Why is this automatically assume to be a primate? It looks like a dinosaur fossil. Human ancestor, there needs to be a new word invented for that level of guessing. What a joke.
For a living thing that died in a prehistoric soup, Ida enjoyed a thoroughly modern unveiling. It, or she as it/she was called, was brought before the world's media with the razzmatazz normally reserved for serving presidents or misbehaving film stars.
It is perhaps churlish to complain about the hour and a half of rampant self-publicising that we had to endure before we finally got to meet it/her. After all, we have already been waiting some 47m years.
So there was no doubting the extraordinary power of the moment.
The most sublime image was of Michael Bloomberg standing beside Ida's glass box, his arm around the shoulders of a school girl who was wearing a T-shirt with the TV tie-in logo: "The Link. This changes everything". The main thing Bloomberg was presumably hoping this would change was his prospects of winning an unprecedented third term as New York mayor in upcoming elections.
Almost on a par with Bloomberg was Tora Aasland, minister for higher education in the Norwegian government, who appeared to think Ida was a wonder of Norwegian science as opposed to a wonder of pre-historic evolution. She pledged $350,000 for the project.
Beyond the politicians, the media crowd was in full voice, each individual making more high-pitched claims about the discovery than the last. Anthony Geffen who has made a film about the secret process to bring the fossil to public attention made an allusion to the moon landings.
Nancy Dubuc of the History Channel that will be showing the film said Ida "promised to change everything that we thought we understood about the origins of human life".
The publishers Little Brown plugged their rapidly turned around and secretly produced book-of-the-film-of-the-science by saying the fossil would "undoubtedly revolutionise our understanding of our origins".
Dr Jorn Hurum, the scientist at the heart of the project, made the most exotic parallels. He screened photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, without elucidation, though the implication was clear. He variously described the fossil as the Holy Grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.
But this is all fine science in the tradition of Bathybius and Piltdown.
Here's a little something on Missing Links by evolutionist John R. Baker.
piltdown ping
Healthy debate and self-checking by the science community.
Sounds like science checks and balances are in force and doing their job.
There really isn’t such a thing as an “Evolutionist.” There are scientists who specialize in TToE and other life sciences. Most scientists (> 99%) understand TToE. The handful who don’t are letting their agenda override their learning and aren’t “scientists” by any meaningful definition of the term.
Have a blessed day!
Thanks for posting the article.
She was definitely the predecessor of Washingtonius Secretarius!
Hurum’s hokum.
>>>But this is all fine science in the tradition of Bathybius and Piltdown.
So carrying forth this fine line of thought, I guess when we have a Tony Alamo and his underage girls, a Jim Bakker with his waterslide and his real-estate frauds, monasteries with enough splinters of the True Cross to build a frontier fort, yadda yadda yadda x 2000 years, then these invalidate Christianity. Or maybe not, after all “this is all fine religion in the tradition of sideshow carneys and false prophets.”
For myself I like the open minded skepticism of genuine science. It is more reliably self-correcting.
Interesting scenario.
Evo scientists are debating how to classify this fossil and where it belongs in the fossil record.
So ultimately, they will decide and put it in where they THINK it fits best, and then offer that up as evidence that the ToE is valid because it can predict where fossils go and here’s the evidence: all these nice fossils neatly transitioning from one to another, because of where they were placed based on human decision, not because anyone REALLY knows that that’s where they go.