Backward Evolution Hoax

Re: After jeers, recognition for “reverse evolution” theorist (March 3): Uner Tan is obviously desperate to make a name for himself.

When this hoax was first published, a woman was shown dashing very quickly on all fours. That is because the epiphyses under the patellae of the knees had set in the normal position for upright walking. The party trick at the village fair was therefore very painful. After she had run for a few seconds, she sat down, and hugged her knees to ease the pain.

It was also stated that she and her siblings spoke a prehistoric language, which only they could fully understand.

“The patients had a rather primitive language... they spoke to each other using their own language, using only a few hundred words” which the parents could partly understand, Tan wrote.

This is like saying that Uner Tan had found some Italians who had backward evolved until they spoke Latin. But language is LEARNT from the environment. Language is not genetic. Therefore it is a hoax.

He also named the condition after himself: Unertan syndrome.

This time he is playing the geneticist, and makes no mention of the prehistoric language:

But he pointed out in his defense that new studies have mapped the defect to a region of the genome called 17p, where some of the greatest differences between humans and chimps lie. Researchers suspect such areas may be important in human evolution.

There are many bogus ‘researchers’ out there, and they will back him up in his bizarre claims. Real scientists will disagree with him.

Charles Douglas Wehner