Thursday 21 May, 2009

Special Report

Darwin in old age

By Andrew Halloway

On Tuesday May 26, BBC 1 claims it will show “the exclusive story behind a scientific discovery that could revolutionise our understanding of human evolution.”

If you’ve watched any BBC TV at all this week, you can’t have avoided seeing the advert for this programme, so often has it been repeated.

Narrated by David Attenborough (who else?), the one-off 60-minute documentary, Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, tells the story of “an important scientific development that could tell us more about where we come from.”

The BBC press info continues: “The fossil, known as Ida, could be an indication of one of the roots of anthropoid evolution – the point at which our primate ancestors began first developing the features that would evolve into our own.”

The rest of the media have jumped on the evolution bandwagon as well, proclaiming this fossil find as a great missing link.

The documentary will show the University of Oslo’s two-year journey to “secretly analyse and verify Ida, piecing together her forensic secrets.” Why does science have to be conducted in secret, you may well ask? Well, because rather than open the research for all to assess, keeping it under wraps allows money to be made by exclusive PR deals with evolution-promoting media like the BBC.

Dr Jørn Hurum, leader of the scientists analysing the fossil, confidently asserts: “This is the first link to all humans.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking this is the ultimate proof of human evolution.

Ida is claimed to be a transitional species showing characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans).

However, many evolutionists are themselves uneasy about the hype surrounding this find. The Guardian advised caution: “[The species] could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved [the line leading to humans], but we are not advocating this here.” In fact, the paper’s scientific reviewers asked that Dr Hurum’s team tone down their original claims that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line.

Times science writer Mark Henderson expressed even more concern in an article headed: “More on Ida: overblown claims and a worrying precedent.”

He said: “Some doubts are emerging. Not about the significance of the fossil per se… but about the interpretation placed on it by the analysis team, and the hype that has surrounded the announcement.

“There is a feeling out there that publication has been rushed, and that the data don’t fully support the sweeping claims that are being made… it is far from certain that the adapids, the group to which Ida belongs, are the ancestors of modern monkeys, apes and humans.

The consensus view is that the adapids were an evolutionary dead-end, and that anthropoids (monkeys etc) are the descendants of animals that looked more like modern tarsiers…

“The team behind the Ida discovery are claiming that adapids like Darwinius are actually members of the haplorrhine group, which contains anthropoids like us and tarsiers. But… their evidence for this is extremely limited: By moving the adapids into the haplorrhine group they can then make the claim that anthropoids evolved from the adapid stem and not tarsiers or omomyids. The problem is that they are using just one genus, Darwinius, to change the placement of an entire group without using any cladistic analysis! This is not good science… The authors haven’t presented enough evidence to support their claims…

“Even though the authors of the paper constructed a very simple cladogram they did not undertake a full, rigorous cladistic analysis to support their claims. I am baffled as to how they could stress the significance of this fossil without undertaking the requisite research to support their hypothesis.”

I’m not baffled at all. Anyone who keeps a critical eye on the overblown claims of evolutionists has been here before. It’s certainly not the first time that a so-called ‘missing link’ has been hyped to the media as the holy grail of evolution, only later to be quietly debunked in the back corridors of academia away from the media’s prying eyes.

As Henderson says: “The interpretation of Jorn Hurum and his team may well be wrong. But their story is all that most people are going to hear.”

And it’s the only story the BBC wants you to hear, as they’ve paid for the rights to the documentary.

Henderson ends with: “… and it may well be a direct ancestor of nothing at all that exists today.”

So be wary of the media when you see TV programmes or headlines that deal with evolution – someone might well be making a monkey out of you.

Prof Michael Egnor, vice-chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the State University of New York, once accepted evolution. But then he began to look at the evidence for himself. This was his conclusion:

“What I found is this: The claims of evolutionary biologists go wildly beyond the evidence.

“The fossil record shows sharp discontinuity between species, not the gradual transitions that Darwinism inherently predicts. Darwin’s theory offers no coherent, evidence-based explanation for the evolution of even a single molecular pathway from primordial components.

The origin of the genetic code belies random causation. All codes with which we have experience arise from intelligent agency. Intricate biomolecules such as enzymes are so functionally complex that it’s difficult to see how they could arise by random mutations.

“I saw that Darwinism was a Potemkin village. But it wasn’t clear to me why evolutionary biologists were so passionately devoted to such pallid science. The evidence that the Darwinian understanding of biological origins was inadequate has been in hand for quite a while.

“Why, when the genetic code was unravelled, didn’t scientists question Darwin’s assumption of randomness? Why didn’t Darwinists ask the difficult questions that are posed for their theory by the astonishing complexity of intracellular molecular machinery? Why do [US] Darwinists seek recourse in federal courts to silence criticism of their theory in public schools? What is it about the Darwinian understanding of biological origins that is so fragile that it will not withstand scrutiny by schoolchildren?”

His answer to those questions is this: “The vast majority of evolutionary biologists are atheists. I’m Catholic, and my religious faith was mocked by my fellow scientists. Many Darwinists openly express their hatred for Christianity – atheist biologist P Z Myers desecrated a Eucharistic host on his website.

“The fight against the design inference in biology is motivated by fundamentalist atheism. Darwinists detest intelligent design theory because it is compatible with belief in God.

“But the evidence is unassailable. The most reasonable scientific explanation for functional biological complexity – the genetic code and the intricate nanotechnology inside living cells – is that they were designed by intelligent agency. There is no scientific evidence that unintelligent processes can create substantial new biological structures and function. There is no unintelligent process known to science that can generate codes and machines.

“Darwinism itself is a religious creed that masquerades as science. Darwin’s theory of biological origins is atheism’s creation myth, and atheists defend their dogma with religious fervour.”

Now you know.

Photo: Public Domain