A NEW DARWINIST FANTASY: THE EVOLUTION OF MEAT-EATING

A piece of research carried out by Peter Ungar from Arkansas University and his colleagues has recently hit the headlines. In the study, the tooth morphologies of Australopithecus afarensis and so-called evolutionarily primitive members of the genus Homo were compared. Ungar was seeking to develop a platform that would be useful in measuring the kind of abrasion brought about by which kinds of foods, forms of wear and the surfaces of the teeth he examined, and he evaluated the anatomical differences between the teeth studied from the point of view of feeding habits.

Realising that the sharpness of the tooth crest came about in relation to eating harder foods, Ungar drew attention to the fact that the transition to such a feature in these teeth took place some 2.5 million years ago and stated that human beings may first have begun eating meat at that time.

It was noteworthy that those publications which reported the study and Ungar’s interpretations offer blind support for Darwinism. Imaginary tales about the process of human evolution were related, and it was claimed that human beings “evolved” from being vegetarian to eating meat 2.5 million years ago. However, Ungar’s interpreting the facts he obtained from an evolutionist perspective merely reveals his own preconceptions. In the study in question, there is no solid indication that the owners of the teeth examined were so-called creatures who had evolved from apes to man. Evolutionary relationships between these teeth are “assumed.” To put it another way, the data obtained are “mounted onto” the scenario that man evolved from an ape-like creature. This is clearly set out in the words of Jane Maienschein, a professor of biology and philosophy from Arizona State University:

Traditional paleoanthropologists concentrate on bones and teeth. Collect all the relevant fossil skulls, teeth, and bones. Observe, measure, compare, and construct a lineage or phylogenetic tree of presumed morphological characteristics to show their evolutionary relationships (which assumes, of course, that there are evolutionary relationships). (Jane Maienschein, “The One and the Many Epistemological Reflections on the Modern Human Origins Debates”; "Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research" edited by G. A. Clark - and C. M. Willermet, Published by Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1997, p. 414)

In short, Ungar has found no evidence of evolution, but adapts his findings to the myth of human evolution. This is nothing other than an effort to keep a collapsed theory alive. The biologist Francis Hitching, well-known for his criticism of Darwinism, describes the collapse of the theory of evolution in the face of the scientific findings thus:

In three crucial areas where [the modern evolution theory] can be tested, it has failed: the fossil record reveals a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than gradual change. Genes are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving. Random step-by-step mutations at the molecular level cannot explain the organized and growing complexity of life. (Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 103, 107.)

As is apparent from Hitching’s words, there is no mechanism in nature which can add new genes to the genes of living things and cause them to evolve. It is known that random mutations, on which evolutionists rely, damage the organism’s genetic data. It is clear that there is no mechanism for the evolution assumed by Darwinists. That being the case, looking at bones and teeth and building evolutionary relationships between them is like examining the similarities between the tyres of a tractor and those of an aeroplane and attempting to construct an evolutionary relationship between them. Both are nonsensical, because there is no natural mechanism whereby a tractor can evolve into an aeroplane or an ape-like creature into a human being.

As we have seen, Ungar’s evolutionary fairy stories and the publications which so blindly support them rest solely on Darwinist preconceptions. Our advice to such publications, which carry such reports, is that they abandon their Darwinist superstitions and accept that modern science shows that intelligent design is the origin of life.