Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

Daily Mail: Crawling inbred weirdos key to evolution?

An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.

As you can see, they are very, very scary. I was going to make an inbreeding joke based on the picture alone, but then I read a little farther:

The five are all mentally retarded. Their mother and father, who are closely related are believed to have handed down a unique combination of genes which result in the behaviour.

What’s “extraordinary” again? Let’s review: Scientists discover bear-crawling, back-country folks. Find that they are genuine crawlers who can barely walk on two legs. Decide family’s genetics will prove invaluable to the study of human evolution. Find family has been fishing in the same gene pool. Don’t change their minds about the significance of the family’s wackiness. Make completely asinine observations, like:

Rather than walking on their knuckles, like gorillas or chimpanzees, they walk on the palms of their hands, with their fingers spread upwards.

Scientists believe this may be the way hominids moved to protect their fingers for more delicate movements.

Hello? Inbred. Humping cousins. Not primitive humans; mentally retarded humans. I’m no scientist, but I know that if I hit my head and started acting like Jesus, no one would believe it was the second coming. Maybe some people would, but they would be crazy. And that’s the point.

Prof Humphrey said: “However they arrived at this point, we have adult human beings walking like ancestors several million years ago.”

Loneliness and moonshine is how they arrived at that point. Not everything has to be cosmically significant. These people should be analyzed, no doubt about it, but probably not through the lens of evolutionary-science breakthrough. Maybe they should be looked at from the perspective of “it doesn’t matter how hot your sister is.”