Once, There Was a Search for the Missing Link
The last chapter showed how the fossil record removed all of Darwinism's underpinnings.
In The Origin of the Species, Darwin did not touch on the fossil record as it relates to human origins. But in The Descent of Man, published 12 years later, he proposed that human beings were the highest rung on the so-called evolutionary ladder, and that their nearest ancestors were primates resembling modern-day apes.
In proposing that human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor, Darwin had no proof to back up these claims; he just imagined that there was a family relationship between human beings and apes, animals that, he thought, were physically best suited to being compared to human beings. In his book, he developed his racial arguments, claming that some of the world's supposedly "primitive races" were proof of evolution. (However, modern genetics has disproved these racial views shared by Darwin and other evolutionists of the time.)
From the last quarter of the 19th century, almost a whole science of paleoanthropology devoted itself to the task of finding fossils to prove this imaginary theory of evolution, and many who accepted Darwinism started digging to find the "missing link" between apes and human beings.
The great discovery they had hoped for was made in England in 1910. For the next 43 years, the skull of "Piltdown Man" was presented to the world as a major evidence of human evolution. The fossil was discovered by Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist who gave it the name Eoanthropus dawsoni. It was an odd fossil: the upper part was totally human in structure, while the lower jaw and teeth were like those of an ape. Within a short time, this discovery became famous; and the English were very proud that this fossil, discovered in their native soil, was an ancestor of their race. The considerable size of the cranium was interpreted as an indication that "English intelligence" had evolved very early. In the following years, hundreds of theses were written on Eoanthropus dawsoni, and the fossil was displayed in the British Museum, where hundreds of thousands of visitors were persuaded as to the "truth of human evolution."
They did not know that the "fossil" was a fake. Tests applied in 1953 showed that Piltdown Man was a combination of bones from a human being and an orangutan. The public was amazed when this fossil, once supposed to be the greatest proof of evolution, was removed from the British Museum exhibit where it had been highlighted for decades.
In 1922, another scandal occurred in the United States, smaller in scope but just as serious. A molar tooth found in the state of Nebraska was alleged to be an intermediate form between man and ape; and on the basis of this discovery, Nebraska Man was concocted. In 1927, however, it was determined that this tooth belonged neither to a human being nor to an ape, but to a wild pig.
In spite of fiascos like this, evolutionists continued their search for human origins. Later, they came to think that extinct apes of the genusAustralopithecus were the oldest human ancestors. It became an evolutionist cliché that, after Australopithecus, came species called Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, with the series finally ending with Homo sapiens, modern-day man. This cliché, with its picture of apes gradually walking on two feet, was officially adopted by textbooks, science periodicals, magazines, daily newspapers, films and even commercials, and was used uncritically for decades.
In short, for a long period in the 20th century, the idea was widely accepted that the theory of evolution explained human origins.
However, the reality was quite different. Extant fossils do not harmonize with the evolutionist scheme. And the problem won't be solved by the discovery of more fossils; on the contrary, it will be complicated even further. Some authorities have begun to accept these facts. Among America's prominent paleontologists, Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, make this important comment:
[It is a] . . . myth that the evolutionary histories of living things are essentially a matter of discovery. . . . But if this were really so, one could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were found the story of human evolution would become clearer. Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred.30
In his 1995 article, one of the well-known names in the theory of evolution, Harvard University professor Richard Lewontin, admits that Darwinism has fallen into a hopeless situation:
When we consider the remote past, before the origin of the actual species Homo sapiens, we are faced with a fragmentary and disconnected fossil record. Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.31
Many other evolutionist experts in this matter recently stated their pessimism about their theory. Henry Gee, for example, editor of the well-known magazine Nature, points out:
To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—-amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. 32
The classic "human family tree" is being seriously criticized today. Scientists investigating the evidence without preconceptions assert that the line of descent from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens that evolutionists put forth is a total concoction, and the in-between species called Homo habilis and Homo erectus are imaginary.
In a 1999 article published in Science magazine, evolutionist paleontologists Bernard Wood and Mark Collard present their view that the H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are concocted categories and that fossils included in these categories should be transferred to the genus Australopithecus.33
Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan and the University of Canberra's Alan Thorne share the opinion that H. erectus is a fabricated category and fossils included in this classification are all variations of H. sapiens.34
This means that the fossils that evolutionists suggest represent the supposed evolutionary forebears of man belong either to extinct species of ape or else to human beings with different racial characteristics. None of these are half-human and half-ape; they are either ape or human.
According to some experts who acknowledge this reality, the myth of human evolution is nothing more than creative writing by a group of individuals who believe in materialist philosophy and represent natural history in terms of their own dogmatic ideas. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford historian John Durant commented on the matter:
Could it be that, like "primitive" myths, theories of human evolution reinforce the value-systems of their creators by reflecting historically their image of themselves and of the society in which they live?35
In a later publication, Durant says that it is worth asking whether ideas of so-called human evolution assumed similar functions both in pre-scientific and scientific societies, and goes on to say:
. . . Time and again, ideas about human origins turn out on closer examination to tell us as much about the present as about the past, as much about our own experiences as about those of our remote ancestors. . . [W]e are in urgent need of the de-mythologisation of science.36
In short, theories about human origins do nothing else than reflect the prejudices and philosophical beliefs of their authors. Another evolutionist who accepts this is Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark, who wrote in a 1997 publication:
. . . paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science . . . We select among alternative sets of research conclusions in accordance with our biases and preconceptions—a process that is, at once, both political and subjective.37
Inside Media Propaganda
As you see, claims about human evolution have been found to be baseless, even by those who played personal roles in their elaboration. The claims are not founded on science, but on the belief and prejudice that shaped the theory. Interestingly, none of these "admissions" from the world of paleontology has been reported in the media. On the contrary, a few media organizations carefully hide the dilemma that Darwinism has come up against and instill the deception that new proofs for evolution are discovered every day. Jonathan Wells, an American biologist, received two Ph.D.s, one from Yale University, and one from the University of California at Berkeley. In his 2000 book, Icons of Evolution, he outlines this propaganda mechanism:
The general public is rarely informed of the deep-seated uncertainty about human origins that is reflected in these statements by scientific experts. Instead, we are simply fed the latest version of somebody's theory, without being told that paleoanthropologists themselves cannot agree over it. And typically, the theory is illustrated with fanciful drawings of cave men, or human actors wearing heavy makeup... It seems that never in the field of science have so many based so much on so little. 38
Media organizations defending Darwinism claim in their headlines that "human evolution is now a proven fact." But who are the scientists writing in newspapers and appearing on television to make these groundless claims? Why do they disagree with those scientists who think that paleoanthropology is unfounded?
In a speech given at a meeting of the Biology Teachers Association of South Australia, evolutionist Greg Kirby explained their psychology:
If you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments. . . 39
These are some of the factors that keep the myth of human evolution alive, even though it has evidently found no scientific support. And every new fossil discovered thrusts the evolutionist thesis about human origins deeper into doubt.
The Admission that There is no "Missing Link"
The latest example showing the impasse confronting evolutionist theses was a fossil skull discovered in the Central African country of Chad by the French scientist Michel Brunet, who called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
In the world of Darwinism, this fossil caused a division of opinion. The well-known magazine Nature admitted that "new-found skull could sink our current ideas about human evolution."40
Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University said that "this [discovery] will have the impact of a small nuclear bomb."41 The reason was that, although this fossil was 7 million years old, it had a more "human" structure (according to the evolutionist criteria) than Australopithecus, which lived only 5 million years ago and was claimed to be the "oldest human ancestor." This showed once again that the already battered human evolution scenario was untenable.
Bernard Wood, an evolutionist anthropologist from George Washington University in Washington, made an important explanation of the newly-discovered fossil. He said that the "ladder of evolution" myth impressed on people's minds throughout the 20th century had no validity, and that evolution could be compared to a bush:
When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder [that] stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. . . .
When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder [that] stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. . . .
How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.42
In an article for The Guardian newspaper, Henry Gee said this about arguments caused by the newly-found ape fossil:
Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for all, that the old idea of a "missing link" [between apes and humans] is bunk. . . It should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable.43
His important book In Search of Deep Time, published in 1999, explains that the myth of how human beings evolved, discussed for decades in the media and in so-called scientific evolutionist literature, was of no value:
. . . the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological achievements such as fire, the manufacture of tools, and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. They can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific. They rely for their currency not on scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of their presentation. Given the ubiquitous chatter of journalists and headline writers about the search for ancestors, and the discovery of missing links, it may come as a surprise to learn that most professional palaeontologists do not think of the history of life in terms of scenarios or narratives, and that they rejected the storytelling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than thirty years ago.44
Gee states that no pattern of evolution can be extracted from the fossil record, and that there is only a number of unrelated fossils "floating around in an overwhelming sea of gaps":
New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries "missing links", as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. . . . Each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.45
These very important admissions say that the theory of evolution, which for 150 years pretended to give a scientific answer to the question of our origins, was only a scenario imposed on science by a particular worldview. Gee refers to this saying "from our vantage point in the present, we arrange fossils in an order that reflects gradual acquisition of what we see in ourselves. We do not seek the truth; we create it after the fact, to suit our own prejudices."
Evolutionists have finally come to accept that the myth of the "tree of human evolution," impressed on people's minds for the past 150 years, was a human invention. In a 1996 article, the evolutionist biologist F. Clark Howell of UC Berkeley wrote: "There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution. . . Alas, there never really has been."46
Evolutionists themselves explain that the "missing link," a popular theme for newspaper headlines, will always remain "missing" because there is no such thing. So, like other Darwinist myths, the myth of human evolution has been exposed.
As we will see in the next chapter, it has been replaced by "information" that proves that human beings were created by God.
Notes
30- Niles Eldredge, Ian Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, ss.126-127
31- Lewontin, Richard C., Human Diversity, Scientific American Library: New York NY, 1995, s.163
32- Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time, New York, The Free Press, 1999, s. 116-117
33- Bernard Wood, Mark Collard, "The Human Genus", Science, vol. 284, No 5411, 2 April 1999, ss. 65-71
34- Pat Shipman, "Doubting Dmanisi", American Scientist, November- December 2000, s.491
35- Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention, s.312
36- John R. Durant, "The Myth of Human Evolution", New Universities Quarterly 35 (1981), ss. 425-438
37- G. A. Clark, C. M. Willermet, Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research, New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1997, s. 76
38- Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth, Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong, s. 225
39- Paul S. Taylor, Origins Answer Book, 5. baskı, 1995, s. 35
40- John Whitfield, "Oldest member of human family found", Nature, 11 July 2002
41- D.L. Parsell, "Skull Fossil From Chad Forces Rethinking of Human Origins", National Geographic News, 10 Temmuz 2002
42- John Whitfield, "Oldest member of human family found", Nature, 11 Temmuz 2002
43- "Face of Yesterday: Henry Gee on the dramatic discovery of a seven-million-year-old hominid", The Guardian, 11 Temmuz 2002
44- Henry Gee, In Search Of Deep Time, Beyond the Fossil Record to a New Hıstory of Life, s. 5
45- Henry Gee, In Search Of Deep Time, s.32
46- F. Clark Howell, "Thoughts on the Study and Interpretation of the Human Fossil Record," ss.1-39 in W. Eric Meikle, F. Clark Howell & Nina G. Jablonski (editors), Contemporary Issues in Human Evolution , Memoir 21 (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1996), ss. 3, 31
