Creationists Take On Homo floresiensis

Kelly Hollowell is not the only one making absurd statements about the new Homo floresiensis find. Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, sees her absurdity and raises it to outright idiocy in this interview with Agape Press. The way this is phrased is absolutely precious:

Answers in Genesis founder Dr. Ken Ham says he is always amazed by the reactions of evolutionists whenever a new, so-called "humanoid" bone is found. Inevitably, he says, the evolution proponents say with the finding of a new fossil that creationists have lost their age-old argument with Darwinists.

But Ham says this is not so. "The interesting thing is that, really, from a creationist perspective, we have no trouble at all explaining variation within human kind like this," he explains. "I like to help people understand that by saying, 'Look -- eight people got off Noah's ark, and as they increased in number, and then you have the Tower of Babel, and you split up the human gene pool.'"

When this happens, the science expert continues, the result is "different combinations of genes moving in different directions. You can get certain features in a particular group that might be unique to that particular group." Thus, he concludes, are the so-called "evolutionary" differences in the features of human skeletons explained.

I'm sure that the average reader of Agape Press misses the obvious fact that Ham is in fact invoking evolution as an explanation for variation among different species in the Homo genus while simultaneously claiming that this is evidence against evolution. The only difference is that, as a young earth creationist, Ham has to believe that all of that evolution was compressed into only a few thousand years at very most. So Ham is in fact arguing for hyper-evolution, not for any creationist explanation.

His organization has elsewhere claimed that Homo floresiensis should in fact be classified as Homo sapiens - as modern humans. Yet in their other writings on hominid specimens, they have always used the guideline developed by creationist Marvin Lubenow that any specimen with a brain size under 700cc could not even be considered a member of the Homo genus, much less of the same species, and should be regarded as merely apes. Well, Homo floresiensis has a brain size of 380cc, just more than half of this imaginary dividing line. But here, they throw all of that away and refer to the find as "soggy dwarf bones". But dwarves have a normal human brain size, while this find has a brain only about 1/4 the normal human brain size.

AIG says, "The Flores discovery fits very nicely into a biblical view of history." They don't explain this, but it begs an obvious question - what could possibly NOT fit very nicely into a view of history that says that God could have created whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted? Pray tell, what IS the creationist explanation for this find? Was God tinkering? Did he just randomly decide to put something looking very much like human beings in this one place and nowhere else, but with much smaller brain sizes? Was he expirementing to see if a smaller brain would work with a bipedal body design? That seems like odd behavior for an omniscient and omnipotent designer. Or perhaps did he make a whole bunch of almost humans and then deposit them in the sedimentary rocks in just the right temporal and anatomical order, from the Australopithicines to Homo habilus to Homo erectus and finally to Homo sapiens, to suggest an evolutionary explanation just to fool us? Sorry, it's just silly to claim that any find "fits nicely" into a creationist framework because absolutely anything could be explained "Well, God can do what he wants".

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