New Human Ancestor, Homo Naledi, Discovered, Science PWNs Creationists Again!
People who deny evolution, keep getting proven wrong, over and over again. Creationists, as they are called, seem to have a talent, a talent for never being right. Recently New Horizons arrived at Pluto, and took the first pictures of the dwarf planet, allowing people to see what the world actually looks like, up close and personal. The folks at “Answers in Genesis” couldn’t help themselves. They had to try to find a way to claim that Pluto somehow disproved evolution! “Pluto’s Surface Is Young!” This must mean that the Earth is young as well! It can’t be four point five billion years old! Therefor evolution is a lie! The Bible is true! Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, and the talking snake were all real! We didn’t come from no monkey!
Well, actually no, off course not, what the space probe discovered when it took those photos proved no such thing. The Earth is still ancient, the universe is still ancient, it wasn’t created by magic about six thousand years ago. Even if it was proven that Pluto’s surface was six thousand years old, or younger, it would not change the fact that radiometric dating of zircon rocks is telling us that planet Earth is billions of years old. It also would say nothing about the age of the universe as a whole, which is older than the Earth, by billions of years.
This is just the latest I’ve heard, in a long line of hilariously bad arguments. Who can forget the classic “If Evolution is real, shouldn’t Eskimos grow fur?”
Another baseless claim made by creationists, is that transitional species have never been found. They’ve been making this claim for a very long time. Here’s a quote from the “Institute For Creation Research’s” website. They state the following, in the title of one of their blog posts, as if it was a fact.
Fossils Show Stasis and No Transitional Forms
The author goes on to insists,
The fossil record reflects the original diversity of life, not an evolving tree of increasing complexity. There are many examples of “living fossils,” where the species is alive today and found deep in the fossil record as well.
According to evolution models for the fossil record, there are three predictions:
1. wholesale change of organisms through time
2. primitive organisms gave rise to complex organisms
3. gradual derivation of new organisms produced transitional forms.However, these predictions are not borne out by the data from the fossil record.
This is nonsense, plenty of transitional forms have been found. The person who wrote that IRC blog post, is ignorant and guilty of wishful thinking, or outright lying, maybe both. While it is true that some “living fossils” do exist, they too evolved from simpler, more primitive organizations. Coelacanths are too complex to have just popped out of no where, and they don’t appear anywhere in the oldest geologic eras. The earliest life on Earth, that somehow arose in the Archean, wasn’t even multi-cellular. Coelacanths are far more complex than the earliest multi-cellular animals to appear on the planet. Fish were not included in Ediacaran fauna. They didn’t exist yet, but their ancestors did, along with the ancestors of all lifeforms on the planet today.
Recently paleontologists in South Africa found another transitional form, Homo Naledi, another human ancestor. I know Charles Johnson already posted something on it’s discovery here at LGF, but I just had to say something about it. This find is yet another blow to creationism. No fossils that show the transition between one species and another are supposed to exist, yet we keep on finding them. Even if it weren’t for this fact, Homo Naledi would be a spectacular find. Just listen to what it’s discover, professor Lee Berger has to say about it.
This creature was not a chimpanzee or an orangutan. We have found other missing links in the human family tree such as Australopithecus afarensis. The first of its kind ever discovered was the fossil nicknamed “Lucy.” Homo Naledi closes another gap in the human family tree. Creationists have claimed that other human ancestors like “Lucy,” weren’t real, or that they were just apes, or in the case of Neanderthals, an old man disfigured by disease.
The only fossil of a human ancestor, which turned out to be a fake, and fooled the scientific community, for a time at least, was Piltdown Man. It would be almost impossible to successfully fake every single “missing link” ever found, and fool paleontologists, including the ones peer reviewing scientific journals. What makes the story even worse for creationists, the people who debunked Piltdown Man, where scientists who accepted evolution. Despite that infamous fraud, the evidence for evolution remains overwhelming.
In addition, creatures like Australopithecus Afarensis, Neanderthals, and Homo Naledi, couldn’t be just modern apes, because they have features that are today, only found in one primate species, Homo Sapiens ( Modern Humans ). They also had physical features that we don’t have, but are none the less found in other primates, therefor these creatures couldn’t have been modern humans either. In addition it appears that Homo Naledi buried their dead, something no extant non human Primate does, as far as we can tell. If Professor Lee Berger and the other paleontologists are not mistaken, this is incredible, it means that an early member of our genus may have recognized its own mortality. That’s something we thought that only Homo Sapiens, and our recent human ancestors were capable of.
“Evolution, the fossils say no?” Dream on guys. The fossils have said “yes, evolution is real.” You guys just didn’t listen, because you were determined not to hear what they were saying.
Even if Homo Naledi were to turn out not to be a direct human ancestor, but part of a dead end on our family tree, the find will remain a marvelous example evolution. Its more evidence of Darwin’s idea of natural selection, and shows that humans, along with all other animals are products of evolution. If not for Homo Naledi, or something like it, we wouldn’t be here today. All evidence points to this creature being a missing link, that fills another gap in the story of our origins.
Now will the likes of Kent Hovind, Ray Comfort, and person who wrote that ridiculous “Institute For Creation Research” post where he or she said there were no transitional forms, finally admit that they’re wrong? Will they admit that Evolution is a fact? Will they abandon their fantasy? Will they finally stop trying to destroy science education in America, Europe, and everywhere else on Earth? I doubt it. However, we can dream, can’t we?