Birth Canal Conundrum

There's a lot of debate on the internet, of varying degrees of quality, but very little gets as vociferous as the religion vs. science battle. I find it quite difficult to get involved with this because although I largely come from the scientific corner, I actually think that each field has precious little of value to say about the other. Most of the arguments that you read, most especially on the comments sections of any relevant articles in major publications, are just a series of conflicting straw men with no hope of ever agreeing on a frame of reference, let alone striking some sensible dialogue.

There is one thing I think most sane people can agree on, however. Each of us has a world view (for want of a better phrase), and our world contains evidence as to the true nature of things. When we encounter a conflict between our world view and evidence, then it stands to reason that one of the two must be wrong in some way.

This got me thinking, as I chanced upon an article detailing recent fossil evidence that suggests large birth canals in early hominids (allowing delivery of large-brained early hominid sprogs) evolved hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. I wondered to myself, and cannot stop wondering, what young-earth-creationists think when they encounter such evidence. Do they just ignore it? Do they assume it is patently wrong? Or some kind of scientific conspiracy to undermine their beliefs? Or do they simply not read such surreptitous publications (the BBC News website)? To someone who genuinely believes that the earth is only a few thousand years old, debating whether early humans appeared 200,000 or 2,000,000 years ago is utterly irrelevant and a total waste of time. But surely there must be some spark of interest, some nagging question as to why other people believe that fossilization of bones takes much longer than the supposed life-span of the earth. The cognitive dissonance must be excrutiating. Or perhaps not....

A diagram detailing the evolution of red underpants (3.2 million years ago to the present day)