'Ida' not all she's cracked up to be

So “Ida,” it turns out, is not “the first link to all humans,” as a member of its discovery team gushed. It doesn’t even belong to the same category as humans and apes, according to a revised analysis, but is more closely grouped with lemurs.

An Associated Press story revealed this new adjustment to the world more than a week ago, but the unraveling of science’s latest missing link occurred almost as soon as it was breathlessly foisted on a gullible public with the help of an equally gullible media, last May.

The story of Ida — a brittle 47-million year-old skeleton of a creature no bigger than a cat — is worth noting, as it reveals the lengths some members of the scientific community are willing to go to prove a hypothesis before all the facts are in, and of an all-too-familiar worshipping media that, given past mistakes, ought to have more sense.

The next time a fossil is instantaneously likened to the “Mona Lisa” of all fossils, or “the eighth wonder of the world,” as Ida was dubbed by its PR campaign, the rest of us might want to step back for a moment and apply some good old-fashioned skepticism. Scientists are revered in our society, which is understandable. They are very smart, and by definition they are supposed to be self-correcting. But, in fact, they are human, too, and they sometimes let their feelings get the best of them.

What happened in Ida’s case is that the discovery team, in its zeal, waged a premature public relations effort that took advantage of gatekeepers predisposed to believe. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg posed at the original press conference. Ida immediately became front-page news and broadcasters called it daddy. The announcement came complete with a TV special and a book. Google pictured Ida on its home page. Even then, wiser scientists withheld their approval.

This, of course, is not the first time a mad rush to scientific judgement went haywire. The lure of the proverbial missing link goes at least as far back as 1912, when Piltdown Man was provided as the definitive proof of human evolution — before it was found to be a forgery.

Looking for a controversy more recent? How about Archaeopteryx, the prehistoric flying reptile embraced as the first bird since Darwin’s day. Now, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, some scientists say Archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of modern birds at all. Recently its bones were placed under a microscope and they were shown to have developed much more slowly than modern birds.

In fact, skepticism regarding Archaeopteryx has been around for quite awhile, but you wouldn’t have known that given the company line that has, supposedly, put the matter to rest. And what’s more, now more paleontologists are claiming dinosaurs may not be ancestral to birds, period.

What is the truth? Hard to say definitively. And that’s just the point. When science declares the book closed before the case is really closed, old mistakes have a tendency to linger in the public mind.

Today, we still have two hands on the evolutionist scale. On one, we have the hyperventilating salesmen, citing every possible discovery as the key to the Darwinian puzzle. On the other, we have the more scientific scientists, those like the late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who conceded in 2004 that we do not have “any fossils that can serve as missing links.”

Which brings us to today, and forces us to ask why, if the fossil record is so cut and dried as others insist, subsequent finds continue to be so shamelessly rushed to fill a void — a void that may yet be filled, but not through silly PR campaigns.

It’s fortunate that science has finally backed off the Ida bandwagon. What’s unfortunate, however (and this is what we all should consider from this saga) is that many of us will only remember the original media circus and be left with the mistaken impression that Ida is more than it is. Real scientific inquiry deserves better than that. And so do we.

Doug Wolter is night news editor at The Free Press. He can be reached at 507-344-6384 or at dwolter@mankatofreepress.com.