Here's today's Reasons to Believe e-mail. Just thought I'd pass it on. As always, you can subscribe to these e-mails yourself by registering at the Reasons to Believe website, reasons.org, click here to go directly to the sign-up page. Once you've registered and logged-in, click on the link "Signup for various Email lists". If you don't want to register, I believe you can just go here and sign-up without registering.

Okay, 'nuff said, here it is:

"Human Evolutionary Trees Ready to Topple"
New research underscores the inherent unreliability of the evolutionary "trees" used to describe humanity's origin. For human evolution to be declared a fact, evolutionary relationships (phylogenies) among hominids in the fossil record and modern humans must be clearly established (constituting branches that emanate from larger branches and, finally, from an evolutionary trunk). Paleoanthropologists now recognize that no reliable phylogeny for the hominid fossil record exists or is possible. The reason: many of the physical features of hominid fossil remains used by paleoanthropologists to build evolutionary trees appear to be due (from an evolutionary perspective) to processes other than descent from a shared ancestor. New research continues to highlight the seriousness and complexity of this problem. If reliable evolutionary trees for the hominids cannot be constructed, then, at least formally, human evolution cannot be declared factual.
Reference:
Stephen J. Lycett and Mark Collard, "Do Homoiologies Impede Phylogenetic Analyses of the Fossil Hominids? An Assessment Based on Extant Papionin Craniodental Morphology," Journal of Human Evolution 49 (2005): 618-42.
Related Resource:
"The Unreliability of Hominid Phylogenetic Analysis Challenges The Human Evolutionary Paradigm" by Fazale Rana

Posted by The Donkey at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)