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."

Comments

How could this be BAD news? Like this...

[KingSkippus]

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.

Evolution was a slow, gradual change...

[saridder]

..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.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm struggling to think of an Internet meme that went from funny to downright annoying as quickly as the FSM.

unfortunately ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is it just me...

[physicsphairy]

...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.

Re:How could this be BAD news? Like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

There's a sane way out of this...

[nowhere.elysium]

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...

Re:There's a sane way out of this...

[Chris Burke]

I second that. People who say "you can reconcile science and religion" are either kidding themselves, or (in most cases) just haven't thought about it very deeply.

What arrogant hogwash. As someone who believes in God and believes in the scientific method (though not precisely the same kind of belief), I have thought about this deeply and for a long time. I find it hard to believe that in 23 years of being an atheist you've thought harder about it than "it's a fairy tale, no reconcilliaton is possible".

The fact is, and I only speak for the Christian religion here, is that it is extremely simple to reconcile religion and science. In fact, there is precious little that needs to be reconciled at all, as the vast majority is not in conflict with science in any way. In fact, the only reason any "reconciliation" needs to be done is because certain literalists have decided that there is in fact a schism where none exists. In fact this schism is only possible when taking a translation litteraly, thus hiding the fact that the word translated as "day" could just as easily mean "era". That this was thus not meant as a literal blow-by-blow account of the formation of the universe should be as obvious as that a description of a table as being "one cubits across, and three cubits around" was not meant to describe the relationship between the radius and circumference of a circle with infinite precision.

So what exactly makes reconciling the two so hard? Where do they, in fact, collide? All you have to do is realize that science describes the physical and the empirical, while religion describes the spiritual and immeasurable.

I find it rather funny that the only groups who believe that religion and science are incompatible one another are the Atheists and the Fundamentalists. It's truly strange where common ground appears.

In the meantime, the fields of science are packed with religious people doing important scientific work with no apparent problems in spite of this being impossible. Lo, it's a miracle!

Re:Dating Fossils

[egomaniac]

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.

Just that simple.

[thatguywhoiam]

There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything.

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.

Re:Not that simple!

[hywel_ap_ieuan]

The reason that scientists don't attempt to disparage evolution is that the personal cost is quite high.

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.

Re:How could this be BAD news? Like this...

[elronxenu]

I think some creationists can't distinguish between the theory of man's evolution and the general theory of evolution. They think that our inability to trace exactly how mankind evolved is some kind of flaw in the theory of evolution. Of course it is nothing of the sort.

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:

There are a number of important implications of the fact that we tend to be bad at the Wason selection task (and indeed, other similar tasks, e.g., the conjunction problem). One has to do with the notion of justified belief. If a belief is recognised to be based on defective reasoning, then to continue to believe it is not justified. But if we systematically, and unconsciously, reason badly, then the extent to which reason actually acts as a constraint on belief is a moot point.

And here's another relevant quote (this one from the 'Taboo' game)...

The other point to make is that it is possible that a judgement that harm occurs is an ex post facto rationalisation of a prior intuition that the acts depicted here are morally wrong. In other words, people don't like things like incest and sex with poultry, they are pretty good at inventing stories to explain why they don't like them, but, in fact, they don't like them regardless. We already know that people engage in this kind of retroactive reasoning when justifying their responses to taboo type stimuli (see Haidt, Koller and Dias). We also know that judgements of wrongdoing by people who take a moralising stance towards the kinds of acts depicted here are better predicted by asking them whether they would be bothered to see these acts than by asking them whether anyone is harmed. The suspicion, then, is that a judgement that harm occurs is simply a buttress of a prior baseline moral commitment.

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.

Re:Obviously

[mdwh2]

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.

Smaller than the leap from discourse to hate.

[Tsar]

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.

Game, set and match.

[khasim]

Please cite for me the exact language I used to say that Intelligent Design is the middle ground.

...and...

Intelligent Design actually is a middle ground - the problem is that it's such a bad word because of how it has come up in the USA in the past few years, and that it is usually presented in a way that makes it just as closed-minded and ignorant as the sources of the problem it attempts to address.

When my statement was ...

So, your "middle ground" is that a supernatural being did it.

Which leaves you arguing whether "your" is the same as "a" which is different from "the".

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".