Creationists have long contended that not only did humans NOT evolve from apes or chimps, but that fossils exist which severely challenge the evolutionary timeline. For example, if a modern human bone was found to be old enough to have appeared near the beginning of the proposed evolutionary timeline, this would mean that modern humans have always existed, and evolution is false.
Today in the news (Fossils Challenge Old Evolution Theory), we see a recent human fossil find that challenges the evolutionary timeline. But will evolutionists recant of their faith? Not so easily.
Meave Leakey, of the infamous Leakey family of paleontologists who discovered the controversial human remains of “Lucy” (now thought to be entirely simian and not human at all), is publishing his “surprising” findings in Nature.
This is not really NEW news, since this information was first unearthed in 2000, but the recent publication of the information in Nature means that scientists are now ready to admit that they have been wrong. Hopefully, such regular surprises by reality will shake them out of their mass delusion that evolution is the answer to the question of origins.
Notice how scientists are missing the bigger question, still trying to modify their broken model:
Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved.
So what is this surprising evidence?
The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man’s early evolution – that one of those species evolved from the other.
The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey’s find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday’s
journal Nature.[…]
It’s the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother
were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.“The more we know, the more complex the story gets,” he said. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, he said. But now we know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals.
Of course, evolutionists know that creationists will jump on this, and are already preparing their meager arguments about how “this is how science works,” still unable to discard their broken model.
Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory. “This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points,” Anton said. “This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn’t do. It’s a continous self-testing process.”
But the real problem is that evolutionary scientists have tried so hard to support their pet theory that they have been making mistakes all along, yet refuse to admit that it is their presupposition of evolution which is causing them to perform poor science, such as the bogus claims of vestigial organs and junk DNA. See how unaware they are of this:
Scientists hadn’t looked carefully enough before to see that there was a distinct difference in males and females.
Hadn’t looked carefully enough really means “were blinded by their evolutionary assumptions.”
We can expect that the more data we get, the more “surprises” evolutionists will find, because their lousy model is piss-poor at predicting much of anything, and the more “complex” (read “convoluted”) their theory will have to become in order to make it accommodate reality. At some point, perhaps they will realize their theory is hopeless complex, entirely non-useful, and most probably not accurate at all.
But people don’t give up their faith so easily. It will be a long hard road of disillusionment before their self-deception gives way to the clarity of this truth – that God created life from nothing, as the scriptures say.
Admitting that God created life from nothing, as the scriptures say, means a lot more than just negating the latest evolutionary "just-so" stories. It reverses the meaning of everything in life!
Hello Josh.
Do you believe in the Theory of Intelligent Design?
Please tell me you do.
Could you please explain to me just what is the Theory of Intelligent Design?
I'm really interested in the 'Theory' part.
:)
By the way, you DO realise that Seeker believes that the Earth is 10,000 years old, yeah?
How old do YOU think the Earth is?
:)
I'm curious, seeker. How does the fact that they may have been even more humanoid species living at the same time than previously thought prove the YEC claim?
If humans are so specially created, why are there also so many close cousins, who were, like us, intelligent tool makers? Could your god not get it right the first time?
This isn't setback at all for evolutionary theory – the news stories misrepresent the actual paper. This changes our current theories of our recent ancestors. This species appears to have lived alongside ours, but was a cousin, not a direct ancestor. The human family tree is even more complex than we first thought – this is evidence for evolution, not against.
(Hopefully this gets to the right place this time)
OMG, Cedric the entertainer is back. Ready for derision, ad hominems, and sentence fragments?
How does the fact that they may have been even more humanoid species living at the same time than previously thought prove the YEC claim?
Well, it's about two things, really – the failure of evolution to predict or understand the fossil record, and the creationist predictions and interpretations.
On the former, this is news because evolutionists are "surprised" AGAIN. You see. for them, surprise is just not in the fact that something new and unknown has turned up, but that their model needs more adjustment. Under normal circumstances, this would be called science. But as I have aleged, when a model needs so much tweaking that what you end up doing is regularly overhauling it and making it hopelessly complex, it has essentially failed as a model.
As to how creationists view this, they have long said that modern man has existed from the beginning of time, and that most fossils are either entirely modern human or simian, with naught inbetween. So when Lucy turns out to be a simian, creationists say "no duh." When supposedly human ancestors turn out to have lived with modern humans, creationists say "no duh, because (a) all of these kinds of animals have existed in fully mature form since the beginning (adaptation not withstanding), and (b) because these fossils are really just modern humans living with one another (or with simians) in the first place.
Creationists have no need to create a fable about how we came from previous, less evolved (or now, it seems, more evolved) simians, and how the previous died out as homo sapiens took over.
This changes our current theories of our recent ancestors. This species appears to have lived alongside ours, but was a cousin, not a direct ancestor. The human family tree is even more complex than we first thought – this is evidence for evolution, not against.
Blah blah, I know. But "more complex" really just means that your model sucks, has little predictive value, and you can modify it into a hopeless complex mess as you try to fit the data into a model that fails to represent what actually happened. When will "more complex" be seen as "hopelessly lost and useless"? Never, if you are a believer. That's my contention.
Evolutionists will NEVER admit that their model is failing, it just always needs to be made a little more complex. Occam would be ashamed.
Josh, are you still out there?
ID.
Remember?
Is it a scientific theory or not?
:)
Mmmmm, yes. Science.
While materialists may be uncomfortable with AIG's easy integration of faith and science, they are blind to their own integration of philosophy of science (which often functions as faith) and science.
While AIG may be unwise in how they present such ideas together (especially when those who are anti-religious or lack a science/philosophy model are concerned), they do have clear ideas about what is science and what is philosophy, and how the two interact while being distinct.
Just as "there is no value-free education," there is no philosophy free science – and while some abuse their science by confusing it with philosophy (both evolutionists and Christians), the proper integration of these two investigations of truth is not, in and of itself, anti either one, though extremists on both sides (science only or faith only) would argue that the two most definitely are antithetical. Poor, poor extremists.