Afarensis

There are a few conservatives out there who support evolution - Indian Cowboy springs to mind, none of whom show up on Conservapedia's entry on Macroevolution.

The entry is a strange mixture of Young Earth Creationism, Intelligent Design and ,well, made up facts. Before going into the parts that specifically relate to anthropology let me give you a taste of some of the lunacy on display.

Second, there is no objective or scientific way to say one thing is like another. If you insist there is, then you'd have to agree that intelligent design is science also. Note, by the way, that all of Shakespeare's plays "share" similar features, but one play did not evolve by itself into another.

The time argument doesn't help. Decay, scattering, extinction, defects, disasters, etc., all INCREASE over time. Besides, all mutations are harmful.

(Pancreatic RNases in colubines have some interesting mutations that allow the RNase to work in the lower PH environment of the stomach, where they breakdown the bacteria that are responsible for digesting cellulose - hardly a harmful mutation - afarensis)

For example, it is relatively easy to crossbreed a pure bred dog so that you obtain a mutt or a nearly pure bred dog of another species. However, it will take an infinite amount of time to entirely replace the traits of the original breed with those of the new breed- the graph of evolutionary change, with change on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, has reached a horizontal assymptote. The dog remains a dog.

In response to someone who questioned the above:

I think you have a misconception of how common descent works. The claim that no dog will become anything other than another kind of dog is, in fact, true, according to evolutionary theory, not a challenge of it. The statement is essentially no different than the claim that mammals never become anything other than mammals, or eukaryotes will never be anything other than eukaryotes. Common descent specifies that evolution happens via nested clades: groups within groups, not one group becoming another.

One critic wrote:

I take it your claim is that all mutations cause a loss of genetic information. This claim is false. Consider: if all mutations cause a loss of genetic information, then point mutations cause a loss of genetic information. But all point mutations are reversible--that is, the nucleotide that changes can change back. So if the original point mutation caused a loss of information, the reversed mutation must cause a gain in information.

And the response:

It requires intelligent intervention to reverse a mutation. Lost genetic information will not be restored simply by chance.

With the above in mind you can readily imagine the kind of nonsense that comes up in connection with actual fossils. One critic of the entry mentioned the evolution of whales and the level of the response amounts to "is not" with no supporting reason given, followed by:

There is no plausible explanation for the evolution of the whale, which is a mammal. Darwin suggested that the whale somehow came from black bears swimming with their mouths open!

One last stinker:

Brilliant autumn foliage is beautiful. You won't find anyone who sincerely denies it, exact perhaps the most hardened evolutionist. But it is impossible for the beauty in brilliant autumn foliage to have evolved before humans even existed.

Evolutionists generally deny that there is intrinsic beauty in nature. Over 99% of Americans think there is beauty in nature.

Seriously! I thought songbirds evolved way before humans. One could also mention the coevolution of pollinating insects and flowering plants.

So, what about human evolution (I'm skipping the 2LOT argument - adding energy to a system only increase entropy according to the writer of the entry)?

Take, for example, the famous Nebraska Man. He was supposed "evidence" for macro-evolution but in reality he was based entirely on a tooth from an extinct species of pig found among some ancient tools! This is only the beginning of the evidence against macro-evolution and I will be adding more to this edit as I get the time!

Raise your hand if you didn't see this argument coming. If you really want to know about "Nebraska Man" go here, where Osborn says:

The anthropoid Primate characters of the tooth are confirmed by another water-worn third upper molar previously found by William D. Matthew in the same beds but not described because it was not sufficiently distinctive. These two teeth establish the existence in the Pliocene period of a new and independent type of anthropoid, intermediate in the structure of its grinding teeth between the anthropoid ape and the human type.

Or here where Osborn Says:

This second upper molar tooth is very distant from the gorilla type, from the gibbon type, from the orang type; among existing anthropoid apes it is nearest to m2 of the chimpanzee, but the resemblance is still very remote. It is excluded from close affinity to the fossil Asiatic anthropoid apes, such as Dryopithecus punjabicus, Palamopithecus sivalensis, and Sivapithecus, recently related to the human stem by Pilgrim.

Later he says:

Thus the proportions of the molar crown of the Hesperopithecus type are about the same as those in the Homo sapiens mongoloideus type. There is also a distant human resemblance in the molar pattern of Hesperopithecus, as very skilfully portrayed (Fig. 1) by the artist, Mrs. L. M. Sterling, to the low, basinshaped, channeled crown in certain examples of Homo sapiens. But the He.speropithecus molar cannot be said to resemble any known type of human molar very closely. The author agrees with Mr. Cook, with Doctor Hellman, and with Doctor Gregory, that it resembles the human type more closely than it does any known anthropoid ape type; consequently it would be misleading to speak of this Hesperopithecus at present as an anthropoid ape; it is a new and independent type of Primate, and we must seek more material before. we can determine its relationships.

You can see some pictures of the tooth in question here. The picture beow is an example:

From the picture you can tell why it was mistaken for a primate. Nothing else was said about human evolution. After this we get the standard "Darwin was responsible for Hitler and evolution is a racist philosophy" spiel. I for one am disappointed. I was hoping for some major mistakes concerning human evolution to fisk.