Although the term is commonly misapplied [Ed: As in this very book, G-Man. Been meaning to talk to you about that. ], the description “Missing Link” strictly applies to the imagined evolutionary ancestor of modern man that was invented by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel – rather than to the zillions of “intermediate forms” postulated by Darwin as an essential part of the evolution of any and all organisms.

Chain Male
After reading Darwin’s seductive theory in translation, Haeckel became the leader of the evolutionary crusade in Germany, emulating the efforts in England of Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”. By the time he published his “History of Creation”, in 1868, Haeckel had dreamed up a twenty-two link chain of evolutionary development leading from the denizens of the mythical primordial slime pool to Homo sapiens—i.e. large-brained, upright-walking, talking, tool-making and wielding, TV watching, car driving modern man.

All this evolutionary nonsense was foisted on a gullible and generally undereducated public without a shred of fossil evidence on which to base it – just pure wishful thinking and vivid imagination. Coming into the charts at link number 20 was the existing Ape, a creature bearing some resemblance to Man, but unable to speak, and clearly many orders of magnitude different in mental prowess to modern Man, i.e Homo sapiens, who topped the inverted chart as the final link, number 22.

Perhaps you are ahead of me again – in realizing that the problem Haeckel had to solve was to identify mystery entry number 21, the speech-less ape-cum-man to whom he assigned the title of “Missing Link” [Ed: Never mind all this talk about men, G-Person, I want to know how and when women and sex got invented – and why! Even Professor Dawkins doesn’t seem to know.]

On reflection, Haeckel’s bid for fame seems to have been based on a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory, which would require not one dramatic jump from Ape to Man, but zillions of gradual changes, with Natural Selection ruthlessly assessing each one for fitness to purpose. In other words, from a Darwinian point of view, all talk of one unique Missing Link was nonsense anyway.

Ever since that time, however, anthropologists have been hot on the trail of this mythical creature – despite the fact that even Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by Natural Selection, apparently drew the line at Haeckel’s proposal, pointing out that man was too perfect a creature to have been formed accidentally and without “spiritual” intervention.

Haeckel found himself in safe company, however, when Darwin later pushed the same approach in his book “The Descent of Man” in 1871 – devising an evolutionary history of mankind, also with no fossil evidence to guide him, led only by his fertile imagination, and driven by his secret agenda and good dose of wishful thinking . [Ed: Wasn’t it old Ernst who said that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny”, G-Man? – i.e. that the stages of development of an egg into an adult in the womb demonstrate the evolutionary history of the organism. That way you don’t need to bother with messy junk like fossils to find out what really happened. You just make it up as you go along!]

Incidentally, it was Haeckel who claimed that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” – i.e. that the stages of development of an egg into an adult in the womb demonstrate the evolutionary history of the organism.

Darwin was evidently greatly encouraged and emboldened by Haeckel’s book, which is why, in “The Descent of Man”, he comments: “If this work had not appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.”

Fully aware, in his heart of hearts, of the error of his theory, and desperate for the support of others in his foolishness, Darwin also commented: “The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form, is not in any degree new. Lamarck long ago came to this conclusion, which has lately been maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers; for instance, by Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, Vogt, Lubbock, Buchner, Rolle, etc.” [Ed: There’s safety in numbers, G-Man.]

Neanderthal Man
An earlier discovery that must have coloured Haeckel’s thinking was that of Neanderthal man, an early contender for the title of Missing Link, whose remains, were discovered in a cave in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856 – the bits and pieces consisting of the top of the skull plus some leg and arm bones.

The enormous eyebrow bulges on the skull [Ed: I think you mean “superciliary ridges”, G-Man.], and the great thickness and bowed shape of the leg bones apparently suggested a “brutish”, “uncouth” appearance and a stocky, powerful build – features that soon made Neanderthal a kind of Fred Flintstone star, the archetypical cave man with walk-on parts in endless evolution textbooks and comics ever since. [Ed: I though you said evolution books were comics, G-Man.]

Incidentally, measurements on a number of Neanderthal skulls have shown his average brain size to have been about 1600 -1700 ml., greater than that of “modern man”, suggesting great intelligence. Studies of other remains found since also indicate the possession of vocal cavities and connecting points for the musculature required for speech.

On the basis of extensive studies of those further discoveries, now numbering some 500, it has been decided that although Neanderthal was human, he was not a direct ancestor of modern man - but rather an earlier offshoot running parallel that mysteriously and suddenly petered out for some reason some 50,000 years ago, having been wandering around Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia for some 200,000 years or so before that. . [Ed: I think that first figure should be 50,003 years, G-Man. The book you got the info from was published three years ago. I know that for a fact.]

In 1908, a near-complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered in a cave in France. On the basis of very meticulous studies at the “Museum of Natural History” in Paris, Marcellin Boule classified Neanderthal as a separate species, Homo Neanderthalenis, rather than as a subspecies of Homo Sapiens, modern man. – i.e. a separate branch rather than an ancestor.

DNA Testing & the Eve Hypothesis
Boule’s opinion has recently been confirmed by of studies of mitochondrial DNA, which suggests that all peoples now on earth descended from one original female -- the “Eve Hypothesis”. The same studies suggest that the once-rampant and violent Neanderthal hordes did not carry this Eve’s mitochondrial DNA and so could not be ancestors of modern man, but were, perhaps, merely a defunct offshoot of the family, an anthropological cul-de-sac, so to speak From the Genesis viewpoint, of course, the Eve of the theory would actually be the wife of Noah, or one of his son’s wives. [Ed: From the Genesis viewpoint, G-Man, wouldn’t that Eve actually be the wife of Noah, or one of his son’s wives?]

The Neanderthal Enigma
The sudden disappearance of Neanderthal man is one of the great mysteries of anthropology. In “The Neanderthal Enigma”, James Shreeve explains that Neanderthal man was typically thick-boned, barrel-chested and with enormous physical strength—in addition to possessing greater brain capacity than modern man. In a struggle for survival with modern man forebears, such as Cro-magnon man, Neanderthal was all set to take over the world. “They could not lose!” says Shreeve - yet they did lose. In geological terms, they “suddenly vanished from the earth”.

The simple solution to this inexplicable mystery, if the Bible account is to be trusted, must be that they perished in the Flood of Noah, which destroyed everyone on earth other than Noah and his wife, and their three sons and their wives.

Expert Opinion
The sheer speculative nature of the evolutionary quest in which anthropologists are involved is illustrated by earlier expert opinion regarding the origins of Neanderthal. One scholar, for example, suggested that the legs were bowed by rickets caused by a vitamin D deficiency – and that the pain of this illness had caused the man to furrow his brow, thereby creating the prominent ridges!

Yet another expert suggested that the bones were actually quite recent and had belonged to a ferocious Russian Cossack cavalry man – his legs having become bowed from sitting astride his horse for long periods. [Ed: Are you having us on, G-Man? It’s not April 1st is it?]

The pronounced eyebrow ridges on the skull were thought to be the result of a disease [Ed: You mean they were “pathological”, old chap.], a theory proved wrong when other specimens were discovered in other locations with the same features.

The Quest
Although a number of apparently-human fossils finds had been made by pure accident over the preceding decades, it was not until 1887 that the young Belgian doctor, Eugene Dubois, born the year before “Origins” was published, set out with his wife Anna on a deliberate quest for the “Missing Link” on the islands of Indonesia – hoping to make a new find of his own that would “open the book of human prehistory”. Dubois may well have been drawn to Indonesia rather than Africa by tales of the cave-dweller culture that apparently persisted there into the last century.

Dubois’ zeal was well rewarded with his discovery of “Java Man”, said to be the “most famous, most discussed, most maligned fossil” of all, more technically named Homo erectus after his upright walking posture. Homo erectus is supposed to have lived some 2 million years ago, whereas Homo sapiens, modern man, supposedly came on the scene a mere 200,000 years ago, as already noted.

The suspicious and subjective nature of the whole evolutionary enterprise, especially with regard to the origins of humanity, was further illustrated by the comments of British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, who said of the revered Dubois: “His mind tended to bend the facts rather than alter his ideas to fit them”. [Ed: Well, he probably got his nice white coat dirty out there in the jungle, right? Stressed him out a bit.]

By the 1950’s the competition for glory was so fierce that fossil men were being discovered on a regular basis, each one being given a unique species name. Such was the profusion and confusion that the “lumpers”, led by Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr had to intervene and sort out the “splitters” who kept on inventing new species —getting everybody to agree to classifying all the supposed intermediates between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens as Archaic Sapiens.

A Brawl in a Bar
Inspired by a newspaper cartoon drawing of that time, Creationists are fond of depicting Neanderthal Man, the eponymous cave man, in a suit and tie, suggesting that he would not be out of place on the modern day streets of New York or perhaps in a bar anywhere in the world – with one anthropologist joking that he sees Neanderthal in his bathroom mirror each morning.

Incidentally, the evolutionist authors of “Java Man” admit that the heated debate among “supposedly objective scholars” over human origins has been “more like a bar brawl than objective scientific discourse”. How, they lament, can the same evidence, scrutinized by different experts equipped with the same sophisticated technology, as well as the same burning Faith, lead to completely opposite conclusions? [Ed: Ah well, G-Man, moving on from that difficulty!]

In discussing the actions of some of their own scientific contemporaries, the same authors feel called on to employ phrases such as “looking for public aggrandisement”, “hungry for acclaim”, “high decibel personal verbal assaults”, and “the tossing around of books”. All this in the ivory temples of the evolutionary establishment.

Lumps and Bumps
The detailed conclusions regularly drawn from fossil fragments are often quite astonishing, bearing in mind that, as the authors of “Java Man” put it, palaeontologists often cheerfully distinguish one species from another on the basis of a few lumps and bumps on fragments of petrified bone. [Ed: They have to do something, G-Man, because the definition of a species as organisms that can breed to produce viable offspring is of absolutely no use when dealing with fossils.]

The uncertainty of the conclusions drawn in such work is illustrated by the comment of biologist Alan Walker who pointed out that if the dozens of species of monkeys living in the trees of Kenya were killed and all the flesh and other soft tissue removed from the bones, it would probably concluded that they were all one species.

Palaeo-anthropology’s Greatest Challenge
According to science writer James Schreeve, even now science still does not know just how or when the all-important but imagined transition from ape to hominid took place. This porblem, he informs us, is “the biggest remaining challenge to palaeo-anthropology”.

The Ape that Stood Up
However, such is their absolute faith in evolution, anthropologists are convinced that someday, somewhere they will find the remains of the elusive ape that cunningly did transformed himself into modern man.

According to one group, the transformation was effectively instantaneous – rapidly endowing our star performer with three key distinguishing characteristics:

a) bi-pedal gait — the ability to walk upright habitually and with a free striding gait . [Ed: i.e. He gave up being a “knuckle walker” as they call it in the trade, G-Man – probably to stop getting his hands dirty in the slime.]

b) the ability to make and use tools and weapons.

c) high intelligence, and a large brain capacity.

Another group maintains that the magical transformation took place very gradually, a la Darwin. As the authors of “Java Man” put it: “the resourceful ape transformed adversity and potential disaster into evolutionary opportunity”. In so doing, it apparently “followed an evolutionary path down which no other ape had ever ventured”. One of the smart moves it made on the way was to decrease the inconvenient size of its very long canine teeth, simply by not using them so much. [Ed: I’m going to run that standing ovation tape again, G-Man. I stand in awe of the magic of evolution and the creative genius of this ape in particular.]

More Expert Opinion
According to one expert, after our ape had come down from living in trees it (he?) acquired bi-pedal gait because it helped him see further across the savannah and spot potential enemies. According to another expert, however, the male apes sometimes stood up straight to warn off rivals, and it just became a habit. Yet another claims that it happened because of a change in diet that required them to reach for things to eat. [Ed: I suppose he means bananas, G-Man. If the ape had really been clever, surely he would have stayed in the trees. On second thoughts, though, perhaps he ate so many bananas that the sheer evolutionary pressure of getting obese made him fall out of the tree, and so start thinking about evolving a bit further.]

Darwin’s pet theory was that standing upright freed the ape’s front legs to become hands, so he could carry things and make things, like tools and weapons. More recently, however, it has been suggested that standing erect reduced the area of body surface exposed to the burning sun, thereby making it less tiring to forage for food at midday. Naturally, the loss of body hair also helped ape man keep his cool.

Notice yet again that evolutionists have no idea how these imagined changes took place, since, as they admit, the anatomical differences between humans and “our closest relatives” are, in the words of one, “quite substantial” and “profound”. Not to be confused by the facts, however, Curtis, Swisher and Lewin sum up the magical leap of imagination in one phrase: “Bipedalism was an ape’s way of living where an ape could not live”. So there you have it.

Unscientific “explanations”
Darwin’s “explanation”, as just described, that the ape acquired an upright walking posture because that freed its “hands” to make and use weapons is a model for all evolutionary “explanations” that are in reality no explanation at all. All Darwin does is to describe the change he would like to have happened to support his theory, and then the advantage such a change would have imparted for Natural Selection to work on -- if it really had taken place in the first place.

Like a magician using misdirection to draw attention to his right hand while his left hand is surreptitiously extracting an item from under his coat, Darwin and Dawkins focus attention on the imagined advantage the magical change would impart to an organism, all the time ignoring the zillions of accidental but fortuitous DNA copying errors that would have been required to make the desired change take place to begin with – saying, in effect, a) It would be nice if evolution had done this, and b) since I have total faith in evolution, c) that proves that evolution did do it.

An Amateur Opinion
According to the “Institute of Human Origins” at Arizona State University, human fossils remains cannot dated directly, but only by inference from the age of the strata in which they are found. Sometimes, as with the famous Lucy skeleton, remains which are found buried in volcanic ash are dated using the Argon-40/Argon-39 technique which is claimed to be infallible – in her case yielding an age of some 3 million years. [Ed: Is it really true, G-Man, that the skeleton got the name Lucy because when the anthropologists were celebrating the find that evening, somebody played some Beatles songs?]

If we entertain the possibility that the great age assigned to the Neanderthals by the same dating method might be in error, perhaps for technical reasons and assumptions not yet appreciated by science, there emerges an interesting parallel between these mysterious Neanderthal people and the descendants of Cain, the disgraced son of Adam and Eve as described in Genesis.

According to the well-known account, which has inspired a number of novels and Hollywood films, Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve, killed his younger brother Abel in a violent fit of jealousy – and when later asked by God where his brother was, he replied in the famous phrase, after the manner of an insolent teenager: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “ (Genesis 4:9. [Ed: Wasn’t that the phrase that inspired the cartoon in Darwin’s time showing a puzzled monkey in a cage in the zoo asking: “Am I my brother’s keeper -- or am I my keeper’s brother?”]

As a punishment from God, Cain, who had become a farmer, was put under a curse and told that he would be driven out to become a restless wanderer in the earth, and that wherever he went the ground he cultivated would be poorly productive (Genesis 4:11-14).

The implication seems to be that Cain and his descendants would live a kind of nomadic existence on the margins of civilization – perhaps becoming cave dwellers and reduced by their isolation to a crude stone-age culture. Incidentally, when anthropologists hold up primitive artefacts as evidence of the evolution of human society, they seem to forget the simple fact that a crude and debased cultures may well the result of degeneracy and retrogression from an earlier more civilized level. The cultural isolation of Cain’s descendants from the mainstream, may well have reduced them to the level of Neanderthal man. [Ed: Do you really believe, G-Man, what you told me about Adam and Eve probably being given things like pots and pans and garden tools by God – and that there could have been a palace or temple in Eden, like in the old fairy stories? I’ve always wondered how they cut their toenails.]

The Mark of Cain
Returning to the Genesis account, we read that God put a “mark on Cain” (Genesis 4:15) so that nobody who came in contact with him would kill him. The nature of that famous “mark” has been a subject of speculation for centuries – some scholars suggesting that it was horn growing out of his forehead, others that he had a Hebrew letter stamped there, and even that the mark consisted of having a dog always trailing along behind him.

If the parallel suggested above is correct, the simple truth of the matter may well be that the mark was in fact the massive double-arched eyebrow ridge possessed by Neanderthal Man, the same mark having been passed on from Cain to his children – a mark that, according to many artistic renderings, gave him an appearance matching his temperament – one of brutishness and violence, a physiognomy that has made Neanderthal skulls immediately recognizable wherever they have been unearthed around the world.

In true Darwinian manner, and attributing all change, no matter how complex or inexplicable, to the magic of Natural Selection, the evolutionist authors of “In Search of Neanderthal Man” make the following fascinating and perhaps significant comment regarding the Neanderthal’s massive double-arched eyebrow ridge: “Perhaps it provided a signal, even a threat, to others”. [Ed: I reckon they’ve have been reading Genesis, G-Man, ‘cos that’s spot on!]

Notice yet again, in their “explanation”, the magical misdirection to imagined effect and away from non-existent cause – as it is suggested that Neanderthal magically evolved a brutish countenance because it would be an advantage in protecting him from enemies.

I suppose the pure Darwinist disciple would suggest that zillions of generations of Neanderthals perished because they were too handsome and unthreatening in appearance and so got killed off by their enemies, but gradually, “given enough time”, a few developed “the look” and so survived and thrived – as a result of zillions of accidental DNA copying errors having fortuitously conspired to make it all possible -- also creating the hollow compensating cavities that are found located behind the extra-heavy Neanderthal forehead bone structure.

The Descent of Man
In “The Descent of Man”, published in 1871, a dozen years after “Origins”, Darwin becomes ever bolder in his assertion that man has descended, with all other creatures, from just one primitive ancestral organism, portraying this belief as almost a visionary insight.

So fully convinced was he, it seems, that the need for corroboration by the fossil record was no longer necessary.

The only evidence Darwin needed to satisfy himself was: a) his burning belief in the absolute truth of evolution, b) the acclaim of an equally deluded intelligentsia, and, c) the observed physical similarities between man and ape and other creatures – stressing the accepted fact, for example, that: “Man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a monkey, bat, or seal. So it is with his muscles, nerves, blood-vessels and internal viscera.”

Seeing commonality of design elements as irrefutable proof of descent from a common ancestor, Darwin asserts: “The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution are facts which cannot be disputed”. Darwin here appears to be appealing to Haeckel’s claim ontology recapitulates phylogeny in the womb.

Although these similarities of design are clear fact, they do not warrant Darwin’s triumphant claim that consequently: “The great principle of evolution stands up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are considered in connection with others.” Adding that: “It is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely”. [Ed: It seems significant, G-Man, that at this point, in Darwin’s tortured mind, belief in the theory of evolution had become more important than fact and reality or physical evidence. It had become THE TRUTH! ]

Clearly on a roll and getting carried away, Darwin continues: “The close resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog . . . the construction of his skull, limbs and whole frame on the same plan with that of other mammals . . . all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.”

The whole theme of “Descent” is in fact the need to believe in the implications of evolution, a faith that makes all things possible.

Had he been on the other side of the argument, Darwin would, no doubt, have pointed out that similarities between organisms, plus the unfathomable complexity of the component parts involved, simply demonstrate that God created and equipped all such organisms to exist and function in the same earthly environment – all generally requiring food for nutrition and energy, oxygen for respiration, some kind of digestive system, circulatory system, plus a means of locomotion, and of course a brain and nervous system to operate the muscles and sense the environment – all demonstrating intelligent design, all stamped with the hallmark of infinite genius.

The Brain and the Mind
Darwin continues: “The brain, the most important of all the organs, follows the same law . . . every chief fissure and fold in the brain of man has its analogy in that of the orang”. However, he adds: “At no period of development do their brains perfectly agree; nor could perfect agreement be expected, for otherwise their mental powers would have been the same.”

Here Darwin makes the usual erroneous evolutionary assumption that “brain” and “mind” are synonymous, so that the massive gulf between man and ape has to be explained by quite small physical difference in physiology. As we have seen, however, because the study of DNA has shown that the physical difference between man and ape is apparently even far less than Darwin suspected at the cellular level, the massive gulf between the two beings becomes even more difficult to explain in terms of mere atoms and molecules, as evolutionists such as Derek Hough and Rupert Sheldrake willingly admit. Evolution, of course, is a matter of atoms and molecules, and only of atoms and molecules.

Ejecting Objections -- As Simple as ABC
In disposing of the petty annoyance of the lack of fossil evidence to support his assertion that man descended from apes, Darwin resorts to the illogical syllogism, of the form:

A – Although there is no evidence to prove that evolution made this thing happen.

B – I firmly believe evolution could have made it happen.

C – Therefore, evolution did make it happen! Q.E.D.

Which is why we find him reassuring the faithful: “The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form”.

Totally unfazed by such objections, he continues: “But this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution.” So there you have it – objection ejected, as easy as ABC. All your need is Faith. [Ed: Don’t confuse me that facts, G-Man!]

Come in Number 13 – Your time is up!
Reassuring his disciples that all would come right and be revealed in the end, given enough time, Darwin then continues: “With respect to the absence of fossil remains, serving to connect man with his ape-like progenitors, no one will lay much stress on this fact who reads Sir C. Lyell's discussion ( in 'Elements of Geology '), where he shews that in all the vertebrate classes the discovery of fossil remains has been a very slow and fortuitous process” – adding: “Nor should it be forgotten that those regions which are the most likely to afford remains connecting man with some extinct ape- like creature, have not as yet been searched by geologists.”

Unluckily for Darwin, however, as we have seen, confirmed evolutionists admit that even over a century and a half later anthropologists have still not found the fossil evidence evolution requires.

The Power of Positive Thinking
Admitting to yet more problems, Darwin continues: “The high standard of our intellectual powers and moral disposition is the greatest difficulty which presents itself” – adding: “There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense”.

Still niggled by the lack of evidence to support his infantile assertions, Darwin then trots out the illogical syllogism once again, saying: “Every one who admits the principle of evolution, must see that the mental powers of the higher animals, which are the same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval between the mental powers of one of the higher apes and of a fish, or between those of an ant and scale-insect, is immense; yet their development does not offer any special difficulty.” [Ed: Charlie seems to be saying that given enough time, and if only the stupid apes would try a bit harder instead of dossing about munching bananas and looking for fleas, miracles could happen. Right, G-Man? Because even “special difficulties” disappear like magic for those who can “admit” that evolution is true! -- Jus’ like that! Jus’ like that! ]

Having both maximised and minimized the gulf between man and ape, Darwin then pauses to ponder again its immensity, saying: “An anthropomorphous ape, if he could take a dispassionate view of his own case, would admit that though he could form an artful plan to plunder a garden -- though he could use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope.” [Ed: You don’t think Chas could talk to the monkeys do you, G-Man, like Doctor Doolittle used to?]

He continues: “Still less, as he would admit, could he follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene” [Ed: So strictly speaking, G-Man, the apes ain’t boverred about becoming human, right? In fact, you might say they don’t give a monkey’s!]

What is Man?
A little earlier we listed the several abilities that supposedly separate man from the ancestral ape, abilities such as making and using tools, and the ability to speak and reason and be creative. In their on-going search for “the Missing Link”, Anthropologists naturally hope to find evidence that a series of ape-man creatures gradually acquired each of these abilities and so bridged the gap, step by tiny step, all the time being ruthlessly sorted out and guided ever upwards by Natural Selection.

However, mental and emotional similarities or commonalities between creatures do not prove common descent any more than physical parallels do. What is interesting, is that just as science is discovering organisms to be increasingly unfathomably complex in their physical structure, so they are discovering that animals in general, even “stupid sheep”, are far and away more sophisticated than they or Darwin ever suspected in their mental powers, emotional make-up and instinctive behaviour.

Recent research has shown, for example, that the Great Apes can recognize themselves in a mirror -- and will reach up and remove a strip of paper that a researcher has stuck on their head. Elephants and dolphins have also passed that same self-recognition test.

Chimps and some birds, we are told, can make and use a variety of crude tools, sometimes fashioning probes from leaves in order to extract grubs and insects from crevices. And primates, for example, are able to learn by imitation – and many creatures can learn to respond to dozens of word commands.

As already noted, however, the Bible does not say that man alone is a sentient being and that all other creatures are mere robotic assemblages of atoms and molecules. As recent research clearly indicates that there is a non-physical component in both man and animals -- a “spirit” that imparts intellect, as the Bible suggests.

Again, if we accept the Bible accounts, man and a variety of angelic beings also have much in common, and on a very high plane, whilst still remaining different kinds of being – with man at the moment being “a little lower than the angels” with regard to his mortal, fleshly physiology (Hebrews 1:1-14 & 2:5-8).

Entrapment by God?
In the dozen year that elapsed between the publication of “Origins” and the “Descent of Man”, Darwin seemingly became seduced by the ancient atheistic idea that similarity between creatures actually proves evolution from a common ancestor, as already noted, a point he hammers at continually, concluding: “Consequently we ought frankly to admit their community of descent.” [Ed: Sorry, Chas, I don’t ought to admit it at all. What about your, G-Man?]

Apparently irritated by the opposite and quite logical view that commonality of design simply demonstrates a common designer, i.e. God, Darwin complains: “To take any other view is to admit that our own structure, and that of all the animals around us, is a mere snare laid to entrap our judgment”.

In other words, Darwin seems to blaming God for his belief in evolution, implying that by employing common design elements in various creatures, God actually tricked him into thinking they all descended from a common ancestor. [Ed: Face it, G-Man, the guy was bonkers.]

Straying even further into the jungle of emotive opinion, Darwin declares: “It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion”. [Ed: That’s interesting, G-Man – If we disagree with Darwin we are arrogant – and according to Professor D. we are also insane!]

Then, in a prophecy that has sadly proved all too true, he predicts: “But the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation”. [Ed: Am I right in thinking, G-Man, that by “wonderful” he means “incredible” or “unbelievable”?]

Out of Africa
With absolutely no basis in fact, Darwin then opines: “.Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere”. Anthropologists today still enthusiastically embrace this apparent insight.

To “descend”, of course, the ape had to lose his hair, and where better to do that than a nice warm climate, rather than the polar regions – which is why Darwin continues: “At the period and place, whenever and wherever it was, when man first lost his hairy covering, he probably inhabited a hot country”.

On reflection, however, Darwin suddenly realizes, losing that furry coating could be a bit of a problem in equatorial Africa, where only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun – causing him to add: “ The loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man, even in a hot climate, for he is thus exposed to the scorching of the sun, and to sudden chills, especially during wet weather.”

Natural Selection Gone Wrong?
This little malfunction of Natural Selection was also spotted by Wallace, the co-inventor of evolution, who stated that: “ The natives in all countries are glad to protect their naked backs and shoulders with some slight covering” – so that: “No-one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man; his body therefore cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection”.

At this juncture, Wallace came up with the rather unwelcome opinion for Darwin that: “Some intelligent power has guided or determined the development of man"

Bad Hair Days
Leaping from one erroneous assumption to another, Darwin assures us, again without evidence, that: “The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles”. [Ed: Bearded ladies with tails and pointy ears they could wiggle? Was Chas was onto something, G-Man, or on something? ]

In a further burst of wishful thinking, Darwin continues: “It appears therefore at first sight probable that man has retained his beard from a very early period, whilst woman lost her beard at the same time that her body became almost completely divested of hair”.

Sexual Attraction
In “The Descent of Man”, Darwin greatly expands the role supposedly played by sexual attraction in the whole imaginary process of evolution – e.g. that men started divesting themselves of hair because the women liked them better that way.

This time his comment is based on the reported custom of a tribe of savages. Quote: “Nor must we overlook the part which sexual selection may have played in later times; for we know that with savages the men of the beardless races take infinite pains in eradicating every hair from their faces as something odious, whilst the men of the bearded races feel the greatest pride in their beards” – adding: “The women, no doubt, participate in these feelings, and if so sexual selection can hardly have failed to have effected something in the course of later times”.

Warming further to his subject, he adds: “It appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex, and transmitted them only to their male offspring” – adding: “The females apparently first had their bodies denuded of hair, also as a sexual ornament; but they transmitted this character almost equally to both sexes.” [Ed: Hold on a minute, G-Man, I’m confused. Is Big D saying that the apes were originally hairy, then they lost it all, because it seemed like a good idea at the time -- but then they got some back again on their chins in order to pull the birds? Or did they start off not being hairy, then decided to get hairy? Must have been some kind of fashion thing.]

A Hairy Problem
Eager to believe that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny”, i.e. that the development of a human foetus in the womb depicts the stages in the imagined evolution of man, Darwin finds himself a little puzzled in his discourse on hair by the fact that: “In the human foetus the hair on the face during the fifth month is longer than that on the head”. In other words, beards should really be much longer than the hair on the scalp, which is why he comments: “It is difficult to form any judgment as to how the hair on the head became developed to its present great length in many races”. [Ed: Houston, we have a problem – a very hairy one at that!]

Cladistics
Darwin’s belief that similarities in the physiology of organisms proves descent from a common ancestor has more recently “evolved” into the science of “cladistics”, a term derived from the Greek word for “branch”. Henry Gee’s book “Deep Time” is an ode to the wonders of cladistics - and also to the achievement of Charles Darwin, who’s intellectual stature is eulogized as being eternal and beyond need of physical memorial.

What cladistics does is to draw branching tree diagrams supposedly relating different organisms to their common ancestors. Since I and my dog Ollie, for example, both have backbones, it is assumed that we must share a common ancestor, “X”, an assumption which is demonstrated by drawing a line from each us in a V-formation linking us both to “X” If we then want to include my cat Tiddles, whose backbone clearly proves that she also descended from “X”, then I have to decide whether she is a lateral off my branch of the V or Ollie’s. In this way very complex diagrams can be created as we add in more organisms, such as the mouse that Tiddles chewed up last week and moles that have been ravaging my back lawn.

After stressing that palaeontologists have no proof to support the conventional evolutionary speculations found in books, Gee claims that by devising several alternative cladistic diagrams and then choosing the one he deems the simplest, he is actually “testing” and proving his ideas in a kosher scientific fashion – since, according to the ancient test known as “Occam’s Razor”, the simplest possible explanation of a phenomenon must invariably be the correct one. That said, the buzz word amongst cladistic fans now appears to be “parsimony”.

In attempting to promote cladistics as the only truly scientific approach to understanding the deep past, Gee says of the “Just-So Story” evolutionary assertions commonly found in books that palaeontologists “invent these stories” according to their “prejudices”, working from “assumptions” that are “baseless”. As he points out, fossils do not “carry labels” or “certificates of authenticity” so we cannot possibly know what really happened long ago in “deep time” and so link cause to effect. To illustrate his point, he informs us that more than 50 explanations have so far been offered for the demise of the dinosaurs. Cladistics is not concerned with events but with theoretical relationships based on similarities in structure.

Having taken a long hard look at his former field of expertise through his newly-opened yes, Gee comments: “We are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong”.

Having been so disarmingly honest and scrupulously logical, Gee then steps into a very deep pool of unwarranted assumption, when he says: “If it is fair to assume that all life on earth shares a common evolutionary origin – it follows that every organism that ever existed must be related to every other. We are all cousins”. That said, Gee apparently feels that yes it is fair to make that massive assumption, because the rest of his book is based on it – despite the total lack of scientific evidence, a classic example of argument from a false premise, a very large house on a foundation of quicksand.

The complexity and extent of the speculative relationships generated by cladistic analysis, now aided by powerful computer programmes, is limited only by the fertility of the human imagination that devises them - with not a few disagreements along the way as to which particular diagram of descent is the most “parsimonious”. Cladistic analysis may be based on visible characteristics, such as the possession of wings by bird, beetles and bats, or on similarities in the DNA of such organisms.

Contemplating the incredible amount of time and effort that has been invested in the futile pursuit of cladistics, I cannot help being reminded of the scripture which says: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (Romans 1:20).