Modern evolutionists adopt and incorporate the Latin axiom of Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species: “natura non facit saltus,” that nature makes no sudden leaps.
An incrementally progressive chain linking together Australopithecus-Africanus (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 would include historically recordable milestone advancements 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 incrementally along the way, both in terms of recognizable physical characteristics, but also 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.[1]
This should be a presentation of the evidentiary facts 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, if gradualism is the paradigm of human development, then 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, vertical spikes of intellectual forward-progress and a Darwinian progress report of horizontally gradual, slowly improving human physical attributes, both occurring within the same span of time.
In the hypothetical progression from ancient ancestors to modern humans, a mindless and undirected natural world can provide no preferential skips forward for mankind’s intellect.
Darwinian macroevolution allows only a slow-moving, naturalistic gradualism.
A large advance of development in a living organism in biology is called a saltation. They are considered outside the reach of random and undirected processes to bring into being, within single creative events.
A saltation requires 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 at a single point in time.
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 ever-increasing 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 action, which is what I am suggesting did occur here based upon the evidence.
The lump-sum addition of human intellectual acuity late in development would create a nonsensical dichotomy between physical and mental advancements in the naturalistic program, a reality that becomes more difficult to explain through random, accidental, and undirected processes.
Modern humans have 215 different cell-types and roughly 100 brain nerve-cell types.[2]
I personally have no problem with Australopithecus-Africanus having 160 cell-types, Homo habilis having 170 cell-types, Homo erectus having 185 cell-types, and Cro-Magnon man having 195 cell-types leading up to modern humans (Homo sapiens) with 215 different cell-types to support our current architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits, for example.
This would explain cave paintings, stone arrowheads, primitive tools, and pottery fragments dating back tens of thousands of years produced by pre-humans lacking the full complement of cell-types, yet still functionally suited to their biodiverse, contemporary environment.
The concept of the download of clustered groups of differing new cell-types removes the need of a metaphorical explanation for the sudden appearance of mature human faculties in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, discussed in more detail later in this essay.
But if we insist upon a linear progression of new and different cell-types one-at-a-time from a hypothetical starting point of 160 cell-types 4-7 million years ago to the current 215 cell-types today, then we must find signs of human intellectual milestones pushed back hundreds of thousands of years, if we are to be logically consistent.
Human Writing as an Indicator
The human invention of writing is a critical, date-stamp indicator of human intellectual progress that helps to pinpoint when humans acquired their full complement of 215 cell-types and 100 brain nerve-cell types.
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 start of the writing of the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch, is dated by conservative scholars at around 1,450-1,410 B.C., at the time of the Exodus.[3]
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 using an alphabet 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 sapiens is generally placed at around 200,000 years ago, which inaugurates the start of what is considered by paleontologists to be modern man.
It would follow then that the invention of writing, by some exceptionally gifted persons having forwardly progressing IQ’s above and out in-front of the general populace as is common today, 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 traitsand lifestyle habits can be compared side-by-side in the common descent theory of human beings.
When Charles Darwin wrote in his classic 1859 book The Origin of Species “nature makes no sudden leaps,” he locked himself into the paradigm of changein relation to time applied to biological development, which in my opinion is wrong because he was working within the limited constraints of the materialistic worldview.
According to what seemed reasonable at the time in 1859, Darwin thought that by hypothesizing small-step changes put-out by living organisms as variant traits through random and undirected processes, that natural selection could arbitrate between the comparative values of these traits for survival and reproductive advantage, and favor the most beneficial.
In fairness to Darwin, it would be asking too much to expect that he could rise above the conventional thinking of change occurring over time, because the modern discoveries of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world of biology were little known in 1859.
But today the concept of an instantaneous rate of change occurring in a “width-less” moment of time t=0 is entirely understandable when we ponder the Big Bang, the origin of life, the Cambrian Explosion, the immergence of human intelligence, and elementary calculus.
From Pondering Our Creation: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.
[1] See the discussion of the Waiting Time Problem during the final roughly 12 minutes of the podcast: Gunter Bechly Explains What the Fossil Evidence Really Says, published by Discovery Science November 23, 2021 on You Tube.
[2] On the Origin of Phyla—Interviews with Dr. James Valentine, by Access Research Network, published on Oct. 22, 2014, on You Tube.
[3] 2061030 The Oldest Yahweh Inscription 2 Kings Joel Kramer, published Oct. 30, 2016 by Lighthouse Church-Twin Falls on YouTube…at Joel Kramer Archaeologist.
The Cross in the Christian Life 
“Modern evolutionists adopt and incorporate the Latin axiom of Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species: “natura non facit saltus,” that nature makes no sudden leaps.”
they don’t. that has long been discarded as an absolute. Funny how Christians always must try to refute superseded information.
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