Question:
Has the increased number of fossils attributed to the human “family tree” settled the question among evolutionary experts as to when and how humans evolved from apelike creatures?
Answer:
No. In fact, the opposite is true. When it comes to how these fossils should be classified, Robin Derricourt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, wrote in 2009:
“Perhaps the only consensus now is that there is no consensus.”
In 2007 the science journal Nature published an article by the discoverers of another claimed link in the evolutionary tree, saying that nothing is known about when or how the human line actually emerged from that of apes.
Gyula Gyenis, a researcher at the Department of Biological Anthropology, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, wrote in 2002:
“The classification and the evolutionary place of hominid fossils has been under constant debate.”*
This author also states that the fossil evidence gathered so far brings us no closer to knowing exactly when, where, or how humans evolved from apelike creatures
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I believe that the more the scientific community tries to attribute fossils to early humans, the more they harm their own argument as each of these so called discoveries do not hold up to true scientific scrutiny.
these fake discoveries only support creationism.
Unfortunately, those who would choose to be atheist cannot allow them selves to believe otherwise so they continue in self imposed ignorance and lead others on the same journey.
Recent fossil discoveries and genetic studies have confirmed more so than before that humans evolved from Apes and in fact are a type of Ape. The Family Tree of humans and apes has been more 'bush-like' than it was 20 or 50 years ago, as we have become aware of an even wider variety of human-like relatives.
Odd that you'd complain that the fossil record (and genetics and science) has brought us 'no closer to knowing', when the alternative would be what exactly, creationism? That gets us absolutely no where with anything, it's been shown wrong on every count.
Derrincourt seems to be a social anthropologist, the type who critique social theory from an anti-imperialist perspective. Hardly a friend of creationism. Why the quote mining?
Did you read Derrincourt's article, from which that quote comes, or did you just see some other dumb creationist post it? Derrincourt is not arguing against evolution, or anything like it, they are making a social critique of what Derrincourt seems to believe is 'imperialist, western' science.
Dr. Gyenis also does not support creationism in anyway. So if they're 'right' (according to you) that fossils have made things more confusing, they must also be right that humans evolved from apes, and that biblical creationism is BS.
Why the distortion, why the lies?
Not that I'm aware of.
Somewhere in Wikipedia there is a list of 17 or 19 fossil species that can be shown to be in the direct line or close to it.
However fossils have never been the main evidence for biological evolution. In the 1800s it was close and very detailed comparisons between the anatomy of different but similar species. This actually goes back thousands of years, but gained detailed evidence by about 1750 with the publication of the Linnaeus classification of plants.
Early in the 1800s Lamarck in France suggested that organisms inherited characteristics acquired by their parents. This turned out to be wrong but the idea of inheritance was there, which Darwin expanded on in 1858. Darwin speculated that there were units of inheritance but he never did enough of the experimental work needed to confirm or refute that.
What he did not know was that much of that work had already been done over 7 years by a Bohemian monk called Mendel. Mendel's work was forgotten until 1900 when it was rediscovered, repeated, confirmed and extended. By 1910 it was clear that Mendel was right and Darwin's guess was correct too. Those units are now called genes.
Since 1976 the development of different methods of chemical analysis of DNA has shown without any reasonable doubt that not only are human and chimp DNA close to identical they also contain the remains of several retro-virus infections in exactly the same places in the genomes. The chances of this being by accident are something like 1 in 10^80.
So who cares about fossils? it has always been genetics and it still is.
This is an example of a surplus of findings.
It--so far, and will probably always be the case--cannot categorically be shown that specific fossils of early hominids were directly ancestral to modern humans.
That is because new candidate fossils are always being found, but it is possible that all of those fossil hominids are our cousins and not in the direct line to us, and that fossils of the actual hominid ancestors of modern humans have yet to, and perhaps will never, be found.
Be that as it may, those candidate fossils are close enough to what our actual lineage would be that they can be considered representative of our lineage.
In that light, your quotes are reasonable, but they are hardly evidence against the evolution of humans and they certainly were not made to discount such evidence.
[Edit. And you can be sure that the quotes you copy and pasted from lying creationist web sites were taken out of context.]
The fact is that all of the evidence is for evolution, including human, and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for myth-based creationism, which is why the promoters of creationism are forced to resort to lies and gross misrepresentation of the facts.
Added
And lay creationists continue to show that they know nothing about evolution and its evidence, and that they gullibly believe what they find in lying creationist web sites.
>>"After all this time there is no human family tree. Even the die hard believers in evolution have commented on the surprising lack of evidence for early hominids."
What are these, chopped liver?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/hominids.h...
>>"these fake discoveries only support creationism."
The only thing that supports creationism is the gullibility of its believers.
>>"No, there is no proven transitional fossils found of any animal type, or man."
See the above link. And also those in Source, below.
>>"Apparently they even found a "Neanderthal man" wearing chain mail armor once in early 1900's. Of course they covered that up and don't speak of such things now days."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/armor.html
Added
And fossils show only part of the story. Not only are human and ape genomes very similar, there is this tidbit.
About fifty years ago, when it was first noted that apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have 23, the creationists subsequently pounced upon that as evidence against the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with the apes. The evolutionary scientists, however, using evolutionary theory and an understanding of genetic modification, proposed that two of the chromosomes must have joined together in the line that led to man from the common ancestor, thus reducing the chromosome number.
That prediction has been verified with the results of the recent human and chimp genome projects. It was found that human chromosome 2 is the result of the joining of two chromosomes that have homologues in the chimp. The decoding of the genomes revealed that human chromosome 2 has a stretch of non-functioning telomere coding in the exact place it should be if the two chromosomes had joined in the human line from the common ancestor with the apes, and there is also non-functioning coding for a centromere in the exact location where the extra centromere would be as it occurs in one of the homologous chimp chromosomes, as well as a functioning centromere in the same location as in the other homologous chimp chromosome.
Long before the genome projects verified it, this article contained an example of the proposition that two of the ancestral chromosomes joined together to form human chromosome 2. (The link is to an abstract of the article. The full article is available for a fee. Sorry)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/215...
The following site (which is an NIH human genome site), however, does have this statement: "Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes - one less pair than chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and other great apes. For more than two decades, researchers have thought human chromosome 2 was produced as the result of the fusion of two mid-sized ape chromosomes and a Seattle group located the fusion site in 2002."
http://www.genome.gov/13514624
These sites explain the finding of the genome projects.
http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chromosome_2
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html
No creationist pseudo-scientist could make a before-the-fact prediction like that. All they can do is to lie or to make up pseudo-explanations after the fact of the finding.
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Well if what you all believe is true then Asians and Africans should not exist. Does the Bible explain the reason why there is change in our body structure from that of ancient times? Are you that stupid or do you just want to believe something that makes you feel great? There is no proof because it is not always possible to get an answer when things happened MILLIONS of years ago! You have your bible and you say that whatever it says, is true, but you can't ignore the fact that GOD hasn't actually been seen by anyone besides crazy mentally sick people starving for attention! And even if people do say they see God, hear him/her <god is probably a hermaphrodite> Like Joanne de Arc they are killed for hearing the devil. Seriously!!
each and every time I pay attention concensus, i think of that's extra approximately politics than technology. there is lots we don't understand. the reason of that's the sparseness of the fossil checklist. That checklist does help the thought human beings evovled yet there continues to be lots that we don't understand. case in point, we used to have confidence that Neanderthals have been in our ancestry. Then we discovered H. heidelbergensis and others that required the reconsideration of the info. It grew to become out that Neanderthals have been extra of a component branch yet later did upload some genes via hybridization. all of us understand this via DNA info. We even have DNA info of different kinds of human beings such as a results of fact the Denisovans and purple Cave human beings. This info leaves incredibly much little question that human beings evovled besides the indisputable fact that it actual additionally nicely-knownshows that we've lots to examine. in certainty, human beings are apelike creatures. we are the final in an prolonged line of bipedal apes. those are the info. you may call a fowl a dogs in case you like besides the indisputable fact that it nonetheless clucks.
Actually the best explanation is one that would inherently have little evidence. Among the great apes, we are the only ones that can swim. More than that, as land-based animals go, we swim very well and very fast. So the one theory is an aquatic ape living near water or swamps. The problem with this, is that living near such an environment would leave less evidence.
Whatever the case is, I have one question for you.
Why does it matter? I believe the teachings of Christ because the teachings are amazing. He provided the perfect answers to how one should live. Love god with all your heart mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. So I concern myself with how I live my life.
That being the case, why does it matter what you believe occurred so long ago?
One can easily note that Jesus did not talk about such things and focused on how one should learn to love, so why not follow that example?
Fossils only help us flesh out our understanding of the relationship between genetic changes and morphological changes as a species evolves. Even if we didn't have *any* fossils, the genetic data alone would establish evolution as fact, and we would have a rough time line of when the major changes occurred. More importantly, speciation has been directly observed, both in the lab and in nature.
The debate you point to is one of detail, not of the overall picture. it is one *within* science, not one that in any way goes against science.
We already know we have not found the missing link yet you idiot, however the incredible number of different human fossils, each from different time periods only indicated creation is complete BS.
It doesn't bring us closer to knowing, but it doesn't pull us farther either. My beliefs always follow science though, and if science had proof that evolution was false, then I would believe that. But as of right now, there is more proof to support that there was and still is evolution than that to prove that creationism occurred.