As I said, I’ll go into more detail about Wolfe’s thesis within the week, but some of its more ridiculous claims can be heard in the interview. The surprising thing is that host Scott Simon sat back amiably, letting Wolfe say the most outrageous things about linguistics and evolution without challenging him. Wolfe’s quotes are indented below:
“It’s misleading to say that human being evolved from animals, and actually, nobody knows whether they did or not. There are very few physical signs except the general resemblance between apes and humans.”
. . . “It’s time for people interested in evolution to say ‘The theory of evolution applies only to animals.'”
This is pure untrammeled hogwash. All rational people—I used to include Wolfe in that group—accept the mountainous evidence that human beings evolved not just from animals, but from other apes. Indeed, we are animals, Mr. Wolfe, and if we didn’t evolve from other animals, just how did we get here?
And what about the fossil evidence: that sequence of fossils, beginning about five million years ago, showing a modern-human-like creature evolving through a branching tree from early primates that had much smaller brains, and were barely bipedal? The fossils alone refute Wolfe’s claim.
But of course there is plenty of other evidence (documented in Why Evolution is True) of our common ancestry with other animals, both living and extinct. This includes the presence of “dead genes” in the human genome: nonfunctional bits of DNA that are the vestigial remnants of genes present in our ancestors, and still active in some of our relatives. Humans, for instance, have three genes for egg yolk proteins: all are nonfunctional, but all are functional in our relatives like birds and reptiles. How do you explain that, Mr. Wolfe? What about our nonfunctional olfactory-receptor genes, or our dead gene for synthesizing Vitamin C? I would love to confront Wolfe with that data. How does he explain it?
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/08/28/tom-wolfe-discusses-his-new-book-on-npr-claims-that-humans-didnt-evolve-from-animals-npr-doesnt-challenge-that/Who knows what has happened to him?
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