What Made Us Human? by Kyle Butt, M.Div.

http://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=1621

What Made Us Human?

by	Kyle Butt, M.Div.

Guess what! Evolutionary scientists claim they have finally found the impetus behind why humans evolved from lower mammals. Charles Choi, a LiveScience writer, penned an article titled: “Eating Meat Made Us Human Suggests New Skull Fossil” (2012). He wrote that “[f]ragments of a 1.5-million-year-old skull from a child recently found in Tanzania suggest early hominids weren’t just occasional carnivores but regular meat eaters, researchers say. The finding helps build the case that meat-eating helped the human lineage evolve large brains, scientists added.” There you have it, the fact that “early hominids” could eat meat is why humans are so intelligent today. But wait, how can that be right? Stephanie Pappas, writing for LiveScience, wrote an article titled, “Did Exercise Make the Human Brain So Buff?” (2012). She said that, “[h]uman brawn may be the key to why human brains are so big, according to a new hypothesis linking exercise to the evolution of our oversize noggins.” Of course, she says there is not enough research to nail this down, but scientists say this is “an intriguing possibility.”

What are we to make of all these possibilities? The simple fact of the matter is human evolution did not occur. If you pay attention to the headlines, you will see one “possibility” after another trotted out in a parade of scientific research, none of which will get scientists any closer to the truth. That so many dead-ends are presented should alert the astute reader to the fact that something is amiss with this system. Just think of the copious resources spent to study how meat eating caused the human brain to get big. No, how exercise did. Rather, how walking on two legs is what inflated our brains. Change that to making crude tools. Well, alter that to elaborate mating rituals. On sixth thought maybe our brains are larger because…just fill in the blank with your favorite latest theory.

Humans did not evolve larger brains. God created humans in His image on the sixth day of Creation. Plus, brain size has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with being a human, or with human intelligence. If we were to compare the late He Pingping’s tiny head with the massive skull of the late Andre the Giant (Andre Roussimoff), we would quickly see a wide range of human skull sizes, and that variations in size do not show a direct correlation to increased or decreased intelligence. If that were true, Neanderthals [I am using the term in the evolutionary sense, but certainly not suggesting that there was a sub-group of human-like creatures from which humans evolved] should have been much smarter than humans, because they had larger brains, on average, than modern humans. Furthermore, the sperm whale should be the most brilliant animal of all time because it has the largest brain ever recorded, weighing in at about 17 pounds. Compare that to the average human brain of about three pounds and you begin to see the “brain size = intelligence” problem the standard evolutionary propaganda faces.

But, some will say, it is not the overall size of the brain, but the size of the brain compared to the size of the animal. If that were the case, the shrew should be about twice as intelligent as humans, because it has a brain that composes between 3-5% of overall body weight, while humans have a brain that composes about 1-2%. And Neanderthals had about the same brain-to-body ratio as modern humans, yet evolutionists are quick to assess their lack of intelligence compared to “modern” humans.

What do we learn from all this talk about the causes of “bigger brains” and “becoming human.” What we learn is that the theory of evolution can tell us nothing about how we became human. And the billions of dollars and man-hours spent fleshing out innumerable theories about human evolution are nothing more than exercises in futility. The next time you see a headline touting the latest, greatest impetus that drove primordial slime toward human-hood, give it some critical analysis and see what is really behind it all. When you do, you will discover that the best answer is simply that humans have been humans from the moment they were created by God in His image on the sixth day of Creation.

REFERENCES

Choi, Charles (2012), “Eating Meat Made Us Human Suggests New Skull Fossil,” LiveScience,http://news.yahoo.com/eating-meat-made-us-human-suggests-skull-fossil-211048849.html.

Pappas, Stephanie (2012), “Did Exercise Make the Human Brain So Buff?” LiveScience,http://news.yahoo.com/did-exercise-human-brain-buff-001925728.html.