Same Story Different Day

It's funny, it's sad...no, it's funny. So many people educated beyond their intelligence. As I reported in a piece called "Ida" Don't Know, the latest fossil to be dubbed as the missing link is an ancient lemur like animal. The problem is that science is so focused on proving to the world that a missing link exists, they forget how many times in the past they made the same claim only to see it become a dead end, or worse, a fraud. Here is a list of sciences greatest misses:

1. Every argument used to validate evolution in the famous 1925 Scopes trial was later proven fallacious, and none of them are used today by knowledgeable people.
2. Remember vestigial organs? All supposedly “vestigial” organs are now known to be functional and useful.
3. The Piltdown man turned out to be a fraud.
   
4. Embryonic recapitulation—made popular by a series of manipulated drawings by Ernst Haeckel—has been thoroughly refuted by embryology.
5. Ramapithecus was once considered “the link,” but it was determined to be nothing more than an extinct orangutan-like creature.
6. Homo habilis has likewise outlived its celebrity status. The majority of paleontologists who recognize that it is really just a collection of both ape and human skull fragments are too uncomfortable to present it as a transitional form in textbooks.
7. Peppered moths and Darwin’s finches remain the same moths and finches.
8. Archaeopteryx was just a bird.
   

Ida is following the same as her predecessors. She has been promoted as a “missing link” with widespread media hype. After further study, however, this claim will be quietly rescinded. The most damaging result of this backward publish the story first and ask scientific questions later routine is that evolution is promoted whether or not the discovery provides any evidence to support it. This is not the way ideal science is conducted—it’s closer to propaganda.