Bob Lies About Lucy

For those who missed it, last week Bob talked about his Christmas vacation trip to the Creation Museum.

That's right, Bob packed up the wife and kids in the Family Truckster and headed down to Kentucky for some old fashioned fake science at the bargain price of $20/head. But a funny thing happened on the path to reinforced ignorance. It turned out that...Bob hated the museum!

Apparently, there simply wasn't enough made-up Creation Science for Bob. He complained that only the Biblical explanations for Creation were presented and not the pseudo-science that Bob is used to from Ken Ham.

At one point in his rant he got off on a tangent about Lucy, the fossilized Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in 1974. Apparently, they had a recreation of the skeleton at the museum with no explanation as to why it was there. So, Bob decided to tell his family the standard creationist lie about Lucy. Specifically, Bob said:

"Do you know why evolutionists say this Lucy skeleton is proof of evolution? Because a knee joint; the knee joint in this Lucy skeleton is supposedly at an angle that is closer to human leg angles than most monkeys. And so therefore, they say that this monkey was actually evolving into a man merely because of the angle of the knee joint, that's it. And then I point out to them that the rest of the information is that first of all the angle of this knee is no different than spider monkeys and orangutans walking the Earth today. And then secondly, the knee joint itself wasn't even found with the rest of the bones, it was found two hundred feet deeper and one and a half miles away. It was just assumed to be part of this monkey's skeleton."

Let's take this mess of misinformation one falsehood at a time.

1. No "evolutionist", i.e., the vast majority of biologists, would ever say that the Lucy skeleton is "proof" of evolution. Instead, they would argue that the skeleton is merely one piece of evidence, among thousands of other pieces of evidence, that shows that evolutionary biology is correct. Science doesn't deal in proofs. "Proof" is for mathematicians and Dutko.
2. The Lucy skeleton was not found with an intact knee. It's true that a knee joint was found some distance away from the Lucy skeleton. But the knee was never represented as part of Lucy. Therefore, Bob's statement that the knee joint was the important part of Lucy is just wrong. It's a flat out creationist falsehood that has been debunked long ago, yet Bob continues to repeat it because it fits his narrative that evolutionary scientists are somehow conspiring to falsify the facts.
3. The knee joint, that is not part of Lucy, therefore, is not evidence that Lucy walked upright. Instead, the length ratio of her humerous to femur, along with the presence of a lumbar curve, provides evidence that Lucy was bipedal.

So basically, everything that Bob told his family, and his listeners, was demonstrably false. Is it any wonder that the museum would not want to print these lies on a sign by the Lucy replica?

Someone let me know when Bob retracts this latest falsehood on the show. I, of course, won't hold my breath.