Meet your Aunt Ida.

Do you want to know why evolution is a theory and not an established fact as many scientists would have you believe? Here are some excerpts from an article about a fossil that was found in Germany. Scientists claim she could be our evolutionary great-great-great-aunt -- a proverbial missing link. Notice that not one thing in here is proven, yet they take it as established. Watch the italicized words -- I think they are very telling.

". . .offered clues about what some of our earliest ancestors might have looked like."

"So far, paleontologists have had to make educated guesses about early primate evolution, because they have been forced to work with fragments of partial skeletons, mainly teeth and jaws."

"They conclude that Ida was . . ."

". . .surmises that the creature could have lived . ."

If I found teeth and jawbones, I wouldn't say I found a skeleton. I wouldn't even say I found a partial skeleton. I'd say I found some teeth and jawbones. Yet that's what evolution is built on. They find one tiny piece of something, then they build a whole imaginary creature around it. And they say, "This could have been . . . this might have been . . . we conclude . . ." and pretty soon the whole scientific world has swallowed the tale.

I predict that this episode may turn out to be like Piltdown man. If you're not familiar with that funny story, in 1912 a jawbone and a skull were found in the village of Piltdown in England. It was the missing link! It was a very early form of man! For more than 40 years, scientists accepted this as fact. Then, in 1953, it was discovered that the jawbone came from an orangutan and had been incorporated into a modern human skull. The educated scientists had been had!

Aunt Ida sounds equally as fishy -- an "unnamed private collector" dug the skeleton up in 1983. The skeleton was split into two pieces and one of the pieces sold to a private museum in Wyoming. The piece kept by the collector was displayed at a fossil fair in Hamburg, Germany, in 2006, and purchased by an Oslo Museum for something in the neighborhood of a million dollars. I think the "unnamed private collector" is one smart cookie, and may be as good a hoaxer as the Piltdown discoverer!

The research on the skeleton has been done "in secret." The researchers have "rapidly written" a book called The Link. A TV documentary will be shown in the U.S. later this year. Asked why this study has not appeared in the most prestigious scientific journals, Philip Gingerich of the Ida research team said, "There was a TV company involved and time pressure. We've been pushed to finish the study. It's not how I like to do science." Hmmmmm - doesn't sound like science at all, to me. Sounds like media hype and a great big hoax -- something like the evolutionary theory as a whole.

"Celebrated Fossil Shown to World." The Wall Street Journal; May 20, 2009; p. A3.