Lecture

In our last lecture, we talked about the origin of species. I gave some arguments against the old Darwinian type of evolution, what might be called General Evolution. In this lecture, number five, we must go on to speak of the origin of man.

We noted before that some prominent biologists are saying that there is no known biological mechanism to explain evolution between major types of life, and there is no biological evidence that actually occurs, though, of course, men have searched very hard for that evidence. Goldschmidt, W.R. Thompson, Heribert-Nilsson of Sweden, Kerkut of England can be cited to this effect.

The same time there are evolutionary geologists who admit that the geological record is by no means on the side of the well-known picture of an evolutionary tree. There are many gaps in the record, even if the usual geological theories are admitted. There is regularly a lack of transitional forms between major types of life. Significant quotations on this subject are given in my book that I referred to, Man—God’s Eternal Creation, on pages thirty-one to forty-one. On the basis of this, I said that it is getting to be possible to believe in a limited type of evolution only rather than in the evolutionary tree in which all forms of life as we see them are derived from one original cell. The idea of many evolutionary trees, sometimes can be called polyphyletic evolution or limited evolution, is a valid choice before Christian scientists today, it would seem.

But there is a consequence of that limited evolution that I did not draw in the last lecture. I said that one of the big arguments in favor of evolution is the argument from similarity. These similarities are obvious. I mentioned the similarities in the seven vertebrae of the neck in men, other mammals, chickens, and so on. But there are other similarities, similarities in blood and in heart, for instance, and in general organs even between men and fish. But there are other similarities that go even farther in the animal field, not only blood but also biochemistry. In particular, the very strange arrangement that God is ordained for reproduction of the species.

Sexual reproduction is something that we find in fruit trees and flowers, in insects, in fish, in men, in animals. This very remarkable arrangement is a similarity that runs through so much of the world of plants and animals. And yet, if you adopt the idea of limited evolution, it does not mean that these different forms that have this remarkable similarity and other similarities to, that these forms are genetically related. One is not derived from the other.

A number of these similarities can be pointed out, some of them very striking. There is a certain kind of a squid. It is a kind of an octopus-like creature in the sea. The bone and the head of this creature is the bone that you have in your canary bird cages for the canaries to pick at. This creature is, of course, very, very different from man. It has no skeletal structure. It would be on a totally different family tree, a totally different phylum. And yet this particular creature has eyes, two eyes, that are remarkably similar to human eyes. They have an aqueous humor and a vitreous humor, a crystalline lens. As I understand, the main difference is that the cells and the retina are reversed. So here we have a similarity, a very remarkable similarity, that apparently does not mean any relationship at all according to this new review of evolution. And even in the older view of evolution, those eyes are very difficult to explain. The conclusion is that similarities do not prove similarity of descent.

What then do they prove? Well, one could say, as Christians have said for many years, one could say that it was simply that God made things in the same general pattern. This, of course, is true and a logical answer. Yet, I think we can explain that just a little bit more. God planned the universe this way for a purpose, and he did it with reason and forethought. In order to do this, He used the same building block. This is where the knowledge of DNA comes in.

DNA is the basis of the biochemistry of all living creatures as far as we can see. And so, because the DNA of these creatures is similar, the products of the DNA life would be similar. The example I give is builders using bricks. You find a bunch of brick houses; you find that they almost all have sharp corners. The reason to have sharp corners is because the bricks are angular. If an ordinary brick layer doesn’t go through the trouble of making a round wall, he ends up with an angular house. So it is with the DNA. The Lord made all living creatures, plant and animal, on the basis of the DNA biochemistry of life. And, of course, this was very wonderful. This means that we, who are part of that cycle, that we can fit into the cycle. If we didn’t have DNA in our bodies like that of chickens, we couldn’t enjoy a good chicken dinner. If the DNA was not the same for vegetables as it is for man, why, we couldn’t enjoy a lettuce salad. But God has made the remarkable, intricate inter-play of the plants and animals and even, what is often called, the carbon dioxide cycle, where plants give off oxygen and animals use the oxygen to give off carbon dioxide that the plants absorb. This sort of a cycle runs through nature and it is because God has made the biochemistry of living creatures so much alike; therefore, these creatures are not alike because they are related, necessarily, but they are alike because they are made out of similar building blocks.

I suppose the Lord could have made things very differently. He could have made us to run on four wheels and to eat petroleum if we wanted to. In which case, we would sit down, I suppose, to a dinner and say, “My, this petroleum tastes good.” But the Lord didn’t do it that way. In His wisdom, He gave us the variety and the beauty of the world as we see it of plants and animals. But it does not mean that similarity within this world of plants and animals proves a common descent. It never did prove that, and now we can see even more that is not a necessary conclusion from the remarkable similarities that we see. If we have similar DNA in our germ cells, we will be similar in our makeup. And those that have the human DNA will be human. Those that have the similar mammalian DNA, will be mammals.

This applies, as I say, to the creation of man. Man has similarities. Man has similarities with many of the animals. In particular, he has similarities with some of the apes and monkeys. These similarities can be overdrawn, but we don’t need to underestimate those similarities either. It simply means that these creatures also have DNA and their DNA is closer to ours than the DNA of pigs and horses.

So when we turn to the creation of man, we see that there are obvious similarities with animal forms, but this does not at all involve root ancestry for man. On the contrary, we have the statement made very plain in the Bible that man is a separate creation of God—the crown of God’s creation. Let us make man in our image, the Lord says in Genesis 1. So an image of God made Him man. Now the image of God there in Genesis 1 is very clearly not the physical image, God does not have a physical image such as we have. This is made very plain when the Lord spoke to Moses and said on the mountain and Moses spoke to the people in Deuteronomy Chapter 4. When you were at Mount Sinai, you saw no similitude when you heard God speak from the mountain. So God does not have a physical image, of course, but we are made in the image of God in our souls and spiritual lives.

God did make man a living soul. Now, the word living soul there in Genesis 2:7 is the same word used for animal life. It does not have reference directly to His spirit life when it says God took the dust of the earth and formed it into a nepeš ḥayyâ. What it means is that God took inanimate matter and made it living. The Hebrew does not say that God took root forms and made them human. No, it says that He took inanimate matter and when He made it into man, it was living. When He made it living, it was man. And so the meaning here of Genesis 2:7 seems clearly to oppose the idea of the root ancestry of man as far as the Genesis record is concerned.

This is against, of course, the idea of theistic evolution. I sometimes say, somewhat in fun but also very seriously, that if there is some thought by some that it took God millions of years to make man out of the dust, taking him up through various forms of life according to the theistic evolutionary theory, that was the way God made man at least, it is very clear that He didn’t make woman that way. It says that God made woman as a special creation from man. Causing deep sleep to fall upon Adam and took from his side a portion, a note that we need to see He took a rib, there’s no real problem there. Some say if the Bible is true, then women would have one more rib than men. That’s kind of foolish, of course. You know very well that if you cut off a man’s fingers, his children will have four fingers and a thumb just the same as the father. So even if Adam did lack one rib, his children would still have the correct number. But at least the Hebrew is not that specific. He took a portion of man’s side and built it into a woman. It has been very beautifully said that God made woman from man’s side not from his head to rule over him nor from his feet to be his slave, but God took from his side and made her that she might be his friend and companion and partner and wife.

We turn then to the question about the history of man and particularly to fossil men. What about these fossils? Well there have been, of course, many fossils found and much interest in this subject for many years now. It used to be rather simple to draw a line of advance, evolutionary development, for mankind. The usual way was to begin with Java Man—pithecanthropus erectus. Java Man was, of course, found in Java some years ago by Dubois, and it was supposed to be five-hundred-thousand years old and he had beetled brows and a stooped gate, not too stooped, he was called erectus, but heavy brow ridges and he was rather elementary. The brain capacity has been in debate but perhaps between 900 to 950 cm³.

After Java man, in former years, they mentioned next would be Piltdown Man who was more intermediate, and then came Neanderthal Man. Neanderthal Man was pictured as a rather stooped, British individual, though he did have a very large brain capacity. His brain capacity was perhaps a little larger than ours today. Today the average American male brain size, I believe, is around 1,450 cm³, though there is considerable variation. Neanderthal Man had a little over that. But Neanderthal Man is pictured as hairy and British and stooped and short legged and walked with a slouching gape. He was in Europe from say one-hundred-thousand to twenty-five-thousand years ago and then after him came the Cro-Magnon Man who was a very advanced individual, fully upright, high-browed, large brain, and worthy individual in every respect. Homo sapiens, as we would say, came to ourselves.

This would be the old sequence. That sequence seemed to be rather attractive to the evolutionary point of view. But, I must say, that that has been changed somewhat by many more recent discoveries. To begin with, we all know we have to strike Piltdown Man from that sequence. Piltdown Man, turns out, was just a plain hoax. Who perpetrated the hoax, we don’t know, but it was found in many books and accepted by many scientists, but it was indeed a hoax. It was a modern cranium, I believe, with an ancient jaw, and they were fitted together wrongly. I believe it was an ape jaw and a modern cranium. At least, it was given an artificial appearance of age. The teeth were stained and filed and so on. It was a hoax by someone, either by the discoverer or someone that played a joke on him. But it was a cruel joke and it has led many people astray.

The Java Man finds are not above suspicion and this suspicion has been drawn out many times. Not much has been found and it is not absolutely certain that the pieces that were found belonged to the same individual or race. At the same level, not too far away, there were modern skulls or relatively modern skulls found called Wadjak Man. So the interpretation of the Java finds are not above suspicion. But if we grant them these finds, we may then say, that they have been illustrated at least by the Peking finds, Peking man.

Now Peking Man also is not entirely above suspicion. The Peking skulls are no longer available. Somehow they perished during the Japanese Chinese war. Some think they are at the bottom of a harbor; some think they were even destroyed on purpose. It is hard to tell. Near Peking there was a cliff that seems to have had caves in it that fell down. Though, even here, there is some question about the locale. Anyhow, several skulls were found, not the whole bodies, but just the skulls. It appears that these skulls had the bottom crushed and broken in because, apparently, the brains were eaten and maybe in a cannibal-like situation. There were some traces of fire, and it is said that these skulls are somewhat like the Java skull, heavy browed, but the brain capacity varies from around 900 cm³, it is said, to about 1,200 cm³, which would be within the limits of some modern men. Therefore, if the Peking men are used to illustrate the Java Men, we must say that, actually, we have here men of the different race, possibly, brain size depends somewhat on race and somewhat on height and weight of the specimen.

I think I might say a little bit about that. We usually smile when we say it, but actually, women have around an average of 100 cm³ less brain capacity than men. This I hasten to explain is not because their intelligence is less but simply because they have a smaller body and do not need as many brain cells to operate the body. So with smaller body, smaller features, smaller head, why the brain is smaller, and yet the intellectual capacity is just as great. This is true also of small races like the pygmies. The pygmies have much smaller heads and brains and bodies, and yet they are very intelligent too. They have, of course, similar ranges of intelligence. We have in all races some that are intelligent and some that are slow.

So with Peking Man and the Java Man and more or less equated now, we can say that here we have creatures that seem to have rather small brains, but certainly within the limits of human kind, and as far as we know are simply other races of men. Well, as far as other forms are concerned, the Neanderthal Man has been supplemented now by other discoveries. Some time ago in Palestine, as they were digging a new railroad between Mount Carmel and the sea, they found some human skeletons and, to be brief, these Carmel Men have been studied extensively, and it appears that Carmel Men are somewhat more advanced than Neanderthal Man. Although they were originally thought to be earlier than Neanderthal Man. Neanderthal Man was put around one-hundred to twenty-five-thousand years ago. Carmel Man was first thought to be 120 thousand years ago. I may say that that has been changed but then the dates of the Neanderthal Man should probably be changed too.

Carmel Man has now been identified at more like thirty-five thousand years ago which shows something of the possibilities of error in the dating of ancient men. Carmel Man, as I say, is somewhat intermediate between Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon Man. So the Neanderthal Man is no longer thought to be so distinct a race or species. He is just another type of man. Here we have Carmel Man earlier, and yet more advanced, which would be, of course, kind of evolution in reverse. But that situation has been intensified somewhat by the discovery of [Swanska] Man in England. [Swanska] Man is supposed to be, the usual evolutionary dating, around three-hundred-thousand years ago, and yet [Swanska] Man, though not much of it is known, the cranium is known, and he had a very high skull cased, large brain capacity and so on. Here we have evolution reversal indeed. A creature long before Neanderthal Man and yet just as advanced as we are.

The result of this and other such discoveries in Europe and Asia would seem to imply that what we have in fossil man in these areas is variation rather than evolution. Different races, yes. Different types, sure. But all men, and if the evidence from Carmel Man has given full weight, it would seem as if they are all perfectly able to interbreed and inter-marry and so on.

As far as the evolutionary picture is concerned from Europe and Asia, we should simply say that we have here races of men, all of which may well be descended from one source, and could well be the descendants of Adam. As far as the dating of these men is concerned, most of the usual datings of the past have been based upon correlation with glacier dates. I think there’s a tendency among geologists now to be not so dogmatic about glacial dating but even some suggested there was one glacier instead of four and the dates of these glaciers are not so well known, so I don’t think that it is at all necessary for us to take too seriously these dates. They are not determined, understand, by carbon-14 measurements which go back only to around twenty-five, forty-thousand years ago, and so the dating of these is still under considerable question.

However, there has been a new development in Africa, and we must say something about this even though briefly. We all know of the work of Dr. Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. Olduvai is a rather dry desert area down on an extension of the Rift Valley that goes north and south through East Africa. And at Olduvai Gorge, Leakey has found a number of very significant skeletons.

The first one that he found was called the Zinjanthropus; he named it Zinjanthropus. A skull was found which he reconstructed. After that, he found another skeleton, about the same age, a little older, and that he called homo habilis, or handyman really. These two have been very much publicized.

It turns out that they are very similar to creatures found in South Africa earlier that are called australopithecine. The name means southern apes, and they were named that because not too much was known about them. Their small brains were obvious, but we did not know at first too much about the rest of their bodies. Since then, more material has come out and their pelvis indicates, at least to some, that they really were erect which is quite an interesting thing.

Also, their teeth: When their teeth are studied, you see that they have a rounded arch. I would call that U-shaped. But look at your own teeth in the mirror. You will see that they are rounded in the front, whereas the teeth of an animal like an ape or a dog is more rectangular with the canine teeth on each side and the front teeth rather straight. Some have called the animal the u-shaped and the human parabolic type jaw. But at least there is that rounded character to the arch of the tooth of the gum, both above and below in humankind and not so in apes. These australopithecine have, it would seem, rather human indentation, but very small front teeth and rather heavy back teeth. Again, I have a picture of this dentation in the book that I have referred to on page 56.

What shall we say about these creatures? Are they men? I have argued that they are. There are other people who question that. There is a recent book by Duane T. Gish, a very competent biologist, called Evolution: The Fossils Say No. And on page eighty-four, he gives some material that bares upon this question. By the way, he gives a picture of the Zinjanthropus man as drawn by one artist and another picture of the same man drawn totally differently. One looks very much like an ape; the other looks very much like a man with a somewhat flat head. That later picture is approximately the same one that appeared in the National Geographic when the find was first reported.

Gish remarks on page eighty-five, opposite of these pictures, that there is a living baboon that has been discovered in the high mountains of Africa called Theropithecus Gelada which he says has a number of dental mandibular, that is jaw and facial characteristics which are stared with the australopithecine. So his conclusion is that these australopithecines are actually brute and apes and this is, I suppose, possible. Much depends on the reconstruction, and the reconstruction is a problem. Zinjanthropus’s skull was found in four-hundred pieces. Leakey feels sure that he has fitted these pieces together accurately, and yet with so many pieces it seems possible to reconstruct in it more ways than one.

At the same time, his son Richard Leakey has been finding some very remarkable things in a situation just north of Olduvai Gorge, around Lake Rudolf, the Omo River Valley, and Leakey claims to have found at an earlier time even than these, forms that are human. I personally would think that there would be no great problem in assuming that these forms are human, both the ones Richard Leakey and the ones of his father. On the other hand, this was Louis S.B. Leakey, the father.

On the other hand, there is this problem with these forms. The brains are very small. Only about one-third the size of man. There are two forms of these australopithecines, the light and the heavy, sometimes called gracile and robust. These two forms have, as I say, small brains. But I think we must remember that at least the light forms of these creatures are themselves very small. If they have a brain capacity of around 450 cm³ to 500 cm³, which is one-third of the ordinary adult American male, they also have a body weight of around sixty to seventy which is itself only about one-third the size of an adult American male. In short, they may well be pygmies. Not exactly like our African pygmies, but a kind of pygmy. A kind of very small human creature. So it would seem as if they may be interpreted as human. We hardly know enough about them to be dogmatic.

On the other hand, Dr. Gish may be correct and it might be that they are not of eight formations. It depends on whether you draw that figure one way or the other, it would seem, as far as our present information is concerned. We should be willing to wait confidentially for new information and new discoveries to be made. Confident that when these discoveries are made and rightly interpreted, they will be in accord with the biblical picture as fairly understood from the Bible.

I might say a word about recent studies on the Neanderthal Man. Neanderthal Man is usually pictured as a slouching animal, half-brutish and stooped with long hair and body hair. Of course, you must remember that the body hair is totally theoretical. There is no evidence for the hair on the body of any of these fossilized forms. But the stooped posture and shambling gate of Neanderthal Man was due to a reconstruction depending on the spinal processes. There are, on the back of the spine of these creatures, rather large bones which were supposed to be due to heavy muscle attachments. These muscle attachments in the neck being so large, gave the scientists the idea that the neck was heavy and the head was thrust forward and therefore this creature was moving with a shambling gate and he is pictured in a stooped posture.

Well, when the other fossil remains of man in Europe were found to be rather modern in the case of Carmel Man who would be more advanced than Neanderthal Man and [Swanska] Man who was also thought to be more advanced than Neanderthal Man though earlier, naturally scientists turned to the skeletons of Neanderthal Man and reexamined them to see whether or not this shambling posture was an accurate picture. I believe it was Straus of Baltimore particularly who did some of this work and he, on more careful investigation, saw that the heavy bone processes on the back of the spine were not because of large muscles but were because of arthritis. Evidently, our Neanderthal Man was afflicted with arthritis, and so the total reconstruction of Neanderthal Man as a semi-stooped, semi-erect figure, has been given up. I remember when this came out in the newspaper the editorial in our local newspaper had the headline, “Neanderthal Man Straightens Up.”