Page 86 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

84 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

they considered appropriate we should not be at all surprised if each one
made a different determination. They concluded by saying that some peo-
ple would certainly be unable to agree on which group to include a spe-
cific fossil in... 213
Roger Lewin is the news editor of Science magazine and has degree
in biochemistry:
How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at
a set of modern human bones the cranial fragments and "see" a clear simi-
an signature in them; and see in an apes jaw the unmistakable signs of hu-
manity. The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientist's' expecta-
tions and their effects on the interpretation of the data. 214

It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific pro-
fession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclu-
sions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data
would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier
and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are
just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions. 215
The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship be-
tween two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and
detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach...can be deceptive,
partly because similarity does not necessarily imply an identical genetic
heritage: a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal)
look similar. 216

Dr. Tim White is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University
of California in Berkeley:
A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone
of a (imaginary) human-like creature is actually part of a dolphin rib. The
problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a
hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. 217
Earnest A. Hooton of Harvard University:
To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertak-
ing. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the un-
derlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a
Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a
philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very