If a Million People Say a Stupid Thing…
Friday, January 25th, 2008 I was watching "Nova" the other night. I don’t think any TV program has caused me to do so much thinking and pondering. It was called "The Family that Walks on All Fours". It was about a rural family in Turkey that has four adult children that cannot walk upright. They walk on their 
feet and hands, bent over.
The show started off with some evolutionary biologists trying to make the claim that these unfortunate people were missing a gene that was causing them to display "primitive characteristics"- walking like our pre-human ancestors walked. In other words, like an ape.
I was flabbergasted! I couldn’t believe it. Such utterly ridiculous nonsense, when the real cause was so relatively easy to see. Even I figured it out once the other facts came to life.
First of all, the parents were close cousins. Ah HAH. Inbreeding to be sure. Both parents carried a recessive gene hampering the ability to walk, and 5 of the children recieved it.
Secondly, and vital to the story, the family was extremely poor and relatively uneducated. In fact the whole village was poor and uneducated.
The "scientists" who viewed these 5 people as "fascinating cases of evolution in reverse" so offended the family that the military had to come make sure they weren’t being insulted. In turkey, insulting a Turk is a capital offense. The female scientist had to work hard to convince the guards that all was OK.
Brain scans were done on the 5 afflicted children, and low and behold, each of them had severe brain damage- their cerebellum was greatly reduced. This area is responsible for voluntary motor movement, balance, and equilibrium. In a word, it makes walking possible. Apparently this recessive gene interfered with the development of the cerebellum, and thus interfering with their ability to stand upright to walk. So they did what they knew how to do- basically crawl. What you don’t learn until the very end is that when the children were babies and toddlers, they crawled fine- but they stopped at crawling. They never made it beyond this developmental stage.
The family has drawn ridicule and condemnation from the village, who believe they are being cursed. The family was forced to move. The son gets rocks thrown at him by the village children, and gets taunted more than the others.
Finally someone realizes that maybe they can LEARN to walk. No one has ever bothered to even try that. The scientists invest in a walker, and many of them stand upright and take a few steps. A set of parallel bars are set up in the yard for "practicing". The youngest girl especially liked this. A physical therapist is also called in to help loosen up the necessary muscles. The son is proclaimed too severe to walk.
When the scientists came back several weeks later, all 4 of the girls were walking with either the walker or the bars. Only the son was not seen for a while. Then, you see him walking - awkwardly but unaided, toward the house. He stumbles, takes a few steadying steps on his hands, then rights himself again to walk normally.
I got to thinking about this whole situation. I have come to several conclusions.
#1. It was a genetic mutation that caused them to not be able to walk as well.
#2. The "evolution in reverse" theory is just about the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
#3. Blinding themselves to their dogma, they were willing to throw aside compassion and mercy in order to "prove" their pet theory- no matter how ridiculous it is.
#4. Had this family been in a "developed" nation, a doctor would have recognized the delay in development, and physical therapy would have been given each of those children when they were still small. The family believed it was the "Will of allah" that they children be that way- to test the faith of the father. They had no idea that all they needed was a little help.
#5. Again, if this family had been in the United States, no scientist would dare compare children to an unknown human ancestor. What an insult. The parents would be educated enough to know total bunk when they hear it. The turkish family was poor and uneducated. Easy targets in my opnion. The father expressed concern, however, that his children were in fact being compared to apes, and was afraid of even further abuse from the villagers.
All this to say that too many evolutionists try to prove their theory by assuming the truth of the premise they are trying to prove. For example- in order to explain the handicap, they had to prove evolution. They claimed it was a kick-back to a more primitive pre-human ancestor. In order to prove this, however, they had to assume the truth of this common ancestor. You can’t do that in science. It’s a circular argument. And extremely bad science!
And, even if it was true, no scientific "fact" is more important than the dignity of a family that is already being ostracized by their own community. The scientists were making a bad situation even worse. These people are not "freaks"- just victims of poverty, lack of education and medical facilities.
And victims of myopic scientists.
