Neither are large mutations—the stuff of “rapid evolution”—likely to be an improvement; chances are, a big jump, genetically, will end in death. Most macromutations, as they are called, are lethal, for any mutation big enough to cause an important change would, by the same token, be fatally disruptive. “Mutation is a pathological process which has little or nothing to do with evolution.”63 Change a gene too much, “and it will be unable to continue its existing functions.”64 Mutants are usually short lived and leave no progeny.
Only tiny changes (micromutations) have a chance. Darwin called them “infinitesimally small” modifications. Indeed, Dixon thought whatever the modifications in man’s development, they were “far more likely to have affected the superficial rather than the actual structural portions of the body.”65
With evolution pinned on random mutations, it is most damaging to find that mutations are overwhelmingly negative and admittedly rare; natural selection actually operates against them. Are human beings the exception to the rule? “Many geneticists express doubt that genes have evolved. . . . Genetic variations are more likely to be harmful than helpful.”66 Not a few biologists will tell you that mutations are pathological and can have nothing to do with evolution.
Perhaps most telling is the observation concerning novel traits in flowers: “What looked . . . like mutants were actually hybrids.”67
INDIVISIBLE COMPLEXITY
Francis Crick, Nobel prize winner, proved that DNA was far too complex to have evolved by random chance. The accidental synthesis of DNA molecules and its associated enzymes would be a coincidence beyond belief. Ask any biochemist. The unfathomable interworking of DNA demands an explanation of order and pattern, not chaos and happenstance.
The unsolvable problem is this: How could so many complex parts evolve piecemeal yet work together toward a coherent whole? The theory of mutations is empirically and even logically unacceptable. We’re talking about thousands of small changes—all happening coincidentally and randomly, yet evolving together in tandem? Please. This is a step in reasoning no thinking person should be asked to take. Minor changes over millions of years, all in exactly the right direction, producing mutually beneficial behaviors? Tell that to the judge.
Partial, incomplete, changes (so-called transitional forms) would be of questionable value to an organism, indeed a hindrance. “The piecemeal evolution of birds’ lungs from reptiles’ lungs,” for example, “seems virtually impossible. The survival of [such] intermediates . . . is totally inconceivable.”68 Biochemist Michael Behe finds no living thing that can be “put together piecemeal” and provides many examples of how the complex machinery of life could not have “come into existence . . . in step-by-step fashion.”69
Correlation of parts (as the matter is classically phrased) implies an all-or-nothing situation, and it is this indivisible web of interrelationship that defies evolutionism and its cozy, safe-sounding “step-by-step” changes. Something more systematic must be involved.
Correlation of parts in the house mouse, for example, entails coat-color genes that have some effect on body size; they are interrelated. In fruit flies, induced eye color mutations actually changed the shape of the sex organs. “Almost every gene in higher organisms has been found to effect more than one organ system, a multiple effect,”70 and these effects are species specific—which means, of course, it doesn’t “evolve” and turn into any other kind of animal, any other species.
It is a question of orchestration, of interdependence.
Each change, taken in isolation, would be harmful, and work against survival. You cannot have mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to commonsense, but to the basic principles of scientific explanation.
ARTHUR KOESTLER, THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Georges Cuvier, an opponent of evolution, regarded organs as so intimately coordinated within the matrix of life that no one part can be fitted to perform a function without affecting other parts. In comparative anatomy, each major group of animals is seen to have its own peculiar correlation of parts—every structure functionally related to others and too well coordinated to survive major change through evolution. All the elements of change must be simultaneously present, and how incredible that would have been, a coincidence beyond belief, coordinating, in synch, all the accidental factors involved.
Figure 9.4. Georges Cuvier. Zoologist, comparative anatomist, paleontologist, once known as the Aristotle of biology, the French scientist was also a statesman and public figure. Cuvier was opposed to the concept of evolution, even before Darwin came on the scene.
Irreducible complexity, said Behe, involves a “meshwork of interacting components . . . matched parts that block Darwinian-style evolution.” Change one link in the chain, and the system is seriously endangered. Gradual evolution, Behe goes on to argue, cannot by any stretch of the imagination account for the origin of: the immune system, metabolism, blood clotting, antigens, photosynthesis, DNA replication, vision, cellular transport, protein synthesis, metabolic pathways—all of which participate in an integrated, irreducible matrix. Darwin’s tiny steps, analyzed biochemically, are a sham, “wildly unlikely.”71 Nor could the symbiotic relationships we find throughout nature have developed gradually, by “incipient stages” or trial and error.
AN INTRICATE WEB
As book review editor of a research journal, I was once asked to review Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi’s Nature’s I.Q.: Extraordinary Animal Behavior That Defies Evolution. Outside the English-speaking world, French, German, Swedish, Russian, and East European biologists and ethologists are not so sold on Darwinism. This colorful book by two Hungarians, Hornyanszky and Tasi, advances the view that species do not and never did evolve from one another, citing “countless instances of complex . . . mechanisms whose origin the theory of evolution is helpless to explain. It seems much more reasonable to conclude that a being possessing higher intelligence equipped all species with the organs, knowledge and abilities they need.”72
Nature’s I.Q. was translated from the original Hungarian to English in the “Year of Darwin” (the 2009 bicentennial of Darwin’s birth), a time when audiences were focusing attention on the undying controversy of Evolution versus Intelligent Design. From the notorious 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee (where the two views locked horns) to ongoing curriculum wars in Texas and other states, this great debate just won’t quit, and with the publication of Hornyanszky and Tasi’s delightful animal study, it becomes crystal clear why the great debate has continued without stint for 150-plus years. Gradual evolution of traits and behaviors does not hold up to scrutiny; rather, they appear to be quite simply innate, givens.
Never letting the facts get in the way, the Darwinists ask us to believe that a series of chance events (mutations) have resulted in the highly intricate mechanisms enjoyed by members of the animal kingdom. Thus does science continue to ignore the inherent order in things. How is it that the house of evolution, built upon the shaky, unscientific principle of blind chance, luck of the draw, has endured? How can the honest man say that one anomaly or mutation—freak, really—after the other has created the incomparable architecture of each and every species?
The matchless efficiency in nature that these Hungarian scientists regale us with, its interactive attunement, harmony, and wonder—in weaverbirds, night moths, scorpion fish, horned frog, mallee fowl, praying mantis, crested grebes, humpback whales, pelicans, starlings, sea turtles, cicadas, and dozens more—is all consigned (by godless science) to random transmutations within each species; the grand theory of evolution thus teaching us and our children that nature’s precision and majesty are nothing more than a collection of fortunate accide
nts, a series of chance events, a chain of randomity bordering on a miracle—no, make that “more than a miracle” (according to Hornyanszky and Tasi).
Blind chance, to these authors, is perfectly laughable in the face of the keenly interconnected faculties found everywhere in the animal kingdom. It is “out of the question” that step-by-step change could result in the carefully arranged and coordinated equipment possessed by living creatures, simply because the behavior is “adaptive” only in its final form; there’d be no survival advantage at all in “incipient stages.” Rather than natural selection or survival of the fittest, it is an intelligent designer, say these authors, who supplied each family of creatures with their life-enhancing characteristics.
Take the South American four-eyed frog whose fake eyes on its rump help to scare off aggressors. To these scientists, it is almost a joke that the posterior eyes appeared suddenly from a mutation, in exactly the right position and with the right markings; not to mention that the frog knows what mask it has on its derriere and behaves accordingly—turns its back on the attacker and lifts its rump-mask menacingly. These ethologists say point blank that the theory of evolution “is on the level of fairy tales.” Indeed, “the sudden appearance of such complex biological systems, as if by magic, is completely impossible.”
Flower and fertilizing insect fit each other like hand in glove. Has this sort of symbiosis “evolved” over and over again in thousands of species by blind chance? No, according to paleontologist Robert Broom and geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, the latter showing that complex mammalian structures could not have been produced by the selection and accumulation of small mutations, which can only account for minor changes within the species boundary. Large-scale mutations would produce “hopelessly maladapted monsters.”
If you make Chance your creator, you are likely to get nothing but monstrosities as your creatures; you cannot make an alarm clock by whirling bits of scrap iron in a closed box.
JACQUES BARZUN, DARWIN, MARX, WAGNER
SPEAKING OF MONSTERS
What science calls mutations (or Loren Eiseley calls “genetically strange variants”) may be nothing more than unfortunate hybrids, the result of unwise mating, in which case, we ask: Have humanoid monsters arisen from mutations or simply from mixing? Some esotericists have interpreted the Sons of God/Daughters of Men myth of biblical fame as a parable of mismatched genetic codes—the merger of the holy watchers with Earth men, their offspring “not quite human.” The antediluvian patriarch Enoch, reasons one writer, knew about this mating between angels and earthlings, which resulted supposedly in the birth of mutants, “hybrid beings of all kinds, contaminated, depraved, a terrifying mixture of intelligence and beast.”73 Another extraterrestrial interpreter supposes that similar unnatural couplings produced hybrid beings, half human and half animal, that “nearly brought about the disappearance of the human race.”74
But leaving extraterrestrials out of our search for monsters, let us consider Carl Sagan’s suggestion that “occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees may be possible.”75 Perhaps this is where our monsters lie. The school of theosophy, accounting in its own way for legendary monsters, posited that the fifth subrace of Lemurians, being stupid things, interbred with beasts. Some of the acclaimed (and controversial) Ica stones of Peru depict such bestiality. Indeed, today’s paleontologists are not above suggesting that the ancestors of chimps and humans may have interbred, about 6 mya.76 Even in today’s world, we occasionally hear of cases such as Siberian village children born from sexual matings between humans and savage humanoids like Yeti.77
In 2001, Michael Brunet and his team made a strange fossil discovery in the Sahara Desert of Chad: six individuals of the race of Toumai. Officially named Sahelanthropus tchadensis, they were dated 6 to 7 myr (the time of the supposed split of anthropoid apes and hominids). This Toumai, put forward as the “common ancestor” of man and ape, possessed a mosaic of human and nonhuman traits. He had an apelike cranium (only 370 cc), round eye sockets, very prominent brow, and a short muzzle; yet he had a flat, vertical, humanlike face*122 and small teeth. Thought to be an upright, walking creature, Toumai was only three feet three inches tall. Prehuman? They found that the angle at which his spinal cord connects to the brain was like humans and quite different than the chimpanzee’s much more acute angle. Sahelanthropus also had a pattern of tooth wear like humans.
Yet, rather than accepting Toumai as a common ancestor, might we ask if he was a hybrid of Asu and ape? Stephen Jones, editor of Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, on the very first page (xi), mentions the possibility of early crosses between man and ape, for we are “extremely close cousins” (sharing 98 percent DNA). There are also “rumors of test-tube crosses between men and chimps.”78
The earliest traditions of Western civilization remembered a time when Earth brought forth monsters, be it legends of the north, with monsters in the region of the Gobi Desert; or India’s memory of a world “polluted with monsters” (at the time of Krishna’s birth); or the Babylonian creation epic, describing Earth as peopled with gods, men, and monsters; or the Chaldean goddess who sired a crop of monsters; or the classical Greek legend of the grotesque Cyclops.*123
Turning to Hebrew tradition, we learn of a time when the purity of the race was imperiled by degrading sexual customs: “There was a time . . . when both men and women had sexual intercourse with animals, from which resulted the birth of monsters.”79 The Bible (Lev. XVIII) warns: “Thou shalt not lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith. . . . It is confusion.” Hebrew legend, moreover, recalls that in the antediluvian period, the tribe of Seth was of noble blood, but then the children of his son Enos(h) became idol worshippers, those who “strayed,” their sins changing the “countenances of men. . . . No longer in the likeness and image of god, they resembled centaurs and apes.”80 Is this a remembrance of the four-footed Yaks (see below) or Pan the satyr (of the early Greeks) who was the most debased child of these miscegenations? Myths depicting men transformed to animals are fairy tales, of course, but their ineluctable kernel of truth lies in the retrobreeding of Adam’s sons. “I showed him that every living creature brought forth its own kind; but he understood not and he dwelt with beasts, falling lower than all the rest.”81 (The time frame for this Oahspe quote matches the advent of the patriarch Enosh and “apeish” men, ca 65 kya.)
Cain, Adam’s son, was not above retrobreeding with the lower races: “The Druks (Cain) went away in the wilderness, and dwelt with the Asuans. . . . And because the Druks had not obeyed the Lord, but dwelt with the Asuans, there was a half-breed race born on the earth, called Yaks . . . and they burrowed in the ground like beasts of the forest. And the Yaks did not walk wholly upright, but also went on all fours [giving us eventually the goatlike satyrs of the Greeks]. And the arms of the Yaks were long, and their backs were stooped and curved.”82
Prehistoric drawings on pottery found in southern Peru depict a queer manimal with bent back and long thin arms, rather like images in the strange catacombs hidden in the cliffs of Easter Island, these frescoes representing a humanoid with a catlike head; the curved form has a rounded back and long skinny arms. Who was this prehistoric monster, this unknown race? Were they Yaks?
Figuer 9.5. Greek Pan, a metaphor, really, of degenerated man.
Figure 9.6. Yak. It is possible that creatures like Zinj, Denisova, and Dmanisi were Yaks, a race produced both before and after the flood, thanks to retrobreeding. Illustration from Oahspe.
The first wave of Yaks, before the flood, resulted from the admixture of Asu (animal-man, with zero percentage of Ihin blood) and Druk/H. erectus (hybrid man, with 50 percent Ihin blood). The Yak therefore had only 25 percent fully human genes. I believe the name Yak has been retained in the languages of the world. It is curious that the long-haired, hump-shouldered, wild ox of Central Asia, domesticated as beasts of burden, are called yaks—just as the subhuman Yaks of old were made into servants,83 to build, sow, and reap for t
he higher races. In fact a Japanese word for servants is yakko.
The name Yak persists in India, where the yakshas are spirits of the wilderness, and Hiran-yak-ashas are legendary giants. In Malaysia, Yak Jalang is the name of one ancestor. In Japan, the Gilyaks, like the Neanderthals, had a cult of bear sacrifices; these people were somewhat hirsute like the Ainu. In Northern Europe are the Votyak people. In Borneo are the headhunting Dyaks.
In Siberia are the dolichocephalic Ostyaks (proto-Australoid), the Koryaks of Kamchatka, and the Yakuts hunters. The Siberian Yucaghiri is phonetically Yakaghiri. It is, after all, from Siberia that we hear reports of humanoids like Yeti (almost a Yak type). In America are the Guayaki tribe of Paraguay, the Yakina Indians, and the Yaqui (Yaki) Indians of New Mexico. Among some California tribes, Sin-yak-sau was the first woman. In addition, the Yakama forest in the Cascades abounds in legends of animalistic Stick Indians; while the Yak name also seems to be recalled in places like Yakima (Washington), Yakutat Bay (Alaska), Tuk-to-yak-tuk (Canada), and the Eyak languages of the Pacific Northwest.
Oahspe makes mention of a great number of monstrosities betwixt man and beast before the time of Apollo. No, man did not come from the beast so much as he became one by these unruly mixings: thus it is said by theologians that “the sons of Adam erred,” filling the world with cannibals and manimals, apes, and centaurs. Such off-spring were without judgment and of little sense, hardly knowing their own species. And they mingled together, relatives as well as others.
Figure 9.7. The Yakuts are a Turko-Tatar tribe near the Bering Strait. Yakuzia is the name of a region in northeast Siberia.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 32
