In response to Answers in Genesis’s article on Bill Nye: Fighting for “Science”
AiG: Fighting for Relevancy
I initially wanted to do a complete, point-for-point rebuttal on this AiG article, but it seemed petty to do so. Insead, here AiG’s central question at the heart of this version of the debate.
“Can you name one piece of technology that could only have been developed starting with a belief in molecules-to-man evolution?”
No. Because the question does not make sense. There is no belief system that has “molecules-to-man evolution” as its premise. There’s no scientific theory of “molecules to man evolution”. There are several ideas or hypotheses concerning how life arose on Earth. One of the Earth-based ideas is called abiogenesis. Now, if humanity can demonstrate that chemicals did self-assemble to form the precursors to RNA, DNA, cell walls, ect., AND develop a theory for this mechanism, then we can either expand upon the Theory of Evolution to include this, or unite both theories into a sort of ‘Grand Unification of Life’ theory. No belief is required, just the knowledge attained by the hard work and insight of many generations of mankind.
Getting back to the actual question…
In doing some research, I have found this question asked in different ways by creationists who are looking for an opportunity to say, “gotchya”, after the respondent doesn’t answer within 10 seconds. The overall idea that this, and other permutations of this question convey is; “What good is teaching evolution to man?”
To answer this question, I can list emerging fields of science that every day people have barely heard of (bioinformatics, phylogenetics), the use of selective breeding throughout history (artificial selection), tools and techniques used to modify or even replicate DNA (GMO’s, synthetic biology), vaccines, and more.
I surmise that one can go even further than the examples that I have provided. Every single thing that mankind has taken from its environment and manipulated in such a way to provide a function for mankind is technology. Since mankind did evolve from a common ancestor with apes (there are multiple lines of evidence to show this), then everything that mankind has developed can be linked to the evolution of Homo sapien sapien. Everything. No belief required.
The original Popular Science article featuring Bill Nye.
Thank you for reading.