The scientific community (and what isn’t a community these days?) is dancing with joy. The fossilised skull on display in Hebei, China, has been identified as belonging to the hitherto unknown progenitor of man, Homo longi, the ‘Dragon man’.
Actually, I strongly believe that the first word appearing in a whole raft of Homo species, such as Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, is offensively homophobic. The former can easily be construed as describing an excited gay man, while the latter sounds like a particularly clever one.
If we reject historical nomenclatures for woke reasons, why not biological ones? It’s a distinct possibility that someone out there may feel offended by the taxonomic term Homo, which can also function as a slur. And we know that such an offence can produce a lifelong trauma, effectively destroying the person’s happiness, not to say life.
But that’s a subject for another day. What has caught my eye today is the story of the Homo longi skull, found decades ago, but only handed over to researchers in 2017.
According to the overexcited reports, Homo longi “had a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans, but sported big, almost square eye sockets [and] thick brow ridges…”
Scientists believe that this Homo is the closest relation of Homo sapiens, quite possibly the missing link that has been such a bugbear for Darwinists. Those scientists don’t even realise how right they are.
For Homo longi has survived almost unchanged to modern times, and photographs of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev prove that beyond any doubt. Just compare the photo above with the description of Homo lungi.
“A brain comparable in size to that of modern humans…” – tick. “Big, almost square eye sockets…” – tick. “Thick brow ridges” – ten ticks. Such a striking similarity couldn’t possibly have been coincidental, could it?
Hence it’s Comrade Brezhnev who fills that lamentable gap in Darwin’s theory. He is both the missing link and proof that the earliest examples of our progenitors are still with us.
You might say this is conjecture, and that would be a fair point. Yet Darwin’s theory, which is universally accepted as an ironclad fact, is just as conjectural. The word ‘theory’ is a dead giveaway there: it’s closer to hypothesis than to fact.
And this particular hypothesis has a dearth of facts supporting it, while there exist an abundance of facts that at best bring it into doubt – and at worst contravene it outright.
The existence of hirsute half-apes living in caves and barely able to stay upright, only then to evolve into Bach and Newton, isn’t supported by reliable evidence, only by conjecture. In fact, the earliest signs of human habitation show that those Homos were easily as intelligent as Richard Dawkins, and quite a bit more artistic.
My problem with Darwinism as the sole explanation of man isn’t that it contradicts Genesis – it really doesn’t. God is equally capable of creating species slowly or quickly. He could easily have breathed a particle of himself into an ape and then watched it becoming human over thousands or millions of years.
What’s deplorable about Darwinism is that it’s allowed to remain merely a theory a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Such a leeway is hardly ever granted to any other scientific theory.
The best they get is some 40-50 years. After that they become either a proven fact or a matter of strictly antiquarian interest.
The reason Darwinism still survives and is even accepted as irrefutable orthodoxy lies not in science but in its political appeal. It’s the biological answer to Marxist determinism, with both providing a simplistic explanation of life.
And modernity, the triumph of mediocrity that it is, loves a simplistic explanation – especially one seen as a knife stuck in the back of our moribund civilisation. Hence it eagerly accepts that a bone fragment found in a cave draws a realistic picture of evolution, one found in museums of natural history around the world.
It’s confidently assumed that the possessor of that bone fragment lived in caves because that’s where the fragment was found. One wonders if a thousand years from now scientists will find the skeleton of a miner killed in a coalmine and infer that Homo sapiens circa 2021 lived in collieries.
None of this in any way diminishes my admiration of the scientists who have now forged an unbreakable chain tying together the dragonfly, the ‘Dragon Man’ and Leonid Brezhnev. We all like the odd bit of sci-fi.
As a zoologist (retired) I will happily file this under “Comedy”.
As a writer (active), I prefer ‘Satire’.
Is the theory of evolution non-falsifiable?
Are we in the Popper territory here? I think it’s falsifiable to the point of being false. It may explain a a few minor things, those falling in the category of microevolution (a species changing under the influence of its environment). But it’s supported by next to evidence of one species evolving into another. Nor are there many fossil records of any intermediate species between simians and humans. There are plenty of fossils of apes and humans, showing that the latter acted as humans from the very beginning. Micribiological adavances drove the last nail into the coffin of Darwinism as a science. When Watson and Crick (both atheists) discovered the double helix, they knew Darwinism was dead. They were wrong: it’s doing very well thanks to its political appeal.
Think of the Russian boxer Valuev. I have often thought he is proof Neanderthals did not go extinct.
Thank you for this. All those human types intermingled, with none becoming extinct — and both Valuyev and Brezhnev are proof of that.
Notice how leftists cling to Darwinism with their attacks on religion , or defending the green position re the animal kingdom but totally discard it when opining on the human condition turning themselves into pretzels of PC on the IQ /race corollary , the gender bending , or the climate scam (admittedly not Darwin’s purview) . Their catchcall ” The science is settled” says everything .