Ida the 47-million-year-old evolutionary farce.
Opinion
Ida, the fossil dud
It's not a missing link at all!
By David Serd : May 21, 2009 (postscript October 23, 2009)
It seems to happen every time an evolutionary “missing link” is announced.
The media says the “missing link” between apes and humans has been found. National Geographic takes the bait and goes out on a limb to publicize its importance to evolution. Everyone gets excited and thinks this will finally silence us pesky, skeptical creationists. Then we find out it's not the missing link at all. It's just a fossilized animal.
And that's exactly what has happened again with the unveiling of Ida (above), an alleged 47-million-year-old alleged missing link named Darwinius masillae that allegedly plugs the “missing link” gap between humans, apes and other primates. British naturalist David Attenborough even went on record with the extremely unsupportable claim, “The link they would have said until now is missing … it is no longer missing.”
Ida was unveiled to the world with a huge media splash on May 19 at New York's Natural History Museum. This very well-preserved primate fossil from Germany is remarkable in its detail and intactness. As a fossil, it is extraordinary.
But many people wanted to go further than that. Much further.
National Geographic quoted paleontologist Jorn Hurum as saying “This is the first link to all humans.” No it's not. It's not linked to humans at all. But it's a lot like a lemur.
New York's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said this was an “astonishing breakthrough.” No it's not. It's an astonishingly well-preserved fossil, but not an astonishing breakthrough.
A representative from the publishers Little, Brown said it was a scientific discovery “that will undoubtedly revolutionize how we understand our own evolution.” No it won't. It's got nothing to do with our evolution.
To their credit, many evolutionists themselves felt uneasy about what sounded like snake-oil claims that other evolutionists were making. And the next day LiveScience started running articles that revealed the high level of scientific skepticism about Ida's supposed link to all humans.
LiveScience quoted paleoanthropologist Chris Gilbert from Yale University, “They make an intriguing argument but I would definitely say that the consensus is not in favor of the hypothesis they're proposing.”
Oh.
Paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University said, “This claim [that this fossil has something to do with the ancestry of humans, living monkeys, and apes] is buttressed with almost no evidence. … And they failed to cite a body of literature that's been going on since at least 1984 that presents evidence against their hypothesis.”
Oh.
Anthropologist Matt Cartmill of Duke University in North Carolina said, “The P.R. campaign on this fossil is I think more of a story than the fossil itself.”
And the anti-Ida sentiments got stronger. Chris Beard, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, told LiveScience, “It's not a missing link, it's not even a terribly close relative to monkeys, apes and humans, which is the point they're trying to make.”
Oh.
Every year or two the definitive “missing link” is claimed to be found. But they never are. Ida, or Darwinius masillae, was shot down as a missing link within hours of the hoopla, big-noting press conference.
That's because Darwinius masillae is not a missing link. It's just a fossil of a dead animal.
Postscript: October 23, 2009
An analysis in the journal Nature by Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University has now vindicated our article above by announcing that Ida is more closely linked to lemurs than it is to monkeys, apes or us. It simply isn't a missing link, and never was, and those evolutionists who suggested it was, and those evolutionists who wrote abusive emails to us complaining about the article above, can now hang their heads in shame.
See also: Which ape evolved into which human?
Photo of Darwinius masillae used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. Original research paper appeared at PLoS ONE in May 2009.
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