[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Eric Anderson, and joining us on the show today is Dr. Casey Luskin to discuss a brand new book he contributed to Science and Faith in Dialogue, part of the Reformed Theology in Africa series. Dr. Luskin is Associate Director at Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. He holds a law degree from the University of San Diego and has bachelor's and master's degrees in Earth sciences as well as a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg. He has spoken and written extensively on evolution and intelligent design and has contributed to or edited more books than I think I can list. So I won't do that. But I could say Casey is uniquely qualified to help us understand our topic today. Welcome, Casey.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Eric. It's a lot of fun to be here.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: So tell us about this new anthology. How did it come about? Who are the contributing authors?
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so the book is titled Science and Faith and Dialogue and I think it's a great book. It's actually free online. Hopefully you can post a link to it with the podcast available as a free PDF download. And it came about because of some relationships that were built by both myself and Brian Miller with folks in South Africa. As many ID the future listeners probably may recall, I I lived in South Africa from 2016 until partway through 2020 and obviously got to meet a number of people while I was there. And Discovery Institute has actually been building relationships with folks in South Africa even before I went there for my PhD and Brian Miller came out and spoke there, I think it was in 2018. And we met a professor at Northwest University of Potchestroom, which is a public university. He, I believe is a physics and engineering professor there named Frederick Van Niekerk, or he goes by Fricke for short, that's sort of a comm. South African term of endearment, or you know, a shortened name. And he's a really great guy, a professor there, and he wanted to put together a volume dealing with issues related to science and faith, but very much focused on looking at the science. And is the science really promoting sort of this materialistic worldview that we are often told it does? So together, working with Professor Van Niekirk, we put together a list of potential contributors to the book. And the book over the last few years, it just slowly came together and was released in December of 20. So I'm very excited about this book coming out.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Excellent. Yes. And so what we'll do is we will include a link to the PDF download so that everybody has that available. It's a great resource.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And if I can mention really quick, Eric, just some of the contributors so people know what a great book it is. It has a contribution, a chapter from Steve Meyer, Guillermo Gonzalez, Hugh Ross, Jim Tour, Fuzz Rana, also from Reasons to Believe, where Hugh Ross is, Brian Miller, Marcos Eberlin, myself, and then Michael Keyes, a historian of science who also works with us here at Discovery Institute. So I think it's fantastic lineup of contributors with very diverse interests and backgrounds, but all experts. And I think folks will have a lot of get a lot out of this volume.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Sure. And in terms of those contributors, so the book covers a lot of stuff. I mean, everything from Origin of Life to, you know, you mentioned Mike Keys at the end there. I think his is the last chapter talking about, you know, science and faith dialogue, Brian Miller talking about engineering application and some others talking about fine tuning, those kinds of things. So it covers a lot of stuff. And your chapter is entitled Evolutionary Models of Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Psychology Fail to Account for Human Origins. That's quite an intimidating title. Tell us maybe in simple terms, in just a sentence or two, what you're covering in this review.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Yeah, so my chapter is basically about human origins, and I look at it from three different academic, scientific fields. Number one would be paleoanthropology, looking at the hominid fossil record. Number two would be genetics, and number three would be psychology, specifically evolutionary psychology. And I ask if in each of those fields, the evidence supports an evolutionary account of human origins.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: So paleoanthropology, that's a long, intimidating word. What does that mean?
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Yeah, paleoanthropology is just the scientific study of human beings, of humanity. And of course, paleoanthropology is studying our origins, looking at human beings in the past. So it's looking at essentially the origin of human beings in the deep past.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Okay, great, great. So tell me a little bit about your particular interest in contributing to this volume. You mentioned you had spent some time in Africa and of course have a connection there while you were working on your PhD. But why did you get interested in contributing to this?
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah, so I appreciate the question. I lived in South Africa for about almost four and a half years from 2016 to midway through 2020. And while I was there, I got to go to a number of hominid sites and had some experiences to really learn a lot about hominids. This was not the topic of my PhD research, but it was something that when I had free time. I would go and visit a lot of places of interest to human origins. And one of the places I visited is the Marapang Museum near Johannesburg. In fact, this museum is just north of Johannesburg in what is called the Cradle of Humankind. A very famous fossil hominid set of sites where they have found many different hominid locations within, I don't know, a location maybe the size of Tacoma or something like that. I made that up. But it's not a big area and there's a number of hominid sites. In fact, the Meropang Museum and the Cradle of Humankind were not at all far from where I lived. If you were to go to my apartment that my wife and I rented in South Africa in Johannesburg, and if you were to walk about three blocks down the street and then turn left and stay on that street for about 40 minutes, it would dead end at the Cradle of Humankind. So we felt a lot of connection to this area. And so the Meropang Museum, I would say, is probably arguably the world's most world class hominid fossil paleoanthropology museum that's out there. It is just an incredibly good museum. Clearly the South African government and other donors put a lot of money into just making it into a fantastic place to learn about human origins. It's very, very impressive. And I went there a number of times while I was in South Africa with various friends who had come to visit. I also would sometimes take people in groups, even on tours of the museum. These are just very informally organized cause they wanted to learn about human origins, but also understand what is wrong with the standard evolutionary story of human origin. So I would take people there. And over time I developed what I call a visitor's guide to the Meropang Museum. Cause I got tired of saying the same thing over and over again. I would just give people my visitor's guide. And I thought it was a pretty good visitor's guide. And eventually when this book opportunity came up, they said, well, what would you like to contribute to a South African published book about science and faith? And I said, I would love to publish my visitor's guide to the Maripeng Museum. So I guess, you know, I thought it was a pretty good visitor's guide. I had all kinds of photos that I had taken in this visitor's guide from the museum. Unfortunately, when we actually came time to publish the the visitor's guide in this book, the museum would not give me permission to use any of the photographs. So I had to take them all out. So this is sort of a stripped down visitor's guide without any of the photographs of the museum. Hopefully it's still fun to read and gives you a sense of what's in the museum. But it's not just a visitor's guide to the museum, it covers a lot of other topics. And so you don't have to be in the museum to follow what I'm talking about in this chapter.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely not. I thought it was very readable absent that. I didn't notice throughout that you mentioned the Maropang Museum a lot and use examples from that, which I think is helpful for the reader to understand what the issues are and the kinds of ways that they might see things represented. Whether they go to Meropang or another science and history museum, they probably would see similar exhibits and similar statements in some of the ways. So that's great. So let's dive in. You write in your chapter, according to the modern consensus of paleoanthropology, Homo sapiens evolve from ape like species through apparently unguided processes driven by natural selection acting upon random mutations. So Casey, how pervasive is this view and where do we run across this kind of view?
[00:08:12] Speaker A: I mean, this view is absolutely pervasive throughout all of mainstream academia. The idea that human beings essentially evolved from ape like precursors through strictly unguided evolutionary processes with, as you just read, natural selection, random mutation being the driving force behind that process. And I wanted to ask the question, what does the evidence really show us? Is the evidence really that strong and compelling where we have to accept that view, or are there other possible views that are also consistent with the.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Right, right. So you mentioned the museum and your time there. What's special or unique about South Africa in terms of paleoanthropology? Maybe mention a couple of the sites that you describe in the chapter.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I think South Africa is special both on sort of the beginnings of the field of paleoanthropology and the last few decades of paleoanthropological research. So some of the earliest known hominid fossils that we discovered, when I say earliest, I mean some of the first ones we discovered in terms of human scientific investigation came from South Africa. I'm thinking of the Taung child which was discovered in 1924, and then Mrs. Pless, which was discovered in, I think in the late 1940s. So South Africa helped sort of launch the field of paleoanthropology with some of these, the first australopithecine fossils Coming from South Africa, the first fossils we knew about, and then just in the last couple decades, I would say, really, in the last 15 years or so, South Africa has produced some spectacular hominid fossils. I'm thinking of Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, which were both discovered in the cradle of humankind, as well as a number of other sites throughout South Africa, not just bearing australopithecines, but also members of the genus Homo Homo naledi, and also fossils of Homo erectus as well. And also some of the earliest very human like fossils, like modern humans, come from South Africa. So we just have a real broad spectrum of hominid fossils coming from all around the country of South Africa. And certainly the cradle of humankind just north of Johannesburg is one of the most rich fossil hominid sites in the world.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Did you get a chance to visit any of the other sites in addition to the ones that are around the cradle?
[00:10:20] Speaker A: I did get to go to the Taung fossil quarry once. In fact, that was one of the last things I did before the US Government informed me that because of the COVID pandemic, I needed to get home to the US Or I would be stuck in South Africa indefinitely. So one of my last memories of actually going out and doing something fun in South Africa was seeing the Taung fossil quarry. And I went to a number of other places around the country where there are stone tools or just things that you would see. Oh, this is where they found this artifact or that artifact. I was a geology student, so we would get out a lot and we'd see a lot of interesting things, even if it wasn't necessarily part of what I was doing my research. So, yeah, absolutely. Saw a lot of great places in South Africa.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: That's awesome. I'm jealous. That sounds fantastic. So I can certainly understand why you'd want to contribute this chapter to the book. It sounds great.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: So sometimes I'll Just one anecdote, Eric. I mean, this is probably a longer story for another time, but, you know, even sometimes just hiking around, you will find amazing things. My wife and I were hiking at a bed and breakfast that we stayed at for our anniversary one year, and we found hominid stone fossil tools. And it was just incredible to see these things just laying on the ground, you know, as you're walking around out there in the bush. It's just incredible the things you'll find there.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Hmm. That's fantastic. So, Casey, sometimes we hear the words hominid hominin, homo, and more. What do we mean by these words so that we understand what you're talking about with this the rest of the hour here?
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Sure. So it's important to understand that these terms are not always used consistently in the scientific literature. So, for example, sometimes the word hominid means any member of family Hominidae, and that would be anything that traces back to our most recent common ancestor that we share with all the great apes, and then, of course, all the great apes, including us, and everything in between. And so in that sense of the word hominid, it has a very broad potential application. It would include us, it would include gorillas, it would include all of our ancestors going back to our common ancestor with the apes. In other contexts, the word hominid is used to describe any member of the lineage that led to human beings since our split with the chimpanzees. So anything that is sort of on the branch of the tree that includes human beings since our most recent common ancestor with just chimpanzees alone. And so I typically like to use the word hominid. I think the word hominid, in the popular mind, really is used in that latter definition, even if people don't realize that's exactly the way they're using the term. The word hominin is also often used in that latter sense to describe any individual that is on the branch of the tree that leads to modern humans since the split with chimpanzees. So, of course, the genus Homo is the latest sort of iteration of organisms on that branch of the tree. According to the standard evolutionary view, that would include human beings. We're Homo sapiens. It would also include Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, one of the earliest members of the genus Homo, and also other species which are debated sometimes as to whether they even belong in Homo, like Homo habilis, Homo naledi and others. And there's, you know, whether you're a lumper or a splitter, whether you think that there are lots of species or just a few, you know, will decide, you know, how many species you think belong in Homo. So, yeah, there's a lot of terms that are out there being used, and it's important to describe how we're using them before we start to have this conversation. As I'm using the term hominid in this conversation today, I'm going to sort of use it interchangeably with hominin. And that means any member of the sort of branch that is said to lead to modern human beings since our most recent common ancestor with chimps.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Okay. And that's a time frame that's typically pegged at around 6, 8 million years ago.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: That's exactly right.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Okay. Okay, so more of the recent.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: I should add that I'm a skeptic of this evolutionary scheme. I'm just describing how we're using the terms and you know, how they're commonly used.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Sure, sure. So when we talk about common ancestor today with, with chimps, it's the evolutionary story that we're discussing here, not necessarily proposing that. Okay, so there's a wonderful chapter. Excuse me, diagram in your chapter, Casey, from Jonathan Jones, that kind of shows the standard textbook ver of human origins, or phylogeny as it's called. I know it's hard to do this orally, but maybe you could just describe this diagram because there's kind of three major sections of fossil finds that are described in that diagram.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so Jonathan Jones is a graphic artist who we commissioned to actually draw a beautiful standard hominin phylogeny based upon various mainstream sources. And so it sort of starts off between 6 to 8 million years ago with some of the earliest hominids or hominins. And these are supposed to be some of the earliest individuals that would have been on the human branch after that split from chimpanzees of the two lines that led to chimps on the one hand, or humans on the other. Some of the early hominid fossils would be organisms like Sahelanthropus tchadensis or Orrorin tugenensis or Ardipithecus ramidus. Those are some of the early hominids, and they're often said to be some of the first upright walking, or as we say, bipedal species that evolved. Then we move into the australopithecines who live between approximately, we'll say, one and a half to four and a half million years ago. And the australopithecines, there's a lot more that's known about them compared to these early hominids. These early hominids we just mentioned, they're very fragmented fossils. There's not a whole lot of them. We don't know a whole lot. But the australopithecines are pretty well represented as far as what we know about them from the fossil record. Sometimes they are said to be bipedal ape like species. There's debate over that. But the bottom line is they are said to be essentially an ape like species that was directly ancestral to our genus Homo. And so the genus Homo then appears. Oh, by the way, the australopithecines would include species like Australopithecus afarensis or Australopithecus africanus. And the most famous, of course, would be the specimen Lucy, who belonged to Australopithecus afarensis and is said by many people to potentially be a direct ancestor of modern humans. Then we get into the genus Homo, which appears somewhere, we could say, between 2 to 3 million years ago. Some of the early Homo species are often said to be Homo habilis or Homo erectus, although there's now, I think, a growing view in the paleoanthropological community that Homo habilis actually should belong to Australopithecus. That's a debate for another day. But Homo erectus is a very prominent member of the genus Homo. And below the neck, Homo erectus was essentially identical to us. We'll talk about that some more. Although above the neck, it was also very similar to us, although its average skull size is smaller than us. And then, of course, in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. So we're getting into very, very human like forms with those three species in the fossil record. So that's sort of the standard evolutionary view, going from the early hominids to the australopithecines to the genus Homo. And this is a standard evolutionary view you'll see described in many textbooks or Richard Attenborough documentaries, that sort of thing.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Sure, sure. So, again, I definitely encourage everyone to download a copy of the book so you can see the diagram and better understand this. But we'll do our best to describe things as we go through here. So you have kind of three main points in your chapter. As you mentioned at the beginning, Casey and I want to set aside for a second that the time frame, the 6 to 8 million years, because there's some serious issues with that that you discuss in your chapter, but let's set that aside for a minute. So tell us about some of the actual fossils you've mentioned, some of the names here, but, you know, first of all, what is the quality typically of these fossils? And, you know, is there a good candidate as a precursor to humans?
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, the quality of the early hominins is not very good. They're typically very fragmented fossils, where in some cases it's very difficult to even know. Did they walk upright? I mean, for example, Sahelanthropuschadensis, or also called the Tomai skull, initially was just reported as a skull with a few jaw. Fragments and a femur. And they didn't say much about the femur for many years until I believe, just about a year and a half ago, at the end of 2020, they did actually publish a report on the femur that described it as being curved, not straight, typical of apes like chimps. So essentially this sort of threw a major bone into the claim that it was an early upright, walking, human like precursor. And so obviously there's debate over a lot of these things. And that's basically because there's very few bones to go on. Some people think it is more of an upright walking species. Same would go for Orrorin tugenensis, was discovered in Kenya in the year right around the turn of the millennium. And with this species they also found a femur. But again, there's just so little data to go on. They didn't find very, very many bones from this fossil that people are just not clear on whether it actually did walk upright. What did it look like? Did it belong to the lineage that led to essentially chimpanzees, or did it belong to the lineage that led to human? There's debate over these questions and no one is really totally sure. Same goes for Ardipithecus ramidus, also known affectionately as Ardi. Ardi was discovered in sort of the early to mid-90s, but it was not actually described and reported in the technical literature until 2009. And the reason for that is because the quality of Arty's skeleton was so bad that they described it as turning to dust when they would touch it, or they described its pelvis as looking like an Irish stew. Now, when they finally published ARDI in 2009, there was a lot of fanfare and it was claimed that Ardi was sort of this long sought after Rosetta Stone for understanding bipedalism. That's what one of Ardi's lead researchers claimed it was. But when you look at the actual fossil and you're seeing that its pelvis was described as being like an Irish stew, I mean, that does not give you a lot of confidence that we actually have a good understanding of this fossil's original state when its quality was so bad. And David acknowledged that Ardi had to go under, undergo a lot of quote unquote, artificial reconstruction. And okay, that's fine. I mean, scientists are allowed to reconstruct fossils and make their models, but I think there's a lot of questions about whether that reconstruction, you know, whether it was done correctly and what do we actually know about Ardi. In fact, even within the journal Science, there was an article that was published that claimed that if we just take Ardi's reconstruction at face value, it's characteristics could also be those of a quadruped, something that walked on all fours, not necessarily a biped. And there have been a number of leading scientists in this field that have criticized the claim that Ardi walked upright and have said, you know what, it's very possible that Ardi actually was a quadruped. So again, there's a lot of questions about how to interpret these fossils, and it's not clear that any of them are an upright walking precursor to the genus Homo.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Right, right. So one of the issues you mentioned is quality in some cases, and obviously some fossils are much better than others, but in some cases, you're dealing with something that has not only been fragmented, but also crushed. Right. In other words, the three dimensional shape of it isn't necessarily visible initially. You have to do some kind of reconstruction.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: And that's very, very common in these fossils, Eric. Not unusual at all to find hominin fossils in a very poor state and requiring reconstruction.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Okay, so let's assume, though, that we have a good fossil that's in reasonable condition. How do we know where this fits in in this lineage? You talk about a few specific ones in your chapter, but you know, the Tomiskol or maybe Lucy, which is the most famous one that I think everybody's heard of. How do we, you know, as paleoanthropologists, go about deciding where this fits in the line?
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Sure. Well, they use a method called cladistics, where basically you score a fossil based upon its morphological traits, you know, presence or absence of this trait, or presence or absence of that trait, did it walk upright? Did it have a large skull, you know, did it have a, what was the angle of its knee joint, et cetera. And you score a fossil based upon its traits, and then you group fossils that are more like together. Now, the assumption that goes into cladistics is 100% evolutionary. And so when they're building these evolutionary trees, they're looking what they call shared derived characters, characters that essentially are found only within a monophyletic group and can be used to identify members of that group, members of that, that essentially that, that clade, as they will put it. And so if they find traits that they think link these fossils with, say, human beings and other hominids, then they will group them on the hominid line. But if they think they find traits that group them more exclusively with chimpanzees or other Apes, then they will put them on the, on the ape line. And this is where the debates begin because there's so little material to work with and there's so much subjectivity that often goes into the reconstructions that you'll find just about one opinion for every researcher that's out there in the field.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: There you go. So tell us about Lucy a little bit. I know that most people have heard about that it's proposed as a human ancestor. What's the current thinking about Lucy as a potential human ancestor?
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so Lucy is a member of Australopithecus afarensis. And as I talk about in my chapter, this Meropeg Museum notes that the australopithecines had ape like features including a small brain, flattened nose and forward projecting jaws. That's absolutely true. If you were to look at the head of Lucy it would have looked very chimp like. But then the claim is that Lucy and many other australopithecines, they were bipedal, they walked upright. And this is where you get into a lot more controversy. There are a number of traits of Lucy that either look ape like and, or human like. One of those traits would be the hand bones of Lucy. Lucy had the hand bones of a knuckle walker. Now if you ask an evolutionary biologist who thinks that Lucy was an upright walking ancestor of humans, they think that those knuckle walking hand bones are simply a primitive retention from their knuckle walking ancestors. It's not reflective of the way that Lucy actually lived. But you have to also ask the question, well that is an evolutionary interpretation that's being imposed upon the data. The raw data from Lucy actually shows hand bones of a knuckle walker. So that's very interesting right there. So, and then that's clavistics at work. You decide which traits actually matter and which traits are informing you about the way this organism actually lived and which are just simply primitive retentions from the evolutionary ancestors. And so again this is where a lot of the debates and subjectivity come in. Lucy also had the, and the australopithecines in general had, have the inner ear canals that are similar to modern apes. And so that's interesting because inner ear canals are very closely connected to the way you walk and sort of, you know, what is your mode of locomotion?
[00:24:54] Speaker B: Because of balance, you mean?
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Because of balance. Exactly. And so that's another interesting fact. You know, what do we make of that? Another interesting point about Lucy is that she had many adaptations that were suited for climbing in trees. She had long, curved feet, and she had other traits that are, we think, would have made her a very good tree climber. So it's very clear, I think it's fairly well accepted that Lucy had an arboreal lifestyle where she spent a lot of time in trees. So that's interesting right there. Okay, so if she's spending a lot of time in trees, is she really an upright, walking, bipedal ape that's evolving into human like bipedalism? And some of the angles of Lucy's femur bones from the pelvis going down to the knee has a higher angle than human beings would. And so what that might tell you, it's been proposed that Lucy was walking upright, but she was walking upright in trees. She was walking on tree branches with kind of that sort of a build and a morphology, not necessarily walking upright on the ground like human beings do. So there may have been a form of bipedal locomotion in Lucy that was very different from the bipedal locomotion that human beings have today. So these are things that are all debated. But again, this is because we don't have a lot of great fossil material even within Lucy. Her pelvis was found in a state of disrepair where it was not good condition, kind of like Ardipithecus ramidus, and it required reconstruction. And some scientists have alleged, even in the mainstream technical literature, that there was error in the reconstruction of Lucy's pelvis, which made it look more human like. So that's very interesting. This comes from a paper, I believe, in the Journal of Human Evolution. And so some folks have argued that there's actually insufficient fossil evidence to conclusively address whether Lucy walked upright. And this is coming directly from a technical paper. And so I think that the, the consensus is that there is more data that is needed to resolve these questions of exactly how Lucy walked.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Right. Okay, so let me summarize that quickly because it sounds like there's a debate about whether she walked upright, but it's clear that she has the ear canals that are more ape like that she has the fingers and the knuckles that are more ape like. And now she was a lot smaller than a, than an adult human, right?
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Oh, that's absolutely true. Lucy would have come up, you know, maybe to your waist or somewhere around there. So they would call her this small bipedal ape like species with a chimp sized brain. But, you know, I think that everything that I just said other than the word small, is in dispute, depending on who you ask.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Mm. So the thinking is that she was an adult. Right. Even though she's only half as big as a human.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Yes. Lucy was probably a young adult at the time that she died.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: In fact, there's been a suggestion that she died after falling out of a tree. So not a great way to die, but, I mean, everybody's got to go somehow.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Yeah, right. The upright walk. Well, it's hard to walk upright on branches. Right, so. So, hey, in the next section of your chapter, we're talking about now the third group, which is the Homo group. So if I'm understanding your viewpoint, that would include really Homo sapiens, of course, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, but perhaps not Homo habilis.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Yes. There have been a number of studies by actually leading paleoanthropologists that looked at the skeletal morphology of Homo habilis and found that actually in every case, it belonged within Australopithecines. And they found that really the reason why people have put it within Homo is because they wanted this species to be associated with tool use. But I think that even then it's very difficult to link any particular set of bones with a set of hominid tools. And so that is a tenuous argument to make that we know for a fact that Homo naledi, or, sorry, that Homo habilis, did use tools. And so I think it's better classified within Australopithecus.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. No chance they're going to rename it though, right?
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Well, this has been proposed. Again, you get different opinions. So there have been multiple papers that would call it actually Australopithecus habilis rather than Homo habilis.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: Okay, all right. So as we move into the genus Homo, is there a clear evolutionary progression?
[00:29:11] Speaker A: So this is one of the most interesting aspects of the hominid fossil record, Eric, and that is that the genus Homo appears abruptly in the fossil record. And essentially what we find is that when human like forms finally do appear, they appear abruptly without direct ape like evolutionary precursors. And in fact, this is well attested to in the literature. You can find people talking about the abrupt transition to the genus Homo, or the lack of fossils documenting an evolutionary transition between the Australopithecines and the genus Homo. Ernst Mayr said that we have no fossils that can serve as missing links. And he says that the earliest fossils of Homo are separated from Australopithecus by a, quote, large unbridged gap. So I find this very interesting that we find in the fossil record. Right. Where the genus Homo, basically the human like form, is supposed to Appear, we do not find fossils documenting how those individuals and how those species evolved and what they evolved from. There's this large unbridged gap in the fossil record associated with the origin of these human like members of the genus Homo. And for me, that's very significant in challenging the standard evolutionary story of human origins.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you mentioned Ernst Mehr. I was just blown away by this quote of his in your chapter. He says, not having any fossils that can serve as missing. He's talking specifically about human evolution here. He says not having any fossils that could serve as missing links. We have to fall back on the time honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative. So to me, this just jumps out, you know, at once. Both a remarkable admission of ignorance as well as saying, hey, the story is really what's driving the process here rather than the data.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Absolutely. There's an evolutionary paradigm that governs the interpretation of virtually every fossil that is found. And that's okay. I mean, people are allowed to have models and interpret data within a model. I don't have a problem with that. The question I have is whether other models are also consistent with the data. For example, there was a commentator from the University of Michigan a few years back talking about the origin of the genus Homo, and they called it a big bang origin, the genus Homo, where we're talking about sort of an explosive origin of basically the human like forms in the fossil record. And I would say that when we talk about, you know, big bang origins or explosions or abrupt appearance, this kind of language requires a very rapid infusion of new information into the biosphere to generate a new body plan, a new type of organism. And that, in my opinion at least, is better reflective of intelligent design, an instance of design in the history of biology, in the history of life, rather than sort of a gradual evolutionary scheme. So I think that there are certainly other ways to look at the data that are very consistent with the evidence and support a more design based view and not the standard evolutionary view.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Right. So what's the bottom line, Casey, as we look at the fossil record as it currently stands in regards to human evolution?
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Yeah. So the bottom line is that most fossils that we find in the hominid fossil record fall into one of two categories, ape like species or human like species. Eric. And there is a large unbridged gap between those groups. And I think that the origin of the genus Homo. Right. When the human body plan, the human like body plan appears, is where we are missing fossils. This gap, this large Enbridge gap, is well attested to in the mainstream literature. This is not something that is being made up by ID people. It's a real problem for evolutionary schemes. It does not get talked about enough and I think it needs to be talked about more. If you want to read a lot of the documentation of this abrupt appearance of our genus Homo and the lack of evidence for how the genus Homo evolved, go ahead and read my chapter. It's all in there.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Excellent. Well Casey, I really appreciate this. This has been fantastic having you here to help us understand more about this often difficult field of paleoanthropology for most of us to understand. I'd love to have you back to talk about the next part of your chapter, the claim that human and chimpanzees DNA is nearly identical.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: If you've got time, that'd be fun. Thank you so much, Eric.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to this episode of ID the Future. Join us again next time to learn more about our human origins and what the genetic evidence really says. You can find Dr. Luskin's chapter and many more excellent contributions from leading ID scholars in the book Science and Faith in Dialogue, available as a free PDF download by going to discovery.orgb that's B for books. Discovery.org be for ID the future. I'm Eric Anderson. Thanks for listening.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
