EVOLUTION 101 - what is there NOT to know?

If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern [ie living] organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of the genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about 'gaps' in the fossil record. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both.

Dawkins is a very bright man. Thanks for letting me know he has a new book.

As there appears to still be some lively discussion about evolution in the Philosophy Forum I've decided to go with one based in the hard sciences. I've been influenced somewhat by the latest offering by Richard Dawkins, 'The Ancestor's Tale' Amazon listing that is an excellent telling of the story of life. From p.17 he states inequovically that the pre-eminence of evolutionary theory.

Creatures of the forest?
The discovery of 4.5-million-year-old fossils of the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus increases our knowledge of a fascinating stage of human evolution, before hominids left the forests for the open savanna. Fossil finds of this age are rare, but deposits in Gona, Ethiopia, have yielded material from at least nine individuals. Their context shows that they lived in an environment of moderate rainfall woodland, and grasslands.

Early Pliocene hominids from Gona, Ethiopia
SILESHI SEMAW, et al.
Nature 433, 301-305 (2005); doi:10.1038/nature03177

Oldest biped skeleton discovered
Posted Mon, 07 Mar 2005

A joint Ethiopian-US team of palaeontologists announced on Saturday they had discovered the world's oldest biped skeleton to be unearthed so far, dating it to between 3.8 and four million years old.

"This is the world's oldest biped," Bruce Latimer, director of the natural history museum in Cleveland, Ohio, told a news conference in the Ethiopian capital, adding that "it will revolutionise the way we see human evolution".

The bones were found three weeks ago in Ethiopia's Afar region, at a site some 60 kilometres from Hadar where Lucy, one of the first hominids, was discovered in 1974.

The Leakey Foundation, which funded the team who found Lucy, dates her 40 percent intact skeleton back 2.8 million years, but other palaeontological sources have said she may be as old as 3.2 million years.