Bill Nye vs. Intelligent Design

His show stopped producing new episodes nearly eight years ago, but it seems that Bill Nye the Science Guy (Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!) isn’t submitting to B-level TV-celebrity status just yet. A mechanical engineer who studied at Cornell under Carl Sagan, Nye has much more under his belt than his beloved educational show; he engineered a hydraulic device for Boeing that is still used on the 747 and a special sundial used during the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Now it seems he’s busy touring small-town America, giving sold-out lectures for charity and ruffling a few feathers with criticisms of intelligent design in the process .

You can use Google News to plot his course across the country: here, the Waco Tribune-Herald reports several people walking out of his talk after he criticized a literal interpretation of the Bible; and here, the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call calls Nye both “Bill Nye the Boring Guy” and “Bill Nye the Controversial Guy” over the course of a single column. Who knew good ol’ Bill could whip up such a furor? —John Mahoney