[MD] A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree

[Ham Priday]

Marsha and Platt --


[Platt]:
> The Darwinists are hard pressed to explain hobbits.
> The theory is now challenged from within.
> Wonders never cease.

[Marsha]:
> Intelligent Design is not credible science.
> My concern is that science is blindly followed without an
> understanding of its danger points, and I am relieved
> that it is being challenged.  It should be properly
> evaluated and monitored by all citizens.

Intelligent Design is not Science at all.  It is an intellectual perspective 
of reality based on man's sensibility to symmetry and order.  When we say 
that the universe is intelligently designed, by whose "intelligence" are we 
judging its design?   Human beings are rational creatures who impute their 
own intelligence to the objective world because of its value (high-quality) 
to them.

The "wonder" is that you don't realize scientific anomalies like the newly 
discovered  hobbit skeletons are constantly being challenged.  The method of 
Science is: investigate - test - confirm.  When you read the entire article, 
you see that paleontologists, biologists, and archeologists are currently in 
the "testing phase", ruling out possible explanations, such as early 
migration of a more primitive species, reversion to an ancestral lineage, 
genetic mutations or pathological disorders, or island dwarfing.  Eventually 
they will have the evidence they need to confirm a conclusion.  Until then, 
unlike armchair speculators and journalists, they withhold any official 
pronouncement.

As Stony Brook's anatomist, speaking for the research team, said, their 
investigation has entered "a period of wait and see.  ...Someday people 
[will ask], why was everyone so puzzled back then - it's plain to see where 
the little people of Flores came from."  That's the way Science works.  If 
Science depended on the "evaluation and monitoring" of uninformed citizens, 
reaching objective conclusions would be about as rare as it is on this 
forum.

--Ham