| Evolution in the News - December 2013 |
| by Do-While Jones |
This little piggy went where no little piggy should go.
What do you get when you cross a pig with an ape? A human being, according to one evolutionist—and he isn’t joking.
There are two good reasons not to address this in our Evolution in the News column. First, this theory is so stupid it should not be dignified with a response. Second, we don’t want to be accused of taking a cheap shot at the theory of evolution by reporting such a stupid evolutionary theory.
So, why even write this column? Honestly, I misjudged how long the Paleontology Busted article would be. Usually, we have to cut lots of things out to get the newsletter down to six pages. When going to the final layout stage, we discovered this month’s “six-page newsletter” was only five pages long, and we needed some amusing filler. This stupid theory is about as funny as it gets. Even so, we had serious doubts about this column for the two reasons stated above.
What changed our minds and made us think this topic was worth including in this newsletter? It was the Stupidity Similarity. 
The notion that human beings are the result of one act of indecent passion between an ape and a pig is just as dumb as the idea that the Earth’s magnetic field reverses polarity every million years. Since we devoted this month’s feature article to paleomagnetism, the claim that the human race exists because a pig raped an ape doesn’t seem out of place. The two stupid ideas just seemed to go together.
In the interest of fairness, we must point out that although the Men Are Pigs proposition isn’t as widely accepted as paleomagnetism, it was taken seriously by the (British) Daily Mail. (But they made sure they blamed the stupid idea on an American! )
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The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, an American geneticist has suggested. The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, who is also one of the world's leading authorities on hybridisation in animals. He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates. 1 |
We hasten to point out that this stupid idea was not published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Dr. McCarthy elaborates his astonishing hypothesis in an article on Macroevolution.net, a website he curates. 2 He is at pains to point out that that it is merely a hypothesis, but he presents compelling evidence to support it. 3 |
The “compelling evidence” is that we share some distinguishing characteristics with pigs.
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These distinguishing characteristics, including hairless skin, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, light-coloured eyes, protruding noses and heavy eyelashes, to name but a few, are unmistakeably porcine, he suggests. There are also a number of less obvious but equally inexplicable similarities between humans and pigs in the structure of the skin and organs. Indeed, pig skin tissues and heart valves can be used in medicine because of their similarity and compatibility with the human body. 4 |
The Daily Mail notes:
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Unsurprisingly, Dr McCarthy's hypothesis has come in for substantial criticism from orthodox evolutionary biologists and their Creationist opponents alike. 5 |
Yes, that’s not surprising. The surprising thing is that paleomagnetism hasn’t come in for equally substantial criticism from evolutionists. The idea that the Earth's magnetic field changes polarity every few million years is just as ridiculous. Why are some stupid evolutionary ideas accepted, when others are rejected? (But then, how many evolutionary ideas aren’t stupid?)
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Footnotes:
1
Daily Mail, 5 December 2013, “'Humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig': Extraordinary claim made by American geneticist”, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2515969/Humans-evolved-female-chimpanzee-mated-pig-Extraordinary-claim-American-geneticist.html#ixzz2mtLmH3Wz
2
http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html#.UqR9acKA2M-
3
Daily Mail, 5 December 2013, “'Humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig': Extraordinary claim made by American geneticist”, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2515969/Humans-evolved-female-chimpanzee-mated-pig-Extraordinary-claim-American-geneticist.html#ixzz2mtLmH3Wz
4
ibid.
5
ibid.