Bill Nye: Anti-Science Politicians Endanger Us All | Big Think

Ebola’s a classic example for me from an evolutionary standpoint of germs and parasites being your real enemy as a big animal, a multicellular organism. Everybody’s terrified of Ebola because you can’t see it, and as the saying goes, this is not my idea. People aren’t afraid of dying so much as they’re afraid of how they’re going to die. And the Ebola death looks horrible. It’s awful.

And what’s making it worse in Africa in particular is scientific illiteracy. People not realizing that these microorganisms get passed from one to another. When I was in South Africa – I guess it’s five years ago – a guy told a story. He was from a village, a small village. He was working for the South African Space Agency, which they have. And he says it’s going to villages where kids have never seen a magnet, and they recommend that you don’t go near that tree because the lightning bird landed on that tree and that means that tree will get struck by lightning and the tree branch will fall on you. And that’s not true, by the way.

So by having a population of people who don’t really understand germs and how serious they are, the germ gets spread really readily. As far as people freaking out here in the U.S., it’s appropriate. However, the same legislatures, when it comes to climate change, say, “Well, I’m not a scientist. I can’t have an opinion on climate change,” sure have a lot of opinions about Ebola. There’s a faction of our leaders, elected officials, who continually cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control, which, to me, reflects an ignorance of how serious germs can be.

I remind us all that in 1918, more people died of what was called the Spanish Flu than died from World War I, which killed a lot of people. The Spanish Flu killed – the estimates vary but about 50 million people died of the flu. And when you think of the flu, you think, “Oh, the flu. You take Theraflu. You take chicken soup. You’ll be fine.” What, cannot take penicillin? Ineffective against a virus, people. Not going to help you. Penicillin is not going to do anything against Ebola.

With that said, it’s very reasonable that researchers, diligent researchers, will be able to develop a vaccine against Ebola. It’s very reasonable. And so, in my opinion, we should be supporting that research full bore. But at the same time, don’t curtail research in other germs, which is going on at the Centers for Disease Control, for example, all the time. That’s not where you save your money, Congress. But if you don’t believe in the seriousness of it and you have a mistrust of scientists, if you have a mistrust of engineers, you’re not going to help us out with that, are you?

So it’s a very serious concern of mine. And if everybody were talking about climate change that we were talking about Ebola, we’d be working on climate change pretty steadily also. So it’s another lesson. You know, we – on my side of it, in the science education world, I mean, this whole thing is so frustrating. The United States used to be the world leader in technology. But when you have this group of leaders, elected officials who are anti-science, you’re setting the U.S. back and then ultimately setting the world back.

So we should support the health workers that are going to take the risks and go to the hot zone. We should support African governments and enable, to the extent possible, science education so that people are more literate about this. It’s a really difficult problem, but solvable, solvable problem.

I’d like to make another comment that occurred to me as an engineer. Everybody – I saw a story this morning about these home elevators that have ruined people’s lives. Kids have gotten these horrible head injuries from home elevators, which aren’t subject to the same standards as elevators in commercial buildings. And that’s another thing where if you had extraordinary supervision over children, they wouldn’t get in this trouble. On the other hand, if the elevators were designed better, the kids wouldn’t get in this trouble.

And it just shows you how much we need – how much we rely on engineers. I’m sorry; these people who designed the elevators did their best. They didn’t think of the ten-year-old getting his head trapped in there. But after it happens, we can make design changes so it never happens again. When people apparently loaded up their key chains so they’re so heavy that they were able to overcome the detent, the stop – the can’t turn it past park of the ignition switch in these Chevrolet vehicles – and people crashed the cars because somebody in the ordering department thought it was okay to have the pin a little shorter than it was last year.

And so the pin didn’t hold the detent, as it’s called, to stop as strongly, and it was able to cause these enormous problems. We rely on engineers to solve these problems, and I, as an engineer, we do our best. We anticipate these things. But you can’t anticipate everything, and this is part of evolution. Future ignition switches will not have that problem for a number of reasons. First of all, some people got seriously injured. And then we have laws to hold corporations accountable for these serious injuries. And then we have systems in the corporation to make changes and enforce it.

This is civilization, and it’s top down and bottom up at once. And I, as an engineer, just want to remind people just how many moving parts there are in a car and how well they work. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying stop and appreciate how complicated these things are and how we all take it for granted, and they are all absolutely a result of science literacy. Of having a population of people who understands the significance of science in our everyday lives. And to eschew that, or set it aside, or not support basic research is not in anybody’s best interest.

This is not a controversial statement, but somehow I find it very frustrating when stuff like that happens and we all take it for granted. So I’ll start pointing fingers without realizing what’s involved. We can change the world, people. We can change the world. Let’s go.