From: "Terry W. Colvin" 
Subject: IUFO: FWD [fort] Darwinism vs. Creationism: A Checkered History, A Doubtful 
 Fu
Date: 26 Mar 2001 22:49:32 -0500
To: "iufo@topica.com" ,
        "skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu" 

->  IUFO  Mailing List

Forgive the long history lesson, but its worth staying with for the
conclusion! Makes kind of sense to me anyway!


[This essay is 5000 words (10 pages) long. It is a serious, comprehensive
piece of journalism written to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the
famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee. It may be transmitted
without restriction via the internet, but requires my permission for copying
into printed mediums like newsletters or magazines.]


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 true roots of the challenge to divine creation extend 65 years prior to
Darwin, back to 1795, when two men-a naturalist and a geologist-published
stunning works. The naturalist was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's
grandfather, a brilliant intellectual in his own right. In The Laws Of
Organic Life he suggested that population numbers drove competition for
resources, that such competition was a possible agent of physical change,
that humans were closely related to monkeys and apes, and that sexual
selection could have an effect on species modification. In short, he dealt
with nearly all of the important topics his grandson would later expand
upon, except natural selection.

The geologist was a Scotsman, James Hutton, whose Theory Of The Earth
suggested for the first time that Earth might be much older than 6,000
years, then the universally accepted time frame established a century
earlier by Anglican Bishop James Ussher. (Many if not most of today's
mainstream Christians are convinced that the creation date of 6,000 years
ago is Holy Writ, even though mortal Bishop Ussher arrived at it by the
mundane method of calculating the who begat whoms listed in the Bible.)

Hutton studied the layering of soils in geological strata and concluded that
rain washed soil off the continents and into the seas; at the bottom of the
seas heat from inside the planet turned soil into rock; over great stretches
of time the new rocks were elevated to continent level and slowly pushed up
to form mountains; then in turn those mountains were weathered away to form
new layers of soil. This unending cycle meant two things: Earth was not a
static body changed only superficially at the surface by volcanoes and
earthquakes; and each layering cycle required vast amounts of time to
complete.

The significance of Hutton's insight, to which he gave the jawbreaker name
of uniformitarianism, cannot be overstated. However, he couldn't challenge
Ussher's 6,000 year dogma because he provided no alternative to it. He was
certain that 6,000 years was much too short a time span for any weathering
cycle to be completed, but in the late 18th century there was no way to
accurately measure geological eras. That would have to wait another
thirty-five years until Sir Charles Lyell, a far more methodical British
analyst and researcher, could firmly establish uniformitarianism as the
basis of modern geology.

Lyell took Hutton's work and ran with it, creating a three-volume series
called Principles Of Geology (1830-1833) that convincingly provided the time
lines and time frames Hutton lacked. Bishop Ussher's 6,000 year dogma still
held complete sway with ecclesiastics everywhere, but the world's burgeoning
ranks of scientists could see that Hutton and now Lyell were correct; the
earth had to be millions of years old rather than 6,000. But how to convince
the still largely uneducated masses of Ussher's fallacy? Like Hutton before
him, Lyell and his supporters could not break through the dense wall of
ignorance being perpetuated by religious dogma. However, they had knocked
several gaping cracks in it, so when Charles Darwin came along in another
thirty years (1859), the wall was ready to begin crumbling with an echo that
reverberates to this day.

Darwin was strongly influenced by Lyell, who published the first of his
geology tomes while Darwin was at Cambridge completing his last year of
theological training (he only studied nature as an avocation). He took the
first volume of the trilogy on his fateful voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle
and devoured it along the way. Masterfully written and persuasively argued,
it made such an impression on the 22-year-old that in later life he said, "I
really think my books come half out of Lyell's brain. I see through his
eyes." So between Lyell's genius and his grandfather Erasmus' unconventional
views about nature instilled during his childhood, young Charles set sail
toward his destiny with a blueprint of his revolutionary theory in mind and
a tool to build it in his hands.



Without saying it outright, Darwin's bottom line was that life's myriad
forms managed their own existence from start to finish without divine help.
This did not take God entirely out of the equation, but it did remove His
influence on a day-to-day basis. The irony is that Charles Darwin did his
work reluctantly, being a devout man who had trained to become a minister.
Nonetheless, the schism he created between evolution (a term he never used;
his choice was natural selection) and God was the battering ram that
breached the forbidding wall of dogmatic ignorance that had stood for
thousands of years.

Though breached, that wall did not come down entirely. Instead, an
ideological war erupted on both sides of what remained of it, pitting
Darwinists against Creationists in intellectual bloodletting that eventually
forced some of the wounded to seek relief in compromise. Both sides might be
content, they suggested, if God could be acknowledged as the initiator of
all life, followed by a "hands-off" policy thereafter to let nature take its
evolutionary course. All well and good. But instead, both sides adopted a
winner-take-all strategy, unwilling to make even marginal concessions to the
other side's point of view.

Allowing no room for compromise left both sides open to continuous attack,
and the salvos they exchanged were fierce and relentless. James Hutton and
Charles Lyell had proven beyond reasonable doubt that the earth was
immensely older than 6,000 years, yet they and their supporters had been
overwhelmed by the oppressive power of ecclesiastic influence. Now, however,
Darwin's arguments supporting gradual changes over equally vast amounts of
time tipped the scales in favor of science. Public opinion began to shift.
The uniform rejection of old became tentative acceptance at an
ever-increasing rate.

This alarming turn of events forced all but the most ardent Creationists to
seek ways to appease their critics, to put themselves back in the driver's
seat of public opinion. Bishop Ussher's unyielding time line of 6,000 years
was gradually coming to symbolize their willful disdain of reality, like a
chain draped around their necks, drowning them as the tide of understanding
shifted the sand beneath their feet. They began to modify their insistence
that God had created everything in the universe exactly as recounted in the
Bible. They could suddenly see the wisdom of granting Him the latitude to
accomplish His miracles in six eras of unspecified length rather than in six
literal days.



Of course, Creationists did more than hit the reverse pedal on their
sputtering juggernaut. The brightest of them dug deep into Darwin's emerging
theory to discover holes nearly equal to the ones scientists were exposing
in religious dogma. In 1873, only fourteen years after The Origin Of
Species, geologist J.W. Dawson, chancellor of McGill University in Montreal,
published The Story Of The Earth And Man, which was every bit as well
written and as carefully argued as Darwin's masterpiece. In it Dawson
pointed out that Darwin and his followers were promoting a theory based on
three fallacious "gaps" in reasoning that could not be reconciled with the
knowledge of their era. What is so telling about Dawson's three fallacies is
that they remain unchanged to this day.

The first fallacy is that life can spontaneously animate from organic
material. In 1873 Dawson complained that "the men who evolve all things from
physical forces do not yet know how these forces can produce the phenomenon
of life even in its humblest forms." He added that "in every case
heretofore, the effort (to create animate life) has proved vain." After 127
years of heavily subsidized effort by scientists all over the world to
create even the most basic rudiments of life, they are still batting an
embarrassing zero. In any other scientific endeavor, reason would dictate it
is time to call in the dogs and water down the fire. But when it comes to
Darwinian logic, as Dawson noted in 1873, "here also we are required to
admit as a general principle what is contrary to experience."

Dawson's second fallacy was the gap that separates vegetable and animal
life. "These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes
and accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or
decay does the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never
in its simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. This gap can, I
believe, be filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance." And thus it
remains today. If life did evolve as Darwinists claim, it would have had to
bridge the gap between plant and animal life at least once, and more likely
innumerable times. Lacking one undeniable example of this bridging, science
is again batting zero.

The third gap in the knowledge of 1873 was "that between any species of
animal or plant and any other species. It is this gap, and this only, which
Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species; but,
notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as
wide as ever, since it must be admitted that no case has been ascertained
inwhich 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?

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: Fortean Times * Northwest Mysteries * Mystic's Cyberpage *
   TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
   TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans,
Allies, and CIA/NSA are welcome]


-> To unsubscribe send email to iufo-unsubscribe@topica.com

____________________________________________________________
T O P I C A  -- Learn More. Surf Less. 
Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose.
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01