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--------------------------------------------------------- OVERVIEW: The school boards around the U.S. who’ve decided to teach children creationism, intelligent design, or whatever you choose to call it, are poking a stick in the eye of anyone who hopes to expand our understanding of the world around us. According to Bill Nye, evolution is such a fundamental scientific truth that…well, watch. If you dismiss evolution, Nye says, how can you get any of the followup questions right? The massive number of generations required for evolutionary changes make obvious the kind of time involved, lengthening the age of the earth from religion’s few thousand years to science’s billions of them. And that expanded view, argues Nye, makes so many other things make sense: If we’ve only been around a little while, for example, what’s the deal with those ancient dinosaur bones and fossils? A belief in deep time is so critical to our understanding of life, the earth, its processes, and the stars above us, that to deny it is to force oneself into settling for ever-more-implausible explanations of what we see around us. What’s got Nye even more chagrined is that it’s one thing to turn your own back on science, but when you pass that outlook on to your children, what’s at risk is nothing less than the creation of a generation whose basic premise—creationism—leads to and answers that just get wronger and wronger. Brilliant young minds consigned to scientific failure from the start. We’d hope for better from educators and parents. Just imagine the things these fresh, inquisitive minds could discover someday. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BILL NYE: Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT BIG THINK: Smarter Faster™ Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Subscribe to learn from top minds like these daily. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. ​We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.