Truth About Controversial Fossil --The huge fanfare surrounding a fossil discovery this spring may not have been warranted.
If Yahoo is your start up page, those were the banner headlines that greeted you when you turned on your computer this morning. And they revealed that the mainstream media (the subsequent story was from the AP) has gone surprisingly sour on a fossil that had them all atwitter just last spring. Remember?
Here's how I described it in a Vital Signs post last May:
...Darwinius masillae ("Darwin's creature from the Messel pit," now better known to the world simply as Ida) is getting absolutely enormous hype in recent days. This even though the fossil was discovered by amateurs way back in 1983. But the find was divided and sold to different buyers, only to be reassembled two years ago and presented to the world a couple of days ago.
And the world (well, the media anyhow) has gone crazy over it. It has been called the 8th wonder of the world; Google's home page today is emblazoned with an image of the fossil; some scientists and a whole bunch of journalists have gone completely over the top, mindlessly hailing the find as the missing link...
Paleontologist Jorn Hurum, whose team analyzed the fossil, is also promoting the lucrative after-effects: an upcoming book, an Anthony Geffen film, a TV special entitled "The Link. This Changes Everything" and a promotional web site -- to be followed, of course, by T-shirts, caps, lunchboxes and action figures. You get the point. There's money and notoriety involved here...as well as selling a worldview which openly competes with Christianity.
"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum says. It represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."
But Hurum was wrong. Way wrong.
There were a few whose skepticism managed to break through the media hype last spring. One in particular I noted in that May 6th post, "But Ida is not the missing link. As CBS News reported (in one of the more responsible reactions around), this discovery doesn't even 'relate to the more heated debate over whether chimpanzees and humans share a common identity.' Conclusion? 'The fossil is not the so-called missing link [though] the two factions will likely pounce on this new find with evolutionists claiming the skeleton adds to the limited fossil record.'"
But now it is the skepticism that dominates the coverage. From this morning's Yahoo story:
Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction.
In fact, Ida is as far removed from the monkey-ape-human ancestry as a primate could be...
Okay. Write in Ida as just the latest in an ever-lengthening list of vaunted "missing links" that turned out to be anything but. The field is awash with them. The one immediately before Ida was Tiktaalik in 2006 and before that Archaeopteryx in 1999 and before that Lucy in 1974 and a whole lot of others besides -- all of them with a crowd of scientists, reporters and educators going gaga and insisting that this one was the breakthrough, the long lost proof, the sought after "missing link."
But none of them could handle close investigation. Each one failed to be what was claimed.
This yearning hope to find the biological link between apes and man is, of course, a religious one. And those materialists (there's no small number of pantheists too) who seek warmth from the Darwinian flame are always looking for fuel -- and finding very little.
Hard science has turned out to be an enemy to their faith as the more we learn about the immense complexity of life, the more shallow (even silly) the evolutionists' position becomes. The discoveries in the science of DNA alone have inflicted particularly grievous wounds.
No, the search for Darwinian fuel has never been successful in the laboratory. It has always concentrated in the earth itself; that is to say, in archaeology. But that search too has been a failure. For the fossil record that should be so immense and comprehensive (if the evolutionist claims were true) just isn't. Not even close. Thus, we witness the extreme wishful thinking that erupts every few years when the fossil record is augmented by a new find. But the wishful thinking quickly "evolves" into absolute irrationality. And you end up with scientists claiming (with a straight face, no less) that the skeleton of an ancient lemur is incontrovertible proof that human beings descended from amoebas. Sigh.
The Darwinian worldview cannot face facts. It just cannot stand logical or scientific scrutiny. But the hardcore evolutionist doesn't really care about those things. He possesses such a fear of God's existence (and all the moral consequences which that would involve) that he will believe any alternative philosophy -- no matter how unscientific or harebrained it might be.
So he will keep his head down and desperately, ineffectually, and tragically...keep digging in the dirt.
