The Pseudo-science of Human Evolution
Most people believe we evolved from a brutish, flesh-eating, thick-headed race of primitive ape. Think about whenever our apparent evolutionary ancestors are portrayed: usually it’s as grunting, club-yielding knuckle-scrapers (the term has entered our vernacular as a euphemism for stupidity) dragging women-folk around by the hair while gnawing on a severed raw leg of pterodactyl. People by and large accept this bizarre portrayal of our past because that’s the story emanating down from the high priests of evolutionary science. And they’re scientists, they’ve proved this shit.
Haven’t they?
I’m going to suggest in this article, as many observers have done before me (it’s certainly not my idea) that the story we’ve been fed about human evolution is largely nonsense and that we’ve been grossly misled by an ambitious mob of pseudo-scientists who have for the last hundred and fifty odd years forged a tradition of academic quackery at odds with scientific objectivity. The mythical missing link definitively explaining the theory of human evolution is not going to be unearthed by a trestle in some trench at Olduvai Gorge. Rather, it is to be found in the disclaiming small print tucked away at the ass end of academic articles on human evolution…a disclaimer grudgingly citing the funding sources of the research that conjured the article.
I’m not anti-science but I am anti-bullshit. Having studied anthropology (physical and social) and archaeology at university, my impression of the story of human evolution is that it’s principally guesswork: mainly a bunch of old academic fossils shifting around bits of old fossils and jamming them together like ill-fitting pieces from different jigsaw puzzles. The evidence purporting to represent our ascent from tree-dwelling ramapithecus to iPhone gazing homo sapien sapien, is ridiculously, painfully scant. Raymond Dart, one of the pin-up boys of paleo-archaeology, once made the point that the entire fossil evidence cobbling together 7 million years of human evolution, could sit atop a single billiard table. The guys and gals who have made a career out of this cobblers are well aware their activity has little to do with science. They revel in the looseness of it all. They call themselves the cowboys of science. They’ve been flying back through time by the seat of their pants.
The standard human evolution myth fed to the public performs two roles: the first is it demoralizes us. We’re the brood of thuggery and stupidity. The second is it endorses the violence and killing we find in the present, particularly the violence and killing of the global meat industry. The theory tells us that we may have altered the means by which we secure our dinosaur ribs, replacing spear and savannah with bolt gun and supermarket, but by exploiting and eating animals in the present, we are doing no more than being true to our killer instincts, just as the tiger or praying mantis is being true to their instincts when they tear a deer apart with their claws or gorge on the brains of a copulating partner.
This entrenched perspective of the human as a natural born killer upholds a narrative that the world is a violent, super-competitive, dog-eat-dog abode. Earth is seen as a battlefield where only the ruthless get to pass their genes on and avoid oblivion. It is a mindset that suggests for the world to function properly, it is required for the weak to be subjugated by the strong, just as it is required for the weak to subjugate the even weaker in a perpetual Hobbesian war of all against all. Cruelty and gross inequality are rendered normal. Professor Jordan Peterson and his absurd ‘lobster analogy’ (check out the 1st rule in his 12 Rules For Life if you don’t know what I’m referring to: it’s covered in the free kindle download sample so you can avoid having to buy the whole god-damned book) is perhaps the highest profile example of social dysfunctions such as gratuitous violence and extreme social inequity supposedly reflecting a natural, biologically ordained order of existence. This ultra-determinist all-in-the-genes perspective on human behaviour seems more evilution than evolution.
The violent-meat-munching-moron perspective on our ancestors is at odds with the sparse scattering of hard evidence we have of our ancestral past, as it is at odds with the co-operative, inter-dependent, symbiotic design of the majority of the natural world. According to a lesser publicized take on evolutionary theory, our ancestors were not killers or meat eaters at all. Spencer for instance, on page 17 of his book The Heretics Feast points out that
‘the traditional interpretation that humankind’s evolution reflects its needs as a hunting carnivore is now disproved. Humankind came into being sustained on a vegan diet’
This seems to make sense, given our closest primate cousins are herbivores. Physically, we are equipped with a herbivore design. We lack claws and fangs and our stomach is of a standard, elongated herbivore model, as opposed to the streamlined carnivore gut which needs its food shunted fast through the intestines before it starts to rot. Our jaws rotate in your classic vegetable chewing manner, rather than the up and down clamp-and-tear design of the meat eater.
The dominant evolutionary meat-eating camp refute the compelling herbivore logic in two ways: 1. Ignoring evidence that does not fit their chosen take on reality (a tried and tested tactic employed successfully throughout history), and 2. Suggesting that humans at some stage stepped out of the role of herbivore and fast-tracked their evolutionary development — particularly in relation to the growth of their brain — by deciding to kill and eat animals. This latter approach is best captured by 20th century writer Robert Ardrey. Ardrey sums up the commonly held belief that ‘man is man — because for millions upon millions of evolving years we killed for a living’ (The Hunting Hypothesis 1976, p10). According to Ardrey’s hypothesis, our success and our smarts are derived from killing.
The idea of our past being dominated by hunting has comprehensively permeated across popular culture and academia alike. Its acceptance has grown commensurate with the growth in global meat consumption which in turn has gone hand in hand with the growth in meat industry advertising. Indeed, the violent-flesh-eating-past perspective could be seen to be driven by a pre-ordained desire to construct a version of human evolution compatible with commercial entities prepared to fund research activity. In many ways the standard story of human evolution can be viewed as an extended PR exercise by the powerful meat industry lobby. What the whole hunting hypothesis is definitively not, is an idea arrived at through a process of objective scientific enquiry. Ardrey was not a scientist, he was a playwright. The story of human evolution appears to be as prone to manipulation as the creationist theories it purports to supersede.
An inexplicable amount of academic activity continues to be been invested into gathering ‘evidence’ in an attempt to substantiate the theory our ancestors spent most of their time killing animals and gorging on their meat. Indeed, this obsession appears to be the principle focus for the entire field of paleo-archaeology. For instance, archaeologist Kristina Killgrove’s article in Forbes magazine (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/08/14/anthropologists-resolve-controversy-over-3-4-million-year-old-stone-tool-marks-on-animal-bone/#5a6586d346b2 ) reports on re-analysis of a previous study of fossilized bones dated from 3.3 million years ago. The re-analysis constituted a sustained effort to prove a hypothesis — previously rejected twice by separate analysis of the data — that tiny marks on two pieces of fossilized bone (out of 4 thousand pieces of fossilized bone found) constituted marks made by our australopithecine ancestors ‘suggestive of butchery’. Next thing you know there is publication and re-publication in Forbes and a hive of interest to the extent the article continues to be re-hashed in electronic media some five years after the original publication in 2015. Problem is, any objective review of the study renders its findings paralyzingly inconclusive. First we have the original analysis of the evidence concluding the marks cannot be confirmed to have been caused by wilful incision. Then there is the fact the marked bones were among 3,998 other pieces of fossilized bone that bore no hint of anthropoid or any other intervention. This should have been enough to uphold the original study finding. Instead, our entire ancestral past is re-written to the tune of a million years, over a couple of non-specific scratches appearing on one out of every 2000 separate pieces of fossilized bone analyzed. Clearly science fiction relates to the past as much as it does to the future. If we extrapolate the sloppiness of the Forbes example out to the field of paleo-archaeology as a whole we begin to realize this is not science based on measurable observation at all, this is at best guesswork; at worst, it is powerful commercial interests paying money for researchers to present desired outcomes as objective science.
The only assured conclusion that can be drawn from efforts to reconstruct the distant past is that the massive timeframe being dealt with, coupled with the paucity of reliable evidence, can lead to almost any theory being imposed upon our past. In fact the whole notion of an evolutionary past even existing in the sequential form it has been popularly presented becomes tentative and based on faith, not fact. Our grasp on the distant past may be proceeding almost entirely from false assumption. As well, our understanding of the past may be impacted by commercial imperatives contaminating academic research. One thing is certain: the accepted story of evolution lacks the bricks and mortar of demonstrable evidence. Science is great at getting a grip on the measurable present, but when it attempts to time travel (which ironically it seems obsessively wont to do) the repeatable methodological processes relied upon to gain information and understanding on the mechanics of the cosmos, are largely absent. Science (or more accurately scientists) may abhor a vacuum, but a vacuum seems a better option than allowing commercial interests to fill the void with a billboard.