Read Online The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lee Strobel
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his eyes helped cement the reality of human evolution.
The encyclopedia confidently described how Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois, excavating on an Indonesian Island in 1891 and 1892, “dug some bones from a riverbank.” Java man, which he dated back half a million years, “represents a stage in the development of modern man from a smaller-brained ancestor.” 46 He was, according to Dubois, the missing link between apes and humans. 47
And I believed it all. I was blithely ignorant, however, of the full Java man story. “What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination,” one author would later write. 48 In other words, the lifelike depiction of Java man, which had so gripped me when I was young, was little more than speculation fueled by evolutionary expectations of what he should have looked like if Darwinism were true.
As a youngster beginning to form my opinions about human evolution, I wasn’t aware of what I have more recently discovered: that Dubois’ shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today’s standards. Or that the femur apparently didn’t really belong with the skullcap. Or that the skull cap, according to prominent Cambridge University anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today. 49 Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois’ claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution. 50
In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was “a true member of the human family.” 51 This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor. 52
THE NARRATIVE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
Wells listened intently as I described to him how my exposure to misinformation about Java man had paved the way for my eventual wholehearted embrace of Darwinian evolution. The factors that contributed to that debacle, he pointed out, are still quite relevant.
“One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans,” Wells said. “Often, it’s just skull fragments or teeth.
“So this gives a lot of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur.
“Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book.” 53
Wells reached over again to pick up Icons of Evolution . “I thought Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature , was quite candid in talking about this issue in 1999,” Wells said as he searched for the right page. “Gee wrote, ‘The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.’
“He called each fossil ‘an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.’ In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution ‘between ten and five million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.’
“Consequently, he concluded that the
The encyclopedia confidently described how Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois, excavating on an Indonesian Island in 1891 and 1892, “dug some bones from a riverbank.” Java man, which he dated back half a million years, “represents a stage in the development of modern man from a smaller-brained ancestor.” 46 He was, according to Dubois, the missing link between apes and humans. 47
And I believed it all. I was blithely ignorant, however, of the full Java man story. “What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination,” one author would later write. 48 In other words, the lifelike depiction of Java man, which had so gripped me when I was young, was little more than speculation fueled by evolutionary expectations of what he should have looked like if Darwinism were true.
As a youngster beginning to form my opinions about human evolution, I wasn’t aware of what I have more recently discovered: that Dubois’ shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today’s standards. Or that the femur apparently didn’t really belong with the skullcap. Or that the skull cap, according to prominent Cambridge University anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today. 49 Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois’ claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution. 50
In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was “a true member of the human family.” 51 This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor. 52
THE NARRATIVE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
Wells listened intently as I described to him how my exposure to misinformation about Java man had paved the way for my eventual wholehearted embrace of Darwinian evolution. The factors that contributed to that debacle, he pointed out, are still quite relevant.
“One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans,” Wells said. “Often, it’s just skull fragments or teeth.
“So this gives a lot of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur.
“Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book.” 53
Wells reached over again to pick up Icons of Evolution . “I thought Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature , was quite candid in talking about this issue in 1999,” Wells said as he searched for the right page. “Gee wrote, ‘The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.’
“He called each fossil ‘an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.’ In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution ‘between ten and five million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.’
“Consequently, he concluded that the
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