Recently I read an article by evolution expert Prosanta Chakrabarty entitled "Is Our Picture of Evolution Still Stuck in the Past?" The article discusses the most famous image used in Darwinist literature, an image that has been called "The March of Progress." The original version of the image was drawn by Rudolf Zallinger, and appeared on pages 47 to 49 of the 1965 book Early Man by F. Clark Howell, which was part of a series of books published and very widely sold by Time-Life Books. Below we see the original illustration as it appeared in that book, as an unusual multi-page "pull-out" requiring special work by the book printer.
Since 1965 variations of this image (usually much shorter, with only about 5 or 6 figures) have appeared endlessly in science literature, particularly in magazines and web pages.
Shockingly, Chakrabarty tells us that the image is misleading. He says this:
"Consider, for instance, Rudolph Franz Zallinger’s 1965 mural 'March of Progress.' This mural — which illustrates a linear progression of humankind from monkey to ape to man (redrawn in part in Fig. 2a) — is one of the most commonly used in popular culture today. But it’s incorrect. As Stephen Jay Gould explains in his 1996 book 'Full House,' evolution doesn’t lead to humans as shown. Rather, we share common ancestry with other great apes, such as our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees; we did not evolve directly from them."
Chakrabarty tells us that there is a "more accurate" way to describe evolution, and gives us the diagram below as what he thinks is the "more accurate" depiction.
We should have great suspicion about a depiction such as the one above. One gigantic problem is the lack of any credible theory as to how there could occur a transition from the point marked as 2, one leading from a claimed common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, all the way to humans. Evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation as to how there could have arisen minds such as humans have, minds so rich in advanced mental capabilities that are of no use to creatures in the wild. This failure was pointed out by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, in his essay The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man, which you can read here.
Human Mental Capabilities, Mostly Useless to Cavemen
Another gigantic problem with the black diagram offered by Chakrabarty is its failure to specify what existed at the nodes marked 1 and 2 in the diagram. We have no mention of some discovered fossil species occupying either node 1 or node 2 in the diagram.
The continued claim that humans and chimpanzees evolved from something vaguely called a "common ancestor" -- without any mention of what such a common ancestor was, or what fossils correspond to such a claimed common ancestor -- is a gigantically suspicious thing. It is as suspicious as someone claiming that he and Franklin Roosevelt have a common ancestor, while refusing to name who this common ancestor was. Such a failure would be a clue that the man was suggesting something untrue. And when scientists claim that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor, while failing to mention the name of any extinct species that they claim was that common ancestor, we should be extremely suspicious that this claim of a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans is unfounded.
Our suspicions about this matter should increase when we analyze how abundant have been the lies told by the very people who claim that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. For many years they told us the false claim that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees are 98% similar, and used this false claim as their primary evidence for the claim that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Throughout the time this lie was told, it was always clear that such a claim was untrue by a large margin. A recent scientific study on this topic found there was about a 14% difference between the DNA of humans and the DNA of chimpanzees. The study is discussed here.
Besides long telling the outrageous lie that human DNA and chimpanzee DNA differs by only 2%, the same Darwinism enthusiasts long engaged in the most outrageous lying by trying to depicts humans and chimpanzees as being mentally very similar. They were like the guy in the visual below:
It is rather obvious why we were so long deceived in this matter. Darwinists have always tried to make the ocean-sized gap between humans and chimpanzees and other apes look like a small gap, as a way of trying to make more credible claims of a natural evolution from an ape-like predecessor to humans.
It is interesting that the type of graph offered by Chakrabarty as an example of "the real story of evolution" is a type of graph rejected by a paper in a scientific journal on human origins. The journal I refer to is the Journal of Human Evolution. In the paper here by anthropologist Lauren Schroeder and Rebecca Rogers Ackermann, we have the two diagrams below, labeled A and B.
The chart marked A is a chart like the chart that Chakrabarty has offered as his "more accurate" evolution chart. But in the article above in the Journal of Human Evolution, chart A is criticized as a "commonly held view of evolution," and the suggestion is made that such an idea differs from "our contemporary understanding of human diversity (B)."
Do you notice the huge difference between the charts? Chart A on the left (and Chakrabarty's diagram) presume that there are in the past particular common ancestors, represented in the diagram by unlabeled circles or unlabeled numbers. But the chart on the right (B) makes no such boasts of knowledge. Instead, it simply lists various types of species existing at various times, and the purple bars represent the range of times in which such species existed, according to the fossil or archeological evidence.
Below is the diagram on the right. The scale on the left (labeled MA) refers to "millions of years ago." The grey figures are largely guesswork, and may not depict the way the corresponding organisms typically looked. The third purple bar in the top left corner (marked H. sapiens) is our species.
Why do the authors prefer diagram B above, rather than diagram A? Probably because the fossil evidence fails to convincingly suggest any specific story of ancestry, and fails to suggest any "tree of evolution." The facts of paleontology actually reinforce the idea that we have no business claiming to understand how the human species arose, and that the origin of humans is an unsolved mystery.
Here is an annotated version of a short form of the "March of Progress" visual, one that highlights problems with the visual.
A news story a few years ago made it rather clear that many experts have been telling us groundless stories about human origins. The news story was entitled "Most human origins stories are not compatible with known fossils." We read the following: " 'When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it's just a big mess -- there's no consensus whatsoever,' said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review."
The "March of Progress" visual constantly repeated (in shortened form) in Darwinist literature helped inspire my "Evolution of Materialism" visual below:
Below are some explanatory notes, some of which are discussed more fully in my post here:
(1) In his De Rerum Natura, the ancient writer Lucretius advanced a materialist theory of human origins, speculating that humans arose from random combinations of atoms. Central to such a speculation was the idea that the universe had existed forever, with the idea that such an eternal span of time would allow the most improbable combinations of atoms to occur. The claim that the universe had existed forever was an error, and is now inconsistent with the standard Big Bang cosmology, maintaining the universe suddenly began about 13 billion years ago.
(2) Charles Darwin advanced a vacuous theory of biological origins, based on a tiny-weight "random variations" idea very similar to the "random combinations" idea of Lucretius. Darwin's idea was even less credible, as he lacked the eternity of random combinations that Lucretius appealed to. But Darwin did have in his favor the misleading misnomer phrase "natural selection," which he used to describe a speculation which was no actual theory of selection, as "selection" means a conscious choice, and no such thing was postulated. Darwin's vacuous ideas "went viral" after they were embraced by biologists and other theorists eager to promote themselves as "grand lords of explanation" who could explain the great mystery of human origins.
(3) The imprisonment, persecution and slaying of theists occurred massively in the Soviet Union between 1917-1950, and for many additional years in Russia and in other communist countries, which officially embraced atheism.
(4) A key element in the late 20th-century propagation of Darwinism was the teaching of the false claim that DNA and its genes had a specification for making a human body and its organs and cells, something that was described as a blueprint, recipe or program for building a human. The lie was told not merely from 1960 to 1990, but for many additional years; and the lie continues to be widely told to this day (although more than than 38 doctors and scientists have confessed the claim is false). DNA and its genes actually have no specification of anything larger than a microscopic protein molecule, and do not specify how to make bodies, organs, cells or the organelles that make up such cells. The only coding system ever discovered in DNA and its genes is what is called the genetic code, a very simple coding system capable of expressing only low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule.
(5) After the clarification by physicists and cosmologists of how precisely fine-tuned our universe is, in a way that causes it (against the most enormous odds) to be habitable (permitting the existence of life), the theory of the multiverse was spread: the idea that there is some infinity or near-infinity of universes, each with different physical characteristics. The idea is pure fantasy, and does not actually do anything to explain the fine-tuned habitability of our universe, for reasons explained here and here. A nutshell explanation of such reasons would include a mention of the fact that increasing the number of random trials does not at all increase the likelihood of success on any one random trial. It is interesting that a few years ago a poll was made of philosophers, who were asked whether "design" or "multiverse" was the explanation for "cosmological fine-tuning." As discussed in my post here, the number of philosophers (144) who preferred the explanation of "design" was significantly higher than the number of philosophers (122) who preferred the explanation of "design."
No comments:
Post a Comment