There are many reasons to doubt the evolutionary transition of australopithecines to the genus Homo in general or Homo sapiens in particular.[1]
REASON #1: The transition from australopithecines to humans is poorly represented in the fossil record.
The famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr writes, “The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation [sudden drastic change]? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative.”[2] John Hawks—a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin—writes, “No australopithecine species is obviously transitional…. Our interpretation is that the changes are sudden and interrelated and reflect a bottleneck that was created because of the isolation of a small group from a parent australopithecine species. In this small population, a combination of drift and selection resulted in a radical transformation of allele frequencies, fundamentally shifting the adaptive complex; in other words, a genetic revolution.”[3] Harvard paleoanthropologists Daniel E. Lieberman, David R. Pilbeam, and Richard W. Wrangham write,
Of the various transitions that occurred during human evolution, the transition from Australopithecus to Homo was undoubtedly one of the most critical in its magnitude and consequences. As with many key evolutionary events, there is both good and bad news. First, the bad news is that many details of this transition are obscure because of the paucity of the fossil and archaeological records… But there is good news: although we lack many details about exactly how, when, and where the transition occurred from Australopithecus to Homo, we have sufficient data from before and after the transition to make some inferences about the overall nature of key changes that did occur.[4]
Casey Luskin comments, “In other words, the fossil record provides ape-like australopithecines (“before”), and human-like Homo (“after”), but not fossils documenting a transition between them. In the absence of intermediates, we’re left with “inferences” of a transition based strictly upon the assumption of Darwinian evolution. One commentator proposed the evidence implies a “big bang theory” of the appearance of our genus Homo. This does not make for a compelling evolutionary account of human origins.”[5]
REASON #2: Hominin fossils are very rare.
Ann Gauger (a developmental and molecular biologist with research at MIT and Harvard) writes, “Ancient hominin fossils are rare, and they typically consist of bone fragments or partial disarticulated skeletons obtained from different locations around the world and from different geologic strata.”[6] Donald Johanson (the discoverer of “Lucy”) and Blake Edgar write, “About half the time span in the last three million years remains undocumented by any human fossils… From the earliest period of hominid evolution, more than 4 million years ago, only a handful of largely undiagnostic fossils have been found.”[7] Constance Holden writes, “The primary scientific evidence” relied on by paleoanthropologists “to construct man’s evolutionary history” is “a pitifully small array of bones… One anthropologist has compared the task to that of reconstructing the plot of War and Peace with 13 randomly selected pages.”[8]
REASON #3: Fossils are usually incomplete.
Stephen Jay Gould writes, “Most hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls.”[9] Henry Gee (the chief Science Writer for Nature) writes, “All the evidence for the hominid lineage between about 10 and 5 million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.”[10] Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute writes, “Only 40% [of Lucy] was found, and a significant percentage is mere rib fragments. Very little useful material from Lucy’s skull was recovered, and yet she is one of the most significant specimens ever found.”[11] Her founder (Donald Johansen) had to pick up her bones across a hillside. He thought that another rainstorm could’ve left her bones lost forever. This has left scientists wondering if Lucy is actually a composite of several species.
REASON #4: Hominin drawings are often very subjective.
Science textbooks often depict Neanderthals to look “ape-like,” yet they picture australopithecines to look “human-like.” Jonathan Marks (an anthropologist from the University of North Carolina) refers to this as “humanizing apes and ape-ifying humans.”[12]
REASON #5: The mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutation doesn’t account for the change
In addition to the difficulty of finding solid evidence from the fossil record, the mechanism for this transition is implausible. That is, how many selected mutations would we need to transition from an Australopithecine to Homo erectus? And could this have happened in 1.5 million years? Anne Gauger (a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington) writes,
Three coordinated mutations are a stretch even for bacteria… But for one of our enzymes to evolve the other’s function, it would take at least seven and provably many more mutations. The waiting time for seven coordinated neutral mutations to arise in a bacterial population is on the order of 1027 years… Yet this is precisely the kind of transition that neo-Darwinism is meant to explain—structurally similar, yet functionally distant proteins should be able to diverge by a process of mutation and selection.[13]
Humans and chimps have significantly different shoulders, rib cages, spines, pelvises, hips, legs, arms, hands and feet, each appropriate for different modes of living.”[14] In fact, there are roughly 16 new anatomical features in Homo erectus. Gauger writes, “Because of much smaller effective population sizes (an estimated ten thousand for humans instead of a billion for bacteria) and longer generation times (fifteen to twenty years per generation for humans vs. a thousand generations per year for bacteria), it would take a very long time for even a single beneficial mutation to appear and become fixed in a human population.[15]
In 2007, Durrett and Schmidt estimated in the journal Genetics that for a single mutation to occur in a nucleotide-binding site and be fixed in a primate lineage would require a waiting time of six million years. The same authors estimated it would take 216 million years for the binding site to acquire two mutations, if the first mutation was neutral in its effect.[16]
While Darwinists cavalierly claim that humans evolved from australopithecines, this transition is much harder than it is often supposed. The mechanism for change in such a small population size does not account for the transition.
[1] As the following citations make clear, these reasons were generously taken from Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012.
[2] Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 17.
[3] J. Hawks et al., “Population bottlenecks and Pleistocene human evolution,” Mol Biol Evol 17 (2000): 2-22. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 23.
[4] Daniel E. Lieberman, David R. Pilbeam, and Richard W. Wrangham, “The Transition from Australopithecus to Homo,” Transitions in Prehistory: Essays in Honor of Ofer Bar-Yosef, p. 1 (John J. Shea and Daniel E. Lieberman eds., Oxbow Books, 2009) (internal citations removed). Cited in Luskin, Casey. More than Myth: Seeking the Full Truth about Genesis, Creation, and Evolution. Chartwell Press, 2014. 26.
[5] Luskin, Casey. More than Myth: Seeking the Full Truth about Genesis, Creation, and Evolution. Chartwell Press, 2014. 29.
[6] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 17.
[7] Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 22-23. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 46.
[8] Constance Holden, “The Politics of Paleoanthropology,” Science, 213 (1981): 737-40. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 48.
[9] Stephen Jay Gould, the Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), 126. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 46.
[10] Emphasis mine. Gee, Henry. In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life. New York: Free, 1999. 202.
[11] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 60.
[12] Jonathan Marks, What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes (University of California Press, 2003), xv. Cited in Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 47.
[13] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 20.
[14] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 22.
[15] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 24.
[16] Gauger, Ann, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin. Science and Human Origins. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute, 2012. 24-25.