"Monkey Girl" and False Icons

 
Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul is a book about the Dover trial. It's written by Edward Humes, an ex-newspaper journalist turned author.

The cover of the book shows one of the common, but false, icons of human evolution. This series of skeletons depicts a steady upward march of human evolution from a chimpanzee to modern humans. The image is false in two ways: (1) humans did not evolve from something that looks like modern chimpanzees, and (2) the "progress" was not a linear transformation as depicted, instead, there where many side branches and lineages that went extinct.

This is the icon that Stephen Jay Gould attacked in Wonderful Life and elsewhere in his essays. Even the Intelligent Design Creationists recognize that this is a bad way to depict evolution. Casey Luskin writes in A Partisan Affair (Part 2): False Attacks Upon Discovery Institute in Edward Humes’ Pseudo-History of Kitzmiller, "Monkey Girl".

Any book with an icon of evolution on its cover — in this case, the fanciful diagram of ape-like skeletons transitioning into a human skeleton — is bound to be unfriendly towards intelligent design (ID).

For once I agree with Casey Luskin!!!! The diagram is a fanciful "icon" and the book is unfriendly towards creationists.

I realize that trade book authors don't get much say in cover design but that has to change. I urge all authors to insert a clause in their contracts that requires approval of the cover design and title. Let's try and prevent future embarrassments of this sort.

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