From my most recent newsletter, sorry - I can't post photos here, but just an internet search and you'll find LOTS of photos of puijila, or follow some of the links in the article. Enjoy!
Ancestor of the seal: Proof of evolution? (missing link #1)
I was swamped with emails from alert readers about the supposed "seal ancestor" found in the Canadian high arctic, as reported in Nature magazine.
Thanks everyone, don't worry about swamping me, I'd rather be swamped then miss a good news item.
While this is a spectacular find to be sure (estimates are that they managed to recover some 65% of the skeleton), it is merely excellent evidence of a dead creature. It is lousy evidence for evolution.
The Canadian Museum of Nature has a page devoted to this fossil:
http://nature.ca/puijila/index_e.cfm
Most people, when reading an article or report, start reading at the top. After reading this analysis, you'll probably find yourself reading articles starting at the bottom from now on.
Let's glean some comments from some of the major news reports on this item first, and you'll quickly get a grasp of why so many people were asking me to comment. I've highlighted the contradictions in red.
The Windsor Star touted Puijila with the headline "Arctic Fossil 'Missing Link,'" saying
"A Canadian-led team of scientists working on a remote Arctic island has discovered the fossilized remains of an extinct forerunner of the modern seal -- a stunning new species hailed as the "missing link" in land-to-sea evolution predicted by Charles Darwin." (emphasis mine)
The Physorg.com website ran the headline as "Fossil evidence of missing link in the origin of seals, sea lions, walruses found in Canadian Arctic" (emphasis mine).
With such bold headlines and claims, one can quickly see why so many people were writing to me for an opinion. I will merely quote straight from the mainstream media in response. If you scootch down to the bottom of the CTV news and CBC news articles, you'll notice some contradictions between their headlines and the information in the article itself:
CTV news had the bold headline "Canadian fossil find sheds new light on seal evolution" (emphasis mine) claiming
"The Puijila darwini is the oldest and most primitive pinniped skeleton found to date, though the scientists say it is not a direct relative of today's seals. Instead, they believe modern seals, as well as the Puijila darwini likely evolved separately from a common ancestor." (emphasis mine)
CBC news claimed "Arctic fossil points to missing link between seals and land mammals" (emphasis mine), and ended their report with a major statement that would be easy to miss:
"Because Puijila lived at around the same time as some flippered pinnipeds, the researchers believe it was not the ancestor of modern seals, but that Puijila and seals shared a common pinniped ancestor." (emphasis mine)
Whoa - did you catch that? Did you notice the contradiction between the headlines, the bold claims made in the various articles, and this one single, stunning fact? The pinnipeds were already around, therefore Puijila could not be the ancestor of the seal!
Puijila is a fascinating find, and while it is excellent evidence for a dead thing, and it can be interpreted within an evolutionary construct, to say that it somehow "proves" evolution is just plain false. It is just as easily interpreted within the creation context as a unique organism... assuming it is indeed unique. The variations within dogs is a classic example of how wide and varied creatures can be, and the similiarities between Puijila and the many examples of Otters makes me suspicious it's simply a variation of the Otter, but I'll leave that discussion for another day.
According to a 1991 Gallup Poll, of the scientists and engineers in the US, only about 5% were creationists. Considering only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory (Robinson 1995). This means that less than 0.15 percent of relevant scientists believe in creationism. And that is just in the US, which has more creationists than any other industrialized country. In other countries, the number of scientists who accept creationism drops to less than one tenth of 1 percent.
This was in 1991, way before the human genome project, after which evolution was basically established as a fact. No real scientist denies the fact of evolution anymore. The debate is over. Face it.
My question is, no one in this discussion (and I would venture to say on this site) is a scientist. I am not a science major but I took some hard sciences in college and even that was very challenging. I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to get a PhD in science. Imagine all the writing, publishing work, thousands of pages and articles to read; it's ridiculously difficult.
What astonishes me is the sheer arrogance of certain religious people without any serious training in the sciences who dare stand up to the whole, world-wide academic institution of science, and who dare to say that scientists are wrong on evolution because of [insert creationist argument].
Seriously, don't you think scientists have thought of that objection? Just imagine, hundreds of thousands of evolutionary biologists around the world who devote their daily lives ONLY to the study of evolution--and they all come to the same basic consensus. Don't you think they've thought of your silly creationist objections? Seriously.
