DARWINISM : A Crumbling Theory

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 1 (Dec '02-Jan 2003)

by Lloyd Pye © 2002

PART ONE

Since writing my first essay for NEXUS in mid-2002 [see 9/04], I've been bombarded by emails (nearing 200) from around the world, many offering congratulations (always appreciated, of course) and many others requesting more instruction or deeper insight into areas discussed and/or not discussed.

Let's face it: nearly everyone is interested in Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the new kid in town, Interventionism. Because of length constraints, this essay must be in two parts. Here, in Part One, I'll go over the basics currently known about the origin of life on Earth. Later, in Part Two, I'll discuss what is known and what can be safely surmised about the origin of humanity.

We begin by understanding that Charles Darwin stood on a very slippery slope when trying to explain how something as biologically and biochemically complex as even the simplest form of life could have spontaneously generated itself from organic molecules and compounds loose in the early Earth's environment. Because that part of Darwin's theory has always been glaringly specious, modern Darwinists get hammered about it from all sides, including from the likes of me, with a net result that the edifice of "authority" they've hidden behind for 140 years is crumbling under the assault.

Imagine a mediaeval castle being pounded by huge stones flung by primitive, but cumulatively effective, catapults. Darwinism (and all that term has come to represent: natural selection, evolution, survival of the fittest, punctuated equilibrium, etc.) is the castle; Darwinists man the battlements as the lobbed stones do their work; Intelligent Designers hurl the boulders doing the most damage; Creationists, by comparison, use slings; and the relatively few (thus far) people like me, Interventionists, shoot a well-aimed arrow now and then, though nobody pays much attention to usÉyet.

Remember, a well-aimed (or lucky--in either case, the example is instructive) arrow took down mighty Achilles. Darwinists have heels, too.

LIFE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

In Charles Darwin's time, nothing was known about life at the cellular level. Protoplasm was the smallest unit they understood. Yet Darwin's theory of natural selection stated that all of life--every living entity known then or to be discovered in the future--simply had to function from birth to death by "natural laws" that could be defined and analysed. This would of course include the origin of life. Darwin suggested life might have gradually assembled itself from stray parts lying about in some "warm pond" when the planet had cooled enough to make such an assemblage possible. Later it was realised that nothing would likely have taken shape (gradually or otherwise) in a static environment, so a catalytic element was added: lightning.

Throughout history up to the present moment, scientists have been forced to spend their working lives with the "God" of the Creationists hovering over every move they make, every mistake, every error in judgment, every personal peccadillo. So when faced with something they can't explain in rational terms, the only alternative option is "God did it", which for them is unacceptable. So they're forced by relentless Creationist pressure to come up with answers for absolutely everything that, no matter how absurd, are "natural". That was their motivation for the theory that a lightning bolt could strike countless random molecules in a warm pond and somehow transform them into the first living creature. The "natural" forces of biology, chemistry and electromagnetism could magically be swirled together--and voilà!Éan event suspiciously close to a miracle.

Needless to say, no Darwinist would accept terms like "magic" or "miracle", which would be tantamount to agreeing with the Creationist argument that "God did it all". But in their heart-of-hearts, even the most fanatical Darwinists had to suspect the "warm pond" theory was absurd.

And as more and more was learned about the mind-boggling complexity of cellular structure and chemistry, there could be no doubt. The trenchant Fred Hoyle analogy still stands: it was as likely to be true as that a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and correctly assemble a jetliner.

Unfortunately, the "warm pond" had become a counterbalance to "God did it", so even when Darwinists knew past doubt that it was wrong, they clung to it, outwardly proclaimed it and taught it. In many places in the world, including the USA, it's still taught.

TOO HOT TO HANDLE

The next jarring bump on the Darwinist road to embattlement came when they learned that in certain places around the globe there existed remnants of what had to be the very first pieces of the Earth's crust. Those most ancient slabs of rock are called cratons, and the story of their survival for 4.0 billion [4,000,000,000] years is a miracle in itself. But what is most miraculous about them is that they contain fossils of "primitive" bacteria! Yes, bacteria, preserved in 4.0-billion-year-old cratonal rock. If that's not primitive, what is? However, it presented Darwinists with an embarrassing conundrum.

If Earth began to coalesce out of the solar system's primordial cloud of dust and gas around 4.5 billion years ago (which by then was a well-supported certainty), then at 4.0 billion years ago the proto-planet was still a seething ball of cooling magma. No warm ponds would appear on Earth for at least a billion years or more. So how to reconcile reality with the warm-pond fantasy?

There was no way to reconcile it, so it was ignored by all but the specialists who had to work with it on a daily basis. Every other Darwinist assumed a position as one of the "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" monkeys. To say they "withheld" the new, damaging information is not true; to say it was never emphasised in the popular media for public consumption is true.

That has become the way Darwinists handle any and all challenges to their pet theories: if they can no longer defend one, they don't talk about it, or they talk about it as little as possible. If forced to talk about it, they invariably try to "kill the messenger" by challenging any critic's "credentials". If the critic lacks academic credentials equal to their own, he or she is dismissed as little more than a crackpot. If the critic has equal credentials, he or she is labelled as a "closet Creationist" and dismissed. No career scientist can speak openly and vociferously against Darwinist dogma without paying a heavy price. That is why and how people of normally good conscience can be and have been "kept in line" and kept silent in the face of egregious distortions of truth.

If that system of merciless censure weren't so solidly in place, then surely the next Darwinist stumble would have made headlines around the world as the final and absolute end to the ridiculous notion that life could possibly have assembled itself "naturally". They couldn't even be sure it happened on Earth.

TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

The imposing edifice of Darwinian "origin of life" dogma rested on a piece of incontrovertible bedrock: there could be only one progenitor for all of life. When the fortuitous lightning bolt struck the ideally concocted warm pond, it created only one entity. However, it was no ordinary entity. With it came the multiple ability to take nourishment from its environment, create energy from that nourishment, expel waste created by the use of that energy and (almost as an afterthought) reproduce itself ad infinitum until one of its millions of subsequent generations sits here at this moment reading these words. Nothing miraculous about that; simply incalculable good fortune.

This was Darwinist gospel--preached and believed--until the bacteria fossils were found in the cratons. Their discovery was upsetting, but not a deathblow to the Darwinist theory. They had to concede (among themselves, of course) that the first life-form didn't assemble itself in a warm pond, but it came together somehow because every ancient fossil it spawned was a single-celled bacteria lacking a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). Prokaryotes preceded the much later single-celled bacteria with a nucleus (eukaryotes), so the post-craton situation stayed well within the Darwinian framework. No matter how the first life-form came into existence, it was a single unit lacking a cell nucleus, which was mandatory because even the simplest nucleus would be much too "irreducibly complex" (a favourite Intelligent Design phrase) to be created by a lightning bolt tearing through a warm pond's molecular junkyard. So the Darwinists still held half a loaf.

In the mid-1980s, however, biologist Carl Woese stunned his colleagues with a shattering discovery. There wasn't just the predicted (and essential) single source for all forms of life; there were two: two types of prokaryotic bacteria as distinct as apples and oranges, dogs and cats, horses and cowsÉtwo distinct forms of life, alive and well on the planet at 4.0 billion years ago. Unmistakable. Irrefutable. Get over it. Deal with it.

But how? How to explain separate forms of life springing into existence in an environment that would make hell seem like a summer resort? With nothing but cooling lava as far as an incipient eye might have seen, how could it be explained in "natural" terms? Indeed, how could it be explained in any terms other than the totally unacceptable? Life, with all its deepening mystery, had to have been seeded onto Earth.

PANSPERMIA RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD

Panspermia is the idea that life came to be on Earth from somewhere beyond the planet and possibly beyond the solar system. Its means of delivery is separated into two possible avenues: directed and undirected.

Undirected panspermia means that life came here entirely by accident and was delivered by a comet or meteor. Some scientists favour comets as the prime vector because they contain ice mixed with dust (comets are often referred to as "dirty snowballs"), and life is more likely to have originated in water and is more likely to survive an interstellar journey frozen. Other scientists favour asteroids as the delivery mechanism because they are more likely to have come from the body of a planet that would have contained life. A comet, they argue, is unlikely ever to have been part of a planet, and life could not possibly have generated itself in or on a frozen comet.

Directed panspermia means life was delivered to Earth by intelligent means of one kind or another. In one scenario, a capsule could have been sent here the same way we sent Voyager on an interstellar mission. However, if it was sent from outside the solar system, we have to wonder how the senders might have known Earth was here, or how Earth managed to get in the way of something sent randomly (à la Voyager).

In another scenario, interstellar craft manned by extraterrestrial beings could have arrived and delivered the two prokaryote types. This requires a level of openmindedness that most scientists resolutely lack, so they won't accept either version of directed panspermia as even remotely possible. Instead, they cling to their "better" explanation of undirected panspermia because it allows them to continue playing the "origin" game within the first boundaries set out by Charles Darwin: undirected is "natural"; directed is "less natural".

Notice it can't be said that directed panspermia is "unnatural". According to Darwinists, no matter where life originated, the process was natural from start to finish. All they have to concede is that it didn't take place on Earth. However, acknowledging that forces them to skirt dangerously close to admitting the reality of extraterrestrial life, and their ongoing "search" for such life generates millions in research funding each year. This leaves them in no hurry to make clear to the general public that, yes, beyond Earth there is at the very least the same primitive bacterial life we have here. There's no doubt about it. But, as usual, they keep the lid on this reality, not exactly hiding it but making no effort to educate the public to the notion that we are not, and never have been, alone. The warm pond still holds water, so why muddy it with facts?

A PATTERN EMERGES

In my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, I discuss all points mentioned up to now, which very few people outside academic circles are aware of. Within those circles, a hard core of "true believers" still seizes on every new discovery of a chemical or organic compound found in space to try to move the argument back to Darwin's original starting point that somehow life assembled itself on Earth "naturally".

However, most objective scholars now accept that the first forms of life had to have been delivered because: (1) they appear as two groups of multiple prokaryotes (archaea and true bacteria); (2) they appear whole and complete; (3) the hellish primordial Earth is unimaginable as an incubator for burgeoning life; and (4) a half-billion years seems far too brief a time-span to permit a gradual, step-by-step assembly of the incredible complexity of prokaryotic biology and biochemistry.

Even more damaging to the hard-core Darwinist position is that the prokaryotes were--quite propitiously--as durable as life gets. They were virtually indestructible, able to live in absolutely any environment--and they've proved it by being here today, looking and behaving the same as when their ancestors were fossilised 4.0 billion years ago. Scalding heat? We love it! Choked by saline? Let us at it! Frozen solid? We're there! Crushing pressure? Perfect for us! Corrosively acidic? Couldn't be better!

Today they are known as extremophiles, and they exist alongside many other prokaryotic bacteria that thrive in milder conditions. It would appear that those milder-living prokaryotes could not have survived on primordial Earth, so how did they come to be? According to Darwinists, they "evolved" from extremophiles in the same way humans supposedly evolved on a parallel track with apes--from a "common ancestor".

Darwinists contend such parallel tracks don't need to be traceable. All that's required is a creature looking reasonably like another to establish what they consider a legitimate claim of evolutionary connection. Extremophiles clearly existed: we have their 4.0-billion-year-old fossils. Their descendants clearly exist today, along with mild-environment prokaryotes that must have descended from them. However, transitional forms between them cannot be found, even though such forms are required by the tenets of Darwinism. Faced with that embarrassing problem, Darwinists simply insist that the missing transitional species do exist, still hidden somewhere in the fossil record, just as the "missing link" between apes and humans is out there somewhere and will indeed be discovered someday. It's simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

For as expedient as the "missing link" has been, it's useless to explain the next phase of life on Earth, when prokaryotes began sharing the stage with the much larger and much more complex (but still single-celled) eukaryotes, which appear around 2.0 billion years ago. The leap from prokaryote to eukaryote is too vast even to pretend a missing evolutionary link could account for it. A dozen would be needed just to cover going from no nucleus to one that functions fully. (This, by the way, is also true of the leap between so-called pre-humans and humans, which will be discussed in Part Two).

How to explain it? Certainly not plausibly. Fortunately, Darwinists have never lacked the creativity to invent "warm-pond" scenarios to plug holes in their dogma.

DOING THE DOGMA SHUFFLE

Since it's clear that a "missing link" won't fly over the prokaryote&endash;eukaryote chasm, why not assume some of the smaller prokaryotes were eaten by some of the larger ones? Yeah, that might work! But instead of turning into food, energy and waste, the small ones somehow turn themselves--or get turned into--cell nuclei for larger ones. Sure, that's a keeper! Since no one can yet prove it didn't happen (Thank God!), Darwinists are able to proclaim it did. (Keep in mind, when any critic of Darwinist dogma makes a suggestion that similarly can't be proved, it's automatically dismissed, because "lack of provability" is a death sentence outside their fraternity. Inside their fraternity, consensus is adequate because the collective agreement of so many "experts" should be accepted as gospel.)

To Interventionists like me, the notion of prokaryotes consuming each other to create eukaryotes is every bit as improbable as the divine fiat of Creationists. But even if it were a biological possibility (which most evidence weighs against), it would still seem fair to expect "transition" models somewhere along the line. Darwinists say "no" because this process could have an "overnight" aspect to it. One minute there's a large prokaryote alongside a small one, the next minute there's a small eukaryote with what appears to be a nucleus inside it. Not magic, not a miracle, just a biological process unknown today but which could have been possible 2.0 billion years ago. Who's to say, except an "expert"? In any case, large and small prokaryotes lived side by side for 2.0 billion years (long enough, one would think, to learn to do so in harmony), then suddenly a variety of eukaryotes appeared alongside them, whole and complete, ready to join them as the only game in town for another 1.4 billion years (with no apparent changes in the eukaryotes, either).

At around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular life- forms (the Ediacaran Fauna) appear--as suddenly and inexplicably as the prokaryotes and eukaryotes. To this day, the Ediacaran Fauna are not well understood, beyond the fact they were something like jellyfish or seaweeds in a wide range of sizes and shapes. (It remains unclear whether they were plants or animals, or a bizarre combination of both.) They lived alongside the prokaryotes and eukaryotes for about 50 million years, to about 550 million years ago, give or take a few million, when the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" occurred.

It's rightly called an "explosion", because within a period of only 5 to 10 million years--a mere eye-blink relative to the 3.5 billion years of life preceding it--the Earth's oceans filled with a dazzling array of seawater plants and all 26 of the animal phyla (body types) catalogued today, with no new phyla added since. No species from the Cambrian era looks like anything currently alive--except trilobites, which seem to have spawned at least horseshoe crabs. However, despite their "alien" appearance, they all arrived fully assembled--males and females, predators and prey, large and small, ready to go. As in each case before, no predecessors can be found.

THE PACE HEATS UP

Volumes have been written about the Cambrian Explosion and the menagerie of weird plants and animals resulting from it. The Earth was simply inundated with them, as if they'd rained down from the sky. Darwinists concede it is the greatest difficulty--among many--they confront when trying to sell the evolutionary concept of gradualism. There is simply no way to reconcile the breathtaking suddennessÉthe astounding varietyÉthe overwhelming incongruity of the Cambrian Explosion. It is a testament to the old adage that "one ugly fact can ruin the most beautiful theory". But it's far from the only one.

All of complex life as we understand it begins with the Cambrian Explosion, in roughly the last 550 million years. During that time, the Earth has endured five major and several minor catastrophic extinction events. Now, one can quibble with how an event catastrophic enough to cause widespread extinctions could be called "minor", but when compared to the major ones the distinction is apt. The five major extinction events eliminated 50% to 90% of all species of plants and animals alive when the event occurred.

We all know about the last of those, the Cretaceous event of 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and much of what else was alive at the time. But what few of us understand is the distinctive pattern to how life exists between extinction events and after extinction events. This difference in the pattern of life creates serious doubts about "gradualism" as a possible explanatory mechanism for how species proliferate.

Between extinction events, when environments are stable, life doesn't seem to change at all. The operative term is stasis. Everything stays pretty much the same. But after extinction events, the opposite occurs: everything changes profoundly. New life-forms appear all over the place, filling every available niche in the new environments created by the after-effects of the catastrophe. Whatever that is, it's not gradualism.

In 1972, (the late) Stephen J. Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History went ahead and bit the bullet by announcing that fact to the world. Gradual evolution simply was not borne out by the fossil record, and that fact had to be dealt with. Darwin's view of change had to be modified. It wasn't a gradual, haphazard process dictated by random, favourable mutations in genes. It was something else.

That "something else" they called punctuated equilibrium. The key to it was their open admission of the great secret that life-forms only changed in spurts after extinction events, and therefore had nothing to do with natural selection or survival of the fittest or any of the old Darwinist homilies that everyone had been brainwashed to believe. It was the first great challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy, and it was met with furious opposition. The old guard tagged it "punk eek" and called it "evolution by jerks".

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

What Gould and Eldredge were admitting was the great truth that evolution by natural selection is not apparent in either the fossil record or in the life we see around us. The old guard insisted that the fossil record simply had to be wrongÉthat it wasn't giving a complete picture because large tracts of it were missing. That was true, but much larger tracts were available, and those tracts showed the overwhelming stasis of life-forms in every era, followed by rapid filling of environmental niches after each extinction event. So while parts of the record were indeed missing, what was available was unmistakable.

Arguments raged back and forth. Explanations were created to try to counter every aspect of the punk-eek position. None was ever particularly convincing, but they began to build up. Remember, scientists have the great advantage of being considered by one and all as "experts", even when they haven't the slightest idea of what they're talking about. That allows them to throw shot after shot against the wall until something sticks, or until the target of their wrath is covered in so much "mud" that it can't be seen any more. Such was the fate of the punk-eekers. By the early 1990s, they'd been marginalised.

One can hardly blame the old-guard Darwinists for those attacks. If granted any credence, the sudden radiations of myriad new species into empty environmental niches could have gutted many of the most fundamental tenets of gradual, "natural" evolution. That idea simply could not become established as a fact. Why? Because the warm pond was drained dry, biochemistry was rendering the "small-eaten-by-large prokaryotes turned into eukaryotes" story absurd, and the Cambrian Explosion was flatly inexplicable. If "sudden radiation" were heaped onto all of that, the entire theory of evolution could flounderÉand where would that leave Darwinists? Facing righteous Creationists shouting, "See! God did do it after all!" Whatever else the Darwinists did, they couldn't allow that to happen.

Speaking as an Interventionist, I don't blame them. To me, God stands on equal footing with the lightning bolt. I see a better, far more rational answer to the mysteries of how life came to be on planet Earth: it was put here by intelligent beings, and it has been continuously monitored by those same beings. Whether it's been developed for a purpose or toward a goal of some kind seems beyond knowing at present, but it can be established with facts and with data that intervention by outside intelligence presents the most logical and most believable answer to the question of how life came to be here, as well as of how and why it has developed in so many unusual ways in the past 550 million years.

So now we come to the crux.

COSMIC ARKS

Darwinists go through life waving their PhD credentials like teacher's pets with a hall pass, because it allows them to shout down and ridicule off the public stage anyone who chooses to avoid the years of brainwashing they had to endure to obtain those passes. However, their credentials give them "influence" and "credibility" with the mainstream media, who don't have the time, the ability or the resources to make certain that everything every Darwinist says is true. They must trust all scientists not to have political or moral agendas, and not to distort the truth to suit those agendas. So, over time, the media have become lapdogs to the teacher's pets, recording and reporting whatever they're told to report, while dismissing out of hand whatever they're told to dismiss out of hand.

Despite Darwinists' rants that those who challenge them do so out of blithering idiocy, that is not always the case. For that matter, their opponents are not all Creationists, or even Intelligent Designers, whom Darwinists labour feverishly to paint into the "goofy" corner where Creationists rightly reside. So Interventionists like me have few outlets for our ideas, and virtually none in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, we feel our view of the origin of life makes the best sense, given the facts as they are now known, and the most basic aspect of our view starts with what I once called "cosmic dump trucks". However, that term has been justly criticised as facetious, so now I call them "cosmic arks".

Imagine this scenario: a fleet of intergalactic "terraformers" (another term I favour) cruises the universe. Their job is to locate forming solar systems and seed everything in them with an array of basic, durable life-forms capable of living in any environment, no matter how scabrous. Then the terraformers return on a regular basis, doing whatever is needed to maximise the capacity for life within the developing solar system. Each system is unique, calling for specialised forms of life at different times during its development, which the terraformers provide from a wide array of cosmic arks at their disposal.

With that as a given, let's consider what's happened on Earth. Soon after it began to coalesce out of dust and gas, two forms of virtually indestructible bacteria appeared on it, as if someone knew precisely what to deliver and when.

Also, it would make sense that every other proto-planet in the solar system would be seeded at the same time. How could even terraformers know which forming planets would, after billions of years, become habitable for complex life? And guess what? A meteorite from Mars seems to contain fossilised evidence of the same kinds of nano- (extremely small) bacteria found on Earth today. All other planets, if they're ever examined, will probably reveal similar evidence of a primordial seeding. It would make no sense for terraformers to do otherwise.

THE RUST ALSO RISES

So, okay, our solar system is noticed by intergalactic terraformers as the new sun ignites and planets start forming around it. On each of the planets they sprinkle a variety of two separate forms of single-celled bacteria they know will thrive in any environment (the extremophiles). But the bacteria have a purpose: to produce oxygen as a component of their metabolism. Why? Because life almost certainly has the same basic components and functions everywhere in the universe. DNA will be its basis, and "higher" organisms will require oxygen to fuel their metabolism. Therefore, complex life can't be "inserted" anywhere until a certain level of oxygen exists in a planet's atmosphere.

Wherever this process is undertaken, the terraformers have a major problem to deal with: iron. Iron is an abundant element in the universe. It is certainly abundant in planets (meteorites are often loaded with it). Iron is very reactive with oxygen: that's what rust is all about. So on none of the new planets forming in any solar system can higher life-forms develop until enough oxygen has been pumped into its atmosphere to oxidise most of its free iron. This, not surprisingly, is exactly what the prokaryotes did during their first 2.0 billion years on Earth. But it had to be a two-part process.

The proto-Earth would be cooling the whole time, so let's say full cooling takes roughly 1.0 billion years. So the extremophiles would be the first batch of prokaryotes inserted because they could survive it. Then, after a billion years or so, the terraformers return and drop off the rest of the prokaryotes, the ones that can live in milder conditions. Also, they have to keep returning on a regular basis because each planet would cool at a different rate due to their different sizes and different physical compositions.

However many "check-up" trips are required, by 2.0 billion years after their first seeding of the new solar system the terraformers realise the third planet from the sun is the only one thriving. They are not surprised, having learned that a "zone of life" exists around all suns, regardless of size or type. Now that this sun has taken its optimum shape, they could have predicted which planet or planets would thrive. In this system, the third is doing well but the fourth one is struggling. It has its prokaryotes and it has water, but its abundance of iron (the "red" planet) will require longer to neutralise than such a small planet with a non-reactive core will require to cool off, so it will lose its atmosphere to dissipation into space before a balance can be achieved. The fourth planet will become a wasteland.

The terraformers carry out the next phase of planet-building on the thriving third by depositing larger, more complex, more biologically reactive eukaryotes to accelerate the oxidation process. Eukaryotes are far more fragile than prokaryotes, so they can't be put onto a forming planet until it is sufficiently cooled to have abundant land and water. But once in place and established, their large size (relative to prokaryotes) can metabolise much more oxygen per unit. Together, the fully proliferated prokaryotes and eukaryotes can spew out enough oxygen to oxidise every bit of free iron on the Earth's crust and in its seas, and before long be lacing the atmosphere with it.

Sure enough, when the terraformers return in another 1.4 billion years they find Earth doing well, but the situation on Mars is unimproved: rust as far as the eye can see. (Mars is likely to have at least prokaryotic life, because there wouldn't have been enough oxygen in the surface water it once had--or in the permafrost it still has--to turn its entire surface into iron oxide.) Earth, however, is doing fine. Most of its free iron is locked up as rust, and oxygen levels in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. It's still too soon to think about depositing highly complex life, but that day is not far off now, measurable in tens of millions of years rather than in hundreds of millions. For the moment, Earth is ready for its first load of multicellular life, and so it is deposited: the Ediacaran Fauna.

Though scientists today have no clear understanding of what the Ediacarans were or what their purpose may have been (because they don't exist today), it seems safe to assume they were even more prolific creators of oxygen than the eukaryotes.

If, indeed, terraformers are behind the development of life on Earth, nothing else makes sense. If, on the other hand, everything that happened here did so by nothing but blind chance and coincidence, it was the most amazing string of luck imaginable. Everything happened exactly when it needed to happen, exactly where it needed to happen, exactly how it needed to happen.

If that's not an outright miracle, I don't know what is.

MAKING BETTER SENSE

Assuming terraformers were/are responsible for seeding and developing life on Earth, we can further assume that by 550 million years ago at least the early oceans were sufficiently oxygenated to support genuinely complex life. That was delivered en masse during the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian Explosion, after which followed the whole panoply of "higher" forms of life on Earth as we have come to know it. (The whys and wherefores of that process are, regrettably, beyond the scope of this essay, but there are answers that have as much apparent sense behind them as what has been outlined.)

During those 550 million years, five major and several minor extinction events occurred, after each of which a few million years would pass while the Earth stabilised with environments modified in some way by the catastrophes. Some pre-event life-forms would persist into the new environments, to be joined by new ark-loads delivered by the terraformers, who would analyse the situation on the healing planet and deliver species they knew would survive in the new environments and establish a balance with the life-forms already there (the Interventionist version of punctuated equilibrium).

We've already seen the difficulties Darwinists have with trying to explain the flow of life on Earth presented in the fossil record. That record can be explained by the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm, but the veneer of "scholarship" overlaying it is little different from the divine fiat of Creationists. And it can be explained by Intelligent Designers, who claim anything so bewilderingly complex couldn't possibly have been arrayed without the guidance of some superior, unifying intelligence (which they stop short of calling "God", because otherwise they are merely Creationists without cant).

Considering all of the above, we Interventionists believe the terraformer scenario explains the fossil record of life on Earth with more creativity, more accuracy and more logic than the others, and in the fullness of time will have a far greater probability of being proved correct. We don't bother trying to establish or even discuss who the terraformers are, or how they came to be, because both are irrelevant and unknowable until they choose to explain it to us. Besides, speculating about their origin detracts from the far more germane issue of trying to establish that our explanation of life's origin makes better sense than any other.

We will continue to be ignored by mainstream media simply because the idea of intelligent life existing outside Earth is so frightening to the majority of those bound to it. Among many reasons for fear, the primary one might be our unfortunate habit of filtering everything beyond our immediate reality through our own perceptions. Thus, we attribute to others the same traits and characteristics we possess. Another bad habit appears when we discover new technology. Invariably our first thought is: "How can we use this to kill more of our enemies?" Collectively, we all have enemies we want to eliminate to be done with the problem they present. Like it or not, this is a dominant aspect of human nature.

Because we so consistently project onto others the darkest facets of our nature, we automatically assume--despite ET and Alf and other lovable depictions in our culture--that real aliens will want to harm us. Consequently, we avoid facing the possibility of their existence in every way we can. (Here I can mention the obstinate resistance I have personally found to serious consideration of the Starchild skull, which by all rights should have been eagerly and thoroughly examined three years ago.)

So Interventionism is ignored because it scrapes too close to UFOs, crop circles, alien abductions and every other subject that indicates we humans may, in the end, be infinitesimally insignificant in the grand scheme of life in the universe. There is much more to say about it, of course, especially as it relates to human origins, but that has to wait until the second instalment of this essay.

For now, let the last word be that the last word on origins--of life and of humans--is a long, long way from being written.

But when it is, I strongly suspect it will beÉIntervention.

PART TWO

HUMAN ORIGINS: CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?

In Part One of this essay, I explained the Interventionist perspective regarding the origin of life on Earth. I showed how the great preponderance of evidence indicates life came here and did not develop here, as we have been brainwashed to believe by generations of scientists struggling to keep the creation myths of religion out of classrooms. Personally, I applaud and support all efforts to keep the most specious aspects of Creationism safely bottled up in houses of worship, where they belong. However, I have even more disdain for scientists who allow themselves to be crushed to cowardly pulp by nothing more debilitating than "peer pressure". Because both groups are so driven by their collective fears and dogma, neither has a working grip on reality. That becomes increasingly clear as research continues, which I believe was made evident in Part One. Now let's try to do the same in Part Two, on human origins.

If anything riles Creationists and Darwinists alike, it's the suggestion they might be wrong about how we humans have come to dominate our planet so thoroughly. Both sides can tolerate substantial criticisms regarding the wide array of subjects under their purviews, including the kind of critique I gave the origins of life in Part One. However, they have no toleration for challenges to their shared hegemony over the beginnings of us all. Dare that and you'll find yourself in a serious fight. Thus, those of us who support the Interventionist interpretation come under attack from both sides, not to mention the other clique at the party, the educated subgroup of Creationists known as Intelligent Designers (a brilliant choice of name that enforces their bottom-line concept of a "grand designer", while simultaneously implying they are smarter than anyone who would oppose them).

All sides seem to agree that humans are "special". Creationists and Intelligent Designers consider it virtually self-evident that humans originated by some kind of divine fiat. Creationists believe the instigator is a universal "godhead" figure, which IDers water down to a more palatable "entity or system" capable of generating order out of chaos, life out of the inanimate. Even Darwinists will concede that many of our physical, emotional and intellectual traits set us far apart from the primate ancestors they believe preceded us in the biological process of evolution. However, despite our high degree of "specialness", Darwinists fervently promote the dogma that even the most fanciful distinctions separating us from our supposed ancestors can be explained entirely by "natural means".

As with the early life-forms discussed in Part One, there's nothing natural about it.

THE EARLIEST PRIMATES

Darwinists believe the human saga begins with mouse-sized mammals called insectivores (similar to modern tree shrews) that scurried around under the feet of large dinosaurs, trying to avoid becoming food for smaller species. Then comes the Cretaceous extinction event of 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and paved the way for those tiny insectivores to evolve over the next few million years into the earliest primates, the prosimians (literally pre-simians, pre-monkeys) of the early Palaeocene epoch, which lasts until 55 million years ago.

As with nearly all such aspects of Darwinist dogma, this is pure speculation. There is, in fact, no clear indication of a transitional insectivore-to-prosimian species at any point in the process. If any such transitional species had ever been found, then countless more would be known and I wouldn't be writing this essay. Darwinian evolution would be proved beyond doubt, and that would be the end of it.

To read the fossil record literally is to discover the legitimacy of punctuated equilibrium (discussed in Part One) as a plausible explanation. "Punk eek", as detractors call it, points out that in the fossil record life-forms do seem simply to appear on Earth, most often after extinction events but not always. Both the supposed proto-primates and flowering plants appear during the period preceding the Cretaceous extinction. They come when they come, so the relatively sudden post-extinction appearance of the earliest primates, the prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers), is one of many sudden manifestations.

In terms of human origins, it begs this question: did proto-primates actually evolve into prosimians, into monkeys, into apes, into humans? Or did prosimians appear, monkeys appear, apes appear, and humans appear? Or, in our "special" case, were we created?

However it happened, there is a pattern. The earliest prosimians are found in the fossil record after the Mesozoic/Cenozoic boundary at 65 million years ago. It is assumed their ancestors will someday be found as one of countless "missing links" needed to make an airtight case for Darwinian evolution. Prosimians dominate through the Palaeocene and the Eocene, lasting from 65 to 35 million years ago. (There won't be a test on terms or dates, so don't worry about memorising them; just try to keep the time-flow in mind.) At 35 million years ago, the Oligocene epoch begins and the first monkeys come with it.

Again, Science assumes that monkeys evolved from prosimians, even though evidence of that transition is nowhere in sight. In fact, there is strong evidence pointing in the other direction, toward the dreaded stasis of punctuated equilibrium. The lemurs, lorises and tarsiers of today are essentially just as they were 50 million years ago. Some species have gone extinct while others have modified into new forms, but lemurs and lorises still have wet noses and tarsiers still have dry, which seems always to have been the case. That's why tarsiers are assumed to be responsible for spinning off monkeys and all the rest.

Monkeys start appearing at 35 million years ago, looking vastly different from prosimians. There are certain physiological links, to be sure, such as grasping hands and feet to permit easy movement through trees. However, prosimians cling and jump to move around, while monkeys favour brachiating--swinging along by their arms. Also, prosimians live far more by their sense of smell than do monkeys. This list goes on.

The reason they're linked in an evolutionary flowchart is because they seem close enough in enough ways to make the linkage stick. Simple as that. Science focuses on the similarities and tries hard to ignore their gaping discrepancies, assuming--as always--that there is plenty of time for evolution to do its magic and generate those inexplicable differences.

For the next 10 million years the larger, stronger, more "advanced" monkeys compete with prosimians for arboreal resources, quickly gaining the upper hand over their "ancestors" and driving several of them to extinction.

Then, at around 25 million years ago, the Miocene epoch brings the first apes into the fossil record, as suddenly and inexplicably as all other primates appear. Again, Science insists they evolved from monkeys, but the evidence to support that claim is as specious as the prosimian&endash;monkey link. The transitional bones needed to support it are simply not in the fossil record.

If this isn't a distinct pattern of punctuated equilibrium, then what is?

THE PUZZLING MIOCENE

In terms of primate evolution, the Miocene makes little sense. By 25 million years ago, when it begins, prosimians have been around for about 30 million years and monkeys for 10 million years. Yet in the Miocene's ample fossil record, prosimians and monkeys are rare, while the new arrivals, the apes, are all over the place.

The Miocene epoch stretches from 25 million to 5.0 million years ago. (These are approximations quoted differently in various sources; I round off to the easiest numbers to keep track of.) During those 20 million years, the apes flourish. They produce two-dozen different genera (types), and many have more than one species within the genus. Those apes come in the same range of sizes they exhibit today, from smallish gibbon-like creatures, to mid-range chimp-sized ones, to large gorilla-sized ones, to super-sized Gigantopithecus, known only by many teeth and a few mandibles (jawbones) from India and China.

That's another interesting thing about Miocene apes: their fossils are found literally everywhere in the Old World--Africa, Europe, Asia. Most of them are known by the durable teeth and jaws that define Gigantopithecus, while many others supply enough post-cranial (below the head) bones to grant a reasonably clear image of them. They present an interesting mix of anatomical features. Actually, "confusing" is more like it. They are clearly different from monkeys in that they have no tails, just like modern apes. However, their arms tend to be more like monkey arms--the same length as their legs. Modern ape arms are significantly longer than their legs so they can "walk" comfortably on their front knuckles. More than any other reason, this is why we hear so little from anthropologists about Miocene apes. Their arms don't make sense as the forelimbs of an ancestral quadruped. Miocene arms fit better withÉsomething else.

This is not to say, of course, that no ape arms in the Miocene fossil record are longer than legs. That's nowhere near to being determined because many species--like Gigantopithecus--have yet to provide their arm bones. However, since we do have some tailless, ape-like bodies with monkey-like arms and hands, we have to consider how such a hybrid would move around. Swing through trees by its arms, like a monkey? Not likely. Monkey arms are designed to carry a monkey's slight body. An ape's body needs to be brachiated and leveraged by an ape's much longer, stouter, stronger arms. So how aboutÉwalking?

From a physiological standpoint, an ape-like body with monkey-like arms and hands does not move as easily or comfortably as a quadruped (down on all fours). It simply can't happen. In fact, there's really only one posture that lends itself to the carriage of such a monkey-ape hybrid, and that's upright. Go to a zoo and watch how much easier monkeys--tails and all--stand upright compared to apes. Any monkey can move with grace on its hind legs. In comparison, apes are blundering, top-heavy oafs. Thus, it seems likely that at least some of the hybrid monkey-apes of the Miocene probably had to carry themselves upright, in opposition to the other apes of the era bearing the longer, thicker arms of gibbons, orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Remember, we're talking about two dozen genera and around 50 species.

WALKING THE WALK

Walking is critical to an understanding of human origins because Darwinists feel it is the factor that set our ancestors on the road to becoming us. The theory is that around 5.0 to 10 million years ago, when the heavy forests blanketing Africa began shrinking, some forest-dwelling quadrupedal Miocene apes still living then (there had been the inevitable extinctions and speciations during the preceding 15 to 20 million years) began to forage on the newly forming savannas. Though terribly ill-equipped to undertake such a journey (more about that later), several ape species supposedly took the risk by learning to stand upright to see out over the savanna grasses to scout for predators. Then--after millennia of holding that position for extended periods--they adopted constant upright posture. In doing so, one of those daring, unknown species took the real "giant step for mankind".

No one can yet say which of the early upright-walking "pre-humans" went on to become us, because the physiological gaps between us and them are simply enormous. In fact, physically, the only significant thing we have in common with those early ancestors is upright posture. But even that reveals noticeable divergence.

Incredibly, we have the walking trail of at least two early pre-humans at 3.5 million years ago. Found in Laetoli, Tanzania, these tracks were laid down on a volcanic ash fall that was then covered by another ash fall and sealed until their discovery by Mary Leakey's team in 1978. Photos of that trail are common and can be accessed in any basic anthropology textbook or on the Internet. What is not commonly portrayed, however, is that detailed analysis of the pressure points along the surface of those prints indicates something that would be expected: they didn't walk like us. After all, 3.5 million years is a long time, and from a Darwinist standpoint it's logical to assume extensive evolution would occur. But whether it was evolution or not, our methods of locomotion are uniquely different.

Humans have a distinctive carriage that starts with a heel strike necessitated by our ankles placed well behind the midpoint of our feet. After the heel strike, our forward momentum is swung to the left or right, out to the edges of our feet to avoid our arches (in normal feet, of course). Once past the arch, there's a sharp swing of the momentum through the ball of the foot from outside all the way to the inside, where momentum is gathered and regenerated in the powerful thrust of the big toe, with the four small toes drawing themselves up to act as balancers. (Watch your own bare feet when you take a step and you'll see those final "thrust-off" stages in action.)

The pre-humans at Laetoli walked with marked differences. Instead of having a heavy heel-strike leading the way, their ankle was positioned at the centre balance point of the foot, allowing it to come down virtually flat with an almost equal distribution of weight and momentum between the heel and the ball area. Instead of a crazy momentum swing out and around the arch, their arches were much smaller and the line of momentum travelled nearly straight along the midline of the entire foot. That made for a much more stable platform for planting the foot and toeing off into the next step, which was done by generating thrust with the entire ball area rather than with just the big toe. When you get right down to it, the Laetoli stride was a superior technique to the one we utilise now.

Slow-motion studies of humans walking show that we do virtually everything "wrong". Our "heel-strike, toe-off" causes a discombobulation that courses up our entire body. We are forced to lock our knees to handle the torque as our momentum swings out and around our arches. Because of that suspended moment of torque absorption, we basically have to fall forward with each step, which is absorbed by our hip joints. Meanwhile, balance is assisted by swinging our arms. Because of those factors, we don't walk with anything approaching optimum efficiency, and the stresses created in us work, over time, to deteriorate our joints and eventually cripple us. In short, we could use a re-design.

What we actually need to do is to walk more like the pre-humans at Laetoli. In order to secure that heel-and-toe plant with each step, we'd have to modify our stride so our knees weren't locked and we weren't throwing ourselves forward through our hip joints. We'd have to keep our knees in a state of continual flexion, however slight, absorbing all the stress of walking in our thighs and buttocks, which both are designed to accommodate. This would provide us with a "gliding" kind of stride that might look unusual (it would resemble the classic Groucho Marx bent-kneed comedic walk), but would actually be much less stressful, much less tiring and incredibly more efficient physiologically.

Based on the evidence of the Laetoli tracks, this is exactly how they walked.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

When Darwinists present reconstructions of so-called "pre-humans", invariably they look nothing like humans.

Lucy and her Australopithecus relatives were little more than upright-walking chimpanzees. The robust australopithecines were bipedal gorillas. The genus Homo (habilis, erectus, Neanderthals and other debatable species) was a distinct upgrade, but still nowhere near the ballpark of humanity. Only when the Cro-Magnons appear, as suddenly and inexplicably as everything else, at around 120,000 years ago in the fossil record, do we see beings that are unmistakably human.

The Laetoli walkers lived 3.5 million years ago. Lucy lived around 3.2 million years ago. Recent discoveries show signs of pushing bipedal locomotion back as far as 6.0 million years ago. So let's assume for the sake of discussion that some primates were upright at no less than 4.0 million years ago.

Thus, from approximately 4.0 million years ago all the way to the appearance of Cro-Magnons some time before 120,000 years ago (95% of the journey), all pre-human fossils reveal distinctly non-human characteristics. They have thick, robust bones--much thicker and more robust than ours. Such thick bones are necessary to support the stress generated by extraordinarily powerful muscles, far more powerful than ours. Their arms are longer than ours, especially from shoulder to elbow. Their arms are also roughly the same length as their legs, à la Miocene apes. And in every aspect that can be quantified--every one!--their skulls are much more ape-like than human-like. Those differences hold from australopithecine bones to the bones of Neanderthals--which means that something quite dramatic happened to produce the Cro-Magnons, and it wasn't the result of an extinction event. It wasÉsomething else.

The chasm between Cro-Magnons (us) and everything else that comes before them is so incredibly wide and deep that there is no way legitimately to connect the two, apart from linking their bipedal locomotion. All of the so-called "pre-humans" are much more like upright-walking chimps or upright-walking gorillas than they are incipient humans. Darwinists argue that this is why they are called pre-humans, because they are so clearly not human.

But another interpretation can be put on the fossil record--one that fairly and impartially judges the facts as they exist, without the "spin" required by Darwinist dogma. That spin says that the gaping physiological chasm between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons can be plausibly explained with yet another "missing link".

LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before. What they fail to mention is that dozens of such links would be needed to show any kind of plausible transition from any pre-human to Cro-Magnons. It clearly didn't happen--and since they're experts about such things, they know it didn't happen. However, to acknowledge that would play right into the desperate hands of Creationists and Intelligent Designers, not to mention give strong support to Interventionists like me. They face a very big rock or a very hard place.

Let's accept for the moment that in Darwinian terms there is no way to account for the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnons (humans) on planet Earth. If that is true, then what about the so-called "pre-humans"? What are they the ancestors of? Their bones litter the fossil record looking very unlike humans, yet they clearly walk upright for at least 4.0 million years, and new finds threaten to push that back to 6.0 million years. Even more likely is that among the 50 or more species of Miocene apes, at least a few are walking upright as far back as 10 to 15 million years ago. If we accept that likelihood, we finally make sense of the deep past while beginning for the first time to see ourselves clearly.

We can be sure that at least four of the 50 Miocene apes were on their way to becoming modern quadrupeds, because their descendants live among us today. Equally certain is that others of those 50 walked out of the Miocene on two legs. Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage. So Darwinists have replaced it in common usage with the much less specific "pre-human", which not so subtly brainwashes us all into believing there is no doubt about that connection. And that brainwashing works.

We are further brainwashed to believe there are no bipedal apes alive in the world today, despite hundreds of sightings and/or encounters with such bipedal apes every year on every continent except Antarctica. Darwinists brainwash us to ignore such reports by showering them with ridicule. They call such creatures "impossible", and hope the weight of their credentials can hold reality at bay long enough for them to figure out what to do about the public relations catastrophe they will face when the first hominoid is brought onto the world stage--dead or alive. That will be the darkest day in Darwinist history, because their long charade will be officially over. The truth will finally be undeniable. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and several relatives are absolutely real.

IF THE SHOE FITSÉ

I'm not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality. I cover it extensively in the third part of my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and there are many other books that cover one or more aspects of the subject. If you care to inform yourself about the reality of hominoids, you won't have any trouble doing so. And the evidence is solid enough to hold up in any court in the world, except the court of public opinion manipulated by terrified Darwinists. However, I will go over a few points that bear directly on the question of human origins.

Let's grant a fairly obvious assumption: that the thousands of ordinary people who have described hominoid sightings and encounters over the past few hundred years (yes, they go back that far in the literature) were in fact seeing living creatures rather than Miocene ghosts. And no matter where on Earth witnesses come from, no matter how far from the beaten path of education and/or modern communications, they describe what they see with amazing consistency. To hear witnesses tell it, the same kinds of creatures exist in every heavily forested or canopied environment on the planet--which is precisely what we would expect if they did indeed stride out of the Miocene epoch on two legs.

Furthermore, what witnesses describe is exactly what we would expect of upright-walking apes. They are invariably described as having a robust, muscular body covered with hair, atop which sits a head with astonishingly ape-like features. In short, the living hominoids are described as having bodies we would expect to find wrapped around the bones found in the so-called "pre-human" fossil record. In addition, witnesses describe what they see as having longer arms than human arms, hanging down near their knees, which means those arms are approximately the length of their legs. Witnesses also contend that the creatures walk with a "gliding" kind of bent-kneed stride that leaves tracks eerily reminiscent of the tracks left at Laetoli 3.5 million years ago.

Now we come to the crux for Darwinists, Creationists and Intelligent Designers. Evidence supporting the reality of hominoids is overwhelming. Truly. And if they are real, it means the "pre-human" fossil record is actually a record of their ancestors, not ours. And if that's the case, then humans have no place on the flowchart of life on Earth. And if that's true, then it's equally clear that humans did not evolve and could not have evolved here the way Darwinists claim. And if we didn't evolve here, that opens the door to the Interventionist position that nothing evolved here: everything was brought or created by sentient off-world beings whom I call terraformers, whose means and motivation will remain unknown to us unless and until they see fit to explain themselves. I hope no one is holding their breath.

The point is that the Miocene epoch had the means to produce living hominoids--50 or more different species (which almost certainly will be shaved down to perhaps a dozen as more complete bodies are found) as far back as 20 million years ago. It produced some with monkey-like arms better suited to an upright walker than a brachiating tree-dweller or knuckle walker.

By the time it ended, 5.0 million years ago, a half-dozen or more bipedal apes were on the Earth, which we know from the ape-like australopithecine and early Homo fossils. And we know from Laetoli that they had a walking pattern distinct from humans, which modern witnesses describe as still being the way hominoids walk. In short, they've followed the punctuated equilibrium pattern of long-term stasis.

SO WHAT ABOUT HUMANS?

Humans simply do not fit the pattern of primate development on Earth. Notice the word development instead of evolution. Species that appear here do undergo changes in morphology over time. It's called microevolution, because it describes changes in body parts. Darwinists use the undeniable reality of microevolution to extrapolate the reality of macroevolution, which is change at the species-into-more-advanced-species level. That is blatantly not evident in the fossil record, especially when it comes to human physiology.

We have shown, I hope, that humans have been shoehorned by Darwinists into having a place in the fossil record that doesn't belong to them but to living hominoids (Bigfoot, etc.). Furthermore, humans have been shoehorned into being primates, when there is little about them--certainly nothing of significance--that fits the classic primate pattern. In fact, if it weren't for the desperate need of Darwinists to keep humans closely linked to the primate line, we would have had our own appellation long ago--and we'll surely have it once the truth is out from the Pandora's box of Darwinist deception.

Relatively speaking, primate bones are much thicker and heavier than human bones. Primate muscles are five to 10 times stronger than ours. (Anyone who's dealt with monkeys knows how amazingly strong they are for their size.) Primate skin is covered with long, thick, visible hair. Ours is largely invisible. Primate hair is thick on the back, thin on the front. Ours is switched the other way around. Primates have large, round eyes capable of seeing at night. Compared to theirs, we have greatly reduced night vision. Primates have small, relatively "simple" brains compared to ours. They lack the ability to modulate sound into speech. Primate sexuality is based on an oestrus cycle in females (though some, like bonobo chimps, have plenty of sex when not in oestrus). In human females, the effects of oestrus are greatly diminished.

This list could go on to cite many more areas of difference, but all of them are overshadowed by the Big Kahuna of primate/human difference: all primates have 48 chromosomes, while humans have "only" 46 chromosomes. Two entire chromosomes represent a heck of a lot of DNA removed from the human genome, yet somehow that removal made us "superior" in countless ways. It doesn't make sense. Nor does the fact that even with two whole chromosomes missing from our genome, we share what is now believed to be 95% of the chimp genome and around 90% of the gorilla genome. How can those numbers be made to reconcile? They can't.

Something is wrong here. Someone has been cooking the genetic books.

THE STUFF OF LIFE

In the wild, plants and animals tend to breed remarkably true to their species. That's why stasis is the dominant characteristic of life on Earth. Species appear and stay essentially the same (apart from the superficial changes of microevolution) until they go extinct for whatever reason (catastrophe, inability to compete for resources effectively, etc.). When "faulty" examples appear, they're nearly always unable to put the fault into their species' collective gene pool. A negative mutation that doesn't kill the individual it appears in is unlikely to be passed along to posterity, despite Darwinist assertions that this is precisely how evolution occurs. All genomes have hard-wired checks and balances against significant changes of any kind, which is why stasis has been the hallmark of all life since beginning here. Aberrant examples are efficiently weeded out, either early in the reproductive process or soon after reproduction (birth). Faulty copies are deleted.

This deletion of faults holds true in the vast majority of species. Most genomes are--and stay--remarkably clear of gene-based defects. All species are susceptible to mistakes in the reproductive process, such as sperm/egg misconnections. In mammals, this produces spontaneous abortions, stillbirths or live-birth defects. However, there are precious few defects that swim in the gene pools of any "wild" or "natural" species. The only places we find significant, species-wide genetic defects are in domesticated plants and animals, and in those they can be--and often are--numerous.

Domesticated plants and animals clearly seem to have been genetically created by "outside intervention" at some point in the distant past. (For those interested in learning more about this, I discuss it in considerable detail in NEXUS 9/04.) Domesticated species have so many points of divergence from wild/natural species, it's not realistic to consider them in any kind of relative context. As we've seen above, the same holds true for humans and the primates we supposedly evolved from. They're apples and oranges.

We humans have over 4,000 genetic defects spread throughout our common gene pool. Think about that. No other species comes close. And yet, our mitochondrial DNA proves we have existed as a species for "only" about 200,000 years. Remember the first Cro-Magnon fossils showing up in strata 120,000 years old? That fits well with the origin of a small proto-group at around 200,000 years ago. (There will almost certainly be Cro-Magnon fossils found prior to 120,000 years ago, but it is unlikely they were dispersed widely enough to have left fossils near the 200,000-year mark. Naturally, the very first one could have been fossilised, but that's not the way to bet. Fossilisation is quite rare.)

All that being the case, how did over 4,000 genetic defects work their way into the human gene pool, when such genome-wide defects are rare to nonexistent in wild or natural species? (Remember, Darwin himself noticed that humans are very much like domesticated animals in many of our physical and biological traits.) It can only have occurred if the very first members (no more than a handful of breeding pairs) had the entire package of faults within their genome. That's the only way Eskimos and Watusis and all the rest of humanity can express the exact same genetic disorders.

If we descended from apes, as Darwinists insist, then apes should have a very large number of our genetic defects. They do not. If, on the other hand, we've been genetically unique for only 200,000 years, then the only way those defects could be with us is if they were put into our gene pool by the genetic manipulation of the founding generation of our species, and the mistakes made in that process were left in place to be handed down to posterity. And, as might be expected, this is also how domesticated plants and animals came to have their own inordinate numbers of genetic defects. It simply couldn't happen any other way.

THE FINAL NAILÉ

When Einstein was asked in reference to relativity, "How did you do it?", he replied, "I ignored an axiom." This is what everyone must do if we are to get anywhere near the truth about human origins.

Darwinists ask us to believe a theory based on this axiom: "There are good grounds to believe our early ancestors lived in forests. There are equally good grounds to believe our later ancestors lived by hunting game on African savannas. Therefore, we can assume that somehow, some way, we went from living in forests to living on the savannas." The trick, for Darwinists, is in explaining it plausibly.

Savanna theorists ask us to believe that, 5.0 to 10 million years ago, several groups of forest-dwelling Miocene apes were squeezed by environmental pressures to venture out onto the encroaching savannas to begin making their collective living. This means they had to rise from the assumed quadrupedal posture attributed to all Miocene apes to walk and run on two legs, thus giving up the ease and rapidity of moving on all fours. Those early groups had to make their way with unmodified pelvises, inappropriate single-arched spines, absurdly under-muscled thighs and buttocks, and heads stuck on at the wrong angle, and all the while doggedly shuffling along on the sides of long-toed, ill-adapted feet, thereby becoming plodding skin-bags of snack-treats for savanna predators. If any harebrained scheme ever deserved a re-think by its originator(s), this would be the one.

Of course, the real re-think needs to be done by Darwinists, because it is glaringly obvious that no forest-bound species of ape could have ventured onto the savanna as a stumbling, bumbling walker and learned to do it better out there among the big cats. If a collective group had been unfit for erect movement on the savanna, they wouldn't have gone. If they did go, they couldn't and wouldn't stay. Even primates are smarter than that. And understand, there are primates that did make the move onto the savanna, albeit always remaining within range of a high-speed scurry into nearby trees. Baboons are the most successful of this small group, all of which have retained quadrupedal locomotion.

In addition to the forest-to-savanna transition, Darwinists face numerous other improbable--if not impossible--differences between humans and terrestrial primates. In addition to bipedalism and the genetic discrepancies already addressed, there are major differences in skin and the adipose tissue (fat) beneath it; in sweat glands, in blood, in tears, in sex organs, in brain size and function, and on and on and on. This is a very long list that can be examined in much fuller detail in the work of a brilliant, determined researcher into human origins, named Elaine Morgan.

Ms Morgan is the chief proponent of what challenged Darwinists derisively call "the Aquatic Ape theory", as if the juxtaposition of those disparate words were enough to dismiss it as an absurd notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In books like The Scars of Evolution (Souvenir Press, London, 1990), she makes a devastating case against the notion that humans evolved from forest-dwelling apes that moved out onto the savannas. She believes humans must have gone through an extended period of development in and around water to generate the bizarre array of physiological oddities we exhibit relative to the primates we supposedly evolved from.

However, despite all her wonderfully creative work, Ms Morgan remains wedded to the Darwinist concept of evolution, which had to play itself out in only the 200,000 years dictated by our mitochondrial DNA.

MAKING SENSE OF THE INSENSIBLE

The pieces of the puzzle are on the table. The answer is there for anyone to see. But rearranging those pieces properly is no easy task, and it is even more difficult to get dogmatists of any stripe to look at the picture in a light different from their own. That has been my purpose in writing these two essays on origins--of life and of humans. They are two of the world's most sensitive areas of scholarship and debate, producing some of the most vitriolic exchanges in all of academia. But vitriol, like might, doesn't make right.

I once knew a baseball player who'd pitched a no-hitter against a seriously inferior team. Upon being criticised for the obvious imbalance between his abilities and those of his opponents, the pitcher shrugged and said, "A no-hitter is a no-hitter, even against Lighthouse for the Blind." And so it is with a mistaken belief. If millions believe a thing, that doesn't make it correct.

I believe that the facts, if fairly evaluated, will over time prove that humans--and indeed, life itself--did not originate on Earth, and that nothing has macroevolved on Earth. It has all been brought here and left to fend for itself, then replaced when events required the introduction of new forms. No other theory suits the facts nearly as well.

As for humans (the object of this essay), look back to the Miocene epoch, where the earliest traces of our ancestors supposedly originate. Apes dominate. Look at the fossils--the so-called "pre-humans"--from the Pliocene epoch, starting 5.0 million years ago. Other than bipedal walking, all of their physical aspects shout out "ape roots". Look at today's tracks, sightings and encounters with living hominoids, Bigfoot and others. These all-too-real creatures will one day be proved to have a direct link back to the Miocene--which, at a stroke, will eliminate any possibility that humans and apes share any kind of common ancestor.

We humans are not indigenous to planet Earth. We were either put here intact or we developed here, but we did not evolve here. Our genes make clear that we've been cut-and-pasted from other, non-primate, non-Earthly species.

Personally, I believe that the work of Zecharia Sitchin (The Earth Chronicles) comes closest to a plausible explanation. But even if some aspects of what he says are wrong, or even if all of it someday is proved to be wrong, that won't change the basic facts that his work--and my own work--address.

Humans are not primates. We do indeed stand apart as a "special" creation, long espoused by theologians and now by certain credentialled scientists. The only question left hanging is, of course: who or what was the creator? I don't think I'll be privileged to learn that in my lifetime. But I'm confident I'm within reach of the next best answer.

I'm confident that we were created by invasive genetic manipulation.

About the Author:
Lloyd Pye, born in 1946 in Louisiana, USA, is a researcher, author, novelist and scriptwriter. His independent studies over more than three decades into all aspects of evolution have convinced him that humans did not evolve on Earth, or at least are the product of extraterrestrial intervention. His book, Everything You Know Is Wrong &endash; Book One: Human Origins, can be ordered through website http://www.iUniverse.com or Barnes & Noble at http://www.bn.com. His article, "Evidence for Creation by Outside Intervention", was published in NEXUS 9/04. Part One of his essay, "Darwinism: A Crumbling Theory", was published in NEXUS 10/01. Lloyd is scheduled to speak at the 2003 NEXUS Conference in Amsterdam next March. Visit Lloyd Pye's website at http://www.lloydpye.com.