Camaban

<a href="http://news.christiansunite.com/religion/religion02357.shtml" target="_blank">http://news.christiansunite.com/religion/religion02357.shtml</a>

Unfortuenately, I'm still a beginner, so don't have the experience nessecary to go through and find each point (and argue it properly)

Bubba

Given Wells previous intellectual honesty with stuff like the evolution of viruses and so forth I don't put much credibility in his answers.

Besides, he offers no valid reason why it is not a precursor to modern humans.

Bubba

Camaban

thanks

Albion

Good grief, that article called Wells one of the leading thinkers in the intelligent design movement! Almost enough to make you feel sorry for the intelligent design movement. Almost.

Camaban, Wells's scientific credentials are in molecuar and cell biology. This does not make him any sort of authority on fossils, All the points he's making are (to be generous) philosophical. He's demanding that IF evolution were true we should see THIS and THIS and THIS, and I have no idea where he's getting that from. Science doesn't decide upfront what MUST happen and then stick to the script regardless, it goes where the data take it.

Dr Rick

From the mouth of Wells:

<strong> "In the absence of sufficient evidence that humans originated by an unguided natural process, it is quite reasonable (indeed MORE reasonable) for Christians to affirm that human beings were created by design, in the image of God," Wells said.</strong>

In other words, sky-daddy belief is the default position for Wells: he doesn't hold religious superstition to any evidentiary standard and rejects all evidence that contradicts his "reasonable" beliefs as "insufficient." One could use such reasoning to argue against evidence for a round instead of flat Earth and be no more wrong than Wells is here.

<strong>"Darwinian evolution, to a large extent, is simply applied materialistic philosophy: It assumes from the start that humans originated through purely material causes, rather than any sort of divine creation."</strong>

Yeah, that's pesky ole' science, all right; always seeking "materialistic" rather than "divine" explanations to explain stuff. That's why we now live in a world with 747's and the internet instead of one wrought by Bubonic plaque and the Inquisition.

Rick

Albion

You know, I'm surprised they let Wells off the leash long enough to take part in ID-versus-evolution debates. The more he writes about ID being a manifestation of the Christian God, the more he's making the IDists look like a bunch of hypocrites with their "the nature of the Designer - sorry, designer - is irrrelevant" while they try to shoehorn ID into the school curriculum. I mean, I'm not saying they aren't hypocrites, but I don't see how they can be happy about having it announced quite so publicly. He's providing good ammunition for the evolution side in these debates.

Valentine Pontifex

Wells is not a Christian (at least not in the strict sense) but is rather part of the Unification Church who dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism because Rev. Moon asked it of him.

Albion

Yes, I know, but that hasn't stopped him yapping on about God and Christians in this article. Just when the IDists are trying to be all sweet innocence about it, too.

Ergaster

There is very little in there worth responding to. He didn't raise any *scientific* points against the find, and the non-scientific points are trivial.

The first paragraph: NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--A chimpanzee-like skull in size and shape, a large brow akin to a gorilla and some human-like teeth -- all features of the latest archaeological find, named "Toumai" -- do not enhance the cause of Darwinian evolution.

implies that biologists are still looking for "proof" of evolution. They are not. A find like this is valuable because it helps to fill in missing details about the mode and trajectory of human evolution, not whether humans evolved. That latter has not been a question for a long long time.

Further along, Wells says: "The most important issue is whether human beings originated accidentally, by an unguided natural process that did not have us in mind, or by design, through a creative act of God," said Wells, who holds Ph.D. degrees in religious studies from Yale University and in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley.


which is nonscientific and irrelevant to the question of what this fossil means to the scientific community. He completely fails to address that question. Wells' problem is that he hates materialism, not evolution per se.

Farther down, he says: In the case of this latest fossil, Wells noted that "its discoverers claim that Toumai is part of our lineage rather than the lineage of gorillas or chimpanzees. Meanwhile, we are left with NO fossils of ancient chimpanzees; the chimpanzee fossil record is empty. This leads me to suspect that Toumai's discoverers were too eager to find human ancestors and too willing to overlook the possibility that their discovery may have nothing at all to do with human origins."

which actually contains some accurate information. It is true that the chimp and gorilla fossil records are non-existent, but he is extremely wrong in his implication that researchers do not want to find them. In fact, researchers are quite eager to find them; other fossils before now have been heralded as ancestral gorillas, but have failed the evidence test. And that is what it comes down to: if this new find is on the chimp or gorilla line rather than the hominin line, the evidence will let us know. It may take some time, though.

Much of the rest of the article is old hat in spirit and is repeated ad nauseum in his book Icons of Evolution. There are some excellent and detailed rebuttals to his arguments from that book all over the web, if you want to get into details. Start with Talk Origins and Nik Tamzek's review.