Increasingly, Evolution Has No Proof

THE DAILY BELL

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A cluster of ghostly hand- and footprints on a mountain north of Lhasa offers evidence that humans scratched out a permanent existence in the thin air of Tibet much earlier than commonly thought, according to a new study.  Some locals believe the prints, pressed into an ancient slab of limestone located 14,000 feet above sea level near the present-day village of Chusang, were left behind by mythical beasts. A team of researchers say that the impressions were left by people and that they offer intriguing clues to the puzzle of Tibetans’ ethnic origins.  –WSJ

The dating of an ancient slab of limestone in Tibet has now been attributed to human beings between 7,000 and 12,000 years ago. But that’s still fairly recent so far as we are concerned.

More than ever we are partial to the idea that people in great civilizations  were alive 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. And we’re willing to consider the possibility it goes back a lot further than that.

A 900 page book on the subject citing a good many examples intends to show human beings on earth go back hundreds of millions of years. The evidence is being removed from museums in favor of proofs that support the idea that human beings are not so old.

This story in Science is example of an article that pushes on the boundaries of science without blowing up the theory in its entirety.

The researchers, whose latest findings are published in the latest issue of Science, say they’ve now developed a clearer picture of the site’s significance. According to their calculations, Chusang was very likely used by inhabitants of a nearby year-round settlement between 7,400 and 12,700 years ago — at least 2,200 years before permanent villages are believed to have been established elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau.

… By positing an earlier date of settlement on the Tibetan plateau, the study is likely to be controversial in Chinese archaeological circles. It could also irk Communist Party officials, for whom the question of where Tibetans came from is freighted with political significance.  Pushing back against advocates for Tibetan independence, the Chinese government recently began arguing that Tibet has been a part of China, not just during the imperial era, but “since ancient times.”

China is using archaeology to make political points. And it is not just China. Archaeology throughout the West has been put in a similar position. It is at least partially in the service of specific political persuasions.

In the West, for instance, the idea is that civilization has been on a constant upward curve. With a certain jaggedness, the curve has been maintained with a regular ascension.

But perhaps this ascension has been maintained dishonestly. Human skeletons for instance, seem to have been buried within strata that is 10, 20 or even 100 million years old. The strata is contiguous and set up in a way that proves the bodies couldn’t have drifted down from a higher level

There is almost as much evidence, it seems, for man being hundreds of millions of years old as there is that modern man is 60,000 years old. The human construct of Petra in Jordan is said to be millions of years old just based in the sites massive erosion. And  the same erosion is said to have affected various sites in South America.

The result has been especially injurious to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin noted a good deal of micro evolution between species and thus concluded that macro evolution must take place. But in nearly 200 years of looking, not a single case of macro-evolution has been definitively proven from what we can tell.

Horses were supposed to have grown from small to large, shedding toes in the process. But these days, there is a good deal of doubt whether the initial multi-toed animal was ever some sort of horse to begin with. Simply calling it a horse does not make it one.

Saying man evolved from apes  sounds good but the evidence may not be there. Great apes did evolve to walk, but not much else actually changed. Great brow ridges remained. The rib cage still went from in to out. The arms still dangled nearly to the knees. The strength of these creatures was five to ten times that of modern man.

Neanderthals are said to be proto-humans, but some have now noted that even the Neanderthal had a strong resemblance to an ape. The shape of the body, including the lengthy arms, barrel chest, prominent brow ridges and other elements far more represent an ape than a modern human. Thus even the Neanderthal could be said to represent an extreme form of ape.

Human beings are far different than apes. Their strength is much diminished, their heads are much different as are the length of their arms. An upright walking ape may still be a kind of ape despite his stance. But a human is a human.

The idea here is that there are many micro-evolutions but these do not add up to a single macro-evolution.

It is also noted that macro-evolutions take place after great extinctions when there are numerous additional animal niches to fill. In very short periods of time, macro-evolution must take place to fill literally thousands of these now vacant niches. Since we cannot definitively identify a single clear-cut macro-evolutionary example, granting an explosion of them in a few thousand years seems at least suspicious.

Conclusion: None of this means the theory of evolution is dead. But much of it seems questionable and the burden of proof after so many years should surely fall at least in part on those who espouse it. Right now, evolution has a lot of adherent including major scientists, but at some point they will have to move beyond theory and actually provide solid evidence.

 

February 1, 2017 | 51 Comments »

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50 Comments / 51 Comments

  2. @ Edgar G.:
    Incidentally, do you know how smart phones, laptops, tablets, and ipods have paradoxically made the world a more dangerous place while making the NY subway system safer?

    Well, they’ve made the world more dangerous by eliminating the need for phone booths* so Superman now has no place to change, but they’ve made the subway safer by taking formerly dangerous individuals and making them autistic.

    *Though I wonder if they won’t bring them back — without phones — because both inside and out it’s too noisy to hear anything anyway.

  3. Edgar G. Said:

    “You DO get around, don’t you. You don’t happen to have a pair of tights with a red vest with an S on it do you and a proclivity for diving into phone booths…?”

    When I was little, my ultra-feminist mother and sister went to see Linda Lavin in “Superman” on Broadway and the exchange where Linda Lavin as Lois Lane says worshipfully, breathlessly to a square-jawed superman looking heroically off into the distance, with arms crossed — she is looking up at him as he is considerably taller — “Oh Superman, you’re so wonderful, you can move faster than a speeding train, etc.” And without looking at her he replies in a deep voice, “Yes!”. It became a standard family punchline, often used. I was looking for that — I never actually saw the show — and was amazed to find this song from the show which relates to this discussion.

    https://youtu.be/mt4AwDvvBI4

    Which in turn reminds me of this funny bit

    https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c

    which in turn reminds me of the lyrics of the National Lampoon Spoof of Desiderata, Deteriorata (both of which are on youtube) here are the lyrics

    http://web.mit.edu/~yandros/poetry/deteriorata

  4. Edgar G. Said:

    No..I happen to know that George Washington DID chop down the cherry tree, except that it was really an apple tree bearing evolved tiny red apples….

    They better have been non-GMO apples or the dems will overthrow the government.

    Oh, Wait. That explains everything. Isn’t Washington State known for its apples?

    “How Washington State Upended Trump’s Travel Ban”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/trump-travel-ban-washington-seattle-ferguson.html

  6. @ Terje:
    @ Terje:
    @ Terje:
    Dear Terje,
    You certainty as to what science is: observation, hypothesis, testing/verification, and replication does not address the existing uncertainty or healthy skepticism as to how evolution manifests itself. Not for that matter do you address Darwinism v. Lamarck v. Gould and the continuing debate whether chemical or biogenesis caused the first living cell. Finally, many believing Jewish scientists find Torah to be a compromise or median between belief and science.

  10. @ Terje:
    Darwinism is NOT testable becasue no one can set up a test that lasts several billion years.
    Therefore, Darwinism is a religion and evolution is its God.

  11. Such an idiotic essay. The proper response id to not spread these idiotic “ideas” and misstated positions of scientists.

  12. Sebastien Zorn Said:

    I suppose next thing you’re gonna tell me that George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree or that he really was able to tell a lie

    xxx

    No..I happen to know that George Washington DID chop down the cherry tree, except that it was really an apple tree bearing evolved tiny red apples….. I happen to have his original axe, etched on the handle. It has had only three changes of handle and two of blade, but it’s the original axe I swear. It is I who cannot tell a lie, Georgie told a few in his time, but it was neccessary then to avoid being staked out on a hillside like the other unwanted childrenas he had Hreek ancestry who kept up the old customs.

    Any time you want to talk rubbish…just let me know I’m all for it. But all that aside, the Dems occasionally do tell the truth…by accident it’s true but now and then, and only realise it afterwards. You DO get around, don’t you. You don’t happen to have a pair of tights with a red vest with an S on it do you and a proclivity for diving into phone booths…?

  24. @ Edgar G.:
    I suppose next thing you’re gonna tell me that George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree or that he really was able to tell a lie. Do you think I was born yesterday? I’m from New York City, ya know!* Oh, yeah, right. Neeeeever mind.

    *I wonder if you are aware of the depth of ignorance here due to the fact that people rely exclusively on liberal fake news. I spoke to more than one person who during the Trump locker room talk scandal: a) didn’t know that Bill Clinton had been accused of rape and reacted with shock and outrage at the very thought b) didn’t believe it. and c) didn’t know or believe that the accusations against Trump had been debunked.d) Didn’t know about or believe any of the accusations against Hillary Clinton. When they asked me where I got my information, if I say Fox they discount it, if I say, Washington Free Beacon, they say, what’s that?, if I say Breitbart, they get hysterical. They are less open-minded than the far-left magazine, “Mother Jones”

    “The Washington Free Beacon Is Unapologetically Conservative. It’s Also Kind of Good.
    NICK BAUMANN MARCH/APRIL 2015 ISSUE”

    http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/washington-free-beacon-conservative-investigative-media

  27. Sebastien Zorn Said:

    “15 minutes plus layover in terminal.”

    I live on a dirt road with three other homes. No traffic or delays. I take that back. Last summer we had a traffic jam as we all had wait on a Mother Hawk killing and dismembering a rabbit.

  28. @ Sebastien Zorn:
    xxx

    Yes I suppose he’d see some sort of stars when the apple came down again and hit him on the nose. The actualy story goes that he was reposing under an apple tree and an apple, obviously in ripe old age, fell from the tree and hit him on the head.

    The historians have debunked that story regrettably, and say there’s no truth to it at all, that his theory was worked out by deep thought. Perhaps that was what drove him mashugga, for a few years. It seems that in that era, it was no uncommon for brainy folk to go crazy. Dean Swift, the Irish Bishop who wrote Gulliver’s Travels and etc, and who became mentally unsound; a bit less so the renowned Archbishop Ussher, whose chronology from the creation until the printing of the James Version of the Bible is/was along the margins of each copy. He even knew which day,(although creation-his creation, preceded the naming of the days, and what time of the day…….. ??? He likely worked backwards -thinking it was forwards…

  29. @ Sebastien Zorn:

    LOL. I used to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I get your point. If Newton grew up in NYC, our understanding of the world would be dramatically different from what it is today, and perhaps more accurate 🙂

  30. @ yamit82:

    Scientific Proof of God

    So, here you start, immediately, demonstrating that you don’t even know what science is. Science, outside of maths, never proves things, so the sentence “scientific proof of” is self contradictory. My recommendation to you would be to learn something about what you are talking before talking. Science doesn’t prove stuff. Anyone running around trying to prove stuff is not engaged in a scientific pursuit.

    Exolain the Bacteria Flagellum motor!!!

    The idea that the Flagellum is irreducibly complex has been thoroughly debunked a long time ago. The fact that you bring it up shows that you haven’t even updated your self on creationism in the past 15 years or so. Even the most hardened creationists have mostly given up this argument.

  31. @ mrg3105:

    misininformed on th e’biblical’ evidence

    They are not, there isn’t any.

    it is common knowledge

    “Common knowledge” is the same as “ignorant superstition”.

    That Adam and Eve were 976 iteration in God’s experimentation to design the modern human is not so unscientific

    It is 100% total nonsense and has nothing at all to do with science. Please, before responding, try find out what science actually is. So far everything you have said about it is flat out wrong.

  32. @ Terje:
    If Newton had ever ridden mass transit in Manhattan, he would have known that what goes up does not necessarily come back down. No, when he threw that apple up in the air, he would have just seen a glowing display in the sky reading:
    “15 minutes plus layover in terminal.”

  38. Dennis Said:

    The late Stephen Jay Gould posited a “punctuated evolution” akin to a staircase, where there is not linear or necessarily “progression”.

    May I suggest a proof for the above statement, The Western American Coyote and Texas Rattlesnake.
    The coyote has now adapted to urban life, large numbers can be found in American cities of the Midwest and East.
    Texas rattlesnake is losing it’s ability to rattle because it is being aggressively hunted by feral hogs. Snakes who do not rattle live and reproduce.

  40. yamit82 Said:

    The Most interesting topic is discovery of our origin ….random or directed?

    Directed Yamit 82 Have you not heard of the ancient Sumerian texts that describe how the “Ananaki” [ancient space travelers] carried the “seed race” of Humans, in their space ships, to earth. ‘ At that time their were Giants living upon the Earth who mated with the Daughters of Man”. And of course Angels and “Ezekiel Wheels”.

    irected

  42. @ Terje:

    Now, here is the rub. The Theory of Common Origin (calling it Darwinism now, though that’s not entirely correct) is currently the ONLY theory that explains our presence on this planet. No other theory has ever been formulated by anyone. Ever.

    You are 100% wrong there are other theories mostly debunking Darwinism the 2 clips I posted above address some of them but there are others. Exolain the Bacteria Flagellum motor!!!

    http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/irreducible_complexity_02.html

    Irreducible Complexity? The Bacterial Flagellum
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_5FToP_mMY
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_5FToP_mMY

  46. You do not address Stephen Jay Gould’s corpus of work nor Lamarck. While articulate, you omit responding to Berlinksi’s four points: fossil record, Ocam’s razor how natural selection and competition works on the micro and macro level, speciation, time reference and environment/ climate trauma and change. Thanks for your input.

  48. The problem is that Darwin, as are most modern proponents of the Theory of Evolution are misininformed on th e’biblical’ evidence. In the Hebrew culture it is common knowledge that 975 ‘generations’ of human beings lived before Adam and Eve. Moreover, the age of the Universe has been shown by Ariyeh Kaplan to be over 18 billion years, close to the estimated scientific time.
    Another word for evolution is iteration, and science projects do this all the time with experimenttion, with laboratory products sometimes numbering in hundreds before the right one is produced for example in commercial medical application. That Adam and Eve were 976 iteration in God’s experimentation to design the modern human is not so unscientific. In fact it is far more suggestive that the current paleontological findings are still missing very many links between #1 and #976.

  49. This article is pure nonsense from top to bottom. The ignorance displayed is staggering in the extreme. Let’s look at science 101.

    1/ Science, outside of maths doesn’t prove things. Ever. It attempts to falsify. There is a huge difference.

    2/ For something, science tends to call this “something” a hypothesis, to be possible to evaluate scientifically at all, it has to have certain properties. One of the properties it has to have (necessary but not sufficient) is that it has to be possible to formulate an observation or calculation that would falsify the hypothesis. In other words, until you can formulate a falsification statement, an idea can not be treated scientifically at all. The idea is said to be “not even wrong”.

    So, science is about proposing hypothesises, documenting observations, making predictions, explaining phenomena etc and then trying to falsify these. Put together in a systematic way they become a scientific theory.

    Now, there is actually no theory of evolution. Evolution is a mechanism that we observe every day. Evolution means that the offspring of two entities is identical to neither parent (unless the offspring is a result of non-sexual reproduction – it happens). The controversial theory is actually The Theory of Common Origin, in other words, we all had common ancestors. Apes. Monkeys. Donkeys. Squid. Humans. Palm trees.

    The controversial topic of this theory is named “speciation”. Speciation means that two groups of a species are separated and stay separated for an extended period of time. For example by one of them moving across a barrier that is temporarily “down” but comes back up. If those two groups change to the degree that one day down the line, they again meet, an individual of one of the groups can no longer mate with an individual of the other and have viable offspring that also can reproduce. Example, donkeys and horses have diverged to this point, their offspring, the Mule, can not reproduce. Donkeys and horses are now two different species.

    Now, here is the rub. The Theory of Common Origin (calling it Darwinism now, though that’s not entirely correct) is currently the ONLY theory that explains our presence on this planet. No other theory has ever been formulated by anyone. Ever.

    So, how does science deal with the above fact? It then assumes that Darwinism is correct. There are no other theories, and nobody has ever falsified Darwinism.

    How to propose an alternative to Darwinism and have it being treated scientifically? You have to do the leg work. You have to formulate a set of hypothesises that explains our existence, these have to be testable and they have to be falsifiable. They should also be able to predict future events, in other words, to take an example from the theory of Gravity: If I drop an object from here it will arrive on the ground with this speed at this point in time. Being able to predict makes the hypothesis more valuable, but it isn’t a strict requirement. Falsibiability is.

    So, the most important “alternative” to Darwinism is some variation of “(Dude) made it so”. There are a number of variations of this one, but the main deviation is who (Dude) is. None of these can be, at the current point in time, be treated scientifically, and they can therefore not be thought of as alternatives to Darwinism. Why? Well, to make “(Dude) did it” possible to falsify, first you have to make “There is a (Dude)” possible to falsify. Now, let’s not kid our selves, the term “(Dude)” here is various definitions of “God”. So, we need a falsifying observation of “There is a God”. Can anyone formulate an observation that would prove beyond any doubt that God doesn’t exist? If you can’t, creationism can not be treated scientifically at all. It doesn’t mean it is wrong, lots of things can not be treated scientifically but are still correct. It only means that creationism is religion, Darwinism is science, and never the twain shall meet.

    Final food for thought. There is substantially more supporting data for the Theory of Common Origin than there is for the Theory of Gravity. In fact, The Theory of Gravity has very, very little of a supporting framework. So, you could say that scientifically it is dumber to doubt Darwinism than it is to doubt the Theory of Gravity. People who reject Darwinism would be wiser than a man who jumps from a 20 story building believing there is no such thing as Gravity. Remember, Gravity is only a theory.

  50. The late Stephen Jay Gould posited a “punctuated evolution” akin to a staircase, where there is not linear or necessarily “progression”. It would seem that a combination of Darwinian, Lamarckian and sudden burst evolution (biblical?) may be in play. Other transplanted species of fish moved from Southeast Asia to South America changed from herbivorous eating to carnivorous eating within a mere decade due to dramatic environmental and food source change. Fascinating stuff; indeed requiring ever keener scientific archeological, anthropological, and biological analysis.