Comments on: Darwin validated: Missing link found?

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:47:35 +0000

Excellent points, and I could not agree more. I think there is far less disagreement about the topic than some small but polarizing groups might want. Exactly as you said–some people simply turn off their brains and refuse to engage the topic, often on the advice of people who should know better.

Though in their paper the authors explicitly say that they are not advocating the find as a missing link, in the press releases for the forthcoming book, that term is specifically used early and often. Science meets advertising, maybe. Even the Google home page graphic!

Link to the article, along with awesome pics of Ida:

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.act…

By: Emmett

Emmett — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:22:16 +0000

Well put, Jay. What worries me, though, is not that a lot of this “missing link” talk is intentionally sensational, but that so many otherwise well-informed journalists just might not know any better. Evolution is very often poorly understood by people who are perfectly capable of grasping it. I blame the Kansas board of education.

That said, this fossil is a fascinating find.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:36:59 +0000

Wait a minute, wait a minute. On edit, and after some coffee, I am officially changing my tone. Calling Ida the 'missing link' is not only premature, but specious.. In fact, it's borderline BS and Mike, I think you have it exactly right: it's an attention-grabbing headline buzzword. And it worked. Our common ancestor would have come from the Pliocene, 5-8 million years ago. Ida is 47 million years old! She might be a great, great, nth-great descendant of some kind of primate, but you just can't in good conscience call her anything remotely like THE missing link. That's not scientific, it's scientistic. (And in no way am I doubting evolution, or Darwin, or science. As I said in that other place, I do not see a conflict between faith and science. What I do dislike is pseudo-scientific reporting that finds its way into our cultural lexicon so that it becomes common non-knowledge that we now have evidence of the missing link.)

By: mrdoornbos

mrdoornbos — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:55:34 +0000

I like your Q through W analogy. I might steal it

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:48:52 +0000

I guess I would prefer a slightly more nuanced editorial slant in the reporting–Ida is the oldest, most complete primate fossil from the middle Eocene that we've ever seen. That's enough to get excited about. Let's not ruin it by pretending that it somehow validates evolution which doesn't need validating. We got from A to Z, but we're missing Q through W. It would appear that Ida falls into that Q through W range, but can we say for certain yet that she's definitively T as opposed to another letter? I don't know, but saying “Ida appears to have been alive during the time when we believe that our common ancestor would have to have been alive, and she has features that we believe the common ancestor would probably have had” is a lot different than “Ida is the missing link” (which I take to mean the end of the line that diverged into, for lack of a better term, lines that “ended” with monkeys on the left and chimps and homo sapiens on the right.)