(November 20, 2014 at 1:01 pm)professor Wrote: The actual bones of the monkey Lucy did not have (don't remember which)- hands or feet, so someone added human extremities to the drawings....which is not what an evolutionary biologist would have expected to find in an Australopithecus fossil. That would be like adding modern-day horses's hooves to an Eohippus fossil to 'prove' they were the precursor of today's horses.
In other words... no one did that.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
