“Look at the dumb thing this idiot tweeted” feels like a very circa-2013 blogging approach, but there are times to make exceptions. So look at the dumb thing Aubrey Huff tweeted:
Aubrey “All I Do Is Jack Off” Huff was a perfectly good major leaguer for 13 seasons before retiring in 2012, and now we’re forced to try to reverse engineer exactly what he thinks he read, because while Twitter is excellent for letting us really get to know our sports stars, the downside is that it lets us really get to know our sports stars.
What Huff appears to have found was this video from “social media driven news brand” Veuer, hosted on AOL.com and running above a transcription. It will not surprise you to see that Huff read the first sentence of the article and no more than that.
The actual news, based on a study appearing in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and published by paleontologists at the University of Portsmouth, is that fossil teeth belong to two different “small rat-like creatures” were recently discovered and identified. These small mammals—which, we emphasize, are not rats, which are a separate genus that exists today—lived 145 million years ago and are now the earliest-known ancestors of most modern mammals, including whales, rats, and, yes, humans.
I think this is interesting! Aubrey Huff, who, again, didn’t read it and/or doesn’t understand it, thinks it’s more proof that science is bad.
I want you to set aside for a moment Huff literally using a “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there monkeys” argument, and instead focus on him citing the tired old “missing link” argument against evolution. “If evolution is real,” it goes, “why are all these gaps in the fossil record? Checkmate, science.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove, but it’s a common qualm among creationists. Never mind that more and more transitional fossils are discovered every year. The article that set Huff off here is literally about two transitional fossils being discovered. The gaps in the fossil record are smaller than they were before the publication of this study. Evolution, which has only ever received more and more evidence to support its implications, just got more hard support, and all Huff could take from the news was “LOLrats.”
OK, now you can focus on Huff saying, “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there monkeys?”
Huff, a former baseball player who is before our very eyes misinterpreting evidence that supports evolution, says “mainstream scientists” are biased against “real evidence.”
Huff loves that “documentary,” which he elsewhere claims provides “the evidence that dinosaurs are not 60 million years old. But only 6,000! Science is once again proving the Bible right!” Which is his true gripe with these rat-like mammal progenitors and evolution as a whole—they require millions of years to make sense, and Huff, a young-Earth creationist, believes the universe to have come into being roughly as-is a few thousand years ago.
Huff has comebacks for just about any evidence you’d like to offer him:
Yes, that’s Keith Law, who attempted to engage Huff while risking being the first ever person to earn two separate suspensions from ESPN for defending evolution.
My favorite exchange of this whole mess was when one Twitter user attempted to troll Huff. (If you say yes, the response is “Imagine draggin deez nuts across your face.”) Huff thwarted the gag unwittingly and completely:
My head hurts. I wish I were dead, like Durlstodon ensomi and Durlstotherium newmani who were definitely real and were not rats.