A bone to pick: Missing link is evolutionists' weakest

Houston Chronical via WorldNetDaily ^ | July 26 | Jeff Farmer

[Tribune7]

Printer-friendly format July 26, 2002, 6:11PM

A bone to pick: Missing link is evolutionists' weakest By JEFF FARMER

It has been said that if anyone wants to see something badly enough, they can see anything, in anything. Such was the case recently, but unlike some ghostly visage of the Madonna in a coffee stain, this was a vision of our ancestral past in the form of one recently discovered prehistoric skull, dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

Papers across the globe heralded the news with great fanfare. With words like "scientists hailed" and "startling find" sprinkled into the news coverage, who couldn't help but think evolutionists had finally found their holy grail of missing links?

For those of us with more than a passing interest in such topics as, "Where did we come from? And how did we get here?," this recent discovery and its subsequent coverage fall far short of its lofty claims. A healthy criticism is in order.

Practically before the fossil's discoverer, the French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet, could come out of the heat of a Chadian desert, a number of his evolutionary colleagues had questioned his conclusions.

In spite of the obvious national pride, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History of Paris sees Brunet's skull as probably that of an ancient female gorilla and not the head of man's earliest ancestor. While looking at the same evidence, such as the skull's flattened face and shorter canine teeth, she draws a completely different conclusion.

Of course, one might be inclined to ask why such critiques never seem to get the same front-page coverage? It's also important to point out that throughout history, various species, such as cats, have had varying lengths of canine teeth. That does not make them any closer to evolving into another species.

A Washington Post article goes on to describe this latest fossil as having human-like traits, such as tooth enamel thicker than a chimpanzee's. This apparently indicates that it did not dine exclusively on the fruit diet common to apes. But apes don't dine exclusively on fruit; rather, their diet is supplemented with insects, birds, lizards and even the flesh of monkeys. The article attempted to further link this fossil to humans by stating that it probably walked upright. Never mind the fact that no bones were found below the head! For all we know, it could have had the body of a centaur, but that would hardly stop an overzealous scientist (or reporter) from trying to add a little meat to these skimpy bones. Could it not simply be a primate similar to today's Bonobo? For those not keeping track of their primates, Bonobos (sp. Pan paniscus) are chimpanzee-like creatures found only in the rain forests of Zaire. Their frame is slighter than that of a chimpanzee's and their face does not protrude as much. They also walked upright about 5 percent of the time. Sound familiar?

Whether it is tooth enamel, length of canines or the ability to walk upright, none of these factors makes this recent discovery any more our ancestral candidate than it does a modern-day Bonobo.

So why does every new fossil discovery seem to get crammed into some evolutionary scenario? Isn't it possible to simply find new, yet extinct, species? The answer, of course, is yes; but there is great pressure to prove evolution.

That leads us to perhaps the most troubling and perplexing aspect of this latest evolutionary hoopla. While on one hand sighting the evolutionary importance of this latest discovery, a preponderance of these articles leave the notion that somehow missing links are not all that important any more.

According to Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman, missing links are pretty much myths. That might be a convenient conclusion for those who have been unable to prove evolution via the fossil record. Unfortunately for them, links are absolutely essential to evolution. It is impossible for anything to evolve into another without a linear progression of these such links.

The prevailing evolutionary view of minute changes, over millions of years, is wholly inadequate for the explanation of such a critical piece of basic locomotion as the ball-and-socket joint. Until such questions can be resolved, superficial similarities between various species are not going to prove anything. No matter how bad someone wants to see it.

Farmer is a professional artist living in Houston. He can can be contacted via his Web site, www.theglobalzoo.com

[gore3000]

1) Gradual evolution.
2) Spontanious Generation.
Your task, is to provide a single example of a new species spontaniously generating.

I'll be generous, I will give you two:

    Platypus

Now the platypus certainly did not gradually evolve from any other living creature. The features it possesses come from many different vertebrate families including fish, reptiles, mammals and birds. There is absolutely no place in the 'evolutionary tree' to put this creature into.


FROM:   Euglena Note the eye.

Euglena is both a plant and an animal, in addition to which it even has an eye. Now it is clearly impossible for a creature to have descended from both a plant and an animal in either small gradual steps or large ones!

[Scully]

a real, classical education

I'm afraid classical education has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

[gore3000]

"Spontaneous generation" - POOF, a critter suddenly appears by magic or God.

Check out the Cambrian explosion. With the exception of single celled organisms, algae and worms every single known animal phyla arose within less than 5 million years. This is well documented and the reason why Gould and Eldredge gave up on gradual evolution. If this cannot be called spontaneous generation, then nothing can. It completely discredits evolution and indeed Darwin himself admitted that if more fossils could not be found then his theory was false.

[PatrickHenry]

Wildly elliptical, Nobel Prize for Creationism placemarker.

[Scully]

As a scientist, I find polls and their results interesting but distressing. People who ignore evidence (or more appropriately are "selective" in their acceptance of evidence) are dangerously confined.

[Heartlander]

My research of opinion polls & surveys greatly surprised me at the significant minority (perhaps 10%?) of Americans who believe in your version of evolution. I was surprised but not concerned...how do you feel about the issue?

Hmmm… Just taking a guess here – It’s hard to remain objective with all my “religious dogma” mind you – but I’ll try…

So you go out and get a bunch of atoms, particles… – wait, I’m talking above my head here – I’m just a stupid Christian who believes in God…. OK so lets just say it’s “stuff”, not atoms, etc.. Now we don’t know how all this “stuff” got here but your gonna need it!

OK so we got this “stuff” and we wait a few billion or million years. Wait… Wait… blah blah blah – mindless - blah blah - no purpose – blah blah blah – undirected…
Wait! Don’t look now but there is life! Intelligence! Love, art, and… purpose? Whoa?!!! Hey, how’d all ‘this’ “stuff” get here?

It’s pretty amazing but it’s not a miracle and not improbable (life has the ability to determine this, but we really don’t know how or why – “free will stuff”) We now have minds, intelligence, love, art, and purpose.

“Stuff” -- it’s fascinating! We use our intelligent minds to study “stuff” because we love “stuff” and “stuff” gives us purpose. Now debating those who may disagree… that is art. Just say, “Stuff it buddy, because I got proof to show my stuff is nothing but stuff” and “Oh yeah, see these transitional fossils”.

Now, back to the “only 10% believe thing”. I’m just taking a guess here because I’m a stupid Christian, but I think most people just don’t believe in “stuff” and “stuff” alone.

[sarcasm “stuff”]

[gore3000]

You will of course claim it's just a superficial, coincidental resemblancethat means nothing.

Well you have a teeny weenie problem with your pictures - archaeopteryx itself did not have any ancestors and the earliest birds ever found arose some 50 million years after archaeopteryx was long gone. So unless you can figure out how the dead reproduce your point is totally false.

In addition to which whales have numerous features similar to fish yet they clearly did not descend from fish. So homology, the methodology by which the phony science of paleontology works is totally unable to show descent.

[Heartlander]

Don’t you get it MAN! We are stuff… Stuff, stuff, and more stuff… Oh, DNA… ummm complex stuff.. and stuff, stuff,…
Hey, don’t make me keep repeating this stuff because my mind has more intelligent stuff than…

Wait, intelligence? OK, just more complicated stuff…

So anyway, see these transitional fossils… pretty cool eeh?

[just more sarcasm stuff ]

[gore3000]

The jury is still out on Neanderthal man.

Absolutely wrong. Neanderthal has been proven not to be an ancestor of man. The proof is absolute from three different DNA tests:

Scientists have analysed the DNA of a third Neanderthal in an attempt to shed light on the genetic history of early humans.

The results suggest that, like modern humans, Neanderthals expanded from a relatively small number of individuals.

And there is no evidence to indicate that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, something that has always been a bone of contention among experts.
From:  DNA Clues to Neanderthals

Neanderthal DNA is distinct from modern humans, Goodwin says, and there are no examples of humans having Neanderthal-type DNA.
From:  A Breed Apart

[gore3000]

Here Bohlin tries to pretend that unless every tiniest detail of a process is known, documented, filed and forgotten, it doesn't happen at all.

Absolute garbage. It is not lack of knowledge that disproves evolution, it is knowledge that disproves evolution. And I showed the impossibility of new genes, new traits arising in post#367. I have already shown all of you that your feeble attempts at refuting it are totally false and that is why why you and your fellow evolutionists do not dare to try to refute it. Let's see you prove me wrong:

essentially to get a new working gene, just one, you need what amounts to a miracle. You need:

1. a mutation which produces a duplicate gene.
2. that the duplicate gene does not hurt a vital part of the genome.
3. that the duplicate gene gets spread through the species at chances of 50% survival at each generation (note no selective advantage since the gene is just a duplicate at this point).
4. that the new gene acquires a mutation and then goes through 3 above to spread itself throughout the species again (again no selective advantage yet).
5. that it hits upon the correct helpful mutation by pure chance while going through 3 above after each try.

(Now the above alone should be enough to dissuade a reasonable person, one not blinded by faith in materialistic evolution, to say such a thing is impossible. The above is where we were some 50 years ago when DNA was discovered. Now we know more and the problem is worse.)

6. After all the above though, we still do not have a working gene! Now we need another miracle, we need the gene to:
a) be expressed in the cells where the new function, ability or whatever should go. Since there are some 3 billion cells in the human body finding which ones it should be expressed in is quite a task.
b. be connected to other processes in the organism that will tell it when to do its thing and when to stop doing it.
c. become part of the developmental program of the organism which tells the organism in what sequence each of the cell divisions is to take place. (we start with one cell and the program at each division has to determine what kind of cells to produce until we get a fully formed human being, the program does not stop there though, it continues running and telling the cells what to do until death).

Evolutionists believe however that all the above have happened - and not just once, but millions of times since the first single-celled organisms arose. Now who says that evolutionists do not believe in miracles?

[VadeRetro]

. . . grandfather and an anteater.

Actually, it was "my old pappy" and I should have followed with </Maverick_mode>

You see, the Maverick brothers Brett and Bart (James Garner and Jack Kelly, no relation to Grace) were always talking about what their old pappy used to say . . .

[VadeRetro]

how do you feel about the issue?

I suspect history is independent of what people think it should be.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Awww geez...not the famous blue poster again! Why do you always have to come in and rain on the evo's parade? They were lollygaggin', slappin' each others' behinds, and congratulating each other on how smart they are and how the 'average joe' is so dumbed-down by TV and the socialist education system. Evolution is for real, man! Almost 10% of the WORLD believes it now! Why can't you just be assimilated and join in the fun? :)

MM

[gore3000]

I don't need the names of the fossils, only their species.

You can't tell the species without more evidence than just bones. Bones are junk, that is why we know so little about dinosaurs and why no one here answered my challenge in post# 345. Care to try? Here it is again:

The evidence is quite lacking in much that is needed to prove descent. For example:
1. What is the evidence that dinosaurs did not have purple skin? (this is needed because skin is almost an absolute requirement for proper classification - fish have scales, reptiles do not, mammals have fur, and birds have feathers).
2. What is the evidence that dinosaurs did not have mammary glands? (again this is absolutely necessary since the definition of a mammal is that it has mammary glands).
3. What is the evidence that dinosaurs had 2, 3, or 4 chambered hearts? (again this is necessary because different species have different hearts)
4. What is the evidence for dinosaur DNA? (again, this is necessary to tell us the relationships to different species).

The answer is that we do not have any such evidence. The answer is therefore that we cannot tell the descent of species from bones because bones do not give us the necessary information to even classify the organisms being studied, let alone to determine if they could have descended from one another.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker (thunderstorm coming, gotta bail and shut down).

[gore3000]

The picture is as far as I know a perfectly legitimate study of the fossil sequence in question.

The picture is not a picture, it is a drawing. The source of the drawing is totally unknown. Anyone with some artistic proficiency could have drawn it and could have totally made it up - just like Haeckel did with the embryos. Just like evolutionists do in every single museum, in every single article published - they paint or draw what they think the creature should look like not what the evidence is.

In short you are calling (as all other evolutionists do) creations of the imagination evidence. They are not evidence. The only evidence is in the bones, in what has actually been found, but that evidence is what the evolutionists never show because it is totally ludicrous as I showed quite clearly in post#216 about the 'first primate'. Of course the one called the first hominid a few years back, the famous Lucy, was just a totally made up face with more plaster than bone, the first mammal also is a total fake, just a lower jaw and a totally plastered up partial upper jaw. Tell me, what evidence did they have for any of the above having mammary glands? Paleontology is just a bunch of frauds based on assumptions which are only true if evolution itself is true. Even with such an aid, they still have to totally make up evidence to prove their theory. That's why evolution is total bunk.

[nobdysfool]

One survey I've seen is that the percentage of people who believe in evolution goes up and up as you sample higher and higher educational levels.

That could also be because they've been exposed to more of the teaching about evolution. It doesn't necessarily mean that they understand it or have even thought much about it. There is a tendency in this day and age to accept what other learned scholars say without question, simply because they are "experts". An expert can be genuinely and sincerely wrong, no malice aforethought, no intent to deceive, but if he's never challenged, his word can and is accepted as fact. Happens all the time in other areas of study and endeavor. So the numbers can still be skewed.

I was being presented with a dichotomy that amounted to, "Either you're religious and believe in creation or you're an atheist and believe in evolution." The dichotomy is false.

I agree. Very few things are that cut-and-dried, and this is one of them.

[VadeRetro]

Not a drawing.

[El Whino]

I suspect history is independent of what people think it should be.

I certainly wouldn't have an argument with that. There seems to be, however, a desire of E's to downplay--perhaps even discredit--what the majority believes to be true. And there has to be some frustration among the E's that as science progresses, the opinions do not shift that much.

It is further interesing that according to information I've read, although the majority of Americans don't believe in the E's version of evolution, about 83% don't object to evolution being taught in schools. Americans have short attention spans and send a lot of confusing signals...but they just don't change their basic dogma too much. That's got to be a challenge for the scientific community in terms of acceptance of new discoveries.

[gore3000]

Wildly elliptical, Nobel Prize for Creationism placemarker.

Always twisting my words. Seems that is the only way dishonest people like yourself can attack me. When are you and your gang of losers going to show us a single Nobel Prize winning discovery that tends to prove evolution? Just one.