Bill Nye is not a Scientist (Blindspot)

Nye is most definitively not the best evolution scientist. He is not a scientist. As I understand it Ham did not invite a scientist.

I totally agree.

Nye did the debate because he was paid to do so, and paid rather more than the tickets sales accrued. In that respect Nye is very much like any other entertainer. Ham staged the debate because it helped him secure funding from a wealthy donor to build his stationary Land Yacht.

I predict we will continue to see new applications of evolutionary science, and these will become a greater part of our lives. We are already seeing cancer treatments based on principles of evolutionary medicine, and it’s just getting started.

I have started a habit of recording predictions that I make or encounter, so that I can follow up on how these claims pan out. I will record these and follow up in 5 years or so. Would you like to be notified when I do?

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Ellie Arroway is certainly a worthy candidate. Allow me to also throw out Dr. Ally Hextall, Jennifer Ehle’s character in Contagion.

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Yes. I welcome any help in cancer. I don’t see evolutionism helping there EXCEPT in the minor cases of in-species selectionism. A YEC would go in this direction too. I hate Cancer especially before the decaying stages of elderlyness.
Nye is a sign of the evolution demise. It needs famous debates to defend itself from famous attacks.
Evolutionism is the only conclusion, said to be a scientific theory, that is popularily, famoiusly assaulted and taking bodyblows.
You said ham did the debate for a rich donor. I never heard that and its unlikely that he did it for money.
It was done to seek audience to make a creationist claim where usually its hard to reach non creationist audiences.
I doubt Nye did it for money. He did it for passionate belief in evolutionism himself.

Funny how many of you chose Ellie Arroway. In the radio astronomy circle she is one of, or perhaps the most mocked (good natured-ly!) fictional scientist :rofl:

Screenshots of this scene often appears in radio astronomy conferences to get easy humor points due to the absurdity of actually “listening” to radio telescopes with a pair of headphones:

I have yet to find a radio astronomer who does not like Contact though, despite its goofyness (or perhaps it is well loved because of its goofyness).

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Just to make sure I understand you correctly, you are using “evolutionism” here is the same sense as scientism? - Is that correct?

Ham contracted Nye for the debate, paying Nye an appearance fee. IIRC this comes from Nye’s agent. I will let you google this one yourself, and I’ll get the next one…

The following are facts: Ham was well below his donation goal to start construction on his Ark Park. Ham lost money on the ticket sales from the debate itself, as they were not enough to cover Nye’s appearance fee (and Ham gave away a lots of tickets too). Ham/AiG is believed to have recouped the loss and probably turned a profit on DVD sales. Following the debate a wealth donor provided the money that allowed Ham to proceed.
— The details about the donor’s conditions leading to the debate I will need to look up, but it was much discussed at the time. I will google for sources when I have time, and edit to include these below.

edit1: This Wiki article confirms some (not all) of my claim, and is well sourced.

edit2:

Those registering for the debate’s live online stream topped 800,000 two weeks before the event, for which the museum is paying Nye expenses plus a fee. The museum would not disclose the fee, but Nye’s normal speaking fee is $50,000 to $75,000, according to Celebrity Talent International [source linked].

edit3:

In early January 2014, only $26.5 million in bonds had been sold; if at least $55 million in bonds were not sold by February 6, all of the bonds would be automatically redeemed.[33] On February 27, 2014, AiG founder Ken Ham announced that his February 4 debate on the viability of creationism with TV personality Bill Nye “the Science Guy” had spurred bond sales, and that the Ark Encounter had raised enough money to begin construction.[34][source] and another [source]

What remains to show for my claim is that a single wealthy donor contributed a substantial part of the $24 million needed at the time of the debate. I’m out of time to pursue this further at the moment.

edit4: This is not the smoking gun I was looking for, but may be as close as I can get:

A few weeks after the debate, Answers in Genesis held an online event in which they announced that they have or had raised the funds for their amazing “Ark Encounter” theme park, or “Ark Park.” I posted a tweet on the Twitter social media site, “Here’s hoping voters & journalists wonder: where did all those $ millions come so quickly? After a deadline?” Soon after that, Mark Looy of AIG sent an email to my office assuring me that the bonds had already been secured, before Feb. 4, i.e. before the debate—and before the unrated bonds’ deadline. I could not help but notice that Ken Ham made no mention of this during our encounter, i.e., during the debate itself. I also could not help but notice that his colleagues suggested that the debate helped close certain aspects of their Ark Park deal, later during their online event—at which not a single journalist, or anyone else for that matter, was present. These are details, but it does make me wonder, who donates those millions? I wonder if one project is leveraged against the other. I’ll leave it to the Kentucky journalism community to seek answers in this funding genesis.[source]
My emphasis added.

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I just went to youtube to see the offending scenes. Man, are those scenes cringy… I can’t believe that they made him play “himself”, where himself is a person who looks and acts like him but has a totally different personal history.

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Disturbing and disrespectful. He is not just a scientist here. He is a “famous” scientist. It is honestly offensive. This was really egregious. Totally unnecessary.

At the very least, they could have made him a struggling scientist, or acknowledged he was playing someone other than himself. This really might be his “Blind Spot.”

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This article has it it right:

In order to earn the privilege of calling yourself a “scientist” one normally has to have an earned PhD (or at least a Master’s) in the natural sciences. But as one geneticist that I know told me, even after earning his PhD, he still felt hesitant using the word “scientist” to describe himself. To be able to call yourself a “scientist” is a very high honor, and not one that those in the scientific community use lightly.

So in very very rare instances, someone with incredible ability, and who has contributed incredible research might be considered a scientist by those of us in the scientific community, even without an earned PhD.

But how does this compare with Bill Nye? Does Bill Nye have any scientific degrees or scientific credentials?

The answer is simply no. However, that does not stop Bill Nye or CNN from pretending like he does.

One fairly mind-bending episode was the BioLogos interview with Nye. There is no claim that he is a scientist, but it just not clear why we should grant scientific legitimacy to an actor who has been repeatedly wrong on the science.

https://biologos.org/blogs/brad-kramer-the-evolving-evangelical/biologos-interviews-bill-nye

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Nothing here justified your accusation. there is no evidence for saying the great debate was done for a certain donar. Possibly there was hope it would raise funds but most likely it was done for the cause.
Paying Nye is irrelevant whatever it was.
Often there is no smoking gun because there is no gun nor murder!

7 posts were split to a new topic: Apprenticeship, Not Classes, Forms Scientists

Since Ken Ham organized the debate and wouldn’t invite a scientist but instead a pretender, it seems that the point you’re trying to make is about Ken Ham and YEC.

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Who says he wouldn’t invite a scientist? Bill nye is presentede to the public as sciency enough to be famous and defend evolutionism. they all embrace him to defend it. i don’t know his science creds but probably its nothing. i think he is a engineer? pretender is not the word.
I do think organized evolutionism is trying to defend its public status and does need famous people to reach audiences.
Attrition is helping modern creationism.
it makes sense to people that god exists and created very thing at least at fundamental levels.
others think its very likely god created as genesis suggests.
i know as a YEC we have NEVER had it so good. our creationism is more famous, supported, and progrossing
since a ancient time of everyone agreeing. i don’t know when in north america.
Our problem is reaching audiences. stopping state censorship in schools might help a little but only very entry level.
In our time will evolutionism, as is, fall.

You know that literally every generation since Darwin said the same thing, right? Yet evolution stands taller than ever. What makes you think the next couple of decades will be any different?

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they say this. its not true. evolutionism only ever moved in tiny circles. never the greater public, even if rejecting it, thought about it. in fact these days lots of thinkers think about it without being paid evolutionists.
Then people keep getting smarter and more confident to take on existing paradigms.
these decades are famous for opposition. The ID movement is world famous and YEC is famous in north america. all doing well and growing like crazy.
Its a clue of a declining idea that opposition is increasing and not decreasing despite more attention then ever. Blogs like this would never of existed decades ago. they are results from the revolution.
many times the demise of the roman empire was made but the last time they were right.
yes i predict, as is, evolutuonism in our time will be seen as a untested hypothesis and this retreat from a THEORY with other great theories will discredit it even as a hypothesis.

By what metrics are YEC and ID “growing like crazy”? I think you’re really overestimating how popular they are in the world, especially outside of North America. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what lay people think - their acceptance or rejection of evolution is a function of science education, not scientific reality.

Call me up in 20 years and let me know how things have changed. Remember, the DI were predicting/hoping back in the late 90’s that ID would have already become the dominant scientific paradigm by 2018. How did that work out for them?

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It is not my intention to appear mean, but almost every sentence in this response is false, most of them easily demonstrable as such.

This is patently false. Bill Nye presents himself as a scientist, but no scientist that I’ve ever met (and I’ve been an active scientist for 20 years) would ever put him forward as our spokesman or even a qualified representative. He’s a media personality and has carefully crafted public perception of him as a scientist, but he’s not and you will not find a single scientist that says he is (if they know his credentials or accomplishments, or lack thereof). Pretender is the word, because that’s what he does, in some cases egregiously.

That’s just not true. The Pew foundation tracks public acceptance of evolution and rates have been stagnant for most of the last four decades but have started rising again over the last ten years. Also, the demography predicts that the future will see a sharp inflection point because acceptance tracks so closely with age. The data shows that creationism (in all its forms) is declining rapidly in the US population and it will eventually bottom out to a very small minority view, as it already has in Western Europe.

While it’s true that YEC and other pseudoscientific explanations for the origin and diversity of life have undergone substantial organizational and structural development, but, in this case, that is a sign of a movement under siege, not one on the rise.

Again, all the evidence points the other way. Evolutionary theory has undergone massive expansion and revision (the normal process of a big idea being refined, incorporating more and more sub-fields, and zeroing in on a comprehensively accurate description of life on earth at both micro- and macro-scales). The thing that creationists always miss is that hard evidence to weaken the theory is very easy to imagine, but is never ever found. There is Haldane’s famous quote, “A single rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian rock,” but we can all easily imagine lots of simple data, that should be easy to find, that would devastate our understanding. But we never find it. Instead, what we do find is increasing data for evolution and evidence of increasing nuance of the process. Even when the field wrestles with upheavals (the new synthesis, eve-devo, neutralism vs. adaptationism, and so on), the result is a more fully explanatory version of the theory, not a rejection of it.

I’m not saying that popularity proves accuracy - we know that’s not true. The popularity of evolutionary theory is a different debate than it’s accuracy. But to say that it is in crisis, declining, and soon to be abandoned is a position that is not supported by any data that I’m aware of (and I read and write about this stuff constantly).

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The debate with Ken Ham was part of a paid appearance contract for Nye, and AiG lost money on the debate itself. Publicity-wise, AiG came out ahead.

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We should be careful when saying things like this - science often depends on public money and if the public has an entirely different view of what science should be, then they will matter a lot. We’ve already seen this happen in the case of climate science funding. Outreach and dialogue to the public is very important.

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Of course, I didn’t mean that it’s not important what the public believe, just that what the public believe has no bearing on the underlying scientific reality. If YECism was becoming more popular in the general public, that doesn’t indicate that the theory of evolution is failing, for example.