Hey, ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye: Come Out of the Ark and Face the Flood of Evidence Against Darwinism

By Douglas Axe Published on August 1, 2016

Bill Nye, host of the popular 1990s kids’ program Bill Nye the Science Guy, has become a celebrity spokesman for science. Nye’s hero status got a major boost in 2014 when he debated young earth creationist Ken Ham. I couldn’t bear to watch, knowing their shared tendency to replace scientific argument with appeals to authority (a form of Biblical authority for Ham and the authority of scientific consensus for Nye). Several million people did watch, though, and millions more have since then.

Nye has been back in the headlines recently after paying a visit to Ham’s new Ark Encounter theme park, promoted as a full-size replica of Noah’s ark. Reporters ate it up.

I’m sure that kind of publicity is hard for either man to resist, but shouldn’t Nye at least try to resist it? If he’s really a science guy, shouldn’t he pay less attention to jousting with Ham and more attention to the weighty scientific case against Darwin’s account of life? After all, how serious can he really be about Darwinian evolution if he ignores all the research that shows it doesn’t do nearly what is advertised?

Despite our different takes on Darwinism, Nye and I have quite a bit in common. We’re both engineering-trained science guys with a strong interest in the big question of where we humans came from. Nye gave us his answer to that big question in his book Undeniable, and — by coincidence — the recently released book that gives my answer is also titled Undeniable.

Undeniable Differences

The fact that our two Undeniables reach opposite conclusions — his portraying Darwin’s story as “the most reasonable creation story that humans have ever found” while mine claims that story has completely unraveled — means our differences are significant as well. What most puzzles me is not that we disagree on the origins question, but that we have such sharply contrasting takes on the role of engineering for settling that question.Undeniable book cover jpg

From the exquisite molecular machines operating inside every cell on up to whole organisms, living things don’t just look like ingenious designs — they are ingenious designs. We all have this intuition in our childhood, and while intuitions aren’t always trustworthy, this design intuition turns out to be solid. As I show in my book, our design intuition is firmly supported by what I call “common science” — the combination of observation, questioning and deduction that we all engage in naturally. The same instantaneous reasoning that tells us origami cranes can’t happen by accident tells us real cranes can’t either — not even in billions of years. And when we examine that conclusion carefully, we find that it holds.

So if kids get this, how can kids who grow up to become engineers miss it — even to the point of strenuously denying it? Nye is a perfect case in point. As a former Boeing engineer, he describes in his book the considerable effort that went into developing those turned-up tips on the ends of aircraft wings, called winglets. In the testing stages, winglets did more harm than good until the concept went through many rounds of revision. But after “countless hours of research and development” a beneficial winglet design finally emerged, after which these perfected winglets quickly became a standard feature of commercial jets.

Barn owls have winglets too, but in this case Nye assures us “there is no evidence that they were deliberately designed.” Natural selection caused owl winglets to be invented by accident, Nye assures us. Humans design in a top-down way, where the low-level details are worked out in order to meet the top-level objective, but according to Nye, “nature works the other way around.”

Hmmm. Why would an engineer be so quick to dismiss the lessons learned from engineering? If engineered aircraft winglets were at first worse than useless — “a waste of time and energy” — why be so quick to assume that a mindless and ruthlessly cost-cutting process like natural selection would be able to get over that hump? Engineers benefit from clear goals, dedicated research budgets, and the patience and foresight to stick with something that isn’t working at all, sensing that it will work. Those key ingredients of invention are completely absent from Darwin’s recipe for innovation.

Darwin’s Mechanism Can’t See Ahead

According to Darwin, evolution invents remarkable things like wings and eyes and brains bit by tiny bit — one little change at a time. That part of his idea might sound reasonable to us because we build things bit by bit as well. Essays are composed one letter at a time. Software code is written one instruction at a time. Buildings go up one brick at a time.

But Darwin’s theory runs into trouble when we consider our own inventive activities more closely. Whether essays or software or buildings, we never start a project without having thought about the objective. We always have a plan in mind, and while this plan may be revised as we work, we’re always working toward something. These plans of ours enable us to evaluate our work all along the way. Are we making good progress? If the answer is yes — judged with respect to the plan — then we’re motivated to double or efforts in anticipation of seeing the fruit of our labors. In this way we invest in our creations — pouring into them with the hope of future benefit.

Darwin’s blind evolutionary process has no way to do this. It has no ability to plan or to hope. Natural selection can’t labor in anticipation of future benefit. Instead, it goes with whatever works best now. The patience and foresight and insight we know to be absolutely essential for invention are completely absent from evolution. If things can’t be improved immediately, then they won’t be improved at all. We can dream up fanciful stories where amazing things happen though little Darwinian improvements, but the sober reality is that they are nothing more than that: fanciful stories.

Charles Darwin, to his credit, recognized the problem long before we had discovered DNA and long before mathematicians had crunched the numbers. It’s the key problem he set out to solve. His solution: These biological novelties arose one tiny random variation at a time, with natural selection tending to seize and pass on the useful variations so that they accumulate over thousands and millions of generations until something as blingy as the eye could emerge.

But Darwin’s solution comes at a price. The Darwinian pathway must proceed by a series of tiny, functional variations. Each new step needs to be functional. The Darwinian process can’t look ahead and say, “Hey, this variation doesn’t help Species G a bit right now. But when I get it put together with a few hundred or thousand other random variations, then it will give the little fellow a real boost, so I’m going to keep this presently useless variation on hand till then.” The Darwinian mechanism can’t look ahead like an intelligent agent can. It can only judge the present step in the process.

Trouble on the Darwinian Path

This is where Nye runs into trouble. If I were to challenge him to come up with actual evidence for his evolutionary interpretation — a series of mutations that improves bird wing structure one tiny, beneficial step at a time — I’m pretty sure he’d come up empty handed, and not just for owl winglets, but for all the stunning inventions that characterize life. Indeed, the most strikingly consistent characteristic of the whole Darwinian evolutionary story is the complete lack of evidence that it could actually work.

It’s worse than that, though. As I explain in my book, there’s plenty of counter-evidence — evidence that the clumsy cost-cutting effects of natural selection prevent even very modest acts of invention. As passionate as Nye is about science, then, why would he choose to ignore all this evidence? In the time he took to visit Ken Ham’s ark, he could have visited a team of scientists here in Seattle who have spent decades testing the ideas he takes for granted, showing them to be woefully inadequate. “When two scientists disagree about evolution,” Nye writes, “they confer with colleagues, develop theories, collect evidence, and arrive at a more complete understanding.”

Exactly. So why not do that, Bill? By dropping your authoritarian approach and engaging some of these scientists who disagree with you on scientific grounds you might find something more rewarding than publicity. The team I work with here in Seattle would welcome you for that kind of in-depth conversation, and I can assure you there won’t be any preaching.

 

Douglas Axe, director of Biologic Institute in Seattle, is the author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Like the article? Share it with your friends! And use our social media pages to join or start the conversation! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MeWe and Gab.

Inspiration
The Scarcity Mindset
Robert Morris
More from The Stream
Connect with Us