> I was having a hard time with the idea that some goober in tan pants would dig up a bone fragment in Africa and know it was his own (great X 1,000) grandmother.
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> But personally, I’m cautious about any theory that keeps the same conclusion regardless of how many times the evidence for it changes. There was a time when the seemingly straight line of fossil evidence was the primary foundation for the theory. Now it seems that that straight line was like Little Billy from Family Circus finding his way home from the playground
This where he's simply wrong and misunderstands what paleontologists and biology experts have always said.
No serious expert in the field has dug up an australopithecus specimen and said "See, here is my great grandmother!". It's absurd to think that. Adams has likely seen the march of progress and thought "Oh, this is what the experts think happened". But that's simply not true and never has been.
Evolution simply posits gradual change over generations. A result of that is a messy family tree with a lot of dead "branches".
But further, the concept of "species" has always been a messy one. A prime example of this is the fact that Neanderthals breed with the Denisovans and some of their offspring have survived to today. 2 different species closely related enough that they could have viable offspring. That makes for a messy tree.
This is an obvious fact to any biologist and isn't the least bit outside of what the theory of evolution predicts. Again, the only real prediction of evolution is that speciation happens gradually as a result of changes in generations. It doesn't predict "straight lines" like Adams asserts, it never has. Nor does it exclude the possibility for the same features to evolve multiple times. It never has.
So, when he goes out of his way to write an article "fossils are bullshit" what exactly do you think he's trying to communicate? He doesn't outright deny evolution is a thing, but he does explicitly voice doubts about evolution being a solid theory.
Now, that doesn't mean that we aren't constantly learning new things from new fossils. That's the nature of science. Adams being concerned that new data updates a theory is a severe misunderstanding of exactly how scientific research works.