BILL MOYERS: Let’s talk politics for a moment.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Go for it.
BILL MOYERS: All right. According to the Pew Research Center, back in 2009, a comfortable majority of Republicans accepted human evolution as a fact. But now, a plurality rejects it. So I ask you, politics can trump science, can’t it?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, in a free, elected democracy, of course. You vote who you want on your school board. There is no provision in the constitution for the government to establish what’s taught in schools. That’s all relegated to the states. Hence, we speak state to state about what’s in their science textbook versus another.
And so that’s the country we’ve all sort of bought into, if you will, or born into. I think it’s a self-correcting phenomenon. Nobody wants to die, okay? So we all care about health. But above all else, among the Republicans I know, especially Republicans, nobody wants to die poor, okay?
So educated Republicans know the value of innovations in science and technology for the thriving of an economy and business and industry. They know this. * If you put something that is not science in a science classroom, pass it off as science, then you are undermining an entire enterprise that was responsible for creating the wealth that we have come to take for granted in this country. So we’re already fading economically. If this, if that trend continues, some Republican is going to wake up and say, “Look guys, we got to split these two. We have to. Otherwise, we will doom ourselves to poverty.” And so I see it as a self-correcting, I don’t know when it’ll happen, but they know. **
BILL MOYERS: So what do you think’s at stake? What’s at stake–
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: What’s at–
BILL MOYERS: --for democracy?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh no, it’s not, the democracy will still be here. It’s a matter of we’re just voting into office people who don’t understand how to make, how money gets generated. In, you know, since the Industrial Revolution and before, we have known the value of innovation in science and technology and its impact on an economy.
If that begins to go away, it’s a different country. We’ll still call ourselves America, but we won’t lead the world economically. And that’s a choice we are making as an elective democracy.