Lucy: Some 'splaining to do?

The fossil known as Lucy has been labeled as one of the "Icons of Evolution" by creationists. One of the claims: the fossil has been modified in order to make it "fit" the evolutionary story.

During the question-and-answer session after the talk, it was asked how alleged human ancestors like “Lucy” fit into this framework. The speaker said he had seen a video in which a scientist (perhaps the discoverer of “Lucy”) “allowed himself to be filmed” using a rotary saw to modify the pelvis or femur of the fossil to make them fit together in a manner consistent with a bipedal posture. Although one attendee expressed surprise that the original fossil bones would be tampered with in this manner, the general sense in the room seemed to be that this was not too surprising, because scientific work is not really objective. These people had no trouble believing that, since the scientists assumed that “Lucy” was a human ancestor, they felt justified in modifying the evidence to conform to what they knew the answer “had to be.” As the speaker later wrote to me, “The assumption of naturalism and belief in the evolutionary model is the lens through which all evidence is examined and interpreted.”

So has the evidence been faked? G.P. Jellison, with the Alliance for Science, looks at what really happened.

My experience has given me a different perspective. Although scientists are human beings, I have found that they generally exercise high standards of intellectual integrity and professional ethics (with, of course, some lamentable exceptions). “Cooking evidence” is unacceptable, and forging evidence is career suicide. The self-correcting nature of scientific culture weeds out arguments based on faulty reasoning or evidence. I also found it inconceivable that the original “Lucy” fossils would be mutilated in the manner described. It was clear that this creationist physics professor had seen something and honestly believed what he was saying, but I was sure there was more to the story.

And indeed, there is.

In this report, I won’t try to prove that A. afarensis was bipedal or an evolutionary ancestor of Homo sapiens. Although I have opinions on these matters, I am not an anthropologist and have nothing to say that isn’t available in any mainstream anthropology textbook. Rather, I address the narrower question: why was the 288-1 pelvis cast cut up with a rotary saw and reassembled? In particular, was this the result of “evolutionary assumptions” as the creationist speaker said, or was it driven by objective scientific criteria? I do feel I have something to say about this because I’ve obtained information from the scientist who did the work, Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy.

Dr. Lovejoy is a professor of anthropology at Kent State University. He is also an adjunct professor of anatomy at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and a member of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Case Western University. He is a Technical Advisor to the Coroner’s Office of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland); people’s lives literally depend on the integrity and accuracy of his scientific analysis. He has published more than 100 articles in scientific publications, and was recently elected into the National Academy of Sciences, one of the top scientific honors in the nation.

Jellison e-mails Lovejoy to learn what went on with the Lucy fossils.

When all is said and done, the reconstruction is far from arbitrary:

Clearly, the reconstruction was not done cavalierly; it was, rather, guided by objective constraints of the most obvious sort – the pieces had to fit together! Lovejoy wrote to me:

I was simply doing what any human will do if they want to keep a teacup that they've dropped and broken....The kinds of procedures we have done here would be admissible in any court (I also do forensics) because anyone could easily reproduce the result in an entirely independent way (give two experts two of the same [broken] teacups and see what they look like when they've been glued back together).

The correctness of the reconstruction could be verified by the “fit” that was achieved. As Figure 3 shows, the front and back sides of the pelvis were fractured in different ways. They were reconstructed independently of each other; when the task was finished, the front and back segments had to fit closely along a curved interface. The reconstruction passed the test.

In other words, Lucy stands up quite well as evidence for the evolution of something.