Quetzal

A correspondent of mine, Andya Primanda, a Moslem biologist (evolutionist but also religious) from Indonesia has been hammering Harun Yahya (or the committee of creationists going under the name) in print and on the 'net. Andya wrote a web article specifically attacking the HY creationist misinformation about Sahelanthropus tchadensis. He has now been attacked in print <a href="http://www.harunyahya.com/70reply_andya_primanda.php" target="_blank">here</a>. He has asked for some help in countering the HY types. Because of his location, (Jakarta) the only sources he has access to easily are internet-based. Any references, articles, etc would be greatly appreciated.

Here is <a href="http://liquid2k.com/traduza/humevol1.htm" target="_blank">Andya's original article</a>. Interested parties can either respond on this thread, or on the original "help me" thread on <a href="http://www.evcforum.net/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000018.html" target="_blank">evcforum, here</a>. Thanks in advance.

Ergaster

Whew! This could get complicated. I've just read about half a page of the link, and already I can see more misunderstandings than can easily be addressed in a couple of posts. If you leave it with me, I'll print out the relevant pages and gather up the original articles and some personal correspondence and see if I can distill something.

One thing should be made clear, though: despite all the preliminary announcements and press folderole, there is *far* from consensus that this really is a hominin (i.e. definitely more closely related to humans than to other apes). But note--this does not mean that it *isn't*, just that at the moment, nobody can really tell. The skull is distorted, which makes assessing the relative positions of any of the basicranial features problematic; nevertheless, from my own eyeballing, I cannot find that the foramen magnum is actually very far forward (in relation to the bitympanic line, which is the general landmark). But since I was examining a photograph of a distorted skull, that may not mean anything. (-:

Quetzal

A million thanks, Ergaster. I knew I could count on the scientists and experts of II for help! You're the best!

Ergaster

Here's an initial offering (I didn't want you to wait too long). Basically, I have looked at HY's initial page on the Toumai skull, and followed it by an examination of AP's response. In a separate post I'll deal with HY's response to Andya's response.

---------------------------------------------

There is nothing very unusual about the original Yahya page ("New Fossil Discovery Sinks Evolutionary Theories") in that it consists of the typical mélange of gross oversimplifications, strawmen, wishful thinking, and ignorance that we have become so fond of from creationists. It's all standard stuff--he makes declarations with no supporting evidence, invents fictional evolutionary "theories" and then demolishes them, and quote-mines freely while completely misunderstanding or ignoring the actual meaning of the quoted passages. None of the sources he uses include the original article (which was available for free for a time on the Nature website), so anything he claims about the skull has come from second-hand commentaries.

I assume that the phrase "stooped posture just like other apes" is supposed to mean that australos did not habitually walk upright, which is, of course, false. HY cites no references, possibly because every study done in the last 30 or so years has shown that australos were unequivocally and unambiguously bipeds, even if the manner of their bipedalism is not entirely clear. It is irrelevant if they did not walk exactly like modern humans do, because, of course, australos were not modern humans, and no evolutionist has ever claimed they were.

HY seems to be trying to give the impression that evolutionists think apes and humans are related because of the mere presence of similarities, but of course this is completely erroneous. Evolutionists know that humans and apes are closely related because of decades of work that has already been done, in a huge variety of different fields that are quite independent of human evolution. HY also clearly fails to understand the nature of science and does not realize that science proceeds by building on the knowledge that has gone before, even if that means we need to revise our ideas in the face of new information. Declaring that human evolution is "false" because we have learned that old ideas about it are erroneous is ignorance of the highest degree. HY seems to think that the "ladder" version is still correct and everyone else is wrong, despite the fact that the "ladder" has been proven to be the wrong model in many lineages of organisms, not just humans. He is perfectly entitled to his opinion, of course, but he is not entitled to complain when educated people laugh at him.

HY also manages to entirely misunderstand what his sources are actually saying. It might be misleading to assert that he is "misquoting"--technically, he is not because he did get all of the words in the right order; what HY completely failed to do, of course, is attribute the correct meaning to the words quoted, but it is unclear whether this is from dishonesty or ignorance.

For example, the Bernard Wood quotes are quite correct. HY apparently is trying to make a point by emphasizing the sentence "Now human evolution looks like a bush", but even that is true--the human evolutionary tree *does* look like a bush. But so what? As we have seen, only HY seems to think this is a problem; everyone else is perfectly aware of what Wood means by this.

However, his interpretation of Henry Gee is completely off the mark, but the reasons are rather complex and require the reading of Gee's book In Search of Deep Time to fully understand why. But in short, Gee is *not* admitting (or even implying) that evolution does not happen or that common descent is not true, he is emphasizing that the "ladder" or "chain" idea of evolution is false and misleading (this is an image that Stephen Jay Gould also used to rail about, so it is not a new complaint by any means), and that a proper understanding of evolution requires the realization it does not proceed in a linear, one-species-after-another fashion, but that many closely-related species usually exist at the same time. Because of this, it is usually impossible to determine an ancestor from a very close cousin (they will look very much alike), and Gee insists that the focus in paleontology should be on reconstructing the pattern of relationships instead of worrying about which species is ancestral to which other. The best we'll be able to do with fossil hominids is to claim varying degrees of kinship rather than trace a direct line from one fossil to another (it is the best we can do with pretty well any other group of organisms, be they horses or dinosaurs). As we have seen, the "bush" concept of evolution and speciation is apparently beyond HY's grasp, so he continues to beat a strawman.

There is probably no need to comment on his use of Jonathan Wells as a source....


Now, on to Primanda's rebuttal. I hate to have to agree with HY (in their reply to AP), but Andya does seem to have missed the mark. He is not wrong in most of his facts--please be clear about that--but he was apparently aiming at a slightly different target. I'll just restrict myself to some of the problems I saw.

Firstly, HY is correct in one thing--the "human-like" features of Toumai were identified by Brunet et al. and not first by HY. HY certainly misunderstood the significance of these, but still, it is not HY's claim, but the discoverer's. I note that AP has referenced the Brunet et al. article, so I am surprised he did not catch this. At any rate, it seems to have led to a subsequent discussion on AP's part that is actually rather peripheral to the (entirely trivial) claims in HY's article on Sahelanthropus.

The thick supraorbital torus is considered by Brunet et al., to be a derived feature, and not a primitive one, since they compare it to that of Pleistocene Homo erectus. Although the foramen magnum position has received a lot of emphasis in commentaries, its significance is played down in the original article, as is the question of whether it was bipedal. Brunet et al's conclusion on bipedalism is a definite "maybe". The position of the f.m. is in fact difficult to ascertain, since the basicranium is distorted and the f.m. shape and position are out of whack. Not only that, but the nuchal plane is very long, which will reflect on the position of the f.m (Hawks pers. comm.) The short face and low prognathism are a couple of the more intriguing features, but alas the photo provided in Brunet et al. is oriented way off the Frankfurt horizontal, so it makes direct comparisons with most other hominid photos problematic. AP does not mention just how he oriented the hominid outlines in relation to Sahelanthropus, and even though he mentions a comparison with A. afarensis in the text, I did not see a corresponding figure. Given the orientation of the original photo, I'm not sure that these outline comparisons actually accomplish anything meaningful.

AP is quite correct when he points out that HY misinterpreted both Wood and Gee, although unfortunately AP also mischaracterized Gee's opinion. I have not read Gee's comment in the Guardian, but in his book In Search of Deep Time he makes it quite clear that he does *not* subscribe to the view that every organism is a "missing link" or transitional. On page 45 he says: "They [fossil hominids] were neither missing links nor transitional forms: they existed in their own right, not as staging posts..." (I happen to disagree with him, because I think one can legitimately identify morphological transitions in the fossil record, even if they are not phylogenetic ones, but of course, the issue is not what I believe or Yahya believes, but what Gee means). HY's problem is that he wants to insist that evolution depends on the linear model, which renders his objections and interpretations ridiculous and based on nothing but ignorance and fantasy.

And just as a postscript: Mayr's idea is interesting, but a little off the mark. Firstly, Homo rudolfensis simply is not as distinctive as Mayr seems to think it is; in fact, there are really very few features that link it to the Homo clade to the exclusion of the australos, and in many ways it is quite australo-like (it certainly isn't "far more advanced"). However, this is actually what we would expect to see if H. rudolfensis is a very early member of the genus Homo--it should not look very distinctive, but should retain rather a lot of primitive features. And with the discovery of Kenyanthropus platyops, there may in fact be an australopithecine-grade east African ancestral population from which it derives (though not a large one). The plot thickens.

I will address HY's reply to AP later. Even if Andya's aim was slightly off, his reply *was* valuable because it provided HY with even more rope to hang himself with.

Ref:

Gee, Henry. 1999. In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life. New York: The Free Press, 267 pp.


[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: Ergaster ]</p>

Dr.GH

At the time of the original anouncement I sent B. Woods a rather angry email about his sloppy use of overly excited language. His reply was that creationists were an American proplem. I sent him a copy of Harun Yahya's latest. Woods is prominantly cited.

Quetzal

Ergaster: Outstanding comments. May I have your permission to repost your comments on evcforum (with attribution and linkback)?

Dr. GH: Did you ever back from Woods?

Ergaster

Certainly you may link to it. Hopefully I'll be able to post the rest today.

Wood is often quoted by creationists, but his comments about creationism being an "American problem" are a bit odd, considering that he is at George Washington University in DC.

Dr.GH

Here is the exchange with some slight editing. On rereading it I would ammend my one-liner assesment. But. It still boils down to "Not my problem."

...'I am afraid the problem is not the science, but the 'right wing Christian forces in the US'.
Are you seriously suggesting one should obscure the implications of the evidence because some of your countrymen choose to interpret those implications for their own purposes.
Then they, the creationists, really have won the battle.
Think about it. Evolution is not a neat, marketable hypothesis.
B
Bernard Wood
Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins,
Anthropology Department
George Washington University

B
On Friday, July 19, 2002, at 01:55 AM, Gary Hurd wrote:


Congratulations, You have given creationists some thing better to chat about than the recent paper by Woese.

As an anthropologist who spends a great deal of time trying to educate the general public, I do wish that you (and others) would spend a moment in consideration of how religious-fundamentalists/creationists will use your sloppy use of language. For example:

<a href="http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/A0021434.html" target="_blank">http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/A0021434.html</a>

This is just your Nature article as used by creationists. It is no doubt very aggrandizing for Nature to request a commentary, I don't receive calls from Nature. I do request that those of you who do respond spend a moment to consider how your provocative comments will be abused politically by the far right wing Christian forces in the US.

Gary S. Hurd, Ph.D.

[ November 01, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]</p>

Quetzal

Gentle "bump" to keep the topic alive - it sorta seems to have drifted off the bottom of the page. Again, thanks to all who've responded. Ergaster - your first post was well received. Thanks...

Ergaster

Urk! Now I feel guilty!

Sorry for the delay--some stuff came up and I sorta got distracted. I'll try to get back to work on it.