Dubois claimed, based the size and shape of a tooth, the fraction of a skull, and a femur, found a year later located roughly forty feet from the tooth and skull, to have discovered the first elusive human missing link. Dubois named the fragments Pithecanthropus erectus−erect ape-man. Two views of these are pictured.

The Java Man, one of the most famous fossils in the history of evolution, was used by Dubois as evidence to promote the theory that humans evolved from an age-like ancestor. Dubois had studied comparative anatomy under professor Ernst Haeckel at the University of Jena. During his lifetime, Haeckel, as an outspoken evolution activist, earned the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog on the Continent”.

Haeckel postulated that evidence for human evolution would be found in Indonesia and charged his students to go find it. Dubois accepted the charge.

Even though the human-like Neanderthal fossils were discovered in 1856, three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, and sixteen years before the 6^th and final edition in 1872, Darwin was never convinced that the Neanderthals were a link to humans due to the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

While never mentioned in The Origin of Species, Darwin refers to the Neanderthals only once in The Descent of Man. The Java Man quickly emerged as the next serious human missing link contender.

Dubois returned to Europe in 1895 for a lecture circuit to display his Java Man fossils to the International Congress of Zoology in the Netherlands. The initial reception, however, drew a mixed reception. Even Ernst Haeckel’s former professor, Rudolph Virchow, known as the father of modern pathology, argued against the human missing link status of the fossils.

In my opinion this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon, in fact. The thigh bone has not the slightest connection with the skull.

Such criticism caused him to become secretive, and paranoid, refusing to let anyone else examine the bones. After 1900, Dubois withdrew completely from public debate for the next twenty years, and refused access to the specimens. A definitive paper on his fossil findings was not published until 1924, twenty-three years after its discovery.

In 1907, a team of German scientists traveled to Java to investigate the strata where Java Man had been discovered. Dubois, however, would not cooperate with the expedition, even refusing the team to examine his bones.

The seventy-five manned team, after unearthing 10,000 cubic meters of material, and sending forty-three crates of fossil material back to Germany, concluded that the femur was from a modern human-not a missing link.

In 1936, another German team led by paleontologist GHR von Koenigswald eventually found a skull fragment similar size to that found by Dubois. Koenigswald, classified the fossils as a Homo erectus species, giving the skull the name Pithecanthropus erectus. Although Dubois strongly objected to the classification and name, Koenigswald did not change the classification. Dubois’ Pithecanthropus erectus finally lost the elusive and coveted human missing link status.

This was no problem for evolution, however, since from earlier in the century the human missing link status was replaced by the by the Piltdown Man. Following the “discovery” in 1911, the Piltdown Man was placed on exhibit at the British Museum of Natural History. Amazingly, the “discovery” was on display for over 40 years until the exhibit was discovered to be an elaborate hoax in 1953.

How, then could Dubois have been so wrong? The answer lies in the method of investigation. Dubois was simply looking to find something that could be called a human missing link.

Dubois used Darwin’s “scientific point of view” approach rather than the well-established Scientific Method. Darwin had abandoned the Scientific Method. For Darwin, observation should be seen only in the context of a preconceived theory. Darwin explained: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

In looking for evidence for human evolution, Dubois, not unsurprisingly then, interpreted the results as evidence for human evolution−if it is a fossil that looks similar to a human, it must be a human missing link.

Darwin’s “scientific point of view” approach continues to be a persistent lingering problem practiced ubiquitous throughout the evolution industry. Today, any fossil record evidence found today is quickly labeled as “evidence for evolution”.

Looking for a human missing link continues to be elusive. Paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History noted that “one could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were found, the story of human evolution would become clearer. Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred”.

In the words of Geoffrey Clark, “scientists have been trying to arrive at a consensus about modern human origins for more than a century. Why haven’t they been successful?

The Java Man was not a human missing link. However, as a glaring a problem the Java Man was, the evolution industry is in even worse condition today, because no single human missing link candidate is currently under investigation.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now, in the absence of scientific evidence, evolution is in crisis without a theory.

Suzan Mazur, Australian journalist, was on track in stating –

Evolutionary science is as much about the posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying that goes on as it is about actual scientific theory.

Cytochrome c is the essential component of life’s electron transport chain. Amazingly, unlike hemoglobin with one metal atom, iron, cytochrome c is even more complex, containing four metal atoms−iron, copper, zinc and magnesium.

Given the importance to life and ubiquitous distribution throughout the animal kingdom, from the unicellular to the most complex of species, cytochrome c oxidase alone with hemoglobin quickly emerged as the favorite molecules to trace the steps of evolution starting in the mid-twentieth century.

Cytochrome C is uniquely composed of about the same number of about 100 amino acids throughout the animal kingdom with nineteen amino acids occurring in exactly the same sequence. Identifying differences in the sequence of other amino acids between species quickly became the center of interest in retracing the evolutionary “successive, slight” changes as conceived by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species.

Early evidence from cytochrome c gave credence to Darwin’s theory. Between the man and dog, a difference of only 5% was discovered compared to a 13% difference between man and carp, a fresh water fish. From an evolutionary perspective, the initial evidence aligned with the concept that the dog should be more closely related to man than the fish.

The race was on.  Armed with the new technological advances in the field of molecular biology to sequence amino acids, evolutionary scientists began to accumulate a library of cytochrome c amino acid sequences from different species for the purpose of re-tracing the “slight, successive” changes to form the proposed evolutionary Tree of Life using molecular evidence−from microbe to man.

In 1972, Margaret Dayhoff, working as a pioneer in this emerging field alongside Carl Sagan, published known sequences in a matrix, which is now known as the Dayhoff Atlas of Protein Sequences and Structure, now known as the Protein Information Resource located at Georgetown University Medical Center.

Commenting on the sequence matrix by the 1980’s, Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton noted that “the most striking feature of the matrix is that each identifiable subclass of sequences is isolated and distinct …All the sequences of each subclass are equally isolated from the members of another group. Transitional or intermediate classes are completely missing from the matrix.” In short, the absence of “successive, slight” molecular changes in cytochrome c contradicts the fundamental tenets of evolution.

Cytochrome c, as we now know, does not demonstrate the “slight, successive” evolutionary changes Darwin had envisioned the framework of his theory. An evolutionary Tree of Life cannot be retraced with cytochrome c−life’s most vital enzyme.

On the molecular level, species are unique−not transitional. Scientific evidence for any species acting as a gateway to a sequence of other species simply does not exist−even within the realm of molecular biology.

As molecular biologist Richard Dickerson from the University of Minnesota later explained, the “more one approaches the molecular level in the study of living things, the more similar they appear, and the less important the differences between, for instance, a clam and horse become.”

Reflecting on the evidence, Denton aligned with the emerging scientific disappointment in Darwin’s theory:

As more protein sequences began to accumulate during the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent that the molecules were not going to provide any evidence of sequential arrangement in nature, but were rather going to reaffi rm the traditional view that the system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent.

Rather than displaying evolutionary sequences in proteins, the cytochrome c matrix demonstrates the unlinked uniqueness of each species. Evidence for protein sequences linking species together is missing. While a gradual evolution of cytochrome c was expected through “successive, slight” transitional changes in amino acids from species to species, the matrix demonstrates a mosaic pattern, not an evolutionary pattern.

The matrix demonstrates that each species is equal in distance in terms of protein sequences from their most likely ancestor—even the bacteria.

Astoundingly, Denton noted that starting from the bacteria, “organisms as diverse as man, lamprey, fruit fly, wheat and yeast, all exhibit a sequence divergence of between sixty-four percent to sixty-seven percent from this particular bacterial cytochrome … this must be considered one of the most astonishing findings of modern science [from an evolutionary perspective].”

Denton and Dickerson are certainly not lone molecular biologists. Eminent Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, editor of the longest-running biology journals in Europe, playing on words, weighed-in: “from a biochemical standpoint the horse and the horsefly are essentially the same”.

“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority,” Michael Behe professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture explains. “There is no publication in the scientific literature—in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books— that describe how molecular evolution of any real complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience and since there is absolutely no authority on which to claim knowledge … the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.”

According to W. Ford Doolittle from Stanford University, molecular biology has “failed to find the ‘true tree,’ not because their methods are inadequate…, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.” The dream of finding a molecular Tree of Life using cytochrome c, or any other biological compound, remains only as an illusive evolutionary dream.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis. Now, the emerging new technologies have been forcing theories of evolution to a tipping point facing extinction−a molecular nightmare.

The next tipping point in the history of evolution occurred at the turn of the twentieth century following the re-discovery of Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns in 1900, rescuing fragments of Darwinism from the brink of extinction. Mendel’s laws of genetics – separate and independent genes – replaced the nineteenth century concept of blending genetics espoused by Darwin.

The re-discovery paved the way to a new version of Darwinism known as neo-Darwinism –also known as the Modern Synthesis Theory. The evolution of new species, according to this version, developed through the natural selection of random genetic mutations−the second wave of modern evolution.

However, with the advent of technological advances in genetics, starting in the mid-twentieth century, evolutionary scientists were increasingly forced to marginalize the basic tenets of neo-Darwinism −natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, the holy grail of evolution.

By the late twentieth century, as the number of human genes turned out to be only about 25,000, not unlike “primitive species”, a point was reached to seriously investigate factors beyond neo-Darwinism dogma. Natural selection of random mutations was increasingly recognized as an inadequate and barbaric explanation for the origin of new species.

The evidence against neo-Darwinism reached a tipping point, early in the twenty-first century culminating in the Altenberg-16 Summit during the summer of 2008. The purpose of the Summit was to develop a new comprehensive framework for the study evolution.

The Altenberg-16 Summit, sponsored by the Konrad Lorenz Institute (KLI) an evolution think-tank in Altenberg, Austria, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was a convening of the 16 greatest evolution intellectuals to develop a consensus on a new comprehensive theoretical framework to study evolution and unite the splintering academic factions within the evolution industry.

The unveiling of a new framework was planned to coincide with the upcoming 2009 Darwin centennial celebrations−150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species.

Dubbed as ‘The Woodstock of Evolution’, the Summit, spearheaded by Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University and Gerd Műller of the University of Vienna and Chairman of KLI , was entitled “Toward an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”.

The Summit attendees included John Beatty of the University of British Columbia, Werner Callebaut of the University of Hasselt, Sergey Gavrilets of the University of Tennessee, Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University and Marion J. Lamb of University of London, David Jablonski of the University of Chicago, Marc Kirschner of Harvard University, Alan Love of the University of Minnesota, Stuart Newman of the New York Medical College, John Odling-Smee of Oxford University, Michael Purugganan of New York University, Eörs Szathmáry of Collegium Budapest, Gunter Wagner of Yale University, David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, Greg Wray of Duke University.

The Summit workshops, behind closed doors, drew only scant media coverage. The journal Nature ran an article entitled “Postmodern Evolution” with the sub-title “This summer a group of high profile researchers met in Altenberg, Austria, to try and plot the future course of evolutionary theory”. The Altenberg-16 Summit became the tipping point, again, launching the third wave of modern evolution−postmodern evolution.

Finally, in late 2010, MIT Press published the contribution from each attendee in the book entitled Evolution-The Extended Synthesis. From the 16 attendees, 16 different theoretical frameworks to study evolution were presented. The goal of developing a new comprehensive theoretical framework to study evolution for the purpose of uniting the splintering academic factions within the evolution industry – never happened.

Alan Love, one of the Altenberg-16 from the University of Minnesota, in the best spin possible, noted that “there is still a lot of outstanding work to do on fitting the pieces together, but there is no consensus on how to go about that right now.” Not only is there not a consensus, “a fully unified view of evolutionary processes,” Love concluded, “may be out of reach”.

Darwinism and neo-Darwinism are long dead, with the third wave of evolution, postmodern evolution, up-and-running but amazingly without any consensus on any theory of evolution. Within the halls of scientific investigation, evolution is at a tipping point, once again, facing extinction.

Philosophy, not science, is currently keeping the evolution industry from facing extinction.

The Scopes Trial—formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, was a landmark American legal case in which high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act which made it unlawful to teach evolution in any state-funded school.

Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial drew intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to the small town of Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers representing each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate for the Democrats, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes.

In the wake of the trial, evolution was quickly incorporated into public education curriculum nationwide. Between 1925 and 2012, however, the theory of evolution tragically rose from exclusion to exclusivity. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it became unlawful for teachers in public education to question the scientific merits of the evolution.

Ironically, while evolution in the public education classrooms increasingly declared evolution as a dogmatic scientific fact, scientists following advances in molecular biology, were declaring “evolution−a theory in crisis”.  By the turn of the century, the gap between public education dogma and scientific consensus was reaching another infamous “tipping point”, once again, in the history of evolution.

To address this ever increasing disparity, during the summer of 2008 in Altenberg, Austria, an elite international group of 16 evolutionary scientists, hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute and led by Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University and Gerd Műller of the University of Vienna, convened to address the recognized crisis in evolution for the purpose of developing a new comprehensive consensus on the theory of evolution.

By 2008, the evolution industry was in serious need of an overhaul. “Scientific inquiry,” according to Suzan Mazur, an Australian journalist, in her 2008 book The Altenberg 16: Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand Up? had “been hijacked by an industry of greed, with evolution books hyped like snake oil at a carnival”

Under a media black-out, the 16 scientists announced the end of the Darwinian era of evolution dominated by natural selection and the need for a new theory for evolution to resolve rivalry divisiveness between scientific disciples that had been promoting incompatible theories of evolution.

Pigliucci told the waiting media that a short report on a new consensus would be released following the meeting. However, a report was never released in 2008. Not until 2010 with the publication of Evolution, the Extended Synthesis published by The MIT Press, was the failure to develop a new comprehensive theory of evolution fully exposed.

Amazingly, the MIT publication has only serve to highlight 16 different theories of evolution from astrobiology to self-organization models. No wonder a consensus statement was never released to the media−the goal of the Altenberg summit was never realized.

Reflecting on the outcome, Alan C. Love, one of the Altenberg 16 from the University of Minnesota could only conclude that “a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.”

The Tennessee legislators, under a barrage of condemnations and threats from the evolution industry, wisely acknowledged opened the door to free-speech and approved the questioning of evolution in the public classroom.

Tennessee joins Louisiana as the only two states in the nation in which allow public school teachers to question the scientific merits of evolution,

At the center of the debate is natural selection. The purported actions of natural selection have been challenged and found to be only of a conservation nature−not of evolutionary nature, as proposed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

In the words of world distinguished Italian geneticist, Giuseppe Sermonti in 2005, “Natural selection could perhaps be invoked as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types and orders, can only leave one dumbstruck.”

Even Darwin questioned the evolutionary role of natural selection in The Origin of Species: “the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is enough to stagger any one.”

Unlike Isaac Newton’s confidence in the newly discovered natural laws of gravity and motion, Darwin had lingering doubts about natural selection: “I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.”

More to the point, Darwin lamented, “natural selection … is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered.”

Since Darwin brazenly questioned the fundamental tenets of his own theory of evolution, Darwin would certainly agree with the passing of House Bill 368 by Bill Dunn and Senate Bill 893 by Bo Watson in law by the vast majority of elected Tennessee officials−Tennessee, Darwin would agree.

Declaring Ryan’s budget as social Darwinism instantaneously launched a salvo of media speculations. What was the relevance of social Darwinism to the budget process?

Even though Charles Darwin never explicitly promoted social Darwinism, he encouraged contemporary German political activists living in England at the time, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, to extending natural selection into the realm of social movements. In 1859, immediately after the release of The Origin of Species, Darwin sent a complimentary copy to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

At the time, Marx and Engels had become widely known as the authors of The Communist Manifesto published in more than ten years earlier in 1848. Friedrich Engels, commenting on The Origin of Species wrote to Marx noting that “this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

Building on Darwin’s concept of “struggle of life”, Marx published Das Capital in 1867. Darwin, in 1873, implicitly endorsed Das Capital in a letter to Marx: “that this [Das Capital] is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.”

In Das Capitol Marx contends that the bourgeoisie, capitalists, unfairly earn income by the exploitation of the workers, the proletariat. Marx called for class warfare by the workers against the capitalists. Social Darwinism, for Marx, was class-struggle from the bottom-up.

In a tribute to Marx in 1883 upon his death, Friedrich Engels declared, “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so [Karl] Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” The works of Marx and Engels established the philosophical foundation that was militarily enforced during the twentieth century by Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, and Mao in China through popular class warfare.

Sadly, contrary to adding “to the happiness of Mankind”, as Darwin had once envisioned, the twentieth century under the banner of social Darwinism became the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. This type of bottom-up “social Darwinism” is irrelevant Ryan’s budget proposal. Could Obama be referring to another type of social Darwinism?

At the turn of the century, the leading steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie commenting on the validity of Darwin’s theory, declared, “There is no more possibility of defeating the operation of these laws [natural selection] than there is of thwarting the laws of nature which determine the humidity of the atmosphere or the revolution of the Earth upon its axis.”

American oil industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, also joined the social Darwinism movement embraced by Carnegie. “The growth of a large business,” Rockefeller explained to his Sunday School class, “is merely a survival of the fittest.” Unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao class-struggle from the bottom-up, Carnegie and Rockefeller launched social Darwinism–from the top-down.

In 1892, Carnegie, employing militant top-down union breaking tactics, forced workers into a fourteen hour gun battle at the Homestead, Pennsylvania steel plant. Carnegie’s officers eventually surrendered after leaving three officers and nine workers dead or dying. Could this been the type of “social Darwinism” Obama was applying to Ryan’s budget proposal? Probably not either

The practice of eugenics, developed by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, has also been classified as another type of social Darwinism. After reading The Origin of Species in the 1860’s, Galton developed and promoted selective breeding programs using forced sterilization of selected populations. Groups considered “unfit” were targeted for sterilization.

In Brazil, The Rockefeller Foundation implemented eugenics as a public health initiative. At one time, the Brazilian eugenics program became the essence public health as expressed in the maxim “to sanitize is to eugenize”.

Eugenic was widely practiced worldwide during the twentieth century, even in the United States. The state of California eventually became the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 until the 1960s.

Could this be the type of “social Darwinism” Obama was applying to Ryan’s budget proposal? Probably not, either

In the words of David Brooks in a New York Times editorial, Obama “acted out of character when he excoriated Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget… [H]e unleashed every 1980s liberal cliché in the book, calling the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinists. Social Darwinism, by the way, was a 19th-century philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples.”

Social Darwinism has nothing to do with budget planning. This “thinly veiled” saga illustrates why the history of evolution should be studied in public education curriculum.

Use of the term social Darwinism could have been done in simple ignorance, or worse, a planned wacky hoodwinking political ploy to create chaos, confusion and aversion to Ryan’s budget proposal−hoodwinking White House politics at its Obama best.

In the same area where the infamous Lucy fossil was discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974, a team lead by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History unearthed a partial foot from the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia, an area locally known as Burtele. The results were published last week in the journal Nature.

The foot, however, is unlike the foot of Lucy, otherwise known as Australopithecus afarensis, a presumed early ancestor of humans. Until formally named, this new species has been named Burtele.

The finding, however, rather than clarifying, further complicates theories on human evolution since the anatomies of Lucy and Burtele feet are very dissimilar and co-existed based on carbon dating evidence. Dissimilarity and co-existence is a problem for evolution that undermines Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin speculated that “much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” However, new species through natural selection was envisioned to cause the extinction, not co-existence:

The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of less-favoured forms almost inevitably follows… Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.

Since Lucy or Burtele co-existed, only one could be a human ancestor−not both, complicating the drawing of a Tree of Life for human evolution. “There was indeed more than one early hominin species during that time,” explained Haile-Selassie in an interview with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Haile-Selassie further noted that “the Burtele foot differs from Australopithecus afarensis largely by possessing an opposable great toe.”

“Carolyn Ehardt, program director for Biological Anthropology at NSF, points out that research findings such as this foster appreciation for the complex processes that ‘shaped the evolutionary history of our species’” the NSF article further explained. Ehardt’s comment on the “complex processes” of evolution statement, amazingly underscores the problem with evolution−the lack of evidence for a cohesive Tree of Life.

Any human evolutionary picture is complicated according to NSF, since “the Burtele foot has some skeletal ratios that fall within the human and gorilla distribution, but outside those of chimpanzees. In addition, the metatarsal of the fourth toe is longer than that of the second toe, a condition seen in some monkeys and Miocene apes.”

“This discovery was quite shocking,” said co-author and project co-leader Dr. Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University in an interview posted on Science Daily. “These fossil elements represent bones we’ve never seen before. While the grasping big toe could move from side to side, there was no expansion on top of the joint that would allow for expanded range of movement required for pushing off the ground for upright walking.”

“We need more fossils to determine what sorts of bodies went with these feet,” wrote Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, in a commentary in last week’s Nature. The new evidence complicates, not clarifies, evidence for a cohesive Tree of Life as proposed by Darwin.

In 1859, Darwin was frustrated with the evidence from the fossil record: Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

One hundred years later, in 1959, paleontologist Gaylord Simpson concluded that “They [species] are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution.”

The “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy,” Stephen J. Gould pined in 1980 in the legendary book The Panda’s Thumb.

Berkley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell, in 1996 concluded: there “is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution…. Alas, there never really has been.”

In the same year, Ann Gibbons, correspondent for the Science magazine, reflected on the ever increasing mystery of presupposed human evolution: “The story of human evolution has lately become as complicated as a Tolstoy novel.”

The chief science writer for Nature, Henry Gee declared “hominid evolution—[is] as mysterious as ever”.

Now, more than 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, evidence to support human evolution is even less clear as they were in 1859.

The new Burtele fossil finding highlights the mosaic design of nature and why evolution, once a theory is crisis, is now is in crisis without even a theory.

The importance Darwin gives to natural selection is highlighted in the complete title of The Origin of Species: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Preservation of Favoured Races.

Darwin envisioned natural selection as the driving force of evolution – the “means”, the proposed natural law, driving the origin of species. In Darwin’s words: “I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations.” The key attributes Darwin of natural selection include successive and slight changes.

While Darwin coined the concept, the general concept of natural selection, while popular at the time, the theory was divisive even within Darwin’s inner circle of evolution colleagues.  These inner-circle critical colleagues included Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray, and Thomas Henry Huxley.

In 1860, the year following publication of the first edition, Darwin pined that “[Charles] Lyell and [Joseph] Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed.”

Thomas Huxley, the consummate avant-garde of evolution of the time, was very critical of natural selection: “You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting natura non facit saltum so unnecessarily.” Natura non facit saltum is Latin for “nature does not make jumps”–the essence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection through slight and successive changes.

Sensing the reluctance of Asa Gray at Harvard University, one of the most influential botanist at the time, Darwin hedged on the value of natural selection:

I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.

At times, Darwin expressed deeper skepticism of natural selection, noting in The Origin of Species that “natural selection … is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered” even to the point of sympathy with critics of natural selection: “I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to expand the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.”

Division over natural selection continued into the twentieth century. Conrad Hal Waddington, leading early twentieth century British geneticist, recognized the inherent problem with even the concept of natural selection envisioned by Darwin:

There, you do come to what is, in effect, a vacuous statement: Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and you ask, which leave more offspring than others; and it is those that leave more offspring; and there is nothing more to it than that.

“Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest,” explains Hugo de Vries, an earlier twentieth century geneticist, “but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”

In blunter terms, Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History pined that “No one has ever produced a species by the mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it, and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question: how a species originates. And it is there that natural selection seems to be fading out, and chance mechanisms of one sort or another are being invoked.”

In 1998, even Jerry Coyne, a steadfast ardent defender of Darwinism and author of Why Evolution is True, recognizes the problems facing natural selection:

We must stop pretending we understand the course of natural selection.

According to Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, “Natural Selection, which indeed occurs in nature…, mainly has the effect of maintaining equilibrium and stability”. Equilibrium and stability are opposing forces to evolution.

Lynn Margulis awarded the National Medal of Science Award by President Bill Clinton in 1996, is no fan of natural selection or Darwinism.In an interview with journalist Suzan Mazur, Margulis said “Darwin was brilliant to make ‘natural selection’ a sort of godlike term, an expression that could replace ‘God’, who did it—created forms of life. However, what is natural selection’ really? … Natural selection is intrinsically an elimination process.”

Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona in the book What Darwin Got Wrong cuts to the chase: “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed”.

With these “slight, successive” changes, an endless cycle of species developing from a previous species was the foundation of Darwin’s theory. To illustrate this concept Darwin drew his infamous “I Think” Tree of Life. For Darwin, “natural selection… can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Last week presented another challenge to Darwin’s theory of natural selection was published in Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology. A research team lead by Graciela Piñeiro, paleontologist at the University of the Republic in Uruguay, discovered fossil evidence for reptiles giving birth to live young−without eggs. The paper was entitled “The oldest known amniotic embryos suggest viviparity in Mesosaurs“.

These newly found fossils with embryos in the first aquatic reptiles known as Mesosaurs — along with a pregnant female — are thought to be the oldest known example of birth given to live young instead of eggs, scientists report.

These fossils that are the earliest amniotic embryos found yet. The most preserved reptile embryo is displayed in the drawing. Classified as belonging to Mesosaurs, these had originally been thought to be the first and most primitive of the aquatic reptiles.

The two fossil embryos, unearthed in Uruguay and Brazil, are only about a quarter-inch to a half-inch long. The one well-developed embryo was found within an adult presumed to be a pregnant female, suggesting that Mesosaurs were viviparous−embryos fed by the mother, like mammals.

Amazingly, “despite their age and their delicate nature,” said Graciela Piñeiro, “they remained in the rocks all that long time almost perfectly preserved.”

In 2011, scientists had reported fossil record evidence of yet another pregnant plesiosaur, an extinct aquatic reptile, giving birth to live young.

Charles Choi, science writer for LiveScience, in the article “The oldest known amniotic embryos suggest viviparity in Mesosaurs” points out the problem for evolution: “The fossil record of amniotic eggs and embryos is very sparse, and as such, scientists have little information about when, how and why they evolved.”

Choi recognizes the evidence from these new fossil record findings contradicts Darwin’s theory of evolution acting through natural selection.

While some reptiles are viviparous, like most mammals, amazingly, the Platypus, a mammal, lays eggs. To date not a single proposed evolutionary Tree of Life has been developed incorporating embryological means of reproduction.

Reptiles are now included as an enigmatic evolutionary species, like the platypus. According to Richard Gibb, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, “there is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus. You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.”

The scientific evidence forces the concept of evolution into an eccentric and mysterious process without evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes as envisioned by Darwin.

Reptiles are like mammals in some ways, and obviously different in other ways. A team led by Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York sequenced microRNAs, which regulate gene expression, from six platypus tissues, and also found a mix of reptile and mammal similarities, concluded that we “have microRNAs that are shared with chickens and not mammals as well as ones that are shared with mammals, but not chickens.

Australian biologist, Michael Archer wrote, “Indeed, evolutionary scientists are baffled about the ancestry of the platypus” in 1992. The recent reptile fossil record evidence only increases the baffling basics of a presupposed biological evolution paradigm.

In a 2008 BBC interview with Helen Briggs, geneticist Mark Batzer from Louisiana State University notes: “One big surprise was the patchwork nature of the genome with avian, reptilian, and mammalian features.”

What is missing is how the viviparous reptiles and the egg laying platypus fits into the Tree of Life sequence as Darwin envisioned. Darwin struggled with the platypus knowing that it contradicted his theory of natural selection—the Platypus should have become extinct. In a 1860 letter to Charles Lyell, Darwin explains that the

I quite agree with you on the strange and inexplicable fact of Ornithorhynchus {platypus] having been preserved.

In 2012, “inexplicable” facts remain. In fact, mountains of “inexplicable” facts, like the fossil record evidence of viviparous reptiles, continue to contradict the basic tenets of evolution.

The theory of evolution was once in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without even a comprehensive theory.

The report from a research team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute headed by Aylwyn Scally stems from the completed gorilla genome sequence project;  the last genus of the living great apes to have its genome decoded. The findings have entrenched the evolution industry into a theoretical conundrum.

Rather than demonstrating a sequence of chimpanzee to human genetic changes, the evidence demonstrate that much of the human genome more closely resembles the gorilla than it does the chimpanzee genome.

For the first time, scientists have been able to compare the genomes of all four living great apes: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The evolution industry anticipated that the DNA information would clarify competing theories on the origin of humans.

After studying more than 11,000 genes in search for the genetic changes critically important to evolution, however, the expected clarification was not found. While humans and chimpanzees are genetically closest to each other, the Wellcome the team found many places where this is not the case: 15% of the human genome is closer to the gorilla genome than it is to chimpanzee, and 15% of the chimpanzee genome is closer to the gorilla than human.

Overall, the human genome is 1.37% different from the chimp’s; 1.75% different from the gorilla’s; and 3.4% different from the orangutan’s. Most perplexing, according to Scally is that “some of our functional biology is more gorillalike than chimplike”.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin theorized that evolution “by means of natural selection” occurs through “slight, successive changes”. Extending Darwin’s theory into the realm of twentieth-century genetics (neo-Darwinism), in 1983 evolutionary biologist Douglas J. Futuyma declared that “By far the most important way in which chance influences evolution is the process of mutation. Mutation is, ultimately, the source of new genetic variations, and without genetic variation, there cannot be genetic change. Mutation is therefore necessary for evolution.”

The evolution industry aligned with this genetic version of evolution through mutation. According Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti,

It seemed as though life could be disassembled and reassembled like a child’s blocks. Some people then placed their faith in the omnipotence of biology and the prospect—it seemed only a matter of time—of being able to put life together and change it in a test tube.

The Wellcome study, however, clearly demonstrates that “slight, successive” process of genetic mutations do not exist even within the four known living great apes.

This is not good news for the evolution industry. In a disparate attempt to address the problem, the researchers resorted to ascribing an earlier time of divergence, 7 to 10 million years rather than 4.5 million years, along with promoting variable speed mutation rates to account for the genetic disparity−multiple molecular clock rates in the same species.

Ajit Varki of the University of California, San Diego, and specialist advisor to the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee who was not involved in the study, stood away from drawing any politically incorrect conclusions, simply stated:  ”This information is, of course, of great interest to many investigators.” What Varki did not say is that the Wellcome evidence supports the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

National Public Radio (NPR) entitled their article on the Wellcome discovery “Gorilla Genome Sheds Light On Human Evolution”.  “Sheds new light” is an evolution industry euphemism for things didn’t work-out the way we hoped and some new light must be found –e.g., the old theory is not working.

Surprisingly, Dave Mosher writing for the National Geographic was actually more to the point in the article entitled “Gorillas More Related to People Than Thought”, said  -

Another surprising result is that part of the gorilla genome is at odds with the current structure of the great ape evolutionary tree. For example, instead of gorillas being most similar to chimps and then humans in that portion of the DNA, the branches flip to humans being most similar to gorillas and then chimps.

Actually, the demise of any genetic-based Tree of Life has been expected for more than a decade. Sermonti noted in 1999 –

One spur to research on mutations was the hope that an accumulation of these might lead to a new species. But this never happened… Displaying the table of the genetic code as though it demonstrated the unveiling of life’s interlocking puzzle is a mistaken enterprise.

In the words of Sermonti, “Science has taken on the great wager … and lost.” The genetic evidence is now clear. H. Frederik Nijhout of Duke University places the role of genes into perspective –

The only strictly correct view of the function of genes is that they supply cells, and ultimately organisms, with chemical materials.

Contrary to the expectations of neo-Darwinism during the twentieth century, hope for finding evidence for evolution in genetics is now nearly exhausted.

The evidence from the Wellcome study further highlights why the concept of evolution is in crisis without even an identifiable theory. Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

The Mimivirus was serendipitously discovered in 1992 while researching Legionellosis, a potentially fatal infectious disease caused by a bacteria belonging to the genus Legionella. Since the new organism appeared to be a bacterium, it was originally named Bradfordcoccus after the city where it was discovered, Bradford, England.

More than a decade later, however, in 2003 researchers at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France published a paper in Science re-classifying Bradfordcoccus as a virus, not a bacteria. Therefore, Bradfordcoccus was re-named Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus−mimivirus short for “mimicking microbe”.

While the Mimivirus is now classified by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses as a virus, the genome size is larger than some bacteria with 1,181,404 DNA base pairs in length making it the largest viral genome in scientific knowledge, outstripping the next-largest virus genome by about 450,000 base pairs.

Since the size of Mimivirus is as large as a number of bacterial species, such as Rickettsia conorii and Tropheryma whipplei, and possesses a genome size greater than an number of bacterial species and codes for products previously not thought to be encoded by viruses, the most interesting question is whether the Mimivirus could qualify as a transitional evolutionary form between viruses and bacteria as would be predicted by Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin argued that evolution by “natural selection generally acts with extreme slowness …by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In the virus to bacteria world, then, what are the known “slight, successive” changes between the virus and bacteria, if any?

With twenty-first century technology, the search for the “slight, successive” changes was anticipated to reveal Darwin’s Tree of Life. In these details, however, rather than filling the missing link gaps, new problems emerged.

These problems include the number of genes. Unlike other viruses, the Mimivirus with an estimated 979 protein-coding genes far exceeds the typical number for a virus.  Also, the genome of the Mimivirus has types of genes not seen in any other viruses, including aminoacyl tRNA synthetases.

In particular, the Mimivirus contains genes coding for nucleotide and amino acid synthesis that have not even been found in some bacterial species. Not only is Mimivirus unlike other viruses, the Mimivirus is even more advanced than many bacteria.

Complicating the distinction between viruses and bacteria further was the discovery in 2011 by researchers off the coast of Chile – an even larger virus than Mimivirus, a virus named a Megavirus with 1,259,197 DNA base-pairs. The Megavirus genome has been fully sequence and what’s missing are Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes. Even between these two closely related virus species only 50% of the genes are identical and only 23% of the resulting proteins show similarity.

The evidence has sent the evolution industry back to the drawing boards. David R. Wessner of Davidson College in a 2010 article published by Nature, attempts to put on the best evolutionary spin possible. The title of the article – Discovery of the Giant Mimivirus. Mimivirus is the largest and most complex virus known. Is it an evolutionary bridge between nonliving viruses and living organisms, or is it just an anomaly? – gives away the conclusion. The answer is: an anomaly.

In the article Summary section, Wessner conceds –

Questions about the nature of viruses remain quite vexing. Recent studies of the giant Mimivirus illustrate this point. Its large size and correspondingly large genome test our general ideas of viruses as small, simple entities. The existence of genes associated with translation, metabolism, DNA repair, and protein folding raises questions about the evolutionary history of viruses.

Not only are questions are certainly raised about the evolution of viruses, the easiest possible species to study, questions are raised about the foundations of the microbe to man evolutionary paradigm through “slight, successive” changes. The evolution industry is now long in the habit of writing-off the lack of “slight, successive” changes simply as an “anomaly.” Even at the micro-level, the evidence is clear: species appear as a unique creation, not as some moving-up transitional form.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. The Mimivirus us the latest example why the concept of biological evolution exists as a philosophy, but not as a science.

On February the first evidence of cracking appeared. On the 14^th, Dawkins appeared on the BBC Radio 4′s Today program to talk about the poll results his organization, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, had conducted. The poll survey conducted by Ipsos Mori showed that half of the people who described themselves as Christian on the 2011 census do not consider themselves religious. The criticism ironically opened the door to his first major “God” crack.

Debating the survey’s findings with the Giles Fraser, the former canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dawkins made much of the fact that 64 per cent of people who said they were Christians in the census were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament.

The second time Dawkins mentioned the finding, Fraser asked him if he could tell him the full title of On the Origin of Species, the book by Charles Darwin considered to be the ‘Bible’ of evolutionary biology.

Dawkins stated emphatically: “Yes I could.”

“Go on then,” said Fraser.

Dawkins’s halting reply, complete with an improbable appeal to a higher authority, said: “On the Origin of Species, er, with… oh God [laughter]… On the Origin of Species, um… There is a subtitle… er, um, with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”

The correct answer is, of course, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

A triumphant Fraser said: “You are the High Pope of Darwinism. If you asked people who believe in evolution that question and only two per cent got it right it would be terribly easy for me to say they don’t really believe it after all.

Dawkins complained: “It’s just not fair to ask people these questions.” Really?

The “oh god” explosion opened the first crack in Dawkins’ foundation quickly followed by a another crack from a second explosion.

In a 100-minute discussion between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Professor Richard Dawkins, titled “The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of Their Ultimate Origin,” moderated by philosopher and agnostic Sir Anthony Kenny on February 23, Richard Dawkins stunned his online and theater audiences by conceding a personal doubt about his conviction that there is no such thing as a creator. Dawkins said that he was only “6.9 out of seven” certain of his long-standing atheist beliefs.

Replying to Kenny, Dawkins said, “I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing (is) very, very low.” In other words, the existence of God cannot be excluded.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and other best-sellers, is a leader of the “New Atheist” movement that aggressively challenges belief in God and criticizes harm done in the name of religion.

While Dawkins has the same problem Charles Darwin had, at least Darwin connected the dots, calling himself what he really was: an agnostic. In his Autobiography, Darwin conceded -

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

The foundations of Richard Dawkins hypocrisy finally and irreversibly cracked.  While criticizing Christians for not knowing the books of the Bible, Dawkins, the self-proclaimed Darwin “pit bull”, could not even remember the title of Darwin’s foundational book, then, as leader of the “New Atheist” movement, disavowed the basic tenets of atheism. “Hypocrite” now describes new the Richard Dawkins facade.

Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now not only in crisis without a theory, the cracks in Richard Dawkins are revealing that the foundations of the evolution industry are now even without a cohesive philosophy.

Privately, in a letter to Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 Darwin alternatively speculated that life might have actually originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”.

This “some warm little pond” explanation has since been considered Darwin’s dominate origin of life point of view. But, this unsettling origin of life issue drove Darwin to become an agnostic: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.” Darwin did not exclude the existence of God.

In 1864, just five years after the publication of the first edition of The Origin of Species, an enormous fireball seared a path through the sky over southern France near Orgueil, announcing its arrival with terrifying thunder. In the aftermath, the villagers retrieved around 20 ink-black pieces of meteorite space rock.

French chemist François Stanislaus Clöez, professor of chemistry at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, after examining some of the samples announced that the meteorite contained organic matter. At the time, theories speculating on the spontaneous generation of life were popular.

Since organic matter can indicate a biological origin, Clöez ‘s declaration supported a spontaneous generation of life from inorganic molecules theory. Evidence from the Orgueil meteorite aligned with the concept of life originating spontaneously in space by random chance from lifeless inorganic matter.

Louis Pasteur disproved the concept of spontaneous generation later that same year. However, spontaneously generation of life in space has continued to be popular. Why?

The infamous Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950’s produced biologically active molecules, but only in an atmosphere without oxygen.

Oxygen is a critical difference between the atmosphere on Earth and space. Tests have demonstrated that biologically active molecules cannot assemble from inorganic matter in an atmosphere with oxygen, like the Earth’s atmosphere.

The scientific evidence points to the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere early in the life of the Earth. In the words of Jon Cohen, writer for Science, “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller–Urey simulation.”

For this main reason, research on origin of life has been focusing on discovering the origin of life in space−not Earth. The 2005, Harvard University announced the launching of the Origin of Life Initiative with $1 million per year seed funding from the university.

The purpose of the initiative is to integrate a range of scientific disciplines from biology to astronomy “to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets”.

David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard explained: ”my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.”

The Origin of Life Initiative declaration:

At Harvard, astronomers search for undiscovered planets… and focus on the route to assemble complex self-replicating molecules; and molecular biologists concentrate on the ultimate leap — how biological evolution can emerge from the chemistry.

The Harvard Origin of Life initiative is simply a Orgueil déjà vu.  The evolution industry, even with vast funding resources, has still not discovered the origin of life. After more than 150 years of exploration, we are still no closer to discovering a non-divine origin of life cause than was Darwin.

Darwin words continue to stand: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us”.

The scientific evidence to exclude a “divine intervention” in the origin of life has been a complete failure−the entire purpose of the Harvard Origin of Life Initiative. Déjà vu

America was bracing for a civil war. England was on the verge of entering the Victorian era and the height of the Industrial Revolution with an unprecedented prosperity.

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room Kentucky log cabin. Charles Robert Darwin was born in a legendary estate. Lincoln was destined to free the American slaves; Darwin was destined to intellectually free minds from a divine creation.

While both Lincoln and Darwin opposed slavery, they differed dramatically on the origins of man. In the Gettysburg Address in November 1863, Lincoln declared –

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

By contrast, the subtitle of The Origin of Species summarizes Darwin’s view on the origin of man:

The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Darwin clearly promotes “Favoured Races”, the essence of racism.  Discarding creation, in The Descent of Man Darwin speculates that the origin of man evolved from the gorilla and chimpanzee -

It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies.

Amazingly, this evolutionary origin of man theory was actually popular at the time in England, even within the Church of England. Charles Kingsley, one of England’s leading clergymen just a year after the release of The Origin of Species in 1859 in a letter after traveling through Ireland wrote -

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. … To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.

In the words of the late evolutionist Stephen J. Gould -

Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.

Lincoln sought the emancipation of men from men, and Darwin sought the emancipation of men from God.

Lincoln liberated the salves. Darwin empowered the social movements of Nazism and Communism. Lincoln died a martyr while Darwin died in misery−contrasts of notoriety and global consequences.

One term to use is “accept” and one word to avoid is “believe”.

Once a Christian Scientist and now one of the leading plaintiffs in the Dover Trial, Scott, now preferring to be called a non-theist rather than an atheist, said in an interview with Science News writer Susan Milius to the question “So you urge scientists not to say that they “believe” in evolution” –

Right. What your audience hears is more important than what you say.… What [people] hear is that evolution is a belief, it’s an opinion, it’s not well-substantiated science. And that is something that scientists need to avoid communicating. You believe in God. You believe your sports team is going to win. But you don’t believe in cell division. You don’t believe in thermodynamics. Instead, you might say you “accept evolution.

For Scott, the ultimate evolution marketing killer term is “belief”. “Accept” is OK, but it is not OK to “believe”.

The term “revolutionize” should be avoided when presenting new discoveries, according to Scott. To the question “How does the language used to discuss new discoveries add to the problem” pose by Milius, Scott replied -

To put it mildly, it doesn’t help when evolutionary biologists say things like, ‘This completely revolutionizes our view of X.’ Because hardly anything we come up with is going to completely revolutionize our view of the core ideas.

“You can say that this fossil or this new bit of data sheds new light on this part of evolution”, but not “revolutionize” according to Scott. This distinction is important for the evolution industry especially when new discoveries contradict known theories of evolution. “Shedding new light” is Scott’s hoodwinking phrase now rampant within the evolution industry.

In the recent Science Daily article “Across the Atlantic on Flotsam: New Fossil Findings Shed Light on the Origins of the Mysterious Bird Hoatzin“, a team comprising German, Brazilian and French scientists, from the Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt unable to explain from an evolutionary perspective how two related birds existed at the same time on the African and South American continents employed Scott’s “sheds light” rule.

To work around this glaring Darwinian problem, the authors speculated that “either the continents were once connected by land, or the distribution took place directly across the water.”

In the words of Gerald Mayr and his colleagues from Brazil and France, “We assume that the bird crossed the Atlantic upon drifting flotsam.”

Really? When is the last time birds have been observed on a floating on rafts drifting across the ocean? Use of Scott’s “sheds new light” marketing in the title is simply a hoodwinking smoke screen over reality to confuse the gullible.

The facts are clear, fabricating birds crossing the oceans on rafts, using “accept” rather than “believe”, and using “shows new light” rather than “revolutionize” highlights the depths the evolution industry desperation to ignore reality.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution continues to be challenged by the scientific evidence. Evolution adherents have been using Scott’s wordsmithing marketing strategies in an attempt to blur the facts that undermine evolution. The Hoatzin bird is the latest example why Darwin’s biogeographical theory of evolution is contradicted by the evidence. Scott’s evolution marketing model should only be used by disparate used car salesmen – not in science.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

The discovery eventually launched an international exploration the area the South African hills that started in 2006. This week, the results of the explorations were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto was the lead author.

Since 2005, ten nests have been discovered at several levels at this site, each with up to 34 round eggs in tightly clustered and carefully arranged clutches. The distribution of the nests in the sediments indicate that these early dinosaurs returned repeatedly (nesting site fidelity) to this site, and likely assembled in groups (colonial nesting) to lay their eggs.

Seven eggs are demonstrated in the image with one of the eggs scrapped open to reveal the underlying embryonic form of the dinosaur skeleton.

“Thus, fossil and sedimentological evidence from this nesting site provides empirical data on reproductive strategies in early dinosaurs”, the report concluded. The reproductive strategies discovered include: 1) repeated returns to the nesting site and 2) grouping of the eggs.

Entitled “Oldest known dinosaurian nesting site and reproductive biology of the Early Jurassic sauropodomorph Massospondylus”, the report was a featured story by the Smithsonian Institute, BBC News, Science Daily, Forbes, and The Huffington Post.

Amazingly, the report then claims that the evidence from the nests “provides additional insights into the initial stages of the evolutionary history of dinosaurs”. While the claim is intriguing, evidence from dinosaur nests cannot be used to validate a presupposed history of evolution.

Evidence for evolution requires transitional links between species, not evidence from nests within a species−typical evolution red-flag spin. In fact the report never even attempt to mention how these nests could even hope to provide evidence of transitional links between dinosaur species.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin cut to the chase what investigators should be looking for: “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species” Reisz PNAS report just presumes that evolution magically happened, never even mentioning transitional intermediate links.

Simply finding and reporting on fossils is not evidence for evolution.  By using the words “dinosaur”, “fossil” and “evolution” together, the evolution industry is attempting to hoodwink support for evolution−a common trick.

More than 150 years ago, Darwin recognized that the fossil record was not kind to even his theory of evolution -

Why then is not every geological formation [fossil record] and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

The late Stephen Gould in The Panda’s Thumb recognized Darwin’s dilemma noting that the “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more”.

Isolated evidence from the nests of a single dinosaur species alone cannot provide “additional insights into the initial stages of the evolutionary history of dinosaurs”. What evolution needs are the missing transitional links.

In an attempt to work-around the vacuum of transitional links that Darwin said should be found to exist once the Earth had been fully explored, committed evolutionary paleontologists have resorted to these hoodwinking tricks.

The absence of transitional links to support Darwin’s “slight, successive” gradual evolution changes is undeniable. Niles Eldredge, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History concluded -

Paleontologists have been insisting that their record is consistent with slow, steady, gradual evolution where I think that privately, they’ve known for over a hundred years that such is not the case.

“It has been the paleontologist, my own breed,” Eldredge opined, “who has been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality.”

In April 2011, British palaeontologist Howard Falcon-Lang at Royal Holloway, University of London, walking through the GBS building of earth sciences spotted an old wooden cabinet hidden in a forgotten corner and “pulled open the door without breaking it, and found a series of drawers containing hundreds of rock samples.”

Normal enough stuff, until he took one out.

“I held it up to the light and tried to make out the words on the slide and there was the signature: C. Darwin, Esquire,” Falcon-Lang says, adding he could “hardly believe it. My heart was pounding all around my body.”

“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained. “This process allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labeled ‘C. Darwin Esq.’”

The specimen was a piece of fossil wood collected along the South American coast during his famous Voyage of the Beagle in 1834.

Most of the evidence Darwin used has been well documented, but the samples Howard Falcon-Lang accidentally found had been lost because Darwin entrusted them to a fellow scientist, Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker did not number these fossils, a problem now for a warehouse with more that 10 million rock samples. Hooker became a close friend of Darwin.

Hooker had assembled this collection of 314 slides while working for the BGS in 1846. The slides – “stunning works of art,” according to Falcon-Lang, contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes.

John Ludden, executive director of BGS said: “This is quite a remarkable discovery. It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.”

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken “a long time” to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides have now been photographed and will be made available to the public through a new online museum exhibit opening Tuesday.

“Scientists are only now starting to study it and understand its scientific importance,” according to Falcon-Lang.

“This is quite a remarkable discovery,” John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, said. “It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.” Could the fossil wood specimens be Darwin’s holy fossil grail? Probably not.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin never used fossilized trees to as examples of evolutionary transitional forms. While the specimens Falcon-Lang rediscovered are stunning, the specimens failed to capture a convincing attention of Darwin or Hooker. Historically, little evidence has been gleaned from fossilized plants or from fossilized animals.

Even the infamous evolution of the horse story espoused by Darwin in The Origin of Species was disintegrated in the twentieth century.

Grasping for significance in the wood fossil highlights the problem with the theory of evolution – lack of fossil record evidence for Darwin’s “innumerable transition” links in the fossil record.  In fact, the lack of fossilized transitional links was a known problem in 1834, and the problem continues to persist.

“The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links”, Darwin argued in 1872 edition of The Origin of Species, “is a very obvious difficulty.” Darwin continued, “Geology [the fossil record} assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”

In the words of American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

In the Presidential Address at the Geological Association, Derek V. Ager dismayed of the fossil record, went on the record to say, “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.”

Senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, Colin Patterson, brings the importance of the fossil record into perspective: “Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.”

While Darwin would not be surprised by Gould, Ager, or at Colin Patterson comments, he would be disappointed in the intense interest in the trivial evidence shown by the media.

The evolution industry was once a theory in crisis, now the evolution industry is in crisis without a theory−with believers begging for any scrap of evidence.

In November 1859, Charles Darwin released the first edition of The Origin of Species. While an instant worldwide sensation – all 1250 copies sold on the first day – critics kept Darwin returning to the drawing board. Over the next thirteen years, Darwin edited, added and deleted major sections of The Origin of Species eventually leading to six editions. The Sixth Edition was published in February 1872.

Now, Ben Fry of Computational Information Design has retraced these evolutionary changes through Darwin’s six editions, chapter by chapter, highlighting the changes in a color-coded greeked version of the text at pixel-scale, as seen in the illustration.

Wordsmithing Darwin’s title, Fly entitled his project “On The Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Traces” – substituting “species” with “traces”.

In collaboration with John van Wyhe, founder and director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, Fry graphically details the evolution of Darwin’s book. On the website, Fry animates Darwin’s changes over time starting with the First Edition with the actual specific changes to the text viewable while hovering with the mouse.

According to Fry, this is “a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions, and is intended as the first in a series looking at how the book evolved over time”.

While The Origin of Species started with fourteen chapters, Darwin expanded the number of chapters to fifteen chapters with the addition of “Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection”. It was not until the last edition, the Sixth Edition, Darwin that used the term “evolution” for the first time.

Darwin used the successive editions to address a wide range of criticisms and to align with emerging evolutionary concepts of the time. The key phrase associated with The Origin of Species, “survival of the fittest,” did not appear until the Fifth Edition. In the First Edition, the title of Chapter IV was “Natural Selection.” By the Fifth Edition, the title was changed to “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest.”

With each successive edition, the length of the book increased, from 3,878 in the first edition to 5,088 sentences. According to Morse Peckham of the University of Pennsylvania Press, between just the Fifth and Sixth Edition, Darwin changed twenty-nine percent of the sentences.

Today, the Sixth Edition is considered Darwin’s final word. Like an artist, though, a creative work is never complete. In 1869, Darwin expressed in a letter to Joseph Hooker that if “I lived twenty more years and was able to work, how I should have to modify the Origin, and how much the views on all points will have to be modified!”

The fact that The Origin of Species is not used at any level, high school or university, in the teaching of scientific principles indicates that Darwin’s work is, in all practicality, philosophical, not scientific. Unlike the natural laws discovered by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Darwin was forced to constantly revise his proposed natural law− natural selection.

The constant revisions trapped Darwin into a litany of contradictions on the subject of natural selection. Contradictions on fifteen aspects are detailed in Darwin, Then and Now – The Most Amazing Story in the History of Science.

While arguing that “There is no logical impossibility in the acquirement of any conceivable degree of perfection through natural selection” in one context, Darwin flips the argument to “Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection” in another context.

Even Charles Lyle, the founder of modern geology, recognizing the contradictions rejected natural selection as a natural law.

In What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), self-proclaimed “out-right, card-carrying, sign-up, dye-in-the-wool, no-holds barred atheists” Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona pined that “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed” because “the theory of natural selection is internally flawed” and now stands as an “intensional fallacy”.

Keenly aware of the theoretical and practical problems presented in The Origin of Species, in Chapter XIV Darwin, dismissed the mounting criticism. “The several classes of facts which have been considered … innumerable species … are all descended”, argued Darwin, “even if it were unsupported by other facts or arguments.” For Darwin, evolution was considered a fact, even in the absence of scientific evidence.

Amazingly, Darwin clearly recognized the problem with his theory. In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish.”

Even in the Introduction of The Origin of Species Darwin recognized the inadequacy of the theory: “I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.”

Darwin was clearly not satisfied with The Origin of Species. In the same year as the Fifth Edition in 1869, Darwin expressed in a letter to Joseph Hooker that if “I lived twenty more years and was able to work, how I should have to modify the Origin, and how much the views on all points will have to be modified!”

Today, as the Origin of Species evolution continues, Darwin’s influence only continues only as a philosophy, not as a science. The animation developed by Ben Rye illustrates the evolving nature of evolutionary philosophy−not a scientific fact.

Famous British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science on the supporting side simply declares “Feathers are modified reptilian scales.”

More than twenty species of dinosaur have been collected with preserve feathers.

While birds and dinosaurs share a range of common features such as feathers, hollow pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors, however, the sharing of features between different species is ubiquitous throughout nature. For example, while the eye of the octopus and human share common features, the octopus is not considered an ancestor to man.

Without fossil record evidence, ancestral relationship is simply speculative, at best. “Among the consensus that supports dinosaurian ancestry [of birds]”, WIKIPEDIA acknowledges, “the exact sequence of evolutionary events that gave rise to the early birds… is a hot topic.”

One of the major reasons for the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary contention centers on evidence from the fossil record for the dinosaur scale gradually evolving into the bird feather.

Study on the origin of birds began shortly after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Described as a nearly complete skeleton in 1863, a new fossil bird discovery was noted to have reptilian features, including clawed forelimbs and a long, bony tail−part bird and part reptile features.

The bird fossil was named Archaeopteryx lithography−Archaeopteryx meaning “ancient wing.” The Archaeopteryx feather is recognized as one of the most beautiful fossils ever unearthed.

Given the optimal fossil conditions in German limestone, even the finest detail structures of the feather have been preserved. Armed with a combination of dinosaur and bird features, the Archaeopteryx launched the dinosaur-to-bird controversy.  By the sixth edition of The Origin of Species in 1872, Darwin gave credence to the dinosaur-to bird theory -

Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archeopteryx.

In the words of evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Archaeopteryx “may well be the most important natural history specimen in existence … Beyond doubt it is the most widely known and illustrated fossil.”

Analysis of the fine feather details has been central to studying the transitional status of the dinosaur-to-bird theory. The Archaeopteryx quickly became recognized one of the most famous fossils ever discovered.

By the late twentieth century, the verdict on the transitional status of Archaeopteryx was settled. Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974) weighed in –

How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.

Alan Feduccia, writing in the journal Science in 1979 , in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

John Ostrom in 1979 published a paper in the American Scientist, concluding that not only is the Archaeopteryx not a missing link, but that “No fossil evidence exists of any pro-avis. It is purely hypothetical.”

Harvard professor, known as Darwin’s 20^st-century bulldog, Ernest Mayr in 1982, even began to weigh in with caution, backpedaling by calling the Archaeopteryx discovery: “the almost perfect link between reptiles and birds.”

Paleontologist Larry Martin of the University of Kansas declared in 1985 that the “Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”

At the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson concluded that the Archaeopteryx was a bird capable of flight and published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly” – not a transitional dinosaur-to-bird transitional link.

Robert L. Carroll, professor of biology at McGill University, in 1997 concluded, “The geometry of the flight feathers of Archaeopteryx is identical with that of modern flying birds, whereas non-flying birds have symmetrical feathers. The way in which the feathers are arranged on the wing also falls within the range of modern birds.”

Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature, wrote in 1999 that the missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story.

So what is the truth about Archaeopteryx? Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, may have summed it up best in a letter to Luther Sunderland on April 10, 1979, writing, “such stories are not a part of science.”

Since the Archaeopteryx discovery in 1860, evolutionists have continued to flounder for feathers in the fossil record long after the evidence has been weighed.  No small wonder that WIKIPEDIA opened the discussion of the Origin of Birds with “The origin of birds is a contentious and central topic within evolutionary biology.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis with speculative evidence, now evolution is in crisis without scientific evidence.

The evolution industry continues with an addiction to old speculations, like the Archaeopteryx, long known to be scientifically bogus.

The Archaeopteryx feather story underscores why evolution is viewed today as only a philosophy, not science.

These are my top 10 highlights in 2011 presented on Darwin, Then and Now during the year with links to the original article.

• Dawn of the Deed. Australian paleontologist, John A. Long article entitled “Dawn of the Deed”, published in the January 2011 issue of Scientific America, new fish fossils inexplicably demonstrate sudden appearance of internal fertilization, rather than external fertilization of eggs−an evolution enigma.

• Collins “Junk DNA” Toss. Francis Collins in Language of Life contradicts his “junk DNA” evolutionary theory in Language of God, stating: “The discoveries of the past decade, little known to most of the public, have completely overturned much of what used to be taught in high school biology. If you thought the DNA molecule comprised thousands of genes but far more “junk DNA”, think again.

• Breivik, a Darwinist. After listing The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin as one of his most “important” books, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, proceeded to take natural selection in his own hands by bombing of government buildings in Oslo, causing eight deaths, and a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people

• Evolution, a Classroom Failure? In a New York Times article “On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan,” free-lance writer Nicholas Bakalar notes “that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology.” The failure of evolutionary scientists to develop a comprehensive theory of evolution over the past 150 years continues as the root of the evolution industry frustration.

• DNA Fails to Resolve Fossil Record Gaps. As Evan Lerner, the Science News Officer at the University of Pennsylvania explains, the “Cataloging the diversity of life on Earth is challenging enough, but when scientists attempt to draw a phylogeny — the branching family tree of a group of species over their evolutionary history — the challenge goes from merely difficult to potentially impossible.”

• Karabo Anti-Science Rhetoric. Donald Johanson paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University and founder of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of California, Berkley, commented on the latest Australopithecus sediba [Karabo] finding in South Africa, an alleged human ancestor: “The oldest Homo specimens are scrappy and enigmatic, leaving researchers unsure about the evolutionary steps between the australopithecines and Homo. … The transition to Homo continues to be almost totally confusing.”

• Neanderthal, Discovery Erodes Differences. John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, based on newly discovered genetic evidence told BBC News that “They’re us. We’re them.” Since the genetic evidence demonstrates the Neanderthal interbreed with humans, the Neanderthals and humans are one species−not a human ancestor. Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow in New York concluded that the “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.”

• Essential Elements of Darwin’s Theory. In an article published in BioEssays (2011) entitled “Why is it so difficult to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution?” Jacques Dubochet, professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, was amazed to discover that less than 20% of attendees to a celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday could “[w]rite down in a few words, the essential elements of Darwin’s theory of evolution”.

• Ancient Eel Defies Evolution. The scientific report of the finding, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society on-line in August headed by G. David Johnson of the Smithsonian Institute, was entitled A ‘living fossil’ eel (Anguilliformes: Protanguillidae, fam. nov.) from an undersea cave in Palau. The comparative morphology and genetic report notes the problem: “The analysis they have performed using morphology and genetics is brilliant and invites as many questions about eel evolution as it solves.”

• Anomalocaris, a Freak of Evolution. A team of scientists from Australia and Spain lead by John R. Paterson, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, extended even further Darwin’s dilemma in examining the Anomalocaris: “Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares”−a nightmare for the evolution industry since Anomalocaris appeared in Cambrian Explosion then disappeared suddenly. The sudden appearance contradicts the basic premises of evolution.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. Scientific evidence from 2011 further supports the contention that evolution only exists as a philosophy.

“On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man… it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject.” Charles Darwin, 1871

On the one hand, speculating on the subject of human origins, was “useless” yet in The Origin of Species, Darwin countered this argument by noting that “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor.” Over the past 150 years, then, in the midst of this confusion, evolutionists have continued to look for the intermediate species leading to humans.

With new fossils are continually being found throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, however, resolving any presumed evolutionary theory on the origins of humans continues to reinforce the long recognized reputation of the evolution industry−constant revision and contention.

Amazingly, the world of paleoanthropology since the publication of The Origin of Species has become a legacy of conflicting personalities and cliquish scientific groups. Some ideas, particularly when they are backed by arguments from authoritative figures in the industry, continue to persist long after they have been proven to be untenable.

In the mid-twentieth century, the evolution debate as to when and where Darwin’s intermediate transitional links gave rise to modern humans diverged from the other great apes became mired in philosophical perspectives−not science.

In particular, one archeologist whose name is synonymous with paleoanthropology, Louis Leaky, was perhaps one of the greatest perpetrators. While Darwin suggested that humans originated from Africa, by the early twentieth century many European scientists were beginning to be convinced otherwise.

In 1912, Charles Dawson presumably discovered a fossil from a gravel pit in the town of Piltdown in East Sussex, England. The new “fossil discovery” was given the named Eoanthropus dawson, now more commonly known as the Piltdown man. In 1913, the Piltdown man was then placed on exhibit in the British Museum of Natural History as fossil for the evolution of humans, even though undermining Darwin’s tenuous out-of-Africa theory.

British scientists, such as Sir Arthur Keith, anthropologist and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, were so convinced that humans originated in Britain that fossils found in other areas were discredited, especially the South African fossils identified by Raymond Dart in 1925 named Australopithecus africanus. Keith considered Dart’s find, also known by the nickname the Taung Child, as another unimportant species of extinct ape.

In 1938, at the Barkham Manor in Piltdown, Sir Arthur Keith unveiled a memorial to mark the site where Piltdown man was discovered by Charles Dawson. Sir Arthur finished his speech saying:

So long as man is interested in his long past history, in the vicissitudes which our early forerunners passed through, and the varying fare which overtook them, the name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance.

Lee Berger, paleontologist from the University of Witwatersrand, suggests that Keith’s philosophy, not science, was the source of his dismissal of the Taung Child.  Unfortunately, over time, as Dart’s colleague Robert Broom began to find more fossil specimens in South Africa, Keith was forced to re-evaluate the Taung Child and his out-of-Europe model of evolution. Then, finally, after decades of display in the museum, in November 1953 the British Museum removed the Piltdown man exhibition because the exhibit was nothing more than an elaborate hoax. The Piltdown man was simply a fraudulent construction of a skull of a man and the jaw of an orangutan.

Nearly a decade later in 1934, a little known American paleontologist from Yale University, G. Edward Lewis, published a paper describing a number of fossil ape species he had discovered in the Siwalik Hills of northern India. Among these apes was a species he named Ramapithecus brevirostris. In 1960, Elwyn Simons pieced together more jawbone fragments and announced the fossils as evidence for the evolutionary origin of humans from ape-like animals.

This out-of-India theory ran in opposition to the more popular out-of-Africa model of human evolution theory espoused by paleoanthropologists in the early 1960s lead by Louis Leaky. In particular, Leaky argued that the series of fossil his team discovered in east Africa later named Kenyapithecus africanus was the evolutionary origin of humans.

Even though Simons’ fragmentary jaw of Ramapithecus was hardly a match for Leaky’s Kenyapithecus, the Kenyapithecus was never been too far out of the woods. Ramapithecus had supporters. During the 1950’s, the renowned paleoanthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, who along with Joseph Weiner and Kenneth Oakley who had exposed the British Museum Piltdown man fraud, advanced the argument in support of Ramapithecus as the more likely evolutionary origin of humans based on dental arcade.

While the dental arcade of Ramapithecus was V-shaped, similar to humans, by contrast the Kenyapithecus the dental arcade was U-shaped.

During the mid-twentieth century, the Simons Ramapithecus camp versus Leaky Kenyapithecus camp debate raged. Leaky was stuck on the out-of-Africa model largely from Darwin’s vague endorsement of the out-of-Africa model.

Although these two hypotheses were in direct opposition to each other, they were linked by a central anthropocentric principle. Both believed the apes were the evolutionary origins of humans. Perhaps because Leaky followed Darwin’s suggestion, he tyrannically gained the most support.

When confronted with scientific evidence opposing the theory, Leaky was known to attack the individual instead of the evidence. This is best exemplified by an event that transpired at an anthropological conference in Chicago in 1965. David Pilbeam was giving a presentation in which he was attempting to argue that Kenyapithecus africanus was actually a member of the previously identified Dryopithecus nyanzae species. This incident is recounted in Virgina Morell’s Ancestral Passions: the Leaky family and the quest for humankind’s beginnings (1996: 291):

At an anthropological conference in 1965, [Louis Leaky] jumped up and shouted at David Pilbeam, who was giving a presentation, to sit down and shut up… Terrified and appalled, Pilbeam looked around the room for someone to come to his defense. But no one – not even Pilbeam’s thesis advisor or the conference chairman– spoke up.

With chaos and contention abounding in the realms of paleontology, evolutionary scientist focused on evidence from biochemistry and genetics.

In the early 1960s, Morris Goodman, a pioneering biochemist at Wayne State University, caused even greater controversy after discovering that human blood proteins were more similar to chimpanzee and gorilla blood proteins than to apes, like Simons’ Ramapithecus or Leaky’s Kenyapithecus.

From this new biochemistry controversy, anthropologist Sherwood Washburn of Harvard University and Vincent Sarich, biochemist of the University of California, Berkley, suggested that the chimpanzee was evolutionary intermediate species leading to the origin of man, not Simons’ Ramapithecus nor Leaky’s Kenyapithecus.

The battle lines were drawn: Simons against Leaky, and Simon and Leaky against the ranks of Pilbeam, Goodman, Washburn, and Sarich.

The prospects of Ramapithecus as a transitional link to man were finally exhausted in 1982 following a systematic review by anthropologist Milford E. Wolpoff at the University of Michigan. While Simons conceded, Leaky died in 1972 without ever seeing the light.

Amazingly, the remenints of the Leaky saga are still at large, including physical anthropologist Jeffery Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh and president of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

More than 150 years ago, Darwin was on target when he said “it is useless to speculate on this subject”. Since then, paleoanthropological perspectives on presumed evolutionary origin of humans has been laced with a legacy of contention fueled only by philosophy−not science.