oh no, not this crap again...
BS
CS/ID/BS
Ping!
Talk about misinterpreting what someone says.
Everyone against evolution - raise your tails and throw a coconut at the vote counter.
GGG ping
use it on tuesday
That, to me, is the crux of the matter. And it is providing a degree of embarrassment to the science establishment, and is fueling this ridiculous debate ( more like stone chucking ) that can be seen in the crevo-evo threads.
Instead of admitting that there is a lot we don't know, there is this adherence to 'dogma' ( much like 'We are at war with EastAsia, we have always been at war with EastAsia').
Opportunists from both sides, whether its the Jerry Falwell brigade or the Dawkins Kool-Aid cadre cloud the need to do more research.
But hey, I'm just an epistemologist.
If you've never been quoted in the newspaper, you have no idea how far from the truth reporters can get.
"He ruined it! He was giving us all this good quote-mine stuff and then he tried to forestall us from twisting his findings beyond recognition! But we're going to use him anyway! Ha ha ha ha!"
For one thing, the "Creation-Evolution Headlines" author has to pretend not to recognize the subdued tones of glee in the original story it quotes:
The bones tell a complicated story. The cast of characters keeps growing. The plot keeps thickening. It’s a heck of a tale, still unfolding.Science gets excited when it realizes there's interesting work to do, not because it fears that its work to date is all a house of cards, but because it has interesting work to do. Creationism has to pretend to be excited at the imminent demise of science whether there's any good material for such excitement or not.
In this case, the author is running around the room barking excitedly because National Geographic has done a survey article on the status of paleoanthropology since Mayr's time. There have been new finds. Whee! Most of us on the crevo threads, following the situation for ourselves, have been on threads about the new finds already over the past several years.
We have of course the usual compliment of bizarrely inappropriate [sic]s, boldings, and sneering interjections. The author makes it perfectly clear that he has no idea how we know anything and doesn't want to know.
Public self-abuse.
Unfortunately for you, I have a subscription to National Geographic. This quote mining is NOT the bulk of the article. It is the introduction. Let's continue where the creationist quote-miner decided to snip it:
The central fact of human evolution is a given--humans decended from a primate that lived in Africa six or seven million years ago--and those who would doubt evolution are arguing against the entire enterprise of science. But even though the basics are established, some key details are unknown.
"Our family tree is no different from that of any other animal. There are a lot of dead ends in it. At certain times you had three, perhaps four species of hominins," says Hans Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.
The article goes on to lament about the lack of chimpanzee fossils, due to the fact that they lived in rain forests and did not fossilize. It also mentions that not every habitat contains fossils, due to the local environment. One of the scientists quoted in the article believes that people are trying to get too much out of too few fossils.
This creationist article is a perfect example of quote-mining. By using only parts of an article, they are claiming that the article is about something that it is not about. Where I come from, that is called a lie. Where I come from, the person that does it is called a liar.
This is a true and quite damning statement, because, mathematically, the process of evolution SHOULD be observable like the fall of an apple.
Evolution is a statistical process operating on populations. Therefore, we should be able to take a snapshot in time of a population and see an expression of that process at every point in the process.
For example, if I go to Disneyworld on a Saturday and take a photograph of the crowd, I will see human beings in every stage of development at that instant in time even though it takes over 70 years for a single human being to progress from birth to death.
Likewise, we can take a sampling of the night sky, and see stars in every phase of their life even though it takes billions of years for a single star to go from birth to death.
Likewise, we should be able to take a population sampling of the biosphere and see various transition forms in a smooth gradation, and more precisely, we should see a distribution spread of organisms about a maxima of adaptation to each given environment.
We see none of this, though the mathematics of evolution predict it should be quite obvious.
This is a known problem, which is why the theory of punctuated equilibrium keeps being re-invented every few years.
read later bump
"Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make.
An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground.
But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones.
In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.
But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts.
The most empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the future He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs--or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it.
He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits.
He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones.
Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point.
The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on the nature of man before he became man. His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they come to the first real evidence about the first real men.
Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic and prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible.
In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation, as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today.
But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known and the thing first became impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support.
The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes.' Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock.
But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidery, and not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies.
A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked-- or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough evidence to know whether they did or not.
- G.K. Chesterton, "the Everlasting Man"
Note how carefully he limits what he concludes from this state of affairs, and what he does not dispute on the basis of it.