They Had it Wrong
Aug 10th, 2007 by Amanda
We’ve all seen this image before - or something similar - that depicts the evolution of humans.
Now, scientists are saying that this is wrong.
I imagine some fundamentalist Christians will use this news to further their own causes, but it’s really not all that remarkable to the layman (no offense to any of you science heads who are excited about this kind of news).
This news doesn’t mean that scientists are saying evolution didn’t happen. It only means it didn’t happen the way they originally thought it did. As one scientist said, “The more we know, the more complex the story gets.”
Kudos for not being one of the ravening hordes
Incidentally, is it just me or does apeman #4 always look like he’s about to skewer the modern human in the back? “Nature red in tooth and claw” indeed!
What’s interesting to me is that the more they have to change, the more it says to me that it’s more of a religion or worldview than it is a science. Since the “theory” has had to change so many times– it’s been proven wrong so many times. Evolutionary “fact” has proven to be just the opposite on so many occasions.
To me, the scientific method means to present a hypothesis that is proven right or wrong. So, I would think that science should start versioning evolution in some way so at least we could keep track of the current version of “truth” they expect us to believe.
Wouldn’t want to be arguing against version 2.0 when they’re currently on 3.1, you know?
Since the “theory” has had to change so many times– it’s been proven wrong so many times.
Dude, gravity has been proven wrong “so many times”. First there was Aristotle and his concept of natural places. Then boom! that was gone, and Newton’s conception took its place. Einstein turns up and - guess what - the whole story gets rearranged. Shifting the proverbial scenery does not automatically invalidate a field of science.
There are two ways you can tell whether this is science rather than ad-hoc shoring up of bad hypotheses. Firstly, does it converge on a “correct” set of predicted values? Einsteinian gravity was a major revolution - but, when you look at the actual predictions it made, in most “normal” situations they were exactly the same as those of Newtonian gravity. Similarly, the issue in this paper is a fiddly little matter of chronology compared to the sweeping debates of yesteryear.
Secondly, once the model has been patched, does the patch itself get a load of testing? That definitely happens in the case of hominid evolution - palaeontologists don’t say “hey, this is a cool fossil we’ve found” and hang up their shovel forever; instead, they go out and find more fossils in the same area that provide an independent check on the new model. Of course, these additional fossils don’t get reported in the media.
There is an issue that we’re basically limited by what we have to dig up. However, we’re coming up with increasingly ingenious ways to get round that limitation. For example, Neanderthal DNA is being sequenced and compared with homo sapiens, to elucidate the exact relationship between these two varieties of human.
I kinda like the versioning idea, though.