Kelly Hollowell Strikes Again

She's already won one Idiot of the Month award, can she go for two? Look at this bizarre diatribe on Worldnutdaily about the recently discovered Flores Man. It's just full of absurd statements. To wit:

But the showstopper in the recent discovery of Homo flores came when the 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton was dated as only 18,000 years old. That means this hobbit-like dwarf of a human shatters the long-held scientific belief that Homo sapiens systematically crowded out other upright walking human cousins some 160,000 years ago and took over the human population tens of thousands of years ago.

Bzzzt. Good try, but wrong. It doesn't "shatter" any long held beliefs because it is, in fact, perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. The island of Flores, where this species is discovered, is home to lots of unique species, particularly dwarf species, because it has been isolated from the rest of the world for a very, very long time. Not only is this consistent with evolutionary theory, it is predicted by evolutionary theory and it's why some of the most fascinating research on evolution looks at biogeography as it relates to island environments (marsupials in Australia, for instance, or Darwin's own studies on the Galapagos islands). The theory that Homo sapiens crowded out our other human cousins (Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis, for example) a couple hundred thousand years ago is not at all inconsistent with the continued existence of another species in the same genus in some small, peripherally-isolated environment where they did not have any competition from Homo sapiens. She continues:

This "would-be missing link" between us and the original missing link also happens to have the brain size of a grapefruit, which is 2/3 smaller than ours. It is actually closer to the brain size of a modern day monkey and other pre-human ancestors who purportedly became extinct 2 million years ago.

According to authorities, this is what makes the dwarf skeleton the most extreme figure to be included in the extended human family. Chris Stringer, the director of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London, said this finding "rewrites our knowledge of human history."

In other words, this finding suggests recent evolution was (just had to be) more complex than previously thought. (Now that's an understatement.)

Well yes, with each new species that is discovered, our understanding of human evolution becomes "come complex than previously thought". Why is this a problem? She doesn't say. But here's the funny part. Despite the fact that she acknowledges here that human evolution is more complex than the simple Species A becomes Species B becomes Species C linear progression, she then invokes that very linear progression in her conclusion:

Now add the recent finding of Flores man. He contains a jumble of features that appear borrowed from extinct primitive man. Yet he lived crossing timelines with both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. If previous timelines are to be believed, this indicates dramatic changes in DNA and creation of a new species rather recently - not millions of years ago.

It also suggests a lengthy coexistence of two different species of man based on geologic evidence that a massive volcano caused the extinction of Homo flores as recently as 12,000 years ago. None of these possibilities are consistent with traditional evolutionary theory.

I don't know whether to chalk this ridiculous statement up to ignorance, stupidity or dishonesty. How on earth is the lengthy coexistence of two different but related species not consistent with traditional evolutionary theory? This is true only if one has a caricature of evolutionary theory that it is a simple linear progression where one entire species turns into an entirely new species and then into a third species, with the already existing species disappearing the moment a new one arrives - the very linear progression she admitted two paragraphs above was NOT part of evolutionary theory. I'll explain how this works in this particular situation.

Based on the preliminary research (and this discovery is very new and just now made available or other scientists to examine), it is believed that Homo floresiensis split off from Homo erectus several hundred thousand years ago when they were isolated on the Island of Flores in a very specific environment, while Homo erectus was spread out over a much larger area. And this is true not only of this species, but of many other species on that island as well, including elephants. The reproductive isolation meant independent evolution specific to the selection pressures of that very narrow environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Does Hollowell really think that evolutionary theory demands that the moment a new species splits off, the species from which it diverged must immediately die off? This is like being shocked to find out that a group of people from Spain moved to England, but there are still people in Spain. Ancestral and descendant species almost always coexist for a period of time, and if they are reproductively isolated from one another there is no competition between them that would insure the survival of one speciess over the other, making their survival a question of local resources and environment, not a question of competition between related species.

In addition, she also seems entirely unaware of the difference between Asian and African specimens of Homo erectus. Homo floresiensis almost certainly would have split off from an Asian Homo erectus that got to the island either through a simple boat of some kind (like a natural raft) or through a land bridge that later disappeared (like the Bering straights), not from the African Homo erectus that gave rise to Homo sapiens. The African Homo erectus shows much evidence of a large increase in brain size that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens, while the Asian specimens of Homo erectus stayed relatively stable and showed no sharp increase in brain size.

In short, Hollowell's article is typical creationist drek, full of misunderstandings that could easily have been avoided with a little research. And it's hardly a shock that this nonsense gets peddled consistently by Worldnutdaily.

Update: This isn't the first time this has happened, and I'm sure it won't be the last, but I probably should have checked PZ Myers' blog before I wrote this. He had already written a critique of Hollowell's nonsense and it's more thorough than mine. He noticed, for instance, the fact that she contradicted herself by first proclaiming that it was just a strange human being, then claiming it was a monkey, then claiming it was a dwarf or a midget (which is absurd, since dwarfs and midgets have normal human brain sizes while Floresiensis had a very small one, but similar brain-to-body-size ratio). Nice work, PZ.