The Errors Of Science On Bipedalism
Harun YahyaThe 3 September 2004 edition of the journal Science carried a report of a special X-ray scanning study performed on Orrorin tugenensis fossil unearthed in Kenya at the end of 2000. (1) The striking point in the report was the way that words intended to give the impression that evolution was a scientific fact were sprinkled among the sentences.
The report by Science regarding the study used the following terms:
"Late Miocene fossils from the Lukeino Formation in Kenya"s Tugen Hills are assigned to Orrorin tugenensis. … One of these preserves an intact head connected to the proximal shaft by an elongated neck. … [C]omputerized tomography scans of the neck shaft junction of reveal that the cortex is markedly thinner superiorly than inferiorly, differing from the approximately equal cortical thicknesses observed in extant African apes, approaching the condition in later hominids, and indicating that O. tugenensis was bipedal." (1)
The claims in the article are depicted as being based on "scientific authority:" scientists analyze a bone with very special and advanced techniques; they observe that the bone belongs to an ape-like creature that walked on two legs; as a result of this, scientists obtain allegedly definitive information regarding the way that the progenitor of man walked on two legs...
That is the picture being presented. But could the average reader be expected to seek and find any alternative idea in the face of that picture? Of course not. It is impossible for the average newspaper reader to stand up against "scientists" expert in their field, or the "scientific facts" obtained by means of "advanced techniques!"
That report tells the reader nothing about the hidden agenda behind the study in question, nor about what is assumption and what is fact. What it does is to impose the message "evolution is a fact" under a scientific guise.
As we always seek to make clear, one frequently sees that resort is made to "scientific authority" in the media"s evolutionary propaganda. Yet there is another situation encountered no less frequently: the scientific authority based on the media does not actually rely on the scientific facts at all, but "imaginary conjecture." In other words, evolutionist claims depicted as facts supported by scientific authority actually consist of speculation in the minds of those who have adopted evolution as a dogma.
For example, looked at a little more closely, it can be seen how evolutionist speculation is presented as scientific fact in the above extract. The fossil referred to in the report belongs to a living thing the size of a chimpanzee. Research is conducted into whether it walked on two legs or not. Yet man is then suddenly brought into the equation and we are told that it has been established that "the progenitor of man walked on two legs..."
The following question may be asked here: "Why is a fossil the size of a chimpanzee necessarily the progenitor of human beings? Since this fossil belongs to a living thing the size of a chimpanzee, maybe it is in reality nothing more than a chimpanzee, or the remain of a similar but extinct species of ape.
There can be no doubt that this question is a perfectly justified one. Yet there is a fact of which most readers are unaware. That question is one, which the Darwinists in charge of scientific research do not permit to be asked. Every fossil discovered has to be interpreted in a manner compatible with the theory of evolution, otherwise it will be impossible for a scientist to have his or her fossil findings published in any scientific journal. The evolutionist claims regarding this bone are the product of just such a one-sided and dogmatic perspective.
Naturally, society is not obliged to think along the lines imposed by materialist philosophy, and every reader should evaluate statements regarding scientific findings about the origin of life as he or she chooses. Therefore, as we always seek to do, it is most important to reveal the evolutionary assumptions made by scientists in the light of materialist philosophy and to show the reader the findings obtained from such studies by "filtering out" such assumptions. Let us now give the reader information regarding the facts obtained in the latest study and compare this with the evolutionist interpretations in the report.
In the study in question, scientists who created a reconstruction model of the femur belonging to Orrorin tugenensis at the Penn State University Laboratory of Comparative Morphology and Mechanics discovered that the femoral neck is thickened. That was the finding obtained in the study.
Thinking about it objectively, what can be said based on that finding? That a living thing the size of a chimpanzee lived in the Tugen Hills of Kenya 6 million years ago. And that it was able to stand upright and walk to a certain extent.
But what did the report tell you? That this was the progenitor of human beings and that it has been definitively established to have walked upright.
There is clearly a contradiction here. Let us explain:
This femur belongs to a creature that died in Kenya 6 million years ago. In other words, this fossil represents a single, isolated period of time. There is a giant gap of 6 million years between the fossil and our own day. To say that this fossil is the ancestor of man means openly claiming that human beings are descended from this fossil, which is an imaginary scenario, not a conclusion arrived at by the scientific method. The palaeontologist Henry Gee, editor of the scientific journal Nature, describes the position thus:
New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries "missing links", as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. In reality, the physical record of human evolution is more modest. Each fossil represents an isolated point, which no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps. (2)
In addition, even if we leave aside the error of making interpretations regarding the descent of a fossil for one moment, there is still no consensus even among evolutionists as to whether Orrorin tugenensis was a hominid or not, or to its place on the fictitious evolutionary family tree. Kate Wong, one of the editors of the American scientific journal Scientific American, wrote the following about some newly discovered fossils among which this fossil was also found in an article published in the January 2003 edition of the magazine:
Not surprisingly, they have also sparked vigorous debate. Indeed, experts are deeply divided over where on the family tree the new species belong and even what constitutes a hominid in the first place… (3)
Moreover, the method employed in this study is not regarded as reliable by some evolutionists. Owen Lovejoy, a Kent State University in Ohio anthropologist, comments: "I"m not sure the scans, which have some problems with them, are very convincing." (4)
As we have seen, evolutionists" opinions with regard to Orrorin tugenensis stem not from that fact that research into the fossil has strengthened their theories, but from the fact they have adopted evolution as a dogma. The theory of evolution is a dogma that everyone who believes in materialism needs to adopt. And a scientist who accepts that dogma can certainly tell tall tales of evolution and the transition to bipedalism by adapting the bones he finds to that belief, yet those comments will still constitute no evidence for the theory.
Conclusion:
We here call on Science editorial staff to be much more careful in the future when preparing reports regarding the theory of evolution. This report, prepared by writers either uninformed about or insensitive to the theory of evolution, led to a storm of social misinformation and error. This journal must know that reports about evolution, a dogma enjoying one-sided support, conflict with the principle of objective news reporting, and it must not allow itself to become a tool of evolutionary propaganda.
1. R. B. Eckhard, “External and Internal Morphology of the BAR 1002’00 Orrorin tugenensis Femur, Science, 3rd September 2004, Vol. 305, pp. 1450-1452
2. Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time, Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, The Free Press, A Division fo Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1999, p. 32
3. Kate Wong, “An Ancestor to Call Our Own”, Scientific American, January 2003, pp. 54-63
4. Hillary Mayell, “Fossil Pushes Upright Walking Back 2 Million Years, Study Says”, National Geographic News, 2nd September 2004
