Summary: According to the theory of evolution, about four million years ago the first “human” came into existence from apes, and has morphed several times since then into different kinds of creatures who became less and less ape-like and more and more like modern humans. Evolutionists also point to the development of the brain as an example of how man has not only evolved physically from a lower form of life but has also evolved intellectually through the same process. However, this is a very simplistic explanation that fails to take into account many other factors. This article takes a close look at what some of the factors are.
According to the theory of evolution, as based on both archeological and genetic evidence, science has concluded that about four million years ago the first “human” came into existence from the family of apes, which include gibbons, chimpanzees, organatangs, and gorillas, and has morphed several times since then into different kinds of creatures who became less and less ape-like and more and more like modern humans.
For example, it is believed that the first transition away from an ape is the creature called Australopithecus who was the first ape who could walk upright on two legs. However, this species was small and had a small brain. We have nearly a complete skeleton of one, whom scientists have named Lucy. About a million years later, a new creature came upon the scene who scientists have called Homo Habilis. Their arms were long like that of an ape, but their brain was twice the size of Australopithecus, thereby giving them greater intelligence.
Around a half a million years later a new creature arrived called Homo Erectus. Their arms were shorter, their legs were longer, and their brains were larger than homo habilis, which allowed them to invent and use more complex tools. Then, around 200,000 years ago, a creature called Homo Sapien came into existence, whose physical makeup was like that of modern man, and whose brain was larger than their predecessors, which allowed them to do something no other animal has ever been able to do, called abstract thinking, which includes being able to comprehend non-concrete ideas such as mathematics, music, using imagination, and creating art.
For this reason, evolutionists point to the development of the brain as an example of how man has not only evolved physically from a lower form of life but has also evolved intellectually through the same process. However, this is a very simplistic explanation that fails to take into account many other factors. Let’s examine some of them.
When we look at a brain, we see that it isn’t just a blob of soft tissue. It is so incredibly intricate and complex that we’re still learning more about how it works. When our body is being put together during the gestation period, as it grows from a single fertilized egg into a fetus, and eventually becomes a fully functioning living person, it depends on the instructions found in the DNA located in every single one of the 30 trillion cells in our body. And included in these instructions is how the brain is to be made.
To understand how DNA works, humans have 23 chromosomes, and each chromosome consists of a great number of genes. Furthermore, each gene is made up of only four chemicals, identified by the first letter of their names – A, T, C. & G – but it’s the sequence and length of these four “letters” that determines the function of the gene.
For example, one gene could be made up as follows: TACGGCT, whereas another gene could be ATCGAGCTTA. Not only is the sequence of letters different but the length of the letters is also different. In addition to this, each gene gives instructions to do one specific thing. For example, there is one gene that determines the color of the eye, another gene determines a certain kind of hormone, and another gene determines when the body is to grow and when it’s to stop growing. Scientists who’ve studied the human genome say that they have discovered at least 46,831 genes, plus another 2300 micro-genes, and one-third of them are devoted to assembling the brain. That’s how complex it is.
When we say that as man morphed from being an ape into a human, and his brain grew in size, we’re not talking about adding more globs of extra tissue, like adding more lumber to build an addition onto a house. We’re talking about adding thousands of new instructions of how to assemble and enlarge a very complicated piece of machinery, and those instructions have to be extremely precise.
If a gene is made up of only four letters, arranged in a very specific order and in a very specific length, then for there to be a change in the instructions of a particular gene it would require a change in the sequence of these four letters. Sometimes that difference can be as small as one letter, but often there are quite a few changes.
For example, there is one gene, located in chromosome #20 called HAR1 that is responsible for making the neurons located in just the cortex of our brain. This gene tells the cell how to form into these neurons, where in the body they’re supposed to develop, and what their function will be.
Furthermore, not all neurons are the same, and it is a particular kind of neuron located in the cortex of the brain that is responsible for such things as thinking, organizing, planning, and learning, and it this kind of neuron, and the number of them, located in a specific part of the brain that makes a human able to think in the abstract. If those same neurons were located in a different part of the brain, they wouldn’t have the same effect on the thinking process.
This gene is made up of 180 “letters” and there are eighteen places in that gene where the letters are different from that of the same gene found in an ape, and it is those specific changes that allows humans to think at a higher level than a primate. However, if there is a change in just one of those 180 letters in the human HAR1 gene, our neurons would not work the way they do now. That’s how precise the sequence of those letters need to be.
But it takes more than just adding more neurons to a certain part of the brain. To make a significant change in something as complex as the brain involves making changes in hundreds, if not thousands of other genes all at the same time. And all of these changes have to be compatible with one another.
To illustrate how precise these changes need to be, when building a house, the workmen follow a blueprint that tells them how everything is to be put together. You wouldn’t find a blueprint calling to have a door that opens into the floor and have no doors placed in the outside walls. You also wouldn’t build the roof before you built the walls of the house. Doors have a very specific function and therefore have to be put in very specific locations, but it takes intelligence to know that. Likewise, it takes intelligence to know that it is impractical to build the roof first before building the walls of the house.
In the same way, if nature is going to build a larger brain that is capable of performing more functions, there has to be changes made in the old blueprint, detailing how the new brain is to be made. This would require changes to be made to hundreds of other genes, and each one of those changes have to be coordinated with the changes in all the other genes, otherwise when the body goes to read the blueprint of how to build this new brain, nothing would go together. In that case you’d have a brain that couldn’t properly work.
According to evolutionists, changes in a gene happen randomly and often at unpredictable times. Then how can multiple changes happen almost simultaneously in hundreds of genes so that the combined effect produces a highly complex yet perfectly working organ without some sort of intelligence guiding and directing this process? The theories that evolutionists propose for explaining how nature goes about making a larger brain don’t adequately answer this question.
But the problem is more complex than that.
As the brain increases in size, if the brain cavity inside the skull doesn’t increase at the same time, then the brain would be squeezed tight inside of it as it grows. On the other hand, if the brain cavity grew but the brain didn’t, the brain would have little support and would therefore wobble around inside the skull. For that reason, both the brain and the cavity housing it would have to grow together at the same time and do it in such a way that they both fit together perfectly.
As we look at the skulls of each of the four different hominins we discussed earlier, we see a marked difference in the shape and size of the cranial cavity, but in order for the skull to know what size and shape it needs to be, it has to know what the new brain is going to look like so it can correctly reshape itself to accommodate the enlarged organ. Either that, or the brain has to know how to reshape itself in order to perfectly fit the differently made skull.
But to change the shape of the skull also takes hundreds of changes in the genes responsible for creating it. Therefore, all the genes that make the brain must not only coordinate their efforts with each other, but they must also coordinate with all the genes that are responsible for creating the skull.
However, the brain cavity isn’t the only change that happens to the skull. There are also many other significant changes in the facial features, including the structure of the cheekbones, jawbone, nose, eyes, and ear openings, and as well as the formation of different kinds of teeth. All of these changes must also take place at the same time that the brain cavity is redesigning itself.
To put this in perspective, that would be like a manufacturing plant adding new equipment to their existing assembly line and having to build a new addition onto their factory to accommodate the extra machinery. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of thinking, planning, designing, engineering, and mechanical knowhow to make all of that happen. And for it all to work properly, there has to be some very precise blueprints that the workmen must follow, otherwise, nothing will fit together and nothing will work right. That doesn’t happen by accident, It takes intelligence.
Yet, evolutionists want us to believe that something far more complicated than a piece of mechanical equipment assembled itself because of some random, accidently changes in a few genes that accumulated over millions of years to account for how the brain continued to increase in size, giving it greater thinking capacity. And then, at the same, exact time, precise changes were also made to the genes that control the size and shape of the skull so that these two very different pieces of the human body fit together perfectly.
And that’s just the brain and the skull. That doesn’t account for all the other parts of the body that also had to change For example, it’s said that as apes morphed into humans, their arms became shorter and their legs became longer, but bones don’t just grow shorter or longer without corresponding changes in the muscles, ligaments, and blood vessels. And there are many other anatomical parts of the body that need to change simultaneously in order for the animal to function properly.
Although science can explain how the process works chemically, what they can’t explain is why it happens so precisely. In other words, they know that when changes happen in genes it causes that gene to perform a different function, and they know the different ways that genes can change, but what they can’t explain is how so many changes can happen in precisely the right places to produce a perfectly functioning animal.
The explanation they offer is that these changes accumulated over millions of years, but they lack the fossil or DNA evidence showing these thousands of gradual changes. Instead, what science has discovered is fully formed different species, where everything in the animal is already perfectly assembled. What they don’t find is the thousands of small steps that had to occur leading up to the new species.
To illustrate this problem, let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say that a change in one gene could prevent the growth of a tail in a monkey, but you’d still have a monkey in every other respect. Then thousands of years later another change could cause this type of monkey to grow a larger torso, which would cause them to be bent over. Then thousands of years later there would be another change where the arms of these evolving monkeys grew longer to support their heavy torso. In this way, a monkey could gradually morph into being an ape.
But scientists see a monkey and they see an ape, notice that their genetic material is nearly identical except in a few genes, and declare that one evolved from the other. However, what they don’t find are monkeys without tails, then monkeys with no tails who have larger torsos, then monkeys with no tails, larger bodies and longer arms. Instead, they just assume that all of these missing in between steps still happened even though they have no evidence to support their conclusion.
In the same way, they see an ape who can walk upright with an ape’s brain, then see another perfectly formed animal with a larger brain and a different size and shape skull, and then see another animal with yet another slightly different body and brain and say one evolved from the other, yet they don’t have any evidence of all the thousands of little changes that had to occur before an ape could walk upright, and then the thousands upon thousands of changes needed for that ape to one day become a Homo Sapien.
The explanation often given for this lack of evidence is that those animals whose genes didn’t help improve their survivability died off, but there are two glaring errors with this theory. The first is that their bones, along with their DNA, would still be in the ground for us to find and examine. The second is that if they died off, how did their offspring survive long enough to eventually become a different species? If it took millions of years for all of these thousands of changes to take place, then there should be millions upon millions of DNA samples that would allow us to see all of these small, gradual changes.
Although evolutionists claim that their conclusions are based on scientific evidence and not on conjecture, yet they can’t explain how the creation of the brain and the skull can work together through natural means when logic at least suggests that some form of intelligence was involved during this process. That would be the obvious conclusion in any other situation, yet instead, evolutionists automatically reject the idea of intelligence in the design and construction that’s evident all throughout nature.
When a viable explanation is not even considered, that’s the antithesis of science. It is perfectly acceptable to believe in some sort of superior being by whatever name you want to call it, while trying to understand the process by which that being uses to bring about changes in nature, but that’s not what evolutionists do. Instead, they begin with the assumption that there is no intelligence involved in the changing of genes, and because of this mindset, they look at only those selected facts that support the conclusion they want to achieve, while disregarding any facts that contradict what they want to believe. And we see this in the theory that humans came from apes.
NOTES On Different Hominins
(Hominins are human-like creatures, while hominids include both humans and apes)
Australopithecus – Lived about 3-4 million years ago. They were only 3 ft 7 inches tall and weighed 66 lbs. Had both ape-like and human-like traits. They walked upright on two legs. We have a full skeleton of one that they’ve named Lucy.
Homo Habilis – Lived around 2 to 1.5 million years ago. Their arms were long like that of ape but were taller than their ancestors. They had a small face and teeth. Their brains were twice the size of Lucy’s which allowed them to use tools. They lived in groups.
Homo Erectus – Lived approximately1.8 million to 200,000 years ago. They were taller and slender, with some as tall as modern humans. They had a bony ridge over their eyes, had longer legs and shorter arms and were well suited for travel and running. They were more advanced than their predecessors and made and used more complexed tools such as axes made out of stone. They also used fire.
Denisovan - Lived 48,260 to 29,200 years ago. Very recently discovered from just one jawbone in upper Siberia. What we know comes from DNA which shows that this hominin has many traits of modern humans but doesn’t appear to be directly related to humans.
Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis -Lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago. They looked more human-like but were shorter and stockier and were much stronger. They had much larger brains and could make use of even more complexed tools. They lived and traveled in groups and had a sense of community. They not only buried their dead but did so with a ritual DNA shows that they are not closely related to modern-day humans.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens – Lived around 150,000 years ago. They had a larger brain and slender bones and had no bony brow. They lived in caves, rather than out in the open as other hominins did, made clothing, and used more advanced tools, such as the bow and arrow, as well as tools used for sculpting, carving, and painting. They were also better hunters than the Neanderthals
(This information has been compiled from various sources, although it should be noted that there is much disagreement on these facts among archeologists and scientists.)
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