By Carl ZimmerPosted Thursday, April 8, 2010, at 10:47 AM ET
The news began bubbling out over the weekend: "Missing link between man and apes found," declared an April 3 story in the LondonTelegraph. When I saw that headline, I thought to myself, "Please, please, not again."
Whenever scientists make a major discovery about human evolution, we get treated to a lot of misconceptions. The most popular of them all is the myth of the missing link—the idea that paleontologists are on an eternal quest for ancestors linking us directly back to earlier forms of life. Last May, for example, scientists reported the discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil of a primate called Darwinius. "Fossil is evolution's 'missing link,' " blared a headline in the Sun."The beautifully preserved remains—dubbed Ida—is believed to be a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom," the article said—a sentence that makes no sense the first time you read it and then somehow manages to make even less sense the longer you look at it. The Sun was not alone in its delivery of nonsensical hype. Shortly after Darwinius was unveiled, the History Channel aired a show about its discovery, called The Link. The show itself may be long gone, but its elaborate Web site lives on, still "uncovering our earliest ancestor." To all our wormlike ancestors and primordial bacterial forerunners: You have my deepest sympathy for that slight.
This weekend's new missing link was much younger than Darwinius, just shy of 2 million years old. "Scientists believe the almost-complete fossilised skeleton belonged to a previously-unknown type of early human ancestor that may have been an intermediate stage as ape-men evolved into the first species of advanced humans," Richard Gray wrote in the Telegraph. Over the next few days, other news outlets picked up the story, repeating the promise that scientists had at last found the missing link in an unbroken chain leading directly back to our ape ancestors. They were all sketchy on the details, however, because the papers detailing the fossil were still in press at the journal Science. It was not until this morning that the real story came to light. Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues unveiled a pair of fossils dating back somewhere between 1.95 million to 1.78 million years. The world finally got to meet a creature called Australopithecus sediba. And while these fossils are certainly significant in a lot of ways, one thing they definitely are not is a missing link.
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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: Slate
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Todas as vezes que eu leio notícias sobre o tal de elo perdido da evolução humana, eu fico com um pé atrás porque sei que logo em seguida vários especialistas vão dizer o contrário sobre o achado. Razão desse meu ceticismo generalizado? É porque a paleoantropologia é um ramo da ciência infectado pela ganância sórdida de seus praticantes encontrarem o tal de elo perdido.
Como há muita 'guerra' entre os pares, e muita subjetividade em vez de ciência, para mim a paleoantropologia é uma ciência contaminada pelos egos onde a objetividade científica já foi pra lata do lixo epistêmico há muito tempo. Já pensou nos louros da fama se você encontrar esse tal de elo perdido???
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
Todas as vezes que eu leio notícias sobre o tal de elo perdido da evolução humana, eu fico com um pé atrás porque sei que logo em seguida vários especialistas vão dizer o contrário sobre o achado. Razão desse meu ceticismo generalizado? É porque a paleoantropologia é um ramo da ciência infectado pela ganância sórdida de seus praticantes encontrarem o tal de elo perdido.
Como há muita 'guerra' entre os pares, e muita subjetividade em vez de ciência, para mim a paleoantropologia é uma ciência contaminada pelos egos onde a objetividade científica já foi pra lata do lixo epistêmico há muito tempo. Já pensou nos louros da fama se você encontrar esse tal de elo perdido???
Continuem procurando. Há mais fósseis para serem encontrados. Não somente um elo perdido, mas toda uma corrente perdida...
