Human Life--Evolution to Self Evolution

• Video 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK6ECiARTvA&feature=PlayList&p=A785C04F890A66CD&index=0
• Video 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswCYL92m6s&feature=PlayList&p=A785C04F890A66CD&index=1
• Video 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4BOnIOQLKA&feature=PlayList&p=A785C04F890A66CD&index=2
• Video 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvdshQPqQ7k&feature=PlayList&p=A785C04F890A66CD&index=3
• Video 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHxe59UrgGE&feature=PlayList&p=A785C04F890A66CD&index=4

This series is the five-million-year story of how humans may have evolved from "tree living apes to modern man." There is only one percent difference between the genes of chimpanzees and humans. The narrator says that if we could take a child born five thousand years ago in the Stone Age and set it in the 21st century, that child could do everything we can today. Also, if we could set a child born today in the Stone Age, that child could do everything people did then. In other words, there is no difference between a child born in the Stone Age and today; there has been no biological evolution in all this time. This agrees with my observation of "ancient man" as portrayed in ancient literature such as the Bible, and in the ancient writings of the Greeks, Chinese, and Hindi.

FROM Post 4:



No it does not look at that aspect at all--at least, not from a specialist perspective. I'd really like to see something like that if you know where to find such videos. Nor does it show intermediate versions of the evolution from ape to man. It focuses more on how we changed physically from chimpanzees walking on all fours to human walking on two feet, from chimps requiring six years to learn how to crack a nut by watching mama doing it to a much shorter period by spoken language instruction.

I liked one analogy; it said we value language so much that we risked death in order to gain it. It shows how the human wind pipe for speaking/breathing and the food pipe for swallowing food are so closely connected that occasionally people choke to death because food goes down the wrong pipe.

It also focused quite a bit on the function of the opposable thumb that allows us to hold something between finger and thumb. I understand this has some impact on brain development. It also talks about the large brain that makes a premature birth necessary for humans. This premature birth is what necessitates the long childhood of humans as opposed to other mamals that can walk almost as soon as they are born.

The above was posted on Reasonable Faith.org, as linked.

I posted the same Opening Post on exChristian.net. People commented that five thousand years is too short a time for evolution to take place. My response:

Come to think of it, five thousand years is a rather short time in evolutionary terms. I grew up in the sixties and was taught by a grey-haired lady of the nineteenth century mind-set that human society can only progress. This was in public school. We were supposedly so much smarter in the 1960s than our forebears of the 1860s had been. WE put man on the moon! THEY didn't even have airplanes. And so went the adult conversations that I heard.

But I did my own thinking. I read the Bible stories because that was the main literature I had access to. The ancient characters were so very much like the people around me in the 1960s. Sometimes they were mad, sometimes they were glad. They had babies, they got old and died. They built buildings, they pulled buildings down. They had animals, they went on trips, and their lives--while quite different from ours--were very much human. Their wise sayings were quite applicable to my own life. The examples set were good and bad by present standards, if you cherry-picked appropriately. I was adept at cherry-picking. The other source of reading available to me was the school readers. The readers were about town children whose lives and dress were just as different from my own as were those of the Bible. The teacher was from town, too.

I could not agree with either my teachers from town or my own people that the people of earlier times were different from the people of our own day. That is where I was coming from. But I realize that five thousand years is rather a short time.

All the same, coming as I do from a closed horse and buggy community that strives to this day to cling to nineteenth century values, styles, and traditions (a condition now made worse by their own school system instituted in the late 1960s), I see much that encourages me in the wider world. It may not be outright evolution, but it certainly is not stagnation so far as the knowledge base of humanity is concerned. Nor does the base of ethics stagnate. See Richard Dawkins on shifting moral zeitgeist. Ethically and intellectually each generation builds on the shoulders of the previous generation. When I entered academia fresh from the horse and buggy community, that is what really hit me between the eyes.

It is true that the masses may not be moving forward as one would wish and hope. I do not know how much, or what kind of, power the religious right will have in our world's future. But when I see an Afro-American in the White House, when I see a very conservative Christian woman contending for the position of President in the Christian world's most religious country, I know that the values of our society have changed on a very deep level from earlier generations. I'm not calling it evolution; I'm calling it change. Evolution is change. I don't think evolution ever took place on a level that could have been observed by the individuals at the time; it can only be seen in retrospect when comparing fossils across vast periods of time.