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Evidence of the Missing Link Found?
HUADPE writes to tell us CNN is reporting that scientists in northeastern Ethiopia recently discovered a skull that they think may be evidence of the "missing link" between Homo erectus and modern man. From the article: "The hominid cranium -- found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old -- 'comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human,' said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia."
Really. Who cares. There's no teaching those people. Saw off the coasts and let the middle rot.
We should be interested in what these things discoveries can teach us. We should absolutely not be interested in trying to convince people who are unwilling to be convinced that this is just a link in a longer chain.
Evolution is at work. We leave them to themselves and we'll stick to ourselves, and in another 250,000 years we can eat them as either game or domesticated farm animals. God knows we don't have to selectively breed them for size.
Cue evolution vs. creationism debate in 5... 4... 3... 2...
Seriously, I almost dread stories like this for a couple of reasons:
- Talking about "missing links" puts the idea in creationists' minds that the evolution from apes to man took place in discrete steps, and that the fact that such "missing links" exist is proof that the Theory of Evolution is still just a hunch unsupported by proof. The fact is that the evolution from apes to man is a continuum, and there are a lot of fossils from lots of time periods along that continuum.
- Because this discovery is relatively recent, there's a chance that it still may turn out to be something other than what this article purports it to be. The real research is just starting. If it turns out that it's for real, it will be valuable insight into our species's evolution, though creationists will still refuse to believe it. If it turns out to not be an intermediary between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, the creationists will accuse the scientists of everything from fabricating evidence to trying to pull a hoax as part of some weird conspiracy. The irony is that if it is discovered that this fossil is not the intermediary that it is suspected to be, it is scientists who will determine that, and unlike creationists who have a nasty habit of wanting to dismiss or even repress evidence, those scientists will let us know as soon as they find any inconsistencies, and the data will be there in the open for us to evaulate and form our own opinions.
I still say that this is the true test for whether a creationist can actually be open-minded or not. Ask them this one question:
What piece or pieces of evidence will it take to convince you that the Theory of Evolution is, in fact, true and that creationism is not?
If the answer is "None," as it is with almost every creationist I've ever met, then don't bother wasting your time arguing with them. Nothing you say will ever convince them, as they have deliberately closed themselves off to any kind of rational conclusion based on reality instead of blind faith.
The nice thing about the question is that it's not a double standard. There are several things that would convince me that creationism is true and not evolution. The most obvious would be if God came and spoke to me in a burning bush. I know that sounds facetious, but it's really not; that really would do it. Or, if compelling scientific evidence were to arise that evolution is a crock, such as discovery of a natural chimera skeleton. These are just a couple of examples, I'm sure there are many more.
I'm always amused at creationists who think that scientists are in some kind of dark conspiracy to push "the agenda" of evolution. What they don't realize is that if a scientist could discover some piece of incontrovertible proof that the Theory of Evolution is all just a bunch of hooey, he would undoubtedly be one of the most famous people in the world, winning all sorts of Nobel Prizes and recognition in his field. Proving the Theory of Evolution wrong would be one of the greatest, not notorious, scientific finds ever, on the level of Michaelson-Morley experiment that proved that there is no aether and set the stage for Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and you'd better believe that any decent scientists would kill to disprove the Theory of Evolution.
I mean sure this sounds like an interesting find but let's not break out the party hats and kazoos just yet. Don't anomalies exist in all of this? I mean we have examples of anomalies today, ala MIDGET. Let's say a million years from now a civilization is studying our planet and finds the remains of a midget. The find in this article is like saying "we've found the midget and its the missing link!" Of course we know midgets have nothing in common with the speculated evolutionary path of humans.
..that happens over time. We just happen to dig up random fossils and see dramatic changes from the previous, older species. We forget that there were sometimes 10,000's or 100,000's of years in between the two species.
There isn't one "link" between two species. A situation where one day a parent gives birth to a dramatically different, more advanced offspring that is more evolved then the parents doesn't happen. And even if they was a missing link, the chances of that fossil surviving and us finding itwould be near impossible.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
I'm struggling to think of an Internet meme that went from funny to downright annoying as quickly as the FSM.
To a depressingly huge percentage of the US and UK population this will just disprove THE THEORY even more. They'll point out scornfully that you now have TWO missing links where previously you jst had the one. 'Silly scientists' they'll say to themselves, laughing ruefully as they prepare for their next bible meeting.
...or is "the missing link" found every couple of months?
(1) This is only one skull. Weigh in the likelihood that it could be just a deformity of something distinctly not a missing link.
(2) Evolution occurs through generation and elimination of lines. Is there even the slightest evidence that this is not from one of the extinct lines? It's fully possible (and likely) that the species in question doesn't even have modern living descendants.
(3) If it *looks* like a human....
(4) And for good measure, color me suspicious that the estimated age is on the same order of magnitude as the estimated error in that measurement.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
"The fact is that the evolution from apes to man is a continuum,"
Sure, but you should be careful. Saying it that way is a bit confusing too. It is a *branching* continuum. To say "from apes to man" is as much an oversimplification of the situation as saying a tree looks like a single stick. Life diversifies and spreads out during biological evolution, and extinction prunes the tree along the way. Many branches can exist at the same time, and it is challenging to find fossils from the branch points themselves (if you think of the sum total of wood in a tree with branches all the same diameter, the branch points are only a small fraction, and that's assuming you have all the wood from the tree preserved).
Exactly where this skull fits in is debatable, but the authors are reasonably confident is from a time when there are few remains known, close to the branch between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, so it is bound to be an interesting addition to the puzzle.
So far, I've only skimmed the /. comments, but i'm getting some pretty distinct bad feeling against christians here... I'd just like to make one thing clear; not all of us christians are into bible-thumping and trying to put the 'fun' back into 'funadmentalist'. I've always considered God to be a craftsman. mayber there's just the off chance that this '6000 years' bollocks is because humans can't count in terms of the infinite. sounds weird, i know, but hear me out. we've already managed to establish a decent and pretty reliable form of carbon dating, yes? comparing half-lives of fairly inert materials gives us a good idea of temporal scale, right? maybe the seven days that the bible mentions is God's idea of seven days, and not ours... i think it's fair to say that the first, say, 5 billion years of the planet's existence were the prototyping stages; the whole 'right, i've got the ball of rock, let's make it habitable' period. we're already starting to consider some of the problems that we'd come up against when it involves terraforming, so it's fair to say that if you include planetary formation into that stretch of time, it increases significantly.
i reckon that yes, God made us; there's got to be a motive force behind it all: i believe it's a sapient beneficiary; otherwise we're all gonna go nuts with loneliness, in the existential sense. however, i also think that evolution is a matter of prototyping, and the design process. not all of us religious types are unreasonable; some of us realise that our holy books may have started as the word of God, but they were ultimately recorded by Man.
just my two pence. if you're gonna shoot me down in flames, then please do it in the form of a decent argument. otherwise, you're just as bad as the next fundamentalist...
http://xkcd.com/313/
Really. Every fossil found is touted by the media as a "missing link" between this and that. The "missing link" hysteria in the media is ridiculous. How many times have we already found the "missing link"? Every fossil that is found is a link between creatures that lived before and after it. Every new fossil can give us a clearer picture of how evolution has worked (and very often they mess up our nice concepts), but they can never give us a complete lineage, and thus the media can always gloat over a new "missing link".
If fossils cannot generally be carbon dated, how do you tell the age of it? We can also date fossils by geological layers in which the fossils are found. But how are geological layers dated? By the fossils that are found in them! This is circular reasoning!
This is a straw man argument. Nobody is claiming you can use radiocarbon dating on anything but recent fossils. Geological layers are dated by a variety of means, including radiological dating of isotopes much longer-lived than carbon-14. I watched as much of the video you linked to as I could stomach, and I think a few of my brain cells committed suicide in protest. Why are you taking this creationist crackpot seriously?
Really? He taught high-school science for fifteen whole years? Wow, I bet he knows more than the millions of serious scientists that disagree with him! Those high-school teachers are smart.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
"Theory of evolution", not just "Evolution". Evolution itself isn't science, it's the basic data that science starts out with: we see species change over the course of generations, changes accumulating with reproductive cycles. While the "Theory" can be disproved, in that our explanation of the phenomenon can (and probably will, at some point) be shown to be mostly or partly incorrect, "evolution" itself isn't an explanation, it's a thing we see, and is thus "true" in the sense that it's a fact.
So saying "disproving evolution" is just stupid, as the phrase itself is fundamentally incorrect. Say "Disproving the theory of evolution" or "disproving evolutionary theory" instead, because that's what you mean.
This lesson in "using the fucking english language properly" brought to you by Jim. Have a nice day.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"Their beliefs are radical and have no factual basis. Do not confuse them with Christians."
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA
It'd be important to consider that:
- we most likely lack any significant amount of information from that period of time of our ancestors; the amount of data present today amounts to little more than "anecdotical" evidence, and thus the only cogent interpretation is that of "anecdotical" evidence;
- anthropologists are masters in the art of selling their "anecdotical" interpretation as "science", whereas in reality, paleoanthropology is a field where we are very often looking at intrinsically unverifiable claims, which puts the technical aspects of the arguments of these prophets into the same class as the technical aspects of arguments of priests: proof by intimidation, proof by "nice pictures", or proof by reversal of prejudiced assumptions, et cetera;
- we have thus no idea whether the remains found belong to healthy, socially integrated, or unhealthy, maybe not socially integrated individuums; so there's no way of integrating that piece of information with the society at-the-time, with any "evolutionary tree" of any sorts, and certainly not with any wider meaning;
- based on a striking absence of data, it appears to be entirely elusive whether human / primate evolution went straight forward in economical minimal small steps that equal mathematical models (i.e., 'parsimony'), or whether such mathematical expectations that modern anthropologists have were not met by the reality of evolution; in addition, morphology and genetics seem to show a striking mismatch particularly in biological entities that are close to each other: so particularly the differentiation between who was, or was not, genetical ancestor to homo sapiens, is going to be hard even in presence of full morphological (i.e., skeletal) data;
Thus, those guys are probably the wrong ones to cite in any "theory of evolution against creationism" debate. It's "time to take the shovel" and dig out some one to ten thousand more skulls, but most certainly not "time to trumpet around assumptions". Looks like it's fun to do - but why do we have to buy the advertising?
I have no doubt that evolution will prevail over creationism, but THAT RIGHT HERE does NOT seem to be the way to do it. Missing links all over.
Uh, not quite. There is a lot of compelling evidence for evolution. There's not a scrap for God. Its all faith.
Both sides rest on circumstantial evidence, and have been mounting a lot of it for a long, long time.
WTF? What does that sentence even mean?
You say that nothing will sway the creationists; I say that BOTH sides are firmly entrenched on this issue, and it's going to take a lot more than circumstantial evidence to convince either side.
The creationists have faith; this is irrational belief. If they want to go ahead and argue that its irrational, I certainly wouldn't stop them. You are framing this like it is some kind of CNN two-party debate. Listen carefully: there are not two sides. There just aren't. There is empirical evidence for evolution, and a bunch of people who refuse to believe it. That's it.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
So you tell me what that accomplished?
But that's just the point! People should be and have to be accountable for their own belief, that's certainly not the same as (comfortable?) blind faith.
Only by making up your own mind using your own sources you can become a whole and balanced person.
Lifelong study is the duty of a religious person.
I think the critical teacher has done her a great favour.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I don't think you mean "disparage", meaning "To speak of in a slighting or disrespectful way; belittle", because disparaging a theory is not part of doing science. You probably mean "disconfirm" or "disprove". The reason scientists don't try to disprove evolution - by which I mean the common descent of all life on earth from a small set of ancestral organisms over about three billion years - is that there is an immense quantitiy of interconnected evidence that supports it. DNA, fossil evidence, biogeography, etcetera. Trying to claim that life isn't the product of evolution is like claiming that ordinary matter isn't made of atoms. Scientists do attempt to explain particular facets and processes within evolutionary history, and in doing so they necessarily argue over particular theories. This leads to...
There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything. Both sides rest on circumstantial evidence
Not at all. Evolution rests on evidence, yes. The evidence is widely available, can be examined by many, many people, and is agreed on by people with widely varying religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. As a theory, it makes predictions about things we haven't seen yet (such as the fossil skull in the article) and more importantly, predicts things we will not see, such as Precambrian reptile fossils, or mammals with feathers.
By contrast, the idea that "God created everything" rests on no evidence at all. It makes no predictions about things that we will see or not see in the world. There is no conceivable evidence that would weigh against it. In short, it's not science.
The process of evolution is a fact, backed up by mountains of evidence. We can even see it happen over short timescales of a few days or weeks.
The exact details of how mankind evolved are always being rethought and sometimes we discard an old theory when we find contrary evidence. Nothing in our lack of knowledge or the mistakes of the past invalidates anything related to the theory itself.
I think that creationists sometimes have an opposite problem as well. They may well be happy to accept the fact of animal evolution but be unable to apply it to mankind. Their church teaches that Man is "special", made in God's image and so on, and so therefore Man could not have evolved from Apes or lesser species.
It's probably a case of one's religious beliefs causing bias in the evaluation of the independent evidence supporting evolution. www.philosophers.co.uk has some great games related to religion and logic, and they explain the results they get from large numbers of people playing their games.
Here's a relevant analysis from the site:
And here's another relevant quote (this one from the 'Taboo' game)...
The analogy is that refusal to accept the theory of evolution despite the many, many facts in its favour is a consequence of one's deeply held religious beliefs causing an inability to rationally evaluate new (and conflicting) evidence. To accept wholeheartedly the truth of the evolution theory may require abandonment of prior beliefs. The adherent has some investment in those beliefs, and to abandon them is just like selling shares when the market is low.
Some can easily be broke with $100 in their pocket, it is called debt. And I have to agree that atheism is pretty much a religion (just like religion can't prove there is a good atheism can't prove there isn't a job). Agnoistic is what all the non-religious should be.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Stephen Jay Gould attacked the mainstream continuous evolution theory and wrote a paper on punctuated equilibrium in 1972. Look how it ended his career.
Atheism is not a religion. The fact that I don't believe that there is no spoon orbiting Mars doesn't exactly mean that it's a religion.
I'm struggling to think of an Internet meme that went from funny to downright annoying as quickly as the FSM.
I wish Creationism was just an Internet meme.
Only produces bad movies and even worse wine? Surely you jest. California has huge amounts of farm land, a large tech industry and other various industries. In fact, without CA, the rest of the US economy would likely collapse rather quickly.
We don't need all you guys, you need us.
A blog about stuff.
A writer promotes the isolation and eventual hunting and eating of a huge fraction of a country's population, based solely on their beliefs, which he sees as evidence of hopeless intellectual inferiority. His statements receive overwhelming agreement from the forum in which he is published.
How is this viewpoint is morally superior to those which wrought genocides in Biafra, Croatia, Nigeria, Rwanda, East Timor and dozens of other places in our lifetimes? Are we really so willfully ignorant that we believe all these atrocities didn't start this way? So filled with hubris that we believe America (or our intelligencia, which has itself been targeted in other times and places) incapable of such virulent hatred?
If you still aren't taking me seriously, consider this: Orthodox Judaism posits a literal six-day Creation. If the writer had singled out this group instead of attacking all Genesis believers and the geographic region which he believes contains them, would any of us have called his diatribe anything but hate speech of the most vitriolic and unconscionable sort?
Please read the parent post again, examine its +5 Insightful score, and tell me how far removed we are from that mindset. And please be intellectually honest; if you plan to claim that BadAnalogyGuy was only trying to be funny, or that the moderators were only moderating ironically, please provide supporting evidence.
We might note here that the mere use of the phrase "missing link" pretty much discredits the writer in scientific circles. This is one of the many phrases that gets you classified as clueless, either a journalist or a creationist.
A common observation is that the "evolutionary gap" idea is a traditional red herring. If you find a fossil that fits in a gap, you haven't filled the gap. You have replaced the gap with two gaps. Trying to fill in all the holes in the fossil record is about as sensible as trying to fill in the gaps in a list of real numbers by adding new numbers to the list.
You can't win the pseudo-debate with the creationists this way. All you can do is give them another gap that "science hasn't filled". Anyone who thinks that filling a gap is significant just doesn't understand how the whole process works.
From a scientific point of view, this is potentially an interesting fossil. It may tell us a bit more about our own primate ancestry. Or maybe not; maybe it will turn out to be a close relative of fossils already found. We'll see.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I wish more christians were like you and actually, you know, followed the teachings of Christ. I have known a few of these sorts of christians in my life, people who quietly lived their faith and were happy to share it if asked, but who never used their faith as a pedastal to put themselves above others.
If Christ's teachings really have value, you don't need to preach. Live your life well and people will ask you "How is it that you are so happy and fulfilled? How did you come to be such a good person?" Then you can tell them.
If you aren't happy and fulfilled, if you are mean, bitter or judgemental, I could care less what religion or philosophy you follow. It obviously isn't doing you any good, why would I want to know about it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anyone who gets his hopes up this might end the bullspit about creationism should realize one thing: Religions were never really bothered by facts.
You can fly back in time 250,000 years and prove that Earth existed before the Bible tells you. You'll get 3 reactions (in this order):
1. They'll claim your results are just fabricated.
2. If your results are simply true and claiming them as fabricated even they can't pretend anymore it's not there, they'll claim that God tricks you into believing it, to test your faith.
3. Once it's proven past the point of any doubt, they'll find a new pet project to "prove" the existance of God.
Take a look at the debate whether the sun revolves around the earth or v.v.
First the observations were called false, since the telescope produces false results.
Once it could no longer be blamed on the telescopes, it was a test of God to ridicule scientists and test the strength of their faith.
Once our probes went to every corner of the solar system and found moons around other planets, proved that the sun is the center etc., the matter was dropped and we got a new "proof" for the Bible's story.
Simply stop listening to those who do not want to learn. If they want to be happy in their own little world, leave them there and let them enjoy being stuck in the past. Should creationism be taught in your school, explain to your kids that the schools have to do that to appease the religious fanatics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Meanwhile, you have still been unable to explain why your proposed "middle ground" contains a supernatural being who is exempt from evolution AND intelligent design/creationism.
No, your "middle ground" is nothing more (or less) than wrapping the scientific findings in your belief that "God wanted it done that way".
Science is not faith.
Faith is not science.
There is no "false dichotomy".
The scary thing here is nothing to do with what 'BadAnalogyGuy' was posting, it's that you're too intellectually-challenged to recognise it as humour - it was in bad taste, malicious, and morally bankrupt, just like most good humour. I would point out that there is a difference between satire and genocide, and that a lot of the most lauded works of literature exhibit "the pen is mightier than the sword" characteristics.
Humour is a sophisticated weapon, no-one likes being the butt of a joke, and cracking jokes at these folks expense is one way of getting them to examine their beliefs in a social context. It may not be the most persuasive of options, but hell, we've *tried* reasoning with them... [sigh] the problem is that they insist on believing their 2000-year-old fairytale. Just because it's old, doesn't make it right.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
All right. Slightly more seriously, then. Your "frog becomes horse" example tries to ridicule the whole concept of evolution, using the fact that nobody ever saw a frog becoming a horse (or a gay prince, for that matter) over night (or in an instance, after being kissed).
/. readers, have had a good chance of dying before the first post without some rather simple, evidence based, procedures applied in the maternity room.
Nobody claims that ever happened. The distinction between micro and macro evolution you invoke is pretty artifical. This is all about timescales. The point is that it is indeed possible to increase the complexitiy of an organism by variation and natural selection, but only by a sequence of very small variations, accumulated over a very long time. If you want "macro evolution", just wait. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe complexity decreases. There is no goal. But it can happen. So, indeed, in principle a horse might have ancestors similar to frogs. Whether this is true of the species we call horses today is a completely different question -- a "just so story". Nevertheless, the species we call horses today almost certainly has some ancestors not looking like horses at all.
A famous example is the question how the human eye comes about. It was invoked by critics of the concept of evolution in order to prove that it must be wrong. The argument goes like this: "You can not seriously claim that something as comlex and wonderful like the human eye just accidently popped into existence!" But nobody claims that. It takes time. Big leaps are dangerous -- there are many more ways to be dead than to be alive. This is reflected by the fact that the organisation of the human eye has serious flaws. Evolution has no way to "correct" them because fundamental changes to the way it is organised are not favoured by small inceremental changes. This, in combination with the completely different types of eyes observed in nature (like, e.g. the eyes of squids), provides a strong hint towards evolutionary mechanisms at work.
So where do we come from? I do not know. I find it plausible that we are the product of accumulating small changes, and that we are actually still subject to change. I have to confess, I like the idea. What I like most, is the idea that we are going to learn more and more about all this, thereby, on many occasions, proving our previous assumptions wrong. If we find evidence that life on Earth was designed to some extent this would be thrilling news. Imagine! Somewhere out there is (or at least was) somebody who visited our planet! If so, let's find out where, when and why she did this. In my opiniion, this would be worth every effort.
One more thing, independent of the topic we discuss here. Science indeed has no means to "rule out a discussion of God". I never claimed that. Science is simply not interested in God. Supernatural entities are by definition not a subject of science. All I am saying is that God (which one?) is not a valid way to explain natural phenomena. Personally, I think the term "supernatural phenomena" consitutes a contradiction in terms.
And yes, you are right, scientists are ordinary people. And yes, there is bias and intertia in the communitiy. But the very method is constructed to overcome these flaws in the long run (a certain amount of intertia is helpful, though). This eveidence based approach is the most successful one ever applied. You and I, and very likely a significant number of
You say you are a Christian. Fine, I do not see how this is related to the subject at hand. As I understand, however, it is very much related to the way you are supposed to treat people. I, for one, wish you love and peace. Live long and prosper.
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There is no such thing as a "missing link" between species, only a continuum of links. CNN needs better science writers.
I think that when many people call atheism a religion, they are referring to the propensity for some atheists to proselytize their viewpoint. It's just a different kind of thumping. Fundamentalists thump the bible, pissed off atheists thump... well, I don't know what they thump but they're definitely thumping something.