Kenyan evangelicals hopping mad over evolution exhibition

I agree that to say that conservative Christians are descended from apes is an insult. To the apes!

That comment, by Christopher Hobe Morrison, of Pine Bush, USA, was one of many added on-line to a report in The Times that evangelical Christians in Kenya have got their cassocks in a twist over an exhibition in the Nairobi National Museum centred on the evolution of humankind.

Bishop Boniface Adoyo, the head of the 35 Kenyan evangelical denominations, is leading opposition to the exhibition.

I do not dispute that as humans we have a history, but my family most certainly did not descend from the apes.

The bishop was invited to view the new Human Origins gallery before it opened this month, and said that he would call on his flock to demonstrate outside the museum if evolution was described as anything other than merely a theory.

Bits of it are being disproved by scientists every day. Yet it’s being taught in our schools to children - a theory being taught as fact.

The star of the show is Turkana Boy, a 5ft 3in (1.62m) skeleton of a human who died 1.5 million years ago, aged about 12. It is the best-preserved example of Homo erectus, the species that set out from Africa to conquer the world.

The evangelicals, in turn, are being vociferously opposed by scientists eager to study the specimens and to explore the role of Kenya as the cradle of humankind.

Richard Leakey, who led the team that unearthed the skeleton in the far north in 1984, dismissed the creationist argument.

Science is at the very foundation of our ability to deal with the new century, so if we bring it down to the idea that science may be un-Christian . . . well, how stupid can you get?