It's a brand new year. Roughly the 195,066th year our species has existed. But just how successful was year 195,06 5? Well, if you're a creationist (or some other psuedosciecne proponent) not very. Human evolution continued to be the best scientific explanation for our species' origins.
And this is despite these psuedoscientists trying their darndest to overthrow our current understanding of human evolution. Just how close did they come? Well let's review in Top Human Evolution Psuedoscience of 2015.
As picked out by my lovely readers.
The least most popular psuedoscience post is a rather generic bit of creationist rambling. On the subject of rambling (or more specifically, the origin of language). It's a simple piece that claims a recent study of langauge found support for the idea that all language had different sources. This matches up with the Biblical story of the tower of Babel.
But what makes this post rather interesting is that simply isn't true. The "study" actually explicitly contradicts those claims. For instance, the creationist notes:
[T]he data supports the idea that multiple people groups have independent origins-a condition one would predict if the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel happened as described in the Bible
Whilst the original study claims the exact opposite
The analyzed languages did not evolve independently
Creationists not understanding science? I know, hardly a new revelation. Perhaps that's why this post - scandalous as it is - came in last place in 2015.
A Facebook user sent me the fourth most popular psuedoscience claim of 2015. The idea that Neanderthals were secretly giant, gorilla-like super-predators that almost hunted humans to extinction.
This idea is wrong on just about every count. Or at least, comes up with crazy convoluted assumption-ridden explanations for basic biological phenomena. For example, animals living further north tend to have larger eyes to deal with the reduced sunlight in those environments. Or are these giant eyes actually an adaptation for hunting humans in the dark? You decide.
Whilst the idea is all sorts of wrong, it did produce some rather cool artwork of what these killer Neanderthals looked like.
Breast sex is an evolved behaviour? This idea takes full marks for creativity, but looses a few point for general insanity. In the end, it turns out to average a third place in popularity.
The general thrust of the idea is that the involvement of breasts in sex (or "sexual breast love" as the author imaginatively calls it) has various health benefits. Thus females somehow influenced evolution in order to make it become more common and gain these benefits.
Women, 150,000 years ago or so, upon discovering the power of sexual breast love, made it a key to the evolution of humanity. Women's discovery and cultural maintenance of sexual breast love, with the cooperation of men, changed human culture and sociality forever. Woman constituted herself as man's social equal when she began to insist on sexual breast love, although equality between the sexes has subsequently been weakened.
But perhaps the most increidble thing of all: this claim was published in an actual scientific journal.
2. The Homo naledi kerfuffle.
The creationist reaction to Homo naledi clocks in as my favourite piece of psuedoscience of the year; yet ultimately only the second most popular on this site.
They key point is that the creationists have no idea how to respond to it. Some argue it's just an ape, others that it's fully human, yet others suggest it might be a human with some sort of disease. Some creationists even flip-flopped between several of these positions.
They're able to come up with such wildly different ideas because they aren't basing their ideas in the evidence. Thus there's no way to confirm or deny them. If you aren't using evidence to determine it's just a human then there's no evidence you can use to convince another creationist they're wrong.
This ignorance of evidence serves as a microcosm of creationism and highlights just why it's not worth spending too much time thinking about.
The most popular psuedoscientific post last year was this one. The idea that there are simply too many stone age artefacts to have been produced in the short time frame postulated by creationists.
With estimates indicating ~15 trillion stone age artefacts in Africa alone (and some individual sites containing millions each) it seems implausible that this many stone tools could have been made if the earth was only 6,000 years old. However, that didn't stop Dr Mortenson from trying to reconcile these two ideas.
He takes a shotgun approach (also known as the Gish Gallop) throwing as much as possible at the wall in the hope that something sticks. He tries to argue that there are too many tools for evolution to explain, that some could be natural, that some might not be from the stone age, and more. Unfortunately for him, there aren't, they aren't, and they are.
For more details on just why his mud slinging doesn't stick, click on over to the post. Or maybe you're just curious about why this became the most popular psuedoscience post of the year. Either way, go give me a bit more traffic. After all, isn't boosting page views what the new year is all about?
