The new fossil
evidence reveals an overlap of about 500,000 years
during which Homo habilis and Homo erectus
must have co-existed in the Turkana basin area,
the region of East Africa where the fossils were
unearthed.
"Their
co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus
evolved from Homo habilis"
said co-author
Professor Meave Leakey, palaeontologist and
co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project. The
jaw bone was attributed to Homo habilis
because of its distinctive primitive dental
characteristics, and was dated to around 1.44
million years ago. It is the youngest specimen of
this species ever found. The skull was assigned to
the species Homo erectus despite being a
similar size to that of a habilis skull. Most
other erectus skulls found have been
considerably larger. But it displayed typical
features of erectus such as a gentle ridge
called a "keel" running over the top of the jaw
joint. Analysis showed the skull to be about 1.55
million years old. The new dates indicate that the
two species must have lived side by side.
Sister species
If Homo erectus had evolved from
habilis and stayed within the same location then
both must have been in direct competition for the
same resources. Eventually, one would have
out-competed the other.
"The fact that
they stayed separate as individual species for a
long time suggests that they had their own
distinct ecological niches, thus avoiding direct
competition,"
Professor Leakey
explained. Professor Chris Stringer, head of human
origins at London's Natural History Museum, said:
"Both were
apparently stone tool-makers, but one
possibility is that the larger and perhaps more
mobile erectus species was an active
hunter, while habilis scavenged or caught
small prey."
It is most likely
that both species evolved from a common ancestor.
Other
possibilities
But the linear, ancestor-descendent relationship
between the two species cannot be ruled out
altogether. Fred Spoor, professor of developmental
biology at University College London, and co-author
of the paper, told the BBC News website:
"It's always
possible that Homo habilis lived, let's
say, 2.5 million years ago and then in another
part of Africa, away from the Turkana basin, an
isolated population evolved into Homo erectus
."
After a sufficient
amount of time to allow both species to develop
different adaptations and lifestyles, Homo
erectus could have then found its way to the
Turkana basin. With separate "ecological niches",
both species could co-exist without direct
competition for resources. "But that is a much more
complex proposition," Professor Spoor explained,
"the easiest
way to interpret these fossils is that there was
an ancestral species that gave rise to both of
them somewhere between two and three million
years ago."
Not so similar
The fossil record indicates that modern humans (
Homo sapiens ) evolved from Homo erectus
. However, to some researchers, the small size
of the erectus skull suggests that species
may not have been as similar to us as we once
thought. On average, modern humans display a low
level of "sexual dimorphism", meaning that males and
females do not differ physically as much as they do
in other animals. The scientists compared the small
skull to a much larger erectus cranium found
previously in Tanzania. If the size difference
between the two is indicative of the larger one
being from a male and the smaller being from a
female, it suggests that erectus displayed a
high level of sexual dimorphism - similar to that of
modern gorillas. Sexual dimorphism can relate to
reproductive strategies and sexual selection. If
erectus was very sexually dimorphic it may have
had multiple mates at a time. This differs from the
more monogamous nature of modern humans, indicating
that Homo erectus was not as human-like as
once thought. The researchers dismiss the idea that
the small size of the skull could be a result of it
belonging to a youngster. "By studying how the skull
bones are fused together we discovered it belonged
to a fully grown young adult rather than a
developing juvenile erectus," said Professor Spoor.
◊ ◊ ◊
Darwinists Squirm Under Spotlight
(An Interview with Phillip E.
Johnson)
This article is reprinted from an
interview
with Citizen Magazine, January 1992.
Phillip Johnson has been a law
professor at the University of California at
Berkeley for more than 20 years. As an academic
lawyer, one of Johnson's specialties is "analyzing
the logic of arguments and identifying the
assumptions that lie behind those arguments." A few
years ago he began to suspect that Darwinism, far
from being an objective fact, was little more than a
philosophical position dressed up as science--and
poor science at that. Wanting to see whether his
initial impression was correct, Johnson decided to
take a closer look at the arguments, evidence and
assumptions underlying contemporary Darwinism. The
result of his investigation is Darwin on Trial, a
controversial new book that challenges not only
Darwinism but the philosophical mindset that
sustains it.
When did you first become aware that
Darwinism was in trouble as a scientific theory?
I had been vaguely aware that
there were problems, but I'd never had any
intention of taking up the subject seriously or
in detail until the 1987-88 academic year, when
I was a visiting professor in London. Every day
on the way to my office I happened to go by a
large bookstore devoted to science. I picked up
one book after another and became increasingly
fascinated with the obvious difficulties in the
Darwinist case--difficulties that were being
evaded by tricky rhetoric and emphatic
repetition. I then began delving into the
professional literature, especially in
scientific journals such as Nature and Science.
At every step, what I found was a failure of the
evidence to be in accord with the theory.
What was it that initially made you
suspect that Darwinism was more philosophy than hard
science?
It was the way my scientific
colleagues responded when I asked the hard
questions. Instead of taking the intellectual
questions seriously and responding to them, they
would answer with all sorts of evasions and
vague language, making it impossible to discuss
the real objections to Darwinism. This is the
way people talk when they're trying very hard
not to understand something.
Another tip-off was the sharp
contrast I noticed between the extremely
dogmatic tone that Darwinists use when
addressing the general public and the occasional
frank acknowledgments, in scientific circles, of
serious problems with the theory. For example, I
would read Stephen Jay Gould telling the
scientific world that Darwinism was effectively
dead as a theory. And then in the popular
literature, I would read Gould and other
scientific writers saying that Darwinism was
fundamentally healthy, and that scientists had
the remaining problems well under control. There
was a contradiction here, and it looked as
though there was an effort to keep the outside
world from becoming aware of the serious
intellectual difficulties.
What are some of the intellectual
difficulties? Can you give an example?
The most important is the fossil
problem, because this is a direct record of the
history of life on earth. If Darwinism were
true, you would expect the fossil evidence to
contain many examples of Darwinian evolution.
You would expect to see fossils that really
couldn't be understood except as transitions
between one kind of organism and another. You
would also expect to see some of the common
ancestors that gave birth to different groups
like fish and reptiles. You wouldn't expect to
find them in every case, of course. It's
perfectly reasonable to say that a great deal of
the fossil evidence has been lost. But you would
continually be finding examples of things that
fit well with the theory.
In reality, the fossil record is
something that Darwinists have had to explain
away, because what it shows is the sudden
appearance of organisms that exhibit no trace of
step-by-step development from earlier forms. And
it shows that once these organisms exist, they
remain fundamentally unchanged, despite the
passage of millions of years-and despite
climatic and environmental changes that should
have produced enormous Darwinian evolution if
the theory were true. In short, if evolution is
the gradual, step-by-step transformation of one
kind of thing into another, the outstanding
feature of the fossil record is the absence of
evidence for evolution.
But isn't it possible, as many
Darwinists say, that the fossil evidence is just too
scanty to show evidence of Darwinian evolution?
The question is whether or not
Darwinism is a scientific theory that can be
tested with scientific evidence. If you assume
that the theory is true, you can deal with
conflicting evidence by saying that the evidence
has disappeared. But then the question arises,
how do you know it's true if it isn't recorded
in the fossils? Where is the proof? It's not in
genetics. And it's not in the molecular
evidence, which shows similarities between
organisms but doesn't tell you how those
similarities came about. So the proof isn't
anywhere, and it's illegitimate to approach the
fossil record with the conclusive assumption
that the theory is true so that you can read
into the fossil record whatever you need to
support the theory.
If Darwinism has been so thoroughly
disconfirmed, why do so many scientists say it's a
fact?
There are several factors that
explain this. One is that Darwinism is
fundamentally a religious position, not a
scientific position. The project of Darwinism is
to explain the world and all its life forms in a
way that excludes any role for a creator. And
that project is sacred to the scientific
naturalist-to the person who denies that God can
in any way influence natural events.
It's also an unfortunate fact in
the history of science that scientists will
stick to a theory which is untrue until they get
an acceptable alternative theory-which to a
Darwinist means a strictly naturalistic theory.
So for them, the question is not whether
Darwinism is true. The question is whether there
is a better theory that's philosophically
acceptable. Any suggestion that Darwinism is
false, and that we should admit our ignorance
about the origin of complex life-forms, is
simply unacceptable. In their eyes, Darwinism is
the best naturalistic theory, and therefore
effectively true. The argument that it's false
can't even be heard.
Surely there are some skeptics in the
scientific world. What of them?
Well, there are several, and we
can see what happened to them. You have
paleontologist Colin Patterson, who's quoted in
my first chapter. He made a very bold statement,
received a lot of vicious criticism, and then
pulled back. This is a typical pattern. Another
pattern is that of Stephen Jay Gould, who said
that Darwinism is effectively dead as a general
theory-and then realized that he had given a
powerful weapon to the creationists, whose
existence cannot be tolerated. So now Gould says
that he's really a good Darwinist, and that all
he really meant was that Darwinism could be
improved by developing a larger theory that
included Darwinism. What we have here is
politics, not science. Darwinism is politically
correct for the scientific community, because it
enables them to fight off any rivals for
cultural authority.
Darwinists often accuse creationists
of intolerance. But you're suggesting that the
Darwinists are intolerant?
If you want to know what
Darwinist science is really like, read what the
Darwinists say about the creationists, because
those things-regardless of whether they're true
about the creationists-are true about the
Darwinists. I've found that people often say
things about their enemies that are true of
themselves. And I think Darwinist science has
many of the defects that the Darwinists are so
indignant about when they describe the
creationists.
Across the country, there has been a
growing trend toward teaching evolution as a
fact-especially in California, your own state. What
does this say about science education in America?
This is an attempt to establish a
religious position as orthodox throughout the
educational establishment, and thus throughout
the society. It's gone very far. The position is
what I call "scientific naturalism." The
scientific organizations, for example, tell us
that if we wish to maintain our country's
economic status and cope with environmental
problems, we must give everyone a scientific
outlook. But the "scientific outlook" they have
in mind is one which, by definition, excludes
God from any role in the world, from the Big
Bang to the present. So this is fundamentally a
religious position-a fundamentalist position, if
you like--and it's being taught in the schools
as a fact when it isn't even a good theory.
Why should Christians be concerned
about a scientific theory? Why does it matter?
Well, not only Christians should
care about it. Everyone should. It is religion
in the name of science, and that means that it
is misleading people about both religion and
science.
◊ ◊ ◊
Relevant
References
New Tests Question Human
Origins
Shattering the Myths of
Darwinism Overview
Shattering the Myths of
Darwinism (Book)
Richard Milton on Wikipedia
Darwinism: The Forbidden
Subject
Darwinism: Time to Reconsider
What Darwin Did Not Know
(Book)
What Darwin Did Not Know (YouTube)
Pro-Evolution
References
Richard Dawkins on Darwin
Why Evolution is True
(PDF download)
Jerry Coyne on
Youtube
Jerry Coyne Website