Young Earth Creationist's "audit" Of Evolution Exhibit: A Review

[Sheerbliss]

Homeschooler and creationist Megan Fox (not the actress) recently "audited" the Evolving Earth Exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. "Audit" is a strong word: I work for real auditors (CPAs), who are highly educated experts in their subfields and concerned with accuracy (because they can be sued). When they don't know something, they look for the answer. They've also passed the long and difficult CPA exam administered by the State of Colorado. Megan Fox doesn't have the equivalent of any of these qualifications in the field of biology: what she's produced isn't an audit, but a silly video that I'm watching so you don't have to.

Megan Fox at the Field Museum. Image from wonkette.com via Google images.

Fox jumps right in with eukaryotes, which she doesn't know how to pronounce. The exhibit says that at first, all eukaryotes were single celled, and some are still single-celled, implying that others are not.   Fox says this means that eukaryotes have always been single-celled. No: it means some of them have changed. If they changed after becoming single-celled eukaryotes, they might have changed before that, too. The conclusions she draws from her faulty logic--that living things have always been made of eukaryotic cells--doesn't even follow her first premise: that eukaryotes have always been single-celled organisms.

Then Fox goes on an angry, confused, frustrated tirade about how angry and confused she is, and she doesn't want scientists to tell her they know how animals came to exist, because they don't know. At least she loves looking at the fossils--"real science," she calls them. Make a note of that.

The next exhibit discusses changes in the atmosphere 470 million years ago. "How do they know this? This sounds so stupid." Unfortunately, the exhibit did lack the footnotes to scholarly work that Fox was apparently looking for. Maybe the atmostphere just came into existence, Fox says. Maybe aliens did it. It reminds me of Judge Jerry Scheindlin's quip to defendants: "Maybe I did it."

The early plant exhibit draws just as much contempt, along with a demand for a videotape from 470 million years ago, proving that green algae and moss at shorelines were the first plants. Fox snorts at the plant fossils (which she called "real science" just a moment before) as proof of nothing. My layman's guess about the assertion that these were the first plants: algae and moss are very simple plants, and there were no fossils of other plants below the first algae and moss fossils.

Next up for attack is the exhibit stating that it took around 50 million years for plants to evolve from tiny, vascular things to leafy trees. Fox again laments the lack of a videotape from the era and wonders how scientists know it's not 40 or 60 million years ago--that they just want people to believe. Through the video, Fox, apparently a young earth creationist, goes on about the purported lack of evidence and appeal to faith without a hint of irony. The object of her contempt this time: an exhibit stating that plants evolved and that roots allowed plants to grow farther inland, along with an explanation of cladiograms, or branch drawings, to depict evolutionary changes.

Like any good young earth creationist, Fox trots out the gaps argument: where are the missing links between one life form and another that it evolved into? She asserts that every "missing link" found has been a hoax. In fact, many real "missing links" have been found, but there's the rub: every missing link creates more gaps. Let's say you have a fossil from 10 million years ago and another from 20 million years ago. There's a gap. If you find a fossil from 15 million years ago, you end up with two gaps of five million years each. But if you don't find a missing link--and you might not since living things usually decompose instead of fossilize, and things can happen to a fossil over the course of millions of years--there's just no proof that one thing evolved into another. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Moving on to early tetrapods, or animals with four feet, Fox says, "They want you to believe that the fins fell off and they grew feet. That's the dumbest theory I've ever heard in my whole life." It IS dumb and it's incorrect: fins evolved into feet--scientists aren't asserting they fell off. Fox compares this evolution to a Coke can: a Coke can can't fall from the sky with letters in a disarray and right itself. It's a version of the pocket watch argument, the problem with which is that non-living objects don't reproduce and therefore cannot evolve. Again, Fox wants to see the video. As much a I dislike smart-mouthed kids, I'd love seeing one ask her for the videotape of the six-day creation of the earth and all its life forms.

Next, Fox gets to the cool part: the dinosaurs, or dragons as she calls them. She knows they are dragons because one of her children told her so, and the skeletons look like drawings of dragons--artists of the 20th and 21st centuries knew what dragons looked like. Yes, they did. (And Harry Potter apparently belongs in the biography section of the library.) Fox asserts that humans and "dragons" lived alongside one another at one time, waving away the idea that long ago, people might have found dinosaur fossils and drew them and made up stories about them, while scientists performed carbon dating and observed that human fossils don't appear under dinosaur fossils. But no, scientists are covering up evidence (like the "dinosaur cave paintings" she saw in Creation magazine) because it would throw off the evolutionary timeline by hundreds of millions of years.

The argument of the gaps comes up again as Fox looks at the human ancestor exhibits. Of course, she's less impressed with fossil evidence here than she was earlier. Neanderthals are just stocky humans (like Eastern Europeans with those big brows). Maybe Leonid Brezhnev did have a little more Neanderthal DNA in him than most of us, but yes, Neanderthals are genetically distinct from Homo sapiens. 

Asking for evidence and wanting to know how something came to be known are great things--except when they're asked rhetorically with arrogance and deliberate ignorance. And it's amusing when the person asking obviously hasn't applied the same demands to their own pet ideas. A suggestion for readers: look at the video with the sound off. You'll get a free tour of an interesting exhibit.

ETA: Fox is not only stupid and annoying, but she's being sued for being a creepy stalker.

 

(From my blog here: http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2014/12/megan-foxs-audit-of-field-museums.html.)

[Avandris]

Alternatively you could watch Armoured Skeptic 'respond' to this woman, I found it rather fun!

 

 

 

Can't help but find it rather sad that there are people that unwilling to learn and so completely oblivious to how dumb she sounds.

[FarflungWanderer]

I love the Field Museum. And the MSI, for that matter.

 

Chicago may be a mess in so many ways, but those museums were my introduction to the larger world. I will love them to death for showing me a world beyond what I saw.

[Joshpantera]

Hey all, I had to drive to Michigan and back last week for a funeral. Along the southern interstates I noticed a lot of anti-evolution billboards starting in Georgia. It's really ridiculous but at the same time it's probably a sign of the fundie's last stand. It's a reaction to the overwhelming tidal wave of evidence drowning their world view. This video seems like more of the same. 

[mymistake]

Hey all, I had to drive to Michigan and back last week for a funeral. Along the southern interstates I noticed a lot of anti-evolution billboards starting in Georgia. It's really ridiculous but at the same time it's probably a sign of the fundie's last stand. It's a reaction to the overwhelming tidal wave of evidence drowning their world view. This video seems like more of the same. 

 

 

It is becoming a generational thing.  More and more of the younger generation are turning their back on religion.  As the population ages religion becomes irrelevant.  Old Christians can see it happening but they can't fix it because the things they would do to help are what drive young people away.

[Joshpantera]

Indeed mymistake. This was part of the funeral experience as it turned out. My wife's grandmother was devout SDA until the end. She had her former preacher grandson deliver a calling to all of the non-believer's in the family to get their butt's to church because she wants to see everyone at the second coming when Jesus calls out the dead in Christ. He, being a believer, has to deal with his own children among the atheist count. He cried and wept about it. And of course none of this moved any one to run back to church because we all fully understand the folly in resurrection doctrine and Christianity as a whole. 

 

The way I see it is that these older generations will gradually die off taking their superstitions to the grave which will not continue into the proceeding generations. Our kids have had the experience of older generations trying to enforce rules on them which they don't like and which we've told them are not real and do not need to be followed. Like the SDA ban on unclean meats, strict adherence to the Jewish Sabbath, and a general attitude of superior biblical knowledge over Sunday keeping Christians. Kids are smart. They came to me about not believing all of this stuff. I simply told them that they are essentially right and then expanded on what's wrong with what their grandparents believe. One of those things is creationism. I took out the Bible and showed them why Genesis is not literal history. They got it. And then I told them that evolution is really the only option out of the two because Biblical creation can be crossed off as a valid option. 

[Blood]

I hope you guys are right. From where I sit, I see these ignoramuses becoming more and more vocal and powerful, influencing educational curriculums in public school, to say nothing of home schooling. The Republican Reich just voted in here in Texas completely caters to these people, and boast of "school freedom" in which taxes are routed to home schoolers so they can teach their kids nonsense just like Ms. Fox. 

 

I actually see the beginning of a new dark ages, not the death of religion by a long shot. 

[Joshpantera]

Here in Florida I know a lot of people who have cut ties with religion as of this generation. It may look dismal in Texas but from what I understand there's a nation wide trend towards no religious affiliation: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/

 

“Nones” on the Rise

The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).3

[Joshpantera]

And it would seem that this trend will necessarily spill over into the creationism vs evolution debate. The rise in no religious affiliation should indicate a loss of fundamentalists to either atheism, agnosticism, or some liberal God belief with no religious affiliation. Knowledge increases, superstition declines......

[Sheerbliss]

The video has been savaged on the internet, with few people coming to the defense of young earth creationism. 

 

There's a saying the science advances one funeral at a time (no disrespect to anyone's grandmother).

[Joshpantera]

Yeah, I completely agree with the funeral analogy.