BOKHARI: Bill Nye Destroyed His ‘Scientific’ Credibility In A Single Netflix Episode

bill-nye-dancer

On the weekend, questions arose as to whether the organizers of the “Science March,” a highly anti-Trump movement dominated by leftists, cared more about politics than they did about science.

In his new Netflix show, which includes a celebration of the most deeply unscientific, feminist-inspired theories of gender, Bill Nye, the most prominent face of the Science March, has given us an answer.

The show’s very first episode opens with environmentalism and climate change, two topics of relentless focus for Nye. They involve politics as much as they involve science – and the very title of his new show, Bill Nye Saves The World suggests that Nye plans to spend as much time lecturing as he does explaining. One wonders if Nye holds airborne writing sessions for the show in a carbon-spewing jet, the same way he celebrated earth day with Obama.

Sure enough, just over 5 minutes into the first episode, viewers are treated to an explanation of how climate change will kill the pandas.

But it’s episode nine of Shill Nye the Sellout Guy Bill Nye the Science Guy’s where the former kid’s TV hero really crosses the line from science to political quackery. This is the episode where Bill Nye jumps off the deep end into the leftist view on gender, an empirically bankrupt position only defended by postmodernists and social theorists. (In other words, college educators and their dogmatic student followers).

The episode can best be summed up by the closing segment of the show, which features an internet meme singing a song about her vagina. It includes the following lyric:

“Drag queen, drag king, do whatever feels right. You’re a tall pansexual flirty Wood Sprite?” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wllc5gSc-N8

The segment became an instant source of mockery on social media.

https://twitter.com/mr_bones_rises/status/856782492895813632

https://twitter.com/CatlinNya/status/856532219023831042

https://twitter.com/El_Scrumpo/status/856754317533081600

In my previous column, I wrote that one of the truths the “Science March” would have to acknowledge in order to avoid the charge of putting politics before science is the fact that there are only two genders. Not only has Nye failed to acknowledge it: he’s rejected it entirely.

Here’s how Bill explains it:

You may not know, but clownfish can change their sex … There’s a variety in chromosomes. And like I said, there are sex chromosome abnormalities in 1 in 400 pregnancies. I mean, that is pretty frequent. But there’s also a variety in sex organs, hormones … This whole thing is wild, people!

So, to sum up: because a species of fish can change its sex, and because 1 in 400 (0.25%) of pregnancies have chromosome abnormalities, this is enough evidence to declare that biological sex is not binary, and, to use Bill’s technical terminology, “this whole thing is wild, people!”

The preschool language is revealing. The left has infantilized its audience to such a degree that the primary way to get them to agree is to use a voice of authority from their childhood, speaking it what’s possibly an even more dumbed-down tone.

There’s a striking difference between the new Netflix show and Bill Nye’s early work. There aren’t any catchy songs about vaginas or stereotypical Indian nerds stripping: it’s just hard science. Nor was there any room for gender spectrums, because that isn’t science either. Bill Nye has gone from “Science Guy” to political pawn.

Bill then goes on to discuss gender, which he suggests is something different to biological sex.

Sex is biological. Gender is how you identify yourself and your experience. I am biologically male, and I identify myself as a man…My sex and gender are on the same side of the spectrum. But there are people whose sex and gender are not the same.

Bill is correct, of course. You don’t have to identify as a man or a woman. If you’re a bearded man, there’s nothing stopping you from identifying as a beautiful woman. You could also identify as a hobbit, an orc, a unicorn, a pony, or a pansexual flirty wood-sprite. But biologically, you’d still be a man.

Your physiology, psychology, and behaviour – all the things we associated with gender – will continue to be male. No amount of identifying can change scientific facts. Those who think otherwise are welcome to test their hypothesis by identifying as a helicopter before attempting to fly off a skyscraper helipad. You can identify all you want, but gravity has other ideas.

There is a legitimate scientific viewpoint to consider, of course. The evidence for biologically based, binary gender identities is overwhelming, but there is plenty of sound science that defends the view that people with female brains might be born with male bodies, and vice-versa. This is certainly true of intersex people, who are born with both male and female genitals but often have hormonal patterns that lean either male or female. There is also a growing body of research that suggests that (some, not all) transgender people may have female brains in male bodies, or vice-versa.

This doesn’t refute the idea of a biological gender binary — on the contrary, it supports it. Trans people are still either men or women. There is no third option.

While this view would be defensible from a scientific standpoint, it is not, alas, what Bill believes.

As a first hypothesis, scientists originally thought that there might be a male brain … and a female brain. So perhaps a person could have a female brain in a male body, or a male brain in a female body, or the other way around? But there are people who identify as both genders, or neither gender, or a combination of the two, and it turns out you can’t identify the gender of a brain just by looking at it! Gender is like sex … It’s on a spectrum!

So, to paraphrase, because some people identify as duo-gender, or agender, or attack helicopter, male brains and female brains don’t exist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For a critic of religion, Nye places lot of stock in the power of personal belief to determine objective reality.

The most telling part of the episode (other than the vagina song) was when Bill brought on a panel of “the world’s foremost authorities” to explain sex and gender. Not a single scientist was on the panel. Instead, Nye had a gay comedian, a professor of gender studies, and a cultural anthropologist. A entertainer, a member of a politically-motivated field, and a member of a field predicated on taking people (and their “identities”) at face value.

If Nye really wanted to understand gender, he would have brought on a cognitive scientist or an evolutionary psychologist — someone from the Steven Pinker school, which has spent much of the last three decades overturning the assumptions of the “experts” on Nye’s panel, who nonetheless repeated 1970s social science dogmas as if the past quarter-century of research never happened.

Pinker, for his part, stayed well clear of the “Science March.”

Despite the vagina song, gender is a serious subject, and the biological denialism preached by Nye has wreaked havoc in the past. The case of David Reimer remains the greatest warning against denying the reality of biological gender. Reimer was born a male, but after a botched circumcision destroyed his penis as a baby, was given gender reassignment surgery to make him a “girl.”

Of course, Reimer’s biology rebelled – despite the outward physical changes, his biology pushed him towards male thought-patterns and male behaviours. Reimer grew up depressed and isolated, and eventually committed suicide — all because his doctors believed that changing his gender involved nothing more than changing his identity.

Perhaps his doctors should have encouraged him to identify as a pansexual flirty wood-sprite instead.

You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to abokhari@breitbart.com.

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