Our missing link has been found

[Malergion]

Well, malergion, you can't deny that a lot of things are still unknown about evolution, so science has to make some assumptions, right?

Actually, no.

Scientists take a bunch of related facts, come up with an explanation that accounts for all of these facts, and then people attack their findings in peer-reviewed journals. If the hypothesis stands up to experimentation and/or reasoning, and if it (hopefully) gains more evidence, it becomes a theory.

Science on the whole doesn't make assumptions at all.

 

[slashvanyoung]

This title is a bit misleading... it's one missing link, but it's not the sought after missing link between apes and humans. What was found is an ancestor of several primates, including Hominidae (great apes) and Homo sapiens.

 

[Chromatose]

Indeed, sensationalism.

but wow that fossil is an amazing find though. I'm impressed.

but on the topic of "lol science", I was reading that it looks like it potentially was thrown into a place in the fossil record that looked more important than where it may possibly belong just for the sake of hype.

Allegedly there are several key traits which make its clade placement highly suspect, as it could come down to convergence, but there was no research done to say for certain.

 

[Lord Foul]

There's a little thing called "science" here that you're not quite understanding.

We don't carbon date fossils.
Carbon dating requires carbon. Fossils have none. You're probably thinking of potassium-argon dating.

Scientists don't claim small samples represent the broad spectrum of the fossil record.

"Many of the suppsed human ancestors" meaning virtually none.
We have nearly complete skeletons from almost every species of human discovered and the supposedly unreliable dating methods (many versions of isotope dating similar to potassium-argon dating as well) back them in most cases. The cases where isotope dating has failed are indeed up in the air, but in that case it's often possible to use just plain archaelogical common sense.

There's also a principle called consillence. The isotope dating backs up the geology which backs up the morophology...etc.

Multiple avenues of convergence. To make such blanket statements in the negative is, with all due respect, ignorant.

Actually, no.

Scientists take a bunch of related facts, come up with an explanation that accounts for all of these facts, and then people attack their findings in peer-reviewed journals. If the hypothesis stands up to experimentation and/or reasoning, and if it (hopefully) gains more evidence, it becomes a theory.

Science on the whole doesn't make assumptions at all.

So I guess I am being misunderstood here as advocating creationism or somesuch (which I am not). Fossils give us tiny windows into thin slices of the vast expanse of prehistory. We have the power to assemble those slices in order of age (the techniques for dating being well tested), but then we have to observe the pattern and tell ourselves a story about how it fits together. Because these hypotheses are untestable, I submit that they are not, in fact, science. The expert consensus about the history of evolution is very plausible and logical, but as it is not possible to use experimentation to pick out the parts of the story that are wrong, we run the risk of placing future discoveries into our narrative based on bad information. I'm not saying the accepted ideas are wrong (they might have got things exactly right, after all), or even that we have a better method than making the most reasonable guess.

/scientific rigor police

 

[Malergion]

So I guess I am being misunderstood here as advocating creationism or somesuch (which I am not).

Not at all.
If I thought you were representing creationism, I'd say "stupid Creationist twat."

What you are representing is a general misinformationn about science which isn't enitrely your fault. Science has to be be rigorous, or it's just some form of quackery. I understand that science is boring to a lot of people, but the forces it documents rule the universe, so it pays to understand them and at least attempt to correct people who are wrong.

Scientific rigor? You bet, Bob. Nice straw man, by the way!

Cheers.

 

[Lord Foul]

Science has to be be rigorous, or it's just some form of quackery.

What I am saying is that paleontology is not a particularly rigorous science, as it produces mostly untestable hypotheses. I take it that you disagree.

 

[Malergion]

What I am saying is that paleontology is not a particularly rigorous science, as it produces mostly untestable hypotheses. I take it that you disagree.

Anything that can be classed as science is by definition rigorous.

It's kind of hard to "test" a paleontological hypothesis by experiment. Dating methods are pretty much all the field has.

But if you gather ten thousand fossils and date them, and the dating agrees with the change in morphology, no further "testability" is needed for the hypothesis to be plausible.

To be sure, there were a lot of quacks early on, just as in psychology, or medicine but times change, and the vast majority that remain are indeed responsible scientists.

 

[DarkNoise]

Many of the supposed human ancestors are known only from a tooth or a piece of a skull.

Remember when they found a tooth buried and surmised that it was from a human back at the dawn of the Neanderthal era, and it ended up being a pig's tooth? I loved that.

 

[Malergion]

That was a deliberate hoax. They didn't find the tooth and guess that it was a pig's tooth later.

 

[Lord Foul]

I have no problem with the dating methods, and in the absence of preserved complete DNA sequences, morphological comparison will have to suffice. Ultimately the issue I have is that there is no falsification method to determine which of a number of equally plausible hypotheses are superior.

 

[DarkNoise]

^^ i had never heard that it was a deliberate hoax.

The more you know...

 

[Malergion]

I have no problem with the dating methods, and in the absence of preserved complete DNA sequences, morphological comparison will have to suffice. Ultimately the issue I have is that there is no falsification method to determine which of a number of equally plausible hypotheses are superior.

Indeed there isn't. But that doesn't mean much. The idea is to gather a gradual picture of of the more likely hypotheses and trim the ones that don't fit. In that way it is scientific and rigorous, and the principle of falsification applies by process of elimination.

 

[Lord Foul]

Process of elimination will get you to a certain point, but not one specific and certain enough to call something "the missing link." Which brings us back to my original objection to the article, which is really an objection to bad scientific journalism.

 

[Malergion]

I suppose I should have mentioned that the idea of a "missing link" between apes and humans is kind of an antiquated idea. We didn't evolve from apes. We evolved, along with apes, from "proto apes". Therefore a "missing link between humans and apes is kind of fruitless to look for.

Arguments that the apelike common ancestor is the "missing link" oversimplify the issue. My point was that if you're going to criticize paleontology, you should at least have the science down But yes, woe to sloppy journalism..and apparently sensationalism. Now, every person on the planet with a computer knows that these fossils have been found, because Google has modded their logo again.

 

[Lord Foul]

Eh, I let my argument with an article overflow into the general arena of science. My bad. I don't have a doctorate in the field, but it is an area of personal interest I do a fair bit of reading about (outside of the sensational journalistic realm) so I doubt I am so ignorant as you think. And hey, a new Google logo. Everyone is a winner!

 

[Malergion]

Eh, I let my argument with an article overflow into the general arena of science. My bad. I don't have a doctorate in the field, but it is an area of personal interest I do a fair bit of reading about (outside of the sensational journalistic realm) so I doubt I am so ignorant as you think. And hey, a new Google logo. Everyone is a winner!

I don't have a doctorate either.

However I've been reading about evolution since I was five or so. My (apparently atheist) aunt bought me a copy of Creatures of the Past, which was a nicely illustrated, (rather thick) book for kids that didn't dumb things down, and I was hooked. Precambrian all the way.

 

[Chromatose]

Accurate dating is all well and good, but there's so many possibilities for lateral placement within numerous branching convergent evolutionary lines that just looking at something and saying "we'll put it.......... here" is a laugh. (yes, I undervalued the research that goes into it by making that statement).

The real excitement comes when DNA analyses are done, and of course this can only determine so little from the overall record presented by fossils and such, but that's when they realize how wrong (or okay, maybe right) they had been and do massive clade overhauls.

 

[Malergion]

"Massive clade overhauls"
+5

 

[Lord Foul]

I don't have a doctorate either.

However I've been reading about evolution since I was five or so. My (apparently atheist) aunt bought me a copy of Creatures of the Past, which was a nicely illustrated, (rather thick) book for kids that didn't dumb things down, and I was hooked. Precambrian all the way.

I wanted to be a paleontologist so badly when I was 5

Accurate dating is all well and good, but there's so many possibilities for lateral placement within numerous branching convergent evolutionary lines that just looking at something and saying "we'll put it.......... here" is a laugh. (yes, I undervalued the research that goes into it by making that statement).

The real excitement comes when DNA analyses are done, and of course this can only determine so little from the overall record presented by fossils and such, but that's when they realize how wrong (or okay, maybe right) they had been and do massive clade overhauls.

Cladistics is really the best thing ever. As much as I love hauling around silly amounts of data about Linnaean taxonomy around in my head, I just love when they discover a bunch of it is wrong. Not only does it provide real falsifiability, but it also supports existing ideas like convergent evolution.

 

[Resonator]

yeh suck my dick creationists

You'll never understand it thinking like that