Of Homind Facial Reconstructions, Transitional Fossils, and Lazy Creationists

As I would have expected, Afarensis comes up with the details into Sal Cordova's paleoanthropological buffoonery regarding Tim Bromage's reconstruction of Richard Leakey's 1470 skull. Afarensis initially provides his usual flare for finding the raw data here (including Bromage's poster in a readable size - I couldn't find one the night before). But he doesn't stop there. Afarensis comes back with a more complete assessment of the struggle Leakey and others went through trying to initially reconstruct the skull and properly assails Cordova's and Wells' biased and absolutely false assessment that Leakey purposefully faked the reconstruction. (Readers of Uncommon Descent should learn to read the entire text before penning the incredibly naive statements I see there - they should also stop dredging up arguments that were put to rest long before any of them were actually born: Oxnard and Piltdown, for example). Afarensis then nails the coffin lid shut with a post on Hawk's comments regarding the new reconstruction.

No need to re-invent the wheel here, but I want to emphasize a couple of themes running through these posts that the creationists never accept. First, Hawks' comments clearly show that both Afarensis and I were correct in our initial assessments of Bromage's reconstruction - it might be true, but let's see the actual data first. On the other hand (but meeting expectations) the ID crowd willingly followed the scienfically ignorant media lemmings in their rush to condemn paleoanthropology. Turns out, the Bromage reconstruction is not as flawless as the ID crowd would have hoped. It seems the media showed the reconstructed version of the skull at a different angle than Leakey's reconstruction, making it appear to have a much greater (hence, ape-like) slope. When oriented correctly, the slope is somewhat greater, but not sufficiently so to warrant an accusation of fraud on the part of paleoanthropologists. Clearly, reconstructing skulls is difficult work and if Bromage's reconstruction is affirmed by further studies (note to the ID crowd: we do that in actual science) it will demonstrate only one thing to me: that Leakey, without the aid of computerized reconstruction methods, 30+ years ago, pretty much nailed the reconstruction. (Now, if I were to employ the standard "scientific" approach common among the ID folks in its mirror opposite, I would immediately issue a media release stating that the media clearly faked the angle to make the skull appear more apelike because they are, of course, biased against evolution and clearly favor Christian worldviews...I would further claim that the IDists are violating my free speech rights by arguing against my position...and then sniffle with bag of Kleenex in hand as I point out that the "establishment" is just against me and my followers).

There is another thing Hawks points out that was bothering me as well: calculation of 1470's brain size. The ID groupies couldn't help but point out the media reports suggesting that 1470's skull size was smaller with the reconstruction, but that didn't quite mesh, particularly since the whole cranial vault was recovered. Hawks confirmed my own unease regarding the "new" brain size estimation:

There is a lot of talk about the brain size of the specimen. I don't have any details of the presentation, and it is possible that Bromage was incorrectly quoted. Here is what the article says:

The new reconstruction suggests H. rudolfensis' jaw jutted out much farther than previously thought. The researchers say the cranial capacity of a hominid can be estimated based on the angle of the jaw's slope and they have downsized KNM-ER 1470's cranial capacity from 752 cubic centimeters to about 526 cc. (Humans have an average cranial capacity of about 1,300 cc.)

That, of course, is utter nonsense. Ralph Holloway produced an endocast, the joins between the fragments are good, and the volume of 752 cc was measured by water displacement. Why in the world would you estimate brain size from the face when you have a perfectly good vault? It has to be a misquote. [emphasis mine].

Seems the ID proclamation that 1470's brain size is smaller than previously thought is well...(par for the course!)...in error.

Secondly, the very fact that Cordova et al. are so hinging their hopes on a slight change in the angle of the face here, a drop in a few cc's there, and the addition of a minor sagittal crest here and there is due to the 800 pound gorilla that they won't acknowledge standing in the ID/Creationist reading room: these fossils are ALL transitional. We have an extremely difficult time calling one Homo and another Australopithecus, or one Homo erectus and another Homo rudolfensis, precisely because they all share characteristics with each other and none clearly stands out anatomically as separate from the others. Creationists will focus on the ape-like characteristics of one fossil so they can comfortably call it an ape, while completely ignoring its human characteristics. None are distinctly ONLY ape or distinctly ONLY human. And the problem gets more complex every year as more and more hominid fossils are uncovered. I tell my Anthropology 1 students when it comes to reviewing each of the fossil hominids available that they have more to memorize than last year's class (and next year's class will have more to memorize than they do now!).

Finally, Duane's comment on Afarensis' first post cuts to the chase and gets at the heart of why creationists like Sal, Davescot, Casey Luskin and their demi-gods Behe, Dembski and Wells have such a problem with paleoanthropology:

What gets me is that the creationists do absolutely no work. But when there is a suggestion by real scientists that previous work might be in error they jump all over it.

Pretty much describes creationism to a "T"....

Paleoanthropology Breaks a Finger Nail...Cordova Claims a Mortal Wound

In a mind-numbing display of intellectually vapid arrogance, Sal Cordova, who couldn't identify a fossil hominid if it bit him on the ass, has the audacity to accuse Richard Leakey of deliberately reconstructing the 1470 skull to appear more human-like. All of this is derived from reports of Tim Bromage's recent reconstruction of the skull based on computer modeling, which makes its face more protruding and brain size somewhat smaller than Leakey originally reconstructed. The immediate implication of this is that all fossil reconstructions must be hiding something (including I'm sure, the fossils that aren't actually reconstructions) and intelligent design is somehow vindicated. It is absolutely amazing the extent to which Intelligent Design proponents really need to cling to every change in scientific thinking and publicly decry it as a failure in order to prop up their own failed methods. Assuming for the moment that Tim Bromage's reconstruction actually holds up (which may or may not happen - it was presented as a poster at a conference and my bet is the full range of the method and data have not been presented, or more importantly, formally reviewed by other experts in the field), what we have here is another case of scientists continually asking questions, formulating hypothesis and testing them against new methods of analysis or new theoretical approaches in order to find more parsimonious explanations of the world around them. Just what does Cordova think he has? The death nell of early hominid evolution? Geez, Sal...wake up from your ID dilusion and have an honest gander at the voluminous (and annually mounting) evidence of the fact that humans and chimps share a common ancestor and were not specialy designed. Since intelligent design proponents don't actually work with data, theoretical perspective or hypothesis testing I suppose I can understand how these concepts are foreign to you, but even you and your band of driveling Ovis can't possibly think a single modified reconstruction is a mortal blow to fact that we have a ton of early hominid ancestors, all at various stages of transition between apes and humans. I mean, you have readers who think Piltdown is still a valid argument against evolution, for Christ sake!

Jonathan Wells is not vindicated by this issue, Sal (he can't even acurately discuss the early hominid evidence). If this holds true, it actually clarifies some issues in paleoanthropology. So keep bailing water out of that sinking ID ship , Sal...

Dikika Hominid, Round 2

Afarensis continues exposing the minimalist interpretations for the new Dikika hominid (ah, it's just an ape!) that are trotted out as explanations for why creatures with both human and ape characteristics are frequently found in the paleontological record. Again, Afarensis states the errors and provides the actual data in context, but I couldn't help responding myself to this statement in the comments from Reasonable Kansans:

What is so amazing about this creature? Could this not have been an extinct ape that we are not familiar with? What makes it a human ancestor? It seems like it’s an ape with legs slightly different than what we are used to seeing on an ape.

I'm sorry, but I'm fighting this urge not to laugh. Bipedalism is "slightly different" from ape-like locomotion? Go to the zoo, watch chimps and gorillas move around their pens, then watch the humans....again, watch the apes, then watch the humans. Australopithecus afarensis walked much more like a human than an ape. Not exactly like a human, no...there are discussions concerning the efficiency of the bipedalism in which Lucy and her kin engaged (i.e., did they walk as well as we do?). But if you were to look only at the way in which an afarensis walked there's no doubt you would include it with the humans. If you looked at its teeth, you would see they are somewhat ape-like, but really more like us (but not quite) and different from the gorilla or the chimp. If you spent your life studying ape and human anatomy and you looked at other skeletal features, you would not be comfortable placing afarensis in the "APE" box, nor would you be comfortable putting afarensis in the "HUMAN" box...they are actually something kind of, well...in-between (intermediate? transitional?). So, in absence of evolutionary theory, how would you explain the existence of this kind of creature to a group of students?

Reasonable Kansans (does Red State Rabble know about this site?) also points out the following:

Again, most readers are not paleoanthropologists...

No, they are not. And that's why those of who have been trained in that and similar fields get so annoyed when lawyers (Casey Luskin, Philip Johnson) and mathematicians (William Dembski) make comments that are clearly not intended to give the average viewer the appropriate context but rather play to their ignorance on the subject matter. That's also why the subject matter in science classes should be left to legitimate scientists and not the general public.

More on Casey Luskin and the Dikika Hominid

Afarensis has already dealt a blow to Casey Luskin’s disingenuous discussion of the new australopithecine fossil from Dikika in Ethiopia. I don’t wish to re-invent the wheel here, but in reading both discussions, several additional issues crossed my mind and made their way to my pen (well, computer key-board). Luskin, being the good ID advocate he is, needs a “big bang” of hominid (human family, including australopithecines) evolution to rival the Cambrian “explosion” that he, Wells, Dembski and others cite ad nauseum (which means, of course, they also need a paleontological discovery rich in quotations that can be expertly and selectively mined to present a much different argument than any the original authorities intended). Luskin would lead the uninitiated to believe he has found just such a hominid big bang:

These rapid, unique, and genetically significant changes are termed "a genetic revolution" where "no australopithecine species is obviously transitional." One commentator proposed this evidence implies a "big bang theory" of human evolution. Now that “Homo” habilis is best recognized as an australopithecine due to its ape-like skeletal structure (see "The Human Genus," Science, 284:65-71), it is no wonder an article in Nature last year recognized the lack of an clear-cut immediate ancestor for our genus Homo...

Of course, Luskin implies that the reporting of the Dikika australopithecine by the news media is purposely covering up the bigger story: australopithecines are just apes and the Homo lineage seemingly sprang from no where, a la Intelligent Design. (I have to give Luskin credit here: his manipulation is so precise that he gets a shot in for Intelligent Design as an alternative explanation, suggests that paleoanthropologists agree with this, twists gaps of knowledge into support for ID, synthesizes thousands of legitimate research into the written equivalent of a 30 second sound bite, AND slams the “liberal” news media for covering it up, all in a few sentences!).

Anyone familiar with the paleontological record (as it currently stands) of any species knows that the only way to get a clean, sudden appearance of any group of organisms is to ignore the volumes of data that don't fit. In citing the Hawks, et al. 2000 paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Luskin is clearly suggesting that the authors themselves have established the “sudden appearance” of Homo as something quite distinct from australopithecines and again, implies that we have a clear case for Intelligent Design moving the inept humans along a specified path to greatness. First, setting aside for the moment the sneaking suspicion I have that there’s far more to the Hawks et al. paper than Luskin is willing to lay out (or readers of Evolution News and Views are willing to pursue – and Afarensis has delved into some of this already), there are a number of issues glossed over by the Discovery Institute minions.

First, Hawks et al. were discussing Homo ergaster and Homo erectus in the passage he cites. Luskin dismisses the habilines (Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis) as nothing more than australopithecines with a single reference, making the gulf between australopithecines and Homo much wider. Pretty convenient. However, while there have been discussions about whether Homo habilis should actually be Australopithecus habilis, my understanding is that this taxonomic change has not garnered wide support. In fact, new dating of the East African early Homo shows that there are now no early small brained habilines (likely candidates for inclusion with the Australopithecus genus) and that rather, that in the habilines we actually now have potential great ancestors to the larger bodied Homo:

Now the situation has changed. The small Turkana habiline, KNM-ER 1813, is now contemporary with the Olduvai sample. There are no longer any small-skulled early Turkana habilines. KNM-ER 1805 makes sense as a male of the later, small-skulled sample because it is relatively small-brained but robustly built (e.g., with a sagittal crest). That leaves KNM-ER 1470, KNM-ER 1590, KNM-ER 3732, and KNM-ER 3735 as plausible habilines before 1.85 Ma.

This seems like a nice sample as a possible ancestor for both later large-bodied Homo and later habilines. Heck, Wood (1991) even wrote this in his description of KNM-ER 3735:

Some features (e.g. vault thickness) ally it with a Homo erectus-like hominid, but in other areas (e.g. the frontal) it is more like crania such as KNM-ER 1813, a conclusion endorsed by Walker (1987) and by Leakey et al. (1989). Tobias (1989) includes KNM-ER 3735 within H. habilis (Wood 1991:134-135).

What more could you ask of a common ancestor?

The only people who seem to think we can readily dismiss early Homo as nothing more than australopithecines are creationists (and I thought Intelligent Design wasn't creationism...silly me!).

Second, even discounting the early Homo fossils, the ID folks still have a problem with a hominid “big bang”. Human history is still best described as mosaic when you look at the data. Bipedalism started in australopithecines, not Homo (how would the ID folks explain bipedalism in Australopithecus versus early Homo – derived separately in both lineages by a designer?; do they not share an evolutionary relationship?); larger brain sizes begin in early Homo, but do not “explode” but rather show slow increases (even if we discount the habilines and start with ergaster as the ID crowd would prefer we do – so the Designer can’t jump up a couple of hundred cc’s right from the start, but has to develop it slowly?). Technology sure doesn’t explode on to the scene (this is another reason why early Homo just can’t be discounted comfortably – there’s no one else around likely to have created the Oldowan). And what of the Acheulean? Seems to be in use for more than a million years, followed by clearly gradual changes in technology…again, why not in one instance? What is the ID hypothesis that accounts for technological innovation beginning with the Oldowan? Nothing about modern humans appears to have come about in quick, consistent, well-designed fashion. Development of specified physical features as well as technology seems to derive far more from contingency than purposeful design.

Finally, the nature of human paleontology is so complex and changes so rapidly that it is hardly surprising Luskin and the Discovery Institute can hide the nuances of the discipline, skip the real questions and data, and portray a quick and easy final solution to those minds ready to swallow it and not venture forward with the hard work of science. I am reminded of another classic takedown by Keith Olbermann where he gets to the heart of what is deceptive about people (in this case he was discussing Ann Coulter) who depend on ignorance to get their point across regarding regarding science:

Yes, it's long, complex, boring [referencing a brief paragraph on the evidence for evolution]. You got to speed it up, that's the point, that's why some people still believe in creationism, because it's hard to grasp the complexities of evolution -- like why we humans have Adam's apples.

And the complexity is why fake authors with fake ideas can still peddle their crap by crafting their talking points so that honest rebuttals are by necessity, long, complex, and boring, which is why it's important that somebody check out the footnotes.

Don't suppose this refers to the Discovery Institute too?