I saw a pro wrestler called the Missing Link in the Sam Houston Coliseum years ago.

I remember a classmate of mine, Greg Benesh, telling me what he heard at the Homecoming prayer breakfast about Richard Smalley's faith. A former grad assistant of Smalley spoke about what Smalley's faith meant to Smalley as he was dying of cancer. The Nobel Laureate must have been able to reconcile faith and science. Greg Benesh teaches physics at Baylor University and he wrote an article for the Chronicle (during the BCM merger proposal) stating that Baylor U did not constrain his teaching of science.

Personally, I think the Bible was not intended to be a science book so I am not stuck with a literal view of the book of Genesis. Like one cardinal said when the Roman Catholic church was confronting Galileo "The Bible is meant to tell how to get to Heaven and not about how the heavens move". It should be noted that the Roman Catholic church is not now opposing science. They adopted evolution way back in 1950. I am an elder in the Presbyterian Church USA and I do not have a problem with science.

(09-20-2013 06:44 AM)JOwl Wrote:  Yeah, I have no biology background either, so I'm sure someone else on this board could contribute a lot more than I can (but that won't stop me from throwing some ideas around ).

Looking at a compilation of paleontological finds ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hum...on_fossils ) the general pattern seems indicative of species changing over time into other species.

For me, any gaps are most easily attributed to the dearth of fossil evidence overall. The likelihood of a knowledgeable human stumbling upon preserved remains from millions years ago seems on par with that of a miracle.

Actually, I think the missing link skepticism could be turned around. That is, it seems for non-evolutionists who believe that species are static that there is a "missing human" problem even greater than the "missing link" problem for evolutionists. We have a smattering of extremely old fossils that appear to be from our non-human ancestors (or closely related species), but then where are the extremely old fossils of current-form humans? To my knowledge, there are none.


Also, I believe there's one conceptual point you have wrong in the rendiering that "The fossil records go A-->B-->C--> (nothing here but hypothesized possible yet completely missing fossilized forms) -->D-->E-->F where A, B and C are apes or ape like and D,E and F are homo sapiens or very close relatives."
I think you're identifying C as where ape evolution split from human evolution, meaning A, B, and C are common ancestors of both modern apes and modern humans and everything after C is an ancestor of modern humans only.

If I have that right, then the clarification I'd like to make is that A, B, and C are not "apes" as you said, just a common ancestor of both apes and humans. They are no more (modern) apes than they are (modern) humans.

Also, there's a minor language thing here, completely irrelevant to the discussion but it could cause confusion. It's my understanding that "ape" is currently a common term for the family Hominidae. Hominidae includes the genuses Pongo (orangutans), Gorilla (gorillas), Pan (chimps and bonobos), and Homo (humans). Everywhere above I've treated apes as something distinct from humans, but that's not correct as humans are apes-- one species of ape. It would be more correct, but much harder to write, if everywhere above I had replaced "ape" with "separately, orangutans, gorillas, and chimps/bonobos".