But what are these forces? Here’s where the fudging begins: We are told, for example, that it is a recombination of factors that exist in the gene pool, or repatterning of the genotype, or genetic drift that accounts for random changes in the proportion of genes. Grasping at straws, these formulas are makeshift at best.
In the 1980s, British-Australian biochemist Michael Denton mounted an incisive case against the “implausibility of selectionist explanations.” This brilliant molecular biologist makes mincemeat of Darwinism’s imagined phylogeny, which he suggests is on a par with “medieval astrology.”6
No, I don’t think the orangutan ever held the “potentiality . . . [of] becoming man,”7 nor does the worm “strive to be man,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson mused in a moment of poetic madness. The idea that we ultimately descend from a wood louse or insectivore sounds, to one critic, like “a Kafkaesque joke.”8
Some critics say the supposed evolution of complex structures—from flagellum of bacteria to the human eye—is mathematically impossible. The eye, to England’s William Paley, was a designed instrument, like a telescope. Darwin himself, who admired Paley’s writing, owned that “to suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances . . . could have been formed by natural selection, seems I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”9 Even his great American admirer the Harvard botanist Asa Gray thought that Darwin was unable to explain the eye by natural selection: How could “the eye, though it came to see, not be designed [e.a.] for seeing?”10 One mathematician argued that there was insufficient time for the number of mutations apparently needed to make an eye. Another mathematician has said that a simple adaptive change involving only six mutations could not occur by chance in less than a billion years. In fact “the probability of evolution by mutation and natural selection is inconceivable.” The odds of the eye evolving by chance are ten billion to one.11 When testing this possibility on computer programs, “it just jams . . . [indicating] zero probability.”12
ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM: PULLING THE CLIMATE CARD
Nature does not seem to have achieved any significant modifications of existing hominid species.
JEFFREY GOODMAN, THE GENESIS MYSTERY
With nothing else—other than Divine Power—to explain the wonderful differences between species, environment then became anointed as the god of change. Pulling the climate card, theory now tells us that human evolution, occurring in Africa, was caused by major aridification: men evolved in adaptive response to the drying out of forest land and the subsequent appearance of savanna land. The whole argument is based on the assumption that man evolved in response to a drying Africa (see chapter 11). But since such different groups as Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens overlap in time and space, it became harder to explain their differences according to climate—considering their shared environment.
It has also been pointed out that, rather than adapt to drastic environmental changes, species tend to move away in search of a habitat like the one they were in. The fact that animals usually choose their habitats and flee from inhospitable environments (those all-powerful selective pressures) just about “pulls the rug from under the whole Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection.”13 Creatures like to investigate their surroundings, changes arising not from the selective pressure of the environment, but from the initiative of the living organism.14
Despite all the damning evidence trouncing natural selection, boilerplate explanations still abound—improvisation at its best. Neanderthaloid prognathism, for example, evolved because it “kept cold air away from the brain.”15 Only a few problems here: (1) cold climate cannot account for Neanderthal’s sloped forehead, chinlessness, large browridge, retromolar gap, and round eyes; (2) The German Neanderthals living in the Valley of the Ilm “enjoyed a warmer climate than now.”16 This adaptation business is “pure speculation . . . the famous Neanderthals of Krapina, in Croatia, actually enjoyed a pleasant climate.”17 As did the Neanderthals in the Near East and North Africa.
The environment plays only a very limited role in the actual creation of new genetic variants.
AARON G. FILLER, THE UPRIGHT APE
What about the assumption that people like the Inuit developed bulky bodies and short limbs to help conserve heat, thus properly adapting to a cold environment? I would argue, though, that length of limbs, like stature, is quite simply an inherited trait. Short legs are the unmistakable legacy from early man. And since the Inuit were probably the last arrivals to Native America, they came on the scene (less than 12 kya) looking rather as they do today.
If, as the evolutionary argument runs, short and stocky Neanderthal got that way due to a cold climate, why then are northern Europeans (in the coldest clime) long legged, tall, and slim? And if taller is better suited to heat, why are the northern Mongoloids taller than the southern ones? The first H. sapiens in Europe, it is argued (to smooth away the contradiction), were slimmer than Neanderthal because they had previously adapted to the warmer climates of the Mideast and Africa. The alternative explanation, of course, is inheritance: gracile AMH genes made them so.
The climate card also cranks out a case for “cold-adapted” Mongolian features (like the broad noses), even though many Asian races live and lived in hot and moist tropics. In Europe, as one moves north, noses actually narrow (rather than broaden, as theory predicts). Scandinavians have small, narrow noses. So do the Inuit. I guess they weren’t around when evolution was happening.
The races of man, in short, give no evidence that differences in nose form have anything whatever to do with cold air. Why do the little white monkeys, adapted to China’s coldest region, have such cute tiny, turned-up, snub noses? It is the opinion of some, moreover, that a smaller nose is actually more adaptive to cold—to reduce the risk of frostbite! At all events, the wide Neanderthal nose would not really heat incoming air, it would dissipate it. And with all this evidence piling up against Neanderthal’s “specialized” snoot, anthropologists are saying, yeah, we were wrong about the “radiator” nose, it was probably just a trait inherited from their ancestors. Back to square one.
Along the same lines, William Howells suggested that large-bodied, big-headed people in the western Pacific must be “the result of a little natural selection . . . [given] the constant cooling breezes that blew from the open Pacific over the islands of Polynesia . . . [whereby] loss of body heat could be a serious matter. Large bodies have a relatively smaller surface-to-bulk ratio, so that heat preservation . . . is better.”*114 18
The same school of extemporizing submits that exertion under the tropical sun led to reduction of body hair; yet man’s “peculiar larval nakedness is difficult to explain on survival principles,”19 and the loss of a hairy covering is actually disadvantageous, even in the tropics, since it exposes the body to the scorching sun. “It is improbable that this denudation could have come about through natural selection . . . there is no appreciable relationship between climate and the amount of body hair.”20
As flattering as it may be to think of ourselves as adaptable, flexible creatures, we are not so plastic as argued by these overplayed “explanations,” which ignore man’s inherited or intrinsic attributes. Magazines and journals are lousy with adaptive explanations for everything from stubby legs to long noses. But may I ask: Why do women have a wider pelvis than men? Will you explain that by natural selection? No, it is simply inherent design. Even Lucy’s modernized pelvis cannot be chalked up to evolutionary pressure: Why is the human pelvic opening larger than that of the apes? The ready answer is that it was an adaptive change allowing for the larger-headed human infant to pass through. Yet the head size of Lucy’s people (australopiths) was no larger than an ape’s.
“Adapative” is so broadly used, it loses all meaning: “Intelligence is obviously adaptive,”21 but consider this—apes are smarter than monkeys but are going extinct while monkeys abound. Go figure.
ON THEIR HIND LEGS
There is no end to these contrived explanations: the
teeth of first man Ardi (Asu) were short and blunt (humanlike) because the males “no longer needed to bare sharp fangs to scare off competing males” (and get the gals). Instead, they now won the gals by going far off “on their hind legs,”22 bringing back enticing gifts of food! This fishy line of reasoning is part of the vaunted but improbable savanna hypothesis, which argues that human bipedalism evolved simply from the need to walk increased distances across open territory (the dry savanna of Africa). Part of evolution’s presumptive logic and circular reasoning is the habit of explaining things by a need for them.
Climate change, it is asserted, having transformed Ardi’s Africa into open grassland (savanna), made standing upright a great advantage. Ardi thus became bipedal due to walking and food gathering, or perhaps by looking over tall grasses (constant surveillance against predators favored a standing posture), even though: (1) George Gaylord Simpson himself, the acclaimed comparative zoologist and champion of neo-Darwinism, says bipedality is an adaptation to desert, (2) “bipedalism is not really the best way of getting around in a hostile world,”23 (3) there are disadvantages to bipedalism: a monkey can outrun a human being, (4) baboons get on quite well on four legs in the savanna, indeed making faster escape from the toothed predators of that open environment, and (5) finally, upright bipedal posture may go deeper into primate history: the “common ancestor” of both chimps and humans could have been already bipedal, say some theorists. Nevertheless, it is held that humans got bipedal because of the need to carry things in their hands, or perhaps the need to expose less body surface to the sun. The final pitch is high drama: If our ancestors had remained in the forest and not gone on to savanna life, “we would not be here.”24
But who can believe such fables? That these conjectural scenarios led to major structural change is as whimsical as the Lamarckian principle of acquired characteristics being inherited.
Down from the trees, but not out of the woods: Another problem with all this is that Ardi (Asu) probably lived in woodlands, not open plains, at least according to paleobiologist Tim White. For example, Laetoli (Au) was already bipedal while living in Tanzania’s woodlands, not in savanna. Earliest man was a creature of the woodlands, a closed habitat (only later was his mixed descendant, Au, associated with open country). Soil research says the African savanna itself is not even 3 myr, while Ardi has been dated to 4.4 myr.
The philosophy of evolution stands or falls on the platform of natural selection, which postulates that the changes that define species come about through adaptations to the rigors of life. Hence, survival of the fittest, meaning: those best equipped to adjust to a given environment have an edge in survival and a better chance of reproducing after their own kind. Which is fine, theoretically; but evolution then boils down to a negative meaning, really, which is to say: The important changes in the gene pool will be the elimination of characteristics too feeble or ill suited to meet the demands of life. Natural selection, in other words, selects or filters out the weaker strains. But how does it account for new and better genes? Or for brand-new species? Where does the improved stuff come from?
Being a conservative force, natural selection merely prevents the survival of extremes, removing defective organisms in order to keep the status quo. Its work is to weed out deleterious genetic information, not innovative or creative at all, but pruning. It “chooses” from among a pool of variations—nothing actually new is introduced.
So where do novel genes come from (like H. sapiens’ prominent chin, high forehead, bigger brain)? They presumably turn up by mutations, which of course are incidental, haphazard events. Despite this randomity, genetic mutations are royally crowned as the grand force behind the development of humankind—the human brain! Could chance events have fashioned the cerebral cortex in all its complexity, with more than ten billion cells all carefully coordinated? Darwinists say yes; let’s have a look at their reasoning.
THE TOOL-FOOD-BRAIN CONNECTION
Recent workers, such as Meave Leakey (along with Richard himself and anthropologist Robert Martin), tell us that the brain requires a great deal of high-energy food; therefore, early man’s increasingly creative use of tools (for hunting, hence for meat getting) must have been the impetus for brain growth. The energy provided now by hunted meat supposedly fueled the development of a bigger brain: “Meat and bone marrow gave them the extra energy to grow larger brains.”25 Thus did technological advances and hunting allegedly give us not only more gracile bodies but also better brains.
But have we got the cart before the horse here? This is the same sort of spurious causality argued by Louis Leakey in 1960—that tool use sped up the evolution of the Zinj hominids (he later abandoned this fruitless argument). Indeed, Ernst Mayr pointed out that freeing the arms to use tools could not have been the main reason for the increase of brain size, for even apes use tools. Nevertheless, a minute later, Mayr said Au’s need for “ingenuity” (against predators) is the deciding factor that “created a powerful selection pressure for an increase in brain size”!26
No hominid species shows any trend to increased brain size during its existence.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD, “EVOLUTION: EXPLOSION NOT ASCENT,” NEW YORK TIMES
But let me stop and ask: Could tools really have refined our anatomy? Or is it a fact that those people who used tools in the first place were already AMH, the earliest Ihin-blooded races? I agree with George Frederick Wright who contended that the more modern behaviors are the results of greater mental capacity “rather than their cause. It is not the use of tools that has produced his mental capacity. It is his mental capacity which has invented tools.”27
It is hard to believe such patent chimeras (tools made the man), given that Hooton, so long ago, cautioned that no “gorilla will ever invent a knife or fork; and if he did invent them and use them, I doubt if his jaws would shrink. . . . Handling things does not necessarily produce thought, nor do tools make the brain grow.” Why do today’s workers ignore his warning against “facile mechanistic interpretations of . . . evolutionary changes . . . evolving an entirely new species out of a new habit.”28 Carl Sagan, for example, had man’s knowledge of tools “even-tually propelling such feeble and almost defenseless primates into domination of the planet Earth.”29 Tool use, as we saw, is also claimed as a cause of bipedalism (according to C. Loring Brace and many others), even though bipedal Au. afarensis (Lucy) had no tools; tool use actually came “long after bipedalism.”30
HOT FOOD AND BIG BRAINS
What stimulated human evolution from our apelike ancestors? Cooking, says Harvard University biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, a former student of Jane Goodall. That way, more nutrition reached our energy-hungry cerebrums, allowing them to “evolve” to their present capacity. This is how H. erectus got such dramatically larger brains than Au (a jump of 400 cc): their use of fire for cooking.31
In Darwin’s own time, the Archbishop of Dublin saw Darwin’s theory as “Lamarck’s cooked up afresh . . . [especially] the conversion of the unaided savage into the civilized man.”32 Even though modern theorists have thoroughly discredited the old Lamarckian doctrine of habitual behavior influencing genes, here it is again, driving the theory that Neanderthal’s ruggedness (large incisors, forward position of jaws, long face, supraorbital torus, and low cranium) developed out of his habitual use of teeth as tool; and also that fire and cooking eventually reduced the massive jaws of early Pleistocene man. I think we made more sense one century ago, following Arthur Keith’s “full examination of all the facts [which] has compelled me to reject such Lamarckian explanations.”33 Mayr, for one, doesn’t much care for Wrangham’s assumptions: “Almost everything in this scenario is controversial . . . [especially] the date when fire was tamed.”34
Figure 9.2. Sir Arthur Keith.
Nonetheless Wrangham seems to have good company: Milford Wolpoff found an “evolutionary” trend of cheek teeth getting smaller as AMHs began “evolving,” the progressive change supposedly reflecting improvem
ents in food preparation. According to Brace, excellent tools reduce the size of molars and the bulky shape of face and jaw.35 Brace then used these “changes” to explain why Australia’s northern Aborigines, with greater “technological elaborations,” like seed grinders and nets, have smaller teeth than southern Aborigines, who lack this technology. I’ll stick with Hooton, who, concerning this supposed dental reduction in African groups, inferred that “this size diminution may have been caused by hybridization [e.a.] of the large-brained type with . . . pygmies.”36
All these primordial cooks are a misdirection: “There is no positive evidence . . . the Pithecanthropines even knew fire.”37 At the famous Peking site, the hearths (the ash deposits in these caves) could have just as well belonged to a more advanced type (like the Ihuan hordes) who hunted H. erectus! After all, Weidenreich showed that Peking man coexisted with AMHs. Or Peking Man’s remains “may have been introduced by carnivores. . . . The ash layers are not hearths and may not even be ash. . . . Animal bones in the deposit are not evidence of hominid diet.”38 Lumps of burned clay could simply represent tree stumps consumed by brush fires; “baked” clays and ashes could be natural objects of volcanic origin, prairie fires, or lightning (“geofacts” versus artifacts).
Druks did not cook their food, though they ate all manner of flesh and fish and creeping things; probably their main meat was carrion. According to a recent study, they snacked more extensively on termites than on meat. Even late in the game (around 6 kya), the ground people (in Egypt) were still eating fish, worms, bugs, and roots. Druks may have been carnivorous (H. erectus sites suggest baboon kills), but not necessarily hunters; heck, even Au ate baboon brains.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 30