Some social media users think they have a slam dunk “gotcha'” on celebrity engineer Bill Nye.
They’re wrong.
Nye, who used to be a fun and informative children’s entertainer, has a new show on Netflix wherein he promotes progressive theories, including the notion that human gender is fluid and the dystopian idea that there ought to be a cap on the number of children that couples in developed countries should be allowed to have.
Though there are several counterarguments to be made in response to things like Nye’s specific claim that, “Gender is like sex, it’s on the spectrum,” circulating the following screengrab from episode three of season five of his old television program isn’t one of them.
For starters, the text included in the above image is not real.
Nye never said, “Gender is determined by your chromosomes” in that particular episode of his old show. The text in the now-widely shared image comes via some random Internet user.
You can see here for yourself what Nye actually said (hint: It’s not what the captioned photo claims).
“Our genes are stories in parts of our cells called chromosomes,” he said in the episode. “Chromosomes contain all of the genetic information; all the instructions you need to make a person. Now humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 46. It’s like the instructions are stored in 46 books and the books are divided into chapters, and each chapter is like a gene.”
He added, “Now humans have about 8,000 genes. It’s like we have 80,000 chapters in 46 books. Now if you’re a cell in a body, you don’t need to read every chapter. If you’re a nose cell, you just read the chapter about noses. If you’re a hand cell, you just read the chapter about hands. If you’re an eye cell, you just read the chapter about eyes. See, in a way, they’re all different names for different parts of the same thing: Chromosome, genes, pieces of DNA, books chapters, letters. It’s pretty good reading.”
To claim that the text is a loose paraphrasing of the episode’s message goes far beyond being generous. It’s flat-out dishonest.
There’s plenty to criticize in Nye’s recently debuted Netflix program, “Bill Nye Saves the World.”
You can go after him for the gender-fluid stuff. You can push back hard on the weird, anti-Christian segment in which anthropomorphized scoops of cartoon ice cream engage in some sort of bacchanal orgy after they explore the Anything Goes theory of sexuality (I swear I’m not making this up).
Please, feel free to trash Nye’s flirtation with eugenics.
Don’t, however, go after him with a fake quote to accuse him of flip-flopping on a sensitive culture war issue.
If you’re going to criticize someone for advocating what you believe are crazy and dangerous ideas, lying does you no favors. It does little to combat the concepts you supposedly oppose, it further confuses the issue and it undermines your own credibility.
But hey – at least you got the re-tweets.
(h/t @datnofact)
