In my previous post, I covered a few points about the documentary titled “Discovering Ardi” that aired on the Discovery Channel this past Sunday evening, October 11, 2009. In that post I gave a brief summary of the research that has taken place over the roughly 15 years since its discovery. The documentary was two hours in length and probably could have covered all of the information in about one hour. That aside, the first half of the documentary details out Ardi’s discovery and research while the second half is mainly devoted to Ardi’s public relations preparation.

The research team hired J.H. Matternes to sketch out Ardi’s skeleton. One problem here is that they don’t have a complete skeleton. They have a partial skeleton which lacks most of the central structure. The hands feet and skull comprise the majority of Ardi’s fossil remains. There is only part of the pelvis and essentially no upper torso fossil bones. This means that Mr. Matternes had to fill in the gaps when he was creating the sketch of Ardi’s skeleton. This is where some other statements in the documentary bothered me.

Owen Lovejoy, the project biologist made a statement concerning J.H. Matternes, which is as follows:

He is the equivalent of a super-computer, into which years and years of primate structure have been poured and recorded and out of which comes an almost perfect image.

Following this comment by Lovejoy, Matternes said, “My job is to interpolate from what is there and what is missing.” Then Lovejoy adds:

We can take something like a partial foot and describe and interact with him (Matternes), as to what’s present, what’s missing and then based on our joint anatomical knowledge, replace the missing part.

What really bothers me about this is that an hour was just spent describing how Ardi was completely astounding in physical structure, that she was unlike anything they had before seen. Matternes and Lovejoy may have years of familiarity with primate anatomy, but they are completely unfamiliar with what Ardi’s missing skeletal anatomy might have been. It seems to me that they assume too much in their ability to “fill in the gaps.” For example, if Ardi’s feet would not have been discovered, would they have sketched them the same? Almost certainly not. I understand their desire to try and complete the picture, but the statement that Matternes can produce “an almost perfect image” and that using their knowledge they can “replace the missing part” is going beyond what the evidence can bear.

Then there was an interesting point brought out towards the very end of the documentary. Owen Lovejoy stated:

As we track humans back through time into the fossil record and all of our individual special characteristics begin dropping out, when you get to the very bottom, it is simply bipedality that becomes the defining character of being human.

He also noted that bipedality “is a terrible form of locomotion.” Owen Lovejoy is most certainly correct that bipedality is not the fastest or most efficient method of locomotion. The documentary really emphasized bipedality as the defining characteristic of humans also. What really bothered me is the lack of honesty in this statement. Humans are not the only animal that walks upright on two legs. Therefore, the statement that bipedality is the only thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is simply not the case. What about Ostriches. Do they not use bipedality as their form of locomotion? Emus, closely related to Ostriches also use bipedality as their method of locomotion. Kangaroos use bipedality as their primary form of locomotion. There are other animals that use bipedality at times, such as penguins when they are on land. Before someone comments on this, I also realize that humans are the only animals that walk completely upright, but we aren’t the only ones that use bipedality.

One question that I know many people are asking is why did it take them 15 years to release this information if it was so revealing and ground breaking? The answer is not extremely simple. One reason is the public relations campaign that had to be prepared. They couldn’t simply release the research. They needed accompanying sketches and digital renditions of Ardi in her habitat.

Another reason is the condition of the bones. They were so fragile that the researchers removed them with clumps of dirt in plaster molds. Then in the controlled setting of a lab, they slowly and carefully removed the fossil bones from the dirt. After they were removed from the dirt, they then had to be reconstructed because of the poor condition of the fossils. The article published in the 2 October 2009 edition of Science. written by Ann Gibbons noted this very problem:

It was the find of a lifetime. But the team's excitement was tempered by the skeleton's terrible condition. The bones literally crumbled when touched. White called it road kill. And parts of the skeleton had been trampled and scattered into more than 100 fragments; the skull was crushed to 4 centimeters in height. The researchers decided to remove entire blocks of sediment, covering the blocks in plaster and moving them to the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa to finish excavating the fossils.

In short, the fossils are in such bad condition that many researchers are skeptical that it can be claimed with any measure of confidence that Ardi walked bipedaly. Ann Gibbons notes this point too in her article, “However, several researchers aren't so sure about these inferences. Some are skeptical that the crushed pelvis really shows the anatomical details needed to demonstrate bipedality.” Who are these skeptical researchers? Paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia; Paleoanthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York; Paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

If that’s not enough to make someone skeptical, then consider this tidbit also from the Science article:

By March of this year, Suwa was satisfied with his 10th reconstruction. Meanwhile in Ohio, Lovejoy made physical models of the pelvic pieces based on the original fossil and the CT scans, working closely with Suwa. He is also satisfied that the 14th version of the pelvis is accurate.

They went through 14 versions of the pelvis and then want everyone to believe they have solid evidence that Ardi represents the connection between humans and chimp/ape primates. I think Ardi is destined to go the way of Ida as far as sensational “missing link” claims are concerned.

I was finally able to sit down and watch the "Discovering Ardi" special last night. It was a very interesting documentary on the work that was accomplished over a period of more than a decade. There were several things which were discussed or stated in the documentary that I would like to address. Before I get into those things, a little background on this discovery is in order.

The full name of the fossil discovered is Ardipithecus Ramidus. It was discovered in Ethiopia in the Middle Awash area. They began discovering some teeth and small bone fragments from many different individuals. How they determined they were different individuals was not mentioned in the documentary. Then they began to discover fragments from the same individual. All of the bones were extremely fragmented and very delicate, to the point that the researchers cemented the bones together and lifted them out in plaster castes. Several years of excavation were conducted before recovering all of the bones which comprise the partial female skeleton that is the current topic of discussion. The researchers then began the painstaking work of removing the bones from the surrounding matrix (dirt) being careful not to damage the bones. They also transported the bones to Japan where they were scanned by a CT machine allowing them to create extremely accurate digital renderings of the bones. The researchers then hired J.H. Matternes to create full-scale reproductions of the fragments. Matternes then drew a complete skeleton followed by a skeleton covered with muscle and then skin, hair, etc. Owen Lovejoy, the project biologist then went to a company to have them create digital videos of how Ardi might have walked and moved through the terrain.

I must state that I think the researchers were very thorough in their work. From watching the documentary, it did not appear that this was hurried or that they were looking to make this “the missing link.” However, some statements made in the documentary caused me to question their conclusions. First, project paleontologist Tim White stated:

“Hominids are incredibly rare. They were rare on the landscape. They had very long life-spans, so few of them die and end up with carcasses on the landscape. They are very smart, smarter than most mammals so you don’t find very many of them trapped in the sediments. So they are extremely rare.”

Few of them die and end up with carcasses on the landscape. ..I don’t think he really thought through his statement here, because I’m sure that he would agree if I asked him if all animals eventually die. This puts one hole in his statement concerning why hominids are rare. They didn’t keep living forever or we would be finding them alive today. To be fair, I don’t think that is exactly what he meant. However, the point is still the same—it doesn’t matter if they lived 150 years or 50 years, they would all eventually die. He also claims that they were smarter than most mammals. The problem I have is that this is an assumption inferred back onto hominids because we as Homo sapiens are extremely intelligent and Tim believes that we evolved from hominids. Please hear me, I am not arguing against the point that we evolved from hominids, but I am arguing against this intelligence assumption. We don’t know how smart they were because it cannot simply be inferred from brain size.

The bones did not contain any material useful for dating the bones themselves. To explain how they dated Ardi to 4.4 million years ago, Yohannes Haile-Selassie a project paleontologist explained:

“We don’t really date the bones themselves, so we rely on geologists to give us dates for the rocks that are above and below the fossils that we are finding.”

How do they date these rocks? There were two volcanic rock bands, one above and one below the location they discovered the fossil. They then take samples from these bands and measure the amount of argon gas built up in the rocks. From this they can determine the age of the rocks. I am not familiar with this type of dating. It sounds very interesting and I will be researching this and learning more about it. One interesting point however, the two different tests came back to essentially the same date. At this point, I would think they might have asked to have the tests repeated because there was a lot of sediment between the two bands, several feet of sediment.

I will continue to make more posts on this documentary and fossil find. If you weren’t able to catch the special when it aired this past Sunday night (October 11, 2009), the Discovery Channel has the entirety of it on their website in small clips.

Click Here to Read Part 2

The Discovery Channel is going to be airing a program titled "Discovering Ardi" this Sunday evening at 9:00 PM ET. This is the latest fossil hailed as evidence shoring up evolution and one more piece of the puzzle from apes to upright bipedal humans.

Obviously I am not posting a critique of the show as it has not yet aired, but I wanted to make all of you aware of it in case you might be interested in watching it. I am recording the show to watch later that evening or Monday evening and I will post my own thoughts and reflections on it after I have a chance to watch it. Look forward to some possible discussion on it with all of you.

The last post in this series discussed the universe. Particularly, whether the universe is eternal or if it had a beginning. The evidence led to the conclusion that the universe did have a beginning. That left us with only two possible explanations as to what brought about that beginning: (1) It brought itself about and developed into what we see today, which is evolution or (2) it was created, which is intelligent design. It is to this point we turn in this post. Does the evidence support evolution or intelligent design?

Evolution is the theory that the origin of life and the progressive change of that life arrived through purely naturalistic means. The first and earliest requirement placed upon Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was by his colleagues. They deemed it necessary to provide empirical evidence to support the sequential pattern of nature proposed by Darwin. Even with all of the evolutionary work that has persisted since the nineteenth century, the hierarchal pattern of nature persists regardless of the infusion of the spirit of sequence and continuity. The argument has, therefore, come about that the hierarchal pattern of nature supports the evolutionary view. This simply is not the case. It is much easier to argue for organic evolution if nature presented itself in sequential patterns.

Another foundational evidence Darwin cited as support for his theory was homologous structures. Darwin defines this term in The Origin to avoid any confusion. The definition he gave is as follows: “The relationship between parts which results from their development from corresponding embryonic parts.” Genetic and embryological research has demonstrated that homologous structures arrive at the end result through different routes as discussed by Sir Gavin de Beer. This demonstrates that homologous structures are not what Darwin defined them to be. This deals a swift blow to the theory because the lack of homologous structures deems descent by modification unnecessary.

Darwin recognized one major area of weakness in his theory. This area of weakness was the fossil record. It could not be ignored that the lack of intermediate species in the fossil record was a flaw to evolution. However, Darwin and those that followed after him believed that the fossil record was not complete enough and that in the future it would bear out the evidence to support the theory. This is such an important area because it is the only physical evidence that will either lend support to the theory or provide evidence that it is indeed false.

A few considerations will reveal that the fossil record does not lend support to evolution currently or in the foreseeable future. First, looking at the total number of fossil species compared to the scarce number of morphological sequences (intermediates) contained therein reveals the lack of any convincing evidence of major transformations in the fossil record. Secondly, the fossil record is nearly complete. When one realizes that 261 of the 329 living terrestrial vertebrates occur as fossils, which yields 79.1% completeness of the fossil record, it becomes apparent that there is not a great disparity in the state of the fossil record. Furthermore, when birds are excluded from the above numbers, since they are poorly fossilized, the percentage rises to 87.8% completion of the fossil record. The argument that the fossil record is not complete enough to conclusively determine whether or not it supports evolution is merely wishful thinking.

Another area often used to support evolution’s claims is vestigial organs. This is the claim that there are organs in the human body that serve no function and can be removed without harm to the body. This argument fails at several points. To simply assume that the lack of harm from the removal of an organ indicates that it is useless neglects the possibility that other organs may compensate for the removal of that organ and that it simply is not feasible to measure any loss of function. Consider the kidneys. A person can have a kidney removed and not suffer serious loss, but they serve a function. In fact, one could actually argue that the loss of function of organs indicates devolving of life, which is the opposite of evolution.

Modern genetics research and the discovery of DNA pose another problem for evolution. Take this along with problems associated with abiogenesis (spontaneous generation), and evolution virtually becomes impossible to argue as a viable hypothesis. The prebiotic soup so often referred to as fact actually has no evidence to support it and in reality has much evidence opposing it. The conditions of earth’s early atmosphere did not consist of the correct elements to produce life and had several factors which led to a “catch 22” situation because if life did happen to arise spontaneously it would have almost immediately been destroyed. Furthermore, the laws of nature clearly define that life arises from life, not that living things arise from nonliving things going against the laws of nature and universal.

The DNA problem has actually caused one atheist to purport that “life in bacterial form may have been transmitted to this planet in a missile from some other part of space.” This does not solve the problem because it still begs the question: “Where did that life come from?” Evolution attempted to show how proteins, the building blocks of the cell and therefore life, arise from purely natural reactions. However, with the discovery of the role of DNA in producing those proteins in the cell, it is more necessary to determine the origin of the information contained in DNA than to determine the natural processes the DNA controls. This presents a conundrum to the evolutionists.

Evolutionists, in general, make the mistake of letting preconceived theories shape the evidence rather than letting the evidence shape the theory. In other words, they are like a fisherman who upon catching a large fish returned the fish to the pond. After watching this happen several times, an onlooker asked the man, “Why do you only keep the small fish and return the larger fish to the pond?” The man responded to the onlooker, “I only have an eight-inch frying pan, and so the larger ones won’t fit!” Simply put, the evidence that proponents of evolution cite does not support the conclusions that are drawn by the evolutionist, or the atheist for that matter.

The evidence does not necessarily prove intelligent design, but it does demonstrate that it better fits the evidence that we currently have about the beginning of the universe and the current state-of-affairs today. The only point left to discuss in this series is that of Jesus’ resurrection. The next post will tackle this topic.

Links to other posts in this series:

• Part 1: Three possibilities about God's existence
• Part 2: What is acceptable evidence?
• Part 3: Is the universe eternal?
• Part 5: What about the resurrection?
• Part 6: Where does the evidence lead?