Why is this automatically assume to be a primate? It looks like a dinosaur fossil. Human ancestor, there needs to be a new word invented for that level of guessing. What a joke.
Posted on 07/21/2009 8:37:13 PM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
On May 19 the world met a most unlikely celebrity: the fossilized carcass of a housecat-size primate that lived 47 million years ago in a rain forest in what is now Germany. The specimen, a juvenile female, represents a genus and species new to science, Darwinius masillae, although the media-savvy researchers who unveiled her were quick to give her a user-friendly nickname, Ida. And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in PLoS ONE, Ida’s significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her “the eighth wonder of the world,” “the Holy Grail,” and “a Rosetta Stone.”
If the detractors are right, Ida is irrelevant to the question of anthropoid—and thus, human—origins.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
For a living thing that died in a prehistoric soup, Ida enjoyed a thoroughly modern unveiling. It, or she as it/she was called, was brought before the world's media with the razzmatazz normally reserved for serving presidents or misbehaving film stars.
It is perhaps churlish to complain about the hour and a half of rampant self-publicising that we had to endure before we finally got to meet it/her. After all, we have already been waiting some 47m years.
So there was no doubting the extraordinary power of the moment.
The most sublime image was of Michael Bloomberg standing beside Ida's glass box, his arm around the shoulders of a school girl who was wearing a T-shirt with the TV tie-in logo: "The Link. This changes everything". The main thing Bloomberg was presumably hoping this would change was his prospects of winning an unprecedented third term as New York mayor in upcoming elections.
Almost on a par with Bloomberg was Tora Aasland, minister for higher education in the Norwegian government, who appeared to think Ida was a wonder of Norwegian science as opposed to a wonder of pre-historic evolution. She pledged $350,000 for the project.
Beyond the politicians, the media crowd was in full voice, each individual making more high-pitched claims about the discovery than the last. Anthony Geffen who has made a film about the secret process to bring the fossil to public attention made an allusion to the moon landings.
Nancy Dubuc of the History Channel that will be showing the film said Ida "promised to change everything that we thought we understood about the origins of human life".
The publishers Little Brown plugged their rapidly turned around and secretly produced book-of-the-film-of-the-science by saying the fossil would "undoubtedly revolutionise our understanding of our origins".
Dr Jorn Hurum, the scientist at the heart of the project, made the most exotic parallels. He screened photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, without elucidation, though the implication was clear. He variously described the fossil as the Holy Grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.
But this is all fine science in the tradition of Bathybius and Piltdown.
Here's a little something on Missing Links by evolutionist John R. Baker.
piltdown ping
That’s what I was thinking.
They’re too eager to make their assessment about where this fossil fits in the evolutionary scheme of things and too eager to announce it.
Likely, they’ll just end up with egg on their faces, as they have with so many other fossils, like the *Hobbit* fossil.
Healthy debate and self-checking by the science community.
Sounds like science checks and balances are in force and doing their job.
There really isn’t such a thing as an “Evolutionist.” There are scientists who specialize in TToE and other life sciences. Most scientists (> 99%) understand TToE. The handful who don’t are letting their agenda override their learning and aren’t “scientists” by any meaningful definition of the term.
Have a blessed day!
Thanks for posting the article.
I question these fossil 'finds' as well.
Usually, what I find upon investigation is that when they say they found the fossil of creature 'x', they are usually talking about a piece of jawbone, or a tooth, or a hipbone. From that they 'reconstruct' the whole creature.
So, I wonder how much of the 'fossil' there is, in this case?
See for yourself.
Looks like they had the skull, jawbone, and at least one limb, possibly the full skeleton. According to the article.
Also, according to the article, this creature may not even be on the same limb as simians and humans.
She was definitely the predecessor of Washingtonius Secretarius!
That’s what stuck out at me as well.
Too eager to classify and too eager to announce.
It makes it look like their desire to find the missing link to establish the ToE beyond the shadow of a doubt, is clouding their judgment.
When they nicknamed it "Ida" Darwinius, I wonder if they had in mind Ida Darwin, the eugenist. She was a promoter of segregation of the eugenically unfit. There was an "Ida Darwin" institute where the so-called feeble-minded were locked up, and so on.
A pattern of behavior going back to Piltdown and Bathybius. And even earlier, with, for example, Haeckel announcing and classifying creatures that existed only in his imagination.
...”Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group.
Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket.
“I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.
They got their 15 minutes of fame...before being shot down.
Thank you.
It is the WHOLE skeleton. What an amazing find.
LOL! Needless to say, Creation and ID scientists had this one pegged RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!!!
Thanks for the ping!
In another article, the scientist says it is her daughter’s name.
Ok. It’s 95%. Close enough for government work.
Ida has a tail.
So do rats and cats.
Wonder if Ida was somebody’s lost pet?
Poor thing, lost in the rain-forest.
Thier judgement is clouded to begin with. When you ask an evolutionist about "missing links", he'll say there are no such things, because all fossils are transitionals. And then he'll go back to organizing public-relation campaigns and TV shows about the latest missing link.
Hurum’s hokum.
An article also framed pictures of the daughter and fossil in similar poses to show how the fossil was a young female and make the suggestion both Ida’s were somehow related.
And considering the abuse rec'd, understandable.
You seem very eager to associate Ida with Piltdown Man. Piltdown man was a hoax, a forgery. Do you have any reason to believe Ida is a hoax, or is this just generic anti-evolution mudslinging?
Really? Creation and ID scientists knew right away that instead of a 47-million-year-old fossil of an adapiform primate on the anthropoid line, Ida was a 47-million-year-old fossile of an adapiform primate but not on the anthropoid line? My, that is impressive. And where did they publish those assertions?
A bit of artistic license?
Oh, it took me a second to get it. I’m so dumb.
The daughter is a ‘female’, and the fossil is a ‘female’, therefore they are related.
Makes sense.
>>>But this is all fine science in the tradition of Bathybius and Piltdown.
So carrying forth this fine line of thought, I guess when we have a Tony Alamo and his underage girls, a Jim Bakker with his waterslide and his real-estate frauds, monasteries with enough splinters of the True Cross to build a frontier fort, yadda yadda yadda x 2000 years, then these invalidate Christianity. Or maybe not, after all “this is all fine religion in the tradition of sideshow carneys and false prophets.”
For myself I like the open minded skepticism of genuine science. It is more reliably self-correcting.
Well this is a new twist. An evolutionist who claims evolutionists do not exist. Did you ever hear this before, Fichori?
But I wasn't talking about "a tail".
I think you have the true cross artifacts confounded in your mind with the "hairs of the prophet".
See the nails?
History.
I'm trying to think of one *missing link* earth shaking discovery which has turned out to be as significant as initially claimed and am coming up short.
Discoveries like that should be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism instead naively accepting anything anyone says just because evos want it to be true so bad. It should be treated as a potential hoax, or at the very least, a misidentification until it has been thoroughly and rigorously studied and classified. This bickering among scientists over what to classify it as indicates too much eagerness and not enough caution in labeling it and making the final determination of what it is and where it goes in the evolutionary tree.
It makes the scientific community look like a bunch of gullible fools and destroys their credibility every time they have to backpedal because they over reacted.
For all the evos worry about science's reputation, they do it to themselves. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
You hit the nail on the head - that fossil could be a lizard, a dinosaur, a big rodent, or just about anything with 4 legs and a tail.
Yet, we're supposed to believe "scientists" (read: ivory tower-indoctrinated overedumacated trust-fund-babies) have some special ability to see more in that "fossil" than we FReepers do.
The sheer arrogance is astounding.
No, it can’t be a lizard, or dino, or rodent - not if the words have any meaning.
Why would it be sheer arrogance for someone who has studied bones of various animals all their life to believe that they have more knowledge than most of what the bones of certain animals look like? Wouldn’t the sheer arrogance belong to someone who hasn’t done any such study and yet believes that they know as much as people who have?
It would hardly be astounding arrogance for a plumber with years of experience to believe that he knows more about plumbing than most. It would be astounding arrogance for me who hasn’t spent a second on plumbing work to think I know as much as plumbers.
Yes. In looking at the picture I also notice something else.
It looks like a caveman took his club and bashed Ida's head in.
Looks more like a dead monkey. Though it is hard to tell with it's skull all crushed like that.
“Well this is a new twist. An evolutionist who claims evolutionists do not exist. Did you ever hear this before, Fichori?”Well, that is a new one I believe.
I'm trying to think of one *missing link* earth shaking discovery which has turned out to be as significant as initially claimed and am coming up short.
I asked why you (well, not you, but you answered) were suggesting Ida was a hoax, not why it might not be "as significant as intitially claimed." As the article shows, lots of "evos" also question its significance. But as far as I know, no one's suggesting it's not actually a 47-my-old primate fossil, which is what the continual "Piltdown" drumbeat implies.
It should be treated as a potential hoax,
Why? I remember Coyoteman used to ask anti-evolutionists to come up with a list of 5 hoaxes out of all the fossils we've found, and he'd spot you Piltdown Man. Nobody ever came up with 4 other demonstrable hoaxes. And yet you act like it happens all the time and say it should color any announcement of a fossil find.
Here is a link to a better article written about Ida.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005723
It turns out there are two ‘halves’ to the Ida fossil find.
The other half, which has been around for a while, was extensively ‘faked’.
See the link in post 46.
That doesn’t mean this new half is also fake, but it makes one think twice.
Silly science defender. Years of study and hands-on experience count for nothing compared to what you can see in a 460-pixel photo on a website.
I've wondered before if any of the anti-evolutionists here do anything themselves that requires training or expertise, because they seem so quick to discount it in science.
The way I read it, the smaller half was found first, and missing pieces were reconstructed. I suppose you can call that "faked" if you want, but there's still no evidence of an intention to deceive. In fact, if you compare the reconstructions to the actual skeleton, you can see they got pretty darn close, and in any case weren't trying to make it seem like more than it is.
Then when the larger half was found, they realized it went with the other half and contained that parts that had been reconstructed before. There are no reconstructed parts in the current specimen.
His request was for five hoaxes in fossil finds specific to man, not all fossils.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2172003/posts?page=200#200
Name five genuine frauds/hoaxes in hominid evolution or stop making your claim. Again, I'll spot you Piltdown Man, a true hoax.
Now come up with four more examples of frauds or hoaxes with the fossils in hominid evolution.
Can't you guys ever be honest in your posts? He asked for 5 hoaxes in HOMIND evolution. And he asked for five in HOMINID evolution, because he knew that there weren't five outright deliberate frauds/hoaxes in HOMINID evolution.
Which proves nothing. Neither does it address the sloppy and careless classification that these scientists engage in on what appears to be a regular basis.
Why should it be treated as a potential hoax? Because there have been other hoaxes in evolution. Because there's been other frauds in science in general.
So that it can be as investigated as carefully as possible and caution used in making an announcement of its significance so that scientists aren't sucked in AGAIN and end up making fools of themselves AGAIN. Because every time that happens, their credibility is compromised.
What's wrong with approaching it with the healthy skepticism that it could be a potential hoax? It's a little too convenient that the fossil is so well preserved - kind of like archaeoraptor that scientists got burned on.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
I honestly can't believe that I'm being criticized by an evo for suggesting that scientists approach something that has the potential to be so significant in their eyes with a healthy dose of skepticism and caution.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.