Ota Benga, the “Ape Man” Put on Display at the Zoo
PREDICTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY SPECIAL CREATION: We will not find any ‘ape-men’ living anywhere on earth. We will only find apes and humans, no ‘in-betweens.’ BASIS FOR PREDICTION: Genesis 1&2 – Separate creation of man and beast. Man is made in the image of God, etc.
PREDICTION OF DARWINIAN THEORY OF EVOLUTION: We should find societies of ‘ape-men’ living in various places on earth. BASIS FOR PREDICTION: Darwinian view that H. sapiens descended from an ape-like ancestor over millions of years.
THE RESULT?
Darwinist prediction: SPECTACULAR FAILURE
Special Creation prediction: CONFIRMED
Jerry Bergman tells the story here … http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5033 … and I would encourage you to circulate this story far and wide. These types of actions are the direct result of Darwinian thinking and need to be exposed. Discussion at IIDB found HERE. Here are some excerpts from Bergman’s article …
One of the most fascinating historical accounts about the social effects of Darwinism is the story of Ota Benga, a pygmy who was put on display in an American zoo as an example of an evolutionarily inferior race. The incident clearly reveals the racism of Darwinism and the extent to which the theory gripped the hearts and minds of scientists and journalists in the early 1900s. As humans move away from this time in history, we can more objectively look back at the horrors that Darwinism has brought to society, of which this story is one poignant example.
Genetic differences are crucial to the theory of Darwinism because they are the only ultimate source of the innovation required for evolution. History and tradition has, often with tragic consequences, grouped human phenotypes that result from genotypic variations together into categories now called races. Races function as evolutionary selection units of such importance that the subtitle of Darwin’s classic 1859 book, The Origin of Species, was ‘The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.’ This work was critical in establishing the importance of the race fitness idea, and especially the ‘survival of the fittest’ concept. The question being asked in the early 1900s was:‘Who was, [and] who wasn’t human? It was a big question in turn-of-the-century Europe and America … . The Europeans … were asking and answering it about Pygmies … often influenced by the current interpretations of Darwinism, so it was not simply who was human, but who was more human, and finally, who was the most human, that concerned them.’1
Darwinism spawned the belief that some races were physically closer to the lower primates and were also inferior. The polyphyletic view was that blacks evolved from the strong but less intelligent gorillas, the Orientals from the Orang-utans, and whites from the most intelligent of all primates, the chimpanzees.2 The belief that blacks were less evolved than whites, and (as many early evolutionists concluded) that they would eventually become extinct, is a major chapter in Darwinian history. The nefarious fruits of evolutionism, from the Nazis’ conception of racial superiority to its utilisation in developing their governmental policy, are all well documented.3,4
Darwinists frequently assert that Special Creation is not a scientific theory because it makes no predictions. Actually they are wrong (technically they are called ‘retrodictions’ because Darwinism and Special Creation are historical sciences) as this example and many other examples which I will explore illustrates nicely.
In this post you make the same (deliberate?) error as you made in your post ‘Nested Hierarchies: Failed Prediction of ToE’. You state,as if it was a matter of self-evident fact, a
‘PREDICTION OF DARWINIAN THEORY OF EVOLUTION: We should find societies of ‘ape-men’ living in various places on earth. BASIS FOR PREDICTION: Darwinian view that H. sapiens descended from an ape-like ancestor over millions of years.’
This is a misleading interpretation that is founded on either a failure to read and understand Darwinian theory at all or on an intentionally misrepresented ‘prediction’ contrived for the sole purpose of discrediting that supposed ‘prediction’.
To refresh your memory, in the ‘Nested Hierarchies’ article you made this claim:
‘…Darwin clearly thought that, according to his theory, all of nature should NOT be well-defined. Rather, we should see “innumerable transitional forms.”’
This is, to all intents and purposes, the same claim as you are making in this article. And yet what do we find Darwin saying a few short paragraphs after the paragraph you referenced in ‘The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ that allows you to draw this perniciously FALSE conclusion:
‘As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved parent-form and other less-favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand. Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of the formation and perfection of the new form.
‘But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? It will be more convenient to discuss this question in the chapter on the imperfection of the geological record; and I will here only state that I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being incomparably less perfect than is generally supposed. The crust of the earth is a vast museum; but the natural collections have been imperfectly made, and only at long intervals of time.’
So the entire premise on which you base your accusation against Darwinian theory in this article is as misleading as it was in the other. Interestingly, of course, the ‘inerrant’ source for your claimed ‘prediction’ of special creation – Genesis – actually makes no predictive claims whatsoever, unlike the continually refined Theory of Evolution. I suggest that you can trawl any collection of pre-scientific myths and contrive predictions from them that you can claim have been ‘confirmed’.