Lancelot Links?

Picking up where we left off...

4) Reptiles to birds. One of the most famous fossils in existence is that of so-called Archaeopteryx, a bird-like creature believed to be about 145 million years old. It has numerous skeletal features suggesting a close kinship to a certain dinosaur species. Its discovery shortly after the publication of Origin helped convince a number of former skeptics and discredit nay-sayers. Analysis of Archaeopteryx indicates that it is best considered as a possible bird ancestor, not a definite one. Nevertheless, it is one of Darwinism's strongest bits of evidence, even in isolation--but it is not very good science to base an entire theory on one data point.

5) Apes to humans. As of the late 1980s there were five putative hominid species: Australopithicus afarensis, A. africanus, Homo habilis, H. erectus, and H. sapiens. But is the fossil record really all that secure? Physical anthropology is one of the most subjective of all investigative fields. It is all too easy to read volumes into the scanty evidence. If one is looking for human ancestors, it is easy to get quite inventive about finding them. There is enormous professional pressure to establish this important concept in evolutionary biology, pressures that sometimes lead to spectacular frauds, such as Piltdown man, covered up by the British Museum for forty years. At this point, the fossil records provide at best some plausible candidates as ancestral forms of modern humans, but they are far from establishing certainty after nearly 150 years of enthusiastic investigation. In fact, the overall testimony of the fossil record is so against the prevailing Darwinian theory of evolution that Darwinists have been forced to look elsewhere for corroboration. Lately they have turned to molecular biology, to which we will turn next.