It still frustrates me that Tumblr and folks my age view Bill Nye as like.. a progressive man of science. The thing is that Bill Nye shouldn’t have any credibility outside his field of engineering. He’s not a biologist, he’s not an astronomer, he’s just received a Bachelors in engineering. He has received honorary Doctorates, but some people receive hundreds of these and they really amount to micro-recognitions on a campus-by-campus basis.
If you want to actually learn about the frontier of this stuff, hit the library. A scholarly database through a university is even better.
But the mere sound of this one television personality honorary doctor with a BA in engineering taught me about biology should be plenty enough for folks to realize the problems here. But they won’t because he’s a childhood element and he says stuff that they want to here and that is more powerful than the desire to actually be as informed as possible.
Do you understand that he’s probably spent his entire career furthering his education and that a degree doesn’t really keep someone from being qualified to speak? Especially as a professional communicator, he probably has hundreds of people that he consults for stuff that he might not be an expert in? And that he’s motivated to educate himself on everything he says BECAUSE he’s a media representative for scientists and if he says something wrong he has literally millions of scientists who will correct or critique him?
Like did you know that pretty much everything he talks about is covered in the intro courses of whatever he is talking about? And that anytime he needs to go more in depth he usually leaves that to the actual experts? And that his job is to being an introductory concept to the masses to make them more scientifically literate and educated? His job is to get people interested in whatever topic he’s talking about so that they can actually go and do their own research and ask actual experts?
THIS.
As a science teacher whose job often involves trying to explain complicated concepts like climate change, human evolution, and dinosaur phylogeny to kids as young as 6, I can attest with some authority that the ability to take a complex scientific concept and distill it down so that it’s a) accessible to young audiences/laypeople, b) still accurate, and c) engaging as hell – that is a SKILL. And one that does not necessarily come as part of a PhD.
if you dont understand why i listen to the friendly man who specialises in accessible mass teaching, then i fully expect you to finance for me the 15 years of university youre demanding i do instead.
Also it is a little bit hilarious that OP focuses so much biology, which suggest they are referring to the newest bit of Bill Nye being affirmative about sex/gender not being the binary that is taught in high school sex ed - which is actually the scientific reality of biology, if you’re looking at the hundreds if not thousands of intersex variations in humans (hormonal, chromosomal, physical, etc)… like an actual biologist doesn’t have a leg to stand on arguing “sex is binary.”
But the minute a tv personality says science is against your bigoted worldview, out come the “he only has a BA, this man knows nothing, stop liking him.” LOL
hey OP did you know that the original Bill Nye the Science Guy television run was done in conjunction with the literal freaking NSF, and I’ll even link you to the Wiki page because although any scientist worth their salt should know just how hard it is to collaborate with the NSF, i have my doubts about your own qualifications.
