What is the missing link?

Question

I half remember hearing something about a missing link that stood between humans and their ape ancesters. My information is either faulty, out of date and probably both. Creationists cited it as it appeared to cast doubt on Darwin's claims.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Answer 1

Paul got it right, spider man got it wrong.  We are in fact animals.  We are primates and are very closely related to apes, particularly chimpanzees.  Based on DNA evidence, we share a common ancestor somewhere around 5 to 6 million years ago.  Due to the scarcity of fossils, it is difficult to say for certain what is an ancestor and which is an uncle as Paul said.  Clearly there are missing links but there are also links that have been discovered.  There will always be missing links as long as we have not discovered all the fossils that exist (and that is not even talking about most creatures that don't form fossils because their remains get consumed).  They will obviously not find all available fossils.  The ones they find are generally weathered and incomplete.  There are plenty of fossils that are most likely ancestral to us or very closely related, it is simply difficult to be sure their exact relationship.  

Answer 2

I agree with you.... but didn't really study it.

From what I remember, the missing link would show apes transitioned to humans.

I thought it was their to support Darwin's claims and the lack of a "link" between humans and apes would support a Creationist view that Man was made separate from apes.

Answer 3

It is an old term from when the idea that man developed from animals that came before man was new.  The biggest argument against it, other than quoting the Bible's account of full form creation, was that there should be a link between humans and animals, but that link is missing.  The argument is out of date, though, but still used.  The evolutionary line of humans is mapped out pretty well based on countless pieces of evidence.  There is no specific "missing link", since evolution doesn't work like links in a chain.  It works like a flowing river or a growing tree, with changes over a period of a thousand years not easily noticeable in anything more complex than microbes such as bacteria, and such changes themselves are very minor.

Here is a good wikipedia timeline on the process of evolution through the perspective of humans;

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

Website with more info on human evolution and popular arguments against;

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

Here is an .edu introductory site on the evolution of man;

http://www.humboldt.edu/~mrc1/main.shtml

*jim z - Could you explain how I am wrong?  Nothing I stated conflicted with anything you or paul has said, atleast in the meaning I intended.  I never said that the path is complete, but that it is pretty well maped out based on lots of evidence.

Answer 4

In Darwin's time, there were far fewer fossils known and classified and there are now, and there was a big gap between humans and their ape ancestors.  This was called "the missing link", and a lot of people (including even Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently developed the theory of natural selection) thought that humans were a special creation.

Now, there are so many intermediate fossils that the problem is to tell the difference between our ancestors and our great uncles. There is an entire recent book on the subject written by real experts:

Sawyer, G.J., Deak, D., Sarmiento, E., & Milner, R. (2007) The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, Yale University Press.