Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

by Bill Nye

We’ve also experienced firsthand what Charles Darwin called descent with modification: the way that an entire population of living things can change from generation to generation.

16 million species on Earth,

This seems to validate to me the very essence/concept of evolution.

Even in places like Pennsylvania and Kentucky, here in the United States, the whole idea of evolution is overwhelming, confusing, frightening, and even threatening to many individuals.

Over 51% of the US population accept Creationism over evolution.

State education standards allow the teaching of fictitious alternatives to evolution in Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Our understanding of evolution came to us by exactly the same method of scientific discovery that led to printing presses, polio vaccines, and smartphones. Just as mass and motion are fundamental ideas in physics, and the movement of tectonic plates is a fundamental idea in geology, evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science.

Evolution has essential practical applications in agriculture, environmental protection, medicine, and

publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859,

Ultimately, the mechanism of evolution was discovered by two men at very nearly the same time: Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

He realized that if humans could turn wolves into dogs, then new species could come into existence by the same means naturally.

He also saw that populations do not grow and grow indefinitely, because their environment will always have limits on the resources available.

It describes any system in which things compete with each other for resources, whether those things are microbes in your body, trees in a rain forest, or even software programs in a computer.

Inherent in this rejection of evolution is the idea that your curiosity about the world is misplaced and your common sense is wrong.

Limestone Rock is created from the skeletal remains of marine organisms.

evolution or anything else: One should be able to use it to make predictions.

Religious prophecy vs Scientific Prediction.

Evolution is thought to work the same way: If you stop running, stop mixing up your genes, you’ll fall off the treadmill of life. The queen will leave you behind.

concern, I reminded the audience of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. One of the duties of Congress is “to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts…”

The creationists press on, looking for ways to isolate their kids as much as possible and to indoctrinate them so thoroughly that no matter what the world throws at them, the children will grow up to do their best to accept a 6,000-year-old Earth.

there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all other creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of

In commonsense terms, the Second Law is this: Given the chance, balls roll downhill; they never roll uphill on their own. Put another way, energy tends to spread out: Heat spreads out, and lakes never spontaneously freeze on a warm summer day.

“The law that entropy always increases—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the Laws of Nature.

The key idea is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics mathematically describes any

system’s loss of energy to its surroundings. It is fundamental to the way the natural world works. Since energy is constantly and continuously spreading out, everything should be winding down to a dead stop.

The Second Law applies only to closed systems, like a cylinder in a car engine, and Earth is not even remotely a closed system. Transfers of matter and energy are constantly taking place.

There are three main sources of energy for life on Earth: the Sun, the heat from fissioning atoms deep inside Earth, and the primordial spin of Earth itself. These sources provide energy throughout the day.

Energy has been pouring in from the Sun for over four and a half billion years.

The is 4.5 billion years old!!!!

Living things ranging from amoebas to sequoias have to

find ways to make the best use of all that energy, lest they be outcompeted by other living things ...

One of Darwin’s most important insights is that natural selection is a means by which small changes can add complexity to an organism.

With each generation of offspring, the beneficial modifications can be retained. Each mutation that doesn’t work as well in nature either dies off with the organism directly, or gets outcompeted by others of its kind in succeeding generations of offspring. It’s by the process of evolution that beneficial changes are added up and up and up.

Nature is self-organizing. That’s another way of defining evolution: Nature builds ecosystems, in all of their complex glory, from the bottom up.

We get energy stored in chemical bonds

The chemicals along a strand of DNA are arranged so that the molecule can make a copy of itself. Things being the way they are out there (or way down in there), these copies are not perfect. In the same way, you can tell the difference between an original document and a copy of the document made with a copy machine, it’s very

difficult in nature to make a perfect copy. Those small changes in DNA that occur during an organism’s developmental stage result in the organism being just slightly different from its parents or parent organism.

Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have used the term “deep time” to describe the magnitude of the scales involved. Understanding just how deep the deep past really is has been likened to staring into an abyss.

Earth is currently reckoned to be 4.54 billion years old. Based on fossilized mats or layers of bacteria, we figure life got started here at least 3.5 billion years ago.

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are, in turn, made of quarks.

There are several other geochemical clocks that radiochemists use to reckon the age of Earth, besides rubidium-strontium. There’s uranium-lead, there’s potassium-argon, and there’s samarium-neodymium.

What he didn’t know is that radioactive elements deep inside our planet keep adding new heat.

The Scottish naturalist James Hutton studied Earth and its natural processes. He is generally regarded as humankind’s first geologist.

Uniformitarianism denotes the idea that the world is uniform, or consistent with one set of natural laws; it connotes another idea that the natural laws we deduce today are the same natural laws that applied eons and millennia ago.

By the late 1830s, people were actively speculating on the philosophical and scientific consequences of a very, very old Earth. It roughly goes like this: If Earth’s surface has changed slowly over countless millennia, does that mean living things like us have also changed over time?

The Linnaean system further encouraged naturalists to think deeply about the relationships between living things.

By the time Darwin was born in 1809, a number of naturalists were starting to explore how different varieties of living things were related and how they could change over time.

What Darwin realized, and what Lamarck missed, is that the complexity emerges slowly through a whole population, not quickly within a single person or animal.

Although genes themselves do not change on their own, the way that those genes are activated can change within a single individual’s lifetime. This phenomenon is called epigenetic change—changes coming from the outside.

The possibility of genetic modification reminds me of the need for a scientifically literate electorate. Please stay tuned and vote!

Sexual selection is the second fundamental idea in Darwin’s theory of evolution, ranking next behind natural selection.

But along with the interplay between individual and ecosystem is another interplay between individual and other individuals of the species. They are competing with each other for energy and opportunities that enable them to reproduce.

For plants, the fundamental resources are sunlight and nutrients in soil. For little fish, it might be zooplankton, tiny animals

in the sea. For big fish, it’s little fish. For you and me, it’s food and water. But from an evolutionary standpoint, no amount of sunlight, fertilizer, nutritious food, or cozy blankets is enough. Organisms have to pass on their genes in order to have successors—in order to k...