Joel Kontinen
The latest Darwinian story features raw meat and our faces, making a connection between them in the lives of our assumed ancestors.
The research itself, published in the journal Nature, does not sound very groundbreaking. Its title merely states: Impact of meat and Lower Palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans. However, when reporting on the results, the BBC manages to come up with a juicier version, viz. Meat eating accelerated face evolution.
The facts:
We have narrower faces and smaller teeth than the big apes.
The assumptions:
1) Our ancestors had a more ape-like face and bigger teeth.
2) They evolved from ape-like creatures via Darwinian mechanisms.
The problems:
1) The assumptions cannot be tested.
2) Even in the inflated timeline that evolutionists use, there is not enough time for the changes that are needed to make our ancestors fully human.
3) Evolution can’t produce the genetic information that would be needed in such a transformation.
The result:
An implausible Darwinian just so story, involving major changes over millions of years.
An article in Science once suggested that this kind of speculation might be paleofantasy. In 2008, Richard Lewontin, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, acknowledged that we don’t know anything about brain evolution.
Often, Darwinian storytelling trumps facts.
It might be the only way to try to keep an endangered theory from becoming completely extinct.
Sources:
BBC. 2016. Meat eating accelerated face evolution (9 March).
Zink, Katherine D and Daniel E. Lieberman. 2016. Impact of meat and Lower Palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans. Nature 531 (7595), 500–503.
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