Friday, October 23, 2009

The Hype Was Caused by "Stupid" People

I've written extensively about how the fossil nicknamed "Ida" was not a fantastic new discovery of a "missing link" between earlier primates and humans.

Bottom line, the fossil of a lemur like creature was being hyped by a European museum that billed it as THE missing link and saying how this discovery would challenge everything we know about human evolution. Just so happens the hype would ensure lots of visitors to the museum and it just so happens the owners of the fossil produced a documentary about it and they stood to make tons of cash based on the hype.

Well, the scientific community finally is calling the fossil nothing more than an ancient lemur! Huh, just what I said it was months ago. You can read the article here, but you know what really pisses me off? The excuse that Dr. Seiffert, one of the scientists who studied the finding and came out to say it ain't all that, still defended the hype. He said this regarding how people came to the conclusion that this was so important (emphasis mine):

“The PR hype surrounding the Darwinius description was very confusing. The uninformed observer watching the associated documentary certainly must have come away with a very different view — specifically that Darwinius truly was a critically important link in the origin of higher primates, if not the origin of apes or even humans.

Nice; it was all because "stupid" people misinterpreted the hype. Here are links to past articles I wrote concerning science and evolution.

A Shattered Image - Science Articles

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