Nexus - 0405 - New Times Magazine-pages

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NATURAL SELECTION vs 'DIVINE’ INTERVENTION The Sumerian claim that man was created by the Anunnaki gods clearly implies that we did not evolve by the Darwinian process of natural selection. Is there any scientific basis for such a controversial claim? The evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould has indeed referred to the "awesome improbability of human evolution".* Allow me to highlight the scale of these improbabilities. If we use an ape as the starting point, a significant number of big evolutionary jumps are necessary if it is to evolve into a man. Scientists agree that mutation is the mechanism by which natural selection works, but they also agree that the vast majority of mutations are bad. They also agree that the mutational mechanism must take a long time because mutations which produce big changes (macromutations) are particularly dangerous to the survival of a species. Furthermore, they say, if a positive mutation is going to take hold in a species it will do so only in the right circumstances, such as when a small population becomes isolated. This combination of improbable factors, allied with the short period of six million years allowed for man's supposed evolution from the apes, has caused severe discomfort for some of our top evolutionary scientists and thinkers such as Roger Penrose and Noam Chomsky.‘ Back in 1954 it was thought that the hominid line leading to mankind split from the apes 30 million years ago, and that we then proceeded to evolve gradually into our present form.’ That 30-million-year period sets an unbiased benchmark of how long evolution should possibly have taken. However, following the discovery that the split occurred only six million years ago, evolu- tionists have been forced to assume a much faster rate of evolu- tion to explain our existence. The other disconcerting discovery since 1954 is the shockingly slow evolutionary progress made by Homo erectus and his prede- cessors up to around 200,000 years ago. The evolutionary graph has thus changed from a nice straight line into an overnight explo- sion (Figure 1). The great power of Darwinism, according to its proponents such as Richard Dawkins, is that, given enough time, natural selection can explain anything and everything. But when it comes to mankind, the lack of evolutionary time becomes a major prob- lem. What are the odds against mankind benefiting from not one, but several macromutations in the course of only six million years? To illustrate the point further, the Darwinists often claim that we are remarkably similar to the chimpanzee since 98 per cent of our DNA is identical. I would like to turn this ratio around and ask how a mere two per cent genetic difference can account for so many ‘value-added’ features in mankind: the larger-sized brain, language and sexuality, to name but a few. Furthermore, it is a strange fact that Homo sapiens has only 46 chromosomes com- pared to 48 in chimpanzees and gorillas. The theory of natural selection has been unable to suggest how the fusing together of two chromosomes—a major structural change—should have come about in such a short time-scale. How did the hominid known as Homo erectus, unchanged after 1.2 million years, suddenly transform itself 200,000 years ago into Homo sapiens with a 50 per cent increase in brain size together with language capability and a modern anatomy? One of the cen- tral principles of Darwinism is that "nature never overendows a species beyond the needs of everyday existence".’ Where was the competitor that caused the brain of Homo sapiens to evolve to such an extreme level of size and complexity? What rival caused intellectual ability to be such an essential survival development? Who were we trying to outsmart? One hundred years ago genetics was an unknown science, so it would have been ridiculous to suggest that the biblical idea of divine creation was actually a physical, genetic intervention. Nowadays, the intervention which is alluded to by the Sumerian texts cannot be dismissed so easily. It is a fact that in the late 20th century we now possess the genetic capability to act as "gods" by creating life in a test tube. The highly focused change in two per cent of the human DNA, as just described, defies Darwinism but is highly suggestive of genetic intervention. Furthermore, the possibility of our DNA being semi-extrater- restrial could help explain the many anomalous features of mankind which have been cited by supporters of the aquatic ape theory.” The idea of a genetic enhancement by the Anunnaki gods (I have termed this "interventionism") provides an alternative to the conventional debate between Church and Science. Most impor- tantly, it provides us with two scientific theories from which to choose. In the past, evolutionists have forced their theory of natural selection to fit mankind simply because no other scientific theory seemed to exist. They were unable to consider genetic interven- tion for the reason that the science of genet- ics did not exist. Even now, their eyes and minds remain closed to the possibility of intervention due to the widespread prejudice _rt which dismisses "the gods" as mythology. THE 'IMMORTAL' SUMERIAN GODS Why are the tales of the gods so routinely dismissed as mythology? One reason is because of the representations of the Hindu and Egyptian gods which combine human and animal features. However, these unreal zoomorphic images were designed to repre- sent certain perceived attributes of real anthropomorphic gods from an earlier era. If we travel back in time to the civilisa- tion of Sumer where the people lived along- side their gods, then we find that the Anunnaki gods were indeed depicted as humanlike (Figure 2). The term "gods" cwt™ ae aed 30 6 0.2 Millions of years before present 60 + NEXUS Figure 1: Evolutionary graph AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1997