PrintSeptember 2, 2012
Bill Nye the Pseudoscience Guy
In a recent YouTube video, former children's TV host Bill Nye weighs in on evolutionary biology by telling the rest of us how to raise our children. If we want to deny evolution, he says, that's our business, "but don't make your kids do it." Presuming that what we teach our children is any of his business, a more fundamental question presents itself: how do we presume to teach our kids something that may or may not be true, particularly when we don't really seem to understand it?
There is a tendency in the economy of belief to oversimplify. Generally speaking, this is a good thing -- or if not good, at least practical. One hardly needs to understand how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car.
However, oversimplification is anathema to maintaining a robust and rigorous science. As Einstein famously put it, make it simple, but not simpler. He meant that any theory, if it is to be a scientific one, needs to be reduced to its...(Read Full Article)
