I know. I know. The fact that evolutionists have been shown to be wrong again proves that they’re right this time. OK. Maybe. Whatever.
But you know how every school child for the past thirty years has been taught that man descended from apes and every time someone called that a “theory” they were laughed out of the room and told to go back to church and dragged into court by the ACLU.
Well. It doesn’t look like we’re descended from apes anymore.
The AP reports:
The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about “Ardi,” a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.
This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.
Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.
“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.
But Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor.
A study of Ardi, under way since the first bones were discovered in 1994, indicates the species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches, but the development of their arms and legs indicates they didn’t spend much time in the trees. And they could walk upright, on two legs, when on the ground.
So we didn’t evolve from apes.
But that doesn’t put the theory of evolution off the rails at all. They simply imagine themselves up some kind of man/ape who existed a long long long long long long time ago which left absolutely no evidence it ever existed.
Man, being an evolutionist must be pretty easy. You sit around smugly spinning yarns about descendants long long long ago and everytime you’re proved wrong you just add a few long long long ago’s to your theory and sit back smugly again. Nice gig for a former ape. Oh wait…
Exit question: How long until all the textbooks are corrected?
October 1, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Hint: as a rule, science reporting is usually about as accurate as religion reporting. In other words, not at all.
I studied ecology in university, and courses in evolutionary biology played a huge role in that. I've never been taught that we were descended from apes. It's always been made crystal clear, as opposed to that tired old Creationist yarn about apes/monkeys/take your pick, we are descended from some sort of common ancestor. So, the AP report is hardly stunning news at all, and none of the biology textbooks in my library are in need of correcting…
You can take evolution or leave it, I guess, but perhaps it would be best to avoid chasing after straw men?
October 1, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Yes, as I understood it, it was always a common ancestor thing, not a one from the other thing.
Macroevolution theory may suffer from many other weaknesses, but "we descended from apes" isn't one of them.
October 1, 2009 at 10:36 pm
So wait. We descended from straw men?
October 1, 2009 at 10:40 pm
World renown paleontologist Richard Leakey, told The Associated Press: "Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his…The bishop is descended from the apes and these fossils tell how he evolved."
October 1, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Wow. I was all set to bring some snark, but I think Matt's comment is too funny.
Does anyone know if there's a name for another branch of Godwin's law, namely, that there is no fact presented on the internet that does not immediately have the exact opposite defended?
And that's not really directed at you, Mandrivnyk, your post makes a decent point and has true thought behind it, my wondering is more to internet traffic in general.
October 1, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Ray Bolger is our common ancestor.
October 2, 2009 at 12:32 am
So how do we account for these half-mannish, half-apish bones that we find?
October 2, 2009 at 12:58 am
You mean the ones Tielhard de Chardin found?
October 2, 2009 at 1:10 am
T. Ambrose, I've put this caveat in many times before but I probably should've put it in this story as well.
I have no problem believing in evolution.
My point was that I, along with many I'm sure, was taught that we descended from apes. That, however, doesn't seem to be the case.
I do have a problem with macro-evolutionists believing they can explain away God.
October 2, 2009 at 1:12 pm
When the Evolutionists can pinpoint who had the first rational soul, then I'll be interested! 😉
October 2, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Matthew, I have no problem with the concept of evolution from a philosophical or theological standpoint. I adhere to St. Augustine's belief that the Holy Spirit came to enlighten our minds and spirits to the existence and nature of God not to teach us science. I have a problem with how unscientifically it is taught. Nearly all of academia demand that we all accept it as fact. A good link to read about how evolution is taught is http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
This article is supposed to set us straight that indeed evolution is a straight up, scientifically established fact. But read the language of their "proof." There is no evidence offered; no scientific method; just invectives against non-believers. If you don't believe it's a fact, you're an unthinking religious bigot.
October 2, 2009 at 1:51 pm
"Correct the textbooks"? But why? Evolution is not about truth, it's about myth, in the proper sense of the word–the assumed reality that is beyond reality and truth/false categories. It is the god behind the scientific method now that the Holy Trinity no longer takes that place for most of these priests of the myth.
No new insights here…except that, well, you gotta stop assuming that textbooks even try to teach the truth and not the agenda and mythos and cult of nothingness in which the West has descended.
October 2, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Matthew,
It may be that your (suboptimally educated) schoolteachers taught you that "man descended from apes" – but be assured that this was either because they hadn't understood evolutionary biology themselves or because they over-simplified things to make you understand.
Evolutionary biologists have never believed that man descended from apes. The theory has always been that man and apes share common ancestors.
This news report is not news at all. The journalist merely suffers from an even worse education than your schoolteachers.
October 2, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Matthew,
It may be that your (suboptimally educated) schoolteachers taught you that "man descended from apes" – but be assured that this was either because they hadn't understood evolutionary biology themselves or because they over-simplified things to make you understand.
Evolutionary biologists have never believed that man descended from apes. The theory has always been that man and apes share common ancestors.
This news report is not news at all. The journalist merely suffers from an even worse education than your schoolteachers.
October 2, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Just to agree with the first comment:
I'm an evolutionary biologist. It is NEVER taught that humans descended from apes. Darwin never claimed this. Humans and apes shared a common ancestor how ever many millions of years ago, whose bones have yet to be discovered. This article is misinformed and incorrect. As a Catholic convert from protestantism, I'm happy to say that the Church doesn't disagree with evolution. The idea of evolution is in no way contradictory with Catholic teachings, except in that it is not possible to take certain passages of Genesis literally: God created the world, God created life, and over time a being came to exist that looked like man, and God made man in His image by endowing him with reason.
October 2, 2009 at 2:44 pm
This was prevailing wisdom at least since 1989. I took an Anthropology class at that time and we discussed this theory that man and chimps had a common ancestor. Through our discussion, it actually made some better sense than the man descended from apes theory. I will add, we discussed this as THEORY. There is, of course, no concrete evidence to support this theory. Why this is not presented in government run primary school should be obvious.
October 2, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I like Bigfoot. Yay!
October 2, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Tielhard de Chardin was a fraud when he wasn't being a heretic.
As for the new theory of evolution,I think I'd rather be descended from Sasquatch than a monkey.
October 2, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Odd, I'm fairly sure I've seen the biologists who worked on this fossil quoted as saying that this shows that the orangutan can no longer be used as a decent stand-in for what the common ancestor of apes and humans must've looked like….
TECHNICALLY it's not taught that man descended from apes, although that's the simplification; it's taught that man and apes came from a common ape-like ancestor. This fossil seems to indicate that the assumed ancestor was a lot less ape-like than assumed.