From the Series–The Origin of Life, part 3

November 23, 2024

I can drive myself crazy researching things that for some reason I just can’t let go, and sometimes they’re topics so obscure that if I were to bring them up in conversation I would probably risk sounding odd or (worse yet) snooty.

For example, recently I’ve had an obsession with learning about surveying practices in the Old Testament (I know, right!) and locating the place names from Deuteronomy 1:1 on a map. But over the last three months (long before the youth group at church requested that I teach on the difference between creation and evolution) I’ve been trying to determine whether Clifford Wilson and Henry Morris, two men who’ve written extensively on biblical archaeology and creationism, were right in saying that Cro-Magnon Man was originally thought to be a hominid (a transitional form between apes and humans).

I contacted the organization, Answers in Genesis, for information, and even e-mailed an evolutionary paleontologist at Tulane University who kindly replied to me within hours. Most days I study into the wee hours of the morning after everyone in my household has long since fallen asleep, and I often follow rabbit trails that I may or may not choose to write about on Facebook or share with the members of my church, but whether I do or not, I very much enjoy my wanderings. I learn so much!

In any event, this may explain the two or three posts lately about the origin of life. But revisiting this topic has reminded me of a time (long before I said “I do” to my bride or “Don’t do that” to my little ones, who admittedly aren’t so little anymore) when I first heard learned voices in college rattle off a list of fossil finds hailed by evolutionists as evidence of transitional forms. It also reminds me of my long ago visit to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to view the bones of “Lucy,” a 3’6” primate from Ethiopia that TIME magazine proclaimed to be the “missing link” after paleontologists concluded that Lucy’s knee joints would have enabled “her” to walk upright!

—But evolutionists today do not universally accept that Lucy walked upright or that “she” is a “missing link” between apes and man despite her inclusion in Wikipedia’s list of 232 human evolution fossils. Lucy then is not categorically different from other fossil finds through the years that have been presented initially with overzealous joy as ground-breaking evidence of transitional forms, but who some, many or even all scientists later acknowledged as a disappointment.

With both past and future discoveries, however, there will always be some (perhaps even a consensus of scientists) who wade into a scholarly obstinacy or a blindness that fails to acknowledge that the fossils before them cannot conclusively say what they so desperately need them to say in order to validate their evolutionary models. In his book, Bones of Contention, Roger Lewin even cites Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, as saying that anthropologists who deal with human fossils tend to get very emotionally involved with their bones.

—Daniel McCabe