15 - Creation and Evolution: Monkeys, Men and Mutations [C]

Creation and Evolution: Monkeys

We now focus on monkeys, men, and mutations. We’ve all opened up publications and seen the whole list of man-like and ape-like creatures that are allegedly the predecessors, the missing links in the development of the human race. We always see pictures where these are very hairy and thick-lipped and all the various kinds of primordial features are present in the early versions. But the thing is, that whenever they discover the remains of the allegedly early creatures those remains are just a skull fragment or a jawbone, they have no idea of what the fleshy parts of the man would look like. And so ninety-eight per cent of what you see in those artistic diagrams are nothing more than the artist’s imagination. It has nothing to do with scientific fact. No one ever has a picture of what these looked like, they just have a few skull fragments. Everything else is just pure guesswork.

We have to realize that with the development of the theory of evolution back in the nineteenth century must was made of finding the missing link. Where is the missing link? We don’t know because it isn’t missing. There is no evidence of any linkage whatsoever. In the development of evolution in the 19^th century it was seen that this whole extrapolation of this series of early men and the idea of stone-age men and having them as predecessors to full homo sapien human beings put a lot of pressure on Christians. So there were various accommodationist theories that were set forth, such as progressive creationism, the day-age view, and the classic gap view that came from Thomas Chalmers and made popular by Pember. It was that view that hi-jacked an older view that there was a time lapse between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 and then they tried to fit 45,000 years into that gap. At least that is what it was when Chalmers wrote. By the end of the 19^th century it was a few million years, but they had already committed themselves and made a mistake. They felt like they were taking scientific conclusions as fact, and they were nothing more than guesswork. So they looked at all of these creatures that were allegedly human beings and seemed like some kind of missing link and they tried to work out where to put them, so they came up with the idea that there must have been some pre-Adamic race that existed before Genesis 1:2. The problem with that is that it lends itself to the view that God was kind of experimenting and it is not until Genesis 1:26-28 that after the death of hundreds of thousands or millions of these creatures comes up with the final plan. So that has negative implications for one’s view of God. Few people are willing to admit that. Usually what we find in this is that you have to be extremely humble when you come to the Scriptures and let arrogance dominate. But we know that arrogance is tenacious, and that is really the theme here: the tenacity of arrogance in evolution. This is because there is no evidence of any missing link, no evidence of any kind of human pre-trail whatsoever, even though there is a tremendous amount of propaganda out there in biology text books, in Time-Life books, and in all kinds of national parks are seen the features of the different kinds of people.

So we will go through a list of some of these alleged predecessors and get the true story on these so-called early men.

1)      Java man. The Time-Life editors in their book The First Men called these “definitely human and definitely old.” Java man was discovered in September 1891 by Eugene du Bios when he found a single ape-like tooth. In October in the same general location, about three feet from the first find he discovered another tooth. In November another three feet from the second tooth he discovered a skull impression in a rock mass—not the skull but the impression of the skull. Then that winter the river flooded the site and digging stopped. It was not until the next year in August of 1892 that they returned to the site, and some fifty feet away they discovered a femur. He confidently announced that he had discovered the missing link—Java man, the link between apes and man. But in the same area were discovered bones from deer, elephants, tigers, hyenas, crocodiles and rhinoceros. So it was a graveyard of all kinds of bones, and how would one be able to discern that these ape-like teeth (two of them) and the skull impression were the same individual. In a separate find a German anthropologist found five skull fragments, which were later identified with that same group. But now they are declared by Time-Life to be “definitely human and definitely old.”

2)      Peking man. Called part of homo erectus. Homo erectus is really a loose designation for something that is pretty much homo sapien, but we are going to knock him down a little bit because they hold the possibility there was some sort of connection, but for all practical purposes they are part of the homo genus. Peking man was discovered in Peking by W.D. Pay who was aided by Teilhard de Chardin. One of the things that we have to be careful of here is who this second person is. He is one of the spookiest guys in the history of Christianity and the history of the 20^th century. He was a Jesuit priest, but many New Agers go back to him, read his writings. He is foundational in many of the avante guard postmodernist background type of thinking, and he was also implicated in the hoax of the Piltdown man. The fact that Teilhard de Chardin was involved with the Peking man at all casts doubts on Peking man. These two men found a total of forty men, women, and children’s parts. This was the allegation because there is a lot of differences in the records, because one anthropologist name Janus writes: “They labeled, described, photographed and categorized the casts of the 175 fossil fragments that had been collected”— the reason we go back to the photographs is because in World War II when the Japanese invaded China all evidence of Peking man was destroyed – So Janus writes, “in relationship to Peking man . . . Those fossil fragments were composed of five skulls, 150 jaw fragments and teeth, 9 thigh bones and fragments, two upper arm bones, a collar bone and a wrist bone.” Another anthropologist, Johannsen, agrees that there were five skulls but instead of 150 jaw fragments there were 15 smaller pieces of the skull or face, 14 lower jaws, and 152 teeth. So no one can even agree what the evidence consisted of for Peking man. The evidence, though, from the pictures was that the skulls were crushed from behind and the brains were probably removed for food. There is agreement now from anthropologists—evolutionists—that Peking man was probably not human but was killed and eaten by humans. This has become more of the accepted view in recent years.

3)      Heidelberg man. This was discovered in Germany and consisted of a single fragment, a jawbone of large proportions and human teeth. Today he is considered an example of homo erectus, so he is in the homo genus, according to Time-Life books. However, Johannsen and Eady, in their book “The Beginning of Human Kind” state that “his finder recognized that he was a man and thus belonged in the genus homo but decided to put him in a species of his own.” So it was just pure guesswork, the original discoverer of this one jawbone fragment wanted to be known for discovering a new species. So Heidelberg man doesn’t fit in the chain.

4)      Piltdown man. This is a fascinating story of how the gullible are easily duped. This was allegedly discovered by a man named Charles Dawson in 1912; but in 1954 it was discovered to have been a hoax. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was associated with Dawson the next year and going back to the same site they discovered a tooth that was buried in that site, and so he is also implicated in putting forth this hoax. The jaw was the jaw of an orangutan that they treated with acid, they stained the skull, and the teeth were filed down, then the jaw of this orangutan was attached to a human cranium. In 1954 it was admitted that this was a hoax. As late as 1969 Harvard Press was still publishing books (15 years after admission of the hoax) affirming the legitimacy of Piltdown man in the human background.

Arrogance is tenacious. Evolutionists continue to hold on to these strands of alleged evidence. In some case they continue to purport that which is known to be false. The Harvard Press account of the Piltdown man was built on nothing but a myth, but a hoax. It shows how they can take something that is fraudulent, warp it around a tremendous amount of scientific language and continue to voice that on the public, even though it has already been proven to be false.

5)      Another group of finds that were popular back in the 70s to say were part of the background for the human race were the ramapithicenes. This was based on a jaw fragment that was discovered in 1937 in India. It was originally given the name, because it was in India, of ramapithicus. But then a couple of years later an anthropologist discovered a skull fragment in southern Africa which he combined with that jaw fragment and the species ramapithicus was then born. Notice they take a jaw fragment from India and a skull fragment in Africa and link them together. In 1973 two evolutionists, Alan Walker and Peter Andrews, wrote an article in Nature Magazine that the jaw of ramapithicus was that of a true ape. By the mid-1970s ramapithicus was considered as an ancestor to the orangutan or ape but was definitely not in the line of man. Yet, you will still find books today which have ramapithicus in the lineage of man. Even after the mid-70s when ramapithicus is no longer in the human line, in 1982 Richard Leaky, the son of a famous anthropologist and evolutionist, declared in a book called Human Origins that ramapithicenes are thought to be the group from which our ancestors evolved. They continue to hold on to these things and promote them as absolute evidence when it is not evidence of anything at all except their powerful imaginations. Then there are the Ostralapithicenes [also known as Nutcracker Man], the ones which have gained probably the most fame. Mary Leaky, the daughter of the famous anthropologist, was walking along the slop of a dig on a July morning in 1959 and noticed some brownish-black premolar teeth, the size of a monkey’s or an ape’s, sticking out of the rocks. It took nineteen days to free the teeth and the other parts of a fossil palate out of the rock. The site where they were working contained more than 400 bone fragments in a 25 square-foot area. T. H. Cann notes in his book, An Introduction to Homonology, that Ostralapithigus is a genus now generally agreed to be homonoid, but it is not human. The most famous of these was a three-and-a-half-foot creature called Lucy. Allegedly Lucy is the first creature to walk on two feet, allegedly the oldest ancestor to man, and Lucy theoretically, according to their view, resembles homo sapiens in three ways: her knee, her arm-to-leg length ratio, and her left pelvic bone. But there are problems. The knee joint was found 60 to 80 meters deeper in the rock strata and almost a mile away from the rest of her! Secondly, her published arm-leg-link ratio (a human being has an arm that is about 75% the length of the leg. An ape has one that is longer than the leg) was 83.9%, which meant that her arm was much longer than a normal human. However, the leg bone was crushed in various places and the pieces don’t all fit together. So you can’t get an accurate arm-leg ration at all, it is just another guess. Then the third piece of evidence is the pelvic bone. This pelvic bone is distorted as we have it and it shows that Lucy probably walked on all fours and that she was a knuckle walker, and other quotes indicate that she was probably a climber. In the article published in Science News, vol. 100, November 27, 1971, we read: “Ostralapithicus limb-bones fossils have been rare finds. But Leaky now has a large sample. They portray Ostralapithicus as long-armed and short-legged (notice how that differs from the earlier analysis). He was probably a knuckle walker, not an erect walker as many archaeologists presently believe. Furthermore, if Ostralapithicus lived in the same region occupied 2-million years before the more highly evolved genus homo than Johannsen and his colleagues suggest, it seems likely that the true man and the near man lived in the same area at the same time. All previous theories of the origin and the lineage of the modern man must now be totally revised. We must throw out many existing theories and consider the possibility that man’s origins go back to well over 4 million years.” (And they don’t know what those origins are)

6)      Neanderthal man. Isaac Asomoth stated very clearly, “Give a Neanderthal man a shave and a haircut, dress him in well-fitted clothes, and he could probably walk down New York’s Fifth Avenue without getting much notice. In other words, Neanderthal man is now believed to be normal European homo sapiens, with the possibility that he just suffered from rickets and arthritis.

7)      Nebraska man was another hopeful missing link. That evidence came from the state of Nebraska. That evidence was built on one tooth, which was discovered in 1922. Then two years later a skull was found in the same location and the tooth fitted perfectly. But it was the skull of an extinct pig!

So there we have eight different contestants all trying to be ancestors to man, and none of which fit. Yet that is what most of us have been told, we see it illustrated in all the magazines. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of these are ancestors to man. There are various differences between man and apes. While an ape may superficially resemble a man because he has two legs and certain appearances it would appear that they are closely related. However that is only superficial. For example, man has a permanent bipedal locomotion. That affects everything related to his spinal cord, the relationship of his muscles, all of which are going to be quite different, whereas apes walk on all fours. Second, man has a big toe in line with his other toes. An ape's large toe is located back toward the rear toward the heel, and it is opposable just like the thumb on your hand – so that he can grab branches and trees. That is really what determines the difference between an ape and a man, not thee skull. And yet, what are they looking for? In fossil finds they always come up with skull fragments and jaw fragments, but don’t come up with the feet which tells us whether it is an ape or a man. Man generally has a larger brain. In man the head is balanced on the top of the spine; in apes the head is hinged in front of the spine. Man is less mature at birth; apes are more mature. Why do we still have so many species of apes and monkeys? There are also more vertebrae in the back of a man than an ape. Men have shorter arms and longer legs than apes. Men as human beings have 46 chromosomes whereas apes have 48 chromosomes. All of this means that it would be virtually impossible for there to be changes.

So the question arises: Where did these prehistoric men come from? Who are they? Most creationists agree that these were groups of fully human beings that for some reason left the mainstream of civilization. Over time they degenerated socially from the mainline of human development. Under evolution what you have socially is that man started off in this primitive stone-age state, and then they gradually discovered things, gradually moved forward. The picture we have in Scripture is that Adam was probably the most attractive, the most physically capable, and the most mentally agile human being that has ever existed. Because of sin everything has gone downhill.

Job makes reference to this in Job 30:1-8, “But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom old age was perished? For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven forth from among men, (they cried after them as after a thief;) To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth.”

There is one other thing that needs to be covered, and that is mutation. The mechanism for advance in evolution from species to species and the development of new species and more advanced species is the idea of mutations, that through radiation, through the introduction of various radioactivity or whatever it might be, would produce mutations, and this would be something positive. But the question is, if that is something positive and mutations are considered something positive, why did everybody run from Three Mile Island when there was a small radioactive leak there. This theory of mutations comes out of science and is based on a lot of genetic theories that are not found in actual fact. Many people assume and many teach that these are actual facts, and that genetics demonstrates the progress of evolution. For example, Ernst Mayor who is a professor at Harvard says ultimately all variation is due to mutation. But we have to ask then question, is DNA really all that flexible? Remember DNA is a nucleic acid that carries the genetic information in the cell and is capable of self-replication. That involves thousands of pieces of information. Two long chains of nucleotides twisted into a double helix and joined by hydrogen bonds between complementary bases. The sequence of nucleotides determines individual hereditary characteristics. DNA is the language of the cell. It is the computer program, so to speak, that makes the cell function. The idea of mutation is that somehow by introducing something like radio activity you can change Microsoft Word into Word Perfect. That is not going to happen, you have to have somebody who can properly order and organize the information correctly and restructure the information code. DNA provides the blueprint that reproduces the cells and all the information again so that that cell can in turn reproduce. That means that it is going to be producing at least 20 or more different proteins. The question that comes up logically is, what comes first? The chicken or the egg thing. If DNA is essential in the manufacturing process of proteins and the manufacturing process produces proteins that are essential to DNA, then you can’t have DNA without proteins and you can’t have proteins without DNA. Which comes first? They are dependent on each other. The only way that it could work is if DNA and proteins both came into existence fully functional and interdependent at the exact same point in time. Further, since DNA is a language it communicates information. It communicates thousands of pieces of data. Where did that information come from? Is all that information just a product of random chance? But random chance cannot produce anything other than chaos. In normal healthy organisms, for example, when you get into dealing with mutation, the DNA cannot be improved. It is what it is supposed to be, a normal healthy organism. But natural selection, i.e. the idea of the survival of the fittest, only explains why the normal healthy organism survives. It is because it is a little more fit and a little healthier than other organisms. Natural selection doesn’t explain how it got there in the first place, only why it survives. It doesn’t explain the arrival of the fittest, only the survival of the fittest. The question is, can a mutation produce new, healthier information?

The problem with mutations is that when mutations do occur geneticists say that 99.9% of all mutations are harmful. One of the most prominent evolutionists at the forefront of stuffy of mutations writes: “The process of mutation is the only source of the raw materials of genetic variability and, hence, of evolution. The mutants which arise are with rare exceptions deleterious to their carriers. That means it is harmful. They can’t survive, at least in the environment which the species normally encounters.” In other words, it is going to be almost impossible to get anything positive that you would want to carry on to the next generation. 

Dr. James Crowe who is professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin writes: “Mutants would usually be detrimental, for a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it just as a random change of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture. The point is if survival of the fittest explained the arrival of the fittest then mutations should not cause extinctions but improved species. But the fact is that there are more extinctions going on today and there is no evidence of improved species anywhere.”

Lorin Isley, the famous evolutionist from the University of Pennsylvania writes: “With the failure of these many efforts to prove evolution to be true science is left in a somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own. Namely, the assumption of what after long effort could not be proved to take place today had in truth taken place in the primeval past.” In other words, he admits it is all mythology; there is no fact to support it.