Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

by Bill Nye

As our understanding of DNA has increased, we have come to understand that we share around 98.8 percent of our gene sequence with chimpanzees.

I remember realizing, first of all, you can recognize someone by the way he walks, and furthermore, you can often infer a good deal about that person by his posture and movement. That’s how I felt about my buddy Ivan. He was in a bad mood in Tacoma and a very good mood in Atlanta.

small to even see, let alone hunt and destroy. The Black Death of the fourteenth century may have killed up to 200 million.

For you Latin buffs, ultra means “above” in Latin. So, ultraviolet is at an energy level above the violet or purple that’s visible to our eyes. The ultraviolet hypothesis points to at least two ways to explore the origin of life.

Planetary scientists have found pieces of Mars and the Moon here on Earth, and may have identified fragments of Venus and Mercury as well. Could life have made the journey from Earth to Mars, or vice versa? This idea has come to be called transpermia, sending life across interplanetary or even interstellar space.

dioxide. It’s the greenhouse effect gone wild—runaway, as it is oft described. In fact, the models of climate change here on Earth were developed in part by scientists, James Hansen especially, who were studying the atmosphere of Venus. They observed that visible light passes the atmosphere, hits the surface, and then is reradiated as heat that is then trapped by carbon dioxide. This process has a big influence on whether or not a planet is habitable.

Answering these kinds of questions is not terribly expensive, in the bigger scheme of things. Right now, the U.S. investment in planetary science is less than $1.5 billion a year. Put another way, it is less than 0.05 percent of the federal budget. That includes all the missions: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and the New Horizons mission currently en route to distant Pluto. What if we upped that a billion and found life on Mars? It would be an extraordinary investment, costing barely the equivalent of an extra cup of coffee per taxpayer. With a president, a Congress, and a NASA administrator focused on such a thing, we could change the course of human history.

Every other aspect of life that was once attributed to divine intent is now elegantly and completely explained in the context of evolutionary science. For me, there is no reason to think that the origin of life is any different.

Amino acids are molecules that hook together to form the proteins that run almost every aspect of biology. They are the building blocks of living things. The details are fascinating, but as a general description, acids are chemicals that can yield or “donate” a proton to another atom or molecule. An acid can be weird and deadly, or it can be mild or gentle like salad dressing.

From there, this idea that creationists call molecules-to-man is quite reasonable, because a lot can happen in 3.5 billion years. The process is often called abiogenesis (life from not life), and it is still the leading theory of how biology got started on Earth.