The cranium, known as MRD, is noticeably different from known A. afarensis skulls. MRD is smaller with a much more projecting face. Down the center of the skull runs a sagittal crest for attachment of jaw muscles. The skull is longer and narrower than A. afarensis skulls. To my eye, MRD looks more like a living ape like a gorilla than A. afarensis does.The existence of bipedal animals that look so similar to us raises many questions about God’s design and their relationships to each other. How many created kinds of upright apes are there? In past analyses, Paranthropus seems well-separated from other australopiths, and A. afarensis and A. africanus are also very distinct. Are these patterns merely the result of a sparse sample of species? Will we eventually find that all bipedal apes belong to one created kind, distinct from humans? What can this new skull tell us about even less well-known fossils like Ardipithecus or Sahelanthropus?
i) I'm not quite sure what Todd means by bipedal animals that look so similar to us given what he says about MRD. However, that may be tangential to his main point.
ii) To consider the question in general, Darwinians and atheists will take this to be yet another example of how science continues to put the squeeze on Christianity. There's increasingly less that makes human beings unique. Science keeps chipping away at human exceptionalism. One theological outpost after another falls to the invincible march of evolutionary biology. Christians are constantly in retreat. Constantly ceding ground to evolution. At least that's how it looks to Darwinians and atheists.
iii) But is that the case? Even in Gen 1-2, it's clear that humans share much in common with the animal world. That's because we're embodied agents and earthlings. Ancient Jews and Christians could see that humans have animals bodies. Physically, our bodies function like other animals. It's not as if modern science provides a revolutionary perspective in that regard. Prescientific observers could see that just fine.
iv) I don't see that bipedal apes pose any greater threat to human exceptionalism than animals with forward-facing eyes. It's my impression that different body designs maximize an organism's ability to exploit a particular niche. Obviously we've never seen bipedal apes in action, but that presumably enables them to take advantage of certain opportunities their environment presents that quadrupedal apes cannot exploit.
But there are tradeoffs in any body design. Gains in one respect are offset by losses in other respects. Leopards lack the power of lions, but that's offset by their superior tree-climbing ability. Cheetahs can outrun prey that's too fast for leopards and lions, but that's offset by weaker jaws and lack of razor-sharp claws.
v) There's the question of what makes something unique. It is a single unique feature or a unique combination of ordinary features?
vi) What makes humans unique isn't primarily our bodies but our minds. Suppose a wolf had a human body. That wouldn't make it human. A lupine mind in a human body would be a disastrous mismatch. It wouldn't survive. It has the wrong kind of intelligence to operate with a human body.
vii) This doesn't mean human bodies are unimportant to human identity. But they are secondary in the sense that human bodies are instruments of human minds. A human mind requires a body that enables it to do human things. A human mind in the body of a dolphin would be stultifying and maddening.
If you hand a mediocre tennis player the racket of a world-class tennis player, that doesn't make him a world-class tennis player. Conversely, a world-class tennis player can beat a mediocre player with an off-the-shelf racket–no matter how good the racket the mediocre player has. Same thing with pool. It isn't the cue or the balls that make the difference. Although Heifetz plays better with a Guarneri or Stradivarius, handing that violin to a mediocre violinist doesn't transform him into Heifetz. Imagine what Newton could do with a computer.
A body is just a medium. It's generally a necessary medium for humans to develop their potential and exercise their humanity, but it's what the operator does with it that's special, and not the medium in itself.
Like animals, we produce offspring and raise offspring, but human parents and their offspring both get far more out of the experience than animals because we have more complex minds. Lower animals may not even have minds. If they do have minds, they have very simple minds. Like animals, humans engage in sex, but we get far more out of the experience because we have more complex minds. There's so much more we can take in.
viii) It's like science fiction stories about extraterrestrials. What kind of bodies does the writer give them? If they rely on advanced technology, they need body parts that enable them to build and operate fancy gadgets. They require bodies suitable to their alien intelligence and alien proclivities.
I'd add:
ReplyDelete1. Morphological (and/or genetic) similarity is not necessarily indication of evolutionary relatedness. For one thing, even if one grants morphological similarity, that doesn't necessarily imply the morphological relatedness is due to natural selection and mutation over eons of time.
2. Morphological similarity could indicate common design just as well as it could indicate common descent.
3. Besides, even on evolutionary grounds, morphological similarity could be evidence of evolutionary convergence rather than evolutionary relatedness. Dolphins and fish are morphologically quite similar, but they're evolutionarily unrelated to one another inasmuch as dolphins are mammals, not fish. Likewise snakes and worms aren't evolutionarily related to one another despite both have similar morphological features. As such, it's possible apes may be quite morphologically similar to us too, but we could be entirely different kinds of creatures, even on evolutionary grounds. At the very least, the evolutionist needs to argue for evolutionary relatedness between apes and humans based on more than morphological (and/or genetic) similarity.
4. Some similarities and patterns are independent of the human mind, but other similarities and patterns exist in our minds alone (e.g. pareidolia). Of course evolutionary biologists argue the former when it comes to evolutionary theory, and that may be true in many cases, but there are some cases in which that's debatable. To what extent (if any) are evolutionary biologists reading anthropomorphic elements into their observations and taking that to imply evolutionary relatedness?
5. There's almost always an element of subjectivity in any classification scheme (e.g. evolutionary trees or hierarchies). For example, one can classify robots according to all sorts of variables like structure, function, purpose, and so on, but that doesn't necessarily imply the robots descended from one another.
Suppose all life on our planet has become extinct in the distant future. All that's left is fossils. Suppose an extraterrestrial intelligent alien species sends one of its paleontologists to our planet to explore it. Suppose the paleontologist discovered the bones of various birds including an ostrich. Of course an ostrich is bipedal. However suppose the paleontologist concludes the ostrich's bipedalism means it's a missing link between birds and humans due to its bipedalism. Or suppose the paleontologist concludes the ostrich is a more evolutionarily evolved animal than other birds due to its bipedalism. All this would sound silly to evolutionists today. Yet at times one wonders if it's all that different from how some evolutionists today reason.
DeleteWhile the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus seem rather similar to us morphologically, the Australopithecus seems rather distant to my eye. This is discussed in chapter 14 of Theistic Evolution (2017).
ReplyDelete--There's almost always an element of subjectivity in any classification scheme (e.g. evolutionary trees or hierarchies).--
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of subjectivity... From offhand memory, I recall praying mantids being included/not included into the same Family as cockroaches.
As well as the inexplicable close relation of rock hyraxes to elephants based on (drumroll please) their foot structure.