We’ve been expecting this. Discovery Institute “senior fellow” Günter Bechly has a record of celebrating the demise of Darwinism whenever something new is discovered that requires the revision of some species’ evolutionary timeline. A typical example is in Günter Bechly: Evolution Has Collapsed! — about a discovery that could require revising the timing of human migration out of Africa.
The latest discovery that has excited Günter was reported at PhysOrg last week in New species of early human found in the Philippines. You’ve almost certainly heard the news already, so we’ll give you only a couple of excerpts. They say:
An international team of researchers have uncovered the remains of a new species of human in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history. The new species, Homo luzonensis, is named after Luzon Island, where the more than 50,000 year old fossils were found during excavations at Callao Cave. Co-author and a lead member of the team, Professor Philip Piper from The Australian National University (ANU) says the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia.
The researchers uncovered the remains of at least two adults and one juvenile within the same archaeological deposits. “The fossil remains included adult finger and toe bones, as well as teeth. We also recovered a child’s femur. There are some really interesting features – for example, the teeth are really small,” Professor Piper said.
Here’s the paper published in Nature: A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines. You need a subscription to see more than the abstract.
There’s another article at PhysOrg about the controversial nature of the new discovery: How much evidence is enough to declare a new species of human? It says:
The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines, reported today in Nature, will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists. Some will greet the publication with wild enthusiasm, believing it confirms their own views about our evolutionary past. Others will howl angrily, believing the declaration goes way too far with too little evidence.
You can read it for yourself. The situation is ideal for Günter Bechly. He just wrote New Fossil Human Species Thwarts Core Darwinian Predictions, which is posted at the Discoveroids’ creationist blog. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:
The rewriting of the evolutionary narrative of human origins is proceeding at such an unbelievable pace that I am running out of new ways to introduce my comments on the latest findings. … I can hardly resist the temptation to say “I told you so,” or to jokingly remark, “Oops, they did it again.” Let’s instead have a closer look at the actual evidence and the implications of this new discovery.
We’ll spare you the details of Günter’s romp through the evidence. It’s all there in his article if you want to slog through it. In his final paragraph he says:
This new discovery is highly interesting and by no means junk science. It confirms that the fossil evidence supports neither an unambiguous phylogenetic tree of fossil humans nor a smooth directional evolutionary trajectory from ape-like to human-like forms. Furthermore, the fossils occur at the wrong place and the wrong time. Therefore, we see three core predictions of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory again refuted by empirical data.
Egad, Darwinism is in crisis! Continuing his final paragraph, he tells us:
That’s how good science is supposed to work according to the late great philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1963): Conjectures and Refutations! If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science. The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support.
So there you are, dear reader. According to Günter, Darwinism has failed once again. That means you can rejoice in the certain knowledge that you ain’t no kin to no monkey.
Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
“This new discovery is highly interesting and by no means junk science.”
Nein, Herr Bechly, das ist Ihren Spezialität.
“If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science.”
BWAHAHAHAHA! Popper wrote exactly about the Demarcation Problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
because he wanted to discredit nonsense like IDiocy!
To those who yet haven’t had enough bats**t craziness today I can recommend.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/the-universe-is-an-egg-and-the-moon-isnt-real-notes-from-a-flat-earth-conference?fbclid=IwAR2-uWbtHE7GAoDZravCp9AJGtYmTDEen5NI-VLMOKweUJIHtR7xkdCNZi8
Our dear SC won’t be running out of topics to write about any time soon.
@FrankB
If a theory …<…
“If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon, but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished.”
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 186
The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support.
Of course this is sheer nonsense.
Notice that there is no attempt to explain the data any other way.
Where are the predictions for organismal diversity given ID? How many human species should there be and when, where, and how should they appear?
For the life of me, I can’t see how this finding contradicts the evolutionary theory!
“For the life of me, I can’t see how this finding contradicts the evolutionary theory!”
Nothing the Tooters have ever produced on all their websites, all their books, all their videos contradicts evolutionary theory. The sum total of their output after decades is no more than background noise that averages to zero.
@hans435
It’s like when the astronomers change their mind about Pluto being a planet – that contradicts the Soar System theory. Or when chemists discover a compound of helium – that contradicts the periodic table theory.
@docbill1351
Every productive science has problems to solve. Once one has all the answers, why would someone spend much time studying it? This means that every interesting science is turning up surprises.
One thing that we know, creationism does not attract people who are going to discover new things.
It might be possible that a creationist might, some time, think up a new problem for evolutionary biologists to solve. Off hand, I think of the “Solar neutrino problem”(see the Wikipedia article) which was a challenge to the theory of energy production of stars, and some Young Earth Creationists pointed to as a difficulty for the age of the Sun. Even before the resolution of the problem (in 1985), the most that the creationists could say was that there was a problem for astrophysics. The creationists did not have an answer. Creationists never have an answer.
So it goes with this “problem”. Even if this creatinist happened upon a problem, there is no “theory of creationism” which could conceivably solve the supposed problem.
Exactly, TomS. What creationist belief is supported by any hominin remains, provisionally dated at 50+K years, turning up in the Philippines?
Didn’t wade through all of Belchy’s verbiage, but as far as I can tell, the new “species” exhibits the sorts of variations we expect to see through geographic isolation.
If Belchy contends the fossil record should show “a smooth directional evolutionary trajectory” for anything, then he’s forty years out of date. Creationists didn’t accept the orthogenetic, or “ladder” model when evolution still used it. Now that “linearism” has been supplanted by a more accurate, branching bush model, creationists want to go back to the old models?
It’s even more ironic that Belchy maintains hominin evolution doesn’t resemble the transitional line of horse evolution, when creationists don’t accept that lineage either (and which is just as branching and complicated, anyway).
Poor things, twenty years of the wedge and still nothing.
@TomS invents an analogy: “It’s like when the astronomers change …..”
It’s like when the astronomers change their mind about Pluto being a planet – that contradicts the Global Earth theory.
“Once one has all the answers, why would someone spend much time studying it?”
Exactly. There aren’t any prizes to win anymore with researching Ohm’s Law for instance.
Bechly has no idea what he’s talking about. (Surprise!)
Let’s consider his points one by one:
• The rewriting of the evolutionary narrative of human origins is proceeding at such an unbelievable pace that I am running out of new ways to introduce my comments on the latest findings. … I can hardly resist the temptation to say “I told you so,” or to jokingly remark, “Oops, they did it again.”
Bechly obviously has no idea how science actually works: it’s based on evidence. For that matter, he doesn’t seem to understand the evidence: recent discoveries have not so much “rewritten” the evolutionary account of human origins as added to it.
• This new discovery is highly interesting and by no means junk science. It confirms that the fossil evidence supports neither an unambiguous phylogenetic tree of fossil humans nor a smooth directional evolutionary trajectory from ape-like to human-like forms. Furthermore, the fossils occur at the wrong place and the wrong time. Therefore, we see three core predictions of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory again refuted by empirical data.
Of course, no evolutionary scientist would expect to find an ‘unambiguous” fossil record of human evolution, or a “smooth transition” either, given the scarcity of hominin fossils. Can Mr. Bechly trace his own family tree back, say, 1,000 years?
• That’s how good science is supposed to work according to the late great philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1963): Conjectures and Refutations! If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science. The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support.
On the contrary: from the actual evidence on hand, it’s the best explanation we’ve got for human origins. Bechly’s claim that evolution lacks “mathematical feasibility” is apparently based on the notion that molecules just plain can’t increase in complexity enough to give raise to life—an example of “dogmatic pseudo-science” if there ever was one. As for “empirical support,” well . . . do I really need to go on?
And if evolution were such a failure, why would virtually all scientists—real scientists, not religion-driven quacks—still accept it after all these years? A vast satanic plot, perhaps?