Free Republic

A few months ago, “Ida” was sitting on top of the world. She’d been lauded as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth.” Falling, indeed. On October 21, Nature published an article announcing that “[a] 37-million-year-old fossil primate from Egypt, described today in Nature, moves a controversial German fossil known as Ida out of the human lineage.” Wired also published a story, noting that, “[f]ar from spawning the ancestors of humans, the 47 million-year-old Darwinius seems merely to have gone extinct, leaving no descendants,” further..."...

News to Note, May 23, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (READ THE FOLLOWING STORIES AND MUCH MORE BY CLICKING THE EXCERPT LINK AT BOTTOM) 1. ICR: “‘Missing Link’ Ida Is Just Media Hype”The news media has been awash this week in hype over an alleged missing link fossil nicknamed Ida. As it turns out, the fossil wasn’t fraudulent, but the hype definitely was. 2. The Telegraph: “New ‘Super Rats’ Evolve Resistance to Poison”Is this “super rat” an example of evolution in action, or the result of an information-reducing mutation? 3. Gallup: “More Americans ‘Pro-Life’ than...

(Read the following stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link at bottom) 1. BBC News: “Rooks Reveal Remarkable Tool Use”In yet another study, scientists have revealed the intelligence and sophisticated tool-use abilities of crows.2. BBC News: “Space Rock Yields Carbon Bounty”A meteorite that landed in Canada supposedly holds a clue to the origin of life: record levels of formic acid, a substance rich in carbon.3. The Times: “Jorn Hurum: I Paid $750,000 for Ida the Fossil and Have No Regrets” The paleontologist who brought Ida to the media spotlight dropped a cool $750,000 (£465,000) to get his hands...

(For all these stories and more, click on the excerpt link below) 1. BBC News: “Primate Fossil ‘Not an Ancestor’” Remember “Ida,” the missing link that wasn’t? In a Nature letter, scientists attack the lofty claims that surrounded the announcement of the fossil primate. 2. Did the Baby Mammoth, Lyuba, Suffocate in a Dust Storm? In a special guest news analysis, creationist (and mammoth expert) Michael Oard considers the well-preserved mammoth “Lyuba” (whom we first discussed in A Mammoth Discovery). The occasion? Lyuba’s worldwide debut. 3. National Geographic News: “Chimps Display Humanlike Good Will” Chimps, especially mothers and their offspring,...

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans. Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar. Based on previously limited...

"This is an incredible piece of hype to popularize a movie and a book. It's hard to believe that this story took off, but the media picked up on very emotional claims about the 'missing link.' It's created good publicity," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum.

Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction. In fact, Ida is as far removed from the monkey-ape-human ancestry as a primate could be, says an expert at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Professor Erik Seiffert and his colleagues compared 360 specific anatomical features of 117 living and extinct primate species to draw up a family...

Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction...

'Missing Link' Primate Fossil Debunked Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press   Oct. 21, 2009 -- Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction. In fact, Ida is as far removed from the monkey-ape-human ancestry as a primate could be, says Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York. He and his colleagues compared 360 specific anatomical...

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...

Darwin fossil hyper-hype by Don Batten 23 May 2009 The orchestrated multimedia blitz over this fossil is almost unbelievable. The paleontologists even got Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to officiate at the public “launch” of Ida (the cute nickname for the fossil), when it was unveiled—like a new sculpture by a famous artist—to the assembled journalists...

Ida: Separating the Science from the Media Campaign by Brian Thomas, M.S., and Frank Sherwin, M.A.* Ida is the nickname of the stunningly well-preserved fossil that is currently being hailed as "our connection with the rest of all the mammals."[1] A massive publicity campaign, including books, videos, a website, and public unveilings, coincided with the publication of a scientific study conducted on the fossil.[2] But published statements from many scientists, both evolutionist and creationist alike, indicate that Ida's accolades as the long-sought-after "missing link" are thoroughly undeserved...

So-called “missing link” Ida hit the media in a major way on Monday of this week, with even search engine Google falling prey to the hype and modifying its search page banner to show Ida. We quickly responded with a full article, Ida: the Missing Link at Last? Yet within a few hours of the unveiling of the fossil—coordinated to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper on Ida—some better media outlets began to report some worrying things about the research. It seems as though the scientific process had been rushed and the claims exaggerated in a bid to...

Is Great Grandma Ida Getting More Accolades Than She Deserves? Just as it seemed the hullaballoo about Great Grandma Ida might go on forever, there is just the hint of some perspective on what the fossil find really means. That the hype around Ida is more selling then compelling is beginning to become clear. The New York Time's business page wrote about how it all seems nicely orchestrated to boost ratings of the History Channel's accompanying documentary. A tongue in cheek report from a London science writer also helped to highlight the fact that the welcome for Ida has been...

Hailed as the “Holy Grail of human evolution” by the New York Daily News, and by lead scientist John Hurom as “like finding the Lost Ark,” Ida is now officially on the road to pop-culture celebrity, being imbued with all the nonsensical notions that such creatures are typically imbued with.

This past May, a fossil nicknamed Ida was loudly heralded by the evolutionary scientific community as the long-sought-after “missing link” that supposedly proved ape-to-human evolution. Directly following the unveiling, ICR News reported reasons why Ida, in fact, linked nothing, being merely an extinct variety of lemur.[1] ICR News also predicted what has now occurred with Ida’s popularity campaign, stating, “After further study, however, this claim will be quietly rescinded.”[2] Ida has been surreptitiously...

The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as "Ida" is not a missing link as some have claimed, according to an analysis in the journal Nature. The research is the first independent assessment of the claims made in a scientific paper and a television documentary earlier this year. Dr Erik Seiffert says that Ida belonged to a group more closely linked to lemurs than to monkeys, apes or us. His team's conclusions come from an analysis of another fossil primate. The newly described animal - known as Afradapis longicristatus - lived some 37 million years ago in northern Egypt, during the...

On May 19 the world met a most unlikely celebrity: the fossilized carcass of a housecat-size primate that lived 47 million years ago in a rain forest in what is now Germany. The specimen, a juvenile female, represents a genus and species new to science, Darwinius masillae, although the media-savvy researchers who unveiled her were quick to give her a user-friendly nickname, Ida. And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in...

It was billed as one of the most important fossil finds in history, a “missing link” that would challenge everything we knew about human evolution. Darwinius masillae, the primitive primate that was unveiled to the world with huge fanfare and a Sir David Attenborough documentary in May, seems now to have been less of a missing link than an evolutionary dead end. Far from being an ancestor to humans, the lemur-like creature from 47 million years ago belongs to an entirely different branch of the primate family tree that has left no known descendants, research has indicated. When Jørn Hurum,...

The History Channel has been running an unusual 14-second ad that simply says: "May 25, 2009. A Global Event. This Changes Everything." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Eg7ICKJrhg Maybe this? ISBN:9780316070089 Library Bound #: 619216 Format: Hardcover Price: $28.99 Pub Date: May 2009 Lying inside a high security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world’s leading museums, is a discovery that will change textbooks, change science, and change how we understand the human race. The author of Untitled has been given exclusive access to all of the research and the team of top scientists who have been validating the discovery, the announcement...