Post by Pahu79 on Jan 15, 2014 16:56:27 GMT -5
Ape-Men? 1
For over a century, studies of skulls and teeth have produced unreliable conclusions about man’s origin (a). Also, fossil evidence allegedly supporting human evolution is fragmentary and open to other interpretations. Fossil evidence showing the evolution of chimpanzees, supposedly the closest living relative to humans, is nonexistent (b).
Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated (c).
Since 1953, it has been universally acknowledged that Piltdown “man” was a hoax, yet Piltdown “man” was in textbooks for more than 40 years (d).
a. “... existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution[/i] [based on skulls and teeth] are unlikely to be reliable.” [/i]Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97, No. 9, 25 April 2000, p. 5003.
In 1995, nine anthropologists announced their discovery of early representatives of Homo habilis and Homo ergaster in China. [See Huang Wanpo et al., “Early Homo and Associated Artifacts from Asia,” Nature, Vol. 378, 16 November 1995, pp. 275–278.] Fourteen years later the same journal published a retraction. The discovery was of a “mystery ape.” [See Russell L. Ciochon, “The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia,” Nature, Vol. 459, 18 June 2009, pp. 910–911.]
How many more mystery apes are there, and do they explain other so-called “ape-men”?
“We have all see[/i] [sic] the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh[/i] [tidy, but sheer nonsense]. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates. ... almost every time someone claims to have found a new species of hominin, someone else refutes it. The species is said to be either a member of Homo sapiens, but pathological, or an ape.” [/i] Henry Gee, “Craniums with Clout,” Nature, Vol. 478, 6 October 2011, p. 34.
b. “Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.” [/i] Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.
c. Lord Zuckerman candidly stated that if special creation did not occur, then no scientist could deny that man evolved from some apelike creature “without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation.” [/i] Solly Zuckerman (former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government and Honorary Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), Beyond the Ivory Tower (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), p. 64.
Bowden, pp. 56–246.
Duane T. Gish, Battle for Creation, Vol. 2, editor Henry M. Morris (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1976), pp. 193–200, 298–305.
d. Speaking of Piltdown man, Lewin admits a common human problem even scientists have:
“How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones—the cranial fragments—and “see” a clear simian signature in them; and “see” in an ape’s jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists’ expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data.” [/i] Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 61.”
[From “In the Beginning” by Walt Brown]