Fossils = god's way of testing our faith

[Garrdor]

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I get it. You sneaky little god, you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius_masillae

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/scien ... ?ref=world

[Fobbon Lazyfoot]

I don't understand what the big deal is.

Its a transitional species, yeah, but honestly I would find transitional species between tunicates and lower vertebrates more exciting, or maybe between tunicates and echinoderms. That would speak greater volumes, at least in my opinion, to the human heritage than something linking two different clades of primates. Or a fossil form between whales and other ungulates, THAT would be pretty cool. Primates, as far as I know, are a pretty well-supported clade, besides hominids. Maybe if it was a hominid transitional form...

Is it an evolution thing? Is it supposed to be a "hey look religious peoples, darwin was right! you're not!" kinda thing? Evolution has such a massive amount of evidence in favor of it (I would not be suprised if it was the most extensively studied natural phenomenon in history) that I don't think a rock monkey is going to sway many more people. More evidence is always good, but national headlines?

This is like the Archaeopteryx of primate evolution

Maybe I'm just being overly apathetic, but thats a pretty big claim. Archaeopteryx helped link two extremely deep and divergent evolutionary lineages and was a huge breakthrough for the argument in favor of Darwin's theories. This just seems to be another piece of evidence in favor of the relationships that we recognize now as a result of modern morphological and molecular data. This is the game-winning shot in the second game of the NBA championships - its a big deal, yeah, but without the work that preceeded it and will follow it, it doesn't mean anything. Charles Barkley may argue that it's insignificant compared to what was achieved before halftime.

*shrug*