Page 88 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism
P. 88

Niles Eld red ge and
                                                            Step hen Jay Go uld, two
                                                              well-known pa le on to lo -
                                                                gists who ad mit the
                                                                  disc re pancy bet we en
                                                                    Dar wi nism and the
                                                                     fos sil record













                    In short, for a long period in the 20th century, the idea was
                widely accepted that the theory of evolution explained human ori-
                gins.
                    However, the reality was quite different. Extant fossils do not

                harmonize with the evolutionist scheme. And the problem won't
                be solved by the discovery of more fossils; on the contrary, it will
                be complicated even further. Some authorities have begun to ac-
                cept these facts. Among America's prominent paleontologists,
                Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of
                Natural History, make this important comment:
                    [It is a] . . . myth that the evolutionary histories of living things are
                    essentially a matter of discovery. . . . But if this were really so, one
                    could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were
                    found the story of human evolution would become clearer.
                    Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred. 30
                            In his 1995 article, one of the well-known
                           names in the theory of evolution, Harvard




                                             86
   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93