Scientific American quietly disowns Ida "missing link" fossil

Michael Bloomberg, check your messages. In "Weak Link: Fossil Darwinius Has Its 15 Minutes: Skepticism about a fossil cast as a missing link in human ancestry" (Scientific American, July 21, 2009), Kate Wong observes,

And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in PLoS ONE, Ida’s significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her “the eighth wonder of the world,” “the Holy Grail,” and “a Rosetta Stone.”

The orchestration paid off, as Ida graced the front page of countless newspapers and made appearances on the morning (and evening) news programs. Gossip outlets, such as People and Gawker, took note of her, too. And Google incorporated her image into its logo on the main search page for a day.

And then it all just melted away, with SciAm being only the latest source to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Shut off the canned wonder track for a minute, will you?"

I will certainly propose for this overall story as a down-list item for the ten top Darwin and Design stories of the year (here is 2008's list). It's rare indeed that popular media actually revolt against a proposition in "evolution," even one as patently foolish as this one - but evidently it happens. And who knows? - raindrops seldom fall solo. More Wong:

Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group. Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. “I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.

The real story here is the desperate need for a secular materialist establishment to find icons of evolution to venerate, Bloomberg-style - and it won't be their fault if they don't get a bunch more bogus relics.

My instinct about what went wrong is this: Popular media consider themselves gatekeepers when it comes to creating a craze, and they resent scientists, like the Ida team, who usurp their time-honoured right. Hence their swift revenge.

Ida? I dunno. I wish I had bet a whack on the pop science press dumping all over it

Holy kazoo! Even Nature isn't buying the hype about the "missing link"? So how soon can we get "evolutionary psychology" relegated to the tabs and the funny papers?

A hyped-up fossil find highlights the potential dangers of publicity machines.
Last week's publication of paper describing a 47-million-year-old fossil primate with a remarkable degree of preservation (see http://tinyurl.com/oycvo8) prompted a trickle of news in The Daily Mail that quickly swelled to a flood of media coverage.

In normal circumstances, the interpretation of the specimen given in the paper (J. L. Franzen et al. PLoS ONE 4, e5723; 2009) would have been no more contentious than that of any other fossil primate, and a good deal less so than some.

[ ... ]

But the circumstances surrounding the paper's publication were anything but normal. Before the paper had even been submitted to the journal, Atlantic, a production company based in New York, had commissioned a television documentary and an accompanying book about the find. Just a week after the paper appeared, the book has been published and the documentary has been aired on the History Channel in the United States, as well as Britain's BBC and Norway's NRK.

Uh, yeah.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Human evolution: Water flows uphill? Science journalists protest latest hype, don't just fall in line ...

Here's what's really interesting about the current "Ida" freakout (= the supposed "missing link" between primates such as humans and earlier animals). Some science journalists, instead of falling in with the hype, have started to try to rescue the discipline of paleontology from the raves of pop science.

Could've happened sooner, but never mind.

In "Origin of the Specious", TimesonLine (May 24, 2009), Jonathan Leake and John Harlow write

Such finds are usually unveiled to the world through the sober pages of an academic journal but for Ida nothing less than a glittering press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York would do.

There, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, stood beside Ida’s glass box, his arm around a schoolgirl who was wearing a T-shirt advertising a television tie-in. It read: “The Link. This changes everything.” The mayor repeated the missing link claim.

Later the scientists who have studied Ida outlined the details of their research. Their pronouncements were just as extravagant.

But that's not what they said to other scientists:

... in the research paper detailing the discovery, the scientists had painted a rather different picture. Ida, they said, “could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates (including humans) evolved but we are not advocating this here”.

In fact,as Leake and Harlow detail, it is a huge PR hype. The also report,

Robert Foley, professor of human evolution at Cambridge University, believes many people misunderstand the huge timescales involved in assessing fossils.

“This animal lived around 47m years ago but human-like creatures only appeared in the last 2m years,” he said. “That’s a gap of around 45m years with many other species lying between us and that era. Any one of them could be called a missing link. Really, the term is meaningless.”

Not only that, we have no way of knowing whether "Ida" just died out, and didn't leave any descendants. Primates could just as likely - or more so - have descended from one of many similar species.

Ida "changes everything" only in a world where hype replaces science. Good for Leake and Harlow for refusing to be intimidated by blowhards, and talking about this. There are enough scandals in science already.

See also:

Human evolution: Hype, tripe, trumpets, and (lagging some way after, way out of breath) truth and realism

Human evolution: The spin machine in top gear

Related issue: Human evolution: Quest for primitive human backfires