Ideology first/good science whenever

Junk Science at Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins

Casey Luskin September 27, 2015 3:38 PM |

This past week I was in Washington, DC (no, not to see the Pope) and had the opportunity to spend a couple hours at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. I had long looked forward to seeing its David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins.

Ever since the hall opened in 2010, I'd been hearing that the exhibit was not just biased in favor of evolution, but had an unabashed evangelical motive to promote evolution to the public. In fact, in 2010 I heard Rick Potts (director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program) speak at an American Scientific Affiliation conference where he essentially admitted just that. He more or less told the audience that the purpose of the Smithsonian's human origins displays was to encourage the public -- especially religious communities -- to accept evolution.

Marvin Olasky recently reviewed the museum in World Magazine, but I needed to see it for myself. I love museums, and I love fossils, and I don't mind at all when museums talk about evolution. What I found is that the Hall of Human Origins is so zealous in its agenda that it was willing to promote junk science to achieve its goals.

One thing that really struck me is how the exhibit repeatedly called early hominins "early humans" even though they're very far from humanlike. This apparently is an effort to make you think that these creatures are really "us" and we are "them."

For example, early on I watched an interactive video display that showed a young paleoanthropologist discussing "early humans." I thought I heard her mention Paranthropus robustus as an example of an "early human," but I wasn't sure I heard that correctly. Surely, I mused, nobody would call Paranthropus robustus an "early human" when it's thought, even by mainstream paleoanthropologists, to belong to a distant side branch that was far removed from human origins. So I stuck around to listen to the whole video over again to make sure I hadn't misheard.

Unfortunately, I hadn't misheard.

So why was the exhibit calling Paranthropus robustus an "early human" -- when its very name means "parallel to man" because it's not thought to be in our line of ancestry, but was a distinct creature that probably lived alongside early Homo? The rest of my visit helped explain what was going on.

This same pattern repeated throughout the exhibit. Again and again, it promotes as "ancient humans" fossils that virtually no scientist would call "human" -- and clearly don't belong in the genus "Homo." Here's one example:

• Another display said, "From at least 6 to 3 million years ago, early humans combined apelike and humanlike ways of moving around." These must be really early humans because there were no humans around back then, and nothing that looked human or walked or thought or behaved like humans. Yet the exhibit calls these "early humans" apparently so visitors will think that these non-human species are connected to us.
• Another display says "For the first several million years of human evolution, early humans lived only in Africa." The display makes it clear they're talking about species prior to 1.8 million years ago. But again, prior to that time it's not clear that Homoexisted. The species from that period were not human.
• Yet another display shows a chimp, an australopithecine, and a modern young lady and calls the australopithecine "early human." A similar display portrays an "early human" that is 3 million years old next to a "modern human" eating a slice of pizza. The problem, of course, is that 3 million years ago there was nothing around that should be called "human," whether "early " or otherwise.
• Finally, one panel calls Sahelanthropus tchadensis an "early human" though it is from about 6 million years ago, and all we have of this species is a skull that some have said resembles a gorilla.

It's simple: The Smithsonian's Human Origins hall is overwhelmingly animated by the desire to sell Darwinism. That isn't surprising. After all, during the California Science Center case, we discovered that internal Smithsonian emails said ID is officially "against SI/MNH policy." And that's true enough. The Smithsonian punished evolutionary biologistRichard Sternberg just for publishing a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer in a technical biological journal.

As an institution, the Smithsonian is zealous for Darwinism -- so much so that it is willing to promote claims that are obviously bad science.

Not the planet of the apes.

Recent Genetic Research Shows Chimps More Distant From Humans, Neanderthals Closer
Casey Luskin April 29, 2010 9:04 AM 

Research published in Nature over the past few months is showing a much greater genetic distance between humans and chimps than previously thought, while revealing a closer one between humans and Neanderthals.

A Nature paper from January, 2010 titled, "Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content," found that Y chromosomes in humans and chimps "differ radically in sequence structure and gene content," showing "extraordinary divergence" where "wholesale renovation is the paramount theme." Of course, the paper attributes these dramatic genetic changes to "rapid evolution during the past 6 million years."

One of the scientists behind the study was quoted in a Nature news article stating, "It looks like there's been a dramatic renovation or reinvention of the Y chromosome in the chimpanzee and human lineages." The news article states that "many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human" since "the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans." According to the news piece, "Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome."

But not wishing to offend the "myth of 1%", the Nature news article carefully adds, "The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%."

While this research takes us genetically further from apes, a more recent report in Nature news takes us genetically much closer to Neanderthals. Titled, "Neanderthals may have interbred with humans," the article explains that "A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today." According to this new article:

[I]t may help explain the fate of the Neanderthals, who vanished from the fossil record about 30,000 years ago. "It means Neanderthals didn't completely disappear," says Jeffrey Long, a genetic anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, whose group conducted the analysis. There is a little bit of Neanderthal leftover in almost all humans, he says.
Given the high degree of skeletal similarity between humans and Neanderthals, the notion that we interbred is nothing new. They have been called a possible "race" of our own species, as studies have found their body shape is highly similar to that of modern human variation. Indeed, the discovery of "morphological mosaics" indicates that they likely interbred with modern humans. The finding of a modern-humanlike hyoid bone in a Neanderthal implies that they may have had language capabilities.

Textbooks often depict Neanderthals as primitive, bungling brutes with a vaguely human-like form (see above)--an attempt to instill the ape-to-human icon in students. But as Time Magazine reported in 1999, there's increasing evidence showing that this evolutionary interpretation was wrong, and Neanderthals were essentially "all just people":

The real message, [a Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik] Trinkaus believes, is that to people living in the Stone Age, Neanderthals were just another tribe. "They may have had heavier brows or broader noses or stockier builds, but behaviorally, socially and reproductively they were all just people."
(Michael D. Lemonick, "A Bit of Neanderthal in Us All?," Time Magazine (April 25, 1999).)


Some ID proponents might disagree with me on this particular point, but it's my view that Neanderthals were a race of human beings that ultimately went extinct. Either way, it's becoming increasingly clear that Neanderthals do nothing to bolster the case that humans evolved from more primitive hominids.