Jason Meyers:
The hominid fossil record shows gradual transitions in skull morphology between an ape-like ancestor to the modern human form.
“Many people think that fossils, almost by definition, are rare
and precious. (Some are, of course–the six specimens of
Archaeopteryx and our limited evidence of human ancestry,
for example.)”[Gould,
Eight Little Piggies (1993), 275-6.]
“The main problem in reconstructing the origins of man is lack
of fossil evidence: all there is could be displayed on a
dinner-table.”[
New Scientist (20 May 1982), 491. Cited in
Alan Hayward,
Creation and Evolution (1985), 51, whose
endnote adds, “News item: ‘Equality in all things - even teeth.’
(Although this writer did not say so explicitly, he may have
been referring to pre-Homo specimens, not early human
remains.)”]
"Nutcracker man stood poised to join Neanderthal man, Java
man, Peking man (and the notorious Piltdown man), as one of
the leading characters in the popular saga of human evolution.
Then he slipped from view… its significance today seems to lie
more in the saga of scientific procedure than in the scientific
study of human evolution. This change of status is not unusual
in the study of fossil man; and each case is the inevitable
consequence of problems inherent to the science, problems
which perhaps deserve a little attention themselves.
Judged by the amount of evidence upon which it is based, the
study of fossil man (palaeoanthropology) hardly deserves to be
more than a sub-discipline of paleontology or anthropology.
The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover
a billiard table, but it has spawned a science because it is
distinguished by two factors which inflate its apparent relevance
far beyond its merits. First, the fossils hint at the ancestry of a
supremely self-important animal-- ourselves.
Second, the collection is so tantalisingly incomplete, and the
specimens themselves often so fragmentary and inconclusive,
that more can be said about what is missing than about what is
present. Hence the amazing quantity of literature on the subject.
Very few fossils indeed afford just one, incontrovertible
interpretation of their evolutionary significance. Most are
capable of supporting several interpretations." [author of
Missing Links (1981) John Reader,
New Scientist (26
March 1981), 802.]
“Furthermore, since the meagre collection has accumulated so
slowly, the long gaps between discoveries have provided ample
time for investigators to form very definite notions of what
ought to be found next.
Zinjanthropus boisei is a good
example of this phenomenon, but ever since Darwin’s work
inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct
ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human
evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the
study of fossil man.”[Reader, 802.]
“Darwin’s treatment of the process of ‘humanisation’ of the
extinct ape-like progenitor of man was his most intensive
imaginary reconstruction of an evolutionary trend, although
many particular points in the structural evolution of man had
been proposed by speculative evolutionists before him. Like all
evolutionary reconstructions, it rests heavily on plausibility
rather than evidence to command assent.”[Principal Scientific
Officer at the Agricultural Research Council Institute of Animal
Physiology at Babraham (near Cambridge) Jonathan Howard,
Darwin (1982), 63. This book is part of the “Past Masters”
series.]
)?
