The Public Broadcasting System (PBS TV) in America is proclaiming that due to “an explosion of recent discoveries [that] sheds light on . . . our hominid relatives,” it was time to broadcast another ambitious TV documentary on human evolution.

Entitled Becoming Human, this three-part series begins airing nationwide tonight.1 Based on our review of program notes on the PBS website, the series apparently relies heavily on speculation and conjecture in an attempt to build a more solid case for an ape-like ancestry of humans.2 It is yet one more unbecoming attempt by evolutionist scientists to use the medium of television to convince viewers that they are mere animals and that they have a long history going back to an ape-like ancestor. Therefore, they are not the special creation of a Creator as taught in the book of Genesis.

On this week’s segment of Becoming Human, entitled “First Steps,” PBS looks at the supposed evolutionary split of humans from apes, including the difference between their brains. A major change in climate, declares the producers, may have been involved in creating the separation. But how climate change could have altered the DNA of an ape-like creature to produce new genetic material that could lead to modern humans will be an interesting concept to see developed in the program (i.e., if a full explanation of this never-been-observed phenomenon will even be offered; this weekend in our News to Note feature, we will look more into this idea).3

In part 2, the earliest species of humans are examined, and in the final episode why the current human species survived over all the others is explored.

Considering that evolutionists are increasingly giving up on ape-like ancestors like Ida—touted last May as a confirmed missing link, but last month was seen falling from the human family tree—we wonder whether this new documentary will expose the dubious nature of many fossils in the supposed transition of ape-like creatures to humans. For example, how will the famous “Lucy” skeleton be viewed, which many evolutionists—and a planned new exhibit in our Creation Museum—say was a knuckle-walking, ape-like creature that walked upright from time to time like a bonobo chimpanzee and had curved fingers and toes for climbing trees?

It bears repeating (though it is probably becoming a tired refrain for the evolutionist activist to hear it yet again): it is the U.S. taxpayer who helps fund expensive TV programs like this. Once again, an opportunity for viewers to receive a critique of hominid evolution will probably be denied, and thus the 44% of Americans who believe that “God created humans pretty much in their present form either exactly as the Bible describes it or within the last 10,000 years” will be dismissed.4

Then again, this is no surprise, for the evolution-only monopoly is well entrenched in almost all of America’s taxpayer-funded schools and in tax-supported media outlets such as PBS. That monopoly is unbecoming of an academic community that constantly insists it is open to new thinking and discoveries, yet persists in censoring any challenges to the evolution worldview.

This weekend in our News to Note feature, we will look more into this new PBS series. For a summary of human origins and the so-called “ape-men,” read this article from a PhD biologist/anatomist on our staff: Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?

Footnotes

  1. For more on this series, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/becoming-human-part-1.html  
  2. This includes words and phrases like: “a fragmentary fossil record” (of human evolution); “are thought to have developed”: “an intriguing theory”; “new evidence suggests”; “experts have proposed”; etc. Discerning viewers of the series should be ready to count the times that tentative, unconfident wording is used.  
  3. Dr. Georgia Purdom of our staff (with a PhD in molecular genetics) notes that the evolutionists involved in the series probably do not believe that “climate directly changed the DNA and added new genetic information, but rather that the climate favored certain characteristics encoded by the DNA. Mutations in the DNA could have made individuals more or less suited for their environment. This itself is still a problem because mutations either do not make a significant enough change in the individual that would be selected for or against or they are detrimental.”  
  4. See Sliding Down the Polls.