Gautam Naik’s first words in a paleontology story today are “In what could prove to be a landmark discovery…” which says two things. If he doesn’t spell it out immediately, its potential landmark status won’t jump right out. Second, maybe it has landmark discover potential, but it’s not there yet. The news he relays in the Wall St. Journal is based, he writes, on a report coming up in the on line Public Library of Science journal about a new find from the Messel Shale Pit Germany, a World Heritage Site that has yielded fossils for more than a century.  New material hints that the lineage that led to today’s lemurs – small primates – is more likely to include our direct ancestor (along with that of monkeys and apes) than is anything in another primate line: today’s tarsirs. This apparently is a topic of considerable debate among specialists.

The meat of the story is interesting. But the Tracker has objections to one of the story’s angles. Naik makes this out as fresh fodder for debate “between evolutionists … and creationists”. First, a quibble. The Tracker seldom hears evolutionary biologists refer to themselves as evolutionists, as the term seems too parallel to the dogmatism of, say, creationists. But they presumably are evolutionist in the same sense that when one hears “Democrat Party” one knows who is being referenced and one has a hint of the political coloration of the person using the term.

More important than the nomenclature is his expectation of sharper conflict between evolutionism and creationism. Hmmm. The two fields, one of doubt-based scientific inquiry and one of faith-based declaration, don’t really debate. They hardly speak. As Gould said, different magisteria. The only time sparks fly is at the behest of a third party – a school board, a court room, a blogger’s imagination, maybe a Larry King show, etc. It’s not as though they routinely call one another up or challenge one another in academic forums. Plus, what’s to debate? Evolutionary biologists say we’re descended from earlier, non-human creatures; creationists say we’re the singular product of divine will – many say all species are similarly separately created. How far back science traces our genealogy and in which direction is not germane to a schism deep as that.

A smaller quibble is that the story comes with a picture of a black and white lemur with a caption saying “humans may be descended from an animal that resembles present-day lemurs like this one.” The bones are 47 million years old! Tracker is no paleontologist, but it seems very likely that whatever it looked like, it bore little resemblance to a black and white, modern lemur.

So much for grousing. I did enjoy learning of the news. I want to know more. There is word here that the skeleton has been kept a big secret for two years. What’s that about?

Pic: Random pic of Messel Pit, source ;

-CP

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