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One of the lessons to be drawn from Solomon’s amazing metaphor is that when the human mind is confronted by unfamiliar and creative ideas, the knee-jerk reaction is to evaluate them on the basis of the ideas and assumptions already admitted, assessed, and accepted as Truth, quickly rejecting those found to be disturbing and contrary to the status quo, often doing so in a quite hostile manner, just like the Watchmen of old at the city gates.

No wonder inspirational writers and psychologists often suggest that many or most people, even in our supposedly enlightened age, are “sleepwalking” through their lives, brainwashed, thinking and reacting robotically, their lives shaped by unquestioned beliefs, false assumptions and circumstances they feel to be beyond their control. Little wonder also that Alex Osborn, the father of Brainstorming, found it necessary to hold separate sessions for the generation of creative new ideas and their evaluation, and that some problem-solving groups even issue red cards for participants to wave at any person making negative comments and attempting to kill of new suggestion in their infancy during the idea generation stage.

So it was that when Charles Darwin proclaimed his revolutionary and unscriptural theory of evolution to the world over a hundred years ago, he got a hostile reception from the majority of people, especially those of a religious persuasion - even though there were already enough atheistic intellectuals and outsiders around to snap up the first three thousand copies of his landmark book “The Origin of Species” in less than a week.

However, just as the population of that ancient city could slowly change and new Watchmen be appointed and issued with totally different orders, so the beliefs embraced by even religious people have slowly changed over the past century – with the result that the rare person who now dares suggest that the Genesis account of creation in the Bible could actually be literally true and that evolution is bunk is generally regarded as a fanatical “fundamentalist”, or, in the opinion of Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, insane.

Perhaps you have guessed by now that the point of this little historical detour is to urge you, the reader, as the chief executive and master controller of the city inside your head, to relieve the Watchmen of their normal duties temporarily, as you personally take complete charge of your thinking processes, and disable any negative conditioned reflex responses long enough to at least consider, as you read what follows, the seemingly outrageous possibility that much or even most of what you have long been led to believe about evolution and the origin of man by books and the mass media such as the BBC might just possibly be seriously wrong.