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
‘I am the truth. . ..’(John 14:6)
For most of time, men and women have assumed that the truth was there to be found out. This began to change in the 19th century and the change gathered pace in the 20th. As people began to question the existence of God, it became obvious to some, that the existence of truth requires the existence of God. With God dismissed, it became impossible to conceive of truth in any absolute sense. This has resulted in the humiliation of truth. Truth is now whatever you would like it to be.
Truth's demise has filtered down through the great centers of learning, the arts, and on into streets and homes. Everything is possible with truth gone. Everything is permissible. Musicians make music that doesn't sound musical. Painters paint pictures that are incomprehensible to normal folk. Playwrights write plays that are nonsense, and architects design buildings that no one can understand. All this is put forward as legitimate, but what does it all mean?
No matter how much... popular culture---is encouraged to believe in the relativity of truth, no one can build a decent life on such a notion.
Inevitably proponents of freedom from God, and from absolute truth, are obliged to reach outside of their own system, and borrow something from theism in order to make their lives work. The person who believes that everything is valid, will soon find that he is condemned to meaninglessness. Christ is a standing offer of escape from such a hell as this To believe that truth is like Christ, is salvation indeed.
Thanks! You're hanging around in the right neighborhood! ;)
God's existence is a certainty. The question is whether He formed a single cell and let everything run its course -- which is doubtful (How did that single asexual reproducing cell become a sexually reproducing creature with a myriad of cells? No one knows. Those who try to answer are just making bad guesses.) -- or He created everything all at once.
Or He did a little of both, which I think, is pretty hard to dispute.
If you treat God's existence axiomatically, creation is not a problem. If you treat God's existence as unlikely, creation is impossible to accept.
But since creation happened, the perspective science should be taking is to deduce what is random and what is not.
It's perspective now is that everything is random.
Yes. That's the approach taken by the Institute for Creation Research. Tenets of Biblical Creationism .
The Bible, consisting of the thirty-nine canonical books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven canonical books of the New Testament, is the divinely-inspired revelation of the Creator to man. Its unique, plenary, verbal inspiration guarantees that these writings, as originally and miraculously given, are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week described in Genesis 1:1-2:3, and confirmed in Exodus 20:8-11. The creation record is factual, historical, and perspicuous; thus all theories of origins or development which involve evolution in any form are false.
If you treat God's existence as unlikely, creation is impossible to accept.
I don't know about God's being "unlikely," but if you start out with a clean slate, and just look at the evidence and apply reason, you are certainly unlikely to end up with the ICR view of things.
Do you mean Wotan or Brahma?
The question is whether He formed a single cell and let everything run its course -- which is doubtful (How did that single asexual reproducing cell become a sexually reproducing creature with a myriad of cells? No one knows. Those who try to answer are just making bad guesses.) -- or He created everything all at once.
Whether a thing happened is one question. Whether every aspect of it is reconstructable is another question. People still argue over why the Great Depression happened, but there's no question it did.
Or He did a little of both, which I think, is pretty hard to dispute.
Not hard, just pointless.
If you treat God's existence axiomatically, creation is not a problem.
Fallacy of Begging the Question.
If you treat God's existence as unlikely, creation is impossible to accept.
No, just unlikely. But it tends to make you think that the creation event if there was one was the Big Bang, period.
But since creation happened, the perspective science should be taking is to deduce what is random and what is not.
Something happened. We need to understand more about what. This answer cannot be assumed up front to have been anticipated by anybody's religious text. Nor should anyone be trying to distort reality to bolster such an assumption. "What happened?" and "What's been going on since it happened?" are bigger questions than "What's truly random and what isn't?" even if the latter is regarded as a search for miracles.
It's perspective now is that everything is random.
Not everything is truly random because there are all kind of processes--chemical reactions come to mind--in which the outcome is determined to a high degree by initial conditions. I know you're using "random" as a stand-in for "non-miraculous" but there's nothing beyond anecdote and deliberate misunderstandings a la Behe to justify a search for miracles.
Now consider the organizations that treated God's existence as unlikely. What did they end up doing?
It is better to believe that every sentence, word and typographical error in the Bible is true than to believe all of it is wrong.
No, ICR treasts God's existence as fact and starts with the view that all things were created and made by God in the literal six days of the creation week.
More than that. Evolution claims to be science. Scientists and scientific theories have to answer challenges to it. They have to disprove the claims of opponents. That is what science is all about, reaching the truth through constant reexamination of theories, of evidence in the light of new knowledge, new questions.
Those are not the only possibilities. Personally, I think some parts of the Bible are true, and some are metaphor -- those are the parts that are explicitly said to be so (dreams, parables, poetry, etc.), and the parts that don't jibe with the physical world that we observe.
The struggle to sperate history from allegory is something every thinking person must deal with.
Nonsense, you simply don't understand the concept of a theory (or science).
If you claim a giant chicken named Harry from Pasadena created the universe yesterday, how would anyone disprove your claim?
Worth repeating.
I must say Patrick, you certainly have a Clintonian ability to weave a dozen lies into a couple of sentences.
Darwin collected evidence which supported his theory and ignored evidence which disproved it. That is why he ignored the platypus and did not talk about the most remarkable characteristic of the bat, the sonar. There was no answer for either so he swept that under the rug. He also had a fantastic ability for charlatanism, of seeming to prove something which in fact disproved his theory.
he cannot prove it, but please believe him.
All these causes taken conjointly, must have tended to make the geological record extremely imperfect, and will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps.
He cannot prove it but it's true:
We should not be able to recognise a species as the parent of any one or more species if we were to examine them ever so closely, unless we likewise possessed many of the intermediate links between their past or parent and present states; and these many links we could hardly ever expect to discover, owing to the imperfection of the geological record.
There is no proof but I believe I am correct:
it deserves especial notice that the more important objections relate to questions on which we are confessedly ignorant; nor do we know how ignorant we are. We do not know all the possible transitional gradations between the simplest and the most perfect organs; it cannot be pretended that we know all the varied means of Distribution during the long lapse of years, or that we know how imperfect the Geological Record is. Grave as these several difficulties are, in my judgment
In the future I will be proven right (like Miss Cleo?):
Species and groups of species, which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be called living fossils, will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life. Embryology will reveal to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototypes of each great class.
Contradicting what he said before of living fossils:
Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.
Both sides prove me right:
it follows, that the amount of organic change in the fossils of consecutive formations probably serves as a fair measure of the lapse of actual time. A number of species, however, keeping in a body might remain for a long period unchanged, whilst within this same period, several of these species, by migrating into new countries and coming into competition with foreign associates, might become modified; so that we must not overrate the accuracy of organic change as a measure of time.
The future again:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches.
If you have read through a few hundred pages of the above drivel, you will buy the garbage I am going to ask you to swallow now:
He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection, although in this case he does not know any of the transitional grades. His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths. from: Origin of the Species, Chapter 6
How dishonest of you and your fellow evolutionists to accuse Christians of being Kool-Aid drinkers. The greatest sin in Christianity is suicide. These kool-aid drinkers were not Christians. Your and your friends going through a dozen posts accusing Christians of being like Jim Jones is totally despicable and a good example of the total dishonesty of evolutionists. Christianity is the religion of life. Atheism and evolutionism is the religion of death.
Evolutionism/Atheism is the religion that says that all men are little more than pond scum, that they have no intrinsic value beyond a mass of proteins and that if they are weak or lame, old or unborn they are totally worthless and may be destroyed as inconveniences. So can all those who oppose the atheists and evolutionists be destroyed because after all they are just a bunch of proteins and being opposed to whatever the 'leader' wants shows their worthlessness. That is why in Germany, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, in Uganda atheists had no compunction about killing hundreds of millions of people for opposing them - because they had no soul, they had no worth, they were just a bunch of protoplasm. It is you, the evolutionists, the atheists that are the kool-aid drinkers, the once with no regards for life or for humanity. And don't give me any nonsense about the Inquisition, it killed less than 10,000 people - nothing to compare to the horrors of the atheist/evolutionists.
And don't give me no garbage about the Crusades either. About the murderers that call themselves a religion and spread a trail of blood and destruction through four continents and would spread more if the Christians had not stood up to them at the gates of Vienna, at the Pyrynees, at Lepanto, and a hundred other places. Don't tell me about the poor muslims who made a living for a thousand years out of rape and piracy until an American President sent the Marines to put an end to their destruction on the shores of Tripoli.
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