"The Evolution Delusion"

One of the main focuses of this fake website is on evolution. The author is convinced that evolution is a false claim with no evidence for support in the fossil record. Mr. Smith states there is, "no proof for ape to man evolution. Bones have been proven to be of a true ape, or a man." Further, he claims there are millions of fossils that are either ape or man, with no scientific evidence for the transition between the two. As he sees it, "There is no evidence at all; ..they just seem to make the evolution theory up as they go." So what does he claim you might ask? That God created human beings to look as we do today. Let's see if we can't debunk this absurdity.

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While Mr. Smith is right that we still have not located the so called "missing link" fossil between chimps and humans, he fails to acknowledge the surmounting evidence in the fossil record and in molecular biology. It is an unsuccessful argument to simply claim the absence of the fossil proves evolution did not occur.

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As we have discussed in class and learned from our readings, there are numerous pieces of evidence lending towards human evolution. We can think of these evolutionary forces on two different scales. On a macroevolution level, we have to look to the fossil record. Macroevolution is, "centered on explaining evolutionary patterns above the species level" (nature.com, "Macroevolution"). Macro-evolution can be thought of in relation to anagenesis, where species break off and are separated from ancestral species in gradual and uniform manner. It is absurd to think that modern humans just one day immediately evolved from an ape species, which is what the fake website claims evolutionary scientists argue. Rather, there were millions and millions of years in which gradual changes occurred creating many species in between apes and modern humans. We have studied a number of these during the semester including Ardipithecus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo erectus. These fossils help us understand how modern humans differ from our ancestors and how we got to where we are today, from our original ancestors leaving the African continent.

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On a more microscopic level, we can perhaps look at the shared DNA that modern humans have with another species on our genus, Homo. As we learned from our Kanopy videos, we were able to decode the genome of the Neanderthal species. From this, we know that there is a high amount of shared DNA between modern humans and Neanderthals. This is a result of interbreeding between the two species. While the sharing of DNA between the two does not inherently indicate one came from the other, it provides incredible evidence of the shared evolutionary history between the two species. If, as the fake website claims, there were only fossils from modern humans and of apes, how would he describe Neanderthals (who share many characteristics of the life, biology, and culture of modern humans) and the fact that they bred with modern humans?