Missing Link Found Between Human Ancestors 664
simetra writes "Researchers with a University of California, Berkeley team are now saying they have 'proof' of human evolution. Fossils have been found linking two types of pre-human species." From the article: "The remains of eight individuals found in the northeastern Afar region of Ethiopia belonged to the species Australopithecus anamensis -- part of the Australopithecus genus thought to be a direct ancestor to humans, according to a report due to be published Thursday in Nature magazine. 'The fossils are anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis,' he said."
Why Intelligent Design Is Good: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I'm sure that by now my opinion regarding ID and its proponents is well-known, and I'm equally sure that the majority of the Slashdot community are in agreement, but there is one positive thing I can say about ID: it's thrown a spotlight onto the theory of evolution, and has stimulated many concerned people towards a more comprehensive understanding of the theory (as well as a more comprehensive understanding of the word 'theory' as it pertains to science). Also, it seems like there have been some major advances lately...this latest story hot on the heels of the walking fish [news.com.au] discovery, that have gone a long way towards silencing the detractors of evolution. Whether these advances are truly happening at a faster pace than in the past, or said advances are merely being perceived as such due to the increased attention evolution has been getting of late, is difficult to say...but the central point remains that the theory of evolution and the theory of ID have both been placed under the harsh light of truth, and it is ID, not evolution, that is shrivelling away.
ID has done quite a bit of harm to the minds of young people, but by virtue of the controversy, it has also done some good. Think of it as...well...evolution in action.
Anyway, this latest news is great....now I finally have something solid to point to when my fundie friends stick their fingers in their ears and chant 'missing link! missing link!'.
Rationality will triumph....it's just going to take us longer than we'd like.
Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, FP?
Will the media stop calling them missing links? (Score:5, Insightful)
The name "missing link" implies there is a problem with evolution, and this "link" solves it, when this is in fact not the case. There will always be gaps in the fossil record, and we should not call every discovery that happens to be within one of those gaps a "missing link".
As is always said, creationists love the discovery of "missing links", since every time one is discovered, the original gap is replaced by two new ones.
In all seriousness though (Score:4, Insightful)
It's cool that they discovered this but it won't change the debate.
Re:Suuuuure they are (Score:5, Insightful)
Would anyone say a metallurgist has an anti-Christian bias?
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Good: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you tell someone "This is the truth" then what you get is someone who believes what he hears. If you show someone how to find the truth, what you get is someone who can make his own descision about what he is told.
You see this every day with stupid lawsuits from people whining because they weren't told that something could be dangerous, when the ability to think rationally and apply logic to a situation should have made that obvious!
I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well and... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is this hesitancy that ruins your Karma (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Good: (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, we've had transitional fossils for a long time, and we keep discovering them. In 1861 we found Archaeopteryx, a bird with feathers and wings like a modern bird, but a long bony tail, clawed fingers, and teeth, like a dinosaur. In the 1880s we found birds that are intermediate between Archaeopteryx and modern birds, such as Hesperornis, which has a short tail and a beak at the tip of the jaws, but retains teeth (it's not an ancestor of modern birds since it was a flightless diver, but it's closer to modern birds than most other Cretaceous birds). In recent years, we've found fossils intermediate between Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx, such as the Chinese Confuciusornis. It's still not clear if we have anything that more-or-less neatly plugs the gap between Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis(though Jeholornis could be such a creature), but sooner or later, we'll find that. Another good example is whale evolution. Just twenty years ago we had virtually no good primitive fossil whales, now we've got things like Ichthyolestes, Ambulocetus, Kutchicetus and soforth, and it's turned into a textbook case of a major adaptive transition from the land to the sea. As for human evolution, well, insofar as you can "prove" anything in human evolution, it was proven a long time ago by discoveries such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Yes, these latest discoveries are important, but in the big picture, they just a few more large boulders added to what long ago became a mountain of evidence.
Re:Oh, but that's just microevolution, you see (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, sure, that's what they say.. but every time I ask if they've got a few billion years while I demonstrate, they suddenly lose interest!
Philosophical Underpinnings (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue at stake is to teach rational and sound thought in learning rather than as another poster said "fact after fact". Teaching critical thinking is just another term for teaching philosophy, and while you don't want to teach a straight mythology, you do want to consider the limitations of scientific inquiry, which intelligent design delineates quite starkly and with a fairly good rational model to step off from.
Considering Intelligent Design forces us to not take for granted the philosophical underpinnings of current scientific inquiry. Why is this important? Because science is not philosophy, but depends on a philosophical framework that can be exploited by politics and religion. Knowing this can make us more aware of the exploitation and more resilient to its efforts to sway public opinion.
Re:In all seriousness though (Score:4, Insightful)
While I am a scientist, I also believe in God, and that was partially my point in the original post, albeit glibly stated. The amazing thing about the creationists and the fundies is that there is no allowance for thought. Look, we have been given the gift of choice and the gift of intellect so that we can question and discover the wonder of the universe through science. Nothing out there says that God/Allah/Yahweh/Jehova etc...etc...etc... cannot work through science. Of course this is partially the deal that ID folks want to play up, but the problem with their perspective is that they *are* blinded by preconceived notions rather than allowing themselves the dangerous and subversive prospect of questioning and thinking for themselves.
For my part, I don't care what people decide to believe or not as long as they don't tell me what I have/should believe. More importantly, there are fundamental issues related to education and economic development and freedom that are dependent upon having a basic understanding of how things work scientifically and mathematically. To cripple education through the agenda that the ID folks are proposing is doing a disservice to us all.
Re:In all seriousness though (Score:3, Insightful)
Gravity is also a theory. I wonder why people aren't arguing that God just will objects in place.
Re:It is this hesitancy that ruins your Karma (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod parent up! Big time... Seriously, yes, there are mod abuses that are a fact here on Slashdot. In fact, I just got modbombed by somebody who did not agree with me regardless of whether or not what I had to say contributed. However, if your contributions are worthy and help to inform the audience here, then your Karma in the long run will not suffer.
Re:Suuuuure they are (Score:5, Insightful)
The facts have an anti-fundamentalist bias.
Re:Naww... (Score:4, Insightful)
What they have done, though, is to create two new gaps.
Proof? (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps I've been going about experimentation and research wrong, or it only applies to the scope of my own fields of study, but I thought theories were either supported or disproved. Proof is completely valid, accepted as true. It's always a bit of a stretch to use it in science.
It can be more of flamebait in a way. A news article cites findings and exclaims proof only to instigate an argument with the other side. More flock to it.
Anyhow, I don't want to detract from this interesting article. I just found it a poor choice of words for an article related to science. Definitive proof will always be elusive, but I'm glad to see we're still headed on the right track for evolution.
Re:Well and... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always thought one of the best portrayals of this is the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. If you look carefully at the dynamics of the relationship between Jesus and the Apostles, Jesus is growing increasingly frustrated that the people closest to him just don't get it; so much so that he begins to lose faith himself in the path he's on, and has to seek reassurance that any of his message will survive.
Those people who "don't get it" are the ones who wrote the New Testament. It's even worse with the Old Testament, where the documents we have now are even farther removed from what was written closer to the time of the events described, and in some cases represents written transcription of tales told by word of mouth.
It is likely (and I'm of the opinion that God doesn't exist, but I'm setting that aside for this discussion) that everything in the Bible is simply a bunch of flawed humans trying to get their minds around stuff they didn't really understand, and then it got translated and retranslated and mistranslated and untranslated and other words I can't be arsed to make up at the moment, and doesn't represent what people actually SAW or were told at all. This is possible without being any kind of evidence for or against the existence of God.
So, let's not confuse Creationism with Religion. The one comes from the other, but the two are not the same thing, and invalidation of the one doesn't speak to the other.
That's where this all started (Score:3, Insightful)
Name your species -- whales, domestic dogs, cattle, modern antelope, sharks, squid, tapeworms, whatever -- and the fossil history won't be perfect but it'll be substantial. Darwin's insight was to explain the mechanism for change between one species and another -- but in terms of physical evidence, "Have we found many other 'missing links'?" is a no-brainer, because even back then the evidence was piling up.
The whole set of events that resulted in Darwin's Origin of Species was all about the enormous new body of evidence for species changing over time. Between the geology of Darwin's day, which showed the earth was of much greater antiquity than had been thought, and the colossal fossil finds that were happening, naturalists were presented with a raft of examples of transitional species: dinosaurs of course, but also all manner of species like fossil camels, burly "terror birds," and on and on. They were presented with overwhelming examples of species evolving, but they had to get their heads around the evidence to explain how things had happened.
And yeah, that does mean creationist objections to evolution have things exactly backwards when they talk about no evidence being there. Evolutionary theory started with evidence piling up to the point where it had to be explained.
The news just doesn't go crazy when someone finds a new fossil shark tooth, and it does play up the hominid remains. That's the only reason you had this idea.
"Proof" = Grandstanding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Count the number of times they use language like "proved", and also words like "for the first time", "unambiguous", "It is the only place in the world",
This is not the language of careful scientists. These are people touting themselves, their research and their region in spectacular ways. It is grandstanding. It may be that the results are valid, but I think we have every right to be skeptical until other scientists weigh in.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop! (Score:3, Insightful)
Science it is not, theory it is not, hypothesis it may be but as a hypothesis it is by design untestable and therefore
Re:Philosophical Underpinnings (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply the understanding that science is not set in stone like some religious text would allow for greater rational thought than the way science is currently taught. With some luck it would limit the current metaphysical nonsense that has encroached itself on science in recent times (like in "What the Bleep"). Simply illustrating sound thought in science classes are not enough to keep the general public from having increasing beliefs in superstitions as ridiculous as ghosts and astrology. [findarticles.com] More needs to be done at the root of the problem.
Re:Well and... (Score:3, Insightful)
For some unknown reason, a particular sect of christians has decided to pick a fight with a body of facts and conclusions about those facts (instead of wisely ignoring this non-conflict).
Historically, when you mix faith and science- faith loses. Because you -can- measure pie is not "3", because you -can- point to measurable, duplicatable hard edged -facts-, and because the bloody earth goes -around- the bloody Sun.
Faith is important to people. Having faith makes a lot of them happy. Having faith allows a lot more of them to at least endure. So why walk into the buzzsaw of facts repeatedly?
Re:Cease fire... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, "the theory of gravity" is a theory because we don't know how it works. We have theories. Some of those show merit, and are actively being examined scientifically. It may be "as close to fact as we have", but that's not saying anything. We could have almost nothing, and that would still be "as close to fact as we have".
The fact that objects fall toward the earth and other large bodies happens and is not the "theory" bit. No one is disputing that things fall. If you examine the scientific history of various theories of gravity, though, you will see a lot of dispute.
Would you say gravity waves or spacial distortion are indisputable fact? What about HG Wells-era gravity "rays," or the Dilbert theory of gravity as the expanding universe?
Fact: things fall. Theory: gravity waves.
Fact: we are here. Theory: evolution.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Good: (Score:3, Insightful)
Come now. You suggest that the capacity to know how to think has been beaten out of children by their own parents. You mean, those same parents who send their children off to be instructed by strangers at an institution where the curriculum is determined by bureaucrats and business interests? Where they are interrupted every 45 minutes by a signal indicating when it's time to think about something different? Where they learn the skills they need to "get a good job" working for sombody else?
You don't watch TV, do you. If you did, you would notice the incessant ADHD-inducing interruptions every five minutes where we all get advertised to. In whose interest is it that we all think for ourselves? What kind of consumer thinks for himself? What kind of marketing campaign works on people who know how to think for themselves? How can a mass-production economy possibly work?
When the tides of "education" were turning in America, President Wilson stated that we don't need any more smart people, only highly skilled people. You see, it's a competition. We have to be better than China, better than India, better than everyone. Knowledge is now an economy. We don't learn for the mere human interests of mind and soul. We serve the social machines of business and government.
I guess parents are to be blamed for a part of that equation, but it's hard to see it when there is an "invisble hand" of economy pushing everything to its inevitable commoditized conclusion. We are born into a mindless culture and yet we want to blame our parents because we're stupid. We need to look back further than that.
Law vs theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Your link is missing. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well and... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then there's words that no longer mean the same thing - if I said "you're gay" in the 1940s, I would mean you're happy. Today, I'd mean you're a homosexual. Even if the language is essentially dead (e.g. Latin), who's to say that the meaning didn't change between the time the text was written and the language dying?
No mistakes are allowed? I think not - I can't think of a great example from the Torah offhand, but a great example of interpretation problems is the tiny piece of Islamic Qu'ran that refers to jihad - viewed from a radical standpoint, it means dying killing your enemies by any means will bring you to heaven (which is justification for suicide attacks). Taken from context (and a more moderate view), it means if you die in battle against invaders to protect your families and home you will go to heaven. Depending on interpretation, you've got two radically different meanings for the same passage.