[blindriver]

My kid, after watching some YouTube videos on prehistoric man, told me that the theory of the Missing Link was wrong.

I was like, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” Apparently it was disproven for decades and I never knew. I felt like the old people who held onto their old beliefs that I felt such disdain for. He also went on to tell me that the brontosaurus didn’t exist either and I had enough.

[1-more]

Brontosaurus is controversial! A paper in 2015 asserts that it's distinct from Apatosaurus. When I was in school it was well understood to be just another name for the apatosaurus. Some teacher claimed it was an apatosaurus with the head and tail switched. But there's been some activity in this space!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus

[gitaarik]

What? The missing link in human evolution, the link between primate and homo sapien, has been found? Not as far as I understand.

[blindriver]

There is no missing link. The issue is that the theory precluded that evolution was a straight line. They have different theories now about rivers and branches of evolution and no straight line.

Plus a lot of missing link evidence was apparently made up!

[gitaarik]

What do you mean that it's a branch instead of a straight line? Then there should still be intermediate species, and the species should not suddenly make an evolutionary jump. And what missing link evidence has been made up? Never heard about that. What is there to make up about it? You can make up something that is missing, but you can't make up something that isn't missing. So then you would mean that they incorrectly said that there was a evolutionary jump between 2 species while there wasn't?

In any case, if you have any sources, would be appreciated.

[gitaarik]

I just read the wiki article about it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_link_(human_evolutio...

So it seems that the name "missing link" has gone out of favor because it implies a linear evolution instead of branches. But in a branch you can still have missing links I would say.

So I feel the scientists just didn't like that there was a term made up for something they can't explain yet. And the various solutions to the missing link story turned out to not fit or be a hoax, so I guess that is what you mean by "has been made up".

The wiki article says at the end of the introduction:

"There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record."

So there is not a singular missing link, but there are multiple missing links! What a smart way to sweep this issue under the rug. And then we can also say that there was never any evidence for the missing link. Which funnily enough is the whole problem, that there isn't any evidence for a species before human sapiens which would explain our evolutionary connection with another primate species.

If evidence for this missing link would be found, or evidence that would make the missing link unnecessary, I think it would be big news, not go unnoticed and that we find out from our children.

I guess they want our children to think that there are not really any big issues with our current theories. Like they did with us when we were children.