On 11 March 2006, the New Scientist magazine website carried an article titled “Are we still evolving?” The article, written by Kate Douglas, contained speculation regarding whether or not the evolutionary process, which evolutionist researchers have adopted as a dogma, is still continuing. After quoting Steven Pinker from Harvard University as saying, “In the biological sense of changes in the gene pool, it"s impossible to say,” Douglas referred to work by Bruce Lahn, considering this as a finding suggesting that supposed evolution is still taking place.
As at the end of every article concerning whether or not evolution is still happening or the future thereof, Douglas’ article had to conclude by admitting that such conjecture actually means very little in scientific terms: “Most experts agree that trying to predict the direction of evolution is a fruitless exercise.”
There is obviously no need to provide a lengthy response to an article that is full of conjecture and that concludes by admitting that this is a fruitless exercise. What we shall concentrate on briefly here is the need to ask “Did man ever undergo evolution at all?” rather than “Are we still evolving?” As she did right throughout the article, Douglas began by regarding evolution as an established fact, and so deviated into dogmatism.
The thing that needs to be known about scenarios of human evolution is that they are adopted because of materialist philosophy, are maintained for ideological purposes, and, beneath a scientific guise, are based on exceedingly inadequate evidence and conjecture that is the subject of fierce debate.
An article by Robert Locke, editor of the magazine Discovering Archaeology, one of the best-known publications concerning the origin of man, said that “The search for human ancestors gives more heat than light,” and quoted the following admission by the famous evolutionary paleoanthropologist Tim White:
We"re all frustrated by all the questions we haven"t been able to answer. (Robert Locke, "Family Fights," Discovering Archaeology, July/August 1999, pp. 36-39)
The article described the dilemma facing the theory of evolution with regard to the origins of man and the groundless nature of the propaganda put forward on the subject:
Perhaps no area of science is more contentious than the search for human origins. Elite paleontologists disagree over even the most basic outlines of the human family tree. [So-called] New branches grow amid great fanfare, only to wither and die in the face of new fossil finds. (Robert Locke, "Family Fights," Discovering Archaeology, July/August 1999, pp. 36-39)
That same truth was also recently accepted by Henry Gee, editor of the well-known magazine Nature. In his book In Search of Deep Time, published in 1999, Gee wrote that all the evidence for human evolution "between about 10 and 5 million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box." The conclusion Gee arrives at is most interesting:
... the chain of ancestry and descent ... [is] a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.
To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. (Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time, New York, The Free Press, 1999, pp. 32, 116-117)
As we have seen, evolutionists maintain that there is a familial link between human beings and chimpanzees, although there is no fossil record indicative of any sign of such a relationship. Human beings did not evolve gradually from a creature resembling a chimpanzee, but came into being in a single moment, with an anatomy suited to walking upright and a large brain. Evolutionists are unable to account for this fact, which clearly points to creation. The anthropologist Lyall Watson has said this on the subject:
Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans—of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings—is, to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter. (Lyall Watson, “The Water People,” Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44)
As we have seen, there is no concrete scientific evidence that human beings in fact emerged through evolution. Devotion to this myth mainly stems from ideological concerns.
By asking “Are we still evolving?” with regard to this scenario, the dubious nature of which is apparent from admissions by evolutionists themselves, New Scientist magazine is producing “speculation about speculation” and providing no scientifically valuable information. We hope to see a realistic and rich scientific content in the pages of New Scientist magazine and hope that its editors will stop wasting those pages on scenarios about human evolution.