8
“THAT MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES”*107
Science vs. Intelligent Design
Think not O man that I did not foresee the time when men should question, and say there is no Great Spirit. . . . For I foresaw these things and provided . . . in advance to show . . . that the cause of evolution came from the Great Spirit and was directed unto righteousness.
OAHSPE, THE LORDS’ FIFTH BOOK 4:21
Here is another hypothetical debate between POE (professor of evolution) and A (adversary).
POE: It is generally agreed that we can rule out extraordinary processes in the ascent of man—touched by nothing more than tangible, observable nature. Some of my colleagues and friends find it appalling that any serious publication would dignify the creationists’ agenda, presenting their views on an equal footing with evolution. And when those uninformed folks say evolution is “just a theory,” this is amazing to scientists. Why, it is a phenomenon, a fact.
THE GOD PARTICLE
A: Each man decides for himself. Some people can picture descent with modification. Others can picture man brought forth by the hand of Creator. Some, like my colleague, John W. White, try to reconcile the two: “It doesn’t matter whether the various human species were natural mutations or special creations. . . . God is the motive force of all history, including evolutionary history.”1
POE: Sorry, but I have to agree with Professor Jerry Coyne and many others besides who see creationism as folly. Evolution is science, not philosophy or belief; it is a child of the scientific method.
Figure 8.1. Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
A: Scientific method? It reads more like rhetoric. The books by Richard Dawkins, although filled with zoological cases (regaling us with long-winded examples of so-called evolution in the animal kingdom—insects, birds, fish, bats, rats, moles, gazelles) still read as turgid, rhetorical tracts, brimming with hypothetical scenarios, impossibly lengthy analogies (highly recommended for insomniacs), mathematical models, arguments from probabilities, analogies, and the composition of “luck”! Not to mention other philosophical intangibles and sci-fi scenarios. Dawkins’s “explanations,” as one biochemist saw it, could be “filed alongside the story of the cow jumping over the moon.”2 In one debate over the God particle, he responded “Why would a theologian have anything to contribute to any worthwhile discussion, on any subject whatever?”3 And in reviewing Richard Milton’s brilliant book, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, he calls the author a “harmless fruitcake [who] needs psychiatric help.”4
POE: Dismissal, condescension, insult, or ridicule certainly should not be the primary weapon. Nevertheless, I do agree with Dawkins that evolution should be taught as science, and intelligent design should be taught as philosophy.
A: But in reality both are philosophy—notwithstanding all the scientific trappings—for they both deal in causality, first causes. With actual scientific evidence admittedly too far removed in the past for direct testing, evolution itself is just as hypothetical as creation-by-design.
POE: We can nonetheless approach the facts by indirect means, and ultimately prove evolution by comparative analysis and extrapolation.
A: Yet evolution, of all scientific theories, is the least provable or proven. You cannot prove, or even demonstrate, the gradual transformation of species, any sooner than opponents can prove creation. It is a matter of ideology. Not science, really.
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
A: Even Dr. Einstein said, famously, life isn’t a crapshoot. Kurt Gödel, mathematical genius, devoted to rationality, and good friend of Einstein, established that mathematical systems are essentially incomplete, simply because—not everything that is true can be proven to be so. It seems that some facts of natural numbers are true but unprovable. Gödel struggled, probably unsuccessfully, with an ontological argument for the existence of God, and also looked into the world of the paranormal; psychic factors and intuition, he thought, might be as important as elementary physics. Brains are a machine, but minds aren’t. Gödel: “I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner . . .the laws [of life] . . . are not mechanical”5; the mind, he thought, is immaterial (incorporeal), not measurable in any orthodox sense.
OK, intelligent design may not be science; it could, though, be the truth. Science can’t explain everything. Paleontology or genetics is only one discipline concerned with the origin of man. The way you are saying “science” or “scientific,” it sounds like you are out to exclude all evidence from other lines of inquiry: oral tradition, ancient tablets, epigraphy, psychogenesis, protohistory, cosmogony, philosophy, and so on. The origin of man is not something anyone can monopolize. And something else: As I see it, we have been laboring under the delusion that science and reality are the same thing—that evolution is objective while creationism is subjective. But either side is a matter of conviction. The materialist’s disbelief, in short, is the belief that no higher power is behind the order of the universe; and its corollary of creation by accident is just as much ideology as creation by design.
POE: Perhaps so, but we have tried to maintain religious neutrality in the study of evolution.
A: Why not let impartial thinking include the possibility of things being created?
POE: God simply does not belong in the sphere of rational discussion. Our parameters must be real—not imagined.
A: People talk about the real world. I wonder if they even know what the real world is. To say that a creator was not involved in any way is, itself, a judgment. There’s no “neutral” position, as you suggest. You know, Darwin turned to materialism, partly in reaction to the fundamentalism of the overbearing Captain Fitzroy, whose conversation and evangelical dogmatism poor Darwin had to endure, in close quarters, for five years on the HMS Beagle. There is also the matter of Darwin’s father Robert, an overbearing man who was a closet atheist, though maintaining an orthodox appearance. The son would come out of the closet. Indeed, Darwin’s pal and watchdog Thomas Henry Huxley invented the word agnostic, and Darwin cheerfully adopted it. But I’d like to ask: Can science alone clear up all the mysteries of the universe? And how qualified is the agnostic professor—unaware of developments in parascience—to judge questions of cosmogony or supernature or the unseen dimensions?
POE: Ah, but we are concerned with no higher authority than nature herself in this scheme called evolution. Science deals with the material content of the universe and must not overlap with matters spiritual or irrational.
A: I say it is no more presumptuous or irrational to assign the order of the living to a great Designer than to the blind forces of nature, which we are then asked to believe could have accomplished (accidentally) something as complex as the human eye or human brain.
Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving. . . . His origin, growth, hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN
Species are evolutionary accidents.
JERRY COYNE, WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Speciation is an accident.
NILES ELDREDGE, DARWIN: DISCOVERING THE TREE OF LIFE
I know of no reputable science that pins all on accident and randomity. Could mere chance produce elaborate—almost perfect—design? The coordination of parts into a functioning whole is characteristic of intelligence—not blind chance.
POE: You must grasp the way natural selection operates—toward the improbable. Is that not marvelous? Nothing in nature is unlikely!
A: You lost me there.
POE: Let me put it this way: The evolutionist trades design for nature’s power of selection. Indeed, there are scientists who believe in a supreme being but draw the line with creation, giving nature alone that power, for it is utterly unacceptable to bring an unknown deity into the scientific equation.
A: If species traits can be correlated to climate and environment, wouldn’t an intelligent designer be able to do the very same?
The cases of the South American four-eyed frog and the snake-tailed caterpillar raise the possibility that these species exist as we know them today because of an artful plan. A caring higher being could have easily equipped these animals with such features to improve their chances of survival.
BALAZS HORNYANSZKY AND ISTVAN TASI, NATURE’S I.Q.
POE: We must hold supernatural forces in abeyance in order to be scientific, to observe the laws of nature impartially.
A: Nature’s law? Or man’s assumptions? Like the law of selection; the law of succession; the principle of common descent (really, a chain of inferences); the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which, disproven, is now no longer a law; or the law of collateral evolution, which assumes that an alleged common ancestor held the latent possibility for its descendants to manifest a trait it didn’t have!
Thou hast blockaded the way against Me on every side. Thou hast put Me away, and said: Natural law! Moral law! Divine law! Instinct!. . . I say unto thee: I have no laws; I do by virtue of Mine own Presence. I am not far away; behold, I am with thee.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 10:16–20
POE: Let me tell you: No mind planned it.
A: How do you know that? Can it be by sheer chance that human beings ended up on this planet? How could a mindless process produce mind? Impossible. Purposeless order is really a contradiction in terms: organization means a plan. Some of Richard Dawkins’s circuitous arguments could actually be taken to prove the opposite of his belief. The complexity of the eye, for example. It’s really stupid: both sides are using the same examples! ID (Intelligent Design) says life-forms are too organized and complex to have arisen by purely natural circumstances. Evolution says life-forms are too organized and complex to have been created suddenly. To me, the remarkably complex design of organisms coming along by pure chance is actually more irrational than a purposeful, planned genesis.
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
LUNATIC FRINGE
POE: ID is a superstition that has long since been discredited by thinking people. Most intelligent folks frankly think the creationists are gulled, humbugged, duped—in short, religion and its dogmas are not our turf and certainly have no place in science.
A: Let me clarify something, I am using the term believer not to mean church or fundamentalism or Christianity or any other particular creed, but to encompass all—regardless of faith—who trust in a supreme power. That is not the same as superstition. It is faith.
POE: And in contrast, evolution comes from a long tradition of rationalism. Reason veers people to science and empiricism and away from religion and doctrine.
Nothing that is destitute itself of life and reason can generate a being possessed of life and reason.
ZENO
A: Yet reason, deep reason, may also be a path to God. Francis Bacon said of atheism: “A little philosophy makes men atheists; a great deal reconciles them to religion.” It is not the irrational mind, but the rational one, that infers a creator from the grand design of the universe. I am ready to argue that belief is actually part of our makeup. All I’m saying is unbelievers do not have a monopoly on reason! It is no more outlandish or “uncritical” to infer a divine, unknowable hand in all things than it is to strike all things sacred from the record of life. To me, the spontaneous transmutation of species is more a piece of magical thinking than the creation of life by an intelligent designer!
POE: Yet for us scientists, it is standard operating procedure to place ID in the category of mythological and supernatural trappings.
A: Treating it like the tooth fairy or snake oil. This is insulting, as if creationists were kooks or cranks. The pop science mags, especially New Scientist in the UK, are full of demeaning, condescending, and hostile remarks on ID as if it were a nasty piece of work by the lunatic fringe.
POE: Admittedly, the problem for us evolutionists is we cannot prove there is no creator. It cannot be falsified (Popper’s rule). It is beyond the realm of science, in the realm of the invisible, intangible.
A: Well, yes, perhaps the answer does lie beyond the domain of science, and since science divorces itself from religion, it thereby relinquishes the right to declare one way or the other on the existence or nonexistence of a creator. The Cartesian way would be to recognize “a fundamental core of unknowability,” the idea that corporeal beings may be incapable of using reason to discover the sublime. Sometimes hidden things are the most potent—intangible but real.
No man can measure my mysteries.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF SAPHAH EMP’AGATU:1
POE: Science does not traffic in intangibles, unknowables. But what we really dislike is the religious intolerance displayed by fundamentals, especially in the U.S., where ID advocates see the hand of a higher being throughout nature, making scientific investigation pointless. Settling for a given such as an unseen intelligence would be, well, just giving up.
Organisms are not less mechanistic for being manifestations of the Creative Power.
MARTIN RUDWICK, THE MEANING OF FOSSILS: EPISODES IN THE HISTORY OF PALAEONTOLOGY
A: Nonsense. Even if Creator made this world, it is still subject to scientific scrutiny! Natural law is not suspended by an original act of creation. You know, Schopenhauer called Darwin’s Origin “soapsuds,” missing the “hidden force.” Adam Sedgwick, a beloved teacher of Darwin’s, regarded Origin as “a string of air bubbles.” Sedgwick, “perhaps the best teacher in England,”6 concluded that man was utterly unaccounted for by the “laws of nature.” My point: there is nothing unscientific about God.
Figure 8.2. Intelligent design. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. . . . A bit of science distances one from God, but much science nears one to Him.
LOUIS PASTEUR, QUOTED IN THE LITERARY DIGEST
There is no conflict between transcendent knowledge and science, only the conflict we ourselves have created in our darkness.
POE: You must realize that science is mechanistic and religion isn’t; science is neutral of belief.
[T]he stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
SIR JAMES H. JEANS, THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE
A: I’ll grant you this: Evolution is the greatest triumph of atheism in the world today.
POE: Would you deny that man can be known from his parts: femur, dental arch, cranial bones, genes?
A: This gives us materialism per se, reductionism, which will never produce a satisfactory account of the origin of mind. Never. As long as science and religion maintain their apartheid, the inexplicable will remain just that. The failed marriage of science and religion has a lot to do with intransigence on both sides. It is emphatically not due to any intrinsic conflict.
OF ALL THE ANIMALS
We are not unique. We are animals.
COLIN PATTERSON, EVOLUTION
A: Isn’t man worthy of a bit more than mere biological, zoological explanation? Should all scientific research be limited to the material, visible realm?
POE: Yes. Nonphysical ideas should not be admitted to science.
A: Like mesons and dark matter? Or subatomic particles? Or neutrinos—particles with no mass, that move about with the speed of light?
POE: To Darwin, humans were quite simply domesticated animals; their social instincts, not really unique, are deeply rooted in animal behavior. We are actually more like chimps than chimps are like lower monkeys, according to degrees of consanguinity. You may not like it, but Boule saw comparisons between the most intelligent modern apes and “savages in the natural state.” Darwin himself found the rudiments of architecture, dress, and even language among the pongids.
A: Man is different from all the rest of animal creation. Darwin’s contemporaries, the scientists Sir Richard Owen, Alfred Russel Wallace, Georges Cuvier, and the Duke of Argyll, held man as a separate phenomenon, distinct from the animal kingdom, a difference in kind, not just degree. Even Darwin’s most avid American supporter, Asa Gray, believed in the special creation of man as against the natural evolution of plants and animals.
POE: Well, that was the nineteenth century; we now know that we are just another kind of animal—different in degree only. It is a matter of critical mass. By careful study, Darwin even found “a mind of some kind” in worms.
A: I wonder why evolutionists are so ready to humanize animals and worms, and at the same time, dehumanize man!
POE: Simply because the rudiments of all our mental faculties can be seen at work in the animal kingdom. Japanese monkeys carry sweet potatoes to the stream and wash them.
A: Hey, raccoons wash their food religiously. Does that mean raccoons are on their way to becoming human?
POE: But chimps can make tools to perform certain tasks and also use stones to crack nuts.
A: So what: Otters use rocks to open clams; beavers cut sticks to make dams.
POE: Yeah, but chimps will sharpen a branch with their teeth, wield it like a spear, and stab their prey. They also dig for bulbs.
A: Can they change a lightbulb?
POE: No, but they can thread a needle and roller skate! Besides, primates also have a form of communication. Chimps, our closest living relatives, have sign language, many gestures to communicate, and a wide range of vocalizations used in the wild. The great apes even show an incipient degree of conceptual thinking. Romanticism aside, man is, quite plainly, an improved animal.
A: A cultured ape? As I see it, this idea springs from powerful nineteenth-century racialism, which took the Andamanese, for example, as “very little above animals.”7 Evolutionists rarely quote Darwin’s comparison of orangutan behavior with that of “naked wild savages,” or Huxley’s equally racist references, such as “the thoughtless brains of a savage.”8 Is there any valid evidence at all that human beings evolved from apes?
POE: Plenty. They are our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.
CHIMPS AND CHUMPS
A: Well, I am not aware of any fossils that link apes to the australopiths ca. 6 million years ago. Every hominid ever found was a primitive man and not an advanced ape. Are we improved chimps or just scientific chumps? Did we really evolve from a tree shrew? (See figure 8.3.)
POE: It is perfectly obvious that man’s anatomy is on the same plan as other primates. The chimpanzee’s short arms and structural details of the skull quite nearly approach man’s.
Noses and Spines
The black African and the native Australian (the latter once considered the most archaic of living races), in their platyrrhine nose, are actually the diametrical opposite of that found in the apes. “The nose of Neanderthal Man, far from resembling that of anthropoid apes, differs from it much more than does that of living Man.”*108 Australopithecus, the protoman, judging from Au. africanus (STS-14), had six lumbar vertebrae—longer than in modern humans: “This is certainly at odds with the evolutionary pressure leading to the shortening of the lumbar spine of the apes.”†109
Figure 8.3. Tree shrew seen placed in this chart as a progenitor of ape and man.
POE: More than 98 percent of the human genome is shared with chimps.
A: And we share 99 percent genes with mice! Although gibbons, of all the apes, are genetically farthest from man, they are the most bipedal of the apes! “It might not be correct,” cautioned Jeffrey Schwartz in Sudden Origins, “to try to sort out the evolutionary relationships of organisms on the basis of overall genetic similarity.”
Similar genes mastermind the development of wildly different creatures.
JERRY FODOR AND MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG
More than 80 percent of all the proteins shared by chimps and humans differ in at least one amino acid. There is a gross difference between human and chimp chromosomes.9 Even so, maybe the apes were the Creator’s prototype for Asu man, a permutation of the same idea. “Even the Creator may use a good device more than once.”10
POE: Only evolution and descent can throw light on the many homo-logs:*110 The chimp’s lower humerus, for example, is very similar to the human’s.
A: I find it curious that evolution, a science that loves to find minute anatomical differences, indulges wholeheartedly in gross similarities when it comes to comparison of man and ape. Man and ape are analogous, not homologous. Homologs, to the German school of Naturphilosophen, were simply archetypes/leitmotifs in the Creator’s inventory; in which case, similars might just as reasonably be attributed to an efficient, parsimonious Creator as to a common ancestor. Even Professor Mayr, after giving Darwin credit for solving the question of homology (from a common ancestor), demurred: “Homology cannot be proven; it is always inferred.” Other authorities see the human pelvis as so distinct from that of the apes that it is impossible to derive them from a common ancestral stock.
POE: Yet the human and orangutan shoulder is strikingly similar. Same holds for orang brain, whose convolutions are numerous, and the frontal lobe (seat of intellect) is more prominent than in any other anthropoid ape.
A: But not because of a genetic link.11 If a common ancestor split into Homo on the one hand and today’s apes on the other ca 6 mya, why do apes have much more genetic variation than we do?
POE: I view the pongid as prologue to man, prefiguring him in shape and form. Do you deny the similarity?
Resemblance does not always imply descent.
MARCELLIN BOULE, FOSSIL MEN
A: These homologous organs may have very different histories. Resemblance does not guarantee an actual relationship, just as Joe Blow in Kalamazoo may be a dead ringer for John Doe in Oshkosh—without any relationship whatsoever. It is entirely gratuitous to assume that similarities between species indicate a common ancestor. At best, pongids are similar—same basic blueprint—but unrelated to australopiths, just as whales (mammals) are similar but unrelated to fish, and sharks (fish) look similar to but share no genetic heritage with porpoises (mammals).
American vultures look a lot like Old World vultures, even though the former are related to storks and the latter to hawks. Falcons may behave like other birds of prey, but are genetically unrelated to them. Conversely, some birds that look very different, such as hummingbirds and nightjars or songbirds and parrots, are more closely related.
POE: We are still looking for that common ancestor—a hominoid type like Ramapithecus, Kenyapithecus, Proconsul—who gave rise to the australopiths.
A: Weren’t those beasties ruled out as ancestors, recognized as a false alarm back in 1979? Nothing more than anthropoid apes? Ramapithecus, last time I checked, was too old to be a hominid forerunner. Any comparison of Ardi or Australopithecus to apes is superficial, for Homo features are dominant even in the earliest men: cranial height, shape of occiput, poise of head on vertebral column, structure of pelvis and limb, face and teeth.
POE: Darwin believed our common ancestor was “furnished with a tail” and our coccyx is what’s left. With that understanding began our attempts to link man and simian homologously, phylogenetically. As an example, the region of a macaque’s brain that controls jaw movements is a direct homolog of Broca’s area, which controls human speech; these findings contradict the theory that speech evolved (from novel neural structures) specific to humans.
There is nothing unique about human evolution.
CHRISTOPHER WILLS, DARWINIAN TOURIST
Indeed, we may well have found a missing link in thick-skulled archaic hominids; and no doubt the eyebrow torus, the “awning,” of the anthropoid ape persisted in H. erectus and Neanderthal man.
A: So why is the gorilla’s cranial wall thinner than modern man’s? The Miocene apes also had a fairly thin skull and no browridge. Proconsul lacked the bony torus: his forehead was smooth. And in many monkeys we find the same shaped browridge as in modern man. In fact, if the heavy brow is supposed to be more apelike, I wonder why H. erectus brow is larger than that of austrolopith, his predecessor. Don’t tell me it’s more specialized.
Some nineteenth-century Europeans believed in direct continuity from ape to man: An 1824 visitor to India spoke of “wild tribes which the native names liken to the Orang-Utang, and my own knowledge certainly bears them out . . . the individual I saw might as well pass for an Orang-Utang as a man.” A like-minded contemporary thought “the pendulous abdomen of the lower races . . . shows an approximation to the ape, as do also the want of calves, the flatness of the thighs, the pointed form of the buttocks, and the leanness of the upper arm.” The first Europeans in Australia called the Aborigines “tailless chimpanzees.” Even today the Semang Negritos, say the (haughty) Malaysians, are descended from siamang (monkey). In India, too, there is talk of dwarf tribes (Negritos) who descended from the monkey god Hanuman. In Africa, the S-shaped spine of the Akkas (who have long arms and short legs) inspired some to posit a link between man and ape. Darwin himself thought the Alacaluf Indians of Tierra del Fuego could hardly “boast of human reason.”*111 Indeed, all these popular etymologies of the nineteenth century are just one step removed from today’s misguided search for a common ancestor linking apes and man.
[They are] looking and hunting for that which was forefather to both man and monkey. What sort of beast they expect to find I cannot imagine.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE CHILDREN OF MU
PONGIDS AND PUNDITS
POE: Of course, we are not from apes as such, but we share a common ancestor with them. There is a difference. Ramapithecus of India—say, 12 to 30 mya—was one candidate for that common ancestor: its molars, canines, and jaw had a decidedly human cast; the curved dental arcade made him look quite human.
A: But molecular dating asserts that nothing hominid could have existed more than 7 mya. Anyway, new evidence, as you well know, overturned these Ramapithecus hopefuls. They weighed no more than thirty pounds; the mandible was finally judged not manlike. It turned out to be some sort of primitive orangutan.
POE: These fossil anthropoids, in Hooton’s time, were called dryopithecines; they were spread over a wide zone of the Old World and probably evolved into the ancestors of today’s apes on the one hand and to several varieties of early man on the other. That apes and humans share a common ancestor is now undoubted fact. Each new fossil tells us more about the continuity of the lines leading from hominoid types to the races of man.
A: Yes, yes, there are always candidates, but why no trace of their descendants until the time of Ardi or Asu man? Why the gap? It was the same with Ramapithecus: there was that yawning gap—millions of years—between that “common ancestor” and any of his supposed human descendants.
POE: Still, Africa’s Lucy and Ardi are close in appearance to that common ancestor—who, I’m sure, will turn up sooner or later. Be patient. The pongids had to have split from the human lineage between ten and five million years ago. Molecular anthropology supports this very nicely: the ancestor of man, according to twenty-first-century genetics, was something rather apelike, something from which both chimp and gorilla also descended. But after the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged, both underwent substantial evolutionary change. It was not until the early 1990s that Australopithecus’s predecessor Ardi, a million years older than Lucy, was discovered, yielding a total of forty individuals. Don’t you think a few more decades will suffice to hand us Ardi’s predecessor?
A: No, I don’t. I’ll tell you why: Because Ardipithecus was true Asu man, and he had no predecessor. He was the first of his kind with all the earmarks—albeit roughhewn—of the Homo lineage.
POE: Well, there were two kinds, two different species: Ardi ramidus 4.4 mya (early Pliocene) and Ardi kadabba 5.6 mya (late Miocene). All right, Ardi had manlike canines, but its jaw was apelike, and the female weighed 110 pounds; she was larger than Lucy.
A: Well, there you go: Lucy was younger and mixed with gracilizing Ihin genes, but Ardi (older) was pure Asu—first man ever—with no gracile features, and the female, at 110 pounds, was a far cry from 30-pound Ramapithecus.
POE: But so apelike, with a chimp-size brain (350 cc) and prognathism—a fruit eater.
A: Precisely the description of Asu man.
POE: But showing an improvement on the anthropoid: Ar. ramidus upper canines were less sharp than chimps. Thinner tooth enamel, too, reflecting a diet rich in easy-to-chew fruits and vegetables. It was a fantastic mosaic of ape and human traits—the foot, with its human toes, but lacking arches and with big toe splayed out; the pelvis is also a mixture of human and ape. Isn’t that proof enough of descent from anthropoid ape?
A: I don’t think so. Ardi’s hand was humanlike. And while chimp feet are made for grasping trees and branches, Ardi’s feet were actually better suited for walking.
POE: Ardi was what we call a facultative biped—climbed trees but also walked upright, though inefficiently, like modern chimps and gibbons. Ardi’s lower hip was adapted to climbing, but upper hip (the ilium) was broad, which is to say, adapted for walking. Ardi’s adaptations did all the hard evolutionary work for her successor Lucy. No one was surprised that Ardi showed a mix of chimpanzee-like and human traits, for Ardi was a link—way closer to an ape than to an australopithecine.
A: Not according to Tim White, its discoverer, who thought it was not particularly chimpanzee-like according to overall morphology.
POE: OK, at best, Ardi shed some light on our last common ancestor—the source of both us and chimps. Ardi tells us a bit about what that creature looked like.
A: Pure assumption. A leap of faith. The details of the alleged pongid split are still a complete mystery. There’s a good reason they never found the missing link. There is no missing link.
Isn’t it curious that some zoologists with no ax to grind for primate evolution have found as many similarities between man and ape as between man and dog.
I’ve seen cocker spaniels who looked about as human as Zinj.
WILLIAM FIX, THE BONE PEDLARS
Figure 8.4. Dog and his man. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
So why not argue our descent from dogs? After all, dogs, like humans, are the only mammals who are all in one species; dogs share 80 percent of their hemoglobin sequence with humans. And dogs are more like humans emotionally than any other animal—capable of shame, remorse, curiosity, enthusiasm, grief, hopefulness, jealousy, deceit, and even some sort of conscience. The love and devotion of a dog for its master, Darwin thought, represents a kind of rudimentary religious impulse! He also thought that the beginning of reason was demonstrated by sled dogs who diverge when they approach thin ice. In 1285 Marco Polo said that the Andaman people “are no better than wild beasts, and I assure you . . . [they] all have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are just like big mastiff dogs.”12
POE: You must be joking. There is hardly any morphological resemblance to dogs, whereas structural resemblance to the anthropoids virtually proves shared descent.
WE WHO WALK ON THE “HIND PAIR OF HANDS”
A: Ardi’s wrist could bend backward. Wholly unlike any known apes (who are knuckle-walkers), Ardi could walk on her palms.
POE: Nevertheless, paleontologists are closing in on the split. We’re in the ballpark. Ardi is the closest we’ve come to the first manlike thing that split off from the common ancestor. Only after the split did chimps evolve specializations—like knuckle walking and broad incisors. Many features of the australopiths are markedly different from both humans and apes alike; the australopiths are rather unique among hominids.
A: Excuse me for noting that Australopithecus was never proven to be a link to the higher apes, or to any apelike common ancestor whatsoever. His elbow and anklebone are human, not at all gorilla- or chimplike. His hand bones and jawbones are slender, teeth quite modern.
POE: But Australopithecus had a decidedly simian look.
A: Sure, he was the first edition of man, a creature of the wild, but he was not an improved ape, dog, or pig—which he also resembles chemically, by the way: most xeno-transplants (for humans) are from pigs. So what, if apes and human beings have similar DNA. So do humans and bacteria.
POE: Perhaps you forget that man and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same model. Nor can you deny that the Pliocene Asiatic apes present dentition in some respects approximate to the Hominidae. The real question then is whether these resemblances indicate an actual phylogenetic relation. We think it does.
A: Pongid dentition is different from man’s, for which reason Le Gros Clark postulated they must have diverged earlier than the Miocene. A fine ad hoc solution. South Africa’s Swartkrans australopith had a pattern of dental eruption the same as H. sapiens, which never occurs in Pongidae. There are fundamental differences between man and anthropoid, especially in the canines and lower premolars. The tooth patterns of early man, noted Dr. Weidenreich, “even in the most primitive forms, remained basically the same as those of the later phases.”13 Don’t you think the man-ape resemblance has been overplayed? Isn’t the ape basically the atheist’s substitute for God’s own creation—man?
POE: Let me refer you to Dr. Gould’s pertinent remark that the subject of evolution “doesn’t intersect” that of religion.
A: Let’s not beat around the bush: it comes down to atheist versus believer, not science versus religion or rational versus supernatural!
To be a true evolutionist, a man must be an atheist. If a man believes in God, and [that] he has a soul and a hereafter, he is not an atheist, nor is he an evolutionist. He only thinks he is. He is only professing to believe in evolution to be considered orthodox.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE CHILDREN OF MU
Figure 8.5. James Churchward was not only the modern founder of Panology but also a sage and prophet in his own right.
BEYOND THE PALE
We are born to search after the truth.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
A: With the sciences so specialized and departmentalized, knowledge has become fragmented and a bit of tunnel vision has set in. We should all be generalists, don’t you think? Probing the origin of man must be an interdisciplinary effort. But do we really know how to work together? Think together?
POE: Frankly, most of us feel that ID doesn’t qualify as a competing theory because it doesn’t offer natural explanations for biological phenomena that can be tested scientifically. Our methods must be empirical.
A: Empirical? This is precisely what evolution is not—based rather on assumptions, special jargon (which favor Darwinism), extrapolations, surmises, comparisons, hypotheses, tautologies, probabilities, computer models, and might-haves. Just for a moment, let us not worry so much if it is science but if it is truth. Darwinism was enshrined to legitimize the age of science and industry. But now we are entering a new time, the age of truth—Satya Yuga. This cut-and-dried Homo sapiens of yours is not the same person as my human being—with a soul and a mind and a heart.
POE: Even though the doctrine of ID thankfully passed away in the nineteenth century with the coming of Darwinism, here it is back again—impeding the advancement of true science, fundamentalists demanding a literal reading of the book of Genesis: the six days, the young Earth, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the rib, all stars made on the fourth day (Genesis 1:16), as well as the idea that Earth and species will last forever, utterly rejecting the fact of extinction.
A: Let’s not make the mistake of equating all religion with the Holy Bible. . . . Those who believe that Christian dogma is the only alternative or rival to evolutionary origins or only complainant in the court of Darwin have not looked very far—to other religions and world traditions. Creationism is not about Christianity. Forget Christianity for a moment. This is about all faiths, philosophies, and cosmogonies that admit a higher power. To understand life and death, you need to go outside the straitjacket of science. And evolution is about life and death.
GODLIKE PRECISION
POE: If you are comforted by the idea of deity, fine, that’s your business.
A: My dear fellow, it’s not a matter of comfort; it all comes down to whether we view man as an intended product or not. To me, it is perfectly inconceivable that humanity is here without reason or purpose.
POE: That is your mistake. There was nothing inevitable about it. Nature follows no purpose. Evolutionists have rightly stood together to strike anything purposive from the ascent of our species, for this would suggest planning, intention, teleology. But yes, we are here for a reason, even though that reason lies in the mechanics of engineering rather than in the volition of a deity.
Mechanical force makes the dog’s tail wag, but something different . . . makes the dog wag his tail.
GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN
A: Max Planck, the Max Planck, said all matter originates from and consists of a force, and we must assume a conscious intelligent spirit behind this force. I see theories all over the place that are trying to account for nonphysical things in physical terms.
A: Oh, brain versus mind, for one.
POE: The theory of evolution holds that the design of man, including his brain, was simply a product of life on Earth, not its ultimate purpose.
A: But design and purpose go hand in glove.
POE: Such as?
POE: Well, natural selection may give the appearance of design, but that design is often imperfect, and imperfection is a sign of struggling, hit-or-miss evolution—and a major flaw in the argument for “intelligent” design.
Whence had man his understanding, if there was none in the world?
SOCRATES, XENOPHON
If it’s unreasonable to believe that an encyclopedia could have originated without intelligence, then it’s just as unreasonable to believe that life could have originated without intelligence.
JONATHAN SARFATI, REFUTING EVOLUTION
Imperfect design, vestigial organs—all argue against special creation: for example, appendix, hernias, or tonsils in no wise reflect “intelligent” design; such imperfections and inaccurate workmanship—the screwy wiring of the retina, the sacroiliac, the wisdom teeth—are unworthy of a designer. And parts created for no use? That doesn’t make any sense. Thymus, pineal. There are too many instances in the animal world where a conscientious designer might have provided better organs, but didn’t, and species are stuck with what nature’s own process provided.
A: You might as well say we should not have been made bipedal, for all the fallen arches, slipped disks, and knee and back problems we suffer. But let me ask: Who says we can assume the Creator made things perfect for us?
POE: I’m only saying this: The idea that evolution has been guided by divine power can easily be squelched by this objection. Indeed, most lines of descent end in extinction. What a senseless effort on God’s part to fabricate species and then let most of them die out! This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an almighty, compassionate one. It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct—and then replace them with other species, which will also vanish.
A: I dare say, it is not the creationists who need to explain extinction, but the evolutionists—and they have not yet done so. Besides, it seems pretty naive to think any species or any planet is here forever, or should be.
POE: If this designer is a loving, caring God, why has he given us stinging wasps, poisonous plants, slimy worms, and creeping parasites to make us miserable? Did your God, so interested in perfection, make the tapeworm? Why would a good God make the serpent or the mosquito or the germs of typhoid?
A: “The serpent bites to death. . . . This is no sin, for it fulfills its labor; it is the remnant of poison of other eras.”14 Even the lowly serpent played its part in the preparation of our world.
I made the serpent the lowest of living creatures. . . . When the earth was encircled with poisonous gases . . . I drove the poison of the air down into vegetation . . . and I created the serpents . . . and they were poison . . . thus I purified the air of heaven . . . [e.a]. Then I overcast the earth with falling nebulae, and covered up the poisons growing upon the earth, and they were turned to oil and coal.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 6:8–15
Figure 8.6. Thomas Edison—“I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us—everything that exists—proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.” Thomas Edison’s parents were spiritualists; interested in the matter, Edison himself conducted remarkable experiments in clairvoyance with the Polish-American medium Bert Reese.
Science pioneers who were devoutly religious include Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Galileo, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Comte de Buffon, Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister, Blaise Pascal, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Francis Bacon, James C. Maxwell, and Sir Humphry Davy. Richard Owen (who identified the fossils Darwin brought home on the Beagle) thought Divine Mind planned the archetypes of species and even their modifications. Sir Richard said: “It is He that hath made us; not we ourselves.”*112 In other words, things did not create themselves or organize themselves or work out their own design under nature’s umbrella. “If developing the precision instruments of an airplane requires many plans and a highly developed intelligence, how could a substantially more complex apparatus [like the avionics of birds] have developed by itself?”†113 Louis Agassiz (Methods of Study in Natural History) expressed his disbelief in Darwinism this way: “The resources of the Deity cannot be so meager that in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.”
Figure 8.7. Known for his famous Sterkfontein find, Robert Broom thought you could just as well call nature’s adaptations the wonderful designs of a supreme intelligence.
“There is intelligence somewhere,” said Robert Broom in The Coming of Man. Though an evolutionist, he believed that life on Earth was the work and concern of a divine creative force.
More recently, John White in Enlightenment 101: A Guide to God-Realization and Higher Human Culture has stated, “Evolution is a divinely driven process by which God as Spirit expresses itself . . . not blind forces and random events . . . or mere chance. They happen because God wills it intelligently, creatively and lawfully. Science has recognized some of the laws of the cosmos, but has not yet recognized the lawmaker. . . . God is the creator-artist behind the entire panorama of the cosmos.”
Natural science and theology, in an earlier day, were one and the same pursuit—though on an unsure footing. I believe the twain shall meet again, but this time on solid ground and in all truth.
Thoughts on Evolution from an Oahspean Viewpoint
by Carl Vostatek
8/3/2011
As students of the book Oahspe, we learn that evolution is not a concept that fits in with the story of mankind’s beginnings on Earth and subsequent development and growth over time. Per Oahspe, each and every creature and plant was created perfect in its own time and place and did not “evolve” or change into a new form as time went on . . .
I offer this perspective because, as an architect, I am naturally inclined to look at things with an eye to design: composition; color; balance; symmetry, form and function. As a designer I am absolutely in awe and overwhelmed by the incredible infinity of shapes and colors and forms of all things. I can only imagine what a “design team” there must be up in the heavens somewhere! What an effort to come up with all the variety, all the necessary moving parts and features to deal with their respective environments, all the beauty, all the visual enjoyment. From a practical standpoint, there is simply no way all these facets could have “evolved by natural selection of the fittest” on their own. It is just too big a design project. . . . There has to be some conscious mind and conscious direction behind it all.
It is then I remember a quote from Oahspe which goes like this:
“. . . for until thou hast created a firmament, and created suns and stars to fill it, thou hast not half fulfilled thy destiny.”
As I ponder the enormity of this statement, I come to realize that one day I can be one of the “designers”; that is, I can be one of those who actually plays a part in creating the infinity of forms and shapes and colors that is found throughout the universe. For I am part and parcel of the creative force, the Creator! The Creator isn’t outside of us, He is in and of us and we are in and of Him. We and the Creator are one.
Figure 8.8. Carl Vostatek. Courtesy of Carl Vostatek.
This is the teaching Oahspe offers mankind; it further says that after due education, training, development, and spiritual growth in realms beyond the Earth plane, this is what I and all of humanity can look forward to. We can each play a part in the design and creation of new worlds and all that occupies them, from the beings to plants and animals and their multitudinous environments.
It is almost too immense to think about, too majestically,
staggeringly, beyond the grasp of comprehension. But to us Oahspeans, it is real, it is reality. And in this light, evolution simply evaporates into non-existence. The alternative is a lot more inviting.