Evolutionary relationships are just whatever Ken Ham decides


Time to revise all of taxonomy, according to Ken Ham. He was annoyed by a sign at the local zoo.

Humans are animals? Something must be done!

From a biblical worldview perspective, humans are different to animals. Only human beings are made in the image of God. ““Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”” (Genesis 1:26).

God made animals differently, “And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds”” (Genesis 1:24). When God created Adam, He brought animals to him to name to show there was no one like him, as none of the animals were made in God’s image, “But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:20).

Because of the emphasis today that man is just an animal & thus affecting people’s view of humanity & how they view various moral issues, I suggest Christians use the criterion “made in the image of God,” for an additional Kingdom. This would place man in his own Kingdom, The Human Kingdom. We need our children to understand that humans are special & made in God’s image, whereas animals are not made in God’s image.

He’s gonna fix that. First step: redesign that zoo sign.

Humans are as different from all other organisms as paramecia are from sequoias, or elephants from mushrooms. The evidence for that is a) the Bible, and b) Ken Ham.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand a full phylogenetic analysis of that tree. I don’t think Answers in Genesis can do it. I don’t think they have the slightest conception of the rigor required of systematics.

Comments

  1. says

    By the way, I’ve seen classification schemes that set up 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 kingdoms. “Kingdom” is a fuzzy category with a lot of waffle room, but we still expect some evidentiary justification for a particular scheme somewhat more sophisticated than “my interpretation of my holy book says so.”

  2. wzrd1 says

    He’s just a heretic. Everyone knows, it’s animal, mineral, vegetable and Trump.

    loop @3, entirely incorrect. There are chimpanzees, Bonobos and Chumpanzees.

    @PZ, ah, but the discussions get ever more entertaining once someone asks about virii. ;)
    To the naysayers, one need only point out an intercellular parasite, then it’s off to the races.
    It’s almost as if life doesn’t respect our attempts to find nice, comfortable pigeonholes to place things in!

  3. billseymour says

    René @5:

    I see Ham included five races of humans.

    IIRC, Ham is from Australia, so maybe the indigenous folks on his home continent are really really different somehow; and we sure need to separate those damn Muslims from the rest of us!

  4. call me mark says

    Part of that tweet:

    When discussing abortion, I’ve had a number of secularists say something like, “humans are just animals, we get rid of spare cats, so we can get rid of spare children in their mother’s wombs.”

    No you haven’t Ham you filthy liar.

  5. HidariMak says

    I imagine there more than a little crossover, between those who treat Ken Ham as an expert on science, and those who purchase Ivermectin from the local farm veterinarian to treat/prevent Covid in themselves.. It’s not like they’d ever learn to recognize cognitive dissonance.

  6. larpar says

    “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
    “Us” and “our”?
    How many deities were involved in making man?

  7. says

    Please let the ‘Kingdom’ category be relegated to a historical articfact. Kingdoms, like those shown above are well known to be wrong. Fungi and animals should be grouped together, protists should be split into several distinct kingdoms, don’t even bother with bacteria and achaea. Fuck Ken Hamm but shame on the zoo for perpetuating out-of-date ideas.

  8. billseymour says

    larpar @11:  if it was Yahweh who said that, it was probably the “royal we”; if the statement was made by the elohim, who knows how many there are.

  9. wzrd1 says

    larpar @11, early in the faith, the angels were all minor deities. Later, they got demoted, El got a divorce and gnostics confused everyone.
    So, naturally all gnostics should be burned, in God’s alsmitey mercy or something.

  10. birgerjohansson says

    Iarpar @ 11
    The original Jewish religion was polytheistic, later monolatristic and -quite late- became monotheistic.
    The OT is chock-full of textual relics from the earliest time that the bosses forgot to redact.

    Leviathan is one of those elemental beasts all Caananite religions had, and were the pets of the boss god. The names differed from area to area but the themes were the same.
    The Host was originally the pantheon, later just heavenly servants.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    Lorax @ 12
    One thing that I did not learn in school is wether plants may have mitochondria in addition to chloroplasts? After all, seeds consume energy until they have built a energy-harvesting plant.

    Complexity:
    I assume multicellular organisms arose several times independently of each other, I seem to recall it happened to plants so presumably also in animalia and fungae

    Another weird thing: some macroscopic algae may be unicellular and have a multitude of cellular nuclei spread across the organism to ensure the DNA can regulate the whole cell.
    .
    Virus-transferred DNA is another of those things that makes the world complicated.
    I want to make a Vulcan mind-meld to force some correct information into Ham’s thick head. But his body may reject the brain, or maybe the other way around.

  12. birgerjohansson says

    H sapiens sapiens, neanderthals, denisovans, H erectus, H Naledi, H Floresiensis…
    Five, but the Hamster has no leeway for additional discoveries.
    The nephilim?

  13. Walter Solomon says

    birgerjohansson @16
    And don’t forget Behemoth (a “sauropod” according to Ham) and Ziz the griffin.

  14. ardipithecus says

    @ 18 Matt G

    Oh, I don’t know. . . I, for one, would enjoy feeding him to lions.

  15. whheydt says

    Re: ardipithecus @ #20…
    But would that be good for the lions? Probably better to feed him to something like a Komodo dragon, since they’re used to eating carrion.

  16. Tethys says

    The odd cherry picking left out all the “dominion over all the creatures and growing things” verses, and the garden with two magic trees.

    For the simple minded who bridle at the fact that humans are animals, it can be reduced to just three categories.
    Animal, vegetable, mineral.
    Clearly Ham is mineral, as he has the cognitive skills of a box of rocks.

  17. wzrd1 says

    birgerjohansson @16, plants have both chloroplasts and mitochondria.

    René @21, I don’t know, there are some humans that I’m quite firmly certain belong in a zoo.

  18. says

    @24

    Speaking of zoo, Dumb Idiot Ham and his like love to tell stories of Ota Benga and the times he was a star attraction at a zoo decades ago to try to prove to people that evolution is all racist while hiding their own racist attitudes against the very black and brown people they claim to care about while giving full support towards White Supremacist hate groups that target such people.

  19. billseymour says

    René @21:  I agree.  Back in ’06 I attended some meetings at DIN and thought I’d check out the Berlin zoo.  It was horrible, especially for the primates sitting in their cages with nothing to do.  To this day, I can’t un-see that.

  20. birgerjohansson says

    Whheydt @ 22
    Crocodiles save their pray inside their dens until decomposition has made them mushy and easy to tear up in easy-to-eat pieces. So carrion is no problem. But I am worried that the venom remaining inside Ham would finish anything smaller than a killer whale.

  21. birgerjohansson says

    Tethys @ 23
    Trolls, being silicaceous, display better cognitive flexibility than the fundie eejits.

  22. rietpluim says

    From a biblical worldview perspective …
    Correct, Ken. That is how we know the bible is false.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Wzrd1 @ 24
    Thanks.
    Also, I think that would be a “Escape From New York” scenario.

  24. nomdeplume says

    I can see a case for putting Ham and his foolish acolytes into a separate kingdom…

  25. Matt G says

    If humans are their own kingdom, we should stop testing drugs on animals. Clearly we need to test those drugs on…other humans. Preferably poor ones….

  26. birgerjohansson says

    Walther Solomon @ 19
    Yes, Leviathan -a sauropod- would be a reptile. And its power comes from the navel. From which the umbilical cord would go to…the egg.
    .
    It was the team at God Awful Movies that pointed this out, they are goddamn polymaths spotting errors in everything fron biology to space physics.

  27. wzrd1 says

    Matt G, didn’t we have enough of that with the Tuskegee and Guatemala syphilis experimentation?
    Prison experiments, including transplanting animal testes into human?

    birgerjohansson, do you mean a yoke sack scar, from their umbilical to the yoke sack?

  28. brightmoon says

    Ya gotta love plastid endosymbiosis. I always ask fundies which one was separately created. The Cyanobacteria that became chloroplasts, the alpha proteobacteria that became mitochondria or the rest of the eucaryote!

  29. says

    The Hamster is clearly stuck on his cognitive dissonance wheel going nowhere fast. If he bothered to read any theology he would know that the concept of Imago Dei continues to be discussed to death and theologians have developed a reconciliation between Man as imago dei and Man that is a process of evolution. Even those who don’t accept evolution see this as a reasonable proposition.
    In the 1930’s the theologian, Emil Brunner proposed a remodelled form of imago dei. He did not accept evolution and realised it was hostile to religion but proposed a resolution to the conflict. Put simply there were two kinds of imago dei, a material one i.e., a material human who had come about by evolution but was so tainted by sin that they no longer held the image of God and a formal one that could speak to and listen to God via revelation etc. The formal imago dei required man to have the power of speech so he could talk to God and the ability to reason so he could understand God’s message. These came about through evolution. In other words evolution was necessary so that Man could believe in and converse with God. Now if Ken Ham bothered to get his head out of the book of Genesis and did some proper study of Christian theology he’s stop riding his Hamster wheel to nowhere but that sort of enlightenment would mean a drastic remodelling of his Creation museum and his Ark Park sinking like the Titanic. Of course that won’t happen. He is to attached to the grift.
    Here’s a reference to a deeper dive into this topic. Yes I do read theology journals. Taede A. Smedes, “Emil Brunner Revisited: On the Cognitive Science of Religion, the Imagio Dei, and Revelation”, Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, vol.49 no. 1 (March, 2014), 191

  30. wzrd1 says

    brightmoon @37, your question called to mind an old commercial with “you got your chocolate in my peanutbutter”, done with beakers of cyanobacteria, proteobacteria and some poor, barely functional cell getting spilled together.
    Which is a warning that it’s late, I’ve been feeling poorly with the weather changing again and well, feeling a bit off in general, so perhaps it’s time to sign off and rest. Coming back from the mailroom, I was throwing so many PVC’s that I was strolling all around v-tach, damned COVID damage.
    I really need to get on the transplant list for a full body transplant. ;)

    garydargan, I liked Bohr’s resolution. “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”.

  31. birgerjohansson says

    Wzrd1 @ 34
    Ham and 1000 BC Caananites will not have heard of the yoke sack scar, so no. The Leviathan as per the old testament has a navel.
    @ 39
    In “Idoru”, an AI uses a 3D printer to get a body, so mebbe if you upload your mind first?

  32. wzrd1 says

    I dunno, they never heard of turtles?

    I’ll have to see how an upload from /dev/random works out!

    Don’t mind me, was just having a good quality conversation in the comments on a youtube video (seriously!) with an aerospace engineer, who decided in college to go with an elective on orbital mechanics, the poor bastard.
    He apparently was unaware of the Pauli Exclusion Principle of orbital mechanics – the math never works out. Move, things wobble, so it’s easier to treat everything like a fluid and no, don’t wander into that corner gibbering, I’m already there, pick your own corner.
    We were laughing over Teller’s Ronnie Raygun SDI x-ray laser project. And Chinese Space Lasers.
    Not sure if they’re related to the Jewish Space Lasers, which were observed on the Jewish Space Whiteboard inside of the Jewish Space Classroom… Cue in Mel Brooks History of the World, Part 2 previews.
    Hey, if all that math doesn’t make you silly first thing in the morning, just think of calculating lunar orbits around all those mascons!
    I’ll be over in my corner, drooling on myself…

  33. birgerjohansson says

    Lunar orbits have the fun quality of being influenced by the Earth and the mascons and the sun…
    And unless you first build Moonbase Alpha (with synthetic gravity for the Eagles!) staying there will be an ordeal.

    Turtles and reptile anatomy? We are talking about people who claimed insects have four legs.
    Apparently rabbits process food exactly the same way as cows and camels.

  34. George says

    Why does a supernatural being ,who exists independently of space/time, look like a primate? Why does he have feet with toes and arches? Does God have a belly button? Does God have a penis, testicles, nipples? If so, why? What’s the point in a dick if you don’t have a Goddess to boink? If God doesn’t literally have any of that stuff, then, in what way are we “it his image?’

    It’s all so embarrassingly childish…

  35. wzrd1 says

    Maybe he has a dick to keep Tom and Harry occupied?

    I’m still trying to wrap my head around so many signing things with “Under His Wings”, as I’ve yet to see a human with wings built in. So, if man is in God’s image and God has wings, does that make them demons?