The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [31]
In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was “a true member of the human family.” 51 This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor. 52
THE NARRATIVE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
Wells listened intently as I described to him how my exposure to misinformation about Java man had paved the way for my eventual wholehearted embrace of Darwinian evolution. The factors that contributed to that debacle, he pointed out, are still quite relevant.
“One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans,” Wells said. “Often, it’s just skull fragments or teeth.
“So this gives a lot of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur.
“Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book.” 53
Wells reached over again to pick up Icons of Evolution. “I thought Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature, was quite candid in talking about this issue in 1999,” Wells said as he searched for the right page. “Gee wrote, ‘The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.’
“He called each fossil ‘an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.’ In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution ‘between ten and five million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.’
“Consequently, he concluded that the conventional picture of human evolution is ‘a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.’ Then he said quite bluntly: ‘To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.’ ” 54
Wells put down the book. “In other words, you’re not going to reconstruct human evolutionary history just based on examining the few fossils we have,” he continued. “The only reason anyone thinks the evidence supports human evolution is because Darwinism is assumed to be true on other grounds. If it is, then it makes perfect sense to extrapolate that to human history, which is what Darwin did in his book The Descent of Man.
“But what if the other evidence for Darwinism is faulty—which, in fact, it is? You and I didn’t even go into the major flaws with a whole host of other evolution icons that are used to teach students today. There’s no shortage of books debunking Darwin. And without any compelling evidence for Darwinism in these areas, the whole question of human evolution is up for grabs.
“Instead, Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit. The narrative can take