There is an interesting article on the SkyNews website today about the discovery of a 47 million year old primate fossil which is either a monkey-like lemur or a lemur-like monkey, but which is thought by some to be the long missing “link” in the evolutionary chain between the monkeys (not the take the last train to Clarksville Monkees) and the apes, including humans. This has evolutionary biologists all a-titter, since they are engaged in an on-going battle to try to prove to people who don’t understand science that evolution by natural selection is a real process. In my view, this is a foolish waste of time because I don’t think that people who deny science for religious reasons or misunderstand science for intellectual reasons will accept good science, no matter what the preponderance of evidence is.
Ironically, this particular fossil was extracted from some central German rocks in 1983, but it hung on the wall of the extracting dude’s house for a couple of decades before it was sold, and it ended up in a museum in Oslo in 2007. They are just now revealing it’s potential significance because expert paleontologists have been examining it for a couple of years. The creature itself is about the size of a house cat and has a
long tail. The researchers suggest it is one of the best preserved early primate fossils ever found, being approximately 95% intact. There are even fossilized remnants of the poor girl’s final meal present. Of course, there are dissenting opinions which suggest that the fossil of the arboreal creature, while remarkable, is not necessarily instructive with respect to human evolution. Some even suggest that it is not even in our family tree (ha ha). The discovery of this fossil is certainly useful to flesh out something’s evolutionary record, but the significance of any single fossil is almost certainly overblown; the evolutionary record is already akin to a murder scene where there are six shell casings and the victim was hit by five bullets; you don’t need that sixth bullet to be certain what happened.
While this is an interesting find, what I find interesting is the reaction many people have when it is suggested that humans evolved from some less human-like creature. I have seen the cliché image of the redneck in countless Public Television documentaries, red-faced and veins bulging, declaring “I ain’t related to no monkey!”, but even more sophisticated persons often have misgivings about evolution, if for no other reason than it relegates humans to the same level of significance as all other creatures in God’s creation. Evolution implies that we are just big-brained apes that discovered the wheel and cirrhosis of the liver. All available evidence indicates that this is, in fact, correct, but either because we value Nature too little, or ourselves too much, we just can’t seem to accept where we really stand.
The more scientific minded among us will perhaps find adequate wonder in a process which, without conscious direction, has resulted in the Earth’s incredible diversity of life and has even produced self-awareness, but our religious brethren can at least comfort themselves in the fact that humans are the only creatures valued enough by God and the Devil to be the subject of an on-going struggle for possession of our eternal souls. The point that I believe most religious people miss, however, is that as a species we made a conscious choice to leave the Garden of Eden. We try to blame tricky old Satan, but everybody knows we are too damn curious to have left that apple alone for much longer, even if Old Scratch hadn’t egged us on. We chose knowledge over bliss because that is at the core of what we are, and we need to quit whining and run with it.
Ironically, this particular fossil was extracted from some central German rocks in 1983, but it hung on the wall of the extracting dude’s house for a couple of decades before it was sold, and it ended up in a museum in Oslo in 2007. They are just now revealing it’s potential significance because expert paleontologists have been examining it for a couple of years. The creature itself is about the size of a house cat and has a
long tail. The researchers suggest it is one of the best preserved early primate fossils ever found, being approximately 95% intact. There are even fossilized remnants of the poor girl’s final meal present. Of course, there are dissenting opinions which suggest that the fossil of the arboreal creature, while remarkable, is not necessarily instructive with respect to human evolution. Some even suggest that it is not even in our family tree (ha ha). The discovery of this fossil is certainly useful to flesh out something’s evolutionary record, but the significance of any single fossil is almost certainly overblown; the evolutionary record is already akin to a murder scene where there are six shell casings and the victim was hit by five bullets; you don’t need that sixth bullet to be certain what happened.While this is an interesting find, what I find interesting is the reaction many people have when it is suggested that humans evolved from some less human-like creature. I have seen the cliché image of the redneck in countless Public Television documentaries, red-faced and veins bulging, declaring “I ain’t related to no monkey!”, but even more sophisticated persons often have misgivings about evolution, if for no other reason than it relegates humans to the same level of significance as all other creatures in God’s creation. Evolution implies that we are just big-brained apes that discovered the wheel and cirrhosis of the liver. All available evidence indicates that this is, in fact, correct, but either because we value Nature too little, or ourselves too much, we just can’t seem to accept where we really stand.
The more scientific minded among us will perhaps find adequate wonder in a process which, without conscious direction, has resulted in the Earth’s incredible diversity of life and has even produced self-awareness, but our religious brethren can at least comfort themselves in the fact that humans are the only creatures valued enough by God and the Devil to be the subject of an on-going struggle for possession of our eternal souls. The point that I believe most religious people miss, however, is that as a species we made a conscious choice to leave the Garden of Eden. We try to blame tricky old Satan, but everybody knows we are too damn curious to have left that apple alone for much longer, even if Old Scratch hadn’t egged us on. We chose knowledge over bliss because that is at the core of what we are, and we need to quit whining and run with it.
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