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ca1fb09
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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.
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Bill Nye |
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295f9e9
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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."
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Bill Nye |
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f4f083d
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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.
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Bill Nye |
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9772b65
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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..
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Bill Nye |
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27d8fde
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I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.
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Bill Nye |
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74968d0
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so long as we each focus only on our individual decisions and their short-term consequences, we will act like renters, not owners of this Earth.
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Bill Nye |
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2437362
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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."
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Bill Nye |
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b7fe65f
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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..
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Bill Nye |
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62f9b3b
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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.
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Bill Nye |
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0fca70f
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More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom of the ocean.
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Bill Nye |
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1e3ceb1
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We can be a lot smarter and more capable than a lot of the technology doubters and climate deniers assume. The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence--we, as a species, working together--to come up with powerfu..
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Bill Nye |
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17c8de6
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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 effec..
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Bill Nye |
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e8b34e7
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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.
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Bill Nye |
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4ed746d
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From time to time, I meet someone who will say something like, "I am not afraid of dying." I don't buy it. Everyone is afraid of dying. It's part of the instinct that helps us survive as a species. It's a crucial feature of human evolution. It's also, I strongly suspect, a crucial reason why so many people have trouble believing evolution is true. Life can be ironic like that."
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Bill Nye |
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e6a12ec
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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.
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dogs
dogs-and-humans
animals
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Bill Nye |
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d1b2b6f
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When religions disagree about just creation, there is nothing to do but argue. When two scientists disagree about evolution, they confer with colleagues, develop theories, collect evidence, and arrive at a more complete understanding. Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself.
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Bill Nye |
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3f39176
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Because methane is so powerful as a greenhouse gas, let's phase it out as fast as we practically can, while we absolutely stop burning coal. It's everything-all-at-once time. Coal, gas, oil ... ultimately, they all have to go. The real key for the Next Great Generation will be to build a society that doesn't need natural gas or fossil fuels of any kind at all.
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Bill Nye |
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488926e
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Some of the most wonderful aspects and consequences of evolution have been discovered only recently. This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.
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Bill Nye |
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7f6a899
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they avoid the exploration of evolution, because it reminds us all that humankind may not be that special in nature's scheme. What happens to other species also happens to us.
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Bill Nye |
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d61ea47
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This is one of the reasons I get such joy from studying evolution. This kind of science is amazing and sexy.
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Bill Nye |
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8ea9d66
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We can become a great generation that leaves our world--our home--in better shape than it is now while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy. We've already loaded the atmosphere with enough heat-trapping gases of various kinds to cause our planet to keep warming for many, many years to come. But the situation is far from hopeless.
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Bill Nye |
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6569541
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Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.
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Bill Nye |
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6131a46
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We are all aware that evolution happens, because we all have parents.
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Bill Nye |
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b1ea161
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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?"
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Bill Nye |
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ff64c74
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Try this way of picturing a human lifespan. The National Football League's Dallas Cowboys' stadium holds 105,000 people. Now, imagine that you're watching life go by down on the field, and every day you watch that life go by from a different seat. You don't even get a third of the way around. Before you've settled into a third of the seats, you'd be dead. And, that's if you had a good run, eighty-two-plus years. Yikes!
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Bill Nye |
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9bd745f
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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.
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Bill Nye |
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4747028
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As I learned more about evolution, I realized that from nature's point of view, you and I ain't such a big deal. Humans are just another species on this planet trying to make a go of it, trying to pass our genes into the future, just like chrysanthemums, muskrats, sea jellies, poison ivy ... and bumblebees.
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Bill Nye |
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3f2065f
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Because I personally met astronomer and Nobel laureate Robert Wilson, I very much enjoyed reminding the audience of his discovery, in conjunction with Arno Penzias, of cosmic microwave background radiation. In the 1960s, the two of them found that the whole sky is glowing, which is exactly what cosmologists who worked on the theory of the Big Bang had predicted. I asked also how we could observe stars that are farther away than 6,000 light-..
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Bill Nye |