Bill Nye Agrees: “There’s No Such Thing as Race”

In a recent interview on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, host Larry Wilmore asked TV’s popular Bill Nye “The Science Guy” the question, “Does racism exist in the animal kingdom?” In Nye’s reply he made this statement, “We’re all the same . . . from a scientific standpoint there’s no such thing as race.” Bill Nye’s answer showed how much evolutionists have changed their position when it comes to the idea of different human races. Actually, this part of Nye’s answer is much more a biblical than an evolutionary view of humanity.

Changing Evolutionary Views

Bill Nye’s statement that “We’re all the same . . . from a scientific standpoint there’s no such thing as race” has been confirmed many times by observational science. For example, when researchers completed the incredible feat of mapping the human genome in 2000, they declared that, based on genetics, “there is only one race—the human race.”1 But this conclusion is not what was predicted in an evolutionary worldview.

Darwin’s ideas about human evolution were inherently racist.

Darwin’s ideas about human evolution were inherently racist. He held that different groups of humans evolved at different times so some were closer to their ape-like ancestors than others. The late Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionist, stated, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”2

Evolutionary ideas about race led to all kinds of horrors such as members of pygmy tribes being put in zoos beside apes,3 injustices toward groups like the Australian aborigines,4 and atrocities like Hitler’s attempted extermination of groups like the Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies. Each of these horrors—and many more—stemmed directly from Darwinian ideas about evolution. So, according to evolutionary predictions, we should expect to see many different races of humans, each at different levels of evolutionary development. Darwin even predicted that the “Caucasian” should have exterminated all other races. This is a failed prediction by the “high priest” of evolution.

Evolutionary ideas about race have largely changed, however, as a result of Christian challenges. As Bill Nye’s statement shows, observational science did not confirm the idea that there were many different races, but instead confirmed the biblical prediction of one race. The shade of our skin does not reflect evolutionary progress but is primarily the result of our genetic makeup that determines how much of a brown-colored pigment called melanin that our skin produces. More melanin produces a dark brown, “blackish” shade, and less melanin produces a lighter brown, “whitish” shade. There is no such thing as different races! This observation from science goes completely against what evolutionists of the past predicted, so evolutionists today were forced to change their ideas to align with the biblical view.

Unchanging Word of God

God’s Word has always taught that there is only one race—the human race.

Now, if instead of starting with man’s fallible ideas about the past, secular scientists had turned to God’s Word and started their thinking with the infallible Word of God, they would not have made these erroneous conclusions that later needed to be corrected by observational science. God’s Word has always taught that there is only one race—the human race. We did not evolve but were specially and uniquely created in God’s image from the very beginning (Genesis 1:26–27). God did not create different races, but “He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Every single human being is a descendant of the first couple, Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:27, 3:20), so we are all related. According to God’s Word, there are not different biological races, there is only one. God’s unchanging Word had it right all along and man’s changing ideas about the past had to catch up with it.

The Tower of Babel

During his interview with Larry Wilmore, Bill Nye said, “So everybody’s from East Africa . . . You migrate into Mesopotamia . . . You have to have lighter skin. It’s this balance between Vitamin D production in your skin and the breaking down of . . . folic acid. Then you migrate across Eurasia . . . Then there’s an ice age. All the snow’s frozen up in the mountains so you can walk to . . . [Alaska]. And then you come down the west coast. [Racism] started because you have these tribes and they have different skin colors as a result of ultraviolet light.” Now, while there are several evolutionary assumptions in Bill Nye’s statements (such as the idea that humanity began in East Africa) and we would certainly not agree with the timeline that Bill Nye holds to for these events, his statements actually sound similar to something a creationist might say!

According to God’s Word, all of humanity is descended from Adam and Eve. This first couple rebelled against God and introduced sin, death, and suffering into creation. Their descendants became increasingly wicked until “every intent of the thoughts of [their] heart[s] was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5), so God sent a global Flood to judge their wickedness. Only eight people, the righteous Noah and his family, were saved through the Flood. After the Flood, God commanded Noah and his family, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). But instead of filling the earth, like they had been commanded to, Noah’s descendants gathered together and built a city and a tower (in Mesopotamia, no less). So God confused their languages, thus forcing them to spread out over the earth (Genesis 11:1–9).

Shortly after the Flood and the Tower of Babel, much of the world was engulfed in the Ice Age that was part of the aftermath of the Flood. This would have exposed land bridges, such as the Bering Strait between modern-day Russia and Alaska. As people migrated from Babel, some of the groups walked across this land bridge into the Americas or came by boat where they eventually spread out from North America to South America.

The Tower of Babel explains why we are so different.

The Tower of Babel explains why we are so different. The different people groups did not begin as humanity migrated from East Africa. They began after God confused the languages and groups began to migrate from Babel on the Plain of Shinar in the Middle East. This also divided up the family group and split the gene pool, including various skin shades. Depending on where these groups lived and populated, the resultant genes were left to their descendants.

Because these groups were reproductively isolated due to the language barrier as well as later geographical barriers, different features, like skin shade or eye shape, were associated with different groups. Babel explains our differences! Different people groups are not the result of evolution. They are the result of the division of languages at the time of the Tower of Babel.

Continuing Evolution?

To emphasize his point that all humans are the same, Bill Nye said that if a man from Norway and a woman from Zimbabwe were to have a child, “All you’re going to get’s a human. You’re not going to get some new thing.” From a biblical standpoint, this is true and will always be true. No matter how many times people have children, they will never produce anything but human beings like themselves. But this statement is actually very inconsistent coming from an evolutionist. After all, according to evolutionary thinking, evolution has not stopped. Humans are not the end of evolution. According to evolutionary anthropologists, at some point in the past a supposed ancestral ape evolved into the Homo genus. That means there was a definite period in time when an ape became something new.

Eventually, the same forces that supposedly produced humans should cause humans to evolve into something new, different, and more fit for the environment. So for Bill Nye to say that “All you’re going to get’s a human. You’re not going to get some new thing” is completely inconsistent with his amoeba-to-astronaut evolutionary worldview, but it is completely consistent with both God’s Word and observational science. According to God’s Word, each organism—including humans—reproduces according to its kind. So we should not expect to see humans producing anything but humans. And this is exactly what the evidence confirms: humans produce humans.

God’s Word Has Been Teaching One Race All Along

Observational science did not confirm evolutionary religious ideas about the past. So evolutionists simply changed evolutionary ideas to match the new data. But what they should have done is realized that the observational evidence confirms what God’s Word has been teaching all along. If they had started with God’s Word, they would have had the right foundation for their thinking and would not have reached such erroneous conclusions. It is God’s infallible Word—not man’s changing and fallible ideas—that is true and is confirmed by the observational evidence.