Did Humans Evolve Through Natural Selection?
Natural selection may be a contributory factor in evolution but I do not believe, contrary to what Darwinians might say, that it can be a complete explanation for human beings. Here are some reasons why not.
The first problem is the human brain. The late Arthur Koestler, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, explained that, according to evolutionary theory, “the senses and organs of all species evolve according to adaptive needs; and novelties in anatomical structure are by and large determined by those needs”. However, “the brain is supposed to have remained anatomically stable for something like a hundred thousand years… evolution had endowed homo sapiens with an organ which he was unable to put to proper use. Neurologists have estimated that even at the present stage we are only using two or three percent of the potentialities of its built-in ‘circuits’ ”. He finds this “a very curious paradox indeed”: “It is entirely unprecedented that nature should endow a species with an extremely complex luxury organ far exceeding its actual and immediate needs, which the species will take millennia to learn to put to proper use — if it ever does. Evolution is supposed to cater for adaptative demands; in this case the goods delivered anticipated the demand by a time-stretch of geological magnitude. The habits and learning potentialities of all species are fixed within the narrow limits which the structure of its nervous system and organs permits; those of homo sapiens seem unlimited precisely because the possible uses of that evolutionary novelty in his skull were quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment”. Koestler concludes therefore that mental evolution “refers to a process in which some factors operate to which as yet we have not got a clue”¹, which is an intriguing suggestion, and a suitably vague phrase.
I recently wrote an article in which I suggested that artistic abilities, specifically musical, did not evolve in the Darwinian sense, rather emerge from a higher non-physical level of our being. I believe that would apply to all artistic endeavours, and also to mathematics, and abstract reasoning. Someone who agrees was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder along with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, although he later realised that this was inadequate to explain all life, and converted to an early version of Intelligent Design. In addition to my list, he adds wit and humour, and I readily agree. Language may also be a further example.
He says: “the Darwinian theory… lends a decided support to a belief in the spiritual nature of man. It shows us how man’s body may have been developed from that of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection; but it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so developed, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit”.
He came to this conclusion because his understanding of the law of natural selection operated on the principle of utility, that only traits useful to humans would survive and therefore evolve. He also thought that any such useful features would be distributed more or less equally. On both counts, this is true of animals, but not true of the mathematical, musical, and artistic faculties of humans. He therefore concludes that these cannot have developed through the law of natural selection. They point to “the existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors”, “the workings within us of a higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for material existence”, “something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature” which is “superadded to the animal nature of man”².
That is very interesting, but perhaps he hasn’t gone far enough. If there are higher levels from which music and art emerge, perhaps higher levels are also responsible for the creation and evolution of the human body. That would be the spiritual alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Following that train of thought, another hard-to-explain mystery is the uniqueness of every human being. In the animal kingdom, each individual is more or less identical to all others of the same type. Every sparrow looks remarkably similar to all other sparrows, and the same is true of earthworms, flies, species of fish, and even more highly developed animals like squirrels, zebras, and so on. There might be minor differences, but nothing on the scale of the individuality of humans. We might say that nature in general tends to conformity, except in the case of humans. The emphasis upon the absolute uniqueness of each individual takes various forms: fingerprints, the lines on one’s palms, brain scans, the voice, before we even begin to consider the personality.
Here’s an interesting thought. According to evolutionary theory, it is features that helped a species survive that were favoured and worked on by natural selection. So how come it allowed fingerprints to develop, the only apparent purpose of which is to help police identify someone who has committed a crime? How does that help you survive?
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. The Sleepwalkers, Penguin, 1964, p524
2. Section entitled ‘Independent Proof that the Mathematical, Musical, and Artistic Faculties have not been Developed under the Law of Natural Selection’ in Darwinism.
