Image: BRAD HINES
Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.
This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.
We know evolution happened because of a convergence of evidence.
Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."
In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the present from a single gene pool of wolves.
Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication."
No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
This article was originally published with the title The Fossil Fallacy.
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6 Comments
Add CommentIn before "there's no such thing as transition fossils because Gawd said so"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis sounds like jibberish! All this said, it still comes down to where is the missing link? If it took millions of years for the human being to evlove shoud there not be millions of fossils to support this claim. Why is it so hard to find even one!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@tdrothrock -- did you even <em>read</em> the article? (Or are you, as I hope, making a funny?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisREAD THIS:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSource: The TOP 25 Crimes of the Century: TIME
THE FAKE APE-MAN, 1912
Eoanthropus dawsoni was the scientific name of this alleged missing link, and it would have been an extremely early example of a creature showing both human and apelike qualities. At 375,000 years old, it put England in contention for a cradle of humankind, being found in the Sussex town of Piltdown. The "first Englishman" he was proudly called when the anthropologist Charles Dawson found him in 1911. For decades, Piltdown Man was cited along with Neanderthal man and Heidelberg man as an example of early hominid life in Europe. Then in 1953, the fragments, including a jawbone, were tested: they did not contain enough fluorine to be the age that Dawson claimed; worse, the jawbone was that of a 10-year-old orangutan, its teeth ground down to simulate age, and a crude chemical wash applied to the bone to make it appear ancient. No one knows who perpetrated the hoax: Dawson had died in 1916. Very quickly, however, Piltdown became a synonym for phony; and England's claim to antiquity was cut short by several hundred thousand years.
What did Darwin prove?Nothing. Suppose Darwin found fossils that prove a mouse evolved to an elephant.And what does this prove about Creation? It is not necessary to go to Silicon Valley,or to Fossil Valley, to know something about evolution.You can observe evolution at home. Take a carterpillar and oberve son evoltion .A foliage eating worm evolves to a honey drinking flying insect, a butterfly. Fundamentlly the adaptations of a caterpillar to become a butterfly are greater than the adaptations of a mouse to become an elephant. And where is the adaptation to environment? I think carterpillars were created with the plans of a buttergly in their belly
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo,if Darwin found hat species A evolved from speciesB, we may suppose B was born with then plan of A inbuilt and so on
I wonder when both creationists and scientists will realise that they both have right and for thousands of years the argue about what separates both instead of what is common. It is pure dialectic and philosophical donduct i can agree. The same way the mystery of life remains a mystery even all the evidence, examples and finally let's call it "alogrythm" is in front of our eyes. Two beings - woman and man, representing two equally right but opposite forces of universe, meet and join ( scientific term is copulate, spiritual term is love ) to perform a mysterious act which results in a birth of a third entity, new life, a child is born. It bilogical dialectics in action. Thesis, antythesis and synthesis. Analogically the same drama apllies to this dillema. Who is right ? They both are. That's why i solved this problem easily and i see that points of view both creationists and evolutionistst are enriching my knowledge with the same importance and influence. I have no conflict with this, i don't see any problem beceause it is simple. By the way, why most of the eastern cultures and other "not western" cultures also don't have any probles with figuring out his battle. It looks like West is still stuck somewhere in the past millenia, convinced that they are the apex of human evolution. It's time to get off the trees and start thinking like humans supposed to do and stop those infantile and ridicolous debates. I'm nor scientist neither religous person. I am quite educated but i feel sorry and pity for so many so intelligent people gathered in communities like this one, so prominent and influential but still behaving like never grown up children, fifty and sisxty years old children with beards. It's real drama of the West. Both comic and tragic in consequences... sad and funny...
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