Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Biased Reporting on Evolution

Lately there has been a spate of newspaper stories in the US and in the UK about evolution. The most recent touts the 47 million year old fossil (Darwinius masillae) found in Germany as the transition between flying lemurs and the human species. There are few fossils from this period as complete as this discovery and what has been found is so limited that such a conclusion can't be drawn. Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist, explains, "From this time period there are very few fossils, and they tend to be an isolated tooth here or maybe a tailbone there. So you can't say a whole lot of what that [type of fossil] represents in terms of evolutionary history or biology."

It is incredible that anyone could believe this fiction about Ida, "the missing link". They do so in ignorance. They are unaware that human fossils and mining tools dating between 80,000 and 100,000 years ago have been found in the Lebombo Mountains of southern Africa, suggesting that the macroevolutionary timeline simply doesn't fit the data.

The earliest human fossils show a range of anatomical features yet all these features are found among humans today. There are the nearly complete skulls of people who lived 160,000 years ago, which in the words of paleontologist Tim White, are "like modern-day humans in almost every feature."

Then there was this brainless report on RNA which attempted to prove that life on earth evolved from a primordial soup (the convergence theory). The reporter failed miserably to explain the mechanism for this and instead raised a lot of eyebrows about the reporter's competency to report on chemistry and genetics.

The newspapers have done a poor job of presenting the facts. None have attempted to present the case for convergence evolution objectively. These reporters seem unaware that macroevolutionists are debating among themselves the lack of documentation.

To read something of what geneticists and anthropologists are saying, go here.

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