Posted on 07/29/2002 6:35:04 PM PDT by Tribune7
Printer-friendly format July 26, 2002, 6:11PM
A bone to pick: Missing link is evolutionists' weakest By JEFF FARMER
It has been said that if anyone wants to see something badly enough, they can see anything, in anything. Such was the case recently, but unlike some ghostly visage of the Madonna in a coffee stain, this was a vision of our ancestral past in the form of one recently discovered prehistoric skull, dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
Papers across the globe heralded the news with great fanfare. With words like "scientists hailed" and "startling find" sprinkled into the news coverage, who couldn't help but think evolutionists had finally found their holy grail of missing links?
For those of us with more than a passing interest in such topics as, "Where did we come from? And how did we get here?," this recent discovery and its subsequent coverage fall far short of its lofty claims. A healthy criticism is in order.
Practically before the fossil's discoverer, the French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet, could come out of the heat of a Chadian desert, a number of his evolutionary colleagues had questioned his conclusions.
In spite of the obvious national pride, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History of Paris sees Brunet's skull as probably that of an ancient female gorilla and not the head of man's earliest ancestor. While looking at the same evidence, such as the skull's flattened face and shorter canine teeth, she draws a completely different conclusion.
Of course, one might be inclined to ask why such critiques never seem to get the same front-page coverage? It's also important to point out that throughout history, various species, such as cats, have had varying lengths of canine teeth. That does not make them any closer to evolving into another species.
A Washington Post article goes on to describe this latest fossil as having human-like traits, such as tooth enamel thicker than a chimpanzee's. This apparently indicates that it did not dine exclusively on the fruit diet common to apes. But apes don't dine exclusively on fruit; rather, their diet is supplemented with insects, birds, lizards and even the flesh of monkeys. The article attempted to further link this fossil to humans by stating that it probably walked upright. Never mind the fact that no bones were found below the head! For all we know, it could have had the body of a centaur, but that would hardly stop an overzealous scientist (or reporter) from trying to add a little meat to these skimpy bones. Could it not simply be a primate similar to today's Bonobo? For those not keeping track of their primates, Bonobos (sp. Pan paniscus) are chimpanzee-like creatures found only in the rain forests of Zaire. Their frame is slighter than that of a chimpanzee's and their face does not protrude as much. They also walked upright about 5 percent of the time. Sound familiar?
Whether it is tooth enamel, length of canines or the ability to walk upright, none of these factors makes this recent discovery any more our ancestral candidate than it does a modern-day Bonobo.
So why does every new fossil discovery seem to get crammed into some evolutionary scenario? Isn't it possible to simply find new, yet extinct, species? The answer, of course, is yes; but there is great pressure to prove evolution.
That leads us to perhaps the most troubling and perplexing aspect of this latest evolutionary hoopla. While on one hand sighting the evolutionary importance of this latest discovery, a preponderance of these articles leave the notion that somehow missing links are not all that important any more.
According to Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman, missing links are pretty much myths. That might be a convenient conclusion for those who have been unable to prove evolution via the fossil record. Unfortunately for them, links are absolutely essential to evolution. It is impossible for anything to evolve into another without a linear progression of these such links.
The prevailing evolutionary view of minute changes, over millions of years, is wholly inadequate for the explanation of such a critical piece of basic locomotion as the ball-and-socket joint. Until such questions can be resolved, superficial similarities between various species are not going to prove anything. No matter how bad someone wants to see it.
Farmer is a professional artist living in Houston. He can can be contacted via his Web site, www.theglobalzoo.com
Interesting. You mean (gasp) that you biology teacher would only accept biology (evolution is the linchpin of all biology) and not religious answers on his test questions? The horror!
Absolute garbage. Biology has completely demolished the theory of evolution. The charlatan Darwin never got anything correct. His theory of traits melding into progeny was just made up bunk, his theory of cells was simple minded. His postulation that man descended from monkeys has been proven false, his claim that man only differs from monkeys in degree an absolute lie. His racist brachyocephalic index was also proven false. His eugenics was completely backwards, it is not the unfortunates who end up with genetic defects, but the parents that are the carriers of them. His claim that organisms recapitulate evolution in development, a completely made up lie.
Evolution is the anti-science.
ROFL!
Actually, people who believe in God do pay attention to evidence. Most of us are very open minded, even allowing for the possibility that God used an evolutionary strategy. However, our world-view is not wedded to that concept and so we do not have a need to believe each new twist and turn in evolutionary theory. We are not gullible enough to swallow the pretensions of people who use a bone fragment to try to force-fit a theory into a pre-determined solution. Paleontology deals in probabilities, not certainties.
” Moneyrunner has found an all-purpose answer to those who would say that it is not. He's strategically insulted. He's tactically a victim. Thus a creationist can ignore all the evidence he wishes and cry "penis-head" when challenged.”
I’m sorry that you misinterpreted my comments. And I will not allow you to twist my words. I am not at all insulted and nowhere do I present myself as a victim. I merely suggested that one of the common “evolutionists” tactics on threads like these is to hurl insults by claiming that their opponents are either stupid or deluded. I then suggested that the art of persuasion precludes insulting those who you are trying to persuade.
It appears that the use of Ann Coulter’s term “penis head” has struck a raw nerve. I did not call anyone a “penis head” (re-read my posts). I suggested that the kinds of insults hurled by the defenders of evolution were similar to the quaint childish habit of name calling (such as calling someone else a “penis head.”)
”Sounds like a "penis-head"-baiting strategy Johnny Cochrane would love.”
Ah, but since I did not call anyone a name (see above) your attribution to me of baiting anyone is off-base. However, it once again illustrates the tendency toward name calling on your part. I have to tell you again, insults and name calling are not persuasive.
Absolute garbage. Biology has completely demolished the theory of evolution. The charlatan Darwin never got anything correct. ... just made up bunk ... simple minded ... proven false ... an absolute lie ... completely backwards ... a completely made up lie. Evolution is the anti-science.222 posted on 7/31/02 7:19 AM Eastern by gore3000
Is the above supposed to be a refutation of my statement below?
Absolute garbage. Biology has completely demolished the theory of evolution. The charlatan Darwin never got anything correct. His theory of traits melding into progeny was just made up bunk, his theory of cells was simple minded. His postulation that man descended from monkeys has been proven false, his claim that man only differs from monkeys in degree an absolute lie. His racist brachyocephalic index was also proven false. His eugenics was completely backwards, it is not the unfortunates who end up with genetic defects, but the parents that are the carriers of them. His claim that organisms recapitulate evolution in development, a completely made up lie.
Evolution is the anti-science.
Seems to me more a concession that my statement is correct! It also sort of shows the ignorance of evolutionists, they are still mired in mid-19th century blather.
Noting:
"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."
What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?
I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:
"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."
Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:
In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:
"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.
The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."
As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.
Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.
Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.
Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?
Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.
Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.
Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.
This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.
Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.
At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.
You've heard of the Medelin Cartel, El Pino, Pablo Escobar, the Pagans, and all of the other drug dealers of our times. The truth is, all together they probably don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the operations of the British empire in the 19'th century. At least one major eastern city was set up for no other reason than to serve as a conduit for Indian opium into China and an entire war was fought to protect the opium trade.
Now, you don't need to be Albert Einstein to comprehend that for a supposedly Christian nation to be engaging in this sort of business must have created at least two problems on an organizational level. One was the question of motivating men to fight and die for such causes: "For God, Bonnie Queen Vickie, and the Opium Trade, CHARGE!!!!!!" probably wouldn't get it...
The other problem which springs to mind immediately would be that which the CEO or chairman of the board of the East India Company must have faced in conducting board meatings. Picture it:
"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and are causing no further trouble.""The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit for this shit..."
Now picture Chuck Darwin walking into this scene and telling all of these people that they're sitting around worrying over nothing, and that the only moral law in nature is "The Survival of the Fittest". Can you not see all of those peoples' eyes lighting up, their hair standing straight up, and somebody screaming "By Jove, I think he's got it?"
I mean, it doesn't even matter what led Darwin to devise the theory of evolution. In any normal time or set of circumstances, he'd have either been laughed to scorn, hanged, or burned. He succeeded precisely because he solved several major problems for the Godfathers of 100 years ago. In other words, there's more than a little truth to my claim that someone has to be stoned to buy off on this BS.
"This is type of thing that has made me skeptical of evolution."
Ah, yes--the opinion of an ARTIST (B.A. in "Fine Arts") whose actual understanding of science is nil is just absolutely devastating evidence against evolution ---ROFLMAO!!
That's ridiculous. You figure it out!
You're shrugging away evidence of species evolving before our eyes by saying there's no evidence that changes accumulate over time. (Logic might demand evidence that they don't, but not to a cretinist.) You shrug away The Fossil Record, saying, "Where are the transitionals?" The fossil record is nothing but transitionals. As seen already on this thread, creationist "rebuttals" of the fossil transitionals make free recourse to lying to the faithful about matters in the public record.
At issue is whether or not so-called scientists are extrapolating unsupported scenarios based on "evidence."
So the "real" science says that, when the evidence contradicts your favorite personal belief, stick your fingers in your ears and go "La la la la la!" Many try to deny what is going on in "creation science" but it shows, yes. Thank you for making it a point of doctrine.
You can always do that, no matter how strong the evidence. That's why a defense lawyer can always make some kind of a speech to the jury that his client is an innocent victim of police persecution. It's called "creative writing." It isn't particularly science.
You can always do that, no matter how strong the evidence. That's why a defense lawyer can always make some kind of a speech to the jury that his client is an innocent victim of police persecution. It's called "creative writing." It isn't particularly science.
I suggest you have no actual familiarity with creationist arguments and what the scientific problems are with evolution theory. Creationists include numerous scientists with impeccable credentials, and contrary to your sweeping dismissal of their arguments, in fact evolutionists have had a great deal of difficulty rebutting them. Some of the evos themselves admit they don't have good rebuttals. There are creationists like Duane Gish who regularly debate evos and demolish them.
The article that started this whole thread is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's claimed that this skull that was found was not simply an ape species but some sort of humanoid. As the author of the article makes clear, this appears to be complete BS. They claimed it walked upright and all they have is the skull. They claim the teeth somehow make it human, yet as the author shows that's BS too. There's probably all these evos running around touting this "discovery" as yet more proof of ape - man evolution and yet more proof that the creationists don't know what they're talking about. Maybe you are one of them.
Gish is a flaming whacko. A Dark Ages lunatic who would cripple man's mind for his own perverted purposes. He's a shameless charlatan at best, but in all likelihood he's an irrational swami. With followers, alas.
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