Strand
According to mainstream science, humans are evolved apes who, as a result of random genetic mutations and environmental pressures, happened to acquire the unique power of selfconsciousness. However, the loud publicity and slick propaganda for the ape-ancestry theory cannot alter the fact that the evidence is scanty and contradictory and open to other interpretations.
Anthropologist Richard Leakey has said that ‘If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) who lived, say, between five and one million years ago, he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out.’1 Most hominid fossils are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls but, as palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould once said, ‘they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling’.2
Paleoanthropological discoveries make it clear that the human family tree is not a single lineage in which one species succeeded another, leading relentlessly to the appearance of modern humans. Instead, the hominid fossil record suggests that our ancestry is better thought of as a bush, with the branches representing a number of bipedal species that evolved along different evolutionary lines.1
For new species to arise through a series of rapid genetic changes, those changes would have to be directed and coordinated in some way. Even then, the belief that humans descended from australopithecines and ultimately from some Miocene ape remains no more than an unproven hypothesis. Theosophy argues that it is actually the apes which are partially descended from man (see section 6). Some scientists have recognized that even the earliest apelike creatures had anatomical specializations that make them unlikely ancestors of humans, who have a simpler, more generalized anatomy (see section 5). As already explained, a few scientists argue that far from being our ancestors, the australopithecines descended from a bipedal hominid and were evolving towards quadrupedalism. However, many evolutionists take the view that there is no objection to anatomical specializations being gained and later lost in the course of evolution – if this is what it takes to save the ape-ancestry theory from collapse!
Anthropologist Richard Leakey has said that ‘If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) who lived, say, between five and one million years ago, he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out.’1 Most hominid fossils are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls but, as palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould once said, ‘they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling’.2
Paleoanthropological discoveries make it clear that the human family tree is not a single lineage in which one species succeeded another, leading relentlessly to the appearance of modern humans. Instead, the hominid fossil record suggests that our ancestry is better thought of as a bush, with the branches representing a number of bipedal species that evolved along different evolutionary lines.1
For new species to arise through a series of rapid genetic changes, those changes would have to be directed and coordinated in some way. Even then, the belief that humans descended from australopithecines and ultimately from some Miocene ape remains no more than an unproven hypothesis. Theosophy argues that it is actually the apes which are partially descended from man (see section 6). Some scientists have recognized that even the earliest apelike creatures had anatomical specializations that make them unlikely ancestors of humans, who have a simpler, more generalized anatomy (see section 5). As already explained, a few scientists argue that far from being our ancestors, the australopithecines descended from a bipedal hominid and were evolving towards quadrupedalism. However, many evolutionists take the view that there is no objection to anatomical specializations being gained and later lost in the course of evolution – if this is what it takes to save the ape-ancestry theory from collapse!
posted by CaptainGoldStar at 12:31 AM
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