It seems like nearly every day, there’s another sensational headline written about some major discovery that “proves” evolution. Fans of evolution hoot and holler and thump their chests, doubling down on their complaints that creationists are just science deniers who don’t even understand evolution. It’s been my experience, though, that most of these headlines age like milk.
I started my first blog on October 19, 2007. I was very passionate about what I believed but wasn’t necessarily a great blogger. I feel I got better over time but, after several years, I took a break from blogging. A couple of years ago, however, I plunged back into blogging because I am just that passionate about my beliefs. I still don’t know how good of a writer I am but I feel like some of my old posts were more interesting than others. I decided to take some of my better posts from my old blog, rewrite them to make them a little more precise, and publish them on my new blog. I did notice something, though - a lot of the old links I had to news stories were broken. Hmmm.
I try to use links to secular sources whenever I can. I do this because I’m usually commenting on claims made by evolutionists and I don’t want to just repeat (or, worse yet, plagiarize) things being said by other creationists. I want to talk about current issues and give original thoughts - my thoughts - about the matter. Anyway, in a post I had written 3/27/2015, I cited a National Geographic article titled, Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree. I would link you to the original article but it’s not there anymore. My first thought was that it’s a little odd that the story wasn’t available any more. I mean, this was supposedly the oldest human fossil and redrew the family tree of human origins so you’d think that’s kind of a big deal, right? Why would the article not still be available?
Of course, we’re talking about National Geographic which offers a lot of content online. I could understand it might not archive every story they’ve ever published online. After all, the article is over 9 years old as I write this so maybe they have no articles that old available anymore. But this was a major find, right? It was claimed to be the oldest human fossil and would “redraw” man’s family tree! Surely there would be more recent headlines written about it that I could use on my blog. Alas, there are not. I did a Google search under the term ‘jaw “Chalachew Seyoum”’ and there’s been remarkably little said about it since 2015. The find made a splash, only to find itself later piled onto the heap of fake news published by evolutionists. In my day, we called this “a flash in the pan.”
I did find a paper published in 2023 titled, Ledi-Geraru strikes again: Morphological affinities of the LD 350- 1 mandible with early Homo. From that paper, we can read the following:
Due to [the fossilized jaw fragment’s] age and location, it has been suggested that the mandible might represent a young specimen of Australopithecus afarensis. However, despite its primitive traits shared with australopithecines, Villmoare et al. (2015a) discarded this interpretation based on the presence of a set of derived features shared with Homo. Furthermore, the LD 350-1 mandible is at least 0.2 Ma younger than the most recent known A. afarensis specimen. Therefore, Villmoare et al. (2015a) assigned the LD 350-1 to the genus Homo… A subsequent study led by Hawks et al. (2015) contested the Homo assignation and drew attention to the fact that the Ledi-Geraru mandible also presents significant similarities with A. afarensis, A. africanus, and A. sediba. They emphasized that LD 350-1 is an isolated and partial remain, making a genus assignation unwise. This interpretation, however, was rejected by Villmoare et al. (2015b), who maintained their original position.
So what was found was the jaw fragment of some creature which, even after years of studying it, scientists still can’t even agree if it was an ape (A. afarensis) or a human (Homo). What was reported is that someone had found the oldest human fossil and that it would redraw the human family tree!
Now, I get it. Online sites, magazines, and newspapers are trying to earn clicks. They use hype to draw views so they can sell ads. They’re just trying to put a little sizzle on the steak as the saying goes. But what is happening is they’re reporting fake news. I’m fairly confident that most of the eager readers of the sensational headlines, never went on to read and “peer-reviewed” scientific papers about what was actually found. The average person will never read much past the headline because he already believes evolution is true so why bother?
I’ve written before (here) about a sort of “conspiracy” going on in the scientific community. Evolutionists are happy for the lay public to believe half-truths and misleading headlines. Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar? Did you know that this amazing similarity only occurs in 82% of the genome? I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you also didn’t know that chimp DNA is about 10% longer than human DNA. If you have two, written sentences with one being 90 characters long and the other being 99 characters long, how can they ever be 98% similar? It’s a joke.
When people hear that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar, they assume it means 98% of the entire genomes. The evolutionists who should know better, won’t bother explaining exactly what’s being compared because it undermines their theory. Like I said, evolutionists are happy for the confusion. Likewise, they’re happy for the sensational headlines even though they know how misleading they are.
Of course, there have been many of these pop-science stories written since 2015 - all of them being just as sensational but also just as forgettable. I see them all the time and I have to endure the chest thumping and name calling displayed by militant evolutionists every time. Deep down, though, I know I will have the last laugh in just a few years when the remarkable find they report today will be all but forgotten.
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