Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say

When the famous skeleton of an early human ancestor known as Lucy was discovered in Africa in the 1970s, scientists asked: Where did she come from?

Now, fossils found in the same region are providing solid answers, researchers have announced.

Lucy is a 3.5-foot-tall (1.1-meter-tall) adult skeleton that belongs to an early human ancestor, or hominid, known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The species lived between 3 million and 3.6 million years ago and is widely considered an ancestor of modern humans.

The new fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as Australopithecus anamensis. The remains date to about 4.1 million years ago, according to Tim White, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

White co-directed the team that discovered the new fossils in Ethiopia (map) in a region of the Afar desert known as the Middle Awash.

The team says the newly discovered fossils are a no-longer-missing link between early and later forms of Australopithecus and to a more primitive hominid known as Ardipithecus.

"What the new discovery does is very nicely fill this gap between the earliest of the Lucy species at 3.6 million years and the older [human ancestor] Ardipithecus ramidus, which is dated at 4.4 million years," White said.

The new fossil find consists mainly of jawbone fragments, upper and lower teeth, and a thigh bone.

According to White, the discovery supports the hypothesis that Lucy was a direct descendent of Australopithecus anamensis.

A argument with those of opinion is useless. They will just have another meaningless thought.

The method of philosophy is the argument for proof of faith and belief in things unknown. In thousands of years it has provided little or no new knowledge. It is void of any fact and all proofs have remained argument.

The method of science is observation of a material fact, evidence, and empirical evidence of the fact and a explanation of the fact with evidence that constitutes theory. Aristotle is known as the father of science. The method of science was invented to exclude faith and belief because faith and belief obstructs and fights new facts or knowledge and views science as a threat. Aristotle's science was retrieved from the Arabs in the early middle ages and accepted by the western world as Aristotelian thought and the method of science. It has no method of observing anything other than a material fact. Faith and belief cannot be observed as a material fact or knowledge and remain argument. Proof is not a term of science. Science provides evidence.

The method of mathematics provides proof of absolutes and determines laws by designation of symbols and numbers. Descartes is thought the father of mathematics and turned to mathematics when his philosophy failed to provide proof of doubt and remained argument that was refused by the church.

The three methods are separate and not interchangeable. Philosophy can only argue faith and belief and is void of facts. Science can only observe material facts and provide the evidence for the fact, not proof. Mathematics only determines absolutes and laws. It does not determine faith and belief not does it observe new facts.

Last there is the failed method of knowledge, Opinion. Opinion is despised by Science, Philosophy and Mathematics. It is incapable of logical argument, is void of facts and knowledge and determines no absolutes or laws. Opinion seeks agenda by accusation, name calling, misrepresentation of facts, lack of knowledge and in the end violence when opinion is refuted. One of opinion is usually known as a opinionest or opinion est. Opinion is thought to be the most vile of all unethical acts.

Now comes a old argument of theological philosophy,(creation dressed up as ID), that has been relegated to opinion for centuries. It begs to be accepted as science. It's premise is that you can't disprove creation or ID and uses a term of philosophy. Well who cares except the opinionest who can't prove or disprove anything by opinion and philosophy. Science simply asks is there any new evidence of a observed fact or knowledge that we can explain by the scientific method. The reply is we have faith and belief, argument and opinion. Science answers you have had thousands of years to provide new facts or knowledge to be explain by science and have failed. You remain argument and the method of philosophy and not a observed fact by science.

Once rejected Creation and ID says we will accomplish our agenda with opinion. We will use the power of philosophical law to impose our faith and belief in science and require it taught as theory. We will distort the meanings and terms science. We will deny any facts of science with opinion. We will refuse and keep from others any knowledge of the scientific method. We will discredit science by any agenda of opinion possible.

However one should caution opinionest to be careful of what they wish. If science ever observes ID or Creation as a fact, that fact will be explained by science whether the the fact is a Deity, God or a unknown. It will not be explained by philosophy. All of faith and belief may cease to exist. Only one or none of religion will be correct. Most of faith and belief along with opinion will become ridicule. The total of their knowledge may be tugging a goat or riding a donkey if lucky.

For those that care here is my background and education. (for those that don’t care, skip to the next paragraph). I have a degree in Biochemistry and a doctorate in Medicine. The degree in Biochemistry included courses in biology, vertebrate morphology, taxonomy etc.

Then how is it you make so many elementary mistakes about science in the following?

I am a conservative Christian and believe in creation

Feel free.

and not the modern Theory of Evolution.

Then how do you account for the vast amounts of overwhelming evidence support evolutionary biology? Oh, right, by just pretending it's "lacking", as you imply below.

The Theory of Evolution has always been and will always be a theory

True, since "theory" is the highest level of explanation achievable in science, there is no higher "step". Your subsequent comments reveal that you're ignorant of this very basic tenet, however -- how did you manage to achieve your degrees and remain completely unaware of this?

and one that lacks good evidence.

Completely and utterly false. Where did you "learn" this, some creationist pamphlet? You clearly haven't actually bothered to *look* at the evidence. If you don't find it personally convincing, so be it, but it takes a remarkable degree of unfamiliarity with it to claim that evolutionary biology "lacks good evidence". There are vast amounts of stunningly good evidence for evolution, enough that it would take more than a lifetime to cover it all.

I think that so many discussing this topic these days lack a basic understanding of the scientific method.

...you say, and then go on to reveal that you "lack a basic understanding" of it yourself, and are just parroting stuff from creationist tracts.

A theory is an idea that explains observations.

That part you've got right, but that's about the only part.

It can never move from a theory to an established law without experimentation and repeated verification.

EERRNNTT! Here's where you reveal that you "lack a basic understanding of the scientific method". Theories don't "move from" a theory to "an established law" AT ALL. They are different classifications of description. Laws don't become theories, theories don't become laws.

How did you manage to screw up something so basic?

The evidence from the fossil record is very weak

Complete nonsense. Parroting your favorite creationist pamphlets again?

For one example, how is the excellent fossil record of the transition of reptiles to mammals "very weak"? Go for it, this should be good for a few laughs.

and no matter how many “missing links” you come up with you can never prove the Theory of Evolution because you 1) were not there to observe the process and 2) cannot reproduce it.

Wow, *more* favorite creationist canards! Where did you "learn" your "science", exactly? Kent Hovind's DinoLand? No one who had an actual science education from a good institution could be this grossly mistaken on basic issues, unless they weren't paying attention at all.

1. Science does not deal in "proofs". Only someone who "lacks a basic understanding of the scientific method" would think that it does (which explains why it's a favorite creationist fallacy).

2. Science deals all the time with processes that "were not there to observe" or which can't be directly observed due to scale, speed, etc. In fact, it's not much of an overstatement to say that science deals almost entirely with processes which "you can't be there to see", because if you could, you wouldn't need to use science in order to investigate them. Science is all *about* investigating the things which you can't just pull up a chair and watch in all its details. Hey, what's the last time you actually watched a hydrogen atom link up with an oxygen atom? Is chemistry therefore not science? Clue for the clueless: Science is valuable precisely because it has accumulated reliable methods of acquiring and validating knowledge about things we *can't* fully "be there to see".

3. If you had actually learned about basic science, you'd like that the "observations" which science requires are the "sit there and be able to see the event/phenomenon in question" nonsense which you presume (see item #2), it's the ability to observe *evidence* or *effects* which can be used to test hypotheses about the thing being investigated. Sheesh.

Just how in the hell did you allegedly get a science degree without knowing these completely elementary things about science?

(I am not talking about and we should make a clear difference between the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection. Natural Selection can be observed directly in nature and actually can be reproduced.

Fine.

Natural Selection does not prove the Theory of Evolution.

No one claimed it did.

Just because I can change one species of fruit fly into another one in the lab does not mean I can change a frog into a dog no matter how much time is given to me.

No, but the vast and overwhelming mountains of evidence along multiple cross-confirming lines which indicate that ancestral amphibians evolved into dogs (and all other mammals) shows that this has, indeed, occurred.

The leap of faith that people take from Natural Selection to the Theory of Evolution is enormous.)

It would be if that's what they were basing their conclusions on, but since it's not, you're just a) engaging in a "straw man", and b) revealing your ignorance about what people actually do base the Theory of Evolution upon.

The fossil record is simply a scattered series of “snapshots” of nature’s past.

It's more than that, but I won't quibble when you've got larger errors which need correcting.

The theory part comes in when you try and assemble all of these snapshots and try and make them tell a story. Imagine taking a film (that you’ve never seen) and isolating 1% of the frames from that movie randomly. Now lay those pictures out on a table. Think you could tell the story accurately. Even if you had a large number of frames and knew what order to put them in you are still not seeing the whole movie.

Wow, what a flawed analogy. How about arguing your case on its actual merits instead of hand-waving about movies in the hopes that it might have some vague relevance to the actual issue of determining evolutionary histories from multiple lines of evidence? If you even can, I mean -- you argue this like someone who's not very familiar with the actual science, but real familiar with favorite creationist fallacies.

I'm not going to waste my time with all the dozens of ways your "movie" analogy is flawed, but here are some of the highlights:

1. Events in movies change too rapidly for a 1% sampling of all "frames" to give you more than an extremely fragmentary view of the whole. The same is not true of evolutionary change, which unfolds much more slowly -- even a one-in-a-million sampling would give you roughly a representative individual from every generation that has ever lived, which would be a very complete picture indeed. Your analogy grossly misrepresents the difficulty. For a more appropriate analogy, try 1% of all frames from a super-slow-motion movie, where even frames several hundred frames apart have changed only very minutely from each other. In that case, it would be very easy to confidently and correctly match up which frames came before/after each other in the proper sequence.

2. Sampled movie frames don't come with independent lines of evidence which can be used to cross-validate which frames belong where. Evolutionary evidence does. For a better analogy, try 1% of frames from a super-slowmo movie for which independent accounts exist of the sequence of events in the film.

3. Movies contain abrupt and drastic scene changes which can make it difficult to determine what frames might belong in what relationship to other frames. Evolutionary histories don't.

4. Movies don't follow specific rules which restrict what frames can follow other frames and how, which could be used to correctly rule out certain alternative arrangements of frames or determine which frames necessarily belong between pairs of others. Evolutionary sequences do.

5. Even in your movie analogy, you "forgot" to mention that many inherent details of the frames can be used to determine their proper sequence, for example if there's a ball rolling down a hill in the background of one scene, it can be used to align the frames of that scene, since balls roll down hills, not up them. The same is true of many independent features of evolutionary sequences.

How many more points would you like me to list showing how poor and (deliberately?) misleading your "movie" example is when it comes to understanding how evolutionary histories can be reconstructed with a high degree of confidence based upon massive amounts of independently cross-confirming evidence?

And how did you manage to get a biology degree without knowing any of this?

To take this analogy even further you first have to

...you first have to be willing to stretch already poor and inappropriate analogies to the breaking point.

take a leap of faith and “believe” that the frames of the movie lead from one to the other. I must first “believe” that one species evolved into another species in order to explain two similar fossils.

There's no "leap of faith" involved at all, son. There's vast amounts of evidence which validates such conclusions, and then re-validates them over and over again across more than a century of literally millions of potential falsifications and validations. Sort of "forgot" to mention that, eh? Or are you just really that ignorant?

And that’s what we are left with: a theory to explain an observation – not proof!

One. More. Time. Science doesn't deal in proofs. Only those who "lack a basic understanding of the scientific method" could mistakenly think that it might. It does, however, deal in many methods by which explanations are overwhelmingly validated beyond any reasonable doubt. And evolutionary biology passed that point before you or I were born, and it has only further solidified its evidenciary foundation since then.

In my office I have a 4’x 6’ chart of all of the typical biochemical reactions that occur in a living cell. Very small print, thousands of reactions. I find it much easier to believe that Someone created than to believe that it all happened by chance.

I'm sure you do, but that's often the case for people who are unfamiliar with the vast amount of evidence overwhelmingly indicating that complex life has, indeed, descended from simpler life, that evolutionary processes (which are very inaccurately described as "by chance" -- there's a lot more to them than that) can and do indeed produce stunning complexity, and that countless times, large and small, when the histories of various pieces of complex biological systems are examined, they are found to be in excellent accord with the results of evolutionary change.

I don't have time to do my usual flood of citations supporting each and every one of my assertions (my wife and I are about to run off to meet some friends), but I'll be glad to do so later if you wish.

In the meantime, let's turn things around for a change -- why don't you explain to us what exactly is flawed in the findings and methods by which, say, endogenous retroviruses are used to validate evolutionary relationships? We'll wait. After you get done with that I've got several thousand other lines of evidence for evolutionary theory for you about which you can show us the error of our ways.

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