On your claim that I’m not going to accept the strange statement you made above “no matter what”:
Please read my post explaining why the scientist did not say it was the missing link but that it “may be” a transitional fossil, rather than “is.” I don’t know if reading it twice will make a difference, but it ought to be clear enough.
Or if your position is that because you are certain that there can be no link between man and earlier ape (not in the sense of man being broadly categorized as an ape) creatures that therefore the concept of a missing link is supposedly meaningless, then you are simply asserting the same thing that I said you were asserting. I have asserted nothing at all as to whether there is such a thing or not. Perhaps you didn’t notice.
(People who have an agenda behind their arguments, with no willingness to even potentially change views from facts but instead maintaining absolute dedication to their agenda, tend to assume and assert that others operate the same way. I suppose this is out of the general human tendency for projection. This is the only explanation I can find for your assertions that I supposedly – as you are – am agenda-driven on either this general question or in interpretation of the above article.)
On the ape issue: I was using the word “ape” as I am expecting that you do – not including man, Neanderthals, etc but meaning hominoids such as the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan.
I was saying in the previous post that Homo habilis is, anatomically, not like the “apes” in that sense of the word. There is not some mistake wherein Homo habilis ought instead to have been characterized as another genus, or at least not according to the consensus use of the words in the science: whereas an “ape” would be.
I certainly don’t blame or criticize anyone for common use of the word ape and that is why I simply adopted your use, as I expect your use to be – unless you call man an ape? – because the technical terms are rather confusing and furthermore have shifted with time, and as personal opinion, in a dubious manner (based on DNA similarity rather than morphology: personally I would give more weight to the latter, but it’s an up-in-the-air matter there.) I do think that what I wrote was clear enough and fully expect that you knew what I meant, actually, with this particular criticism of yours being in the same category as the earlier “skeleton” vs “skeletons” criticism. That is to say, out of willfully wanting to misconstrue and claim error because you really dislike the whole subject and want to tar it in any way you can, valid or not. Or so it seems anyway.
