Safari to Creationstan: Hominids and Creationist Drivel

Good morning, and welcome aboard today's safari into the wilds of Creationstan!

A couple of days ago, it was reported that human evolutionary history has undergone a small and provisional revision. As is the case with all scientific theories, any model deduced from the available evidence is subject to change as new data becomes available. In this case, the new data is the finding that two archaic hominid species, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, are likely to have co-existed for an indeterminate period in the remote past. That's not exactly earth-shaking news. Granted, it's always interesting when science figures out another one of the multitudinous details that add up to a bit more clarity as to how we Homo sapiens got here. In the overall scheme of evolutionary history, and even in the scheme of our own descent, it's a tiny rearrangement of one branch on a very large and diverse phylogenetic tree. I read a number of articles dealing with this new discovery and thought, "Hey, that's kinda cool," despite the articles in the popular media having overblown titles such as "Evolution theory overhauled after the discovery of ‘handy man’ fossil" (Times Online) and "Evolution revolution creates stir" (Denver Post). This is all very interesting, but it's not a "blow to evolutionary theory" in the slightest. LL and I discussed it briefly and that was about it.

Of course, what's a nifty little detail to someone with a fairly good grasp of the concepts involved in evolutionary theory can easily be viewed as an earthquake of biblical proportions in the eyes of someone who hasn't a clue as to the context in which this finding is placed. Today, we begin to see how the overwrought reporting of a small change to scientific model is magnified in the twisted maze of fun house mirrors that is the Creationstan. Let's take a little tour. Please keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times; this ride can be dangerous to your intellectual well-being!

Where to begin? Well, this looks like a good place, so let's pause for some snapshots. In a blog entitled J's Cafe Nette, the author writes the following:

All my life I’ve heard about the Neanderthal Man, Homo erectus and Homo habilis being the ancestors of man.

The story went like this: First we had Homo habilis which eventually evolved into Homo erectus, which eventually evolved into Neanderthal Man, which eventually evolved into Homo sapiens or humans.

I could never quite understand why these species died out and we survived as Homo sapiens. It seemed logical to me that even though there was an evolution period some of the creatures from which we evolved would have still been around.

Like, why do we still have gorillas which look a lot to me like Neanderthal Man?

Well, bless my soul! Now comes a study that says remains of Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived within walking distance of each other at the same time!

OK, full stop right there. How much nonsense do we find in just these few lines of text? No one with half a clue about human evolutionary history thinks that Neanderthals were an ancestor of modern man; all molecular studies to date have shown, in fact, that Neanderthals were not a direct ancestor of ours, so how J has heard this all her life is something of a puzzle. J also throws out one of the silliest and most frequently debunked of Creationist canards, that the existence of an ancestral species at the same time as one of its descendants isn't accommodated by evolutionary theory — sheer nonsense. That great apes and modern humans, or that Homo habilis and H. erectus, coexist isn't a problem in the slightest. To claim otherwise is very much like saying that since there are some Americans whose ancestors were Scots there can't be any true Scotsmen left in Scotland. It is quite common to find an ancestral species and its descendants living at the same time, even in the same locality, albeit occupying different ecological niches. This isn't even a revision of Darwin's original predictions on the subject; to the contrary, it's precisely what he theorized in his observations of the finches of the Galapagos.

As far as J's contention that "remains of Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived within walking distance of each other," that's just a bit of evidence of how sloppy Creationist thought really is. Remains aren't alive by definition, and they certainly don't walk about outside of a certain genre of horror movies (Night of the Living Dead Homo erectus, anyone? George Romero take note!)

To continue, author J somehow now makes the gargantuan leap from a small revision in human ancestry to the conclusion that a scientific finding proves her initial biblical thesis that "God made man in His image" and says:

Now, if you believe God looks like any of these other creatures then I guess this evolution garbage could be correct, but there’s a problem with that. Jesus is God Incarnate and when He came to earth He looked exactly like us! Imagine that!

Of course you have to believe in God to believe that, but that can’t be much harder than believing you came from a knuckle-dragging being that simply vanished.

Lo and behold, we're clearly into the realm of superstition. What a surprise! Leaving aside the simple fact that nobody knows what Jesus looked like and certainly nobody can say that he looked "exactly like us" (who is the "us" implied here? Does it include humpbacked midgets?), the more important point is that none of our "knuckle-dragging" ancestors are theorized to have simply vanished. They gradually became extinct; some were evolutionary dead-ends (e.g., Neanderthals) and some evolved, population by population, into new points along the way in the phylogeny that eventually gave rise to our species (e.g., Homo erectus, potentially). Nowhere in evolutionary biology does an entire species "simply vanish." As is so often the case with Creationists, author J is attacking a strawman of her own design and, I might add, rather sloppily at that.

So much for our first random sample of how overblown science reporting stokes the silliness of Creationonsense. Let's check out another example. For this stop on our expedition through the benighted land of Creationstan we must put on our pith helmets, for we're off to the rainy forests of the northwest which the inhabitants, we find, can't see for the trees. It is here we find the shaggy and shambling creature that calls itself Darwin's Undertaker. It's an interesting specimen in that it says it has "...degrees in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, and equivalent of MS in statistics and probability as minor in PhD work" which, when taken together, prove that it understands biology every bit as much as my own degree in biology proves me qualified to design lunar rovers.

If we stay very quiet and remain absolutely motionless, perhaps we'll hear the beast speak!

In case you did not see it, I just wanted to share how the (in)famous monkey-to-man icon featured on the cover of Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution continues to wilt in the heat of continued investigation. Do they really still teach this stuff to kids? Or to adults?

Well, no, I don't know of anyone who is teaching Wells' insipid nonsense to adults or children, aside from a few misguided theologists-in-thin-scientist-like-disguise. Oh, wait; it's just another instance of Creationist sloppiness. The author meant to ask whether anyone teaches a linear progression from monkey-to-man, as in the strawman depicted on the cover of the rather sticky copy of the book he owns, is how we got here. The answer to that question, too, is no. But it continues...

I would say that Darwin is feeling the heat, but since he devoted his life to pulling down the King of the Universe, the Almighty Creator, from the eternal throne in Heaven, Sir Charles might be feeling a different kind of heat at the current time.

But I diverge.

Yes, you diverge from reality. Darwin dedicated his life to understanding the origins of diversity, not to overturning your personal favorite fairytale.

So what is it this time? It seems Maeve Leakey and team in the year 2000 dug up a Homo erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. "That makes it unlikely that one evolved from the other, researchers said."

Ahhhhhhh, quote-mining. Watch as the Creation-beast forages for food with which to feed its pet delusion. In fact, the article linked also points out that this doesn't overturn the whole concept of evolution, only that we have a new understanding of an evolutionary relationship. The same article also quotes someone else from the same research team as stating that "As the pattern of evolution becomes more clear it seems we are not so unique. We are more like other mammals - it places us more in the animal kingdom." Darwin's Undertaker seems to have selectively removed that troublesome tidbit.

That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, keeps getting proven wrong and too simple, said Bill Kimbel, who praised the latest findings. He is science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and wasn't involved in the research team."

Wasn't that fun? For more fun, read Wells' book Icons of Evolution.

And there we have it. Even when someone is saying that the "old evolutionary cartoon" that Darwin's Undertaker has set up as his strawman has been shown to be incorrect not only just now but many times over, the Creation-beast still tries to portray it as the current understanding of evolutionary history. We knew going in, though, that the trees of northwestern Creationstan make it impossible for the inhabitants to see the forest. Now we have proof! And of course a small revision to this tiny bit of the grand phylogeny of life means that Wells must be correct in his assertion that all of modern evolutionary theory is incorrect. We conclude, therefore, that the copy of the book in the possession of Darwin's Undertaker must be printed in Braille because the owner is clearly blind.

Moving on, we'll make just one more stop in our tour of the Phlogiston Memorial Zoo. Our last specimen refers to itself as Truth Buckler. A buckler can be a small shield, but in this case it appears to be something that causes truth to buckle. Here's what he has to say about the latest in a long progression of scientific clarifications of human evolutionary history:

FoxNews reports a new finding by paleontologist Meave Leakey doing research in Ethiopia. Evolutionary theory teaches that Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus, which then became Homo sapiens (you). But Leakey just discovered in parts of Kenya that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived side by side!

Whenever a piece starts with "Fox News reports..." you can rest assured that you're going to get an informed opinion. This is confirmed by the assertion that "evolutionary theory teaches" something specific about human phylogeny, which is completely untrue, of course. Evolutionary theory merely teaches that populations of living things can, and sometimes do, evolve into new species over time. The theory itself has nothing specific to say about any particular phylogeny; a particular phylogeny provides evidence for evolutionary biology, but evolutionary biology itself makes no assertions a priori about any given evolutionary history, and certainly not about the pathway leading to modern humans. To continue...

Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College of London says that overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us."

Bill Kimbel, science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University who praised the latest findings, says that the old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, keeps getting proven wrong and too simple.

Again, here's a Creationist talking about what scientists are calling a cartoon as if anyone in the field actually believed it to be reality. Why is it that Creationists can't seem to understand that they're the only ones who can't distinguish between cartoons and science?

What is amazing is that they close the article by saying, "All the changes to human evolutionary thought should not be considered a weakness in the theory of evolution, Kimbel said. Rather, those are the predictable results of getting more evidence, asking smarter questions and forming better theories, he said."

Why in the face of massive evidence for Creation do they keep trying to deny the truth and hold to the lie of evolution? May God open their hearts and minds to receive the Truth.

And there we have it... yet another leap from a revision in a particular phylogeny that could only be arrived at through an understanding of evolution passed off as "massive evidence for Creation." This is a major point that Creationists can't seem to grasp; if it weren't for evolutionary biology, we couldn't say anything about these two species. We only posit a relationship between them in the first place because we can analyze them in terms of evolutionary history. The reason that the article concludes in the way it does is because this isn't evidence in favor of Creationism, it's a better understanding of evolution itself. Nothing about this discovery contradicts evolution; instead, it provides more data that supports it! Scientists aren't befuddled by this new information, despite the bizarre reporting on it by Fox News. They look at the new data and say, "OK, this makes sense in light of the overall theory, and we can now say that the two species have relationship X, not relationship Y. Good work, Leakey!" Or else they can say, "That's an interesting idea, but here's some data from molecular investigation that doesn't fit the predictions of this new hypothesis. You'll need to explain why we see this result before we molecular biologists will accept this new postulate." Note that what we don't see are masses of scientists burning their papers and running off to attend revival meetings because this nice little bit of new information indicates that the Genesis myths suddenly account for the existence of two species of hominids existing at the same time that looked different but were both made in the image of an invisible Semitic sky-king.

Lastly, a bit of explanation for why I chose the Creationists I did rather than scouring the websites of well-known organizations like Answers in Genesis or the Discovery Institute. I chose to do this because what organizations like these will do is very much like what I'm doing now. They don't have a theory, and they'll simply make ad hoc statements based on exactly the sorts of things you're seeing in this piece. They'll listen to how uninformed, fundamentally ignorant authors like J, Darwin's Undertaker and Truth Buckler have to say, then they'll synthesize a position on the results of this new research that spoon-feeds the silliness right back to those people, effectively lending an air of authority to the nonsense in order to assure that it spreads to all true-believers who listen to people like Dembski and Wells. That helps to create the appearance of a controversy that such nitwits resolve by inserting divine intervention at whatever point in history they feel like inserting it. This, in turn, reinforces the completely political notion that religious ideologies have a place in science classrooms. Such a statement, if it hasn't been made already, should be forthcoming within a matter of days, if not hours. That makes it no less ignorant, and certainly no less deceitful, than it would have been for the leaders of Creationstan to have made up such stories themselves. It only means that the basis of their "teach the controversy" strategy isn't controversy at all. It's a combination of fallacious ideas, scriptural literalism, and a very good understanding of how to con people by telling them exactly what they want to hear.

In any case, I hope you've enjoyed today's expedition to Creationstan as much as I have. See you next time a bunch of nitwits decide that scientific progress equates to proof of the existence of the fairy at the bottom of the garden. It won't be long, I'm sure. As for me, I'm happy at this moment to be living in the great state of Massachusetts rather than the dark and savage wastelands of Creationstan.

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