Can You Believe?

Every now and then I click on the links that WordPress features on their main page, and sometimes I find a gem of a blog that I bookmark, and sometimes I find something that shocks and amazes me.

In the shocks and amazes category, I clicked through to a blog called: Family Reformation (that should have been my first red flag; in the immortal words of Monty Python, “Run away! Run away!”) where there was a post entitled, intriguingly:

Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”

(read it here, if you dare, and note that all quotations of the author below derive from this link, so I will not link them individually.)

In Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”, blogging Pastor James McDonald takes aim at women seeking fulfillment outside the domestic sphere by comparing the arguments in favour of said expansion of women’s sphere by “egalitarians” (quotation marks his) to the evolutionary missing link – a species between apes & humans that McDonald clearly believes is a silly myth. I should point out here that taxonomically speaking, of course, we — Homo sapiens sapiens* — are already apes, as we belong to the family hominidae, or great apes, along with gorillas and chimpanzees.

*From here onwards, I’ll shorten Homo sapiens sapiens for simplicity’s sake to just H. sapiens: anyway, when you read tripe like this you question whether we deserve even the one sapiens moniker; wise indeed!

As a thinking (and reasonably educated) person, I couldn’t ignore his off-hand dismissal of evolution; as if it were a given that there was no missing link (there are many!), and so I’d like to take on Pastor McDonald first on these grounds, then (in my next post) on his real argument: that of woman’s “unique role as wife, mother, and keeper at home—the normative role for women…happily under the authority of her husband”. Join me, if you will: all that’s required is an open, questioning mind. I ask you simply to look at the evidence and make your own decision, unlike some, who would require you to believe in the – frankly – unbelievable.

Pastor McDonald relies for his argument against an evolutionary missing link on two cases that are often used by those proposing the creationist argument: Heidelberg Man and Nebraska Man.

N.B. Other than two first year science courses in university (biology & astronomy) I have no formal training in science. So: read the information below with this in mind and take as it is intended; as an earnest attempt to shed a little bit of the cool, clear light of reason where it has been so willfully snuffed out by religion.

Heidelberg Man

McDonald suggests that the Mauer jaw — the first evidence of Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) to be discovered — was later “conceded to be quite human”. I guess if what he means is that any member of the genus Homo is a human, he’s right. If, as I suspect however, he means that the Mauer jaw was later conceded to actually belong to a member of H. sapiens, he’s simply wrong. Go see a picture of the Mauer jaw beside a H. sapiens jawbone here and make your own judgment on that
point.

In fact, there have been many finds of H. heidelbergensis as far away from Heidelberg as France and Greece, and most experts believe Africa’s Rhodesian Man to also be an example of H. heidelbergensis. There is ample scientific evidence (much more than “just a jawbone” as McDonald asserts) that the European H. heidelbergensis is a distinct species and a likely ancestor of Neanderthals, while it is most likely that the African heidelbergensis is a direct ancestor of H. sapiens, aka: you & me, baby.

The Question of the Quotes and the Not-So-Missing Link

One thing that I don’t understand at all about the creationist argument is why they insist on putting the term missing link in quotation marks, as if it is somehow a dubious term. To wit: McDonald’s opening phrase:

We’ve all heard stories of scientists striving to find the “missing link,” the remains of some creature that connects modern man with the chimpanzee.

Uh, no actually, Pastor McDonald, you’re wrong. The missing links connect modern man with a now-extinct ancestor common to both us and chimpanzees (and gorillas). What connects us with the chimpanzees is 96% of our DNA.

And also: how many missing links have to be found before they will accept that we are descended, in common with the other great apes (namely gorillas and chimpanzees) from an earlier ape progenitor? There are actually thirteen species in the genus Homo, including H. sapiens, although admittedly not all of the other twelve are direct H. sapiens antecedents. But some certainly are, and they in turn can be traced to earlier ancestors that spawned the branch of our family tree on which the taxonomical family hominidae dwells. And don’t think I don’t get the “dwelling in trees” metaphor, ’cause I do, and I’m likin’ it!

Nebraska Man

The claim here is that a single tooth, which was later proven to be from “an extinct pig” according to McDonald (actually, it was a peccary) was used to postulate evidence of a missing-link-type hominid. In fact, there never was a serious scientific case made that “Nebraska Man” was real, and the media and scientific community both openly printed retractions to earlier articles about “Nebraska Man”. In fact, the case of “Nebraska Man” is “actually an excellent example of the scientific process working at its best“; you know, make a discovery, present a hypothesis, test it, revise it and admit it if you’re wrong. They were. And they did. End of story.

Phew! Are You Done Yet, Lady?

Okay, so I’m satisfied that neither Heidelberg Man (a legitimate hominid species) nor Nebraska Man (an example of the scientific process at work) is an effective argument against evolution, or as McDonald puts it: “the mysterious “link” that would distance [men of worldly wisdom] from their Creator.” But please, don’t just take my word on it: make up your own mind, based on the evidence.

In my next post I’ll address the “pink link”. Really, I’m mentally exhausted by the knowledge that there are people, in the developed world where education is pretty much universal, who actually believe this stuff. They really, really do. Stunning, actually. And frightening.