In response to my post which referred to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record as one of the most powerful arguments against evolution, Dan asks “…what would you say to those who point to ‘Nebraska Man’ or ‘Neandertal Man?’ Arn’t these transitional forms reliable? Why or why not?”
First, I’d keep in mind that if someone asserts one of these ape-men as an example of a transition form, then he is the one making a claim and bears the burden of proof, not you. Unless you invest a good bit of time, you will probably not be able to answer every single archeological example someone might come up with, but chances are the person you are talking to, probably knows very little of the actual facts around the example either. Don’t get snowed over by someone bluffing by tossing out a few names.
However, it isn’t bad to have an answer for the few biggies out there. All of them fall into one of three categories man, ape, or neither. The famous Neanderthal man was once thought to walk upright but with his head slumped over, resembling apes. Archeologists now realize that they were looking at the skeletons of men deformed by disease, but virtually no different than modern man. There are a bunch of others that fit into this category (slight variations on modern man), like Java Man and Peking Man.
Then there are others who go the other way—just variations on modern apes. Like the famous ‘Lucy’, who turns out to be closely related to the pigmy chimpanzee and not on her way to becoming human at all.
Then there is good old Nebraska Man who was little more than a tooth and a lot of speculation. The tooth turned out to be from a type of pig that is now extinct from North America.
This article gives a quick rundown of each of the famous ape-men.
Nice article Eric. It’s so true that people who speak of these “proofs” for transitional forms are parroting high school or college teachers who are living out of science books of the 50’s. Let me ask you to clarify another common smoke-screen. What about carbon dating? Doesn’t this method give us the scientific “margin” to, at least, create the time needed to sponsor evolution? I mean, if carbon dating is true, then at least we have the billions of years needed to pull off the evolutionary model?
I’ll field this question very briefly, if you don’t mind, Eric.
Carbon dating depends on the amount of carbon-14 present in organic matter at the time of death. (I assume we’re talking about carbon dating, and not radiometric dating in general.) Because it is a radioactive isotope, carbon-14 decays at a fairly rapid rate. From the time of death (because only living organisms contain carbon-14–it can’t be used to date rocks, dirt, etc.), the amount of carbon-14 in the organic matter decreases steadily as the radioactive isotope decays. By calculating the ratio of carbon-14 to (normal) carbon-12, scientists can determine how long ago the thing died–given what concentration of carbon-14 was originally present in the organism.
That means that this method is dependent on knowing the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere (and therefore in the organism) at the time of its death. For evolutionists, that means knowing those data for millions of years back. They must either find the concentration somehow (impossible) or assume a value for it (anyone heard of…uniformitarianism?). So, for one thing, honest scientists will tell you that carbon-14 dating is only accurate when we know the exact ratio of the concentrations of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere at the time of death.
Secondly, carbon-14 has a relatively short half-life (the time it takes for half of an amount of the radioactive isotope to decay). Half the carbon-14 will decay into nitrogen-14 in about 5,730 years +40. It’s easy to see that, after not too long, no carbon-14 will be left…yielding an infinite carbon-14 date. Just how far into the past is carbon dating accurate?
In fact, the only way to yield semi-accurate dates in carbon dating is through historical caibration–dating objects known by historical record to be a certain age, and calculating the atmospheric concentration of carbon-14 at that time in history from that. Such calibration is only possible within recorded history–kind of defeats the evolutionists’ purpose in the first place, does it not? “…even with such historical calibration, archaeologists do not regard 14C dates as absolute because of frequent anomalies” (same article as above).
When I was in high school biology, we plotted a carbon-14 calibration curve using some known dates, with the intent to find the dates of some unkown objects. The curve was fairly in-step with the data points up until about 5,000 years B.C. Then, it rose steeply, with no regard to the data points at that range. We could date anything past 5,000 years any way we wanted–but the margin of error was unacceptable for scientific inquiry.
Two interpretations of the evidence exist: either the dating scientists are wrong in their assumptions of uniformitarianism and the carbon-14 concnetration was different enough in the past to cause their errors in dating, or carbon-14 is a flawed method past (at most) 50,000 years and is only reasonably accurate back to 5,000 B.C. The interpretation you choose will place you either in the OEC camp or YEC camp, respectively.
One question for the OEC’s…just wondering…what is your problem with carbon dating? Shouldn’t the dates they receive jive with the evolution (albeit under divine direction) of species? Other than the scientific flaws in the method, doesn’t it give the results you want?
Man, in high school biology we cut open a pig. (Insert Bevis & Butthead voice -> Yeah, it was cool. Huh huh.)
Hey that’s cool…we just looked at the pigs, but we actually dissected a mink. Pretty awesome stuff.
*thread is now officially derailed*
I’m good at that…just finished doing so in “The Role of Emotion in Revival” by Dan.
😛
Wow, I wandered into this blog not realizing that you people cover the spectrum of conversation – from C.14 to cutting pigs open. I feel tired…
BTW. Eric, how much did you give Jeffrey to answer that question? Now, if only I could find a young padouin…
I’m a fence-sitter on the old/young earth debate, but I believe that an old-earther would have no problem with dating techniques. He would argue that even if dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago, it has no bearing on the credibility of evolution. The fossil record shows the sudden appearance a wide range of species and doesn’t support evolution over time, not matter how many years. Even 150 million years would not be enough time for random mutations to produce a human being from a tadpole (or whatevever lower form came before).
Hey, do you have any non-religious links to the disqualification of the different types of missing links? In a real debate you can’t just say, “but they were disproven, check out this evangelical website with no references”. 😉 Thx!
The Intelligent Design movement has a bunch of purely scientific resources, though it can sometimes be difficult to find items of interest on the Discovery Institute site without a good bit of reading. Here are the other leading ID sites:Access Research Network (very good for aggregating a lot of relevant articlesIDURCThe International Society for Complexity, Information, and DesignAs for non-religiously-affiliated articles on this specific topic, here are a few:BBC articleNational Geographic’s Archaeoraptor (also called “the Piltdown Bird” 😉National History Museum exhibit on the Piltdown ManArchaeological Forgery and Fictions of the First HumanHope you checked back sometime and were able to see this.