Science and God: Human Development and Evolution

            Modern evolutionists adopt and incorporate the Latin axiom of Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species: “natura non facit saltum”…nature makes no sudden leaps.

            A continuous chain linking together Australopithecus (4-7 million years ago), Homo habilis (2 million years ago), Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago), and Cro-Magnon man which are early Homo sapiens (200,000 years ago)…requires the logical consistency of a uniformly straight, gradually moderate, upward sloping, horizontal graph-line.

            This should clearly illustrate historically recordable milestone events along this progression.

            Darwinian macroevolution applied to human development requires incremental improvements chopped-up into small enough pieces in order to easily progress through the process of genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection. 

            This has to occur over a long, drawn-out period of time.

            This evolutionary progression would reveal human transitional improvements as historically evident milestones spaced-out along the way, both in terms of recognizable physical characteristics and intellectual/lifestyle advancements.

            We cannot adopt gradualism as the axiom that nature makes no sudden leaps over a long period of time in the advancing anatomical and intellectual development of human beings, without some tangible evidence in the intellectual/lifestyle arena to show for it. 

            This should be a non-negotiable presentation of evidentiary fact required of modern evolutionists in support of progressive development, especially as historical time ticks downward in the very recent past decades at 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 thousand years ago.

            In plain words, we would expect to see a quarterly report-card…a historical audit report…of humanity’s physical and intellectual progress at mid-stride points in time in the distant past. 

            We cannot have sudden leaps forward and a progress report of gradually improving human attributes both at the same time.

            In the hypothetical progression from ancient ancestors to modern humans, a mindless and undirected natural world can provide no preferential leaps forward for mankind. 

            Darwinian macroevolution allows only a slow-moving naturalistic gradualism.   

            Large advances of development in living organisms in biology are called saltations.  They are considered outside the reach of random and undirected processes to bring into being within single creative events.  Saltations require the combination and coordination of too many small genetic mutations to coalesce into one large, beneficially functional trait…to then successfully be chosen by natural selection.   

            If the historical development of human beings was in-fact gradual, this would apply not only to physical traits but also to lifestyle/intellectual advancements.  These advancements must be in a relatively close one-to-one correspondence to the physical traits being put-out by the advancing complexity of new and different cell types introduced over time.  

            Otherwise, the only option left is to have a lump-sum addition of advanced intelligence to human beings at a late, singular point in time…which could only occur through divine creation. 

            The lump-sum addition of human intellectual acuity late in development would create a dichotomy between physical and mental advancements…a reality that becomes more difficult to explain through random and undirected processes.

Human writing as an indicator

            The human invention of writing is a critical, date-stamp indicator of human intellectual progress.

            The invention of writing is dated to as recent a time as 3,200 B.C. in the wedge-shaped cuneiform lettering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The cuneiform alphabet in Syria is dated to around 2,000 B.C., and the invention of the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet is dated to around 1,000 B.C.

            The writing of the first five books of the Old Testament…called the Pentateuch…is dated by conservative scholars at around 1,450 B.C.

            The Greeks adopt the Phoenician writing script around 800 B.C.   

            The invention of human writing is therefore placed at only 5,200 years ago.

            There is no evidence of sophisticated, written communication 15,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, or 150,000 years ago in the very recent past…as a milestone event in human intellectual development.

            The boundary-line between Homo erectus and Homo sapien is generally placed at around 200,000 years ago, which inaugurates the start of what is considered to be modern man.

            It would follow then that the invention of writing, by some exceptionally gifted persons having forwardly progressing I.Q’s above and out in-front of the pack, would have occurred at least as far back as sometime around 200,000 B.C.

            To have a smooth transition of beneficial, variant physical traits moving incrementally forward in a positive direction from the start of Homo erectus at 1.8 million years ago to the start of Homo sapiens at 200,000 years ago…yet have human writing start around 3,200 B.C., is illogically nonsensical.

            For humans to invent writing in 3,200 B.C. and then be standing on the moon in 1969 A.D. is fact-based evidence that argues for the near instantaneous introduction of intellectual capacity.

            This is in stark contrast with Darwin’s notion that nature makes no sudden leaps…in the one and only area where the developments of advancing physical traits and lifestyle habits can be compared side-by-side…in the common descent theory of human beings.

            If Darwinian macroevolution encompasses human development, which it must for the overall theory to be true, we should expect to see the gradual progression of writing, the invention of paper and books, farming, villages, towns, politics, institutionalized civilizations, and other signs of creative intellectual advancements in technology, music, creative writing, and the arts…pioneered in the long ago.

            We should expect to see milestone advancements pushed way back in time, actualized by exceptionally gifted people with higher IQ’s and innate talents according to genetic variation, in relatively small numbers yet producing great effects.

            Charles Lyell, a contemporary and a friend of Darwin, posited the research methodology for the historical sciences such as geology of using the present phenomena to reconstruct events in the past.

            I would suggest here that the wide range of intellectual acuities we observe in humans today, if extrapolated backwards in time according to Lyell’s dictum that the present explains the past, overrules Darwin’s materialistic requirement that nature makes no sudden leaps.

            Intellectual development in human beings does not have to keep pace with physical development on a perfectly precise one-to-one correspondence, one or the other lagging behind slightly at times.

            But if the macroevolutionary scenario put forward by Darwinists is true…which I do not think it is…then the recent time-crunch for the observably rapid intellectual development of human beings, must be spread-out backwards over a much longer period of time.

            We should expect to see preview fore-glimpses of an Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Stradivarius, Isaac Newton, Rembrandt, Mozart, Darwin, Edison, and Einstein, at repetitive intervals of time counting down the decades between 200,000 B.C. to around 5,000 B.C., for example. 

            This would reveal an unmistakable, upward sloping, gradual ascending progression to the high elevation of our modern era today.

Humans are unique

            Homo sapiens are the only species on earth capable of producing history…of creating a record of the events of advancing civilization.

            The one area where we can track the accuracy of the linkage procedure used in common descent…is in the intellectual progress of Homo sapiens.

            This cannot be tracked in the same way looking at the lifestyle habits of ancient fossils of other creatures, because woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers are incapable of writing histories documenting their instinct-based, lifestyle progress.

            We can easily tell whether or not the intellectual progress of human development keeps pace with the hypothesized linkages that could demonstrate advancing anatomical progress over vast periods of time.  

            Near-mature intelligent human beings getting close to full-development…would be the only living species capable of leaving behind a written history that would enable a parallel tracking of both advancing anatomy and intelligence…the critical comparative tracking of architectural body-plans to lifestyle habits.

            Creating common descent linkages between Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens on anatomical grounds, using the straight-line Darwinian formula of nature makes no sudden leaps, cannot then exclude and ignore the evidence of the exponential, upward spiking graph-line track of human intellectual progress.

The on/off switches of gene regulatory networks

            Could the concept of developmental gene regulatory networks (DGRN’s) in pre-human living cells build and store-up the future capacity for modern human intellectual moral reasoning to explode on to the scene recently within a short time-span?

            This is one research program currently underway in molecular biochemistry trying to explain the near instantaneous immergence of complex living creatures during the Cambrian Explosion between 535-515 million years ago.  If answered, this could then apply to the apparent singularity of the near instant appearance of human intellectual and moral reasoning.  

            Researching the matter-and-energy mechanics of the sudden immergence of complex life-forms at the Cambrian Explosion still does not address the fundamental question of where did the genetic information come from in the first place…no matter how it was then translated into the reality of architectural body-plans.

            Whether or not the supporting genetic information is built-up gradually over long periods of time, and then released into physical actuality through the on/off mechanism of a controlling regulatory switch, is a brilliant scientific inquiry.

            But the answer to this question still does not address the fundamental questions of where would this information come from that guides DGRN’s, and how could it be so precisely timed and coordinated with specific geological eras of complimentary biodiversity and supportive ecosystems?

            Answer this question definitively through DGRN matter-and-energy mechanisms or through some other system of epigenetic information (a controlling informational system outside of DNA)…and we only push the fundamental question of the creative origin of genetic information…back one step. 

            We have then only answered more deeply the physics and chemistry of how ink bonds to paper, but have gone nowhere near solving the mystery of the intelligent agency that arranges the ink to convey the specified information of the headlines in the New York Times newspaper.

            The fact-based evidence of modern science does not support the traditional Darwinian process of small-step incremental gradualism as the causal explanation for human development, which must exhibit intellectual milestone improvements as well as anatomical advancements in an upward sloping linear progression.