A reproduction of the discovery institute's article
The meeting room was tense as Ronald Wetherington, a professor of
anthropology at Southern Methodist University, took the podium. He was about to
address the Texas State Board of Education before its vote in March 2009 over
whether to inform students about scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian
evolution.
And what Dr. Wetherington told the board is that there are no
weaknesses. Human beings have "arguably the most complete sequence of fossil
succession of any mammal in the world," he said. "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." According to
Wetherington, the field of human origins provides "a nice clean example of what
Darwin thought was a gradualistic evolutionary change."
It is not
uncommon for evolutionary scientists like Wetherington (even those who teach at
Christian universities) to be adamant about the evidence in favor of human
evolution. Digging into the technical literature, however, we find a situation
that's starkly different from the one presented by Wetherington and many other
evolutionary scientists who engage in public debates.
A closer look at
the literature shows that hominin fossils generally fall into one of two
categories—ape-like species or human-like species (of the genus
Homo)
—and that there is a large, unbridged gap between them. Despite the claims of
many evolutionary paleoanthropologists, the fragmented hominin fossil record
does not document the evolution of humans from ape-like precursors. In fact,
scientists are quite sharply divided over who or what our human ancestors even
were. Newly discovered fossils are often initially presented to the public with
great enthusiasm and fanfare, but once cooler heads prevail, their status as
human evolutionary ancestors is invariably called into question.
Early Human History The details of the earliest
stages of human origins are murky. They come from what UC–Berkeley
paleoanthropologist Tim White once called "a black hole in the fossil
record."
1 There are, to be
sure, three main species that have emerged as contenders for the supposed common
ancestor of humans and apes. But despite what is printed in the media, the
extant fossils for all three species are fragmented and greatly disputed by
experts.
When
Orrorin tugensis was initially discovered in
2001, the
New York Times ran a story titled "Fossils May Be Earliest
Human Link."
2 The fossil
itself—dubbed Millennium Man—was known only from "an assortment of bone
fragments,"
3 including pieces
of the arm, thigh, and lower jaw, as well as some teeth. Debate over
Orrorin has centered on whether it was an early hominin capable of
walking upright, and on this point a 2007 commentary made a key admission: "All
in all, there is currently precious little evidence bearing on how
Orrorin moved."
4
When
Sahelanthropus tchadensis was first discovered in 2002,
the popular science journal
New Scientist claimed that "the new species
is close to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees."
5 But since that fossil was known only
from a skull and some jaw fragments, experts naturally disagreed. For example,
Brigitte Senut, a leading researcher at the Natural History Museum in Paris,
said, "I tend towards thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla."
6 Three paleoanthropologists
subsequently concluded in an article in
Nature that
"
Sahelanthropus was an ape."
7 The most recent hyped-up hominin fossil find was
Ardipithicus ramidus, dubbed "Ardi" by its promoters in the media. The
Discovery Channel ran the headline "'Ardi,' Oldest Human Ancestor, Unveiled" and
quoted Tim White as stating that Ardi was "as close as we have ever come to
finding the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans."
8 Doubts arose, however, after news
reports acknowledged that "some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed
nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction," and that its
pelvis initially "looked like an Irish stew."
9 Later, technical papers in both
Science and
Nature disavowed claims that Ardi was a human ancestor.
10 According to
Time
magazine, one of the authors of those papers, Esteban Sarmiento, "regards the
hype around Ardi to have been overblown."
11 Australopithecines Are Like
Apes While early hominin fossils are controversial, due to
their fragmented condition, there is one major group—the australopithecines—that
is widely promoted as directly ancestral to humans. The primary claim is that
australopithecines had the head of a chimpanzee but a body that allowed it to
walk upright, like humans.
Despite the prevalence of that standard view,
authorities have found that the fingers, arms, chest, hand bones, striding gait,
shoulders, abdomen, inner-ear canals, developmental patterns, toes, and teeth of
australopithecines point away from their being human ancestors and/or suggest
that they didn't have human-like bipedal locomotion.
12 For example, an article in
Nature observed
that the most complete australopithecine specimen—the famous fossil Lucy—was
"quite ape-like," especially with respect to her "relatively long and curved
fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest."
13 The article reported that Lucy's
hand bones suggest that she "'knuckle-walked', as chimps and gorillas do
today."
14
Paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, who served as head of the
anthropology department at University College London, stated that when it comes
to locomotion, "Australopithecines are like apes, and the
Homo group
are like humans. Something major occurred when
Homo evolved, and it
wasn't just in the brain."
15
A Big Bang Origin of Homo When the
human-like members of our genus
Homo appear, they do so abruptly. A
paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution called the appearance of
Homo sapiens "a genetic revolution" in which "no australopithecine
species is obviously transitional."
16 In a 2004 book, the famed evolutionary biologist Ernst
Mayr explained that "the earliest fossils of
Homo,
Homo
rudolfensis and
Homo erectus are separated from
Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap" without "any fossils that
can serve as missing links."
17 The lack of fossil evidence for this
hypothesized evolutionary transition was confirmed by three Harvard
paleoanthropologists, who wrote:
Of the various transitions that occurred during human evolution, the
transition from Australopithecus to Homo was undoubtedly one
of the most critical in its magnitude and consequences. As with many key
evolutionary events, there is both good and bad news. First, the bad news is
that many details of this transition are obscure because of the paucity of the
fossil and archaeological records.18
And the good news? "Although we lack many details about exactly how, when,
and where the transition occurred from
Australopithecus to
Homo," the three went on, "we have sufficient data from before and
after the transition to make some inferences about the overall nature of key
changes that did occur."
19
In other words, the fossil record provides us with ape-like
australopithecines ("before") and human-like
Homo ("after"), but not
with fossils documenting a transition between them. In the absence of
intermediaries, we're left with "inferences" of a transition based strictly upon
the assumption of Darwinian evolution. No wonder one commentator argued that if
we take the fossil evidence at face value, it implies a "big bang theory" of the
appearance of our genus
Homo.
20 Resistance Isn't Futile
Despite the constant drumbeat of media stories announcing the discovery
of the latest "missing link," the evidence shows that human-like forms appear
abruptly in the fossil record, without any fossils connecting us to our alleged
ape-like evolutionary ancestors. This contradicts the expectations of
neo-Darwinian evolution and suggests that unguided evolutionary mechanisms do
not account for the origin of our species. •