“Lucy” Fallacy Based On Conjecture, Not Science.

worshippingchristian.org

An “Institute For Creation Research” article which recently caught my eye was about a human-looking bone discovered in the Hadar Formation in Ethiopia, supposedly belonging to Australopithecus afarensis.

Australopiths are extinct apes known only from fossils. “Lucy” is the most famous example, and she was long thought to represent an evolutionary transition between ape-kind and mankind. The latest discovery is taken as additional evidence that human ancestors gradually morphed from tree-dwelling apes.

So what does this newly described bone actually prove? Well, nothing less than it looks just like a human fourth metatarsal. Its description, published in the journal Science, clearly showed that the foot bone is within the range of modern humans and does not match any metatarsals from living apes or show any hint of being ape-like.

In fact, the foot could not look like ours because prior finds showed that Lucy’s foot was actually configured like a hand, with a thumb-like big toe projecting sideways. A strange fact to be omitted, for sure, since this means their conclusion is based on mere speculation that the human-looking bone belonged to an ape. In fact, Lucy-like specimens have indicated characteristic flat ape feet with curved toes, not arched feet as the media have claimed.

If you will notice the picture in this article, it shows 20% of the bones we have found of a supposed Lucy. Now, is forensic science that good at creating facts from so little information? After all, it’s not like reconstructing a skeleton at a crime scene. We know what a modern person looks like, so filling in the missing pieces is so much easier. But in Lucy’s case, we don’t have the missing information. All we can really determine from the 20%  data we have is that the the long bones help us in in determining height and stature. The rest of the 80% we are told is conjecture, not real science.

So the question remains: Is one more bone singled out from a scrap heap of “greater than 370” individual bones the best evidence for an upright-walking ape? As the article stated, this bone has not proven that Lucy walked, but instead illustrates how improper science leads to flawed conclusions.

Read the complete article here – www.icr.org