Bubba

I heard a new creationist arguement today. The person I was discussing this with (evolskeptic, on creationtalk) said that there were no fossils of great apes at the levels/areas the homminids were found at and thus they were an invalid example of human evolution.

I have no trouble with the idea of Human evolution, I've just never heard this arguement beofre.


Comments, anyone? I post there as Chris H and Tgamle posts there as Homer Simpson.

<a href="http://WWW.Creationtalk.Com" target="_blank">WWW.Creationtalk.Com</a>

Any help would be most appreciated.

BTW, this guy also says Dembski's arguements are mathematically rigorous and as such are good science. If anyone wants to jumnp in for fresh meat... <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> [/LIST]

Amen-Moses

Hominids are great apes!

Amen-Moses

Ergaster

It is a little unclear what he means by this (if you are paraphrasing him correctly). If he means that there are no hominoid fossils found in exactly the same levels at exactly the same sites as hominids, he's right--but so what? Fossil location is not used as evidence for the evolution of humans from apes, so the *lack* of fossil apes in certain locations is not an argument against it.

&lt;brief pause&gt; I finally tracked down the post here he made the claim, and it is even vaguer than you suggest. If all he wants are examples of fossil hominoids at the same time as fossil hominids, he's in luck--Gigantopithecus fossils are found in China from the late Miocene (roughly 8 (?) million years ago) until the mid-Pleistocene--about 500,000 years ago. That time span overlaps with virtually *all* hominid fossils that have ever been found, from Sahelanthropus to Homo erectus.

Of course, that is a relatively meaningless observation from the perspective of the evolution of humans, since nobody thinks that Giganto was related in any way to humans (save the high-level taxonomic fact that *all* hominoids are related to each other--sort of like very distant cousins a few times removed). Gigantopithecus seems to be most closely related to the extant orangs (but certainly not *ancestral* to them--just part of the Eurasian fossil hominoid clade that also includes Sivapithecus, orangs, and Lufengpithecus).

Just from scanning through his posts, it is clear that he really knows very little about evolution of any sort. He's just firing blindly. It's a meaningless argument.

tgamble

He means me.

Neruda

what the hell does that have to do with anything?

Bubba

Tgamble...

1. Sorry for misspelling your name!

And

2. You did a nice job with your response.


I normally don't swear but...

What an utterly fucking idiotic moron this Evolskeptic is. Who in their right mind says that speciation occurs but then denies evolution entirely as a mechanism and then claims evolution isn't even really science?

Thanks to Ergaster for the info on the ape fossils...

Bubba <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

[ November 05, 2002: Message edited by: Bubba ]</p>

Valentine Pontifex

This is hitting a rather common creationist arguement. Indeed the one that seems to been distorted by retelling to many times of one fact commonly mentioned by creationists that really is factually correct. (A rare thing but even they sometimes by dumb luck get something right.) That fact is that there are no fossil chimpanzees or fossil gorillas. Indeed chimps and gorillas really could use their own Leakey! It would be very nice and instructive to have a few fossils so we could know what their ancestors looked like two million years ago.

The implication that the creationists try to make with this observation should be obvious. They are trying to say that no anthropologists wants to call the bones he found a chimp ancestor and hense calls them a human ancestor -- an (alleged by creationists) case of self-delusion.

What the creationists don't understand is that not all enviroments and species are equally likely to have fossilized. Chimpanzees and gorillas live in tropical rain forests -- the jungle. This is not a good location to live in if one wants to be fossilized. If the ancestors of today's chimps and gorillas also lived in such enviroments than it really is not surprising that there is a lack of fossils for their ancestors. It was exceedingly good fortune for the Leakeys that a few million years ago that hominins were living in the savanna and not the jungle. That the hominins (members of the human clade; i.e. on our side of the human-chimp common ancestor) were appearently geographically widespread in Africa helped as well. (Even before any killing by man or loss of habitat caused by man neither chimps or gorillas were not very widespread.) And that the Great Rift Valley in Eastern Africa formed that exposed the rocks of the age of when hominin lived was another stroke of luck.

I can quite easily imagine that in some other Galaxy in a forum much like this one except that the participants look much different than we do, have different biochemistries, and don't have Microsoft there will is much discussion that the likely ancestors of animals closely related to them are plentiful, but that a complete lack of fossils the could be their ancestors.