10.02.09

Ardi, ID vs Darwinism: double knock out punch?

Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 12:39 pm by nemo

The 4.4 Million-Year-Old Blow To Intelligent Design
It is hard to see how the discovery of Ardi is a blow to ID, as compared with homo erectus, say, but it is certainly not much of a plus, and it is equally hard to see how we can conclude anything about Darwinian evolution here.
All we can conclude is that the ‘fact’ of evolution seems confirmed.

Let us note how misleading it is to point to even reference ‘human evolution’ here (most biologists would agree here) since to do so implies some kind of teleological process. But then again there might have been one, not due to ‘design’ but perhaps due to an anthropic principle. But most of human evolution per se occurs quite late in the game, please note.

It’s always encouraging to see a science story on the front page of The New York Times (above the fold, no less!). And it’s even better when it’s a piece about the discovery of a specimen that now serves as the earliest known relative of the human branch of the primate tree (in this case, the story involves a skeleton dating back 4.4 million years, making it much older than its 3.2 million year old cousin, Lucy).

Why? For a variety of reasons, but mainly because it, yet again, supports the notion of Darwinian evolution, which means it is another serious chink in the already weak armor of the Intelligent Design movement. For those unfamiliar with ID, it is essentially creationism re-branded with a name that sounds less biblical (but no less unintelligent, oddly). Despite the name swap, the two share the same core idea–that the earth and every living thing therein was created by an “intelligent” cause all at once, and not by random natural selection that occurred over billions of years.

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