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Helping Hand? Copyright 2004 by World-Mysteries.com
HUMAN ORIGINS: CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?
by Lloyd Pye
Part 1
Since writing my first essay for NEXUS in mid-2002 [see 9/04], I've been
bombarded by emails (nearing 200) from around the world, many offering
congratulations (always appreciated, of course) and many others requesting more
instruction or deeper insight into areas discussed and/or not discussed.
Let's face it: nearly everyone is interested in Darwinism, Creationism,
Intelligent Design, and the new kid in town, Interventionism. Because of length
constraints, this essay must be in two parts. Here, in Part One, I'll go over
the basics currently known about the origin of life on Earth. Later, in Part
Two, I'll discuss what is known and what can be safely surmised about the origin
of humanity.
We begin by understanding that Charles Darwin stood on a very slippery slope
when trying to explain how something as biologically and biochemically complex
as even the simplest form of life could have spontaneously generated itself from
organic molecules and compounds loose in the early Earth's environment. Because
that part of Darwin's theory has always been glaringly specious, modern
Darwinists get hammered about it from all sides, including from the likes of me,
with a net result that the edifice of "authority" they've hidden behind for 140
years is crumbling under the assault.
Imagine a mediaeval castle being pounded by huge stones flung by primitive,
but cumulatively effective, catapults. Darwinism (and all that term has come to
represent: natural selection, evolution, survival of the fittest, punctuated
equilibrium, etc.) is the castle; Darwinists man the battlements as the lobbed
stones do their work; Intelligent Designers hurl the boulders doing the most
damage; Creationists, by comparison, use slings; and the relatively few (thus
far) people like me, Interventionists, shoot a well-aimed arrow now and then,
though nobody pays much attention to usÉyet.
Remember, a well-aimed (or lucky--in either case, the example is instructive)
arrow took down mighty Achilles. Darwinists have heels, too.
LIFE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
In Charles Darwin's time, nothing was known about life at the cellular level.
Protoplasm was the smallest unit they understood. Yet Darwin's theory of natural
selection stated that all of life--every living entity known then or to be
discovered in the future--simply had to function from birth to death by "natural
laws" that could be defined and analysed. This would of course include the
origin of life. Darwin suggested life might have gradually assembled itself from
stray parts lying about in some "warm pond" when the planet had cooled enough to
make such an assemblage possible. Later it was realised that nothing would
likely have taken shape (gradually or otherwise) in a static environment, so a
catalytic element was added: lightning.
Throughout history up to the present moment, scientists have been forced to
spend their working lives with the "God" of the Creationists hovering over every
move they make, every mistake, every error in judgment, every personal
peccadillo. So when faced with something they can't explain in rational terms,
the only alternative option is "God did it", which for them is unacceptable. So
they're forced by relentless Creationist pressure to come up with answers for
absolutely everything that, no matter how absurd, are "natural". That was their
motivation for the theory that a lightning bolt could strike countless random
molecules in a warm pond and somehow transform them into the first living
creature. The "natural" forces of biology, chemistry and electromagnetism could
magically be swirled together--and voilà!Éan event suspiciously close to a
miracle.
Needless to say, no Darwinist would accept terms like "magic" or "miracle",
which would be tantamount to agreeing with the Creationist argument that "God
did it all". But in their heart-of-hearts, even the most fanatical Darwinists
had to suspect the "warm pond" theory was absurd.
And as more and more was learned about the mind-boggling complexity of
cellular structure and chemistry, there could be no doubt. The trenchant Fred
Hoyle analogy still stands: it was as likely to be true as that a tornado could
sweep through a junkyard and correctly assemble a jetliner.
Unfortunately, the "warm pond" had become a counterbalance to "God did it",
so even when Darwinists knew past doubt that it was wrong, they clung to it,
outwardly proclaimed it and taught it. In many places in the world, including
the USA, it's still taught.
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
The next jarring bump on the Darwinist road to embattlement came when they
learned that in certain places around the globe there existed remnants of what
had to be the very first pieces of the Earth's crust. Those most ancient slabs
of rock are called cratons, and the story of their survival for 4.0 billion
[4,000,000,000] years is a miracle in itself. But what is most miraculous about
them is that they contain fossils of "primitive" bacteria! Yes, bacteria,
preserved in 4.0-billion-year-old cratonal rock. If that's not primitive, what
is? However, it presented Darwinists with an embarrassing conundrum.
If Earth began to coalesce out of the solar system's primordial cloud of dust
and gas around 4.5 billion years ago (which by then was a well-supported
certainty), then at 4.0 billion years ago the proto-planet was still a seething
ball of cooling magma. No warm ponds would appear on Earth for at least a
billion years or more. So how to reconcile reality with the warm-pond fantasy?
There was no way to reconcile it, so it was ignored by all but the
specialists who had to work with it on a daily basis. Every other Darwinist
assumed a position as one of the "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil"
monkeys. To say they "withheld" the new, damaging information is not true; to
say it was never emphasised in the popular media for public consumption is true.
That has become the way Darwinists handle any and all challenges to their pet
theories: if they can no longer defend one, they don't talk about it, or they
talk about it as little as possible. If forced to talk about it, they invariably
try to "kill the messenger" by challenging any critic's "credentials". If the
critic lacks academic credentials equal to their own, he or she is dismissed as
little more than a crackpot. If the critic has equal credentials, he or she is
labelled as a "closet Creationist" and dismissed. No career scientist can speak
openly and vociferously against Darwinist dogma without paying a heavy price.
That is why and how people of normally good conscience can be and have been
"kept in line" and kept silent in the face of egregious distortions of truth.
If that system of merciless censure weren't so solidly in place, then surely
the next Darwinist stumble would have made headlines around the world as the
final and absolute end to the ridiculous notion that life could possibly have
assembled itself "naturally". They couldn't even be sure it happened on Earth.
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
The imposing edifice of Darwinian "origin of life" dogma rested on a piece of
incontrovertible bedrock: there could be only one progenitor for all of life.
When the fortuitous lightning bolt struck the ideally concocted warm pond, it
created only one entity. However, it was no ordinary entity. With it came the
multiple ability to take nourishment from its environment, create energy from
that nourishment, expel waste created by the use of that energy and (almost as
an afterthought) reproduce itself ad infinitum until one of its millions of
subsequent generations sits here at this moment reading these words. Nothing
miraculous about that; simply incalculable good fortune.
This was Darwinist gospel--preached and believed--until the bacteria fossils
were found in the cratons. Their discovery was upsetting, but not a deathblow to
the Darwinist theory. They had to concede (among themselves, of course) that the
first life-form didn't assemble itself in a warm pond, but it came together
somehow because every ancient fossil it spawned was a single-celled bacteria
lacking a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). Prokaryotes preceded the much later
single-celled bacteria with a nucleus (eukaryotes), so the post-craton situation
stayed well within the Darwinian framework. No matter how the first life-form
came into existence, it was a single unit lacking a cell nucleus, which was
mandatory because even the simplest nucleus would be much too "irreducibly
complex" (a favourite Intelligent Design phrase) to be created by a lightning
bolt tearing through a warm pond's molecular junkyard. So the Darwinists still
held half a loaf.
In the mid-1980s, however, biologist Carl Woese stunned his colleagues with a
shattering discovery. There wasn't just the predicted (and essential) single
source for all forms of life; there were two: two types of prokaryotic bacteria
as distinct as apples and oranges, dogs and cats, horses and cowsÉtwo distinct
forms of life, alive and well on the planet at 4.0 billion years ago.
Unmistakable. Irrefutable. Get over it. Deal with it.
But how? How to explain separate forms of life springing into existence in an
environment that would make hell seem like a summer resort? With nothing but
cooling lava as far as an incipient eye might have seen, how could it be
explained in "natural" terms? Indeed, how could it be explained in any terms
other than the totally unacceptable? Life, with all its deepening mystery, had
to have been seeded onto Earth.
PANSPERMIA RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD
Panspermia is the idea that life came to be on Earth from somewhere beyond
the planet and possibly beyond the solar system. Its means of delivery is
separated into two possible avenues: directed and undirected.
Undirected panspermia means that life came here entirely by accident and was
delivered by a comet or meteor. Some scientists favour comets as the prime
vector because they contain ice mixed with dust (comets are often referred to as
"dirty snowballs"), and life is more likely to have originated in water and is
more likely to survive an interstellar journey frozen. Other scientists favour
asteroids as the delivery mechanism because they are more likely to have come
from the body of a planet that would have contained life. A comet, they argue,
is unlikely ever to have been part of a planet, and life could not possibly have
generated itself in or on a frozen comet.
Directed panspermia means life was delivered to Earth by intelligent means of
one kind or another. In one scenario, a capsule could have been sent here the
same way we sent Voyager on an interstellar mission. However, if it was sent
from outside the solar system, we have to wonder how the senders might have
known Earth was here, or how Earth managed to get in the way of something sent
randomly (à la Voyager).
In another scenario, interstellar craft manned by extraterrestrial beings
could have arrived and delivered the two prokaryote types. This requires a level
of openmindedness that most scientists resolutely lack, so they won't accept
either version of directed panspermia as even remotely possible. Instead, they
cling to their "better" explanation of undirected panspermia because it allows
them to continue playing the "origin" game within the first boundaries set out
by Charles Darwin: undirected is "natural"; directed is "less natural".
Notice it can't be said that directed panspermia is "unnatural". According to
Darwinists, no matter where life originated, the process was natural from start
to finish. All they have to concede is that it didn't take place on Earth.
However, acknowledging that forces them to skirt dangerously close to admitting
the reality of extraterrestrial life, and their ongoing "search" for such life
generates millions in research funding each year. This leaves them in no hurry
to make clear to the general public that, yes, beyond Earth there is at the very
least the same primitive bacterial life we have here. There's no doubt about it.
But, as usual, they keep the lid on this reality, not exactly hiding it but
making no effort to educate the public to the notion that we are not, and never
have been, alone. The warm pond still holds water, so why muddy it with facts?
A PATTERN EMERGES
In my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, I discuss all points mentioned up
to now, which very few people outside academic circles are aware of. Within
those circles, a hard core of "true believers" still seizes on every new
discovery of a chemical or organic compound found in space to try to move the
argument back to Darwin's original starting point that somehow life assembled
itself on Earth "naturally".
However, most objective scholars now accept that the first forms of life had
to have been delivered because: (1) they appear as two groups of multiple
prokaryotes (archaea and true bacteria); (2) they appear whole and complete; (3)
the hellish primordial Earth is unimaginable as an incubator for burgeoning
life; and (4) a half-billion years seems far too brief a time-span to permit a
gradual, step-by-step assembly of the incredible complexity of prokaryotic
biology and biochemistry.
Even more damaging to the hard-core Darwinist position is that the
prokaryotes were--quite propitiously--as durable as life gets. They were
virtually indestructible, able to live in absolutely any environment--and
they've proved it by being here today, looking and behaving the same as when
their ancestors were fossilised 4.0 billion years ago. Scalding heat? We love
it! Choked by saline? Let us at it! Frozen solid? We're there! Crushing
pressure? Perfect for us! Corrosively acidic? Couldn't be better!
Today they are known as extremophiles, and they exist alongside many other
prokaryotic bacteria that thrive in milder conditions. It would appear that
those milder-living prokaryotes could not have survived on primordial Earth, so
how did they come to be? According to Darwinists, they "evolved" from
extremophiles in the same way humans supposedly evolved on a parallel track with
apes--from a "common ancestor".
Darwinists contend such parallel tracks don't need to be traceable. All
that's required is a creature looking reasonably like another to establish what
they consider a legitimate claim of evolutionary connection. Extremophiles
clearly existed: we have their 4.0-billion-year-old fossils. Their descendants
clearly exist today, along with mild-environment prokaryotes that must have
descended from them. However, transitional forms between them cannot be found,
even though such forms are required by the tenets of Darwinism. Faced with that
embarrassing problem, Darwinists simply insist that the missing transitional
species do exist, still hidden somewhere in the fossil record, just as the
"missing link" between apes and humans is out there somewhere and will indeed be
discovered someday. It's simply a matter of being in the right place at the
right time.
For as expedient as the "missing link" has been, it's useless to explain the
next phase of life on Earth, when prokaryotes began sharing the stage with the
much larger and much more complex (but still single-celled) eukaryotes, which
appear around 2.0 billion years ago. The leap from prokaryote to eukaryote is
too vast even to pretend a missing evolutionary link could account for it. A
dozen would be needed just to cover going from no nucleus to one that functions
fully. (This, by the way, is also true of the leap between so-called pre-humans
and humans, which will be discussed in Part Two).
How to explain it? Certainly not plausibly. Fortunately, Darwinists have
never lacked the creativity to invent "warm-pond" scenarios to plug holes in
their dogma.
DOING THE DOGMA SHUFFLE
Since it's clear that a "missing link" won't fly over the prokaryote&endash;eukaryote
chasm, why not assume some of the smaller prokaryotes were eaten by some of the
larger ones? Yeah, that might work! But instead of turning into food, energy and
waste, the small ones somehow turn themselves--or get turned into--cell nuclei
for larger ones. Sure, that's a keeper! Since no one can yet prove it didn't
happen (Thank God!), Darwinists are able to proclaim it did. (Keep in mind, when
any critic of Darwinist dogma makes a suggestion that similarly can't be proved,
it's automatically dismissed, because "lack of provability" is a death sentence
outside their fraternity. Inside their fraternity, consensus is adequate because
the collective agreement of so many "experts" should be accepted as gospel.)
To Interventionists like me, the notion of prokaryotes consuming each other
to create eukaryotes is every bit as improbable as the divine fiat of
Creationists. But even if it were a biological possibility (which most evidence
weighs against), it would still seem fair to expect "transition" models
somewhere along the line. Darwinists say "no" because this process could have an
"overnight" aspect to it. One minute there's a large prokaryote alongside a
small one, the next minute there's a small eukaryote with what appears to be a
nucleus inside it. Not magic, not a miracle, just a biological process unknown
today but which could have been possible 2.0 billion years ago. Who's to say,
except an "expert"? In any case, large and small prokaryotes lived side by side
for 2.0 billion years (long enough, one would think, to learn to do so in
harmony), then suddenly a variety of eukaryotes appeared alongside them, whole
and complete, ready to join them as the only game in town for another 1.4
billion years (with no apparent changes in the eukaryotes, either).
At around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular life- forms (the
Ediacaran Fauna) appear--as suddenly and inexplicably as the prokaryotes and
eukaryotes. To this day, the Ediacaran Fauna are not well understood, beyond the
fact they were something like jellyfish or seaweeds in a wide range of sizes and
shapes. (It remains unclear whether they were plants or animals, or a bizarre
combination of both.) They lived alongside the prokaryotes and eukaryotes for
about 50 million years, to about 550 million years ago, give or take a few
million, when the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" occurred.
It's rightly called an "explosion", because within a period of only 5 to 10
million years--a mere eye-blink relative to the 3.5 billion years of life
preceding it--the Earth's oceans filled with a dazzling array of seawater plants
and all 26 of the animal phyla (body types) catalogued today, with no new phyla
added since. No species from the Cambrian era looks like anything currently
alive--except trilobites, which seem to have spawned at least horseshoe crabs.
However, despite their "alien" appearance, they all arrived fully
assembled--males and females, predators and prey, large and small, ready to go.
As in each case before, no predecessors can be found.
THE PACE HEATS UP
Volumes have been written about the Cambrian Explosion and the menagerie of
weird plants and animals resulting from it. The Earth was simply inundated with
them, as if they'd rained down from the sky. Darwinists concede it is the
greatest difficulty--among many--they confront when trying to sell the
evolutionary concept of gradualism. There is simply no way to reconcile the
breathtaking suddennessÉthe astounding varietyÉthe overwhelming incongruity of
the Cambrian Explosion. It is a testament to the old adage that "one ugly fact
can ruin the most beautiful theory". But it's far from the only one.
All of complex life as we understand it begins with the Cambrian Explosion,
in roughly the last 550 million years. During that time, the Earth has endured
five major and several minor catastrophic extinction events. Now, one can
quibble with how an event catastrophic enough to cause widespread extinctions
could be called "minor", but when compared to the major ones the distinction is
apt. The five major extinction events eliminated 50% to 90% of all species of
plants and animals alive when the event occurred.
We all know about the last of those, the Cretaceous event of 65 million years
ago that took out the dinosaurs and much of what else was alive at the time. But
what few of us understand is the distinctive pattern to how life exists between
extinction events and after extinction events. This difference in the pattern of
life creates serious doubts about "gradualism" as a possible explanatory
mechanism for how species proliferate.
Between extinction events, when environments are stable, life doesn't seem to
change at all. The operative term is stasis. Everything stays pretty much the
same. But after extinction events, the opposite occurs: everything changes
profoundly. New life-forms appear all over the place, filling every available
niche in the new environments created by the after-effects of the catastrophe.
Whatever that is, it's not gradualism.
In 1972, (the late) Stephen J. Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldredge of the
American Museum of Natural History went ahead and bit the bullet by announcing
that fact to the world. Gradual evolution simply was not borne out by the fossil
record, and that fact had to be dealt with. Darwin's view of change had to be
modified. It wasn't a gradual, haphazard process dictated by random, favourable
mutations in genes. It was something else.
That "something else" they called punctuated equilibrium. The key to it was
their open admission of the great secret that life-forms only changed in spurts
after extinction events, and therefore had nothing to do with natural selection
or survival of the fittest or any of the old Darwinist homilies that everyone
had been brainwashed to believe. It was the first great challenge to Darwinian
orthodoxy, and it was met with furious opposition. The old guard tagged it "punk
eek" and called it "evolution by jerks".
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
What Gould and Eldredge were admitting was the great truth that evolution by
natural selection is not apparent in either the fossil record or in the life we
see around us. The old guard insisted that the fossil record simply had to be
wrongÉthat it wasn't giving a complete picture because large tracts of it were
missing. That was true, but much larger tracts were available, and those tracts
showed the overwhelming stasis of life-forms in every era, followed by rapid
filling of environmental niches after each extinction event. So while parts of
the record were indeed missing, what was available was unmistakable.
Arguments raged back and forth. Explanations were created to try to counter
every aspect of the punk-eek position. None was ever particularly convincing,
but they began to build up. Remember, scientists have the great advantage of
being considered by one and all as "experts", even when they haven't the
slightest idea of what they're talking about. That allows them to throw shot
after shot against the wall until something sticks, or until the target of their
wrath is covered in so much "mud" that it can't be seen any more. Such was the
fate of the punk-eekers. By the early 1990s, they'd been marginalised.
One can hardly blame the old-guard Darwinists for those attacks. If granted
any credence, the sudden radiations of myriad new species into empty
environmental niches could have gutted many of the most fundamental tenets of
gradual, "natural" evolution. That idea simply could not become established as a
fact. Why? Because the warm pond was drained dry, biochemistry was rendering the
"small-eaten-by-large prokaryotes turned into eukaryotes" story absurd, and the
Cambrian Explosion was flatly inexplicable. If "sudden radiation" were heaped
onto all of that, the entire theory of evolution could flounderÉand where would
that leave Darwinists? Facing righteous Creationists shouting, "See! God did do
it after all!" Whatever else the Darwinists did, they couldn't allow that to
happen.
Speaking as an Interventionist, I don't blame them. To me, God stands on
equal footing with the lightning bolt. I see a better, far more rational answer
to the mysteries of how life came to be on planet Earth: it was put here by
intelligent beings, and it has been continuously monitored by those same beings.
Whether it's been developed for a purpose or toward a goal of some kind seems
beyond knowing at present, but it can be established with facts and with data
that intervention by outside intelligence presents the most logical and most
believable answer to the question of how life came to be here, as well as of how
and why it has developed in so many unusual ways in the past 550 million years.
So now we come to the crux.
COSMIC ARKS
Darwinists go through life waving their PhD credentials like teacher's pets
with a hall pass, because it allows them to shout down and ridicule off the
public stage anyone who chooses to avoid the years of brainwashing they had to
endure to obtain those passes. However, their credentials give them "influence"
and "credibility" with the mainstream media, who don't have the time, the
ability or the resources to make certain that everything every Darwinist says is
true. They must trust all scientists not to have political or moral agendas, and
not to distort the truth to suit those agendas. So, over time, the media have
become lapdogs to the teacher's pets, recording and reporting whatever they're
told to report, while dismissing out of hand whatever they're told to dismiss
out of hand.
Despite Darwinists' rants that those who challenge them do so out of
blithering idiocy, that is not always the case. For that matter, their opponents
are not all Creationists, or even Intelligent Designers, whom Darwinists labour
feverishly to paint into the "goofy" corner where Creationists rightly reside.
So Interventionists like me have few outlets for our ideas, and virtually none
in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, we feel our view of the origin of life
makes the best sense, given the facts as they are now known, and the most basic
aspect of our view starts with what I once called "cosmic dump trucks". However,
that term has been justly criticised as facetious, so now I call them "cosmic
arks".
Imagine this scenario: a fleet of intergalactic "terraformers" (another term
I favour) cruises the universe. Their job is to locate forming solar systems and
seed everything in them with an array of basic, durable life-forms capable of
living in any environment, no matter how scabrous. Then the terraformers return
on a regular basis, doing whatever is needed to maximise the capacity for life
within the developing solar system. Each system is unique, calling for
specialised forms of life at different times during its development, which the
terraformers provide from a wide array of cosmic arks at their disposal.
With that as a given, let's consider what's happened on Earth. Soon after it
began to coalesce out of dust and gas, two forms of virtually indestructible
bacteria appeared on it, as if someone knew precisely what to deliver and when.
Also, it would make sense that every other proto-planet in the solar system
would be seeded at the same time. How could even terraformers know which forming
planets would, after billions of years, become habitable for complex life? And
guess what? A meteorite from Mars seems to contain fossilised evidence of the
same kinds of nano- (extremely small) bacteria found on Earth today. All other
planets, if they're ever examined, will probably reveal similar evidence of a
primordial seeding. It would make no sense for terraformers to do otherwise.
THE RUST ALSO RISES
So, okay, our solar system is noticed by intergalactic terraformers as the
new sun ignites and planets start forming around it. On each of the planets they
sprinkle a variety of two separate forms of single-celled bacteria they know
will thrive in any environment (the extremophiles). But the bacteria have a
purpose: to produce oxygen as a component of their metabolism. Why? Because life
almost certainly has the same basic components and functions everywhere in the
universe. DNA will be its basis, and "higher" organisms will require oxygen to
fuel their metabolism. Therefore, complex life can't be "inserted" anywhere
until a certain level of oxygen exists in a planet's atmosphere.
Wherever this process is undertaken, the terraformers have a major problem to
deal with: iron. Iron is an abundant element in the universe. It is certainly
abundant in planets (meteorites are often loaded with it). Iron is very reactive
with oxygen: that's what rust is all about. So on none of the new planets
forming in any solar system can higher life-forms develop until enough oxygen
has been pumped into its atmosphere to oxidise most of its free iron. This, not
surprisingly, is exactly what the prokaryotes did during their first 2.0 billion
years on Earth. But it had to be a two-part process.
The proto-Earth would be cooling the whole time, so let's say full cooling
takes roughly 1.0 billion years. So the extremophiles would be the first batch
of prokaryotes inserted because they could survive it. Then, after a billion
years or so, the terraformers return and drop off the rest of the prokaryotes,
the ones that can live in milder conditions. Also, they have to keep returning
on a regular basis because each planet would cool at a different rate due to
their different sizes and different physical compositions.
However many "check-up" trips are required, by 2.0 billion years after their
first seeding of the new solar system the terraformers realise the third planet
from the sun is the only one thriving. They are not surprised, having learned
that a "zone of life" exists around all suns, regardless of size or type. Now
that this sun has taken its optimum shape, they could have predicted which
planet or planets would thrive. In this system, the third is doing well but the
fourth one is struggling. It has its prokaryotes and it has water, but its
abundance of iron (the "red" planet) will require longer to neutralise than such
a small planet with a non-reactive core will require to cool off, so it will
lose its atmosphere to dissipation into space before a balance can be achieved.
The fourth planet will become a wasteland.
The terraformers carry out the next phase of planet-building on the thriving
third by depositing larger, more complex, more biologically reactive eukaryotes
to accelerate the oxidation process. Eukaryotes are far more fragile than
prokaryotes, so they can't be put onto a forming planet until it is sufficiently
cooled to have abundant land and water. But once in place and established, their
large size (relative to prokaryotes) can metabolise much more oxygen per unit.
Together, the fully proliferated prokaryotes and eukaryotes can spew out enough
oxygen to oxidise every bit of free iron on the Earth's crust and in its seas,
and before long be lacing the atmosphere with it.
Sure enough, when the terraformers return in another 1.4 billion years they
find Earth doing well, but the situation on Mars is unimproved: rust as far as
the eye can see. (Mars is likely to have at least prokaryotic life, because
there wouldn't have been enough oxygen in the surface water it once had--or in
the permafrost it still has--to turn its entire surface into iron oxide.) Earth,
however, is doing fine. Most of its free iron is locked up as rust, and oxygen
levels in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. It's still too soon to think
about depositing highly complex life, but that day is not far off now,
measurable in tens of millions of years rather than in hundreds of millions. For
the moment, Earth is ready for its first load of multicellular life, and so it
is deposited: the Ediacaran Fauna.
Though scientists today have no clear understanding of what the Ediacarans
were or what their purpose may have been (because they don't exist today), it
seems safe to assume they were even more prolific creators of oxygen than the
eukaryotes.
If, indeed, terraformers are behind the development of life on Earth, nothing
else makes sense. If, on the other hand, everything that happened here did so by
nothing but blind chance and coincidence, it was the most amazing string of luck
imaginable. Everything happened exactly when it needed to happen, exactly where
it needed to happen, exactly how it needed to happen.
If that's not an outright miracle, I don't know what is.
MAKING BETTER SENSE
Assuming terraformers were/are responsible for seeding and developing life on
Earth, we can further assume that by 550 million years ago at least the early
oceans were sufficiently oxygenated to support genuinely complex life. That was
delivered en masse during the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian Explosion, after
which followed the whole panoply of "higher" forms of life on Earth as we have
come to know it. (The whys and wherefores of that process are, regrettably,
beyond the scope of this essay, but there are answers that have as much apparent
sense behind them as what has been outlined.)
During those 550 million years, five major and several minor extinction
events occurred, after each of which a few million years would pass while the
Earth stabilised with environments modified in some way by the catastrophes.
Some pre-event life-forms would persist into the new environments, to be joined
by new ark-loads delivered by the terraformers, who would analyse the situation
on the healing planet and deliver species they knew would survive in the new
environments and establish a balance with the life-forms already there (the
Interventionist version of punctuated equilibrium).
We've already seen the difficulties Darwinists have with trying to explain
the flow of life on Earth presented in the fossil record. That record can be
explained by the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm, but the veneer of
"scholarship" overlaying it is little different from the divine fiat of
Creationists. And it can be explained by Intelligent Designers, who claim
anything so bewilderingly complex couldn't possibly have been arrayed without
the guidance of some superior, unifying intelligence (which they stop short of
calling "God", because otherwise they are merely Creationists without cant).
Considering all of the above, we Interventionists believe the terraformer
scenario explains the fossil record of life on Earth with more creativity, more
accuracy and more logic than the others, and in the fullness of time will have a
far greater probability of being proved correct. We don't bother trying to
establish or even discuss who the terraformers are, or how they came to be,
because both are irrelevant and unknowable until they choose to explain it to
us. Besides, speculating about their origin detracts from the far more germane
issue of trying to establish that our explanation of life's origin makes better
sense than any other.
We will continue to be ignored by mainstream media simply because the idea of
intelligent life existing outside Earth is so frightening to the majority of
those bound to it. Among many reasons for fear, the primary one might be our
unfortunate habit of filtering everything beyond our immediate reality through
our own perceptions. Thus, we attribute to others the same traits and
characteristics we possess. Another bad habit appears when we discover new
technology. Invariably our first thought is: "How can we use this to kill more
of our enemies?" Collectively, we all have enemies we want to eliminate to be
done with the problem they present. Like it or not, this is a dominant aspect of
human nature.
Because we so consistently project onto others the darkest facets of our
nature, we automatically assume--despite ET and Alf and other lovable depictions
in our culture--that real aliens will want to harm us. Consequently, we avoid
facing the possibility of their existence in every way we can. (Here I can
mention the obstinate resistance I have personally found to serious
consideration of the Starchild skull, which by all rights should have been
eagerly and thoroughly examined three years ago.)
So Interventionism is ignored because it scrapes too close to UFOs, crop
circles, alien abductions and every other subject that indicates we humans may,
in the end, be infinitesimally insignificant in the grand scheme of life in the
universe. There is much more to say about it, of course, especially as it
relates to human origins, but that has to wait until the second instalment of
this essay.
For now, let the last word be that the last word on origins--of life and of
humans--is a long, long way from being written.
But when it is, I strongly suspect it will be Intervention.
HUMAN ORIGINS: CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?
Part 2
In Part One of this essay, I explained the Interventionist perspective
regarding the origin of life on Earth. I showed how the great preponderance of
evidence indicates life came here and did not develop here, as we have been
brainwashed to believe by generations of scientists struggling to keep the
creation myths of religion out of classrooms. Personally, I applaud and support
all efforts to keep the most specious aspects of Creationism safely bottled up
in houses of worship, where they belong. However, I have even more disdain for
scientists who allow themselves to be crushed to cowardly pulp by nothing more
debilitating than "peer pressure". Because both groups are so driven by their
collective fears and dogma, neither has a working grip on reality. That becomes
increasingly clear as research continues, which I believe was made evident in
Part One. Now let's try to do the same in Part Two, on human origins.
If anything riles Creationists and Darwinists alike, it's the suggestion they
might be wrong about how we humans have come to dominate our planet so
thoroughly. Both sides can tolerate substantial criticisms regarding the wide
array of subjects under their purviews, including the kind of critique I gave
the origins of life in Part One. However, they have no toleration for challenges
to their shared hegemony over the beginnings of us all. Dare that and you'll
find yourself in a serious fight. Thus, those of us who support the
Interventionist interpretation come under attack from both sides, not to mention
the other clique at the party, the educated subgroup of Creationists known as
Intelligent Designers (a brilliant choice of name that enforces their
bottom-line concept of a "grand designer", while simultaneously implying they
are smarter than anyone who would oppose them).
All sides seem to agree that humans are "special". Creationists and
Intelligent Designers consider it virtually self-evident that humans originated
by some kind of divine fiat. Creationists believe the instigator is a universal
"godhead" figure, which IDers water down to a more palatable "entity or system"
capable of generating order out of chaos, life out of the inanimate. Even
Darwinists will concede that many of our physical, emotional and intellectual
traits set us far apart from the primate ancestors they believe preceded us in
the biological process of evolution. However, despite our high degree of "specialness",
Darwinists fervently promote the dogma that even the most fanciful distinctions
separating us from our supposed ancestors can be explained entirely by "natural
means".
As with the early life-forms discussed in Part One, there's nothing natural
about it.
THE EARLIEST PRIMATES
Darwinists believe the human saga begins with mouse-sized mammals called
insectivores (similar to modern tree shrews) that scurried around under the feet
of large dinosaurs, trying to avoid becoming food for smaller species. Then
comes the Cretaceous extinction event of 65 million years ago that took out the
dinosaurs and paved the way for those tiny insectivores to evolve over the next
few million years into the earliest primates, the prosimians (literally
pre-simians, pre-monkeys) of the early Palaeocene epoch, which lasts until 55
million years ago.
As with nearly all such aspects of Darwinist dogma, this is pure speculation.
There is, in fact, no clear indication of a transitional insectivore-to-prosimian
species at any point in the process. If any such transitional species had ever
been found, then countless more would be known and I wouldn't be writing this
essay. Darwinian evolution would be proved beyond doubt, and that would be the
end of it.
To read the fossil record literally is to discover the legitimacy of
punctuated equilibrium (discussed in Part One) as a plausible explanation. "Punk
eek", as detractors call it, points out that in the fossil record life-forms do
seem simply to appear on Earth, most often after extinction events but not
always. Both the supposed proto-primates and flowering plants appear during the
period preceding the Cretaceous extinction. They come when they come, so the
relatively sudden post-extinction appearance of the earliest primates, the
prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers), is one of many sudden manifestations.
In terms of human origins, it begs this question: did proto-primates actually
evolve into prosimians, into monkeys, into apes, into humans? Or did prosimians
appear, monkeys appear, apes appear, and humans appear? Or, in our "special"
case, were we created?
However it happened, there is a pattern. The earliest prosimians are found in
the fossil record after the Mesozoic/Cenozoic boundary at 65 million years ago.
It is assumed their ancestors will someday be found as one of countless "missing
links" needed to make an airtight case for Darwinian evolution. Prosimians
dominate through the Palaeocene and the Eocene, lasting from 65 to 35 million
years ago. (There won't be a test on terms or dates, so don't worry about
memorising them; just try to keep the time-flow in mind.) At 35 million years
ago, the Oligocene epoch begins and the first monkeys come with it.
Again, Science assumes that monkeys evolved from prosimians, even though
evidence of that transition is nowhere in sight. In fact, there is strong
evidence pointing in the other direction, toward the dreaded stasis of
punctuated equilibrium. The lemurs, lorises and tarsiers of today are
essentially just as they were 50 million years ago. Some species have gone
extinct while others have modified into new forms, but lemurs and lorises still
have wet noses and tarsiers still have dry, which seems always to have been the
case. That's why tarsiers are assumed to be responsible for spinning off monkeys
and all the rest.
Monkeys start appearing at 35 million years ago, looking vastly different
from prosimians. There are certain physiological links, to be sure, such as
grasping hands and feet to permit easy movement through trees. However,
prosimians cling and jump to move around, while monkeys favour
brachiating--swinging along by their arms. Also, prosimians live far more by
their sense of smell than do monkeys. This list goes on.
The reason they're linked in an evolutionary flowchart is because they seem
close enough in enough ways to make the linkage stick. Simple as that. Science
focuses on the similarities and tries hard to ignore their gaping discrepancies,
assuming--as always--that there is plenty of time for evolution to do its magic
and generate those inexplicable differences.
For the next 10 million years the larger, stronger, more "advanced" monkeys
compete with prosimians for arboreal resources, quickly gaining the upper hand
over their "ancestors" and driving several of them to extinction.
Then, at around 25 million years ago, the Miocene epoch brings the first apes
into the fossil record, as suddenly and inexplicably as all other primates
appear. Again, Science insists they evolved from monkeys, but the evidence to
support that claim is as specious as the prosimian&endash;monkey link. The
transitional bones needed to support it are simply not in the fossil record.
If this isn't a distinct pattern of punctuated equilibrium, then what is?
THE PUZZLING MIOCENE
In terms of primate evolution, the Miocene makes little sense. By 25 million
years ago, when it begins, prosimians have been around for about 30 million
years and monkeys for 10 million years. Yet in the Miocene's ample fossil
record, prosimians and monkeys are rare, while the new arrivals, the apes, are
all over the place.
The Miocene epoch stretches from 25 million to 5.0 million years ago. (These
are approximations quoted differently in various sources; I round off to the
easiest numbers to keep track of.) During those 20 million years, the apes
flourish. They produce two-dozen different genera (types), and many have more
than one species within the genus. Those apes come in the same range of sizes
they exhibit today, from smallish gibbon-like creatures, to mid-range
chimp-sized ones, to large gorilla-sized ones, to super-sized Gigantopithecus,
known only by many teeth and a few mandibles (jawbones) from India and China.
That's another interesting thing about Miocene apes: their fossils are found
literally everywhere in the Old World--Africa, Europe, Asia. Most of them are
known by the durable teeth and jaws that define Gigantopithecus, while many
others supply enough post-cranial (below the head) bones to grant a reasonably
clear image of them. They present an interesting mix of anatomical features.
Actually, "confusing" is more like it. They are clearly different from monkeys
in that they have no tails, just like modern apes. However, their arms tend to
be more like monkey arms--the same length as their legs. Modern ape arms are
significantly longer than their legs so they can "walk" comfortably on their
front knuckles. More than any other reason, this is why we hear so little from
anthropologists about Miocene apes. Their arms don't make sense as the forelimbs
of an ancestral quadruped. Miocene arms fit better withÉsomething else.
This is not to say, of course, that no ape arms in the Miocene fossil record
are longer than legs. That's nowhere near to being determined because many
species--like Gigantopithecus--have yet to provide their arm bones. However,
since we do have some tailless, ape-like bodies with monkey-like arms and hands,
we have to consider how such a hybrid would move around. Swing through trees by
its arms, like a monkey? Not likely. Monkey arms are designed to carry a
monkey's slight body. An ape's body needs to be brachiated and leveraged by an
ape's much longer, stouter, stronger arms. So how aboutÉwalking?
From a physiological standpoint, an ape-like body with monkey-like arms and
hands does not move as easily or comfortably as a quadruped (down on all fours).
It simply can't happen. In fact, there's really only one posture that lends
itself to the carriage of such a monkey-ape hybrid, and that's upright. Go to a
zoo and watch how much easier monkeys--tails and all--stand upright compared to
apes. Any monkey can move with grace on its hind legs. In comparison, apes are
blundering, top-heavy oafs. Thus, it seems likely that at least some of the
hybrid monkey-apes of the Miocene probably had to carry themselves upright, in
opposition to the other apes of the era bearing the longer, thicker arms of
gibbons, orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Remember, we're talking about
two dozen genera and around 50 species.
WALKING THE WALK
Walking is critical to an understanding of human origins because Darwinists
feel it is the factor that set our ancestors on the road to becoming us. The
theory is that around 5.0 to 10 million years ago, when the heavy forests
blanketing Africa began shrinking, some forest-dwelling quadrupedal Miocene apes
still living then (there had been the inevitable extinctions and speciations
during the preceding 15 to 20 million years) began to forage on the newly
forming savannas. Though terribly ill-equipped to undertake such a journey (more
about that later), several ape species supposedly took the risk by learning to
stand upright to see out over the savanna grasses to scout for predators.
Then--after millennia of holding that position for extended periods--they
adopted constant upright posture. In doing so, one of those daring, unknown
species took the real "giant step for mankind".
No one can yet say which of the early upright-walking "pre-humans" went on to
become us, because the physiological gaps between us and them are simply
enormous. In fact, physically, the only significant thing we have in common with
those early ancestors is upright posture. But even that reveals noticeable
divergence.
Incredibly, we have the walking trail of at least two early pre-humans at 3.5
million years ago. Found in Laetoli, Tanzania, these tracks were laid down on a
volcanic ash fall that was then covered by another ash fall and sealed until
their discovery by Mary Leakey's team in 1978. Photos of that trail are common
and can be accessed in any basic anthropology textbook or on the Internet. What
is not commonly portrayed, however, is that detailed analysis of the pressure
points along the surface of those prints indicates something that would be
expected: they didn't walk like us. After all, 3.5 million years is a long time,
and from a Darwinist standpoint it's logical to assume extensive evolution would
occur. But whether it was evolution or not, our methods of locomotion are
uniquely different.
Humans have a distinctive carriage that starts with a heel strike
necessitated by our ankles placed well behind the midpoint of our feet. After
the heel strike, our forward momentum is swung to the left or right, out to the
edges of our feet to avoid our arches (in normal feet, of course). Once past the
arch, there's a sharp swing of the momentum through the ball of the foot from
outside all the way to the inside, where momentum is gathered and regenerated in
the powerful thrust of the big toe, with the four small toes drawing themselves
up to act as balancers. (Watch your own bare feet when you take a step and
you'll see those final "thrust-off" stages in action.)
The pre-humans at Laetoli walked with marked differences. Instead of having a
heavy heel-strike leading the way, their ankle was positioned at the centre
balance point of the foot, allowing it to come down virtually flat with an
almost equal distribution of weight and momentum between the heel and the ball
area. Instead of a crazy momentum swing out and around the arch, their arches
were much smaller and the line of momentum travelled nearly straight along the
midline of the entire foot. That made for a much more stable platform for
planting the foot and toeing off into the next step, which was done by
generating thrust with the entire ball area rather than with just the big toe.
When you get right down to it, the Laetoli stride was a superior technique to
the one we utilise now.
Slow-motion studies of humans walking show that we do virtually everything
"wrong". Our "heel-strike, toe-off" causes a discombobulation that courses up
our entire body. We are forced to lock our knees to handle the torque as our
momentum swings out and around our arches. Because of that suspended moment of
torque absorption, we basically have to fall forward with each step, which is
absorbed by our hip joints. Meanwhile, balance is assisted by swinging our arms.
Because of those factors, we don't walk with anything approaching optimum
efficiency, and the stresses created in us work, over time, to deteriorate our
joints and eventually cripple us. In short, we could use a re-design.
What we actually need to do is to walk more like the pre-humans at Laetoli.
In order to secure that heel-and-toe plant with each step, we'd have to modify
our stride so our knees weren't locked and we weren't throwing ourselves forward
through our hip joints. We'd have to keep our knees in a state of continual
flexion, however slight, absorbing all the stress of walking in our thighs and
buttocks, which both are designed to accommodate. This would provide us with a
"gliding" kind of stride that might look unusual (it would resemble the classic
Groucho Marx bent-kneed comedic walk), but would actually be much less
stressful, much less tiring and incredibly more efficient physiologically.
Based on the evidence of the Laetoli tracks, this is exactly how they walked.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
When Darwinists present reconstructions of so-called "pre-humans", invariably
they look nothing like humans.
Lucy and her Australopithecus relatives were little more than upright-walking
chimpanzees. The robust australopithecines were bipedal gorillas. The genus Homo
(habilis, erectus, Neanderthals and other debatable species) was a distinct
upgrade, but still nowhere near the ballpark of humanity. Only when the
Cro-Magnons appear, as suddenly and inexplicably as everything else, at around
120,000 years ago in the fossil record, do we see beings that are unmistakably
human.
The Laetoli walkers lived 3.5 million years ago. Lucy lived around 3.2
million years ago. Recent discoveries show signs of pushing bipedal locomotion
back as far as 6.0 million years ago. So let's assume for the sake of discussion
that some primates were upright at no less than 4.0 million years ago.
Thus, from approximately 4.0 million years ago all the way to the appearance
of Cro-Magnons some time before 120,000 years ago (95% of the journey), all
pre-human fossils reveal distinctly non-human characteristics. They have thick,
robust bones--much thicker and more robust than ours. Such thick bones are
necessary to support the stress generated by extraordinarily powerful muscles,
far more powerful than ours. Their arms are longer than ours, especially from
shoulder to elbow. Their arms are also roughly the same length as their legs, à
la Miocene apes. And in every aspect that can be quantified--every one!--their
skulls are much more ape-like than human-like. Those differences hold from
australopithecine bones to the bones of Neanderthals--which means that something
quite dramatic happened to produce the Cro-Magnons, and it wasn't the result of
an extinction event. It wasÉsomething else.
The chasm between Cro-Magnons (us) and everything else that comes before them
is so incredibly wide and deep that there is no way legitimately to connect the
two, apart from linking their bipedal locomotion. All of the so-called
"pre-humans" are much more like upright-walking chimps or upright-walking
gorillas than they are incipient humans. Darwinists argue that this is why they
are called pre-humans, because they are so clearly not human.
But another interpretation can be put on the fossil record--one that fairly
and impartially judges the facts as they exist, without the "spin" required by
Darwinist dogma. That spin says that the gaping physiological chasm between
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons can be plausibly explained with yet another
"missing link".
LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear
out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before. What they
fail to mention is that dozens of such links would be needed to show any kind of
plausible transition from any pre-human to Cro-Magnons. It clearly didn't
happen--and since they're experts about such things, they know it didn't happen.
However, to acknowledge that would play right into the desperate hands of
Creationists and Intelligent Designers, not to mention give strong support to
Interventionists like me. They face a very big rock or a very hard place.
Let's accept for the moment that in Darwinian terms there is no way to
account for the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnons (humans) on planet Earth. If
that is true, then what about the so-called "pre-humans"? What are they the
ancestors of? Their bones litter the fossil record looking very unlike humans,
yet they clearly walk upright for at least 4.0 million years, and new finds
threaten to push that back to 6.0 million years. Even more likely is that among
the 50 or more species of Miocene apes, at least a few are walking upright as
far back as 10 to 15 million years ago. If we accept that likelihood, we finally
make sense of the deep past while beginning for the first time to see ourselves
clearly.
We can be sure that at least four of the 50 Miocene apes were on their way to
becoming modern quadrupeds, because their descendants live among us today.
Equally certain is that others of those 50 walked out of the Miocene on two
legs. Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that
are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is
considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage.
So Darwinists have replaced it in common usage with the much less specific
"pre-human", which not so subtly brainwashes us all into believing there is no
doubt about that connection. And that brainwashing works.
We are further brainwashed to believe there are no bipedal apes alive in the
world today, despite hundreds of sightings and/or encounters with such bipedal
apes every year on every continent except Antarctica. Darwinists brainwash us to
ignore such reports by showering them with ridicule. They call such creatures
"impossible", and hope the weight of their credentials can hold reality at bay
long enough for them to figure out what to do about the public relations
catastrophe they will face when the first hominoid is brought onto the world
stage--dead or alive. That will be the darkest day in Darwinist history, because
their long charade will be officially over. The truth will finally be
undeniable. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and several relatives are absolutely
real.
IF THE SHOE FITSÉ
I'm not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of
evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality. I cover it
extensively in the third part of my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and
there are many other books that cover one or more aspects of the subject. If you
care to inform yourself about the reality of hominoids, you won't have any
trouble doing so. And the evidence is solid enough to hold up in any court in
the world, except the court of public opinion manipulated by terrified
Darwinists. However, I will go over a few points that bear directly on the
question of human origins.
Let's grant a fairly obvious assumption: that the thousands of ordinary
people who have described hominoid sightings and encounters over the past few
hundred years (yes, they go back that far in the literature) were in fact seeing
living creatures rather than Miocene ghosts. And no matter where on Earth
witnesses come from, no matter how far from the beaten path of education and/or
modern communications, they describe what they see with amazing consistency. To
hear witnesses tell it, the same kinds of creatures exist in every heavily
forested or canopied environment on the planet--which is precisely what we would
expect if they did indeed stride out of the Miocene epoch on two legs.
Furthermore, what witnesses describe is exactly what we would expect of
upright-walking apes. They are invariably described as having a robust, muscular
body covered with hair, atop which sits a head with astonishingly ape-like
features. In short, the living hominoids are described as having bodies we would
expect to find wrapped around the bones found in the so-called "pre-human"
fossil record. In addition, witnesses describe what they see as having longer
arms than human arms, hanging down near their knees, which means those arms are
approximately the length of their legs. Witnesses also contend that the
creatures walk with a "gliding" kind of bent-kneed stride that leaves tracks
eerily reminiscent of the tracks left at Laetoli 3.5 million years ago.
Now we come to the crux for Darwinists, Creationists and Intelligent
Designers. Evidence supporting the reality of hominoids is overwhelming. Truly.
And if they are real, it means the "pre-human" fossil record is actually a
record of their ancestors, not ours. And if that's the case, then humans have no
place on the flowchart of life on Earth. And if that's true, then it's equally
clear that humans did not evolve and could not have evolved here the way
Darwinists claim. And if we didn't evolve here, that opens the door to the
Interventionist position that nothing evolved here: everything was brought or
created by sentient off-world beings whom I call terraformers, whose means and
motivation will remain unknown to us unless and until they see fit to explain
themselves. I hope no one is holding their breath.
The point is that the Miocene epoch had the means to produce living
hominoids--50 or more different species (which almost certainly will be shaved
down to perhaps a dozen as more complete bodies are found) as far back as 20
million years ago. It produced some with monkey-like arms better suited to an
upright walker than a brachiating tree-dweller or knuckle walker.
By the time it ended, 5.0 million years ago, a half-dozen or more bipedal
apes were on the Earth, which we know from the ape-like australopithecine and
early Homo fossils. And we know from Laetoli that they had a walking pattern
distinct from humans, which modern witnesses describe as still being the way
hominoids walk. In short, they've followed the punctuated equilibrium pattern of
long-term stasis.
SO WHAT ABOUT HUMANS?
Humans simply do not fit the pattern of primate development on Earth. Notice
the word development instead of evolution. Species that appear here do undergo
changes in morphology over time. It's called microevolution, because it
describes changes in body parts. Darwinists use the undeniable reality of
microevolution to extrapolate the reality of macroevolution, which is change at
the species-into-more-advanced-species level. That is blatantly not evident in
the fossil record, especially when it comes to human physiology.
We have shown, I hope, that humans have been shoehorned by Darwinists into
having a place in the fossil record that doesn't belong to them but to living
hominoids (Bigfoot, etc.). Furthermore, humans have been shoehorned into being
primates, when there is little about them--certainly nothing of
significance--that fits the classic primate pattern. In fact, if it weren't for
the desperate need of Darwinists to keep humans closely linked to the primate
line, we would have had our own appellation long ago--and we'll surely have it
once the truth is out from the Pandora's box of Darwinist deception.
Relatively speaking, primate bones are much thicker and heavier than human
bones. Primate muscles are five to 10 times stronger than ours. (Anyone who's
dealt with monkeys knows how amazingly strong they are for their size.) Primate
skin is covered with long, thick, visible hair. Ours is largely invisible.
Primate hair is thick on the back, thin on the front. Ours is switched the other
way around. Primates have large, round eyes capable of seeing at night. Compared
to theirs, we have greatly reduced night vision. Primates have small, relatively
"simple" brains compared to ours. They lack the ability to modulate sound into
speech. Primate sexuality is based on an oestrus cycle in females (though some,
like bonobo chimps, have plenty of sex when not in oestrus). In human females,
the effects of oestrus are greatly diminished.
This list could go on to cite many more areas of difference, but all of them
are overshadowed by the Big Kahuna of primate/human difference: all primates
have 48 chromosomes, while humans have "only" 46 chromosomes. Two entire
chromosomes represent a heck of a lot of DNA removed from the human genome, yet
somehow that removal made us "superior" in countless ways. It doesn't make
sense. Nor does the fact that even with two whole chromosomes missing from our
genome, we share what is now believed to be 95% of the chimp genome and around
90% of the gorilla genome. How can those numbers be made to reconcile? They
can't.
Something is wrong here. Someone has been cooking the genetic books.
THE STUFF OF LIFE
In the wild, plants and animals tend to breed remarkably true to their
species. That's why stasis is the dominant characteristic of life on Earth.
Species appear and stay essentially the same (apart from the superficial changes
of microevolution) until they go extinct for whatever reason (catastrophe,
inability to compete for resources effectively, etc.). When "faulty" examples
appear, they're nearly always unable to put the fault into their species'
collective gene pool. A negative mutation that doesn't kill the individual it
appears in is unlikely to be passed along to posterity, despite Darwinist
assertions that this is precisely how evolution occurs. All genomes have
hard-wired checks and balances against significant changes of any kind, which is
why stasis has been the hallmark of all life since beginning here. Aberrant
examples are efficiently weeded out, either early in the reproductive process or
soon after reproduction (birth). Faulty copies are deleted.
This deletion of faults holds true in the vast majority of species. Most
genomes are--and stay--remarkably clear of gene-based defects. All species are
susceptible to mistakes in the reproductive process, such as sperm/egg
misconnections. In mammals, this produces spontaneous abortions, stillbirths or
live-birth defects. However, there are precious few defects that swim in the
gene pools of any "wild" or "natural" species. The only places we find
significant, species-wide genetic defects are in domesticated plants and
animals, and in those they can be--and often are--numerous.
Domesticated plants and animals clearly seem to have been genetically created
by "outside intervention" at some point in the distant past. (For those
interested in learning more about this, I discuss it in considerable detail in
NEXUS 9/04.) Domesticated species have so many points of divergence from
wild/natural species, it's not realistic to consider them in any kind of
relative context. As we've seen above, the same holds true for humans and the
primates we supposedly evolved from. They're apples and oranges.
We humans have over 4,000 genetic defects spread throughout our common gene
pool. Think about that. No other species comes close. And yet, our mitochondrial
DNA proves we have existed as a species for "only" about 200,000 years. Remember
the first Cro-Magnon fossils showing up in strata 120,000 years old? That fits
well with the origin of a small proto-group at around 200,000 years ago. (There
will almost certainly be Cro-Magnon fossils found prior to 120,000 years ago,
but it is unlikely they were dispersed widely enough to have left fossils near
the 200,000-year mark. Naturally, the very first one could have been fossilised,
but that's not the way to bet. Fossilisation is quite rare.)
All that being the case, how did over 4,000 genetic defects work their way
into the human gene pool, when such genome-wide defects are rare to nonexistent
in wild or natural species? (Remember, Darwin himself noticed that humans are
very much like domesticated animals in many of our physical and biological
traits.) It can only have occurred if the very first members (no more than a
handful of breeding pairs) had the entire package of faults within their genome.
That's the only way Eskimos and Watusis and all the rest of humanity can express
the exact same genetic disorders.
If we descended from apes, as Darwinists insist, then apes should have a very
large number of our genetic defects. They do not. If, on the other hand, we've
been genetically unique for only 200,000 years, then the only way those defects
could be with us is if they were put into our gene pool by the genetic
manipulation of the founding generation of our species, and the mistakes made in
that process were left in place to be handed down to posterity. And, as might be
expected, this is also how domesticated plants and animals came to have their
own inordinate numbers of genetic defects. It simply couldn't happen any other
way.
THE FINAL NAILÉ
When Einstein was asked in reference to relativity, "How did you do it?", he
replied, "I ignored an axiom." This is what everyone must do if we are to get
anywhere near the truth about human origins.
Darwinists ask us to believe a theory based on this axiom: "There are good
grounds to believe our early ancestors lived in forests. There are equally good
grounds to believe our later ancestors lived by hunting game on African
savannas. Therefore, we can assume that somehow, some way, we went from living
in forests to living on the savannas." The trick, for Darwinists, is in
explaining it plausibly.
Savanna theorists ask us to believe that, 5.0 to 10 million years ago,
several groups of forest-dwelling Miocene apes were squeezed by environmental
pressures to venture out onto the encroaching savannas to begin making their
collective living. This means they had to rise from the assumed quadrupedal
posture attributed to all Miocene apes to walk and run on two legs, thus giving
up the ease and rapidity of moving on all fours. Those early groups had to make
their way with unmodified pelvises, inappropriate single-arched spines, absurdly
under-muscled thighs and buttocks, and heads stuck on at the wrong angle, and
all the while doggedly shuffling along on the sides of long-toed, ill-adapted
feet, thereby becoming plodding skin-bags of snack-treats for savanna predators.
If any harebrained scheme ever deserved a re-think by its originator(s), this
would be the one.
Of course, the real re-think needs to be done by Darwinists, because it is
glaringly obvious that no forest-bound species of ape could have ventured onto
the savanna as a stumbling, bumbling walker and learned to do it better out
there among the big cats. If a collective group had been unfit for erect
movement on the savanna, they wouldn't have gone. If they did go, they couldn't
and wouldn't stay. Even primates are smarter than that. And understand, there
are primates that did make the move onto the savanna, albeit always remaining
within range of a high-speed scurry into nearby trees. Baboons are the most
successful of this small group, all of which have retained quadrupedal
locomotion.
In addition to the forest-to-savanna transition, Darwinists face numerous
other improbable--if not impossible--differences between humans and terrestrial
primates. In addition to bipedalism and the genetic discrepancies already
addressed, there are major differences in skin and the adipose tissue (fat)
beneath it; in sweat glands, in blood, in tears, in sex organs, in brain size
and function, and on and on and on. This is a very long list that can be
examined in much fuller detail in the work of a brilliant, determined researcher
into human origins, named Elaine Morgan.
Ms Morgan is the chief proponent of what challenged Darwinists derisively
call "the Aquatic Ape theory", as if the juxtaposition of those disparate words
were enough to dismiss it as an absurd notion. Nothing could be further from the
truth. In books like The Scars of Evolution (Souvenir Press, London, 1990), she
makes a devastating case against the notion that humans evolved from
forest-dwelling apes that moved out onto the savannas. She believes humans must
have gone through an extended period of development in and around water to
generate the bizarre array of physiological oddities we exhibit relative to the
primates we supposedly evolved from.
However, despite all her wonderfully creative work, Ms Morgan remains wedded
to the Darwinist concept of evolution, which had to play itself out in only the
200,000 years dictated by our mitochondrial DNA.
MAKING SENSE OF THE INSENSIBLE
The pieces of the puzzle are on the table. The answer is there for anyone to
see. But rearranging those pieces properly is no easy task, and it is even more
difficult to get dogmatists of any stripe to look at the picture in a light
different from their own. That has been my purpose in writing these two essays
on origins--of life and of humans. They are two of the world's most sensitive
areas of scholarship and debate, producing some of the most vitriolic exchanges
in all of academia. But vitriol, like might, doesn't make right.
I once knew a baseball player who'd pitched a no-hitter against a seriously
inferior team. Upon being criticised for the obvious imbalance between his
abilities and those of his opponents, the pitcher shrugged and said, "A
no-hitter is a no-hitter, even against Lighthouse for the Blind." And so it is
with a mistaken belief. If millions believe a thing, that doesn't make it
correct.
I believe that the facts, if fairly evaluated, will over time prove that
humans--and indeed, life itself--did not originate on Earth, and that nothing
has macroevolved on Earth. It has all been brought here and left to fend for
itself, then replaced when events required the introduction of new forms. No
other theory suits the facts nearly as well.
As for humans (the object of this essay), look back to the Miocene epoch,
where the earliest traces of our ancestors supposedly originate. Apes dominate.
Look at the fossils--the so-called "pre-humans"--from the Pliocene epoch,
starting 5.0 million years ago. Other than bipedal walking, all of their
physical aspects shout out "ape roots". Look at today's tracks, sightings and
encounters with living hominoids, Bigfoot and others. These all-too-real
creatures will one day be proved to have a direct link back to the
Miocene--which, at a stroke, will eliminate any possibility that humans and apes
share any kind of common ancestor.
We humans are not indigenous to planet Earth. We were either put here intact
or we developed here, but we did not evolve here. Our genes make clear that
we've been cut-and-pasted from other, non-primate, non-Earthly species.
Personally, I believe that the work of Zecharia Sitchin (The Earth
Chronicles) comes closest to a plausible explanation. But even if some aspects
of what he says are wrong, or even if all of it someday is proved to be wrong,
that won't change the basic facts that his work--and my own work--address.
Humans are not primates. We do indeed stand apart as a "special" creation,
long espoused by theologians and now by certain credentialled scientists. The
only question left hanging is, of course: who or what was the creator? I don't
think I'll be privileged to learn that in my lifetime. But I'm confident I'm
within reach of the next best answer.
I'm confident that we were created by invasive genetic manipulation.
DARWINISM vs. CREATIONISM
A Checkered History, A Doubtful Future
by Lloyd Pye
Starting with the Sumerians, the first great culture 6,000 years ago, through
the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, everyone accepted that some form of heavenly
beings hadcreated all of life and, as a crowning achievement, topped it off with
humans. Now, consider that for a moment. Today the CEO of a medium-sized
corporation can verbally issue an instruction to be carried out company-wide and
have no hope it will reach the lower echelons intact. So the fact that most
historical cultures, from first to most recent (our own), believed essentially
the same creation story is astonishing in its consistency.
Naturally, such long-term consistency made it extremely difficult to
challenge when the accumulation of scientific evidence could no longer be
ignored. Charles Darwin is usually credited with issuing the first call for a
rational examination of divine creation as the belief system regarding the
origins of life and humanity. However, in his 1859 classic, The Origin Of
Species, he skirted both issues in an attempt to placate his era’s dominant
power structure — organized religion. Though he used the word “origin” in the
title, he was careful to discuss only how species developed from each other, not
how life originated. And he simply avoided discussing humanity’s origins.
Ultimately, pressure from both supporters and critics forced him to tackle
that thorny issue in 1871’s The Descent Of Man; but Charles Darwin was never
comfortable at the cutting edge of the social debate he helped engineer.
The true roots of the challenge to divine creation extend 65 years prior to
Darwin, back to 1795, when two men — a naturalist and a geologist—published
stunning works. The naturalist was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather,
a brilliant intellectual in his own right. In The Laws Of Organic Life he
suggested that population numbers drove competition for resources, that such
competition was a possible agent of physical change, that humans were closely
related to monkeys and apes, and that sexual selection could have an effect on
species modification. In short, he dealt with nearly all of the important topics
his grandson would later expand upon, except natural selection.
The geologist was a Scotsman, James Hutton, whose Theory Of The Earth
suggested for the first time that Earth might be much older than 6,000 years,
then the universally accepted time frame established a century earlier by
Anglican Bishop James Ussher. (Many if not most of today’s mainstream Christians
are convinced that the creation date of 6,000 years ago is Holy Writ, even
though mortal Bishop Ussher arrived at it by the mundane method of calculating
the who begat whoms listed in the Bible.)
Hutton studied the layering of soils in geological strata and concluded that
rain washed soil off the continents and into the seas; at the bottom of the seas
heat from inside the planet turned soil into rock; over great stretches of time
the new rocks were elevated to continent level and slowly pushed up to form
mountains; then in turn those mountains were weathered away to form new layers
of soil. This unending cycle meant two things: Earth was not a static body
changed only superficially at the surface by volcanoes and earthquakes; and each
layering cycle required vast amounts of time to complete.
The significance of Hutton’s insight, to which he gave the jawbreaker name of uniformitarianism, cannot be overstated. However, he couldn’t challenge Ussher’s
6,000 year dogma because he provided no alternative to it. He was certain that
6,000 years was much too short a time span for any weathering cycle to be
completed, but in the late 18th century there was no way to accurately measure
geological eras. That would have to wait another thirty-five years until Sir
Charles Lyell, a far more methodical British analyst and researcher, could
firmly establish uniformitarianism as the basis of modern geology.
Lyell took Hutton’s work and ran with it, creating a three-volume series
called Principles Of Geology (1830-1833) that convincingly provided the time
lines and time frames Hutton lacked. Bishop Ussher’s 6,000 year dogma still held
complete sway with ecclesiastics everywhere, but the world’s burgeoning ranks of
scientists could see that Hutton and now Lyell were correct; the earth had to be
millions of years old rather than 6,000. But how to convince the still largely
uneducated masses of Ussher’s fallacy? Like Hutton before him, Lyell and his
supporters could not break through the dense wall of ignorance being perpetuated
by religious dogma. However, they had knocked several gaping cracks in it, so
when Charles Darwin came along in another thirty years (1859), the wall was
ready to begin crumbling with an echo that reverberates to this day.
Darwin was strongly influenced by Lyell, who published the first of his
geology tomes while Darwin was at Cambridge completing his last year of
theological training (he only studied nature as an avocation). He took the first
volume of the trilogy on his fateful voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and
devoured it along the way. Masterfully written and persuasively argued, it made
such an impression on the 22-year-old that in later life he said, “I really
think my books come half out of Lyell’s brain. I see through his eyes.” So
between Lyell’s genius and his grandfather Erasmus’ unconventional views about
nature instilled during his childhood, young Charles set sail toward his destiny
with a blueprint of his revolutionary theory in mind and a tool to build it in
his hands.
Without saying it outright, Darwin’s bottom line was that life’s myriad forms
managed their own existence from start to finish without divine help. This did
not take God entirely out of the equation, but it did remove His influence on a
day-to-day basis. The irony is that Charles Darwin did his work reluctantly,
being a devout man who had trained to become a minister. Nonetheless, the schism
he created between evolution (a term he never used; his choice was natural
selection) and God was the battering ram that breached the forbidding wall of
dogmatic ignorance that had stood for thousands of years.
Though breached, that wall did not come down entirely. Instead, an
ideological war erupted on both sides of what remained of it, pitting Darwinists
against Creationists in intellectual bloodletting that eventually forced some of
the wounded to seek relief in compromise. Both sides might be content, they
suggested, if God could be acknowledged as the initiator of all life, followed
by a “hands-off” policy thereafter to let nature take its evolutionary course.
All well and good. But instead, both sides adopted a winner-take-all strategy,
unwilling to make even marginal concessions to the other side’s point of view.
Allowing no room for compromise left both sides open to continuous attack,
and the salvos they exchanged were fierce and relentless. James Hutton and
Charles Lyell had proven beyond reasonable doubt that the earth was immensely
older than 6,000 years, yet they and their supporters had been overwhelmed by
the oppressive power of ecclesiastic influence. Now, however, Darwin’s arguments
supporting gradual changes over equally vast amounts of time tipped the scales
in favor of science. Public opinion began to shift. The uniform rejection of old
became tentative acceptance at an ever-increasing rate.
This alarming turn of events forced all but the most ardent Creationists to
seek ways to appease their critics, to put themselves back in the driver’s seat
of public opinion. Bishop Ussher’s unyielding time line of 6,000 years was
gradually coming to symbolize their willful disdain of reality, like a chain
draped around their necks, drowning them as the tide of understanding shifted
the sand beneath their feet. They began to modify their insistence that God had
created everything in the universe exactly as recounted in the Bible. They could
suddenly see the wisdom of granting Him the latitude to accomplish His miracles
in six eras of unspecified length rather than in six literal days.
Of course, Creationists did more than hit the reverse pedal on their
sputtering juggernaut. The brightest of them dug deep into Darwin’s emerging
theory to discover holes nearly equal to the ones scientists were exposing in
religious dogma. In 1873, only fourteen years after The Origin Of Species,
geologist J.W. Dawson, chancellor of McGill University in Montreal, published
The Story Of The Earth And Man, which was every bit as well written and as
carefully argued as Darwin’s masterpiece. In it Dawson pointed out that Darwin
and his followers were promoting a theory based on three fallacious “gaps” in
reasoning that could not be reconciled with the knowledge of their era. What is
so telling about Dawson’s three fallacies is that they remain unchanged to this
day.
The first fallacy is that life can spontaneously animate from organic
material. In 1873 Dawson complained that “the men who evolve all things from
physical forces do not yet know how these forces can produce the phenomenon of
life even in its humblest forms.” He added that “in every case heretofore, the
effort (to create animate life) has proved vain.” After 127 years of heavily
subsidized effort by scientists all over the world to create even the most basic
rudiments of life, they are still batting an embarrassing zero. In any other
scientific endeavor, reason would dictate it is time to call in the dogs and
water down the fire. But when it comes to Darwinian logic, as Dawson noted in
1873, “here also we are required to admit as a general principle what is
contrary to experience.”
Dawson’s second fallacy was the gap that separates vegetable and animal life.
“These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes and
accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or decay does
the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never in its
simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. This gap can, I believe, be
filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance.” And thus it remains today. If
life did evolve as Darwinists claim, it would have had to bridge the gap between
plant and animal life at least once, and more likely innumerable times. Lacking
one undeniable example of this bridging, science is again batting zero.
The third gap in the knowledge of 1873 was “that between any species of
animal or plant and any other species. It is this gap, and this only, which
Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species; but,
notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as wide
as ever, since it must be admitted that no case has been ascertained in which
individuals of one species have transgressed the limits between it and other
species.” Here, too, despite a ceaseless din of scientific protests to the
contrary, there remains not a single unquestioned example of one species
evolving entirely—not just partially—into another distinct and separate species.
To be fair, some of today’s best-known geneticists and naturalists have
broken ranks and acknowledged that what Dawson complained about in 1873 remains
true today. Thomas H. Morgan, who won a Nobel Prize for work on heredity, wrote
that “Within the period of human history, we do not know of a single instance of
the transformation of one species into another if we apply the most rigid and
extreme tests used to distinguish wild species.” Colin Patterson, director of
the British Museum of Natural History, has stated that “No one has ever produced
a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has gotten near it.” And
these are by no means extraordinary disclosures. Every scientist in related
fields is well aware of it, but shamefully few have the nerve to address it
openly.
By the time Darwin died, in 1882, one of his most zealous supporters, German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel, had produced a series of drawings that showed the
developing embryos of various mammals (rabbit, pig, chimp, man) were virtually
identical until well into their gestation. This had been a great comfort to
Darwin in his old age, but by 1915 it was clear that Haeckel had forged the
drawings. Nonetheless, they served Darwinists so well that Haeckel’s forgery
conviction at the University of Jena, where he taught, was conveniently
overlooked, and his drawings can still be found in modern texts supporting
evolution. In fact, any reader of this article who was taught evolution in
school will very likely have seen Haeckel’s drawings in textbooks and been
assured they were legitimate.
A more widely known fraudulent attempt to support Darwin’s flagging theory
was England’s famous Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, which was an ancient human skull
found in conjunction with a modern orangutan’s lower jaw that had been doctored
(its teeth filed down to look more human) and aged to match the look of the
skull. This was much more important than Haeckel’s fraud because it provided the
desperately sought “missing link” between humans and their proposed ape-like
ancestors.
Nearly all of England’s evolutionary top guns swung in behind the fraud, and
their colleagues worldwide joined them with such zeal that it took 40 years to
expose it for what it was. However, the damage it caused to the search for truth
had already been done. The world became so convinced that Darwinian evolution
was true and correct, it was just a matter of time before Creationists would
draw a line in the dirt and call for a last great battle to decide the issue
once and for all. That battle did come, to an obscure American hamlet called
Dayton, Tennessee, 75 years ago (July, 1925).
The “Monkey Trial,” as H.L. Mencken dubbed it, revolved around John Scopes, a
24-year-old gym teacher and football coach who once substituted for the regular
biology teacher in Dayton’s high school. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) chose him as its point man because he vocally disagreed with a new
Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution instead of, or alongside,
the Biblical account of creation. He also was unmarried, incurring no risk to a
family by allowing himself to be prosecuted.
Though now one of many so-called “trials of the century,” this one drew 200
reporters from 2,000 newspapers across the country and the world. It has since
generated hundreds of books, plays, television movies, and feature films. In
October, 1999, George magazine chose it the fourth most important event of the
20th century. Yet historian Garry Wills has astutely called it “a nontrial over
a nonlaw with a nondefendant backed by nonsupporters. Its most profound moment
involved nontestimony by a nonexpert, followed by a nondefeat.” Without question
it can stand alongside the O.J. Simpson debacle as a world-class black eye for
the American legal system.
All during the trial Clarence Darrow, a staunch Darwinist and Scopes’ lawyer,
tangled with William Jennings Bryan, an equally staunch Creationist who
represented the State of Tennessee. Both were outstanding advocates and renowned
orators, and each was certain he could outtalk the other and convince the world
of the rightness of his vision of creation. However, Darrow’s rapier wit
shredded Bryan’s assertions that the Bible was a literal record of God’s
sacrosanct word. Bryan won from a legal standpoint because the issue in question
was whether Scopes had defied his state’s law, which he admitted all along in
order to get the trial arranged in the first place. Scopes was convicted and
fined $100, which was later overturned on a technicality, so in the end he was
vindicated.
More than anything else, the Monkey Trial was staged to settle the
Darwinism-Creationism debate once and for all by pitting the most eloquent
defender of each in a mouth-to-mouth duel on a world stage that no one could
ignore. And when the dust had settled it was clear the rolling tide of history
would not be turned. The mounting support for Darwinism crested in a tsunami of
doubt—and even ridicule—that crashed down on Creationists everywhere, sweeping
them from the dominant positions they had enjoyed for centuries, into the social
and political backwaters they endured for decades.
Though clearly knocked down by the Darrow/Scopes haymaker, the Creationists
were far from out. They lowered their profile and became relatively inactive
through the Depression and the years of World War II, waiting until society
stabilized in the 1950’s. Then they rallied their troops and resumed attacking
educational systems, where young minds were being indoctrinated with Darwinist
dogma. And this time they did it right. Instead of wasting effort and money
lobbying state legislatures, they moved out into the heartland and focused on
local school boards, insisting belief in evolution was costing America its faith
in God and religion, and destroying morality and traditional family life.
When the social eruptions of the 1960’s appeared, Creationists were quick to
say “We told you so!” They blamed the teaching of “Godless evolution” as a
primary cause, demanding that religion be put back in schools as a quick way to
return to “the good old days.” At the same time, they hit upon their most
brilliant tactic yet: formally changing their basic tenet from “Biblical
Creationism” to “Creation Science.” Then, in an equally brilliant stroke, they
shifted from lobbying school boards to getting themselves elected to them.
Predictably, they enjoyed great success in the Bible Belt girdling the Deep
South.
Apart from making most real scientists gag every time they hear it, “Creation
Science” provided Creationists with the cachet of authority they had been
seeking—and needing—since Darwin so thoroughly sandbagged them. And, it has been
remarkably effective in shifting public opinion away from the scientific
position. Gallup Polls taken in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999 show the percentage
of Americans who believed “God created human beings in their present form at one
time within the past 10,000 years” was 44%, 47%, 44%, and 47% respectively. In a
recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll asking people what they thought about
human origins, 15% said they accepted Darwinian evolution, 50% believed the
Biblical account, and 26% felt there was truth on both sides. The most
perceptive group might well have been the 9% who said they were not sure.
One could argue that those numbers are more of a comment on America’s failing
educational system than on the effectiveness of Creationist strategies. But in
any case, the Creationist cacophony reached a fever pitch in August of last
year, when the Kansas State Board of Education voted by a 6 to 4 margin to
eliminate from the state’s high school curricula the teaching of not only
biological evolution, which received virtually all media focus, but also of
geology’s “Old Earth” theories, and of cosmology’s “Big Bang” of universal
creation. The Kansas School Board went after science across the board.
That vote has been by far the high point of the modern Creationist offensive,
but courts are still loath to accept any comparison between so-called “Creation”
science and what is considered “real” science. In 1981 Arkansas and Louisiana
passed laws requiring that Creationism be taught in public schools. In 1982 a
U.S. District Court declared the Arkansas law unconstitutional. In 1987 the
Louisiana case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled Creationism was
essentially a religious explanation of life’s origins and therefore favored one
religion (Christianity) over others (Islam, Hindu, etc.).
As usual, after the 1987 defeat the Creationists went back to the drawing
board and devised yet another shrewd strategy, which has carried them through
the 1990’s and into this new millennium. They have transformed “Creation
Science” into theories they call “Sudden Appearance” outside the Bible Belt, or
“Intelligent Design” within it. Both versions carefully avoid referring to God
by name or to specific aspects of religion, but they strongly focus on the
Achilles heel of Darwinism, which is that all species thus far discovered in the
fossil record appear suddenly, whole and complete, males and females, leaving no
plausible way they could have evolved by Darwinian gradualism.
Fortunately for Darwinists, the legal protection provided by the Supreme
Court currently trumps the Achilles heel their rivals keep pointing out. But
that tide is |
