In the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets, there is a story about "Ardi". No, Ardi is not some ethnic guy from Brooklyn, NY who will be starring in the next Spike Lee movie, rather "she" is the oldest hominid skeleton that has been put together, pre-dating Lucy by about 1.2 million years. For the NY Times treatment, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/science/02fossil.html?em=&pagewanted=all
I assume that other sources will provide more detail about the research that went into putting Ardi together. This raises a number of interesting questions, one of which is posed in the subject line of this post. In the U.S. it is possible to run a college along religious line (i.e., secterian) and there can be an uneasy tension between the religious orientation maintained by the administration and the individuals working there, especially the secular faculty and faculty with different beliefs. An example of the type of problem one encounters is provided in the following article which appeared in the AAUP publication "Academe": http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JF/Feat/hill.htm In the sciences, the problem is more acute because science claims to deal with facts and truth (note lower case "t"), such as the estimated age of fossils and out potential ancestors, such as Lucy and Ardi. But many times these facts conflict with religious beliefs and dogma and "creation stories" (I believe that the terms "creation myths" is now politically incorrect because various groups object to having their stories about their origins treated as myths -- why should science have the final say on how the world was created, eh?). So, what does one do in a college or a university which has a strict literal interpretation of the Bible and claims that according to it, the universe can only be about 6,000 years old? Will such colleges claim that stories about Ardi and Lucy are frauds promoted by a vast left-wing conspiracy of dishonest intellectuals who are using secularism and humanism to try to destroy the religious beliefs of the majority of the people who have the simple commonsense to believe that a God exists and that He can do anything he wants? Or will they simply ignore Ardi, Lucy, and their promoters? And what does this say about science education at the university level of the U.S. and elsewhere? Are there any anthropologists or sociologists of science studying this situation presently? Sort of like the research done by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter had done for their book "When Prophecy Fails"? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails and http://tinyurl.com/yb3qffp Do we have any obligation in evaluating the evidence for Ardi and Lucy and, if we find it to have sufficient validity, work to counter those that might claim that it is a fraud, especially if the claim is made on religious rather than scientific grounds? -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
