Luskin: The Intelligent Design of Earth for Life
Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC
On a new episode of ID the Future geologist Casey Luskin explains how Earth contains many intricate geological processes required for life. He argues that, taken together, these point to intelligent design rather than dumb luck. This episode is the first half of a talk Dr. Luskin presented at the 2022 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
The Standard Story of Human Evolution: A Critical Look
Casey Luskin
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by geologist Casey Luskin asking, “Do Fossils Demonstrate Human Evolution?” This is the second post in the series, which is adapted from the recent book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Find the full series here.
Despite disagreements, there is a standard story of human evolution that is retold in countless textbooks, news media articles, and documentaries. Indeed, virtually all the scientists I am citing here accept some evolutionary account of human origins, albeit flawed.
Starting with the early hominins and moving through the australopithecines, and then into the genus Homo, I will review the fossil evidence and assess whether it supports this standard account of human evolution. As we shall see, the evidence — or lack thereof — often contradicts this evolutionary story.
Early Hominins
In 2015, two leading paleoanthropologists reviewed the fossil evidence regarding human evolution in a prestigious scientific volume titled Macroevolution. They acknowledged the “dearth of unambiguous evidence for ancestor-descendant lineages,” and admitted,
[T]he evolutionary sequence for the majority of hominin lineages is unknown. Most hominin taxa, particularly early hominins, have no obvious ancestors, and in most cases ancestor-descendant sequences (fossil time series) cannot be reliably constructed.1
Nevertheless, numerous theories have been promoted about early hominins and their ancestral relationships to humans.
Sahelanthropus tchadensis: The Toumai Skull
Although Sahelanthropus tchadensis (also known as the Toumai skull) is known only from one skull and some jaw fragments, it has been called the oldest-known hominin on the human line. When first published, articles in the journal Nature called it “the earliest known hominid ancestor”2 and “close to the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees”;3 as of 2020, the Smithsonian Institution still called it “one of the oldest known species in the human family tree.”4
But not everyone agrees. Brigitte Senut, of the Natural History Museum in Paris, called Toumai “the skull of a female gorilla,”5 and co-wrote in Nature that “Sahelanthropus was an ape,” not bipedal, and that many features “link the specimen with chimpanzees, gorillas or both, to the exclusion of hominids.”6 In 2020, nearly two decades after the fossil was first reported, the debate was seemingly settled when the femur of Sahelanthropus was finally described, confirming that it was a quadruped with a chimp-like body plan.7 This evidence forced the researchers to suggest that if Sahelanthropus were a human ancestor, then that would mean bipedality is no longer a necessary qualification for status as a hominid8 — an unorthodox view that would wreak havoc with the primate tree. More likely is the view of Madelaine Böhme at the University of Tübingen in Germany: “itʼs more similar to a chimp than to any other hominin,”9 meaning, as another commentator put it, Sahelanthropus “was not a hominin, and thus was not the earliest known human ancestor.”10
Precious Little Orrorin tugenensis
Orrorin, which means “original man” in a Kenyan language, was a chimpanzee-sized primate known only from “an assortment of bone fragments,”11 including pieces of the arm, thigh, lower jaw, and some teeth. When it was initially discovered, the New York Times declared, “Fossils May Be Earliest Human Link,”12 and reported that Orrorin “may be the earliest known ancestor of the human family.”13 Nature responded to such hype by warning that the “excitement needs to be tempered with caution in assessing the claim of a six-million-year-old direct ancestor of modern humans.”14
That seems like wise advice. Paleoanthropologists initially claimed Orrorin’s femur indicates bipedal locomotion “appropriate for a population standing at the dawn of the human lineage,”15 but a later Yale University Press commentary admitted, “All in all, there is currently precious little evidence bearing on how Orrorin moved.”16
Ardipithecus ramidus: Irish Stew or Breakthrough of the Year?
reconstructions weren’t satisfied that the fossil was a bipedal human ancestor. Primatologist Esteban Sarmiento concluded in Science that “[a]ll of the Ar. ramidus bipedal characters cited also serve the mechanical requisites of quadrupedality, and in the case of Ar. ramidus foot-segment proportions, find their closest functional analog to those of gorillas, a terrestrial or semiterrestrial quadruped and not a facultative or habitual biped.”25 Bernard Wood questioned whether Ardi’s postcranial skeleton qualified it as a hominin,26 and co-wrote in Nature that if “Ardipithecus is assumed to be a hominin,” then it had “remarkably high levels of homoplasy [similarity] among extant great apes.”27 A 2021 study found that Ardi’s hands were well-suited for climbing and swinging in trees, and for knuckle-walking, giving it a chimp-like mode of locomotion.28 In other words, Ardi had ape-like characteristics which, if we set aside the preferences of Ardi’s promoters, should imply a closer relationship to apes than to humans. As the authors of the Nature article stated, Ardi’s “being a human ancestor is by no means the simplest, or most parsimonious explanation.”29Sarmiento even observed that Ardi had characteristics different from both humans and African apes, such as its unfused jaw joint, which ought to remove her far from human ancestry.30
Whatever Ardi was, everyone agrees the fossils was initially badly crushed and needed extensive reconstruction. No doubt this debate will continue, but are we obligated to accept the “human ancestor” position promoted by Ardi’s discoverers in the media? Sarmiento doesn’t think so. According Time magazine, he “regards the hype around Ardi to have been overblown.”31
Notes
1) Bernard Wood and Mark Grabowski, “Macroevolution in and around the Hominin Clade,” Macroevolution: Explanation, Interpretation, and Evidence, eds. Serrelli Emanuele and Nathalie Gontier (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2015), 347-376.
2)Michel Brunet et al., “Sahelanthropus or ‘Sahelpithecus’?,” Nature 419 (October 10, 2002), 582.
3)Michel Brunet et al., “A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa,” Nature 418 (July 11, 2002), 145-151. See also Michel Brunet et al., “New material of the earliest hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad,” Nature 434 (April 7, 2005), 752-755.
4)Smithsonian Natural Museum of Natural History, “Sahelanthropus tchadensis,” https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/sahelanthropus-tchadensis (accessed November 30, 2020).
5)“Skull Find Sparks Controversy,” BBC News (July 12, 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2125244.stm (accessed October 26, 2020).
6)Milford Wolpoff et al., “Sahelanthropus or ‘Sahelpithecus’?” Nature 419 (October 10, 2002), 581-582.
7)Roberto Macchiarelli et al., “Nature and relationships of Sahelanthropus tchadensis,” Journal of Human Evolution 149 (2020), 102898.
8)Macchiarelli et al., “Nature and relationships of Sahelanthropus tchadensis.”
9)Madelaine Böhme, quoted in Michael Marshall, “Our supposed earliest human relative may have walked on four legs,” New Scientist (November 18, 2020), https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833093-600-our-supposed-earliest-human-relative-may-have-walked-on-four-legs/ (accessed November 30, 2020).
10)Bob Yirka, “Study of partial left femur suggests Sahelanthropus tchadensis was not a hominin after all,” Phys.org (November 24, 2020), https://phys.org/news/2020-11-partial-left-femur-sahelanthropus-tchadensis.html (accessed November 30, 2020
11)Potts and Sloan, What Does It Mean to Be Human?, 38.
12)John Noble Wilford, “Fossils May Be Earliest Human Link,” New York Times (July 12, 2001), http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/12/world/fossils-may-be-earliest-human-link.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
13)John Noble Wilford, “On the Trail of a Few More Ancestors,” New York Times (April 8, 2001), http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/world/on-the-trail-of-a-few-more-ancestors.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
14)Leslie Aiello and Mark Collard, “Our Newest Oldest Ancestor?” Nature 410 (March 29, 2001), 526-527.
15)K. Galik et al., “External and Internal Morphology of the BAR 1002’00 Orrorin tugenensis Femur,” Science 305 (September 3, 2004), 1450-1453.
16)Sarmiento, Sawyer, and Milner, The Last Human, 35.
17)Tim White, quoted in Ann Gibbons, “In Search of the First Hominids,” Science 295 (February 15, 2002), 1214-1219.
18)Jennifer Viegas, “‘Ardi,’ Oldest Human Ancestor, Unveiled,” Discovery News (October 1, 2009), https://web.archive.org/web/20110613073934/http://news.discovery.com/history/ardi-human-ancestor.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
19)Randolph Schmid, “World’s Oldest Human-Linked Skeleton Found,” NBC News (October 1, 2009), https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna33110809 (accessed October 26, 2020).
20(Ann Gibbons, “Breakthrough of the Year: Ardipithecus ramidus,” Science 326 (December 18, 2009), 1598-1599.
21)Gibbons, “New Kind of Ancestor,” 36-40.
22)White, quoted in Gibbons, “In Search of the First Hominids,” 1214-1219, 1215-1216.
23)Michael Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman, “Ardi Is a New Piece for the Evolution Puzzle,” Time (October 1, 2009), http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1927289,00.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
24)Gibbons, “New Kind of Ancestor,” 36-40, 39.
25)Esteban Sarmiento, “Comment on the Paleobiology and Classification of Ardipithecus ramidus,” Science 328 (May 28, 2010), 1105b.
26)Gibbons, “New Kind of Ancestor,” 36-40.
27)Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison, “The Evolutionary Context of the First Hominins,” Nature 470 (February 17, 2011), 347-352.
28)Thomas C. Prang, Kristen Ramirez, Mark Grabowski, and Scott A. Williams, “Ardipithecus hand provides evidence that humans and chimpanzees evolved from an ancestor with suspensory adaptations,” Science Advances 7 (February 24, 2021), eabf2474.
29)New York University, “Fossils may look like human bones: Biological anthropologists question claims for human ancestry,” ScienceDaily (February 16, 2011), https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110216132034.htm (accessed October 26, 2020).
30)See Eben Harrell, “Ardi: The Human Ancestor Who Wasn’t?,” Time (May 27, 2010), http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1992115,00.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
31)Harrell, “Ardi: The Human Ancestor Who Wasn’t?”
"Among those who actually think about such matters, the two most popular understandings of the doctrine of the Trinity are Latin Trinitarianism (LT) and Social Trinitarianism (ST). According to LT, God is essentially one being who subsists in three distinct persons. Each person of the Trinity is numerically identical to God, but numerically distinct from the other two persons. As I’ve argued elsewhere (and so have others) this conception of the Trinity is mysterious to the point of paradox," professor James N Anderson.
Now let us think carefully about what the learned professor is asking us to believe,with no more support than the imagination of himself and like-minded academics, we are told that the one God whom the Bible tells us is the most high God see Psalms 83 and is the only God entitled to Man's devotion/loyalty see Deuteronomy ch.6 vrs.4,5 is a being 'who'(not which) subsists in three persons each of whom is numerically identical to the same being despite their each subsisting in one person. So really we are talking about four people, a quadrinity ,if you will ,who, despite the demands of elementary school arithmetic, are actually the same person as the one God. At least social Trinitarians understood ,that if the Essence shared in common by the divine persons in their trinity was himself a person, they could no longer claim that their Godhead was a trinity ,and that claiming that each member of the trinity was identical to the trinity would compound the absurdity of the doctrine they were already requiring their congregants to give credence.
Thus Latin Trinitarians could not even clear the abysmally low bar set by social trinitarians. Once more the rock of stumbling for Trinitarians (both Latin and social) is the claim that each equal and distinct member of their trinity is Fully God. JEHOVAH has no equals according to scripture and common sense ,JEHOVAH is necessary i.e cannot be substituted, JEHOVAH is immutable (in the dictionary sense). The call to the worship of the only true God JEHOVAH is a call to sanity re:our religion.
"And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."
Jesus Christ as quoted by his disciple and friend at John ch.3 vrs.19 of the king James version of the holy bible.
Do Fossils Demonstrate Human Evolution? Let’s Consider the Technical Literature
Casey Luskin
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by geologist Casey Luskin asking, “Do Fossils Demonstrate Human Evolution?” This is the first post in the series, which is adapted from the recent book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Find the full series here.
Evolutionists commonly tell the public that the fossil evidence for the Darwinian evolution of our species, Homo sapiens, from ape-like creatures is incontrovertible. In 2009, Southern Methodist University anthropology professor Ronald Wetherington testified before the Texas State Board of Education that human evolution has “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils…So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true. And it is not true specifically for our own species.”1 According to Wetherington, human origins show “a nice clean example of what Darwin thought was a gradualistic evolutionary change.” But does the fossil record support such claims? Digging into the technical literature reveals a starkly different story.
Far from supplying “a nice clean example” of “gradualistic evolutionary change” that has “no gaps” or “no lack of transitional fossils,” the record shows a dramatic discontinuity between ape-like and human-like forms. Human-like fossils appear abruptly in the record, without clear evolutionary precursors, contradicting Darwinian expectations. The fossil record does not show that humans evolved from ape-like precursors.
The Fragmented Field of Paleoanthropology
The discipline of paleoanthropology studies the fossil remains of ancient hominins and hominids. Paleoanthropologists face many daunting challenges in their quest to explain human evolution from this hypothetical human/ape common ancestor. Their field is fragmented in multiple senses, making it difficult to confirm evolutionary accounts of human origins.
First, the fossil record is fragmented, and long periods of time exist for which there are few hominin fossils. So “fragmentary and disconnected” is the data, according to Harvard zoologist Richard Lewontin, that “[d]espite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.”2
The Specimens Themselves
A second challenge is the fragmented nature of the fossil specimens themselves. Typical hominid fossils consist of mere bone scraps, making it difficult to form definitive conclusions about their morphology, behavior, and relationships. As Stephen Jay Gould commented: “Most hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls.”3
Flesh reconstructions of extinct hominins are likewise subjective. They often attempt to diminish the intellectual abilities of humans and overstate those of apes. One high school textbook4 caricatures Neanderthals as intellectually primitive even though they exhibited intelligence and culture, and casts Homo erectus as a bungling, stooped form — even though its skeleton is extremely similar to that of modern humans. Conversely, the same textbook portrays an australopithecine (which, in reality, had a chimp-sized brain) with gleams of human-like intelligence and emotion — a common tactic in illustrated books on human origins.5 The words of the famed physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton from Harvard University remain valid: “alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.”6
The Problem of Sparse Data
Third, the field itself is fragmented. The sparse nature of the data, combined with the desire to make confident assertions about human evolution, often betrays objectivity and leads to sharp disagreements.7 After interviewing paleoanthropologists for a documentary, PBS NOVA producer Mark Davis recounted that “[e]ach Neanderthal expert thought the last one I talked to was an idiot, if not an actual Neanderthal.”8
Even the most established and confidently promoted evolutionary models of human origins are based on limited evidence. Nature editor Henry Gee conceded that the “[f]ossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”9
Notes
1)Ronald Wetherington, testimony before Texas State Board of Education (January 21, 2009). Original recording on file with author, SBOECommtFullJan2109B5.mp3, time index 1:52:00-1:52:44.
2)Richard Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995), 163.
3)Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), 126.
4)See Alton Biggs et al., National Geographic Society, Biology: The Dynamics of Life (New York: Glencoe/McGraw Hill, 2000), 442-443.
5)Biggs et al., Biology: The Dynamics of Life; Esteban E. Sarmiento, Gary J. Sawyer, and Richard Milner, The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Richard Potts and Christopher Sloan, What Does It Mean to Be Human? (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010); Carl Zimmer, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins (Toronto, Canada: Madison Press, 2005).
6)Earnest Albert Hooton, Up from the Ape, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 329.
7)Paige Williams, “Digging for Glory,” The New Yorker (June 27, 2016), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/lee-berger-digs-for-bones-and-glory (accessed October 26, 2020); Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
8)Mark Davis, “Into the Fray: The Producer’s Story,” PBS NOVA Online (February 2002), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/neanderthals/producer.html (accessed October 26, 2020).
9)Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature 412 (July 12, 2001), 131-132
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