At The Stream, Douglas Axe issues a challenge to “Science Guy” Bill Nye. Axe invites Nye to visit his team of scientists in Seattle and confront the genuine science that is rocking orthodox evolutionary theory, while also considering the evidence for intelligent design.

Mischievously, Dr. Axe gave the same title — Undeniable — to his new book as Nye gave to his own recent work. So in that respect, the two are well matched as conversation partners. Beyond that, I think Nye would be at a disadvantage, which may be why he has up till now seemed to prefer hanging around with creationists.

Axe begins:

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?

True. And isn’t it curious how creationists and evolutionists enjoy this symbiotic relationship? Ken Ham, no doubt with the single pure intention of defending his way of reading the Bible, effectively acts as Nye’s enabler. He provides Mr. Nye with a convenient way of evading hard questions about the adequacy of Darwinian mechanisms in explaining life’s history.

Their “debate” at the Creation Museum was a big hit, with five and a half million viewers on YouTube so far. (See Casey Luskin’s comments here.)

But there can be no meaningful debate or conversation between parties that, instead of arguing about science, prefer to appeal to their favorite authorities. And that situation seems to suit Bill Nye just fine.

The nub of Doug Axe’s challenge? It’s a matter of eningeering:

As a former Boeing engineer, [Nye] 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.

Nye hides behind Ham’s Ark, as if the only alternatives were design-denying materialism or Scriptural literalism. The binary choice is simply false, but it evidently serves Nye’s purposes. Dr. Axe invites him to come out from there and have a meaningful discussion:

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.

Now how much would you pay to be a fly on the wall if that meeting ever comes to pass?

Photo: Bill Nye, by Bill Hrybyk, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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