Ken Ham and a horse’s ass
Actually, this article is about Ken Ham, horses, and the height of a horse. Close enough. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kenny, he is an evolution denialist whose anti-scientific ideas could be easily disregarded, as he preaches his silly ideas to ignorant, uneducated Americans. Actually, it would have been best if he had stayed in Australia with his anti-science pal, Meryl Dorey, the vaccine denier who runs the vaccine-hating Australian Vaccine Network. So, Kenny runs Answers in Genesis (AIG), a creationist faux-science screed, that was originally written to counter the more scientific, and better written, TalkOrigins website, which was constructed over the years to debunk the stupidity of creationism, which is rather easy. Admittedly, AIG is a prettier website, but Kenny lacks any evidence whatsoever for his claims, so, as we all know, if you don’t have a message, make it look nice.
We could have still ignored Ham as a waste of human evolution, if not for his insane Creation Museum in Kentucky. The craziness of this museum is almost beyond comprehension. The museum cost $27 million to build, which probably could have fed the poor and destitute of Kentucky for many years. It has thoroughly comedic ideas like dinosaurs were friendly with humans, that the earth is only 6000 years old, and that carnivorous dinosaurs were actually vegetarians. Even ignoring the “museum’s” (intentional scare quotes, because this museum is an insult to real museums) ridiculous ideas, it otherwise fails on the basic level. For example, Utahraptor is shown to without feathers, when every single piece of evidence today indicates otherwise. Kenny’s museum has been thoroughly ridiculed by top evolutionary scientists.
Despite all of this, which can be written off as pure stupidity and fodder for jokes, on a more serious side the museum pushes racist propaganda, by promoting the Curse of Ham. Basically, the story is based on the mythical Noah placing a curse on Noah’s mythical grandson, Canaan, for some biblical insanity of some sort. Click the link if you want more details. So, biblical scholars (how hard is it to study the Bronze Age Goatherder’s Book of Fairytales, Myths, and Hallucinations) have stated that Canaan was made black, and exiled to Africa. Why is this racist? Well, it was used for many years to justify slavery, and, more recently, why blacks are somehow inferior to white people. Of course, race is meaningless in biology, as all human beings belong to one species, Homo sapiens. The genetic variability amongst all humans is around 2%, meaning humans share 98% of its genome with all other humans. Ironically, humans share 97% of its genome with its closest relatives, chimpanzees. Do with that what you will.
And to further feed Kenny’s fragile ego, he has decided to rip off the good citizens of Kentucky, and use favorable tax treatment to build his paean to Noah’s Ark with the equally hysterical Ark Encounter, a $150 million orgy to Hammy’s ego. Maybe the Curse of Ham should refer to Kenny’s continued obsession with his evolution denialism.
Back to horses and their asses. Yesterday, Kenny got all upset because a museum (this time a real museum) near his beloved palaces to creationism, dared to describe evolution accurately. The Kentucky Horse Park appears to be nice place where you can find out all about horses, something for which Kentucky is actually well known. One of the displays at the attraction, describes the evolution of horses, starting with Hyracotherium, from about 50 million years ago, to the modern horse. The Kentucky Horse Park, like the horse evolution chart on the right, seems to indicate that horses have gotten larger over time.
Kenny appears to be apoplectic about the displays, and started with this comment:
…Robert Owen, the discoverer of this species, named the original specimen Hyracotherium because it resembled a rabbit-like creature. So this supposed evolutionary ancestor of the horse was not a horse at all!
First, Robert Owen identified the species in the 1840′s, well before we understood the evolution of the horse. Moreover, sometimes the binomial naming system use Latin words that that can be descriptive. Owen may have thought the fossil appeared to resemble the Hyrax (the “rabbit-like” creature). There is a bug named Cedusa medusa, which I am certain did not evolve from the mythical Medusa. In fact, the scientist who named it, enjoyed the word play. There is a clam that has the hysterical name of Abra cadabra. It’s doubtful that the clam evolved from David Copperfield. Nor should we ignore the lungless salamander, Oedipus complex. In other words, there is no real standard for binomial names, not now, and certainly not in the 1840′s. The only reason to debunk this silly comment is because it’s fun to list out some really good binomial names in biology.
Kenny needed to continue his vast ignorance of biology and evolution:
One popular belief in regard to the horse evolution series is that as horses supposedly evolved, they got bigger. Eohippus is listed as 14 inches tall, while Mesohippus is listed as 24 inches tall. The next two horses in the display, Miohippusand Merychippus, grow steadily bigger. What’s the problem, though, with the belief that horses somehow evolved into larger and larger animals? If that were true, shouldn’t we see only very large horses today? But we don’t—horses vary in size from the Clydesdale to the much smaller Fallabella (just 17 inches tall).
Because modern horses are all one species with artificial selection creating different “breeds” of horses. Some were selected to be draught horses used in farming. Arabians were bred to run fast and survive in tough environments. Artificial selection has given us hundreds of breeds of dog, all with different purposes in helping man. Canine evolution brought us the wolf, which was domesticated by man about 15000 years ago (or approximately 9000 years before Kenny thinks the world was created). By Kenny’s ridiculous understanding of evolution, then the chihuahua disproves evolution. You can laugh now.
Kenny concludes his post about horses, with this asinine remark (see, back to horse’s asses):
This example of a poor, unscientific display at the Horse Park is just another good reason why you need to visit a place that will tell your children the truth—the Creation Museum!
In response to Hammy’s use of “unscientific,” we should quote Inigo Montoya from the classic movie (at least for some great quotes), The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
In Panda’s Thumb, an evolution blog, Matt Young wrote the best metaphor ever debunking Kenny’s fallacious statements about horse evolution:
If IQ’s are generally increasing, then why do we still have creationists?
Seriously Kenny, why don’t you and Meryl Dorey save us all a lot of time and merge your two blogs. Then you can write about bad science together, and writers can be more efficient in debunking bad science from both of you. And you can both talk about Australia.
The Creation Museum is OPPOSED to the teaching of 'the curse of Ham', and has an anti-racist exhibition. So where did you get your false information from? And will you apologize that you have falsely accused the Creation Museum of racism?
With atheists' relativistic morals, Nietzsche's will-to-power has enormous appeal. The biggest bully wins.
If you had visited the Creationist Museum you would see that it does not teach about the curse of Ham but rather denies it and all racism, in fact.
Your comment about the $27M being used to feed the poor & destitute is downright ignorant, unless of course you are going to apply that same reasoning to every other museum in Kentucky as well. The rest of your diatribe is not even worth commenting on.
Not to go into every tendentious remark in this article, I'll take up SR's claim about "the mythical Noah", which I take it goes hand-in-hand with the belief that the whole Genesis Flood story is unhistorical too, along with Noah's three sons of course.
Anyone who believes this idea has the following challenges to contend with:
(1) If the whole thing is a piece of Jewish folklore, how come traditions of a world-destroying flood are part of cultures all over the world, long before the Book of Genesis was ever brought there? What are the chances of a coincidence like that? All but nil.
Some people rejoin to this that all those cultures are simply reflecting their respective collective memories of local floods which devastated their own areas at some time or other. But in that case,
(2) Using Occam's razor, which is the simpler explanation: lots of different unrelated floods each giving rise to such a tradition, or one single grand one which different cultures remembered with varying degrees of loss or distortion over time?
(3) Why, indeed, should the destructive event in each and every case be a flood? Floods are just one of several categories of natural disasters capable of wiping out local or regional human settlements: what about volcanoes (Thera, Vesuvius, Krakatoa), earthquakes (Bam in Iran), hurricanes, forest fires? Where are the equally widespread cultural traditions of wholesale destruction and renewal involving such events?
(4) How is it that many of these flood traditions incorporate elements corresponding to those found in Genesis (e.g. the sending out of a dove), when they wouldn't necessarily be expected there?
(5) Among these traditions, there is a correlation between proximity to the Middle East and similarity of details to the Genesis account. Why should there be though, if there never was a dispersion from Ararat/Babel?
(6) How is it that Chinese characters can be seen to derive origins fitting the events of early Genesis – e.g. the character for "ship" includes radicals meaning "eight" and "mouth"?
(7) Why do the ancient royal genealogies of several pre-Christian northern European countries go back to "Sceaf/Seskef" son of "Noe"? The pagan-era Saxons even claimed this son was born on the ark, which nobody with access to Genesis would ever say about Japheth (nor would they use such corrupt forms of his name).
(8) How did the Miaotsu people of southern China come to have ancient verses including the following lines:
"The Patriarch Lama begat the man Nuah.
His wife was the Matriarch Gaw Bo-lu-en.
Their sons were Lo Han, Lo Shen and Jah-hu."
They name several other of Noah's descendants identifiable with names in Genesis 10, and describe both the Flood and the Babel dispersion.
(9) Given that the Hebrews were never a great maritime nation, how come they "invented" dimensions for a supposedly fictitious ark which just so happen to be ones which would give a REAL ark great seagoing stability? If Genesis were derived from the Gilgamesh Epic, why doesn't it describe a cubical ark like that one does? – one which would be no good in stormy seas!
(10) According to the Bible, Japheth's descendants settled in Europe. If he never existed, how do you suppose the ancient Greeks came to regard "Iapetos" as one of their Titans, or the ancient Romans saw "Japetus" as the father of mankind? Not to mention "Jupiter" king of their gods.
(11) Again, if Ham never existed, how did the Egyptians come by the name of their own principal god Amun?
(12) We could ask similar questions about many of Noah's grandsons whom you imply are mythical along with Canaan. How does the skeptic explain the following 'coincidental' resemblances?
Javan – Ionian, Yunanistan (Turkish name for Greece).
Tubal – Tobolsk, Tbilisi.
Meshech – Moscow (in the Meshchera lowlands).
Tiras – Thrace, Troy/Troas, Thuras, Thor.
Elishah – Hellas (Hellenic Republic), Elysian fields (pagan Greek heaven).
Noah – Vishnu (Heb. "the man Noah"), Janus (two faces looking back to the old year/world and forward to the new)…and many more. (See Bill Cooper, "After the Flood", Appendices 1, 2 and 3.)
I'd have much else to say about other remarks in this blog post, but not to the wilfullly ignorant.
Yes, not only Ken Ham and Meryl Dorey but Ropert Murdoch as well!
As an Aussie, I almost feel the need to apologise, but then what about Tim Minchin and Peter Singer?
Seems like the British parliament is taking care of Murdoch for all of us. You’re keeping Meryl Dorey close to you, as I’ve never heard about her hanging with Jenny McCarthy here in the US.
As for Minchin and Singer. I don’t know, both them are good atheists, but they do have some rather odd viewpoints on things. I guess you can’t have it all.
By the way, my little passive aggressive battle started a few weeks ago when I was writing an article about the whooping cough outbreak in Australia. I just threw in a little joke about how Ken Ham and Meryl Dorey are basically two different sides of the same crap. Well, he found my little blog, threw it onto his Facebook page, and dared to lecture me about evolution. (I basically said that a subpopulation of the pertussis bacteria evolved to avoid immunity to pertussis…he said that it wasn’t evolution…bah)
But thanks for reading. And if I send you Ken Ham, would you please send back Nicole Kidman?
Sorry, no can do. But I’ll do my best to stop Mel if he ever thinks about returning.
I just noticed that Meryl Dorey is actually an American. So we might be even on Ken Ham for Meryl. But you’ve sent us Crocodile Dundee and Mel Gibson. I think we need to have Nicole Kidman. It’s only fair. And also, you need to apologize for that awful movie Australia (with aforementioned Nicole). It really was a waste of my time.