The hoked-up Ida fossil
Ida, discovered in the Messel pit in Germany, is one of the most complete primate fossils ever found. Key features of her skeleton suggest she is not an ancient lemur. She has no 'grooming claw' on her second toe, a feature that all lemurs share. She also does not have a set of fused teeth in the middle of her bottom jaw called a 'tooth comb'. Finally, the tarsus bone in her ankle is shaped like our ancestors. So it is likely that she is a very early haplorhine primate.
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Darwinists are so desperate to "prove" evolution once and for all that they engage in grasping at straws and wishful thinking. A good example of this is the overhype about a primate fossil named "Ida." A news article ballyhooed,
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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".
They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be "somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth".
Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.
Sir David Attenborough said Darwin "would have been thrilled" to have seen the fossil - and says it tells us who we are and where we came from.
"This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of the mammals," he said.
Scientists say Ida - squashed to the thickness of a beer mat by the immense passage of time - is the most complete primate fossil ever found.
With her human-like nails instead of claws, and opposable big toes, she is placed at the very root of human evolution when early primates first developed features that would eventually develop into our own.
Another important discovery is the shape of the talus bone in her foot, which humans still have in their feet millions of lifetimes later.
Opposable thumbs are not unique to primates -- Wikipedia lists several non-primates that have opposable thumbs.
The Darwinists cherry-pick features that link us to Ida while ignoring features that separate us from Ida, like Ida's long tail. And maybe the similar features show convergent evolution rather than ancestry.
The absence of a bacculum (penis bone) confirmed she was female, and her milk teeth put her age at about nine-months-old - in maturity, equivalent to a six-year-old human child.
Humans don't have a bacculum either, so how did we lose it?
When Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, he said a lot about transitional species," said Prof Hurum
"...and he said that will never be found, a transitional species, and his whole theory will be wrong, so he would be really happy to live today when we publish Ida. . . . .
. . . ."It's part of our evolution that's been hidden so far, it's been hidden because all the other specimens are so incomplete.
"They are so broken there's almost nothing to study and now this wonderful fossil appears and it makes the story so much easier to tell, so it's really a dream come true."
What? I thought that evolution has already been proven. Now this professor is saying that it hasn't been?
Ida was discovered 25 years ago but only recently was its value recognized. It has been studied for the last two years. The incredible price of $1 million was paid for it. One wonders why its value was not recognized sooner if it is so special.
Even Darwinist NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg couldn't resist the opportunity to take an implicit swipe at the fundies [link] --
The bit that grated was the desperate, unseemly scramble to grab some of the action. In a display that was utterly primatal, figures as varied as the mayor of New York and the higher education minister of Norway made sure they were front and centre stage.
The most sublime image was of Michael Bloomberg standing beside Ida's glass box, his arm around the shoulders of a school girl who was wearing a T-shirt with the TV tie-in logo: "The Link. This changes everything". The main thing Bloomberg was presumably hoping this would change was his prospects of winning an unprecedented third term as New York mayor in upcoming elections.
Ida provides no evidence that evolution was driven solely by natural genetic variation and natural selection.
Remember the famous transitional fossils archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik, and Lucy? We don't hear very much about them anymore. Maybe Ida is also a passing fad.
Well, Judge "Jackass" Jones and other Darwinists will now have something else to beat the fundies over the head with.
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Labels: Evolution controversy (4 of 4)
posted by Larry Fafarman | 5/20/2009 07:22:00 AM
7 Comments:
The quotes below are from this article --
Some scientists object to the Ida team's findings on scientific grounds:
"On the whole I think the evidence is less than convincing," said Chris Gilbert, a paleoanthropologist at Yale University. "They make an intriguing argument but I would definitely say that the consensus is not in favor of the hypothesis they're proposing."
The Ida team points to the fact that some the fossil's teeth, toe and ankle bones resemble anthropoids more than modern lemurs. But other researchers point out that primitive lemurs, as opposed to modern lemurs, also share many of these features.
"They claim in the paper that by examining the anatomy of adapids, these animals have something to do with the direct line of human ancestry and living monkeys and apes. This claim is buttressed with almost no evidence," said paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University. "And they failed to cite a body of literature that's been going on since at least 1984 that presents evidence against their hypothesis."
Kay said the researchers did not compare Ida to other important fossil primates from this time, especially those from a group called Eosimiads, that could contradict their claims. Some scientists object to the snake-oil huckstering --
Besides scientific objections, some paleontologists take issue with the way the discovery was announced. The research team unveiled the fossil Tuesday at a showy press conference at the American Museum of Natural History. A History Channel documentary and a book about the discovery are also being released to tout the news.
"The P.R. campaign on this fossil is I think more of a story than the fossil itself," said anthropologist Matt Cartmill of Duke University in North Carolina. "It's a very beautiful fossil, but I didn't see anything in this paper that told me anything decisive that was new."
. . . ."This fossil has been hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. Frankly I've got 10 more in my basement," said Chris Beard, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Though the fossil is a beautiful specimen, it is not dissimilar to many slightly less well-preserved primate fossils from around the same period.
. . . . Beard said he applauded the push to get the public excited about science. But he disagreed with some of the outlandish claims researchers made during the press conference, such as the suggestion that Ida represents a "missing link" between early primates and humans.
"It's not a missing link, it's not even a terribly close relative to monkeys, apes and humans, which is the point they're trying to make," Beard said.
Kay agreed that the hoopla surround Ida "does have its Barnum and Bailey aspects," but said that he supported the idea of reaching out to the public to make science accessible.NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg made himself look very foolish by participating in this hype. Even if the fossil is as great as has been claimed, what credit can he claim for it?
Now that the Darwinists have staked so much of evolution theory's prestige on this single fossil, what are the chances that the Darwinists are ever going to be objective about this fossil in the future? Not much.
This is the dumbest candidate for an ancestor of humans that I've seen yet. Apparently the Darwinites have gone insane under the stress of the mounting controversy. Or...or...could Pat Roberston and Ken Ham have bribed these goofy paleontologists into making purely imbecilic staements? Hmmm.
In his book The Bone Peddlers (1984) William R. Fix documented the errors, confusion, and downright stupidity of Darwinist paleontologists. Fix isn't a creationist, he believes that humans had ape-like ancestors, and his "religious" views are of some "New Age" type. But, like some intelligent design theorists, he thinks that some sort of intelligence played a role in "evolutionary" descent. A good book.
Here are some more criticisms of the overhyping of the Ida fossil [1] [2] [3].
They even called the thing Darwinius, that is the name they gave its genus; in an effort to prop up old Chuck Darwin's rapidly collapsing reputation?
Anyone who still believes in evolution of all life by chance and natural selection, might well be classified as belonging to a new genus. How about the genus "Ignoramus?"
Mayor Bloomberg has clearly made a monkey of himself, but so have the paleontologists involved.
Humans don't have a bacculum (sic) either, so how did we lose it?If you find out, I would like to know how to get it back. ;->
The Darwinists cherry-pick features that link us to Ida while ignoring features that separate us from Ida, like Ida's long tail.These are not cats either.
Perhaps they are alligators.
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