Hair-Brained Thoughts About Evolution

Evolution is one of my favourite topics. Being a practising Christian I feel eminently entitled to pontificate on evolutionary conjecture. After all, evolutionists like Richard Dawkins are not shy about talking about religion and shooting down God at every opportunity. Incidentally, I prefer the term “evolutionary conjecture” to evolutionary theory or science because, well, conjecture predominates. A number of instances interspersed below illustrate my point.

One of the things I’ve noticed about evolutionists is their desperation to prove their conjecture. Thus their eagerness in the first half of the 20th century to embrace the Piltdown Man as one of those missing in-between creatures. And, in this case, no less a find than an ape-like (cum) man-like creature. What a lark that was.

A prank given pride of place in the British Museum for forty years. The skull of a man, the jaw and teeth of an orangutan, with a bit of chimpanzee. These kinds of things only happen when scientists are prepared to put all scepticism aside for the sake of the cause. Think “climate change,” for another prime example.

Anyway, an article on the BBC website triggered my latest interest in evolution. Some research scientists reported seeing a Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia treating a wound on its face using a paste made from plants it had chewed up. Reportedly, “the wound closed up and healed in a month.” The video and commentary accompanying the article claimed that the nasty wound was deep and probably caused by a bite from a rival orangutan.

More than two years ago I fell on a treadmill and scraped my right leg rather badly on the rough outside edge of the belt. It took a very long time to heal and even now a spot of redness remains. Thus, rather than focus on the behaviour of the orangutan, the researchers in question might serve humanity enormously by revealing the secret of the orangutan’s rapid-healing balsam to the medical world. But I digress. Back to the article.

According to the researchers, “it is the first time a creature in the wild has been recorded treating an injury with a medicinal plant.” Let’s assume the story is kosher, at least up to a point — the video available at the link above is rather like a typical UFO sighting, vague and indeterminate. If it is, I am not sure how to put it in perspective or exactly what it means in the scheme of things. I suspect nothing much. Not so for the so-called scientists. To wit: “Scientists say the behaviour could come from a common ancestor shared by humans and great apes.”

Really? Did I say conjecture? Should have said wild speculation. Nonetheless, let’s take it at face value and speculate still further. What other human behaviours do orangutans – and not just the one studied – share with humans that can be traced to our common ancestor? Apart that is from eating, drinking, bodily functions, copulation, and fighting? Surely applying topical medicine is not the only takeaway. How about building things?

Beavers build dams and also lodges to live in. Here is David Attenborough presenting a video of the clever little fellas. Clearly some inexplicable relationship to a common ancestor of ours going much further back is at work here too, and one would imagine orangutans could do even better. The jungle must be strewn with as yet undiscovered chalets.

Talking of our so-called common ancestor of which, by the way, nothing at all is known, I googled and by chance came upon a quite recent article in Scientific American (August 10, 2017). The article bounced off a study in the prestigious journal Nature which reported on the discovery in Kenya in 2014, “of a 13-million-year-old infant skull, which … likely belonged to a fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon.”

 “Among the living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes which include the lesser apes (gibbons) and the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans).”

“Much remains unknown about the common ancestors of living apes and humans,” we are further told. You can say that again with knobs on.

Now hold onto your hats. Study co-author Christopher Gilbert, a paleoanthropologist at Hunter College in New York reportedly said the following.

Because they are probably close to the ancestor of all living apes, the specimen may help give us some sort of idea of what the common ancestor of all living apes and modern humans might have looked like, and because our specimen looks most similar to gibbons among living apes, it would potentially support the idea that the common ancestor of living apes and humans looked like a gibbon.

There you are. Having found the skull of a very-ancient gibbon-like creature; ipso facto, we evolved from a common ancestor which looked like a gibbon. Now gibbons are cute enough, I suppose, but Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie they are not. Below, a baby gibbon from whose likeness we supposedly evolved.

Notice how hairy it is. Herein lies another evolutionary tale.

Naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace can both claim to have independently discovered the theory of natural selection; although Darwin earned the fame. However, they disagreed when it came to human evolution.

Wallace wanted to keep man as a special category, distinct from animals; arguing that only a “superior intelligence” a “controlling intelligence” could account for man. Wallace reminded Darwin of three central assumption of natural selection. Powers expand only up until a survival advantage is attained. Nothing will be produced which disadvantages a creature. And, natural selection can’t develop an attribute or organ which is either useless or will only become useful in the future.

And one of the anomalies which follows, and which is a hard to account for, is the hairlessness of humans. All other animals have protective coats of hair to ward off the rain and cold? Hairlessness is a serious disadvantage which natural selection cannot possibly explain.

Humans didn’t lose hair knowing that they would invent clothes and warm fires. That’s not the way natural selection works. In order to explain it, Darwin had to appeal to sexual selection, rather than natural selection. In a nutshell, his argument is that early hairy Homo sapiens (and perhaps, to the point, Homines erecti) of both sexes started fancying sexual partners with relatively less hair. Consequently, sexual congress became skewed towards the less hirsute and the rest is history.

I don’t know. It seems a conjectural stretch to me. Moreover, while I’m not nearly as prepossessing as Brad Pitt, I don’t quite see my distant forbears as being originally made in the mould of a gibbon-like creature? And then, unlike gibbons themselves, eschewing hairiness? Why didn’t gibbons start fancying the less hirsute among their number, I’d like to know? Ah, unanswered questions, inside conjectures, inside speculations. Along with singer Norman Greenbaum, I reckon the Spirit in the Sky is a lot easier to believe in than in Adam and Eve looking like a pair of gibbons. But that’s just (sceptical) little old (Christian) wine drinker me.