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"Darwin's claim to fame was not so much that he thought that organisms might have evolved from common ancestors," Behe said. "Other people had put forward other theories but had always invoked guiding intelligence. His main point was that it might happen by chance."

But with the complexity at the cellular level found in the last 50 years, Behe said, "it is difficult to see how [complex systems] could have been put together in small steps as Darwinian evolution requires. Our argument is that it is a good conclusion to think that instead of chance inflection, things were really designed instead of apparently designed."

Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a pro-ID think tank, agreed that paleontological finds do little for ID. "Fossils don't tell us one way or the other whether God created us in a divine image," he said.

Besides, Wells argued, most evidence of evolution really only supports micro-evolution (the small changes over time within a species) that "nobody denies." Regardless, he said, evolutionists often trump up their evidence in an attempt to support their theory—even when it doesn't.

"This is being hyped all out of proportion by those who want to prove the Darwinian viewpoint, which I find rather comical actually because it doesn't prove it," he told CT. "At best, this finding complicates it. At worst it is irrelevant."

He said that Toumai could be just a chimpanzee and not evidence of evolution at all. No one is exactly sure yet where—or if at all—the new skull fits into human lineage. "The truth is the fossil record of chimpanzees is totally empty," he said. "Every time a fossil like this is found, it is shoehorned into the human lineage instead of the chimpanzee lineage, so there are no chimpanzee fossils."

Bill Hoesch of the Institute for Creation Research, says that evolutionists realize that Toumai hurts their case by making the ancestral line more blurry. Their defense, he says, is to turn it around to help them.

"You have got to attach more bluster to something that makes your case even weaker," Hoesch told CT. "They are crying out for help. They are using words like, 'This makes the picture look more bushy' and 'more complex.' We really ought to translate and say, 'It's a mess.'"

Todd Hertz is assistant online editor for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

After the announcement of the Chad skull, U.S. News ran an evolution cover package including:

How evolution really works, and why it matters more than ever

Species: Life's mystery packages

Evolution timeline: An idea's brilliant career

A new breed of anti-evolutionists credits life's grand design to an unnamed intelligence

For more articles, see Christianity Today'sarchives and sister publication Books & Culture's Science Pages.

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46