"Chimera" Charade Was Just Kooky Injections

There are many serious problems plaguing the people advancing the claim that all organisms share a common ancestor.  One of the biggest problems is the appearance in natural history of some types of organism without any clear evolutionary path that might explain their appearance. For example:

• Almost all animal phyla (the main divisions of animals) appear suddenly in the fossil record at the time of the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Birds appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Flying insects and flying dinosaurs appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Humans appear suddenly in the natural history record about 100,000 years ago, when we first start to see signs of the symbolic activity that is the true hallmark of humans (fossils long before that are often called human fossils without warrant, in cases where there is no corresponding evidence of symbolic activity). 

Darwinists have long had a strategy for dealing with such problems, the strategy of trying to assert that one group of organisms "really is" just an example of some other group of organisms that preceded it.  This strategy hasn't been used in connection with the first item on the bullet list below, there being almost nothing in the way of known animal predecessors of all the animal types appearing in the Cambrian Explosion. But the strategy has been used very much on the last three items on that list. Specifically:

• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "birds are dinosaurs."
• The nonsensical claim has sometimes been made that "insects are crustaceans."
• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes."

You can call this type of talk Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense, and you can call the people who advance such nonsense DENiers. That seems like an appropriate term, since advancing Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense is very much a case of denying facts.  The facts are that there are a great many dramatic physical differences between birds and dinosaurs, that there are some huge physical differences between crustaceans and insects (particularly flying insects), and that there are a host of physical and mental differences between apes and men. The absurd claim that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes" has always been a claim that facilitated racism, because once a man believes that some other men are "just apes" or "just animals," he may be more likely to abuse other humans on grounds that "their race is more apelike" or to abuse or destroy such men, thinking that such actions are not much different from slaughtering cattle. 

It is easy to see the reason why Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense occurs. When you have a giant leap you can't credibly explain, it helps to try to portray the leap as no leap at all. So if you want to maintain that a  heap of auto parts naturally and accidentally transformed into a working car, it sure helps if you can say, "a heap of auto parts is a working car," or "a working car is just a heap of auto parts." And if you want to maintain that some dinosaurs transformed into birds, it helps if you can say "birds are really dinosaurs," a phrase that is a classic example of ivory tower inanity. 

One of the strangest DENiers was a Soviet biologist named Ilya Ivanov who developed plans to secretly inseminate women in French Guinea with chimp sperm, under the guise of a physical examination. He hoped that this would result in a chimp-man hybrid.  The French governor did not permit this. 

Later Ivanov actually got five women to agree to be inseminated with chimp sperm.  You can only wonder what was going on in their minds. Maybe some zealot sold them on the need to prove the claim that men are really just apes, by having a baby that was half-chimp.  Nothing resulted from Ivanov's nutty schemes. But it is rather obvious what his motivation was. A New Scientist story says, "When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes."

Recently there was something in the science news that made me say "shades of Ivanov." Some scientists injected some human cells into some very early monkey embryo. Only 25 human cells were injected into each such very early monkey embryo, which is not a visible amount. This was reported with news headlines such as "Scientists generate human-monkey chimeric embryos."  But such headlines suggested that something was going on much bigger than what actually occurred. 

When you think of an embryo, you visualize something with at least a shape a little like that of a baby.  But no, all we see at the end of the video provided in the scientific paper is a formless round blob.

The scientists injected only 25 human cells into each monkey embryo blob grown in a lab. Most of these tiny embryo blobs died before 20 days, but some lasted 20 days, never developing beyond a round blob-like shape.  The press coverage and the scientific paper avoid telling us how big these blobs were, and we may presume they were barely even visible. Calling such things "chimeras" is quite misleading. They are properly described as monkey embryos injected with a tiniest trace of human cells.  A wikipedia article on biological chimera says " animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs," but that was not done in this case, so the press stories calling these wacky blobs "chimeras" are not accurate. 

Why on Earth did the scientists perform such a stunt? Perhaps so that the DENiers could have a new talking point.  We can imagine how they will enthuse about this result:

"Didn't we tell you that humans are just apes or monkeys? Why now they've even made something that is part-monkey and part human. That shows we were right all along."

But such reasoning would be baloney. You probably could have done the same silly stunt with monkeys and sharks, injecting some shark cells into a monkey embryo, to get a mangled blob of cells that might survive for a few weeks.  But that would do nothing to show that monkeys are really sharks.  And putting some human cells into a mangled monkey embryo living for a few weeks does nothing to show that humans are really just apes or monkeys, just like a man getting some intestinal worms does not show that men are kind of worms.  

Everytime someone brings up the topic of embryonic development in the connection of Darwinism, they should be reminded of the most important relevant truths:

• There is no specification or blueprint or recipe for making an  adult human being in DNA or the fertilized egg that is the beginning of the process of embryonic development (contrary to the untrue statements that Darwin enthusiasts often make about such a topic, statements many biologists and professors have refuted by reminding us that DNA has only low-level chemical information, not anatomical specifications). 
• The progression of such a speck-sized cell to a full grown human with so many levels of stunning hierarchical organization is therefore a miracle of origination utterly beyond the understanding of today's scientists, no more understandable than a tornado passing through a lumber yard and hardware store, and creating from its materials a large house with working electricity and plumbing. 
• Lacking any such understanding of how the body or the mind of a single adult human being arises from a speck-sized egg cell, there is no basis for claiming that we understand the vastly harder problem of the origin of the human race, or that random  changes in DNA can explain the origin of species, since their anatomy is not specified by DNA. 
• Because there are a host of dramatic differences between the minds and behavior of humans and the minds and behavior of apes, statements such as "humans are just apes" are nonsensical and are violently contrary to a multitude of human observations.  

The tactic of claiming that "men are apes" is an example of what we may call shrink-speaking. Shrink-speaking is when someone describes some reality as being vastly less than what it actually is. Below are some examples of shrink-speaking, all absurd examples of reductionism: 

"Mentally you are just a bundle of sensations."

"Humans are just apes."

"The United States is just a bunch of addresses."

"A human body is just a heap of cells."

"Living your life is just hanging around."

"History is just some lines on pages."

"Earth is just a rock with a little extra gas and water." 

"You're just some nerve impulses bouncing around in a brain, like pinballs bouncing around in a pinball machine."

Shrink-speaking is one of the the main tactics of a certain type of thinker, a thinker who also uses very often an opposite type of technique we may call humbug hype. Humbug hype is when some thing small or relatively insignificant is trumpeted as if it were something extremely important. Nowadays our science news sites are overflowing with humbug hype, as such sites (financially motivated to maximize their web page hits to increase advertising revenue) give us a constant stream of stories in which insignificant, unimpressive or flawed and poorly designed studies are heralded as if they were major breakthroughs. 

Through a combination of shrink-speaking and humbug hype, many on-the-wrong-track thinkers try to persuade us that they are on the right track.   Their general strategy is often kind of like this: try to verbally shrink something or someone to a mere shadow of itself or himself, and then hype up some crummy little thing until it sounds like it might explain such a shadow.  Combining shrink-speaking and humbug hype is kind of the "rinse and repeat" of some people.