A Brief Note to Brian Thomas: Of Apes and Men

 


Note: This letter was initially penned in late 2018

Recently, Glen Kuban forwarded me an email he had received from the Institute for Creation Research, featuring a small piece by Brian Thomas (the ICR's "science writer"). The email was about the ICR's Discovery Center, a creation museum set to open in Dallas in early 2019. The Center is aiming to spread the ICR's creation model to a large number of visitors. I have included Thomas' piece below, with the points I found most interesting emphasized.

Title: Refuting Ape-Men Myths

I'm Brian Thomas, Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research. My wife and I have five college-age kids. We look forward to the day when we can take them and their friends who have heard about evolution their whole lives to the ICR Discovery Center. Powerful, Bible-confirming science will pack every room.

Ape-men myths are one of the most persuasive icons of evolution. In the Discovery Center, we'll highlight scientific evidence that shows we descended from Adam, not apes. Genetics confirms this, and all of the relevant fossils look like either apes or men, leaving no support for human evolution.

We could read these facts in a book, but the high-tech visual displays planned for the Discovery Center promise to bring these truths home in unforgettable ways. How many lives will change after seeing the science that supports human origins in Genesis?

Please support this project. Your gift will help make this unprecedented creation experience a reality.

- Brian Thomas

The reason I wanted to offer a response to this is that Thomas claims the title of "science writer", but seemingly has no grasp on the science surrounding the statements made above. To start, there is no such thing as an "ape-man" in evolutionary literature or general theory. That might make one wonder how it's the most "persuasive icon of evolution" given that it doesn't exist.

Humans are, by definition, apes: we are primates who lack tails and are related closely to the other great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos). (Wikipedia, 2022) To put it in simpler terms, a German shepherd is a dog: both titles ("German Shepherd" and "dog" equally apply to it. If you had a mixed breed German Shepherd, it would not be half-German-Shepherd and half-dog: a German Shepherd is a dog. In the same way, there's no such thing as a half-human, half-ape (an "ape-man"): a human being is an ape. This makes Thomas' comment that "...all of the relevant fossils look like either apes or men..." a redundant strawman, since the theory of evolution does not incoherently claim that apes and humans are different creatures, as he suggests.

As such, I'm looking forward to visiting the Discovery Center. I'd like to see what evidence they will be putting forth to attempt to prove that Adam either wasn't a human being (i.e., an ape), or that everything we know about how humans came to be is somehow incorrect. In the same way that a geneticist can trace back parental ancestry in order to identify who the father of a child is, biologists are able to trace back the ancestry of various living organisms to discover what creatures gave rise to them in the past. (Wikipedia, 2022b) By this, we know that human beings share ancestry with all other forms of life on Earth, and became anatomically modern approximately 300kya. (Ewen, 2017) I worry, based on this small piece put forth by their resident "science writer", that the Discovery Center will mainly concern itself with promoting the same tired arguments and positions which have been meticulously deconstructed and demonstrated to be inaccurate a thousand times over, and will do nothing to help the cause of young earth creationism other than circulating these age old fallacies.

Note: I will be visiting the ICR's Discovery Center in October 2022. Hopefully I will be proved wrong!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ewen, C. (2017) Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history. Nature. LINK.

Wikipedia (2022, August 28) Ape. LINK.

Wikipedia (2022, September 13) Human evolution. LINK.

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