What Darwin Didn't Know - Part 10: The Hominids

What would you say best characterizes human beings as distinct from all other created beings? I think that is a great question. The Bible states in Genesis 1:26-27 and Genesis 5:1-2 that male and female humans were made in the image of God. Here are the verses for your reference:

Genesis 1:26-27

²⁶ Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Footnotes:

1. Genesis 1:26 Hebrew; Syriac all the wild animals

Genesis 5:1-2 (New International Version)

Genesis 5

From Adam to Noah

¹ This is the written account of Adam's line.
When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. ² He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them "man."

Footnotes:

1. Genesis 5:2 Hebrew adam

These verses imply that we human beings in some ways bear a likeness or similarity to God, and uniquely in that respect. In other words, there ought to be a distinction somehow between we human beings and the animals or other created beings. Nowhere does scripture teach that the animals were also created in God's image, but rather only human beings were. Nor does scripture really tell us exactly what this "image of God" really is, so we are stuck with centuries of debate from theologians. A consensus of this concept by the theologians identifies these main characteristics:

(from "Who Was Adam", by Dr. Fazale Rana, Page 79)

1. Human beings possess a moral component. They inherently understand right and wrong and have a strong innate sense of justice.

2. Humans are spiritual beings who recognize a reality beyond this universe and physical life. Mankind intuitively acknowledges the existence of God and has a propensity toward worship and prayer.

3. Human beings relate to God, to themselves, to other people, and to other creatures. There is a relational aspect to God's image.

4. Humanity's mental capacity reflects God's image. Human beings possess the ability to reason and think logically. They can engage in symbolic thought. People express themselves with complex, abstract language. The are aware of the past, present, and future. Human beings display intense creativity through art, music, literature, science, and technological inventions.

For a more in depth description of the Imago Dei,

Kenneth Samples talks about "the Imago Dei" and describes how humans differ from the animals.

Interestingly, the fossil record displays a sudden burst of this "image of God" activity, including a sudden appearance of art, jewelry, music and musical instruments including the flute, the use of clothing, sophisticated tools and tool use, and religious artifacts involving worship. This cultural big bang occurs a few thousand years after the origin of humanity, which the RTB model dates to about 50,000 years ago. Prior to this, there are fossils of other quadrupedal and bipedal primates known as the hominids, but these "image of God" artifacts are conspicuously missing in all the fossils involving these primates, who date from millions of years ago to about 100,000 years ago (the Neanderthals). Just like the sudden appearance of complex first life on Earth, humans appear on the scene in the fossil record suddenly and without ancestral predecessors. The hominids that preceded the humans have far too many biological and cultural differences to have made any naturalistic evolutionary contributions to the origin of humanity.

Here is an excellent audio clip from Reasons To Believe's Biochemist, Dr. Fazale Rana on the vast differences between the hominids and human beings. As you listen, I'll just add a few points on the lack of time available for the vast anatomical and biological changes which must take place to go from a hominid to a human being (speaking from the point of view of the natural/Darwinian model). Bipedalism (the ability to walk upright on 2 limbs), and brain size, are considered to be humanity's two most significant anatomical features by evolutionary biologists. Significant discoveries in paleoanthropology and paleoecology push the date for bipedalism back to the very first hominids, between 5 and 6 million years ago. This shows that bipedalism did not emerge gradually in a step by step fashion, as would be expected in an evolutionary framework, but suddenly with the hominids' first appearance. Not only this, but bipedalism went through 2 stages over long periods of time without change. From "Who Was Adam?" page 162, Dr. Rana writes:

"Instead of gradually changing over time, bipedalism endured through two long periods without change. The first period lasted roughly 5 million years - the second, 2 million. The fossil record indicates that transition from one form of locomotion to another took place rapidly.

Australopithecines manifested facultative (optional) bipedalism. The Homo genus has always possessed obligatory bipedalism. Though australopithecines existed for nearly 3 million years, their facultative bipedalism did not gradually change into an obligatory form. Rather, it remained static throughout the duration of the australopithecines' existence. With the appearance of the Homo genus, a distinct new form of bipedalism (obligatory) suddenly showed up in the fossil record."

But this is antithetical to a gradual, step by step transitional process known as Darwinian Evolution, and the sudden appearance of obligatory bipedalism from facultative (optional) bipedalism can only be understood as a fingerprint of God, removing the older animals (australopithecines) with the newer homo hominids, as conditions in the environment changed.

What I'm saying is that if a naturalistic evolutionary model were true for the origin of humanity, wouldn't one expect bipedalism to transform from a crude and inefficient form to a more sophisticated, efficient form? Yet we see exactly the opposite in the fossil record, that bipedalism appears early and suddenly and does not experience any gradual changes over long periods of time, but only shows sudden changes as one species goes extinct and gives rise to another.

What about brain size? A similar pattern exists in the fossil record. The brain sizes do not gradually change in size over time, but remain constant for the time each hominid existed. In other words, the jumps in brain size are discontinuous, not gradual. Here's Dr. Rana again in "Who Was Adam?" from page 164: "The discontinuous jumps in brain size occur as new hominid species successively appear in the fossil record. For example, the brain size of the australopithecines, which existed from about 5.0 to 1.5 million years ago, was about 400 cm3. Brain size for those specimens assigned to Homo habilis, existing between 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago, jumped to between 650 and 800 cm3 in volume. Homo erectus/ergaster (about 1.8 million to 500,000 years ago) had a brain size that was larger still, ranging between 850 and 1000 cm3. Neanderthal's brain size was 1100 to 1400 cm3. By comparison, modern human brains range in size between about 1,000 and 1,500 cm3. These numbers show the general pattern of discontinuous leaps in brain size, not gradual increases."

Again, this is inexplicable from a strictly naturalistic evolutionary perspective. No known evolutionary processes can explain or produce such a cadence of change. The hominids were not the ancestors of humans, as most people on Earth today seem to mistakenly believe. Even the children's cartoons and movies, such as "Ice Age" make reference to the hominids as being human. Yet the evidence doesn't support this conclusion.

What about the argument that we share a common ancestor with the Chimpanzees? You may have heard that we share a 99% similarity in our DNA. This is totally bogus. There is more dissimilarities in the genetic makeup than similarities. Read this article on the latest on human-chimp genetic comparisons.

The fingerprint of God is unmistakable. God created the various hominids as distinct creatures. The fossil records portrays a lawn rather than a branching tree, where these animals are created, live unchanged for a period of time, then go extinct and are replaced with newer animals.

So what have we discovered these past 10 periods in our blog history? I think the evidence overwhelmingly refutes a Darwinian explanation for the origin of life on Earth and the origin of humanity. There's insufficient time, and there's no prebiotic soup. There seems to be evolution repeating itself, eventhough a blind, random mechanism such as natural selection should very rarely repeat itself. More accurately, it is a Creator who chooses to reuse archtypes or templates which work well in different unrelated organisms, much as an engineer designs parts to be used in different engines. We also saw how the Sun's luminosity has not been constant since Earth began, begging the question of just how could a blind process as naturalistic evolution could possibly forsee the future changes to the environment to know when to remove the old animals/organisms and to also know which kind of properties the new animals should possess, such that we human beings could benefit from their existence in the past? Also, how could Darwinism explain the sudden appearances of life, such as those appearing suddenly during the Cambrian Explosion, or those appearing just after the Permean Mass Extintion event? Or, how can a blind random process produce molecular machines which resemble those that human engineers produce? In my opinion, these can all be described as God's fingerprints. Let's take a quick look at Romans 1:

²⁰For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this series on What Darwin Didn't Know, although I believe that if Darwin could have lived today, he would become a believer in the God of all creation, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is "before all things" as stated so perfectly in Colossions 1:

The Supremacy of Christ

¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. ¹⁷He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. ¹⁹For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Well stated.

Stay tuned - next we turn to the cosmos to discover just how fined tuned it is for life to even be possible anywhere in the universe. But for something to be fine tuned, you need someone to fine tune it. I'll show you who the fine tuner is and you'll learn some cool stuff about the universe, in my next topic called "The Design of the Cosmos"

Cheers

Tom