For without are dogs,...
and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
Revelation 22:15
"Dr. Giberson, physicist and advocate of theistic evolution, has now said he is sorry for twice employing a Photoshopped image in public arguments. The image is of a tailed human infant, and he unwittingly used it in making his case for our common descent from a tailed ancestor. Saying you're sorry and that you'll strive not to do it again is normally a gracious thing to do. In Giberson's case, the admission is accompanied by a spray of insults and untruths.In the same article, Giberson linked to the image as he found it at the website
Interestingly, Giberson's co-agitator Nick Matzke takes a different tack. At Twitter, Dr. Matzke points out an X-ray image taken from a 1980 journal article. In addition, the article includes one photo, as distinct from an X-ray, which looks like a birth defect, not so much like the computer-generated pig tail in Giberson's image. For Matzke, the fact that the growth is not well or perfectly formed actually counts for its relevance:
Nick Matzke @NickJMatzk Follow
@d_klinghoffer And, it's silly to pretend that atavisms are supposed to be fully grown. The expectation is the opposite. Duh! More #IDerrors
Remember, the disagreement here is not over whether babies are (very rarely) born with a growth where a tail would be, but whether that has any evolutionary significance. I might have thought that the massive literature citations that Casey Luskin collected in his recent series on tails, echoed by pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor with his impressive clinical experience, would put an end to this whole dispute. Not so.
You see, if "tails" are "perfectly formed," that supports the case for Darwinian evolution. If they are not well formed, that's even better support, since the "expectation" is that "atavisms" will not be "fully grown." Heads we win, say Giberson and Matzke, tails you lose." EN&V