Evolutionists are true heroes

Physicists Pierre and Marie Curie ruined their health by deliberately exposing themselves to radiation. Yet their self-experimentation made possible the use of radium in medicine.

There are many other examples of scientists becoming their own guinea pigs for the sake of a higher good. But none so heroic as evolutionists, who courageously put out reams of twaddle to prove by their own example the simian origin of at least some humans.

The latest of such unsung heroes is Dr Adriano Lameira of Warwick University. He proved that chimps, described by The Times as “our nearest evolutionary relatives”, move their lips at the frequency of human speech.

“It is exactly the signature you see if you looked at my lips open and close right now,” said Dr Lameira. “This is exciting.”

Orgasmically so, I’d suggest. As The Times, itself in the throes of excitement, explained, “He and his colleagues argue that this implies we inherited the trait from a common ancestor. And while most descendants use it as a general form of interaction, one particular ape added more complex sounds and grammar and it became language.”

Just like that. One ape decided its life wouldn’t be complete without subjects, objects and predicates. So instead of just moving its lips it used them to form words and eventually write Summa Theologiae, Hamlet and The Critique of Pure Reason.

While complimenting Dr Lameira on the self-lacerating honesty of his analysis, one can’t help noticing that, for most other people, there’s more to speech than lip movement.

Dr Lameira may not realise this, but language depends on a capacity for abstract thought. That’s what it takes to relate a concept, be that a melon, love or categorical imperative, to sounds of speech or squiggles on paper.

And thought is the metaphysical output of an intricate physical organ, the brain. That’s about all we know about it.

For despite the billions pumped into assorted Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, we still don’t know what a thought is, how it’s produced and how, if at all, man’s capacity for it has developed over history.

The only thing those scanner-wielding scientists have discovered is that some physical processes accompany thought. But these aren’t the same as thought any more than, on this evidence, a doctorate degree is the same as intelligence. 

I recall Khrushchev claiming back in 1961 that, since Gagarin didn’t see God in space, God doesn’t exist. This is roughly the intellectual level on which the Lameiras of this world operate.

I’d suggest, without any pretensions to scientific rigour, that he ponder the verb ‘to ape’. The first giant stride would be to understand why it was the primate and not, say, the giraffe or the antelope that was chosen as the metaphor for imitation (and not just in English).

Having concluded that it was perhaps due to the ape’s knack for grotesque mimicry, Dr Lameira would then be ready to make another leap, towards considering the possibility that his chimp moves its lips like talking humans because it, well, apes them.

I’m not insisting that this is the only possible explanation, only that it sounds more plausible than the chimp being on the verge of declaiming “To be or not to be?” (or, being a modern animal, perhaps he’d opt for “To be or to not be?”).

When faced with such offensive mockery, evolutionists explain that transitions like the one from lip movement to Hamlet happened over a long time. How long exactly?

Well, you name it. Millions of years, they’d suggest first, but then some real scientist will show this would be too short a period to produce the requisite amount of evolutionary change. Well, billions then. No? Fine, trillions, but that’s my last offer.

Then they like to flag the fact that chimpanzees and humans share some 99 per cent of their active genetic material. Yet the QED expressions on their faces are premature. For biochemical likeness between apes and humans creates problems for their ilk.

Biology can’t explain why, given such close proximity, apes still look rather different from humans, even those as flawed as Richard Dawkins. Anything near the same biochemical closeness produces virtual twins in other animals. For example, even though they are 20 to 30 times further apart, some species of squirrels or frogs are practically indistinguishable from each other.

Dr Lameira and indeed The Times accept as fact that humans and chimpanzees have “a common ancestor”. If so, why is it that millions of uncovered fossilised remains belong either to apes or to humans, with no intermediate species ever found? In fact, there’s a remarkable dearth of evidence of any intermediate species, not just between ape and man.

Dr Lameira’s sort of reasoning would have him drummed out of any other science: his colleagues would be too busy laughing to do any serious work. But evolutionism isn’t like any other science. In fact it’s not a science at all. It’s an ideology by pseudo-scientific means.

That explains its remarkable longevity: any theory less politically charged would have been discarded at least a century ago. Few unproven ones (and anything called ‘a theory’ lacks decisive proof by definition) ever lasted longer than 40 to 50 years.

But evolutionism is essential to modernity, brought to life as it was by an attempt to debunk God. A modern zealot knows a priori that everything must have a purely physical explanation. And if facts don’t support that presupposition, then they must be dismissed, falsified or spuriously interpreted.

Here’s another promising area for Dr Lameira to explore. I’ve noticed that some frogs do flip-flops in mid-leap. Doesn’t that prove that Olympic high jumpers doing the Fosbury Flop share an ancestor with amphibians? Worth a grant, that.