I thought this was a pretty good summary of the actual reality of the facts and what they really mean. (very little)
Many people honestly believe that the ancestry of mankind has been mapped faithfully and nearly completely. They have heard about “missing links,” and regard them as scientific proof for man's evolution from primates. However, in truth, no ancestor for man has ever been documented. The “missing links” are still missing. Here is a summary of facts relating to some of the most well known fossil discoveries.
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neandertal man) - 150 years ago Neandertal reconstructions were stooped and very much like an 'ape-man'. It is now admitted that the supposedly stooped posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind.
Ramapithecus - once widely regarded as the ancestor of humans, it has now been realized that it is merely an extinct type of orangutan (an ape).
Eoanthropus (Piltdown man) - a hoax based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw. It was widely publicized as the missing link for 40 years.
Hesperopithecus (Nebraska man) - based on a single tooth of a type of pig now only living in Paraguay.
Pithecanthropus (Java man) - now renamed to Homo erectus. See below.
Australopithecus africanus - this was at one time promoted as the missing link. It is no longer considered to be on the line from apes to humans. It is very ape-like.
Sinanthropus (Peking man) was once presented as an ape-man but has now been reclassified as Homo erectus (see below).
Currently fashionable ape-men; These are the ones that adorn the evolutionary trees of today that supposedly led to Homo sapiens from a chimpanzee-like creature.
Australopithecus - there are various species of these that have been at times proclaimed as human ancestors. One remains: Australopithecus afarensis, popularly known as the fossil 'Lucy'. However, detailed studies of the inner ear, skulls and bones have suggested that ‘Lucy’ and her like are not on the way to becoming human. For example, they may have walked more upright than most apes, but not in the human manner. Australopithecus afarensis is very similar to the pygmy chimpanzee.
Homo habilis - there is a growing consensus amongst most paleoanthropologists that this category actually includes bits and pieces of various other types - such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus. It is therefore an 'invalid taxon'. That is, it never existed as such.
Homo erectus - many remains of this type have been found around the world. They are smaller than the average human today, with an appropriately smaller head (and brain size). However, the brain size is within the range of people today and studies of the middle ear have shown that Homo erectus was just like us. Remains have been found in the same strata and in close proximity to ordinary Homo sapiens, suggesting that they lived together.
Dammit, Mike! You have been here a very, very long time to still be barfing up nonsense like this! Nebraska man? Really?
"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." H L Mencken
Oh hello, Micky's back knocking on the door, throwing dog turds into the room, then running away laughing and telling all his mates at EFT what a blast he's having winding up all those non-believers at EVC
It's getting tedious Micky, how long are you going to stick around this time making a smell before you run away again without answering anything or learning anything? Don't you feel a fraud churning out the crap that even you know is crap? It's just narcissism isn't it? Do you come back here and read your posts and think how clever you are?
I don't suppose you care much what we think about you and your fake arguments, after all that's not the point is it? But you and your kind are doing a lot of harm to your belief system by your egotism, disingenuity, and, let's be frank, plain lies. When are you going to get real with us Mike?
Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
quote:Many people honestly believe that the ancestry of mankind has been mapped faithfully and nearly completely. They have heard about “missing links,”
Is it nearly complete or are there missing links?
quote:They have heard about “missing links,” and regard them as scientific proof for man's evolution from primates.
How can missing links be 'proof'?
quote:However, in truth, no ancestor for man has ever been documented.
Except the ones that have been documented.
quote:The “missing links” are still missing.
That is tautological. The links that are not missing are just links.
quote:Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neandertal man) - 150 years ago Neandertal reconstructions were stooped and very much like an 'ape-man'. It is now admitted that the supposedly stooped posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind.
150 years ago we didn't know about helium, the germ theory of disease, weather forecasting, Maxwell relations, Rayleigh Scattering, oceanography, Boltzmann equations, the photoconductivity of selenium, thermionic emisisons, Mycobacterium leprae, heroin, DDT, Antarctica, Bacillus anthracis, silent dog whistles, telephone communication, Phobos and Deimos, Iguanadon, scandium, Venn diagrams, piezoelectric effects, the transmission of yellow fever, that squaring the circle is impossible, cathode rays, protons or the function of the pancreas.
quote:Ramapithecus - once widely regarded as the ancestor of humans, it has now been realized that it is merely an extinct type of orangutan (an ape).
An ancestor to orangutans. A view held for like 50 years.
quote:Eoanthropus (Piltdown man) - a hoax based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw. It was widely publicized as the missing link for 40 years.
Yes, and it would have proven a challenge to the biogeographical evidence for the evolution of humanity. So thank goodness modern science was capable of understanding its true nature.
quote:Hesperopithecus (Nebraska man) - based on a single tooth of a type of pig now only living in Paraguay.
Was not accepted by scientific consensus and was definitively rejected within a few years.
quote:Australopithecus africanus - this was at one time promoted as the missing link. It is no longer considered to be on the line from apes to humans. It is very ape-like.
Since humans are apes, our ancestors must be very ape-like, or even apes themselves.
Sure, we can quibble over the particulars but for me the point is a pretty obvious trend; that evolution is promoted but then vanquished by later discoveries.
Evolution is still accepted as the explanation for the diversity of apes and hominids. It has not been vanquished.
For all those who will quibble, "link got this fact wrong, link said X is so when it isn't". Yeah...you can do that if you want but still, it's just not a very convincing STORY.
If you want a story, go pick up a story book. In the meantime scientists will continue to attempt to reconstruct natural history.
The Great Apes (Hominidae) appear about 15mya Pierolapithecus and other Homininae appear about 13mya Sahelanthropus and Orrorin and other Hominini at about 6-7mya Australopithecus about 3-4mya, a cousin group of the family Hominidae and potentially part of the group that is ancestral to Homo Kenyanthropus about 3mya, closely related to Australopithecus This is about where the resolution of the record starts to become fuzzy enough to not be definitively clear but about 2.5 mya Homo Habilis appears. Despite what Christian Answers tells you there is no 'growing consensus' that it is an 'invalid taxon'. About 15 years ago some people first proposed this might be the case, but the consensus remains that they are a 'valid' taxon. 1.8 mya - Homo Erectus. It is expected that earlier forms than apes would be smaller than humans, so I'm not sure what CA's point is in saying this as a problem. It is also expected that ancestral forms would start having overlaps with extant humans, although the overlap is very slight (average cranial size about 600 cubic centimetres vs 1200 for humans). Homo ergaster - 1.4mya. Early examples have cranial sizes of up to 900 cubic centimetres, later examples close to 1100. Homo heidelbergensi/Homo antecessor - 700kya. Cranial sizes around 1250 cubic centimetres Homo neanderthalensis - 500kya Homo sapiens - 250kya
We know, given fossil scarcity of hominids, we aren't likely to find direct ancestors which we can be 100% confident are direct ancestors. But we've do have a fair amount of information on how the hominid branch of apes changed over time leading us to the modern extant groups of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and the explanation for these changes has remained consistent for over 150 years: they evolved.
This nonsense again? I first read it in 1970 in the original version of Chick Pubs' "Big Daddy?". That was 46 years ago, nearly half a century! And I'm sure that it was being kicked around for decades before that. And despite it being refuted time after time the same old creationist lies just keep coming back.
... that evolution is promoted but then vanquished by later discoveries.
It's called the scientific method. Obviously you've never of it but it would do you immense good to learn about it. It's the opposite of your impossible method of starting with the entirety of perfect knowledge which then becomes more and more corrupted. Mathematically speaking, your revelational method is divergent in that the further you proceed the more you veer away from the solution, from the truth. In contrast, the scientific method is convergent in that it iteratively forms hypotheses based on evidence, tests them in order to correct and refine the hypotheses especially in the light of new evidence, etc.
Now, just like in theology and other religious endeavors, scientists make mistakes -- indeed, the first iteration of their hypotheses can be far off the mark. But then the scientific method enables scientists to detect and correct those mistakes. Indeed, scientists want to find the mistakes in their work because they are strongly motivated to correct them. And there will be hoaxes in science, same as in all other human endeavors such as religion, but the scientific method will ferret those out as well, unlike in the situation in religion which has no corrective process.
So when creationists make loud noises about older scientific ideas having been found to be in error and are no longer used, then they're telling us that they don't understand the scientific method nor how it works. Like when they proclaim, "It's only a theory!", meaning that they don't know what a theory is. Or "Why are there still monkeys?" and "But they're still MOTHS!", meaning that they don't know what evolution is nor how it works. There's a cure for that, Mike: learn something about it!
So you think that being able to test and correct your ideas is a bad thing. What about creationists' claims? What do you think about making claims that are wrong and continuing to use them for several decades in spite of those claims having been proven to be false? That's what creationists do. Don't you think that that's far worse than what scientists do? I certainly do. There's a reason why we call creationist claims PRATTs, because they have been refuted thousands of times. Yet despite the certain knowledge that your claims are false, you continue to make them. There's a word for that, Mike.
Mike is playing you guys like harps. As he has announced, his strategy is to post and run. He may respond to one or more of your posts, but only if he can troll you some more. He does not give a crap about your rebuttals.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson
Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith
Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
Since it contains controversial misinformation rather than information, Mike the Wiz should have posted Message 1 as a thread proposal over at Proposed New Topics. Given that known bad information shouldn't stay in the Links and Information forum it has to be moved. Since the thread has already drawn a number of replies I'm moving it here to the Human Origins and Evolution forum. I think the thread should be treated as an opportunity to discuss:
Chutzpah - how in the past human origin researchers again and again expressed certainty that the fossils they'd discovered lay on the human evolutionary path.
Mistakes and frauds - how do human origin researchers occasionally go so wrong, such as Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man?
Science - how does the scientific process correct errors introduced by points 1 and 2?
Accurate information - what is it we know today about the human evolutionary bush?