We are trying to bring some reasonable pressure to bear on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and its scientifically inaccurate displays about the degree of genetic difference between humans and chimps. The up-to-date figure is not the mythical 1 percent but more like 14.9 percent. The Trump Administration has been “on it” with regard to anti-American propaganda at the Smithsonian but this disinformation directed at the exceptional status of human being in nature also needs to be addressed.
I wrote today at the Daily Wire:
Pressed by the Trump Administration, the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents has ordered a review of its museums for what President Trump calls “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.” Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation observes that “The ordered review can’t come fast enough.”
“The Smithsonian has wholeheartedly enlisted in the leftist imperative to “decolonize the American mind” and to change America’s narrative from one that made citizens proud of this nation’s astonishing achievements to a counternarrative that focuses on where America has fallen short and drums shame into citizens. Unfortunately, this shift has accelerated since [Dr. Lonnie] Bunch became the leader of the Smithsonian in 2019.”
Gonzalez provides dismaying examples from the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Also in need of fixing, however, is the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The nation’s museum shouldn’t be in the business of shaming the nation. But neither should it be in the business of belittling human beings, by all but equating us with chimps….
Why does it matter? After all, any visitor to another Smithsonian facility, the National Zoo, will quickly be able to detect that there’s a lot more than 1 percent — in fact a lot more than 14.9 percent — difference between the chimps at the zoo and the human beings gazing at them. There is no chimp equivalent of the Smithsonian, with chimp curators educating chimp visitors about chimp origins. There are exactly zero displays of humans at zoos available for chimps to casually observe.
As I discuss in my new book “Plato’s Revenge,“ these percent differences are evidence that something transcending the genetic information in DNA must be directing the development of organisms. Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg and others have made similar arguments.
Regardless, the 1 percent myth is intended to be a put down to human significance — to the exceptional status of human beings in nature, and in the cosmos as far as we know. Yet, when popular atheist scientists like Bill Nye “The Science Guy” brandish the term, it results in human self-hatred, what we might call the “‘I Suck’ Principle,” now a staple of atheist rhetoric.
As Nye put it in a speech to the American Humanist Association, speaking (as he sees it) on behalf of all human beings, “I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck!”
The rest of the article, “Memo To The Smithsonian: Make Humans Exceptional Again,” is at the Daily Wire. You can read it by signing up for free, which I recommend.