A: Right, no change, that is, until they mixed—starting in the very beginning with Asu/Ihin blends. Take Gona, Ethiopia, for example—with carefully manufactured tools made by Au. garhi. Paleontologists say this happened 2 million years after the first human ancestor began to walk upright. Until garhi, nothing much had changed. Crossbreeding was the “change.”
A HORSE IS A HORSE IS A HORSE
POE: Neanderthals changed because they specialized during the isolation created by Ice Age conditions. Early Neanderthal had been of a generalized type, without the severe traits of later classic Neanderthal. Zinj was also generalized, without any of those specialized traits seen in the animals: stingers, spurs, spines, scales, talons, tusks.
A: “Generalized” strikes me as a purely circular argument invented to cover a negative meaning only—the absence of traits that scientists assume developed afterward by “selective pressures.” It is meaningless otherwise. You call classic Neanderthal specialized because of his strikingly coarse features, and progressive Neanderthal generalized because most of his features are vaguely modern (except ridges and thick cranium). Richard Leakey calls H. erectus’s massive brow a more advanced feature, specialized, even though this so-called advance is away from the modern type! This is nonsense, a semantic blanket, covering anachronisms, which, taken at face value, simply force us to abandon Darwinian evolution.
POE: The species Neanderthal is a collateral development that went nowhere, not really primitive per se. Their features are simply the consequence of special physiological adaptations to northern cold. They became too specialized in this regard, then died out with the postglacial warmth, just as Solo River Man and Rhodesian Man paid the penalty of overspecialization, and went extinct. In fact, all specialized creatures are dead ends, really, like the great apes who became specialized for forest living and are now dying out.
A: I have a problem with this. Natural selection, the very pillar of evolution, entails animals specializing in various ways to meet the demands of the environment. How then can you call specialization the road to extinction? Those adaptations are supposed to be the road to survival! Your ad hoc mechanisms are contradicting each other! Didn’t Le Gros Clark (back in 1955) establish “the astonishing conservatism of morphological elements,” such as the 3-million-year stasis of leopards and impalas?
POE: Conservatism? My dear woman, this outdated immutability of species or conservatism was discredited more than 150 years ago.
A: Right, by Band-Aids and jargon: As soon as a feature doesn’t fit with the expected model of evolutionary sequence, it is called a specialization or divergent modification or a collateral branch of the Homo tree. They even call Ardi a side branch! And that is our true ancestor, the first man—Asu! And since Negritos in Europe also came as a surprise, they were labeled either “specialized” or “pathologic” or “aberrant offshoot,” like the Grimaldi Woman, whose prognathism was labeled a pathologic condition: she had suffered presumably from a phenomenon of orthodontics, her face hence more protruding. But prognathism is a mark of those early races that inhabited every portion of the globe and whose genes were retained in the Grimaldi type.
POE: The point is that the more generalized an animal, the more it is amenable to, and capable of, making new adaptations; they are not so narrowly conformed or restricted to a given environment as are more specialized creatures. Take mankind: Our species is peculiarly unspecialized, blessed with infinite creativity and marvelous adaptability, going all the way back to Lucy’s bunch, who were great generalists. Look at the huge amounts of climate change they survived in the face of overwhelming challenges. They had that plasticity that we label “generalized.”
[There is] no evidence whatsoever that the earlier members of any long-continued group were more generalized in structure than the later ones.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, “PALEONTOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION,” CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES
A: I really wonder who is to say which animal is specialized and which is not—or which is simple and which is complex. Hindsight makes it so, but it is pure assumption that simpler forms became specialized (grew horns, stingers, and so on) by progressive morphological changes. Doesn’t biochemistry tell us that even the most rudimentary forms of life are already exceedingly complex and sophisticated?
Fossil residues of ancient life-forms . . . do not reveal a simple beginning.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
Simple structures . . . have staggering complexity. . . . Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.
MICHAEL BEHE, DARWIN’S BLACK BOX
POE: Evolution from a primordial common ancestor has unfolded over an immense period of time and has followed a step-by-step sequence from primitive to advanced, complex, forms of life. Animal life, for example, followed plant life.
A: But complex plant life and animal life appeared together in the Cambrian. The Cambrian explosion, the biological Big Bang, saw the sudden appearance of highly organized marine fauna, the first shells appearing fully developed.
POE: Do you doubt that organisms progress from simpler to complex? There are thousands of examples. Evolution does not necessarily imply or require progress, just change—even though things in fact have gotten more organized and complex.
A: Fact? Or opinion? Sir Richard Owen, statesman, anatomist, and zoologist, “the British Cuvier” and headman at the British Museum in the mid-1900s, said this is not the case among reptiles. Dinosaurs, for example, were actually more complex than today’s lowly reptiles.*71 Dinos were the apex of reptilian life, and (if you don’t mind my mentioning this), according to Sir Richard, they did not evolve from some simpler reptile but had been created by God. To him, the coexistence of very simple and very complex life-forms today refutes natural selection; there was, he said, not a single proven instance of transmutation of species. If simple organisms were always “evolving” into more complex ones, why are the most numerous creatures in nature today of the simplest form?
Figure 4.7. Thomas Henry Huxley and his cartoon of “Eohomo” (dawn man) riding the dawn horse, Eohippus. By showing the graded evolution of the horse, Huxley thought he verified Darwin’s predictions. Others say the early horse is the size of a fox and may not be a horse at all.
POE: We must touch on complexity theory here—complex adaptive systems, in which the individual elements interact, adapting their behavior to changing conditions. Out of the process—and over time—emerge complexity and diversity. Horse evolution, as an example, marks a path from multitoed horses (the dog-sized Eohippus) to today’s singletoed horse, the species known as Hipparion providing the intermediate type, the progression moving from small to large, from simple grinding teeth to complicated cusps.
A: Eohippus, I am afraid, has been found in the same strata as the modern horse. You cannot say horse evolution was progressive. They grew taller, then shorter, then taller again. No single branch led from smaller to taller; some had three toes, others had just one. Paleontologists tell us there have been numerous regressions in the number of toes. Even today a modern horse with three toes is occasionally born. In any case, from multiple toes to hoof (single working toe) is merely a modification—which in no way made the animal either more or less complex. Fewer toes, longer legs, larger molars—is this complexity or just change? Besides, the so-called horse sequence uses specimens from different places!
Most of them [intermediates] are simply varieties . . . artificially arranged in a certain order to demonstrate Darwinism at work, and then rearranged every time a new discovery casts doubt upon the arrangement.
FRANCIS HITCHING, THE NECK OF THE GIRAFFE
POE: Horse evolution still is not quite worked out, but we can demonstrate that the seed-eating and vegetation-eating finches indeed evolved from simple insect-eating finches: after a drought, larger-beaked finches were selected, for they were able to eat tough seeds, hence survive; whereas
in a rainy year, with softer seeds, the smaller beaked finches were more likely to prosper.
Figure 4.8. Galapagos finches, illustrated in Darwin’s Journal of Researches, show differences in beak structure. It is then argued that isolated populations derived from a single parent species, which diverged on different islands, producing new species, each adapted to a different environment. But who is to say these different beak shapes were not in the original phenotype from the beginning?
A: The seed-eating finches are not more evolved than the insect-eating ones, or any higher on some imagined evolutionary ladder. Besides, the shape of the finches’ beaks are not all that different. Neither does the concept of higher and lower apply to the Galapagos finches or perhaps anywhere else. When biologist Lynn Margulis was asked to comment on “speciation happening” among the Galapagos finches, she replied: “They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species—never.”23
POE: Ah, but if we observe, in other birds, that a slight increase in the wing flaps can make the difference between life and death, then we can see evolution, survival of the fittest, in action. Human societies, too, pass through stages of increasing complexity—steps in advancing evolution.
A: What has been termed steps in evolution are mere modifications, slight adjustments that seem to suit creatures to their environment, without in any way making animals more complex.
POE: So where have the more elaborately organized forms of life come from? They must have evolved from simpler forms—no alternative interpretation has ever been offered. Man is living proof of this, certainly the culminating peak of primate evolution—the last to become differentiated from the common ancestor of all.
A: Actually, ammonites were succeeded by simpler forms. When a simple form appears earlier than a complex one, it does not mean it is a phyletic precursor, just that the time was ripe for that sort of organism. If the fossil record shows a history of life from simple to complex, this reflects the ages of Earth—at first able to sustain only seaweeds and algae. If complexity came later, Earth was ready for it, but this does not prove one came from the other or from a “common ancestor.”
POE: Unfortunately, our knowledge of the development of multicellular organisms is very limited, because they seldom leave a fossil.
A: The one-celled organisms that are supposed to be at the top of the evolutionary tree—why are they still around? Can you tell me why even the first fish were already highly complex vertebrates? At the lowest level of geologic strata, the fossil record consists of quite complex creatures—such as the Cambrian trilobites. Life does not start with only a few rudimentary species. It begins with many life-forms. Darwin wrote in Origins that if any complex organ existed that could not possibly have been formed by slight modifications over time, “my theory would absolutely break down.”
POE: We now know a lot more about living forms than they did in Darwin’s day. Still, there is not a single case of a complex organ that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications.
A: Even though the simplest of all living things, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex, with thousands of design pieces, far more complicated than any machine built by man. I’m not sure any living system can be labeled primitive or ancestral, simple or complex.
POE: The earliest membrane-bound cells were extremely simple. The first self-replicating organisms were not up to the complexity of today’s DNA and proteins. Bacteria was probably more primitive than eukaryote cells; first came archaea, then bacteria, then eukaryotes.
It came as a great surprise in biology that a handful of fungi cells contain [sic] as much DNA as a man, and that the salamander contains a great deal more.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
A: Explain, then, why the skull of a mammal or a bird, as Professor Mayr pointed out, “is not nearly as complex as that of their early fish ancestors.” Even the amount of DNA does not increase up the evolutionary scale. Indeed, toads have more DNA than mammals and “the organism with the most DNA . . . is the lily.”24 It is also a fact that tomatoes have 7,000 more genes than humans and rice almost twice as many as humans.
If evolution has taken place . . . it ought to be relatively easy to assemble not merely a handful but hundreds of species arranged in lineal descent. Schoolchildren should be able to do this on an afternoon’s nature study trip to the local quarry, but even the world’s foremost paleontologists have failed to do so with the whole Earth to choose from and the resources of the world’s greatest universities at their disposal.
RICHARD MILTON, SHATTERING THE MYTHS OF DARWINISM
5
THE MATING GAME
Crossbreeding from Day One
As for those genealogies which you have recounted to us . . . they are no better than the tales of children.
PLATO, TIMAEUS
The glut of inconsistencies and unsolved mysteries in the evolutionary family tree simply vanishes with an understanding of crossbreeding, one of the oldest habits of mankind. It is because man is and has always been a mixer that we so regularly find a striking combination of primitive and advanced traits in hominids. These mosaics are screaming hybridization, Homo hybridis, Homo cohabitensis. But are paleontologists listening?
We are all a complete mixture.
BRYAN SYKES, THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE
Students and scholars alike are forever struggling with the relationship between the different fossil men. Well, that’s the right word. They had relationship, relations. Unthinkable? Not really. The hybridized “ascent of man”—which easily replaces the theory of evolution—is the other shoe about to drop on the scientific world.
Man is perhaps the most promiscuous animal . . . in the matter of indiscriminate interbreeding.
EARNEST HOOTON, UP FROM THE APE
IS NEANDERTHAL OUR ANCESTOR?
C. Loring Brace, representing America’s “pro-Neanderthal” school, and the Smithsonian’s Ales Hrdlicka, seized on Israel’s Mt. Carmel evidence to establish Neanderthal as forerunner of Homo sapiens. Other American scientists such as Franz Weidenreich and Milford Wolpoff also believed this to be so. Their European counterparts would have none of it. Neanderthal was merely some irrelevant distant cousin, for traces of mods earlier than Neanderthal came into existence, instantly disqualifying him as an ancestor.
Earnest Hooton also pointed out that the time line was much too brief: How could “he have changed thus rapidly into modern man . . . in so brief a space of time”? Besides, Neanderthal’s brain was too large to be a phylogenetic link between low-order hominids and modern man—“a less credible miracle,” Hooton thought, “than the changing of water into wine.” Rather “radical race mixture [would be] . . . exactly the sort of phenomena that are shown in the skeletal series from the caves of Skuhl and Tabun in Palestine.”1 Hooton thought only the progressive Neanderthals stood a chance of evolving to moderns. (Two Neanderthal types have been discovered: a more robust specimen with a brutal continuous torus or visor called classic Neanderthal, which I call Neanderthal 2 [N#2], and a somewhat more refined, progressive type, which I designate Neanderthal 1 [N#1]. The more gracile Neanderthal 1 should, according to evolution, follow Neanderthal 2, but it actually came before.)
Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark, for his part, thought the skeletal differences and “pattern of growth” in classic Neanderthals represented an isolated group not in the Homo line. Swiss workers (after making skull comparisons), concluded that Neanderthals belong to a separate species and did not give rise to living Europeans. More recently (2008) Germany-based geneticists, despite finding “no difference between Neanderthals and modern humans,” proceeded to argue that “Neanderthals were a separate species.”2
Mod traits have been found in Ethiopia before Neanderthals vanished from Europe and Asia. Neanderthal could not possibly have evolved into H. sapiens, as seen also at Dordogne, where a Cro-Magnon skeleton was found just above Neanderthal ones�
�a few thousand years is not enough time. Elsewhere in France mods at Combe Capelle and Mentone were again much too close in time to Neanderthals to have evolved from them: just as 35 kyr St. Cesaire Neanderthals could not have evolved in 3,000 years to 32 kyr Cro-Magnons.
The same situation applies to Grimaldi Man whose existence “in close association with the much more primitive Neanderthal form shows that Homo neanderthalensis could not be the ancestor of Homo sapiens, since both species were contemporary.”3 All told there is no real transition in Europe from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, the latter appearing not by evolution but quite suddenly.
Neanderthal, others argued, was too specialized to become anything else, no less modern man; and how could he be the ancestor of us all if his bones were basically confined to southern Europe (and adjacent western Asia)? Or if “fully modern men . . . lived in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and other areas of the world while the Neanderthals still inhabited Europe.”4 And he could not be our ancestor, if only because H. sapiens replaced or absorbed him in Europe rather than evolved from him (see chapter 12).
Even Thomas Henry Huxley, who would have loved to, could not see Neanderthal as an ancestor, because he was too much like us; though according to others, such as England’s Chris Stringer, Neanderthal was too different from us (especially in skull shape) to be our ancestor. (Go figure.)
But a way out of these difficulties was found—just create a common ancestor (out of thin air). Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck research team in Leipzig, declared: “We shared a common ancestor with the Neanderthal” before diverging from them, and evolving apart. But Neanderthal is simply, very simply, a retrobred race resulting from Ihuan (Cro-Magnon) “indiscretions.” He is not “pre-modern,” but actually post-modern, offspring of the back-breeding Cro-Magnons. Neanderthal owes his existence, not to any separating or splitting, but to a coming together of Ihuan and Druk. Marcellin Boule came very close to the truth when he suggested that Neanderthal “was a degenerate species.”
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 17
