Neither, of course.

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

Step 3 and especially step 4 are lacking in research and verification to make such grandiose and absolute statements about “Ida.” Ida could have been a “dead end” and is she really that different from some living species of primate today?

Of course, this is media hype and the good doctor is hyping as well, calling it the Eight Wonder of the World. Well, in his tight knit circle maybe it is. But I daresay that for most of the world, even those of us with an interest in science and paleontology, it is not. It would not be the first time a major pronouncement was made about a fossil, only to backtrack and recant on the position later.

Finding a lemur which lacks toilet claws or grooming teeth, just proves you found an extinct lemur without toilet claws or grooming teeth. It doesn’t prove it’s offspring will be anything other than lemurs.

If I found a fossil of a boa and a python, and one was fossilized giving birth to live young, while the other was fossilized laying eggs what would that mean? One was becoming a mammal? Or the other was becoming a duck-billed platypus after mutating into a duck, then a beaver, and co-opting certain characteristics?

You have to undestand that this is the type of reasoning used when looking at bones in a rock. It is a hundred percent interpretation and zero percent inspiration. You cannot prove that the bones or it’s ancestors had any features that were not expressed from it’s existing genome. For it to not just speciate, but to actually be a part of a macroevolution chain where animals turn into different kinds of animals, you are not looking at empirical science but at a religious belief desperately plastered with ‘the long time ago, and far away, over zillions of years’ excuse.

What use is it if a lemur loses those teeth and claws in the evolutionary paradigm anyway? Isn’t it worse off? When’s it ever not going to need those features?

I don’t see why this find cannot be catalogued with other extinct primates and just be forgotten about, other than for financial gain and the perpetuation of evolutionary propaganda. Sometimes when you want to see something, you’re gonna see it no matter what the reality, and the usual appeal to homologeny doesn’t change that.

How do they know it’s 47 million years old anyway? Don’t tell me they relied on geologic column circular reasoning or hit and miss radiometric dating!

I just happened to scroll over the progression of evolution graphic in this post. I guess you saved it as annoying_graphic on your computer as the title popped up on my screen. That’s actually pretty funny …and says a lot too.

The entire Piltdown man fiasco is instructive. The “missing link” came from Britain! The Royal Society then became entirely blinded by jingoism to a complete (and less than convincing) hoax by an art forger. It stayed on the books for 40 years and was taught to countless students until a simple test exposed it.

How much of our science is being corrupted today by similar misdeeds performed for profit, fame, academic recognition, or dogma?

Maybe it’s not even so much that it’s overhyped as that it is hyped for the wrong reasons.

Any primate find in the fossil record hits close to home for us primates. That alone. But you don’t come across too many fossils this well preserved. Period. That it also happens to be of a primate? THAT is cool news, all by itself.

Guess that my reservation about saying or even speculating where Ida stands vis-a-vis us is that it’s so hard to, well, TELL where. I hear too many people say that the sasquatch’s feet and upright bearing make it human. Well, um, not so much there. To make snap judgments (and hyping what’s been said here makes it look snap to me) just isn’t justified by, among other things, the very incompleness of the fossil record. We don’t really have any more evidence that Ida is in our direct line of ancestry than we do that the aye-aye is. What’s been seen here is intriguing. It should make us wonder.

But any scientist should know that it shouldn’t make us CONCLUDE. (Or line up stacks of books and mayors etc. that make it look as if we are.)

I still think it was overhyped.

And it is still unproven that it is a “missing link.”