Human paleontologist Richard Leakey is whistling in the dark

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 26, 2012

Evolution, News}

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Richard Leakey, son of famed “Lucy” finders Louis and Mary Leakey, told a New York gathering.

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it.” ( – “Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history” –MSNBC.com, May 26, 2012)

But that’s just the trouble, of course. There is no shortage of discoveries, but they are pointing in all different directions.

Just glancing briefly at some recent UD News posts,

If turtles are closer to birds than to lizards and snakes, genetically, then …

A pluralistic model of heredity is now emerging

Convergent evolution: Tooth enamel of vertebrates and crayfish (?!)

And that hardly begins to tell the story. One wonders, is there anything specific that one should believe? Or is the idea that we should just believe whatever our betters choose to roll down the pike at us?

Note: The colourful Leakey’s team discovered “Turkana boy” in 1984-86.

Comments

The discoverer of Lucy was Donald Johanson.goodusername_{May 27, 2012
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F/N: Saw this at yahoo/AP, then noticed UD News on the ball. AP has a very significant take:
Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it." "If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."
What this brings most forcibly to mind is Philip Johnson's rebuke to such atheism wearing the holy lab coat and announcing the triumph of "science." Namely:
For scientific materialists the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. [[Emphasis original] We might more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes capable of producing complicated organisms that (in Dawkins’ words) "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." . . . . The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked . . . Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses. [[Emphasis added.] [[The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 – 25.]
Somehow, that part never makes it into the news, nor does the issue that evolution as change over time does not translate into answers to the origin of major body plans in the teeth of evidence that the only empirically observed and analytically well warranted explanation for the sort of functionally specific complex organisation and information as we see in text in blog posts, or a car driving down the road, and the very similar info in the living cell, is design. And, not even universal common decent would suffice to overturn that. KFkairosfocus_{May 27, 2012
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of note:
“Dr. Leakey produced a biased reconstruction (of 1470/ Homo Rudolfensis) based on erroneous preconceived expectations of early human appearance that violated principles of craniofacial development,” Dr. Timothy Bromage http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/research/Mans_Earliest_Direct_Ancestors_Looked_More_Apelike_Than_Previously_Believed.asp Hominids, Homonyms, and Homo sapiens - 05/27/2009 - Creation Safaris: Excerpt: Homo erectus is particularly controversial, because it is such a broad classification. Tattersall and Schwartz find no clear connection between the Asian, European and African specimens lumped into this class. “In his 1950 review, Ernst Mayr placed all of these forms firmly within the species Homo erectus,” they explained. “Subsequently, Homo erectus became the standard-issue ‘hominid in the middle,’ expanding to include not only the fossils just mentioned, but others of the same general period....”. They discussed the arbitrariness of this classification: "Put together, all these fossils (which span almost 2 myr) make a very heterogeneous assortment indeed; and placing them all together in the same species only makes any conceivable sense in the context of the ecumenical view of Homo erectus as the middle stage of the single hypervariable hominid lineage envisioned by Mayr (on the basis of a much slenderer record). Viewed from the morphological angle, however, the practice of cramming all of this material into a single Old World-wide species is highly questionable. Indeed, the stuffing process has only been rendered possible by a sort of ratchet effect, in which fossils allocated to Homo erectus almost regardless of their morphology have subsequently been cited as proof of just how variable the species can be." By “ratchet effect,” they appear to mean something like a self-fulfilling prophecy: i.e., “Let’s put everything from this 2-million-year period into one class that we will call Homo erectus.” Someone complains, “But this fossil from Singapore is very different from the others.” The first responds, “That just shows how variable the species Homo erectus can be.” http://creationsafaris.com/crev200905.htm#20090527a
bornagain77_{May 27, 2012
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But until then, we'll just have to take it by faith I guess. And the trend of the discoveries will have to change direction as most of the current discoveries support ID and creationism quite nicely.tjguy_{May 27, 2012
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Then why are they trying to stifle academic freedom now? We'll keep talking about the problems with their darwinian myth, and they can keep pretending it's a fact until that magical discovery is made. I won't hold my breath though.Blue_Savannah_{May 26, 2012
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