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To: Fester Chugabrew
When one assumes the history of primates is one from ape to human it is not difficult to make the evidence support the assumption.

We happen to have one historical test of this hypothesis of yours, and that one case at least suggests that it not only IS "difficult to make the evidence support the assumption," it's nearly impossible.

That test case is of course Eoanthropus dawsoni, or "Piltdown Man," a completely faked hominid (an engineered fraud combining fairly recent ape and human bones) that was nevertheless accepted as a genuine fossil creature for a number of decades.

If it really is "not difficult to make the evidence support the assumption" of evolution -- whether or not it genuinely does so -- then it should have been easy to work Piltdown into the scheme of human evolution along with actual fossils.

But it was not easy. Indeed no one succeeded in doing so. As real fossils accumulated from Africa and Asia clear patterns in human evolution became apparent. For instance teeth and jaws were reduced in size and became more human-like while the brain remained small and the skull remained apelike. Piltdown showed exactly the opposite pattern. (Unsurprisingly since it was an ape's jaw combined with human skull fragments.)

No one could ever "make" Piltdown fit. Textbooks and research papers began to ignore it or openly declare it an unsolved anomaly. If an attempt was made to include it in an evolutionary scheme it was inevitably shunted off onto a lonely side-branch.

273 posted on 03/24/2006 7:09:55 PM PST by Stultis (I don't worry about the war turning into "Vietnam" in Iraq; I worry about it doing so in Congress.)
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To: Stultis

Why use an obvious fake to support the idea that the evidence cannot be made to fit the assumptions? It would not be easy to work a combination of ape and human bones into anything, although the fraud may have enjoyed wide support for a time.

What specific bone shapes would lead one to conclude that skull is not that of a human, but of something quasi-human? What is the range of bone shapes in our current population? How does its diversity compare to all the bone shapes found throughout history? Can the shape of a bone found buried in Ethiopia match the shape of a bone residing in the body of the bum crouching at the corner of 5th and Bergen a Newark at 2:37 this afternoon?

When I say it is "easy," what I mean is the inclination to interpret morphological similarities as historic continuities, or to arrange the findings in a manner that shows a progression. We are born into progressions, so it would be natural to assume progressions govern all things.


292 posted on 03/24/2006 7:34:34 PM PST by Fester Chugabrew
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