Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsVery little science, obvious bias against religious belief
Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2020
If all the public knows is what people like Nye tell them, it is no wonder that so many people do not know or understand the complexity of life and the many problems with evolutionary theory. In this book Nye provides little science behind any aspect of the presumed evolutionary process. He simply states that whatever is is the beneficial result of evolution.
Nye does not discuss the major issues with evolution: how DNA and RNA arose, how proteins could form outside a cell, how the first cell membrane could form, how multicellular organisms developed, how DNA and genes increased to create new cell types and more complex organisms, how new gene regulatory networks that control the cell differentiation process were created, and how all this new information coding was derived from inanimate chemicals. Most of all, he does not discuss the general necessity for multiple successive mutations in order to effect a significant genetic change and the virtual mathematical impossibility of this successfully happening. In short, contrary to its title, his book teaches us very little about any science associated with evolution.
Where Nye definitely goes wrong in my opinion is when he states that children who believe in the biblical creation story "will have to suppress the basic human curiosity that leads to asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries." (p. 10) Yet the person Bill Nye said he would most like to meet is Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867) who developed the sciences of electricity and magnetism and invented the electric generator. He was the foremost physicist of his day and also a committed Bible believing Christian who believed science and the Bible were not in conflict.
Nye forgets that the scientific revolution was propelled primarily by biblical believers who sought to understand the mind of their Creator by exploring His creation, people like Galileo, Kepler (planetary motion), Newton (calculus and gravity), Francis Bacon (scientific method), Blaise Pascal (probability), Robert Boyle (gas dynamics), Carolus Linnaeus (biological taxonomy), George Cuvier (paleontology), Samuel Morse (telegraph), James Joule (thermodynamics), Louis Agassiz (glaciology), Gregory Mendel (genetics), Louis Pasteur (bacteriology and disease prevention), Lord Kelvin (thermodynamics), Joseph Lister (antiseptic surgery), Joseph Clerk Maxwell (electromagnetic field theory), Bernhard Riemann (non-Euclidean geometry), Edward Hitchcock (geologist), John Ambrose Fleming (electronics), George Washington Carver (agriculture), and Werner von Braun (rocketry). The science Nye so esteems was developed by Christians such as these "asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries."
