[eesmith]

You wrote "the hip looked just like a chimpanzee hip". The PBS link you gave says "Superficially, her hip resembled a chimpanzee's, which meant that Lucy couldn't possibly have walked like a modern human." The term "resembled" is much weaker and broader than your phrase "just like."

Elsewhere in the same transcript it says "[Lucy] didn't look like anything we had ever found before." and "Lucy had an ape-like face with a brain just a little larger than a chimps." If Lucy looked "just like a chimp" then what explains these quotes about the differences?

Because it sounds to me like you are cherry picking and distorting quotes, which is a standard creationist practice.

Earlier you wrote that humans separated from monkeys 10,000 years ago. This of course is not true. How old do you think Lucy is?

Lucy is not the only Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found. This includes AL 129-1 found by the same Don Johnson you quoted. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AL_129-1 : "It is estimated to be 3.4 million years old.[1] Its characteristics include an elliptical Lateral condyle and an oblique femoral shaft like that found in humans, indicating bipedalism."

Or there's AL 333-160. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_afarensis : "The foot bone shows that the species had arches in its feet, which confirmed that the species walked upright for the majority of the time.[33] The foot bone is one of 49 new bones discovered, and indicates that A. afarensis is "a lot more human-like than we had ever supposed before", according to the lead scientist on the study.[34]"

Or Selam, "Here we describe a well-preserved 3.3-million-year-old juvenile partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis discovered in the Dikika research area of Ethiopia. The skull of the approximately three-year-old presumed female shows that most features diagnostic of the species are evident even at this early stage of development. The find includes many previously unknown skeletal elements from the Pliocene hominin record, including a hyoid bone that has a typical African ape {hominid} morphology. The foot and other evidence from the lower limb provide clear evidence for bipedal locomotion, but the gorilla-like scapula and long and curved manual phalanges raise new questions about the importance of arboreal behaviour in the A. afarensis" (using the quote by Alemseged et. al from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selam_(Australopithecus) .

So even discarding the reconstruction of Lucy's hip, there is other evidence that A. afarensis was bipedal in way that chimps are not.

You write "Where is the creature with half wings and partial feathers?" This is not how evolution works.

To begin with, feathers existed long before wings. Sinosauropteryx is an example of a non-avian dinosaur with feathers. We've found feathers on Epidexipteryx, from 160-170 million years ago, which is 10 million years before Archaeopteryx. Hardly "overnight".

The "half wing" is a standard creationist argument, but essentially meaningless. First, there are many definition of "wing". If I stick my hand out the window of a moving car, I can use it to get upward lift. That makes it a wing.

Under this definition, the body of a Paradise flying snake is a wing, even though it looks nothing like a bird or bat wing. Unlike my hand, but like birds, the wing property of the snake body is the result of adaptive selection.

The evolutionary argument is that "wing" is a continuum of abilities, from very poor wing to a very good wing. All of them are wings. None of them are "half wings".

What a creationist will do is place absurd requirements on what a "wing" is such that any evolutionary reasonable interpretation for "half a wing" is disqualified for not being a wing.

That would be like saying that email didn't exist until the late 1970s because no previous system implemented the 32 distinct components that Ayyadurai says were needed to be "email".

You write "When something shows up in the record, it stays the same". As I pointed out earlier, that's because species labels "are human constructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation", to quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil . When things change, we call it a new species. It is not a fundamental reflection of the biology.

[ableton]

First your right about the 10k years thing. I misspoke, estimates are on the order of millions of years. But my point still stands at 10 million vs 1 billion. Anyways, all these dates are complete conjecture. Nobody really knows how old anything is, or what the effect of ice ages, meteors, etc. would be.

As for the rest of the interview, this guy is lying through his teeth when he says "Lucy had a brain just a bit larger than a chimp's" There is no possible way to get this from the bones. Here is a picture of what they found of "Lucy":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction_of_the_fos...

These guys just make stuff up, probably to get more fame and funding. I just found another link, turns out they found a baboon bone in the skeleton! The reason that the hip is so important is because it's the only thing that's really fully formed enough to say it looks human (note that lucy is about 3.5 feet tall, the size of a chimp).

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-fou...

As for Epidexipteryx, first, sure I will grant that it has something close to feathers, but it's still a weak argument, because they are in the wrong place! There must be a birdlike animal that has partially formed feathers on it's wings. Unfortunately, fossils are rarely preserved well, and it is difficult to tell what is actually happening. Combine that with scientists' desire for fame, and you get sketchy results like lucy

[Oletros]

> There is no possible way to get this from the bones. Here is a picture of what they found of "Lucy"

http://www.efossils.org/book/how-big-was-lucys-brain

> Fossil remains of Lucy’s braincase are fragmentary, limiting the reconstruction of her brain size. However, brain size estimates from other members of her species suggest that Lucy’s brain was probably about the size of a modern chimpanzee’s (range between 387 – 550 cc; average 446 cc)

Try again

> These guys just make stuff up, probably to get more fame and funding.

> Combine that with scientists' desire for fame, and you get sketchy results like lucy

Why creationists are so quick to call others liars and frauds?

Funny thing is that they don't even understand the science and only sput the same debunked thing found in sites like answersingenesis et al.

And funnier, this is just a thing in some Christian denominations in USA and in some Muslim countries like Turkey.

The whole majority of the world doesn't believe the bullshit those people spout

[eesmith]

What does it mean to "really know" something? I might not "really know" something if the estimated standard deviation is +/- 10% when I really want it to be +/- 0.1%. While for some things the estimated error is +/- 0.00001 % or smaller. (For that matter, Heisenberg says we'll never "really know" the position and velocity of a particle.)

We don't "really know" the effects of the ice ages, but we know a lot of the effects. We don't "really know" what the effect of a major meteorite strike, but we have some idea of its effects.

We know enough about both topics to draw some reasonable conclusions based on multiple trails of evidence.

We know how to date things well enough to be able to date things far better than "10 million vs 1 billion" years. Creationists love to challenge the potassium-argon dating used in East Africa for early hominid remains. While there was controversy early on with, say, the dating of the KBS Tuff, as http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD031.html covers, that link points out there are now multiple different methods by different people which agree on a time around 1.9 million years ago, with a +/- of about 1%. This is a well-studied topic because understanding it is so important for the story of human evolution.

I have read enough about the science behind reconstruction from bone fragments to get the sense that it's a reasonable science, and to realize that it is a specialized skill that depends on intensive understanding of many different animals. Just because neither you nor I can make much sense of those fragments doesn't mean that others cannot.

In any case, there's no reason to trust their interpretation. As I pointed out before, Lucy is not the only A. afarensis fossil. AL 444-2 is the complete skull of an A. afarensis male. It's larger than Lucy; the assumption is sexual dimorphism. That makes the AL 444-2 skull even less like a chimp than Lucy, yet they are of the same species, which you say is a chimp.

Furthermore, reconstruction is eminently testable. Here are two I thought of: 1) How well does the reconstruction match more complete skeletons found later, and 2) create a 3D model of part of a known skull and do a double-blind test to see how well the reconstruction matches the skull. If people mostly "made stuff up" then it would easily be discovered.

The New Scientist link is clear to say "He stresses, though, that the analysis, which he will present at a meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco next week, also confirms that the other 88 fossil fragments belonging to Lucy’s skeleton are correctly identified. And the mislabelled baboon bone fragment doesn’t undermine Lucy’s important position in the evolution of our lineage.".

Furthermore the actual paper says "This work does not refute previous work on Lucy or its importance for human evolution, but rather highlights the importance of studying original fossils, as well as the efficacy of the scientific method."

And again, why is all of your focus on Lucy? We have other A. afarensis fossils which give us even more details about bipedal adaptations.

You write "they are in the wrong place". And your point is ... what exactly? Evolutionary theory predicts that existing structures get adapted for new uses, including to change place. Also, "right place" implies that somehow those early feathers were in the wrong place. They weren't. They were only in a different place.

You write "There must be a birdlike animal that has partially formed feathers on it's wings". No. Feathers came first. They were always fully formed, but in a different form. By analogy, there's no such thing as a giraffe with a partially formed neck, only earlier giraffe-like animals with a fully-formed but shorter neck.

"Combine that with scientists' desire for fame". What a silly argument. First, scientists are humans, and yes many humans want fame and will do short-cuts to achieve it. Do you have any evidence that scientists are more prone to that than other fields?

That said, there are many easier ways to fame than to become a scientist, fame built on sketchy research is fragile, and one way to become famous is to show that someone else is wrong or even a fraud. For example, Ioannidis became famous as a result of his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".

Furthermore, over time it becomes more difficult to produce sketchy new results which are consistent with the existing body of work. At some point it's easier to do non-sketchy work. (Like the old observation that it was easier to go to the Moon than to fake the Moon landing.)

Most of the scientists I know are not in the field to become famous, and they know they will never be famous. How many famous paleontologists do you think there can be? How many paleontologists are there?