Undeniable Quotes

“To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select which facts you like and which you don’t.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“I’ll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“What happens to other species also happens to us.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“No other organism on Earth does that. Yes, yes, I understand that dolphins are very smart, but I don’t think they build libraries or even contemplate such a project.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Skin color is basically a measure of the local ultraviolet levels, and it is controlled by relatively minor adaptive changes in the genome.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Put another way, I love all of you dog lovers, but I have to spoil your fun a little with a fundamental truth. There is, in an important evolutionary sense, no such thing as a specific breed of dog. If a Great Dane has sex with a dachshund, you get a dog. If a Standard Poodle has sex with a Jack Russell terrier, you get a dog. If a mutt has sex with a so-called purebred, you get a dog.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“If you’re a creationist reading this, and you want to remark something like, “Well, that’s the way he did it,” I’ll tell you right back, that is just not reasonable, nor is it satisfactory. If we were playing on a team right now, I’d say, “Get your head in the game.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“If the argument is, “Well, that was all part of the plan,” then I have to ask: How can you take the lack of evidence of a plan as evidence of a plan? That makes no sense.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“We are all aware that evolution happens, because we all have parents.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“It’s survival of the good-enough.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“We all have DNA, and it’s nearly the same. In rhesus monkeys, we’re close to 93 percent the same. In mice, it’s closer to 90 percent overall.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“A woman came up to Michael Faraday after he performed this demonstration and asked: “But, Mr. Faraday, of what use is it?” Faraday famously replied, “Madam, of what use is a newborn babe?”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“The essence of the evening was captured by a question from the audience. Someone asked: “What would it take to change your worldview?” My answer was simple: Any single piece of evidence. If we found a fossilized animal trying to swim between the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon, if we found a process by which a new huge fraction of a radioactive material’s neutrons could become protons in some heretofore fantastically short period of time, if we found a way to create eleven species a day, if there were some way for starlight to get here without going the speed of light, that would force me and every other scientist to look at the world in a new way. However, no such contradictory evidence has ever been found—not any, not ever.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“There is a deep-seated reason why intelligent, sensible people suddenly recoil from objective evidence when the topic turns to evolution. I think the fear of death has a lot to do with it.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“To be successful as a living thing, you have to have offspring, who have offspring, who have offspring. Rest assured, your family did, or you wouldn’t be here. As troubling as it may seem, your parents had sex—at least once. If you have brothers and sisters, more than once … One shudders to think of it.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Our ancestors who did not have a fear of heights, who did not have a fear of eating something poisonous, who did not have a fear of venomous snakes and spiders, who were not afraid of drowning, well—they’re dead.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“The key to fighting germs and parasites seems to be sex. At one level, this may bring you down. All the lipstick, high heels, hair products, salary seeking, sports cars, and weightlifting seem to be a result of germs. But then, so are art, and music, and good cooking. By having sex, organisms like dandelions, sea jellies, perch, parakeets, and termites can stay ahead in the game of life just enough to have offspring that succeed in producing more offspring in a subsequent season.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“People love dogs. This is, I hope, the least surprising sentence you will read in this book. I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet, and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions—from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life—will be found in not too much more time.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“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.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Most of the living things on our planet are microscopic, and those microscopic organisms are less like you than you are like a cabbage.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation