Bill Nighy, the English actor, whose name is also pronounced “Nye”, said in an interview not long ago that he was taken for granted when introduced to younger audiences in America precisely because of a case of mistaken identity, namely as Bill Nye the Science Guy.
The confusion reached its peak when he played Slartibartfast in the otherwise misbegotten film version of H2G2.
Thanks Bill, you have always been one of my heroes. Let’s hear your voice more often.
In several of Arthur C Clarke’s books set in the next century he had an end to religion and red meat. Not bad thoughts.
JC: “I’ve never even seen his show.”
Let me fix that, with a topic close to your heart. This was a show aimed at kids around 7-12, so there’s a lot of silliness, but notice how much solid information Bill slips in.
youtube.com/watch?v=svHQ4BQY__o&feature=related
I disagree- one can have a “religion” without believing that the Babble is the literal word of God, but it would be a very different kind of religion from the ones we see today: Christianity may indeed wither as it is faced with the errancy of the Babble (no garden of Eden, no temptation and original sin, and no need for a later “blood-atonement”, etc.), but say one simply worships the universe, or reality itself? Although it is incorrect to consider the universe an “entity”, it satisfies all of the commonly-assumed characteristics of an omnipotent God: “eternal”- the Big Bang happened once, why not over and over again?; “all-knowing”- all knowledge of this universe is only present IN the universe, though all of it may forever be inaccessible to us; “all-powerful”- all power is, of course, “embedded” in the very structure of reality….notice that I’ve not included that this “God” likes people in particular
Creationism will be around as long as superstition flourishes.
Hey, if you believe that someone literally rose from the dead, what is to stop you from believing, well, just about anything else?
Bill Nye highlights an interesting phenomenon…denial of evolution IS unique to the United States. So why is that? I think mainly it’s because there’s confusion in this country about Darwin’s Origin of Species. Scores of people believe that Origin of Species means the origin of life. And that is a massive misunderstanding. Darwin only wrote about how creatures modify their biology to accommodate changing environmental forces to ensure their survival. These people have this knee-jerk response… evolution…no god; an either or proposition. The fact that the movie, Darwin, was banned from entering the U.S., is a prime example of just how threatened many people are by him…unnecessarily so.
Two points I will disagree with. One is that there are other countries where evolution is unacceptable, notably Turkey. And, of course, other countries where Islam predominates. Still, I agree with you here if we limit the universe to western industrialized countries.
That said, my second bit of disagreement…
The fundamentalist response to Darwinian evolution is perfectly reasonable. The deity that they believe in, and his sacred book upon which they are to guide their lives, are full of notions that are completely incompatible with evolution, a process which requires no deity at all to work and the evidence for which directly contradicts what their deity is (in their minds) telling them.
They are appropriately fearful for their faith. They are just wrong to think that their faith has any value.
Does anyone think that there is cultural aspect to this? For example, is it possible that the distain for Darwin is based on nationalism or patriotism? If Darwin was an American, would he be venerated, instead of reviled? He is on the British 5 pound note (I think) and he is not nearly as vilified in England as he is here in America. I wonder what the debate would be about he had been American. We don’t argue about Thomas Edison’s ideas or inventions.
Does someone think that religions aren’t cultural phenomena?
What exactly is your point? Are you suggesting that distain for Darwin among religious Americans isn’t due to faith considerations? Are their hoards of non-religious Americans who are hostile to evolution? Why don’t we hear from these people?
*there
The idea of “God and Country” is powerful, yet of the two, which would overcome the over. For some, country means more than god, otherwise no one would break the Commandment, “Thou shall not kill” in time of war. And, clearly people kill during wartime. So, if Darwin was an American (country), would that change how Americans view him enough to nullify the debate (god). It’s a thought experiment, not a challenge to debate.
The thought experiment gets answered when you substitute “Newton” or “Galileo” (or other such names). American religious folk don’t freak out about them. Why? Evolution isn’t what Newton/Galileo are known for.
And when you control for religion in your thought experiment (religious American vs. non-believing American) you don’t find the same response to Darwin.
Whether a challenge to debate or not, it was posed as an experiment for SOME reason (I assume). I am skeptical that random nerve-firing caused the fingers to pose this particular thought experiment.
Odd, why do you cite “Newton” or “Galileo?” Neither is American, and both were religious. Newton is still dragged out as an example of a pious Christian so of course, “American religious folk don’t freak out about them.” I agree that neither pushed evolution, but that was before their time as well.
You said, “And when you control for religion in your thought experiment (religious American vs. non-believing American) you don’t find the same response to Darwin.” That was not part of the thinking nor what I wrote, but I should have clarified. No one contests that non-believers do not see a conflict. However, what about English believers V. American believers? So, in response to your “skepticism” about my thought on this, both my parents are English, as am I, and I have lived in the United States for most of my life. My family in England, as the family here, are moderately religious yet they have no problem with evolution (I know, that’s another issue). Darwin is not a threat to them, unlike the threat he poses to American Christians.
So, does Darwin message change in England? Are the English Christians reading from a different book? I suspect the difference in Darwin’s nationality. In England he is seen as a national treasure, not threat to their children.
No. The difference is that the UK is far more secular than the US. Secular people are not threatened by evolution. Religious fundies are. When you encounter fundies in the UK, the too are hostile to Darwin. Check out the recent hubbub regarding the Giant’s Causeway and Creationists.
Americans are not hostile to Darwin unless they are religious. The point about Newton and Gallileo is that they are “feriners” that don’t upset any Americans. Religious aren’t threatened because it ain’t evolution an us non-believers have no reason to be upset in any case.
I think your argument (er… “thought experiment”) is intended to distract from the obvious fact that hostility to evolution/Darwin is religion-based.
On the point of evolution denial, I was at the library with a couple of fellow nursing students browsing a post for a biology teaching position. The post stated that the candidate would need to be comfortable teaching evolution. My colleagues derided the post and threatened the school leaders with hell. These were nursing students mind you. They will at some point be treating evolved humans, and attempting to combat evolved bacteria out to do major harm to their patients. Do they think that MRSA was designed by god to kill us all?
This is what the rationality community is up against:
If believers refrained from indoctrinating their children into God and the supernatural aided by professional theists, religion would be gone from the face of the earth within a generation or two. No child would construct God on his own.
Clearly: 1) “good” can come to rest in the heart and mind of a growing child without “God”; and 2) I do not suggest there is any prospect for passing laws or otherwise prohibiting the indoctrination. The victory over superstition will have to be won in the marketplace of ideas the hard way: over the insidious weapon of childhood indoctrination.
I salute Bill Nye for his forceful and uncompromising stance on this, and the courage to speak out. He has to listen to the self-righteous scorn of parents who consider it a right, a duty, a delight and a victory to force superstition on a child.
Any anthropologists here that can speak to the hypothesis that homo sapiens descended from one actual female in Africa? In other words, the scientific “Eve.” Has that been established as fact?
Human mitochondria can (in principle) be traced back to one individual woman. Y chromosomes can be (in principle) be traced back to one man. This is not true of the rest of the genome.
Please, professional biologists, correct me if I have that wrong. (You don’t require an Anthropologist to answer this question.)
Yes, “can.” However, I believe there is already a contention that someone ‘has.”
Okay, I googled a little…I remembered this story breaking right around the time of my son’s birth. Sure enough….
http://io9.com/5879991/the-scientists-behind-mitochondrial-eve-tell-us-about-the-lucky-mother-who-changed-human-evolution-forever
Well, “has”, depending on what the definition of “trace” is. I meant it to mean step by step back through time, which really can’t be done.
But the FACT of all of us sharing mitochondria from one female in the past is agreed upon.
The same thing can be said of every gene in one of our bodies that is shared with one or more other people. There is a single common person/animal that is the most recent common ancestor for that gene. Mitochondria and Y chromosomes are just a bit simpler to work with because they don’t get shuffled around the way the rest of the genome does during cell division and recombination.
Or at least that’s what I think I’d say if I was a biologist. Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale is excellent in helping understand this.
from that link…..same problem then as now….
“People tended to have one of two reactions – they either thought they knew this answer all along, or, they thought I couldn’t possibly be right. Some were very dismissive, and you may know that only about 40% of Americans even believe in biological evolution, and a lot of these people even think that it doesn’t apply to humans. So there were some religious objections, especially when the Mitochondrial Eve story took off and you had to say that Mitochondrial Eve wasn’t the same woman as the Eve in the Judeo-Christian Bible’s story of genesis.”
Most likely religion will still be here with fewer believers, but it will have changed to have accommodated the massive amount of knowledge acquired by then.
Intelligent biological design only came into being ever since the advent of genetic engineering and synthetic genomics.