The Piltdown Man, Part Deux

Here's my bold prediction:

The "hobbit" found in Indonesia will be established to be either a hoax or not a human ancestor at all within the next 5 years.

Anyone predisposed to think that scientists are somehow immune to embracing hoaxes and myths (yeah, I'm talking to you, Derbyshire) needs to stop hitting the sauce before their livers pickle.

Here's a thought experiment for you:

A man stops you on the street and tells you that the universe rests on the back of a turtle, and that evil is nothing more than tremors resulting from the turtle's swimming through the void.

If you laugh and say, "That can't possibly be true," but offer no alternative explanation regarding either the nature of the universe or the nature of evil, are you a Luddite?

If the man has a doctorate in Physics, are you a fool?

Evolutionists claim that the diversity of species is explained by the mechanism of natural selection. The fossil record has produced no evidence thus far of the transmutation of one species into another that I am aware of (I assume it would be big news were it so), and such events as the Cambrian explosion of diversity tend to argue against the theory, assuming the fossil record might show such evidence at all.

This is not to say that natural selection does not exist (it clearly does) nor that species do not change significantly over time (this seems like a reasonable inference from what we know of biology).

It is a leap of faith to go from microevolution to macroevolution without some compelling evidence. As someone who employs statistical analysis tools daily in practicing my profession, I am exceedingly leery of small sample sizes, particularly sample sizes of one, as with Piltdown Man or this "hobbit".

Evolutionary theory is elegant and quite simple to understand in its basic conception---these are two points in its favor, one would think. For its advocates to claim that its macroevolutionary aspects have been proven correct is a bridge too far. As there is enormous money to be made in producing the elusive final piece of the evolutionary puzzle, the smoking gun which will establish once and for all that the various religious conceptions of the creation of the world are simple superstition, each new "find" ought to be treated skeptically, in particular by those professional scientists whose credibility is their currency.

It would help if evolutionary theory produced anything remotely so useful as Newton's theories have---God knows we could use speedy macroevolution once the glaciers hit the equator and the global warming doomsayers are proven mistaken once and for all.