Bill Nye To Creationists: You're Anti-American and Hurting Your Children

Here’s a recipe for video views: Take Bill Nye, famously well-spoken defender of science, and have him tell creationists that they’re hosing their kids with their ass-backwards beliefs. Nothing like a little discussion on the not-at-all controversial evolution-creationism debate — as usual, the real absurd thing is that anyone is willing to call it a debate at all — to fire up the old Internet, to the tune of 1.1 million views in just four days.

As part of the Grand Old Party’s plan to drag us back to the grand old 19th century, evolution deniers have gained steam in recent years, using the same tired argument — evolution is just a “theory” — that shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic science terminology. (Meanwhile, other conservatives state hypotheses as fact, so no one seems to know anything.) Nye, in his segment for Big Think, took the bold step of saying that such backwards thinking is actually hampering the country.

“People still move to the United States. And that's largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science," he said. "When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really.”

Oh, damn! How about that for a political argument: Science deniers are the ones killing the economy by killing intellectualism. But why, exactly, are people that refuse to accept hard science screwing the country? Because they’re preventing their kids from ever developing into the type of fact-based critical thinkers that produce major economic breakthroughs.

"And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them," he said, in a quote pulled by ABC. " We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can — we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.

"It's just really a hard thing, it's really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it."

There it is: Forget the national debt and the crushing weight of our historically-low taxes. The real problem facing this country is that we’ve got leaders whose path to power involves denying reality to stir up their followers, who in turn are hurting their children’s chances of become productive innovators. For a two-minute video, that’s a pretty damn heavy truth.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead