Answers in Genesis Doesn’t Understand Human Evolution

Answers in Genesis Doesn’t Understand Human Evolution

Since I first read the story of the groundbreaking 1974 discovery of possible human ancestor Lucy, I have been captivated by the study of human origins. I felt as if during my atheistic indignation at the fantastical creation stories in the bible, paleoanthropology took my hand and showed me that there is an entire field of study that strives to learn where humans really came from. I’ve been baffled that more people weren’t devouring the findings of fossil hunters. I’m afraid that that might be partly because creationist teachings have been normalized, at least in the United States. I want to help break down, clearly and understandably, why creationism holds no answers about human origins whatsoever.

Inspired by Viced Rhino

I have written posts against creationism before, but I never really refuted any specific claims. I’ve mostly commented on why someone’s logic was faulty or how someone was showing extreme bias. Mostly, when it came to deconstructing specific claims, I’ve referred people to the Viced Rhino YouTube channel; and before I go any further, I just want to do that one more time.

I know it has a funny name and a funny cartoon, but Viced Rhino’s entire channel is his analyses of videos from creationists (and occasionally other Christian apologists) and point by point explanations into why they are wrong. He’s not a scientist by trade, but he’s excellent at researching, he always lists his sources, and he picks up on sly tricks employed by the creationists that an untrained eye would never notice. This series is partially inspired by his channel, and I can only hope to do as well as he does at the task at hand.

Why I’m starting this series

This takes me to what this new series of blog posts will be: I want to look at the articles on creationist websites about human evolution and do in-depth analyses and commentary. I’ve already spent more hours on Answers in Genesis than I’d ever wanted to. I want to be an accessible resource for those who are duped by creationists’ dishonest, and often convincing, tactics.

Most of all, however, I’m doing this to learn about paleoanthropology. I learn by reading books on it, but reading on its own isn’t as effective as, say, taking a real class complete with studying, essays, and tests. To take it further, as we’ve all heard, nothing will teach you a subject as effectively as you becoming the teacher. I want to better understand paleoanthropology and build skills in writing about it specifically, all while taking on the claims made by biblical creationists.

What this series will be

Finally, rather than just presenting you with an announcement that I’m starting this new series, I want to give you a taste of what it will be like. Unlike Viced Rhino, I won’t be tackling one post (or one video, in his case) at a time, at least not with my first contestant, Answers in Genesis. Their website is deliberately set up to feel like a maze. They have multiple names for each article so that you feel like they have more articles than they do. They have a main hierarchy of posts on various topics, but there are dozens of posts just floating in the AiG void that can’t be found except through link trails from other posts. If I talked about every single post, you and I would both go crazy.

Instead, two weeks ago I started reading through all the posts linked to in the main hierarchy at answersingenesis.org/human-evolution. You probably could have guessed that even with their thirty-six posts, some of which are 5,000+ words, not a whole lot is said. Or at least, a lot of things that are said in one post will also be said in five other posts. It’s a way of sounding like they have more arguments than they do. Knowing this, I want to refute specific groups of ideas, and in each post I’ll list the articles that they show up in. For example, they reiterate an already refuted nineteenth-century hypothesis that Neanderthals were just Homo sapiens with arthritis in three different articles. You can say something as many times as you want, but that doesn’t make it true.

Fuzzy words

Here’s a little taste of the types of things I’ll be refuting. The authors at Answers in Genesis (none of which, in this case, are Ken Ham himself, I’m afraid) like to purposely not define words. Their whole schtick is that “apes are apes, and humans are humans.” At least in what I’ve read so far, they very rarely refer to Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens. Of course, in regular conversation, we know that each other are referring to Homo sapiens when we say “human,” but when you are distinguishing between various extinct human species, you really need to specify which species you’re talking about. They like to use words like “man,” “mankind,” and “modern man” to mean Homo sapiens. First of all—you know what I’m going to say—what about women? Why not humankind, at the very least?

Fuzzy words like this render a lot of their arguments null. When it comes to Neanderthals, their view is that Neanderthals are humans, too. This implies that paleoanthropologists don’t think that Neanderthals are humans… but they do. Neanderthals are a species of human: Homo neanderthalensis. Some believe them to be more closely related to us than others do, and so they define them as a subspecies of Homo sapiens: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. We all agree that they’re humans, but when you don’t define human as a genus containing multiple human species, you’re withholding information from your reader to make your opponent look worse than they are. It’s a form of the straw-man fallacy. (And we’ll get back to Neanderthals in much more depth later.)

Defining apes and humans

Likewise, they never define apes. Here, allow me: an ape is any creature in the superfamily Hominoidea. The superfamily includes the families Hylobatidae (lesser apes, gibbons) and Hominidae (great apes). Among the great apes are four genera (plural of genus): orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans. Of all living genera within the ape family, chimps (of the genus Pan) are the closest relative of humans. If a paleoanthropologist is examining the morphology of a fossil with both “human” and “ape” characteristics, she will most often (but not always) be comparing the skulls of Homo sapiens and a chimpanzee.

An ape family tree showing the relation between different kinds of apes, showing that humans are a genus of ape
Wikimedia Commons. You could go even further to show species within Homo such as Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo erectus.

Answers in Genesis ignores all this. Like I said, they just say “man” and “apes,” as if there’s only one species of each. Hominoidea is an entire superfamily, and Homo is an entire genus four levels deep within that superfamily. This tells us that any species between us and the common ancestor we share with chimps (and much further than that), are all apes. So the distinction between “apes” and “man” makes no sense. We’re all apes.

Deception from Answers in Genesis

The madness continues, however. AiG will discuss the supposed differences between a human and an ape, and if you’re lucky enough for them to specify what kind of ape they mean, it will often be an orangutan. Now, take another look at the diagram above: excluding only gibbons, orangutans are the furthest removed apes from us in the ape family tree. If AiG had instead compared a Homo sapiens skull with that of a chimp, you would see that they’re not all that different.

The science of taxonomy (classifying organisms) is hard enough as it is. It is a lot more confusing when you make it so on purpose. Answers in Genesis author Roger Patterson knowingly did this in the post The Origin of Humans by saying: “Many nearly identical terms are used to describe alleged human and ape ancestors. Care must be taken to distinguish between hominoids, humanoids, hominins, hominans, and hominids.”

He is making it sound like scientists try to trip us up by using words that sound like each other, but if you look closely at his list, he includes words like “hominan” and “humanoid.” “Hominan” seems to be nothing but a misspelling of “hominin,” and “humanoid” had nothing to do with taxonomy whatsoever. “Humanoid” refers to anything that resembles a human, like an alien in a science fiction movie. Even so, there are still a lot of words that sound very similar: it’s how taxonomy, and science at large, work. Do you know how hard it was to learn the pronunciations and differences between words like Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus anamensis, and Australopithecus africanus? Big words just come with the territory of learning a new field of science.

This is the kind of deception that I want to bring to light as I go through this series. We’ve all heard a creationist say, “If we evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?” But Answers in Genesis is smarter than that. They sneak in big words, but they use them wrong. They quote snippets from real scientists, who aren’t creationists, to make their arguments seem valid. They have their own in-house “journal,” Answers in Depth, that is made to look and sound like a peer-reviewed science journal, but isn’t. They don’t expect people familiar with paleoanthropology to read their articles in detail; they want people to read their posts who have been taught creationism for their entire lives and who want their beliefs to be reinforced.

10 thoughts on “Answers in Genesis Doesn’t Understand Human Evolution

  • August 2, 2020 at 10:04 am
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    The first thing that comes to mind is “willful” ignorance, but that conflicts with the dictum “Know thine enemy.” So, I suspect that some at AIG do understand the Theory of Evolution, at least in broad strokes, because they would need that knowledge to mount a successful campaign against it.

    The fact that their campaign isn’t at all successful shows how much uphill their battle is. The best thing they have going for them is that science is complicated and therefore off-putting to many on the general public.

    One of AIG’s approaches, therefore is to out simplify the science explainers in a category I call “I Ain’t No Kin to No Monkey.” So, we end up explain how they got it wrong and the AIGs primary audience hears … science … wrong … see, I told you so.

    We should push AIG in the other direction, basically well if the theory of evolution is incorrect, what is indeed correct? Ask them to be specific, including how they know, and what researches they are doing to prove they are right.

    Their approach now is to focus on how evolution is wrong, we need them to shift into a position in which they need to prove they are right. How was the earth created 6000 years ago? Was it by magic? Where do fossils come from? Dis God deliberately try to mislead us by making the planet and universe look so old? Why would he try to hide the true nature of his creation?

    If we were to look at this relationship as if everything they said was a t a news conference and took the role of tough reporters, maybe we would get them to do Trump-like walk outs and show their true colors.

    Reply
    • March 19, 2021 at 9:45 pm
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      I love this approach to creationism. If you are going to try to disprove the theory that explains SO MUCH that we have seen in SO MANY fields, then you will have to provide an alternative answer that accounts for ALL of it. And throughout this series I’ve realized that “Doesn’t Understand” might be a misnomer. They know what they are doing. To write what they write, they must read entire articles that debunk what they believe, only to pick out one sentence that sounds odd on its own. It’s very deliberate, and not very “stupid” as I once thought.

      Reply
  • August 2, 2020 at 10:41 am
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    Thanks. I’ll be interested in your series on creationism.

    I tend to think of Ken Ham as a carnie (Carnival operator). He seems to be always producing the kind of hooplah that we expect from a carnie.

    I guess he is good at what he does, which is getting rich at the expense of gullible people.

    Reply
  • August 2, 2020 at 12:00 pm
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    Quite a project you’re taking on. Wish you success.
    i recieve Acts & Facts monthly from The Institute For Creation Research every month and you’re right on about their attempts to look official from a science perspective. Hamm and his Ark is another comic site.
    Good Luck on your mission.

    Reply
    • September 1, 2020 at 10:55 pm
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      You are taking on the Christian Apologists? Pack a lunch, and if you are inclined, tuck a bottle of bourbon in your bag. I see you have already engaged them somewhat so you know they have limited resources, but what they have they will arrange and re-arrange for every argument.

      “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

      Richard Dawkins March 16, 1941

      “He (she) who combats religion and its phantasies by the arms of reason, is like a man who uses a sword to kill flies: as soon as the blow is struck, the flies and the fancies return to the minds from which we thought to have banished them.
      Jean-Paul Messier Superstition In All Ages (1732) / Common Sense

      “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
      Robert Green Ingersoll. The Gods / From ‘The Gods and Other Lectures’

      “The first principle of our study we will derive from this, that no thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing.”

      Translation: there was no fantastic being who pulled all the universe out of …
      Lucretius 99 to 55 BC
      The Nature of Things Bk. 1 line 149-150

      My point in posting all this is to point out that from about first century BC to today, men and women have argued against the gods. Science against mystery and myth. You are dealing with people who can never accept they have lost the argument.

      But, I read your profile. I think you have the goods.
      Will you keep the rest of us informed?

      Reply
  • August 3, 2020 at 8:12 am
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    Your articles are brilliant beyond words. I have begun to see how manipulative things can get if not pondered and spent time on carefully.

    Reply
    • March 19, 2021 at 9:41 pm
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      Thank you so much, that really means a lot!! 🙂

      Reply
  • September 1, 2020 at 10:45 pm
    Permalink

    You are taking on the Christian Apologists? Pack a lunch, and if you are inclined, tuck a bottle of bourbon in your bag. I see you have already engaged them somewhat so you know they have limited resources, but what they have they will arrange and re-arrange for every argument.

    “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

    Richard Dawkins March 16, 1941

    “He (she) who combats religion and its phantasies by the arms of reason, is like a man who uses a sword to kill flies: as soon as the blow is struck, the flies and the fancies return to the minds from which we thought to have banished them.
    Jean-Paul Messier Superstition In All Ages (1732) / Common Sense

    “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
    Robert Green Ingersoll. The Gods / From ‘The Gods and Other Lectures’

    “The first principle of our study we will derive from this, that no thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing.”

    Translation: there was no fantastic being who pulled all the universe out of …
    Lucretius 99 to 55 BC
    The Nature of Things Bk. 1 line 149-150

    My point in posting all this is to point out that from about first century BC to today, men and women have argued against the gods. Science against mystery and myth. You are dealing with people who can never accept they have lost the argument.

    But, I read your profile. I think you have the goods.
    Will you keep the rest of us informed?

    Reply
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