Creationist taxonomy | Blogotariat

A taxonomist is a
person who studies organisms in part to work out their relationships and the
classificatory framework (i.e. their taxonomy) which explains those
relationships. Creationists have little understanding of taxonomy nor an
understanding of time frames. Some days ago, one creationist asked me, as if to
refute evolution ‘how come there are no humanzees?’ (presumably he meant chimpanzee-human
intermediates). There are two ways to interpret what this creationist means,
and it all depends on context. In the context of someone explaining to him we
are apes, as are gibbons, gorillas and chimpanzees1, it seems
redolent of an interest in bestiality. In the context of explaining to him how
evolution works, it clearly shows he lacks an understanding of the time frame
of evolution, and how evolution works. He seemingly thinks that evolution is
occurring quickly all around us and that if you watch a chimpanzee for long
enough, it will turn into a ‘humanzee’ and eventually a human. This is to
mistake evolution for morphing, a technique used in CGI and often used in
movies2. Of course, creationists never believe that if you stare at
a human long enough, it will turn into something else, because they believe
that humans (especially those that adhere to their beliefs) are the epitome of
perfection, so we could never evolve. Religious people who don’t quite believe
in creationism, but are ambivalent about evolution, still seem to think that we
are some sort of pinnacle of development. This is the same form of species
narcissism that creationists have in spades.

I also had a
creationist argue with me about birds being unrelated to dinosaurs. He said it
couldn’t be the case because birds don’t walk, they hop, whereas all reptiles
walk. He has apparently never seen chickens, pigeons, emus, ostriches, herons
or penguins, among a myriad of other birds. Another argued the same point, but
said that birds have feathers whereas dinosaurs don’t. Clearly, he has never
seen recent photographs of some of the fossils of small theropods from northern
China, on which you can see the feathers preserved; they have feathers as
crests, on their arms, and on their tails, and in some cases over their body3,4,5,6.
The more fossils that are found, the harder it becomes to draw the line between
what is a bird and what is a dinosaur. Indeed, what was supposed to be the earliest
bird, Archaeopteryx lithographica
from the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany, some 155 million years old (i.e. Late
Jurassic) has, in addition to feathers, a long bony tail, claws on its wings
and numerous small teeth in its jaw, just like small theropods do.

Creationists do not seem
to understand that modern scientific taxonomy is hierarchical (i.e. composed of
several levels) and not like the colloquial classification that people use in
their everyday conversations. Creationists don’t like being called apes,
mammals or animals. However, everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that
humans are mammals (i.e. belong to the Class Mammalia). At the risk of boring
the reader senseless, I need to demonstrate how sophisticated and hierarchical
this system is. The Mammalia comprise two subclasses (Yinotheria and
Theriiformes). The Yinotheria includes the monotremes, while the Theriiformes
includes the marsupials (Marsupialia) and placentals (Placentalia). Humans
belong to the Placentalia, which comprises three groups, Afrotheria, Boroeutheria
and Xenarthra. Of these, humans belong to the Boroeutheria. This group consists
of two superorders, Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatheria. Of these, humans
belong to the Euarchontoglires. This group, in turn, comprises two grandorders,
Gliriformes and Euarchonta. Of these, humans belong to Euarchonta. This
contains three orders, Scandentia (treeshrews), Dermoptera (colugos) and
Primates (lorises, lemurs, monkeys, apes)7,8.

The Primates consists
of two suborders, Strepsirrhini (lemurs, lorises etc.) and Haplorhini
(tarsiers, monkeys, apes). The Haplorhini comprises two groups, the Tarsiiformes
(tarsiers) and Simiiformes (monkeys, apes) and the latter group comprises two
groups Platyrihini (new world monkeys) and the Catarrhini (old world monkeys,
apes). The latter group comprises Cercopithecoidea (old world monkeys) and
Hominoidea (apes), and this latter group consists of two families, the Hylobatidae
(lesser apes) and the Hominidae (great apes). Humans are members of the family Hominidae
along with their cousins, the chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan9.

The determination of the
levels in this hierarchical system is based on a large amount of evidence, including
morphological, molecular biological and genetic, and this evidence has been
obtained by thousands of scientists and published in thousands of peer reviewed
scientific papers. The arrangement of these groups sometimes changes due to the
discovery of new evidence, and several of them are currently hotly debated.
That is another thing which creationists do not understand. Science is
constantly advancing as new evidence becomes available. While these do change
the arrangement of groups, and their content, never will they go back to a
system of having humans divorced from the rest of life. That is where we
started when we were almost completely in the dark, and this is to where creationists
want to return us. The fact that creationists blithely discard the massive
amount of evidence in an attempt to put across their infantile belief system,
as if it was in some way based on evidence, is simply ludicrous.

Sources

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