DARWINISM vs. CREATIONISM
A Checkered History, A Doubtful Future
Ó Lloyd Pye 2000
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 had created 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 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 running and running strong. Eventually it will turn on them the way the tide of ignorance turned on Creationists when Darwin appeared, and then again at the Monkey Trial. But as long as its legal protection remains intact, Darwinist dogma is in no imminent danger of being confronted with Creationist dogma in the nation’s classrooms. In fact, all this could soon be moot because many school districts have responded to the pressures being applied to them by refusing to teach either viewpoint, which will leave a large and serious hole in the educational background of our next generation of students.
Despite the extreme volatility of these issues, and the immediate rancor received after aligning with the “wrong” side in someone else’s view, any objective analysis will conclude that both Darwinists and Creationists are wrong to a significant degree. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when each can shoot such gaping holes in the other? If either side was as correct as, say, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which—apart from occasional dissonance with quantum mechanics—has faced no serious challenge since Einstein revealed it to an awestruck world in 1915, there would be no issues to debate: one side would be declared right, the other would be wrong, and that would be that.
We all know “right” when we see it, just as we all should know “wrong.” Anyone without a vested interest should be willing to accept that the earth is vastly older than 6,000 years. Likewise, despite widespread proof of the noticeable changes in body parts called for by microevolution, there is no clearly definitive evidence for the innumerable species-into-higher-species transformations required by macroevolution. If Charles Darwin were alive today and could be presented with the facts that have accumulated since his death, even he would have to admit his theory has turned out wrong.
Let us make the assertion, then, that both Darwinists and Creationists are wrong to such a degree that their respective theories are ripe for overthrow. It is simply a matter of time and circumstance before one or another piece of evidence appears that is so clear in its particulars and so overwhelming in its validity, both sides will have no choice but to lay down their bullhorns and laptops and slink off into history’s dustbin, where so many other similarly bankrupt theories have gone before them. But until that happens, what about those who would choose to explore more objective and possibly more accurate scenarios for the creation of life itself and human life in particular?
Because of their all-out, do-or-die strategies, Darwinists and Creationists stand at opposite ends of a very wide intellectual spectrum, which leaves a huge swath of middle ground available to anyone with the courage to explore it. Moreover, the signposts along that middle ground are numerous and surprisingly easy to negotiate. All that’s required is a willingness to see with open eyes and to perceive with an open mind.
The basic Darwinist position regarding how life began is called “spontaneous animation,” which J.W. Dawson complained about back in 1873. It is the idea that life somehow springs into existence suddenly, all by itself, when proper mixtures of organic and inorganic compounds are placed into proximity and allowed to percolate their way across the immensely deep chasm between non-life and life. Based on everything known about the technical aspects of that process—from 1873 until now—it is quite safe to say spontaneous animation doesn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance of enduring.
Ignore the howls of protest echoing from far off to our right. Here on the middle ground reality rules, and reality says there is simply no way even the simplest life form—say, a sub-virus-sized microbe utilizing only a handful of RNA/DNA components—could have pulled itself together from any conceivable brew of chemical compounds and started functioning as a living entity. To cite just one reason, no laboratory has ever found a way to coax lipids into forming themselves into a functional cell membrane, which is essential for encasing any living microbe. Then there is permeability, which would also have to be a part of the mix so nutrients could be taken into the cell and wastes could be expelled.
Fred Hoyle, a brilliant English astronomer and mathematician, once offered what has become the most cogent analogy for this process. He said it would be comparable to “a tornado striking a junkyard and assembling a jetliner from the materials therein.” This is because the complexity evident at even the tiniest level of life is mind boggling beyond belief. In short, it could not and did not happen, and anyone insisting otherwise is simply wrong, misguided, or terrified of dealing with what its loss means to their world view.
So, if spontaneous animation is simply not possible, how does life come into existence? How can it be? Here we must call on an old friend, Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of saying that in any quest for truth one should first eliminate whatever is flatly impossible. Whatever remains, however unlikely, will be the truth. With spontaneous animation eliminated, that leaves only one other viable alternative: intervention at some level by some entity or entities. (Ignore the rousing cheers erupting far to our left.)
Before anyone in our group of middle-ground explorers goes jogging off toward those would-be winners, understand that “entity or entities” does not mean “God” in the anthropomorphic sense espoused by Creationists. It means some aspect or aspects of our present reality that we do not officially acknowledge—yet—but which nonetheless exist and act on us, and interact with us, in ways we are only just beginning to understand.
As of today, all human beings are bound by three dimensions. We are born into them, we live in them, and we die in them. During our lives we struggle to fit all of our personal experiences into them. Some of us, however, undergo experiences or receive insights which indicate other levels of reality might exist. These don’t manifest in our usual corporeal (body) sense, but in purely ethereal forms that nonetheless have enough substance to make them perceivable by those locked into the three known dimensions.
For as woo-woo metaphysical as that might seem at first glimpse, please take a closer look. There is a slowly emerging branch of “new” science which deals with these other dimensions. Called hyperdimensional physics, it concerns itself with devising and executing experiments that—however briefly—provide glimpses into these other realms of reality. It is not greatly different from the earliest days of Einstein’s time-and-motion studies, when he was trying to break the 200-year-old academic straitjacket imposed by Newtonian physics. Now Einstein’s revolutionary physics has become the straitjacket, and hyperdimensional physics will eventually become the means to break out of it and move humanity to a much higher level of awareness and understanding of true reality.
Detailing these experiments is grist for another mill, but suffice to say that string theorists are leading the charge. (Their subatomic “theory of everything” requires ten or more new dimensions in order to be considered valid.) In due course they and others will progress from the barest glimpses being obtained at present to fully opening the doors to those other dimensions. When they do, they are likely to find them populated by the kind of entity or entities discussed earlier, beings who are not necessarily “God” with a capital “G,” but rather “gods” with small “g’s.” Perhaps, even, the same plural “gods” mentioned in Genesis (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”) But that, too, is grist for another mill. However, it does lead into an analysis of how humanity came to be as it is.
The problem is simple: nobody in any conceivable position of power wants to confront the truth about human origins. No scientist, no politician, no clergyman could hope to preserve his or her authority—at whatever level—after actively coming forward with the truth about this incendiary subject. They have all seen colleagues “disappeared” from their ranks for stepping out of line, so they know retribution is swift and sure.
As noted above, Creationists insist that God (a singular male now, reduced from the genderless plurals of original Biblical text) created man in His own image, after His own likeness. Well, if that’s true, He must have been having a heck of a bad day, because we humans are a poorly designed species. True, we do have highly capable brains, but for some reason we are only allowed to use a relatively small portion of them. (Now we will hear frantic howls of protest from the scientists off to our right, but ignore them. If 100 idiot savants can access 100 different portions of their brains to perform their astounding intellectual feats, then those same portions must be in our brains, too, but our normalcy keeps us from being able to access them. Period.)
Morally we are a terrible mishmash of capacities, capable of evil incarnate at one moment and love incarnate the next, while covering every range of emotion in between. Physically we carry more than 4,000 genetic disorders, with each of us averaging about 50 (some carry many more, some many less). New ones are found on a regular basis. No other species has more than a handful of serious ones, and none which kill 100% of carriers before they can reach maturity and reproduce. We have dozens of those. So how did they get into us? Better yet, how do they stay in us? If they are 100% fatal before reproduction is possible, how could they possibly spread through our entire gene pool?
If we assume God was at His best the day He decided to create us, functioning in His usual infallible mode, that gives Him no legitimate excuse for designing us so poorly. Surely He could have given us no more physical disorders than, say, our nearest genetic relatives, gorillas and chimps. A little albinism never hurt any species, not those two or ours or dozens of others that carry it, so why couldn’t He just leave it at that? What could have been the point of making us much less genetically robust than all the other species we are supposed to be masters of?
There is no point to it, which is my point. It simply didn’t happen that way.
Now, let’s examine the Darwinist dogma that humans descended from primates (chimps and gorillas) by gradually transitioning through a four-million-year-long series of prehumans known as Australopithecines (Lucy, etc.) and early Homos (Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, etc.). Even though Australopithecines undoubtedly walked upright (their kind would have left the famous pair of bipedal tracks at Laetoli, Tanzania, 3.5 million years ago), their skulls are so ape-like as to be ineligible as a possible human ancestor. But let’s assume that somehow they bridged the evolutionary gap between themselves and early Homos, which indeed are in the ballpark of physical comparison with humans.
Notice that in any series of photos showing the skulls of the Homo prehumans, little changes over time except the size of their brains, which increase by leaps of roughly 200 cubic centimeters between species. Every bone in those skulls is much denser and heavier than in humans; they all had missing foreheads; huge brow ridges; large, round eye sockets holding nocturnal (night) vision eyes; wide cheekbones; broad nasal passages beneath noses that had to splay flat across their faces (no uplift of bone to support an off-the-face nose); mouths that extend outward in the prognathous fashion; and no chins.
Each of those features is classic higher primate, and they predominate in the fossil record until only 120,000 years ago, when genuinely human-looking creatures—the Cro-Magnons—appear literally “overnight” (in geological terms), with absolutely everything about them starkly different from their predecessors. In fact, the list of those differences is so lengthy, it is safe to say humans are not even primates! (More howls of outrage from off to our right, but please keep to the middle ground and consider the evidence.)
According to our mitochondrial DNA, humans have existed as a distinct species for only about 200,000 years, give or take several thousand. This creates quite a problem for Darwinists because they contend we are part of the sequence extending back through the Australopithecines at four million years ago. Furthermore, we should follow directly after the Neanderthals, which followed Homo Erectus. But now the Neanderthals, which existed for about 300,000 years and overlapped Cro-Magnons by about 100,000 of those, have provided mitochondrial samples which indicate they are not related closely enough to humans to be direct ancestors. This compounds yet another serious transition problem because human brains are on average 100 cubic centimeters smaller than Neanderthal brains! How might that have happened if we are on a direct ancestral line with them?
Anthropologists are now left with only Homo Erectus as a possible direct ancestor for humans, and Erectus supposedly went extinct 300,000 years ago—100,000 before we appeared. Obviously, something had to give here, and—as in war—truth has been the first casualty. Recently anthropologists started reevaluating Homo Erectus fossils from Indonesia and guess what? They are now finding possible dates as early as 30,000 years ago, well beneath the 120,000 years ago Cro-Magnons first appeared in the fossil record. Such a surprise! However, scientists still have to account for our “sudden” appearance and our wide array of new traits never before seen among primates.
Understand this: humans are not primates! Yes, we do fit the technical definition of having flexible hands and feet with five digits, but beyond that there is no reasonable comparison to make. We don’t have primate bone density (theirs is far more robust than ours) or muscular strength (pound for pound they are 5 to 10 times stronger than we are); but we do have foreheads; minimal brow ridges; small, rectangular-shaped eye sockets holding poor night-vision eyes; narrow nasal passages with noses that protrude off our faces; mouths that are flat rather than prognathous; we have chins; and we are bipedal.
Apart from those skeletal differences, we don’t have primate brains (that is an understatement!), throats (we can’t eat or drink and breathe at the same time; they can); voices (they can make loud calls, but we can modulate them into the tiny pieces of sound that make up words); body covering (they all have pelts of hair from head to toe, thick on the back and lighter on the front; we have no pelt and our thickness pattern is reversed); we cool ourselves by sweating profusely (they tend to pant, though some sweat lightly); we shed tears of emotion (no other primate does); we do not regulate our salt intake (all other primates do); we have a layer of fat of varying thickness attached to the underside of our skin, which primates do not have; that fat layer prevents wounds to our skin from healing as easily as wounds to primate skin; human females have no estrus cycle, as do all primates; but the number one difference between humans and primates is that humans have only 46 chromosomes while all higher primates have 48!
This last fact is the clincher. You can’t lose two entire chromosomes (think how much DNA that is!) from your supposedly “parent” species and somehow end up better. And not just better, a light year better! It defies logic to the point where any reasonable person should be willing to concede that something “special” happened in the case of humans, something well beyond the ordinary processes of life on Earth. And it did. The “missing” chromosomes, it turns out, are not actually missing. The second and third chromosomes in higher primates have somehow been spliced together (there is no other term for it) by an utterly inexplicable—some might call it “miraculous”— technique.
Once again, the only plausible explanation seems to be intervention. But by whom? The same hyperdimensional entity or entities that might have created life in the first place? Not necessarily. Certainly that would have to be considered as a possibility, but humans were probably a breeze to create relative to initiating life and engineering all subsequent forms. That leaves room for three-dimensional assistance. In other words, we could have been created as we are by other three-dimensional beings who for reasons of their own decided to make us “in their own image, after their own likeness.”
Accepting such a heretical explanation would certainly go a long way toward resolving these anomalies about humanity: (1) our many inexplicable differences from primates; (2) our all-too-sudden appearance in the fossil record; (3) our much-too-recent speciation; (4) our lack of a clear ancestor species; (5) our astounding number of genetic flaws; and (6) the unmistakable splicing done to our second and third chromosomes. The last two are, not surprisingly, hallmarks of hybridization and genetic manipulation, which is exactly how human origins were accounted for by—get this—the ancient Sumerians! We began this essay with them, and now we will end it with them.
As was noted at the beginning, the Sumerians were Earth’s first great culture, emerging fully-formed from the Stone Age around 6,000 years ago (shades of Bishop Ussher!). They utilized over 100 of the “firsts” we now attribute to a high civilization, among them the first writing (cuneiform), which they inscribed on clay tablets that were fired in kilns (another first) into stone. Thousands of those tablets have survived, and in many of them the Sumerians describe a period wherein hundreds of three-dimensional “gods” (with a small “g”) came to Earth from another planet orbiting in a long clockwise ellipse around the Sun rather than in a counterclockwise circle like the other planets.
While on Earth, those vastly superior beings decided to create for themselves a group of slaves and servants they would call Adamu. It was written in stone over 4,000 years ago (1,500 years before the Old Testament) that those “gods” agreed to “make the Adamu in our own image, after our own likeness.” They did it by processes that sound remarkably like genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, and hybridization. Perhaps most remarkable of all, they said they did it around 200,000 years ago, precisely when our mitochondrial DNA—against all expectations—says we originate as a species!
When the task of creating the Adamu was complete, the first of them were put to work in the Lower World of deep, hot mineshafts in southern Africa, where—not to put too fine a point on it—nearly every modern authority agrees that humankind originated. Eventually a surplus of slaves and servants became available, so that group was sent to work in the lush Upper World home of our alleged creators, which they called the E.Din (“home of the righteous ones”) located in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of modern Iraq.
All went well until the end of the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago, when the gods realized the immense icecap covering Antarctica was rapidly melting, and at some point in the future its massive edges would drop into the surrounding oceans and cause gigantic tidal waves to sweep across Earth’s lowlands, where their cities were. Because all Adamu could not be saved, several of the best were chosen to survive in a specially constructed boat able to withstand the immense tsunamis that were certain to strike.
When the time came, the gods boarded their spacecraft and lifted off into the heavens, from where they watched the devastation below and were shocked by the level of destruction. But when the waters receded enough for them to come down and land in the Zagros Mountain highlands, above the now mud- and sludge-covered E.Din valley, they joined the surviving Adamu to begin rebuilding their decimated civilization.
Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but most scholars now agree that modern civilization (settlements, farming, etc.) inexplicably began around 12,000 years ago in the Zagros Mountain highlands, where settlements would be extraordinarily difficult to build and maintain, and where terrace farming in poorly watered, sparse mountain soil (not to mention arid weather) would be vastly more demanding than in any fertile, well-watered lowlands. Yet the same scholars do not accept that there was any kind of worldwide flood event which may have caused a prior civilization to have to reboot itself in dry highlands.
In general, modern scholars scoff at all similar correlations to the Sumerian texts, considering them nothing more than an extended series of coincidences. They insist the Sumerians were merely being “overly creative” while forming incredibly sophisticated, richly detailed “myths.” After all, the myriad wondrous things they described over four thousand years ago simply could not be an accurate record of their “primitive” reality.
Or could it?