So where’s the debate in the OP? Whether or not the alleged fossil is photoshopped? :rolleyes:
Absent a religious angle, “Neat new fossil found!” impresses me as far more of an MPSIMS than a GD.
No, no. Here’s the Straight Dope!
This reminds me of a philosophy class I took a few years back. The professor had originally been an archaeology/paleontology major whose goal in life was to “find the missing link.” She took a took a philosophy class as an elective and somehow adopted some weird hybrid of deism and creationism, and became convinced evolution was wrong and she’d never find the missing link because there wasn’t one. It was really frustrating having to pretend to agree with her to pass the class, and yes she did give bad grades to people who disagreed.
My favorite bit of headline idiocy is something along the lines of “fossil hailed as our common ancestor.” Uh, common ancestor with WHAT in particular??? It’s like saying “man hailed as closest living relative” without saying to whom.
I’ve jotted down my skepticism here. Too many things are being confused all together, and it’s really setting scientists up for a big black eye. The fossil, if legit, is definitely one more piece for common descent… but we never really needed more in the first place, it was already well established. It is one more piece of evidence for human being’s place in the ancestry of primates… but ditto. It does certainly help fill in a previously murky period of primate evolution, and that’s great. But it’s also being used to make an argument about a particular arrangement of ancestries, and that, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
The way this was rolled out, kept under wraps and then done by press release before critics of this particular theory had a chance to even hear about it, much less publish articles about it, gives me the willies. Scientists shouldn’t be trying to lobby for their theories in the media and to the public before everyone else in the field has had time to debate things out and come to a pretty stable consensus.
Agreed, not much of a debate except wether it is a trasitional form or a “missing loink”, but it’s like socking-by-proxy to invent the possible responses of absent people.
The paper describing the critter is available for free online at PLoS ONE, should anyone want to see the original paper, rather than rely on news sources. It’s been named Darwinius masillae.
In general, no new species is made known to more than a handful of people prior to being published. So the “critics” don’t get a chance to hear about it any sooner than anyone else, in most cases. And, as I noted above, the official paper has just been published, so the criticisms (if any) will start showing up in the near future. The only difference between this and any other find is that the AMNH decided to do a big exhibit roll-out concurrently with the paper.
While not in the best interests of being scientific if this fossil cost them $1 million to obtain perhaps they hope to cash in somehow with this big “revelation”.
Probably hundreds, at least. What I’d like to know are the first seven.
That’s easy: The Pyramids, the Mausoleum, the Hanging Gardens, the Temple of Diana, the Colossus, the Pharos, and the Statue of Zeus. The Pyramids are the only surviving wonder.
This “missing link” isn’t likely to convince any hard-core creationist. They will demand to see yet another link between monkeys and monkey-lemurs, or lemurs and monkey-lemurs. Used to be the “missing link” was the void between chimps and humans, and the discovery of the Australopithecus fossil “Lucy” did nothing to convince creationists that evolution is real.
And yes, it’s a common claim among fundies that God actually created these old-looking fossils just to “test our faith” and tempt us into worship Satan…that was a standard explanation at my church while growing up. :rolleyes:
Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 B.C., to be precise. 
No, it was the devil. He put it there to confuse us. Kirk Cameron said so.
I thought those were quite specifically the seven wonders of the ancient world. What are the seven wonders of the modern world?
This “missing link” won’t even convince the tarsier people.
I’ve DONE IT! I’ve found the Missing Link…
-XT
There’s no such canonical list. See Wonders of the World - Wikipedia for a dozen or so lists of seven wonders of various worlds.
NM
I don’t think you quite understand how the word “ancestor” works.
Another nail in the coffin of creationism. I hope it just keeps piling on.
And a media storm full of bullshit that scientists are going to have to walk back, complete with gloating creationists. But maybe that’s not the fault of the scientists themselves. Still, a website and a film, all kept under wraps until the big launch? Lobbying the public and the media to jump unto your particular clade-theory bandwagon (which this fossil may help with, but certainly doesn’t come close to ending the debate on) is not the sort of thing I like seeing.