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

Obviously

[ubersonic]

the flying spaghetti monster burried it there!

oO

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.

Re:Is it just me...

[Charles Dodgeson]

is "the missing link" found every couple of months?

Well, not quite that often, but you are right. Almost all the major finds have been since the publication of The Descent of Man which is when the challenge was first posed. The article itself says that this find joins a handful of others between homo erectus and ourselves. And of course homo erectus is also a "missing" link discovered since The Descent of Man.

This is only one skull. Weigh in the likelihood that it could be just a deformity of something distinctly not a missing link.

You are right. It's happened before. For decades the thinking about Neanderthal was distorted because the first major find turned out to me a severely arthritic and deformed individual. It will take more finds before we can more confidently draw conclusions.

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.

Again, this has been a mistake that's been made before. (Neanderthals again provide an example). But even if this branch of hominid doesn't turn out to be a direct ancestor, the more we learn about it the better picture of Human evolution we'll have. Also while it has certainly happened that there have been separate hominid species living at the same time, on the whole you don't expect there to be many distinct simultanteous species of something so mobile.

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.

The article doesn't say how the dating was done, nor whether further analysis should refine the estimate.

404 ?

[mOOzilla]

I clicked the link and all I got was 404 page not found, I guess it really is the missing link :)

Re:Sure, but it's a big jump, still from H.E to th

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The middle of the country feeds you

Yes, and if you had a server room temperature IQ, you'd have noticed that I in fact posit that in 250,000 years they will continue to do so.

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...

You've got us all wrong

[murderlegendre]

Animosity against Christians? Oh hogwash, that is just a vast oversimplification of a set of very complex socio-political dynamics which play out here on Slashdot. Christian folks like yourself are quite welsome to join in and partcipate in any capacity.

Anyway, we have some activities planned this afternoon over at the Coliseum. Invite your friends, and don't forget to bring a loincloth. Lunch will be served.

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.