‘Missing Link’? Not Quite, Say Catholic Scientists

ncr ^ | June 1, 2009 | STEVE WEATHERBE

[NYer]

VICTORIA, B.C. — The announcement of an extraordinary fossil find touted “the missing link” in mankind’s evolutionary development has provoked controversy in the scientific community. But Catholics would do well to stay clear of it, warn several scientists who are believers.

However, Catholic critics of Darwinism say the ongoing debate over evolution is an important one for the faith.

The find, dubbed “Ida,” is a nearly intact fossilized skeleton of a squirrel-sized, 47-million-year-old primate called Darwinius masillae. Ida’s unusual state of preservation provides a wealth of data about one of the possible branches that led to higher primates such as apes and man, said Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, but it doesn’t decide the issue about which branch — and it doesn’t constitute any kind of a missing link. “The missing link does not exist,” he said. “Evolution is a tree, not a chain.”

White is one of many biologists and paleontologists who quickly criticized the claims attending the discovery, while contrasting it with the much more modest tone of the scientific report.

The hype, including a film, a book and a website, calls Ida “A Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change Everything,” and Ida researcher Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan proposes it as the earliest anthropoid and therefore the progenitor of monkeys, apes and humans.

The report itself, however, concludes that “we do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid,” but it might “deserve more careful comparison with higher primates.”

Casey Luskin of the Darwin-denying Discovery Institute, founded by Catholic Bruce Chapman, said the protests over the Ida hype are interesting because “usually when discoveries are hyped as missing links, you don’t get disagreement from within the scientific community.” Lufkin said such finds are used “to evangelize for Darwinian evolution,” but the disagreements will make that less likely this time.

Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a Catholic, agrees with White.

“To call this ‘the missing link’ between humans and pre-human organisms is false. It just isn’t true,” said Miller, a lecturer on the compatibility of Christianity and science and the author of a textbook on evolution. “There are at least 100 specimens and a dozen distinct species in the fossil record linking humans with non-human life forms. … The missing link isn’t missing.”

Miller also finds the publicity unseemly: “There’s a book; there’s a website with downloadable interviews with celebrities; there’s a documentary movie, and they all have ‘Link’ or ‘Missing Link’ in their titles; and there’s a tie-in with a TV channel.”

Evolution Evidence

On the question of what Catholics and other Christians are to make of the larger questions raised by the Ida affair, Miller advises that the last 35 years have “established beyond doubt that humans had ancestors, just as every other life form had ancestors and emerged from the same process of evolution.”

The Catholic Church has long stated that there is no conflict between some form of species development and the Catholic faith. “The ideas that God created humanity and nature and that current life forms developed from natural processes are not in conflict,” said Miller. “Scripture tells us God made us from the dust of the earth, and science tells us we emerged from non-human life forms through natural processes.”

Miller calls the current debate over the teaching of evolution in the schools “a battle for the soul of America.”

The United States has been “remarkably hospitable to science” and has prospered as a result, he said. “We are practical people: We don’t look at credentials so much as results, and science is the same way.”

Christian critics of evolution are really attacking the whole idea of “scientific rationalism,” he charged.

At stake for the Catholic Church and other churches, he said, is that “if they adopt a position at odds with the established principles of science, then young people will turn away from them” to the degree they find the scientific evidence convincing.

“The conflict is entirely unnecessary,” he concluded. “Catholics should be allied to the truth above all, and that includes scientific truth.”

Chapman, founder of the Discovery Institute, and like many Intelligent Design advocates, a Catholic, has little to say on the Ida find, but he defends Intelligent Design.

“So many Catholics accept ID because ID makes sense,” he said. While the Catholic Church does not teach the “young earth creation” model holding the world to be 6,000 years old, neither does it accept the idea advanced by some evolutionists, including, Chapman said, Kenneth Miller: “Humans came about through an unguided process that did not have us in mind.”

Chapman quoted Pope Benedict XVI’s first homily as pope on April 24, 2005, where he stated that humanity is “not some casual and meaningless product of evolution, but each of us is the result of a thought of God.”

Philosophical questions do not belong in the science classroom, according to Chapman. “We don’t want them there. We want to play by the rules. We believe design can be shown scientifically,” he said. “But we don’t want to talk about the designer.”

Not so fast, says Hugh Ross, director of Reasons to Believe, a self-described “science-faith think tank” based in California, and proudly “old-earth creationist.” As such, the evangelical Protestant organization has no problem with the age of Ida, but it disagrees with the claim that the fossil is a transitional link between lower and higher primates.

Ross said Ida is a small animal capable of both leaping and climbing, and, as such, well adapted to the wet and tropical characteristics of the Eocene Period in which it lived. It is not, in other words, a creature marking a halfway point on an evolutionary trip from jumper to climber.

Ross’ organization cites Scripture and credits the continued and direct intervention of God for the variety of life forms and the gradations among them. But his organization is dedicated to meeting the criticism of evolutionists that creationism is unscientific because it is untestable: “We have created a testable model, which we use to make predictions about future discoveries.”

Ida’s characteristics fit well with the model, he said.

[jessduntno]

Ida’s unusual state of preservation provides a wealth of data about one of the possible branches that led to higher primates such as apes and man, said Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, but it doesn’t decide the issue about which branch — and it doesn’t constitute any kind of a missing link. “The missing link does not exist,” he said. “Evolution is a tree, not a chain.”

Ahhhh...the precison of the scientist...”Science is fancy guesswork, not science.”

[bronxville]

book mark

[NYer]

Some of us are old enough to remember the media hype over the discovery of “Lucy”. That is the popular name given to the famous fossil skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia by American anthropologist Donald Johanson. At the time, Lucy was proclaimed to be the “missing link”. The media never tire of celebrating scientific discoveries.

[jessduntno]

“Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a Catholic, agrees with White.”

Here’s a guy who won’t be at Brown for long...

[Two Kids' Dad]

Definitely an interesting find, though time will tell if it’s actually important. Had this been an advanced primate - somewhere between chimps and humans - and not a squirrel-sized lemur thing with a long tail I’d attach more significance to it.

[annalex]

Finding of so-called missing links does next to nothing in legitimizing the evolutionary hypothesis. What the hypothesis needs in order to be plausible is not a series of distinct species that all look similar and fit on an imaginary evolutionary trajectory, but a continuum of specimens starting at a specimen of one complex species and ending at a specimen of another, different and complex species, so that the adjacent specimens can be a product of a single random mutation. Until such a find occurs, all that is proven with missing links is that God created many similar creatures and not all survived till today. But that is something we know already, with or without Ida.

[NYer]

Had this been an advanced primate - somewhere between chimps and humans - and not a squirrel-sized lemur thing with a long tail I’d attach more significance to it.

Guess you were not around in 1974 when scientists hailed the discovery of an ape like creature as the missing link!. Then, as now, the media was all over this story. Up until a few days ago, there were still those who hailed Lucy as such. Every few years, some scientist digs up a fossil which becomes the new "missing link".

Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"a nearly intact fossilized skeleton of a squirrel-sized, 47-million-year-old primate"

This should provide much fun for liberal Darwinists to waste endless amounts of time drawing and designing imaginary charts and models to justify their fornication and adolescent masturbatory fantasies. The drive behind it is sexual and adolescent anxiety to be liberated from conventional morality. The obsessive-compulsives among them have the greatest need for plotting the prehistoric fossil graphs for this rationalization. It's a very strange phenomenon since no fossil could ever prove the non-existence of God, the apparent goal of these obsessions. As the dorks' quest for the missing link to justify a world without God or morality rages on, in the end, it's just a darn monkey skeleton.

[cranked]

More Contrived Science ping.

[goodusername]

Ida and Lucy are not in competition. Lucy is a link between humans and ape-like creatures; Ida may be a link between monkeys and lemurs (simians and prosimians).

[blackpacific]

It was a monkey named “Dusty”, Moses messed up the dictation. :)

I don’t see how the term “Catholic” in this article means anything more than a coat one puts on.

I think what is missing from the discussion is a level of precision commensurate with the subject. The darwinians tend to rely upon data that is hundreds of years old, and is based upon an argument by association, one of the weakest forms of argument. If one looks at the wonderful heirarchy of life forms, the “tree of life” as it were, one could either say that the species were created similar for the sake of a beautiful harmony, the eternal music of the cosmos as Plato would say, or one could say the similarities are the result of random mutations which led to new life forms from common sources. We now have the ability to test this theory by looking at the DNA sequences, to see if the billions of lines of code from one species are off from the billions of lines of code from the “next” species by a few random mutations. Then we can do the math, the probability and statistics to verify that even one species gap could have occurred in the time alloted by the age of the universe. It is quite simple, I don’t think there is any need to rely upon crude out-dated evolutionary storyboards found in most natural history museums.

[Varda]

“idea advanced by some evolutionists, including, Chapman said, Kenneth Miller: “Humans came about through an unguided process that did not have us in mind.””

Kenneth Miller doesn’t advocate that. Chapman is in a position to know what Miller advocates (theistic evolution). Lies don’t become his cause.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Yeah, it basically sets up a Straw Man. But Bishop Usher helped them out there a bit with that. Interesting controversy.

The Catholic position has not relied on Old Testament chronology tables and there has always been a framework for metaphysical cosmology in a broader sense with which most activist atheists avoid debating for some reason. It boils down to an ontological distinction between creatio ex nihilo and the possible mechanisms for the generation of life or living things AFTER the cosmic creation is theorized to have occurred ("in an instant of time").

At any rate, in their cosmic struggles against Young Earth Creationism some secular Darwinists overlook this and fall back on the Straw Man fallacy. Like Sisyphus, little progress or headway is made. It doesn't really matter what intermediary geological, physiological, biochemical, or genomic processes God may have set in motion after the cosmic creation (from a Catholic point of view). The findings of paleontology or primatology would not eliminate the theological anymore than they would affect Anselm's ontological argument or the Five Ways of Aquinas. Evolutionary models would still have a "design" component from a theological point of view. Whether part of Whitehead's idea of "process" or any of the other models, classical Deism, etc.

But no serious Catholic would ever lose his faith or doubt the existence of God based on the debates about fossils or possible scientific explanations for the generation and differentiation of life, living things, bodies, or genetics. That would not change the Gospels. Whatever the fossil record reveals has no bearing on the articles of faith (the Nicene Creed, etc.). It's a category mistake whenever someone makes such a claim.

A real debate between evolutionary theories and theistic metaphysical cosmology would be more helpful than the usual circus which goes on with this. But no one can prove the non-existence of God with fossils and graphs about primates. It's a strange obsession.

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

Here’s a guy who won’t be at Brown for long...

Miller has been a professor at Brown since 1986. They seem to be happy with his work.

[jessduntno]

Miller has been a professor at Brown since 1986. They seem to be happy with his work.

Must be a different Brown...

[blackpacific]

Nice reply. Robert Gentry’s work seems to indicate that the very stones themselves declare that they were made, in an instant. So even though there can be no evidence of creation from nothing, polonium halos are a good substitute.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Like the ship in a bottle that "made itself."

Supposedly, Ronald Reagan once said he would cook a fine gourmet dinner and then after dinner ask his skeptical son, "Who made it?"

It is an interesting controversy.

[onedoug]

I wonder about the teeth in this fossil. Y-5 dentition?