OGDEN — The announcement last spring of the discovery of a 3.3 million-year-old child skeleton in Africa underscores the debate that played out earlier this week at Weber State University between two evolutionists and a creationist.

The scientific journal "Nature" expanded this week on the discovery of partial remains of a 3-year-old female in Dikika, Ethiopia, calling the find "a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history."

Adding to the "fossil record" that scientists use as a building block in their argument for evolution, the find was characterized as "an outstanding resource to understand the development of a human ancestor that seems to have both walked upright and climbed through trees," by the publication.

Though Wednesday's debate at Weber State didn't include specific discussion of the new find, it did revolve around the issue of whether science has actually proven that one species can evolve from another — particularly from a "lower" life form to a higher one.

Robert Fudge of the WSU philosophy department said creationists "can't explain an ordered fossil record," instead arguing that the great flood recorded in the Bible gave fossils the appearance of being ancient in origin. He said the sheer number and various kinds of life forms that exist also argue against creationism, as does any lack of understanding about the "nature of the divine mind" if a creator or "designer" exists.

"It comes down to design or order. How do you measure design? You can measure order. To say that it is 'designed' requires a whole different layer of argument. This is one of the big problems with intelligent design (theory)," which postulates that life on Earth evolved the under the direction of an organizing force.

Dr. Randy Guliuzza, a physician and engineer with a master's degree in public health from Harvard, argued that design is not only present in the universe, but that it can be proven through mathematics and probability theory, rather than simply an appeal to religious belief. Biological systems, including human beings, are comprised of "precise timing and arrangement and alignment" of their critical systems in order to survive, he said, adding "all of those patterns can be observed and measured.

"You can rule out random chance altogether. You can see whether there are choices that were made through independent measures. I'm not just saying that evolution fails because we don't have an explanation for it now, but because the science that we have for it doesn't prove that it works."

Nicole Berthelemy-Okazaki, a microbiologist at WSU and a Christian who believes in evolution, said that "creation stories are, for me, accounts of humankind on Earth." While most mainstream Christian faiths accept the theory of evolution, she said, a few "fundamentalist Christians reject evolution and insist on imposing their theories on others. There is no scientific evidence for creation as told in the Bible," she said.