Fossils Bridge Gap in African Mammal Evolution

Reuters to My Yahoo! ^ | Wed Dec 3, 2003 | Patricia Reaney

[Pharmboy]

LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.

Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.

But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.

"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.

The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.

"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.

Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.

"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.

Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.

Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.

[bluejay]

I'll bet you can't produce a quote from any textbook that makes this argument.

Don't you trust me?

From Biology by Cambell, Reece, and Mitchell, 5th eddition (1999) pp 423-424.

"Descent with modification is evident in anatomical similarities between species grouped in the same taxonomic category. For example, many of the same skeletal elements make up the forelimbs of humans, cats, whales, bats, and all other mammals, although these appendages have very different functions (figure 22.9). Surely, the best way to build a bat's wing is not also the best way to build whale's flipper. Such anatomical peculiarities make no sense if the structures are uniquely engineered and unrelated."

Talk about ego. These guys feel they know best how to engineer living beings. Since God failed to do it to their specs, he cannot possibly exist. QED.

[bluejay]

Pretend I'm from Missouri - show me.

Sorry, I did not see your post. Similar question was posted just before yours. See my post #101 for a reply.

[edsheppa]

You said "they conclude that there is no God." Your quote in #101 does not make that conclusion. Post the quote where the textbook concludes that there is no God - adding your own bogus "conclusion" doesn't count.

[Ichneumon]

However, the study of evolution is dominated by people who do not believe a person can be scientific and even believe in God at all.

That's a... fascinating claim. Perhaps you ought to try to support it.

[raygun]

Its called religious scientism. "An exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science..." (Merriam-Webster 1099).

Carl Sagan attributed the same spiritual qualities of intelligence and purpose [of God] to matter [and energy]. Of course this isn't science, but scientism, a religious faith unsupported by evidence. It is often mistaken for science when authoritatively proclaimed by scientists. "If we must worship a power greater than ourselves," says Carl Sagan, "does it not make sense to revere the Sun and Stars?" A native bowing before a stone...a witch worshiping nature...and a university professor worshipping the atom (or time)...offer obvious similarities. There is one significant difference, the native and the witch remain true to the relgious aspects of their faith, something that Sagan's scientism denies.

The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that "Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existance of God are Buddahism, Taoism, Secular Humanism, and others" In 1983, the Virginia U.S. District Court said, "The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible, or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established" (Gabler, Mel and Norma. What are They Teaching Our Children? Illinois 1987).

For this reason I posit that evolution is, for the most part, a humanistic type of religion. Evolutionists can not and do not know that it is true; it is somethey choose to believe.

When most people think of "religion", they visualize clergy, temples, churches, rituals, etc. However, what people do not realize is that a religion is simply the "belief in or reverence for a supernatural power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe (Heritage 1044). That is all any philosophy needs in order to be religious in nature. It is very reasonable to assert then that, to humanists, evolution is their "religion" and the passing of enormous amounts of time is their omnipotent "creator".

A Wayne State University geology textbook earnestly admits, "In human terms, the inconceivable length of time [of a 4.6 billion year old univers] might as well be eternity of the Norwegian folktale" (Geology, An Introduction to Physical Geology, 2nd Ed. Univ of Wash., Seattle, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999; Chernicoff, Stanley, p208).

Chandra Wickramasinghe, a world-famous British astronomer, testified in an Arkansas trial, "Contrary to the popular notion that only creationism relies on the supernatural, evolution must as well, since the probabilities of random formation of life are so tiny [they] require a "miracle"...tantamount to a [religious belief]" (Gabler 137). Dr. D.M.S. Watson, said in the journal Nature, "The theory of evolution itself [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible" (Watson 233). Dr. W. Scott Morrow, professor of biochemisty at Wofford College, South Carolina, and an evolutionist, conludes that the primary reason most scientists believe in evolution is because "they wanted to believe in it, they looked at the evidence and saw it one way, and didn't consider alternatives" (Gabler 141).

Wolfgang Smith was quite candid about the truth of evolution:

"We are told dogmatically that evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told that the doctrine is founded upon evidence...but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precicely, this evidence consists." (Teilhardism and the New Religion - Rockford, Ill. 1988)

The science journal Nature had no problem admitting in 1967, "Our theory of evolution has become...one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus 'outside of empirical science' but not necissarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. There is an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training."

The universe is a closed system. So where did the matter and energy come from for the supposed Big Bang that begat the evolutionary miracle? The law of cause and effect indentifies the universe as the effect and demands to know the cause. Evolutionists might counter, "Where did God come from?, demonstrating that the issue is really on of diametrically opposed worldviews - naturalism and supernaturalism - and are belief systems. Neither can be scientifically proven; one must simply believe. The difference being however, that the law of cause and effect requires an explanation from the eveolution model. The intelligent design model doesn't have to explain it - because it predicts it. I'd posit to say that it takes more faith to believe that the universe "just happened" than believing an all-powerfull, all-knowing, self-existent, eternal intelligence created it.

That notwithstanding, I will point out that Dr. John Rankin in his Ph.D. dissertation showed mathematically that galaxies could not form from the Big Bang (Safarti, Jonathan. Refuting Evolution: A Response to the National Academy of Sciences "Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science." Brisbane 1999).

Evolution is not about science. The textbook, "Glenco Biology", 1994, instructs children, "You can better understand how the eyeball might have evolved if you imagine a series of changes during the evolution of the eye" They're supposed to teach science in science class, and that is not science.

"To suppose that the eye with all its unparralleled contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree" (Darwin, Charles. "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life" Chicago, Mentor, 1958). When do they begin to start teaching that?

Dr. Richard Dawkins, head of the Department of Zooology at Oxford University has stated, "the more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it happened by blind chance. The obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent designer." However, that is anathema to humanistic secular scientism. They rather pin their secular humanistic religion of scientism on the following garbage:

"Scientists use the order of rock layers to decide how old the rock layers are. WHen scientists figure out how old the rock layers are, they can also figure out how long ago organisms lived. Sometimes scientists do just the opposite. If they know the time in history when a plant or an animal lived, that tells them how old the rock layer is" (Harcource Brace D59).

One teacher's edition science textbook instructs to tell children:

1) index fossils determine the age of rock layers
2) a fossils age is established by the age of the rock layers in which the fossil resides (SBGS - Discovery Works, Parsipanny; pg 262)

A geology textbook used at Wayne State University states:

"Knowing the spatial relationships between rock strata, then, helps geologists estimate the relative ages of the fossils contained in them - and vice versa ... Index fossils [enable] us to date the rocks in which they are found... Knowledge of a fossil organism's place in the geological record can help date a rock [layer] in which the fossil appears (Chernicoff 212-13)

In the Encylcopedia Brittanica, under the heading Geology, a university of London professor states, "It can not be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their remains embedded in rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of the organisms that they contain (Rastall, R.H, "Geology." Encyclopedia Britannica. Vol 10, 1949)

Niles Eldridge, states: "Paleontologists can not operate this way. There is no way to simply look at a fossil and say how old it is unless you know the age of the rocks it comes from. And this poses something of a problem: if we date rocks by their fossils, how can we turn around and talk about patterns of evolutionary change through time in the fossil record? (Eldridge, Niles. Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinism, Evolution, and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. New York 1985)

This is just some of the impecable intellectual honesty that is at the core the great fact of evolution. And when the dim witted knuckle dragging God worshippers object, they are met with shrieks of ridicule and laughter eg. Flat Earther, Luddite, or even worse: stupid.

G.W. Harper wrote in School Science Review, "For some time it has seemed to me that our current methods of teaching Darwinism are suspiciously similiar to indoctrination" (Harper, G.W. "Darwinism and Indoctrination." School Science Review: Dec 1977, vol 59. no. 207)

John Dunphy, in his prize-winning essay, "A Religion for a New Age" stated: "I am concinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public classroom by teachers who correctly...proselytize a new faith: A religion of humanity...utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into wherever they teach... The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new- the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism... (The Humanist: 1983)

Dr. John Moore, from the University of California said, "If we do not resolve our problems with the creationists, we have only ourselves to blame. Let us remember, the greatest resource of all is available to us - the educational system of the nation" (Okland, Roger, Matrisciana, Caryl. The Evolution Conspiracy. Oregon 1991)

Former Nebraska senator Peter Hoaglund, on a 1983 radio show said "Creationists have no right to indoctrinate their children in their beliefs. We are preparing their children for the new millenium and life in a global one-world society, and those children will not fit in." Hoaglund is a humanist, and also member of the Nebraska Board of Education.

In 1973, at a seminar on childhood education attended by 2000 educators, Dr. Chester Pierce, a professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard University stated:

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiences towards our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, towards his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, towrds the sovereignity of this nation as a separate entity. Its up to you teachers to make these sick children well by creating the international children of the future (Oakland 25).

"To be forced to believe only one conclusion - that everything in the universe happened by blind chance - would violate the very objectivity of science" - Dr. Wernher von Braun

But then, as I've attempted to point out, objectivity is not really the issue here is it? So now, let the arguementum ad hominem begin.

[Ichneumon]

Until the day a full "skeletal remains" are dug up, then scienctists don't have anything but what they dream up.

So... If a fossil skeleton is missing, say, a toe, you're going to claim that it doesn't mean "anything", that nothing at all can be learned from any of the rest of it? That any information learned from the rest of it is only "dreamed"?

That sort of rationalization for refusing to look at the available evidence just boggles my mind.

By your own criteria, though, it's just "dreaming" to believe in the Bible unless every timber of the Ark is recovered, every one of Adam's bones is found, all the nails used to fasten Christ to the cross are located (along with the cross itself), etc.

Are you sure you really want to go down that road? Or are you maintaining a double standard for the required level of evidence for things you want to believe versus the things you don't?

Interesting how many discoveries have been made and yet these supposed intellectuals, hold fast to the very thing that removes their credibility.

Your point might be a bit more convincing if you could present something resembling an actual argument and supporting examples. For starters, what in the heck are you referring to here?

[Ichneumon]

Another hoax was an embryology scandal in about 1966 claiming that the coccyx was a vestigial tail, not an anchor for musculature.

The coccyx *is* a vestigial tail, as well as an anchor for musculature.

Why do you presume that it has to be one *or* the other?

[At _War_With_Liberals]

The Cardiff Giant!

[At _War_With_Liberals]

How come the missing link turned into the missing links?

[At _War_With_Liberals]

Cyborg, I find your posts refreshing. You are the real deal.

[raygun]

That reeks a lot like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny (just not in so many words).

Even so everybody claims that the biogentic law is as dead as a doornail, supposedly officially exorcised from biology textbooks in the Fifties, being for all practical purposes extinct for serious theoretical inquiry in the Twenties, take a look at the pictures displayed in:

The Revised and Expanded Answers Book. Batten, Don. Arizona, Master, 1990 (pg 120)

Basic Biology. American Guidance Service. Charles LaRue ed. 1992 & 2001. (pg 264)

I fail to see any distinction between Haeckel's embryos of 1892 and the drawings, for which he was tried for fraud, convicted and summarily fired from his college. What is trying to be presented here, in a modern day biology book, when you line up fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, rabbit and humans in various stages of fetal development?

They're teaching the science of evolution, that's what. What they don't teach is the fraud upon which the science is based.

[Ichneumon]

Don't forget to mention the the original "comparative embryology" frauds published by Ernst Haekel, which were expose as such back in the late 19th century.

You are invited to explain how you think you have determined that Haeckel's hand-drawn drawings were actual "frauds" as opposed to careless errors due to various sorts of 19th-century shortcomings (technological, funding, standards, etc.)

Around the same time as Haeckel, respected astronomers Schiaparelli (in Italy) and Percival Lowell (in the US) both made sketches of Mars based on their telescope observations and in good faith drew maps of the "canals" that they had seen. Unfortunately, they were tricks of the eye resulting from trying to glean too much detail from fuzzy images of a distant planet, and never actually existed on Mars itself. The maps of Mars's "canals" were wrong, but they weren't frauds or hoaxes.

Schiaparelli's map:

Despite this embarrassing (and famous) error, Lowell achieved real accomplishments by building the historic Lowell observatory, and accurately predicting the existence of the planet Pluto via mathematical analysis of variations in Uranus's orbit, twenty years before Pluto's eventual discovery.

What evidence do you have for your claim that Haeckel's oversimplifications of embyonic anatomy were actual frauds instead of honest mistakes like Schiaparelli's and Lowell's?

In any case, while embryonic development has more subtleties than Haeckel appreciated in the 19th century, contrary to many creationist claims, his points were not all wrong either. While embyronic development across vertebrate families varies more than Haeckel claimed, his insights about the their striking similarities and parallel structures are still valid today.

[Dimensio]

Darwin's flesh is dead,

Well, yes, and is his bone. That's really all that makes up a person, unless you have actual evidence to show otherwise.

fear not he who can destroy the flesh, but HE who can destroy the flesh and spirit.

Huh?

Darwin is in another dimension, you will get to sit and chat one day.

No, Darwin is dead, d-e-a-d, dead. As in, terminal, no-more. Or are you speaking of an alternate Charles Darwin in some alternate universe? If so, then I can't imagine that you can demonstrate this to any length, so I can only assume that you're treating your wild speculation as fact.

[Ichneumon]

Now why would anyone perpetrate a scientific fraud? A) The perpetrator has overwhelming faith in a pet theory and feels an urgency to proselytize by deception. B) The perpetrator is incompetent and desires peer respect. C) The perpetrator is not a scientist and finds pleasure in hoodwinking those who take themselves too seriously. D) The perpetrator is afraid of Pascal's wager. E) All of the above!

Note that various creationists have perpetrated scientific frauds for all of the above reasons except "D", and they have their own variation on that one as well ("afraid of going to hell if they question The Word").

[Dimensio]

I looked, but I didn't actually see a claim that there are no gods in the quote that you provided. Perhaps you could point it out, boldface the particular part of your citation that explicitly states as much?

[Dimensio]

Evolution is unproved and unprovable.

So is any theory in science. That's the nature of science.

We beleive it because the only alternative is Special Creation, and that is unthinkable.

An ignorant statement. Rule out evolution, and you simply have no scientific explanation for the origin of the species. You don't automatically assume a divine event simply because you can't think of a better explanation. Do you, by chance, have a reference for this quote?

Materialism is absolute......we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Such is the nature of science.

I have had evos right here on this board try to tell me that it is "unscientific" to even consider the possiblilty of Divine Intervention as a cause for anything.

That would be because science cannot address the supernatural. As such, any speculation into supernatural intevention of any kind is inherently unscientific. Doesn't mean that it's false, just means that the scientific method cannot be applied.

[Ichneumon]

["We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants,"]

Say what? Guess they weren't all "missing" if some "continue to live" through these years.

Oh come on, it wasn't *that* hard to understand. "The missing years" refers to the historical time span for which fossils (of any sort) have not been found yet. Those years are so far "missing" any found fossil record. And the researchers have determined that a given species has lived throughout those years by an easy method: They have found fossils of that species from both before and after the years in question.

I'm not current on the latest evolutionary theories, they um, evolve so often...

No, actually, they don't. But creationists so often like to claim that they do in order to give the false impression that evolutionary science is frequently throwing out last years' theory and frantically coming up with fresh ones, which is *NOT* the case.

Even creationists' favorite "example" of a "new" theory in evolution to replace the old (punctuated equilibrium) was, in fact, clearly described by Darwin himself in "The Origin of Species" in 1859. So much for the "latest theories", eh?

And as for your question ("And is this saying that some elephant "ancestors" stayed the same, while some were evolving?"), the answer is, "yes", since in fact most new species are formed by an existing theory "splitting" into two, with a new splinter population evolving in a new direction while the bulk of the original population remains relatively unchanged. I can see how you might not be aware of this, since you're "not current on the latest evolutionary theories", and this particular one was only published a scant HUNDRED AND FORTY YEARS AGO.

"...one species giving rise first to two or three varieties, these being slowly converted into species, which in their turn produce by equally slow steps other species, and so on, like the branching of a great tree from a single stem, till the group becomes large."
Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species", 1859.

[Ichneumon]

And may I say in kind, being an evolutionist means "one who continuosly evolves theory under the broad label 'evolution' to fit the latest contradictory evidence."

You may "say" that, but it doesn't make it true, and in fact it is not, although it's a common urban legend among creationists.

Just for fun though, do please grace us with your "history of evolutionary science" which delineates the alleged "rewrites" of the theory and the alleged "contradictory evidence".

I know, I know, thats science.

Your straw man description actually bears little resemblance to actual evolutionary science.

But just don't pretend you're on "holy ground" with your theory of the day!

Feel free to describe for us the the last "day" when evolutionary theory allegedly had to be revised.

And science doesn't make the mistake of claiming "holy ground". It leaves that fallacy for people in other fields to make.

Instead, science only claims that its theories are based on mountains of evidence and have been verified countless times in a myriad of ways, and produces workable results like jet fighters, digital computers, and designer pharmaceuticals. I'll take that over declarations of "holy ground" any time.

[Pharmboy]

The Giant was a fraud perpetrated to make fun of a believer...it was never positioned as a missing link in human evolution. See here for story

[Pharmboy]

Hornier than a rhinocerous...brutal looking chap, eh?

Thanks for the post.