One single fossil does not the missing link make...Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.
The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years - but it was presented to the world today at a special news conference in New York.
The discovery of the 95%-complete 'lemur monkey' - dubbed Ida - is described by experts as the "eighth wonder of the world".
These guys naming this fossil the eighth wonder and breathlessly revealing it to the world in a silly news conference is as stupid as Al Gore showing the famous "hockey stick", CO2/global warming graph and exclaiming, "The science is in and the debate is over".
A 50 million year old fossil that shares a couple of bones with humans, while interesting, doesn't exactly "prove" Darwin's theory of the evolution of species, and certainly not the origin of man. Certainly the process of evolution exists and I believe it accounts for much diversity on Earth. But we share gill slits with fish, embryologically, we have a vestigal tailbone, and share countless traits with thousands of species. If this discovery "proves" the evolution of man from ape, why don't our embryonic gill slits prove that we're closely related to the carp?
On the other hand, this guy does sort of remind me of regular reader David.
4 comments:
This is something I struggle with as a homeschooler. I don't know what to teach my kids. I admit it.
I do want them to know what scientific "proof"
is out there, and I want them to know what the Bible says. Six thousand years vs. billions... I don't even know where to begin.
The 'embryonic gill slits' aren't gill slits at all. They are small nubbins of flesh that stick out of the main body and form into limbs. A passing visual resemblance doesn't make them vestigal gill slits, they aren't even slits.
Right you are Johann. I checked the story that I was taught in high-school biology and it turned out to be false. And actually, it shows that we are even less likely to have branched off from sea creatures and eventually primates than I previously argued.
Tracie, I don't think you can convincingly teach your kids that the man is only 6,000 years old. That is provably false. Somehow the existance of God has to jive with what we know to be factual about the physical world in which we live. I'm not saying I have all or any answers. That's where faith comes in. Believing in the unseen or the unexplained. Maybe God chose to do his experiment once the Earth, though not necessarily modern man, had evolved to a point that we were somewhat intelligent and inquisitive about our origins, that sort of thing. Clearly there were people on Earth tens of thousands of years before Adam and Eve. There's no getting around that. Maybe God plopped those two down and started the experiment in the midst of all the other life forms evolving around us. Who the heck knows?
Ed,
My gilld closed up when I was a toddler.
David
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