This quote is rather shocking. It comes from Ben Carson and, as you can see from the wiki page, Carson is a top notch neurosurgeon. You would think that that would make him do a little research before talking about evolution in general and human evolution in particular. However:
I was alerted to creationist article published in the Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center via Why Evolution Is True. The author of the paper is Joseph Kuhn, MD who claims that “…surgeons are uniquely capable of gathering information, making observations, and reaching conclusions about scientific discoveries.” For the most part it is your standard ID mumbo jumbo and has been ably dissected elsewhere. One part, however, caught my eye:
The transitional species from primitive primates to man have been illustrated in textbooks for over 100 years. These drawings form the visual imagery that supports Darwinian evolution for high school students, university students, medical students, and the public. However, honest dissent exists in the accuracy of most of the transitional prehominoids, with many found to be frauds or animal species. Reconstructions based on fragmentary and scattered bones, surface bones, and gross morphologic features are limited. Anomalous findings of stone tools, bones, and hundreds of other artifacts have suggested that Homo sapiens were actually present 2 to 7 million years ago (at the same time as early proposed transitional species)…(reference omitted – afarensis) Certainly, there has been no additional transitional mutant or species change from the first generally accepted Homo sapiens over 200,000 years ago.
A while back I wrote this post pointing readers to an interesting look at the way creationists misuse Owen Lovejoy’s reconstruction of Lucy’s pelvis to try and cast doubt on human evolution. Unfortunately the piece I linked has vanished – as has the entire website the piece was on. Fortunately, Chris O’Brien has covered the same ground in a post at Northstate Science.
William Meikle and Eugenie Scott have an article in Evolution: Education and Outreach that looks at the frequently heard creationist question “If we evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?” The paper is short, coming in at three pages. In it the suggest that one answer the question by comparing human evolution to human genealogy – a pretty common tactic if one reads blogs. Continue reading
In the previous post in this series I looked at vitamin D metabolism and the effects of vitamin D deficiency on the skeleton. So, lets talk about Lubenow and Neanderthals. Lubenows discussion of Neanderthals and rickets occurs in chapter 14. He begins the chapter by invoking the Genesis flood to explain the ice ages, which only lasted, according to Lubenow, for 700 years (give or take). Continue reading
I have mentioned previously that I was reading Lubenow’s Bones of Contention. In this post I would like to focus on Lubenow’s understanding of rickets and Neanderthal morphology. In order to discuss that I first need to discuss vitamin D deficiency Continue reading