Evolution versus Creation is actually Science versus Religion.
The tiresome argument that has dragged on interminably should be declared a draw by its embattled contestants.
Nobody wins. Science 0 — Religion 0 - a NO-SCORE draw.
There's an intriguing new hypothesis that concludes science to be suffering from the same kind of illusion that science has concluded (arrogantly, as it turns out) that religious believers suffer.
Because human intelligence - and especially science — can be shown to be surplus to requirements when it comes to evolutionary success:
All other species, apart from man, have survived quite happily for hundreds of millions of years without it.
Yet humans have been around for perhaps a mere 5-7 million years, according to all the evidence.
Has intelligence and our undoubted ability to produce complex tools furthered our survival chances? Well, no; the same evidence points to the fact that it’s we humans who are Nature’s very own ‘weapon of mass destruction’.
It can be shown that ‘successful’ species are those which adapt to a specific ‘niche’ to achieve such a precise ‘fit’ (using the word as Darwin intended).
In this way they reach ‘stasis’ — a true balance between their needs, as determined by the process of natural selection, and what the environment can provide.
The shark, one example from hundreds of thousands one could cite, has been around, virtually unchanged, for 650,000,000 years. This is no misprint.
Bacteria, the Earth’s most abundant species, existed more than 4,000,000,000 years ago — and an excess of them can still upset us humans.
Mankind, it turns out (following the hypothesis), is in fact a primate that probably suffered a mutation to that area of the brain dedicated to simple memory function.
This gave rise to our ability to recall events at will. Without this unique ability we would be, well, just apes.
Recall allows us to voluntarily ‘scroll’ forward and backward across events, dipping into experience to modify the way the world affects us. Humans, probably uniquely, use recall to overlay memories to produce novel insights.
In this way the first tools made by humans appeared; creating stone, leather, bone artefacts that mimic the teeth, hide, claws of much larger predators. So humans began to compete in niches that primates were not naturally selected for.
It was probably recall that allowed humans to ‘sidestep’ the normally slow process of Natural Selection in which mutation drives small, physical changes incrementally to make a species more ‘fit’ to occupy a niche.
In side-stepping Natural Selection humans began to progress in an accelerated fashion as feedback from their own behaviour modified their environment.
In the recall hypothesis humans come to be named a ‘pseudo species’ a term also applied to the many groups, governments, organisations and companies that mankind has spawned, but which have no natural history and seem to follow agendas not connected with survival within a naturally-occurring niche or the earth’s ‘natural’ environment.
The ‘leverage’ effect that recall confers on the human brain has implications beyond the fact that the power of mental evolution went unrecognised by Darwin. The brain, therefore, is a much more powerful influence when affected by mutation than are physical characteristics.
It’s manifestations include all conceptual and abstract notions, which before the mutation did not exist; ‘sequence’, ‘order’, ‘time’ and many other mental constructs that are modifiers in our world have no meaning in the world of the chimpanzee , giraffe or snail ; ‘tomorrow’ is simply not there and neither is ‘yesterday’ - they never were, and never will be.
This hypothesis rests heavily for its terms of reference on the work of some of the world’s most respected scientists — Darwin, Gould, Dawkins, Leaky, Sagan, Schmandt-Besserat, Rose, Ramachandran, Christiensen and many others.
Unfortunately for some of them — and paradoxically — the hypothesis implies that some stark logical truths must be faced; not only is it clear from an evolutionary standpoint that a mere five million years or so is insufficient time to demonstrate humans are a ‘successful’ species destined to endure or move towards stasis.
Logic also dictates that, at some time after humans diverged from a last-common-ancestor, consciousness came into being with recall, the result of a mutation caused by beta radiation from outer space. This accepted as a key driver of evolutionary change
The conclusion must be that before that event, time, consciousness and science not only did not exist, but even now must be viewed with the utmost suspicion as perhaps the consequence of a delusion induced by a mutation to the brain.
Within the context of the Earth environment, animals without the mutation fare much better, whereas humans (as we now know) represent a lethal danger to all other species.
Religious belief, too, can be said to date only from a time when humans gained consciousness through recall. But at least Christianity and other beliefs in a Divinity redeem themselves with emphasis on attempts to restrain human excess, especially aggressiveness, materialism, cruelty, .etc., rather than the opposite.
It seems rather obvious to draw the conclusion that time and money spent on research with largely altruistic goals is heavily outweighed by research that is not.
Yet it must be recognised that any religion centred on Divine worship could not have existed either before the advent of recall in humans and that the environment bears evidence of a proliferation of life forms before the supposed date of the appearance of this phenomenon in man. So chaotic Nature rules. Any perceived order is a product of the way our minds work under the influence of recall.
But in the mythic works of mankind there resonates in legend, poetry and gospels an acknowledgement that at some point — as in the story of Adam and Eve — there came a time when mankind lost the innocence of the animal and became something else.
Ample illustration of what ‘this something else can do’ comprises a large part of the recall hypothesis; from WWII to Michelangelo’s Pieta, from Olduvai Gorge to the particle accelerator at C.E.R.N, from Easter Island to the prehistoric caves of France.
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