BILL NYE: Denial of evolution is unique to the United States.
I mean, we are the world's most advanced technological—so, I mean, you could say Japan, but generally
the United States is where most of the innovation 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, and all of biology.
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 claim they don't believe in evolution.
And my response generally is: 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 that are at a different point in their
life cycle.
The idea of deep time, of billions of years, explains so much of the world around us.
If you try to ignore that, your worldview just becomes crazy, it's just untenable, inconsistent.
And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world that's
completely inconsistent with everything we have observed 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 engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.
It's just a really hard thing, it's really a hard thing.
In another couple centuries, that world view, I'm sure, just won't exist, I mean, there's
no evidence for it.