Did Man Evolve From Apes?
ALL OVER THE world we find museums and textbooks that contain models and pictures portraying a gradual line of development from small animals up through monkeys to man. These very colorful displays and pictorials are intended to show the viewer that this is how humans originated. What young students and uninformed adults often do not consider, however, is that the models and pictures are fabrications designed to reinforce the world view of the people creating them. This world view includes the origin of mankind and rests on a materialistic philosophy that presupposes the absence of a divine intelligence.
At first glance, the sequence of change from small animals up through man appears reasonable because the reconstructions are gradual, and the changes between adjacent life forms are depicted as small. Moreover, if one believes that nothing exists except physical matter and its motion, few alternatives remain except to suppose that humans developed in the way portrayed in those textbooks and museums. Given materialistic philosophy, the belief in man's gradual ascent from apes is embraced because there are no other easy answers to how it could have happened, based upon observed similarities in their anatomy. The conjecture seems even more reasonable when we consider that many sequences along the DNA of ape and man are similar in appearance.
The problem, of course, is that the reconstructions are just that — reconstructions. They are produced by people who imagine that it must have happened that way. But the fossil record is very incomplete, and the claim that man came from ape actually rests upon a relatively small collection of significant fossils germane to the question at hand. Many of the models and pictures
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are based on bits and pieces of skulls and, in several instances, some bones and teeth. However, when one compares the actual data with the claims that are made, the contrast is startling.
Paleontology was founded by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier who, before his death one hundred fifty years ago, boasted that he could reconstruct an entire animal from one tooth. In February 1922 a geologist, Harold Cook, found such a tooth while digging in the bed of a quarry in Snake Creek several hundred miles west of Omaha.1 The molar tooth soon became a pillar of human evolution known as "Nebraska Man." Henry Osborn, then head of the American Museum of Natural History in New York called it the "herald of our knowledge of anthropoid apes in America," and Grafton Smith, an expert in brain evolution at University College in London, said that the tooth was from a "primitive member of the human family." Thereafter the ape-man appeared in the scientific literature as Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. The genus "Hespero" put the missing link in the western world, and the new species haroldcookii honored the geologist who found the damaged molar (remember, that's all we've got).
The tooth was offered as proof of human evolution in the Scopes "monkey" trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and later admitted into evidence over the protests of attorney William Jennings Bryan. Bryan died in 1925, and two years later the tooth was officially acknowledged as belonging to an extinct pig.2
Ten years before the tooth incident, another "missing link" had appeared, called the Piltdown Man.3 This discovery also received worldwide attention; but unlike Nebraska Man, it was an outright fraud. Yet despite the lessons learned from the 1927 fiasco, Piltdown Man continued to fool investigators for another twenty-five years. The deception was discovered in 1953, and the reason it took so long is not because the facts known at the time were inadequate to uncover the error. Instead, it was because the existence of a creature that was half ape and half man reinforced the materialistic assumptions of the world's experts who were predicting that a missing link would exist.
Java Man was another example of an alleged missing link. In 1892 a Dutch physician, Eugene Dubois, found a thigh bone in a spot not more than twenty yards from where he had discovered a skullcap a year earlier. Dubois created Java Man when he assumed that the skullcap and thigh bone belonged to each other. But this was an error, and just before his death he identified Java Man as a small, slender, longer-armed gibbon from India.4
A fourth example of a so-called missing link was Peking Man. The problem here was that the fossils disappeared during the Second World War, thus the primary evidence rested on models reconstructed from earlier notes and drawings. Moreover, these records show a hole in the skull, implying that Peking Man was the victim of other human hunters. I've greatly abbreviated the history of the fossil evidence, but the story is sufficiently muddled to disqualify trustworthy conclusions in the matter.5
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There have been other alleged missing links, but they have all fallen by the wayside. In examining these incidents, one is impressed with the very real tendency of workers in this area to claim knowledge beyond what the fossils actually warrant. Moreover, this tendency to say more about a fossil than one knows is true persists into the present. The old pronouncements of ape-man celebrities have been replaced by the widely accepted current scenario that man came from the chimp-gorilla line,6 and that his "descent" 7 was gradual.8 However, the comparative evidence is so meager that as one anthropologist put it, the entire affair is like reconstructing the narration of War and Peace by randomly selecting thirteen pages, and using them to fabricate the rest of the story. On those rare occasions when fairly complete fossil specimens are found, they do not show that man came from ape. Rather they teach that apes once walked the earth. This will become more clear as we proceed.
Dominant Personalities
The study of prehistoric man is known as "paleoanthropology." It's a field where beliefs and conclusions are dominated by strong personalities.9 This is unlike the physical sciences where measurements dictate the conclusions. One such personality is Richard Leakey whose mother uncovered a skull in East Africa in 1959 and whose father discovered another skull in the 1960s. He himself found yet another skull in 1972 which became known as "Skull 1470."
Another personality who has dominated the field is Donald Johanson, who discovered the so-called Lucy Skull in northeast Ethiopia in 1974. He later discovered a number of other bones to go along with it. The reason I cite these men is to illustrate the kind of disagreement that can exist among "experts" in such matters. In this case, the reported disagreement was not only on how old the skulls were and which bones belonged to the Lucy Skull, but also on the very important question of how many species the skulls represented.
It's helpful to understand that when someone is called an expert in this field, that does not mean that he possesses significant knowledge regarding human origins. It only means that he knows the most about the typically sparse number of fossils he happened to stumble across. Even so, the data do not mandate definitive conclusions, and the uncertainties usually appear in very important areas. For example, the reports indicate that Johanson believed that one of his major bone collections came from a single species. Leakey concluded that the identical bones showed the existence of at least two, and possibly several different species. In addition, Johanson believed he had uncovered a human "missing link" of sorts, whereas Leakey believed
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on the basis of molecular anthropology that the Lucy Skull was a late survival of an ape. Furthermore, regardless of who one believes about any of these skulls or bones, most of them seem to belong to a family of long-armed, short-legged, knuckle-walking African apes of the genus Australopithecus.
The Materialistic Heartbeat
But if one ignores the opinion of the dominant personalities and asks what the actual data teach regarding human fossils, the answer is that they show man existing as man for about 40 thousand years or so. The skulls and bones found in layers that are dated much older than this are not human, but rather belong to prehistoric creatures from whom most of the investigators presume man to have come.
Yet this presumption is demanded neither by the fossils nor from molecular phylogeny; it stems from assumptions made by people predisposed to the philosophy of materialism. If one is committed to this philosophy, then the known sequence of fossil change compels the doctrine of human descent from apes. In this case it's argued that human evolution is a fact on the basis of both these changes, and because the body of a human and an ape display similar biological structures.
It is quite common to find articles or even books publicizing the idea that people are an advanced form of animal.10 News items in publications far removed from anthropology, but that promote the theme, "A New Ape in Our Family Tree," are not at all uncommon.11 Also typical is the theme, "How Ape Became Man," found in reports with sweeping pronouncements that pontificate biological changes in humans over millions of years — an idea that extends well beyond the fossil data actually reported.12 Even publicity of discoveries that give the appearance of "upsetting the apple cart" really do just the opposite, and serve to further entrench the idea that man is an advanced form of ape.
For example, researchers in Pakistan several years ago uncovered skull and jawbone fossils that were dated at 8 and 13 million years old.13 Whereas the headlines on these reports indicated that the ancient fossil discoveries had shattered widely held notions on human origins, what the fossils in fact really did was to alter the time that the "man-ape evolutionary split" was alleged to have occurred. Thus, instead of the fossil discoveries forcing realignment of evolutionary claims regarding man's origin (as the headlines seemed to indicate), the publicity surrounding the discoveries actually served to underscore the idea that human beings (the hominid family) split off from the evolutionary tree apes (the pongid family) at some distant time in the past.
The anthropological tide linking man with ape is so enormous that research has been done aimed at identifying human traits in animals. In one report, the rare pygmy chimp was heralded as being the "most human" of the apes.14 One year later, work was published (DNA-DNA hybridization) to reinforce
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the idea that humans should be put with the chimps rather than the gorillas.15 As is often the case in such matters, the scientific work itself is outstanding, but the philosophical presuppositions others bring to its interpretation force conclusions that the discoveries do not imply. Such presuppositions add fuel to the materialistic bandwagon that man is only his body, and that all that a man is evolved gradually from apes. The philosophical presuppositions permeating anthropology are so deep that in the conclusions of a review article citing 145 references dealing with the topic of human evolution, the principle concern was not whether or not humans came from apes, but rather whether they did so gradually or explosively.16
Similar Structures
The similarities between man and ape are so strong that it almost seems nonsensical to deny that the two are related. And indeed this is so. They are related.
But the question that needs to be raised is how are they related? Is our only alternative the belief that man emerged from molecular changes along the DNA of apes in a way that transposed apes to a higher plane? Or are there other options that are consistent with the data that we should consider? We now turn our attention to not only how the biological structures of men and apes are related, but also to the more important question: How does man differ from an ape?
To this end, let's proceed with the same assumptions evolutionists use to interpret hominid fossils and see their application in a transportation junkyard containing parts and fragments of airplanes and automobiles. We observe that both have tires, windows, doors, a metal body, and an engine that runs on petroleum fuel. We also observe that the shape of certain fenders gives the appearance of a transition into wings, and that the trunk hinges allow big metal lids to swing open for what may be later evolution into a rudder. In fact, we see certain cars with open trunks and note that their evolution into the tail parts of an airplane has already begun.
We also observe that the propeller in the plane can be explained in terms of some of the automobiles shedding their radiators in order to survive certain environmental conditions, thereby leaving the fan exposed to wind conditions that caused its evolution into a propeller. As nonsensical as all of this is, the logic employed to support the thesis that airplanes are an advanced species of automobiles is identical to that used to defend the belief that apes changed into men. One might counterargue that the latter is a biological system where such change is possible, but the argument is a weak one. No biological mechanism has ever been shown to systematically increase the complexity of a physical system through natural processes, and the New Generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics disqualifies nature's ability to produce such a mechanism.
Now extend the argument to an electronic junkyard. Here we find a television set with transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, a speaker, and a
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plug for electrical power. But we observe that radios also have these things. Furthermore, some of the radios have a glass panel in the front that contains numbers for tuning not unlike the big glass panel in the front of the television picture tube. Since both are found in cabinets with knobs that are somewhat larger on the television set, it could be said that natural processes and environmental pressures operating on small populations over extended time periods caused radios to evolve into televisions. An evolutionist could further argue that there must have been a gradual diminishing of environmental light, so that the panel had to enlarge in order for the cabinet to survive. As it did so, cross-coupling with the cabinet caused the knobs to enlarge!
These examples are not as silly as they might appear. The reasons given to defend the change of a radio into a television set are not unlike those used to support the belief that apes changed into men. The fundamental basis for such belief is that each displays parts that differ in their development, but yet are common to both. However, a fallacy in the evolutionary argument is the assumption that common subsystems — engines in cars and planes, or speakers in radios and television sets — logically require the evolution by natural processes of one from the other. In the examples cited, this is clearly not the case. Intelligence, not chaos, was the guiding light. Moreover, the vastly higher information content along human DNA attests to a labor of intellect rather than primeval confusion.
Biological Complexity
Some have argued that the evolution through natural processes of one species from another has been proven by data from a field of science known as "molecular phylogeny," the study of the chemical history of the amino acid sequences.17 This false belief about molecular phylogeny comes from the failure to distinguish between the amino acid count along protein strands, and the information content resident within the actual sequence of the residues.18
When one considers that a typical human cell contains almost seven feet of DNA, and that its information continues to be resolvable down to distances of well under ten-millionths of an inch, one can well understand the confusion that exists regarding alleged similarities between the protein of humans and apes. For example, just to assimilate the content of this amount of information for study requires a computer whose storage capacity exceeds 10 billion bits. And were we to attempt to examine the short- and long-range interactions in and among the triplet centers throughout each of the twenty thousand DNA folds, it would require a computational capability that exceeds all of the computers that exist on earth now or that we can hope to produce in the foreseeable future.
Profound Differences
Ordinarily when we look at man and ape, the differences between the two are enormous. We see man traveling through space and apes jumping
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from trees. We find man sampling foods all over the world while chimps grab the closest banana they can reach. And whereas man builds thermonuclear power plants, monkeys run in fear from fire. Why is there so vast a difference? What truly divides man and ape? Is there an absolute distinction that sets human life apart from all other life? And if so, what is it? The literature of Shakespeare, the discoveries of Einstein, and the music of Beethoven have no parallel in the animal world. Did these things originate from a unique, unseen imperative? Or did they evolve from slime as the theory of evolution would have us believe?
Some say it's a mystery whose answer we may never know. Others say it is not a mystery, but a shadow of the deeper truth that the human body was actually designed, and that man was created in the image of his Designer. However, when we try to isolate the uniqueness that human accomplishment implies, we find that it is not an easy thing to identify. The reason is that many of the things that we may believe are unique to man turn out not to be. In almost all instances, the trait or characteristic that is alleged to lie exclusively in man's domain turns out also to belong to the animal world. This is why many have come to regard man as a "social animal," albeit one who lives on a higher plane of awareness and activity than do animals. Yet, if an absolute disunion exists between human life and all other life forms on earth, and if we can discover this regal distinctive, we may be able to identify the attribute responsible for human uniqueness. Once this attribute is found, we can use it to help us discover man's origin and acquire insight into the anatomical similarities he shares with apes.
Questions That Need Answers
Does man have an attribute that separates him in absolute disunion from the animal world? Is there truly a distinctive "something" that gives us the power to participate in a destiny inaccessible to animals — one that offers the promise of eternity? If so, what imprint does human life carry that uniquely separates us from all other life forms on earth? What quality is present in man that enables him to defeat the mightiest of jungle beasts, despite the fact that he is inferior in size and in strength? How is it that at a zoo, man enjoys the privileged position of looking into the cage as a visitor, and not the other way around? What makes human life "human" and what makes animal life "animal"?
Chapter Seventeen || Table of Contents
1. Blinderman C. Science 85 (1985) 6(5):47 Jun.
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