Missing Link
QUESTION: Have we found the missing link?ANSWER:Many articles have been published by prominent newspapers and magazines stating that the "missing link" has been found. What this metaphor implies is that chain links representing current species are connected together by one or more links representing transitional fossils from extinct life forms to form one or more unbroken chains that only need one transitional fossil link to complete the chain. This implies that evolution has almost fully explained how man has descended from the earliest ancestral life form of some microprobe. Nothing could be further from the truth! The truth is that for the last 150 years, since Darwin, evolutionists have been searching for the first transitional fossil link out of potentially millions required to explain the entire chain and still have not found it.
In a slightly different metaphor using the tree of life, the late Stephen J. Gould, America's most famous evolutionist, confirms this. He stated, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism. I wish only to point out that it was never seen in the rocks."
How could so many articles reporting finding the "missing link" in prominent newspapers and magazines be wrong? That is an interesting question that begs for an answer. It turns out that all of the assertions that missing links have been found have been identified as false or discredited. Let's examine the most common ones.
Piltdown Man was declared to be 500,000 years old and the missing link. After it became the consensus of the world's greatest authorities that it was the genuine link in the evolution of man, it was found to be a hoax. Someone combined an orangutan jaw with filed teeth with a human skull that had been chemically treated to make it look old.
Neanderthal Man was found in Neander Valley in Germany in 1856 by Johann Fuhlrott. The find consisted of a skull and several bones. He was portrayed to the world as a semi-erect, brutish subhuman creature that was supposed to be the "missing link" in the evolutionary chain to show man evolved from earlier ancestors. It is now believed that these creatures were real people who suffered from rickets, a vitamin D deficiency, and arthritis!
Nebraska Man was found in Nebraska in 1922 by Harold Cook. The find was exactly one tooth! It was immediately declared by H.F. Osborn of the American Museum to be the vaunted missing link! He placed it at the very bottom of man's ancestry! The curator of the American Museum of Natural History and Professor of Paleontology of Columbia University called it "The Million Dollar Tooth"! The London Illustrated Times assigned an imaginative artist to draw the "ape man" that carried this tooth around in his mouth some 6000 centuries ago. During the famous Scopes evolution trial in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan was ridiculed by lawyer Clarence Darrow because Bryan had not heard of the tooth and other facts of evolution by a delegation of authorities, led by Professor H.H.Newman of the University of Chicago. In 1927, to the supreme embarrassment of many, the tooth was discovered to be that of an extinct pig.
Lucy is the popular name given to the famous fossil skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia by American anthropologist Donald Johanson. To many people, Lucy is regarded as some kind of link between ape-like creatures and humans. According to Richard Leakey, who along with Johanson is probably the best-known fossil anthropologist in the world, Lucy's skull is so incomplete that most of it is "imagination made of Plaster of Paris." Leakey even said in 1983 that no firm conclusion could be drawn about what species Lucy belonged to.
How can it be possible that many of our great scientists, our best media sources, and academia are so wrong about the truth of evolution and the facts that support it? The only possible answer is that biological evolution is a devout religious philosophy that must be supported at all costs looking for scientific evidence to support it while ignoring the mountain of evidence supporting the alternative conclusion, special creation.
