Smithsonian exhibit monkeys around with the scientific evidence on human origins

The Trump Administration recently called out the Smithsonian Institution for pushing “one-sided, divisive political narratives,” leading GOP Sen. Jim Banks last week to introduce a bill prohibiting the Smithsonian from promoting woke ideology, as The Post exclusively reported.

But American history isn’t the only domain in which the Smithsonian, with an ideological ax to grind, advances misinformation. The National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins vastly distorts the scientific evidence on human evolution, seeking to convince visitors that there’s nothing special about us as human beings.

“There is only about a 1.2% genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees,” the exhibit starts, with large photos of a human and apes. “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar.”

No doubt you’ve heard this statistic before because many science popularizers say the same thing.

Yet it’s been known for years that these numbers are inaccurate. Thanks to a groundbreaking April paper in the journal Nature, we know just how wrong they are.

For the first time, the paper reports “complete” sequences of the genomes of chimpanzees and other apes done from scratch. When we compare them to humans, we find our genomes are more like 15% genetically different from chimpanzees’. That means the true genetic differences between humans and chimps are more than 10 times greater than what the Smithsonian tells us.

The museum distorts human origins in other areas, too. Again, the purpose is to diminish the exceptional place of humans in nature.

The museum’s Human Origins fossil hall claims the ancient species Sahelanthropus tchadensis was an “early human” that walked “on two legs.” But leading paleoanthropologists sharply dispute this claim.

A Nature article found that “Sahelanthropus was an ape,” and many features “link the specimen with chimpanzees, gorillas or both, to the exclusion of hominids.”

A 2020 Journal of Human Evolution paper showed that Sahelanthropus’ femur was like that of a chimp-like quadruped — in other words, it didn’t walk upright, and it wasn’t a human ancestor.

Similarly, the Human Origins exhibit presents the ape-like australopithecines as “early humans” who walked upright “on the ground” much like us. Some paleoanthropologists agree.

But other scientists strongly disagree, pointing out that some australopithecines showed evidence of ape-like knuckle-walking and only limited capacity for running.

Their upright-walking ability was likely best suited for walking along tree limbs, not “on the ground” exactly like we do. Large questions remain about how they walked, and the Smithsonian gives no hint of the scientific controversy.

The museum’s hominid reconstructions also humanize apes while ape-ifying humans. Australopithecus afarensis (the iconic “Lucy”) is portrayed thoughtfully gazing up at the sky, while Australopithecus africanus is presented smiling, perhaps at a friend’s wry remark.

Yet australopithecines had brains about the size of a chimp’s, and there’s no fossil evidence they were capable of abstract thought — or humor. We should remember the famed Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton’s declaration that “alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.”

The Smithsonian’s exhibit also gives scientifically misleading support to the idea humans evolved slowly — saying “we became human gradually,” much as Darwin imagined, from “earlier primates.” Again, the result is to blur distinctions between us and other creatures.

Yet the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr acknowledged there is a “large, unbridged gap” in the fossil record between the australopithecines and the first humanlike members of our genus, Homo. In his words, we’re in a position of “not having any fossils that can serve as missing links.”

One scientific commentator even said this evidence calls for a “big bang theory of human evolution.” Why doesn’t the Smithsonian disclose any of this information?

This month is the centennial of the Scopes “monkey” trial, remembered as a warning against hiding scientific information about human evolution. How ironic that 100 years later, the nation’s premier science museum obscures scientifically objective data on the very same subject.

To fail to correct this exhibit is to use taxpayer money to miseducate the public about a question of profound scientific, sociological, and philosophical importance.

Casey Luskin is the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture’s associate director and co-author of the book “Science and Human Origins.” He holds a geology Ph.D. from the University of Johannesburg.