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.”
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
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!
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.
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?
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.