Anthropology
Week 3 Module: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
Introduction
This week we will be learning about the creationism/intelligent design movement. I would like you to watch the movie Judgment Day,which depicts the caseKitzmiller v. Doverthat took place in 2005 and will be available in the library or online. The other one, Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham video, is a debate between the famous scientist, Bill Nye, and the Answers in Genesis spokesperson, Ken Ham.The purpose of watching this video is to get an idea of what the politics are behind learning evolution and why it is important to know what science is.
Creationism/Intelligent Design
Why do scientists use the theory of evolution to understand human origins? Why can’t they use creation myths and origin stories, like creationism or intelligent design? Is the theory of evolution the same kind of explanation as an origin story or creation myth? Be sure to back up your point with credible/scientific examples and sources.
Creation Myths
MENU
MYTHS
MEANINGS
ARCHETYPES
PATTERNS
BEGINNINGS
Creation Myths
Stories about How the World Began
Creation myths are stories about the birth of the world. They exist in just about every culture and reveal how people in ancient times speculated about how the world may have emerged. Creation stories were their kind of cosmological research, albeit of a very speculative nature.
Therefore, the creation myths reveal a lot about the thoughts of human beings in the very distant past – how they saw the world and tried to understand it. Since their minds were not very different from ours, their myths also teach us a lot about ourselves.
Creation Myths Around the World
How stories of the beginning might have begun. An introduction in depth to my ongoing dissertation on creation myths, where I speculate on how the myths emerged at the dawn of human civilization and what shaped them.
Creations stories have appeared in just about every culture and mythological tradition. They differ tremendously, but also have several patterns and ingredients seemingly in common.
These similarities can be traced down to how human speculation about the birth of the world was likely to begin and what inspired it. Also, many similarities between creation myths have to do with the narrative, the rules of telling a story – especially one dependent on oral tradition. Click the header to read about it.
Genesis 1
The First Creation Story of the Bible
The Bible begins with two separate creation stories, differing significantly from one another – Genesis 1 and 2. Genesis 1 is the first and probably the oldest one. In this text I discuss how to analyze and understand the myth, especially the cosmology it indicates.
I also quote some of the Genesis commentaries made by St. Augustine and Martin Luther, who both contributed to shed light on how the Bible was perceived in the past. Click the header to read about it.
Enuma Elish: Babylonian Creation
One of the very oldest creation myths we have documented in its ancient form is Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story. Here I write at some length about its content and how to interpret it, especially its introductory part in which the world is created and the gods have their initial battle for sovereignity.
It is a theme that can be recognized in many other creation myths. In Enuma Elish, the babylonian god Marduk defeats the gods of old, inherited from neighboring cultures, including the divine couple making the world appear when they join. Click the header to read about it.
The Paradox of Origin – Rig Veda 10:129
Every creation myth wrestles with the same problem as science does, when it comes to how the world began: What was before it?
Rig Veda, the ancient collection of hymns from India, also speculates about it – with thoughts that are perfectly relevant to us today as well. It’s in the famous hymn Rig Veda 10:129, which ends in what almost seems like a joke. Click the header to read about it.
Insoluble Solitude – Xingu Creation of Man
The Xingu Indians in Brazil seem not to have a myth about the world creation, or it has not yet been revealed by the anthropologists. But they do have other emergence myths. Here is the one about the birth of man, which is quite a sad story. Click the header to read about it.
The Meanings of Mythology
How to understand and explain myth and fable? Here are the major theories through the centuries about the meanings of mythology. Click the header to read about it.
The Logics of Myth
The basic patterns and structures of myths in general, and creation myths in particular. Discussion on what constitutes a myth and what the rules are for its form and content. Six criteria are used to decide what is and what is not a myth, and these criteria also define the necessary structure of it.
There are two kinds of myth: explanatory (like creation myths) and adventures (mainly hero stories). As for the former, there are additional rules regarding dramaturgy and time-space dimensions. Click the header to read about it.
Psychoanalysis of Myth
Here are the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung on myths and their origins. Both pioneers of psychoanalysis wrote extensively about myth and its significance in human culture, speculating quite daringly about how myth emerges and what can be learned about our past and our present from it.
Freud was particularly interested in myths about the appearance of gods and men, whereas Jung saw a pattern of archetypes in every myth of whatever content. This text is on my personal website stenudd.com. Click the header to go there.
Myth of Creation
Introduction to the nature of creation myths, their structure and the thoughts behind them. This is a short article explaining my angle on creation myths, their structure, meaning, and what can be learned from them about human thinking in the distant past as well as the present. The text is on my personal website stenudd.com. Click the header to go there.
Cosmos of the Ancients
What the Greek philosophers wrote on myth and cosmology. The legendary philosophers of Ancient Greece pondered the gods and the origin of the world at depth. Although they lived in a time when the gods were feared and worshipped as if very real indeed, most of them doubted their existence – at least in the way the gods were portrayed in mythology.
The Greek philosophers had alternative views on cosmos and the divine, being much more similar to present day understanding of such matters.
Here, the cosmological ideas of each one of the Greek philosophers is presented and compared. The texts are on my personal website stenudd.com. Click the header to go there.
Life Energy Ideas
There are countless examples of life energy ideas in the many cultures of the world, from the dawn of human civilization to the present. I’ve gathered all these concepts and similar ones (it took a few years), listing them in a little Life Energy Encyclopedia.
There are indeed many near-synonyms to the life energy concept, as we know it from the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, the Indian prana, the Chinese qi (or chi), and so on. But here are also many concepts that have been regarded as examples of a life energy, although at closer examination it’s clear that they are not.
Beliefs from distant times and cultures are not that easy to comprehend, so we frequently fall into the trap of expecting them to be exact counterparts to ideas of our own past. That’s far from always the case.
Those concepts that are indeed examples of a life energy, though, show several similarities – but still some significant differences, which help us to understand the life energy idea in the mind of man. The texts are on my website devoted to life energy ideas. Click the header to go there.
Stefan Stenudd
MENU
Creation Myths Around the World
How stories of the beginning began.
The Meanings of Mythology
Theories through history about myth and fable.
Archetypes in Myths
The mythological symbols and what they stand for.
The Logics of Myth
Patterns of creation.
Contact
About Cookies
CREATION MYTHS IN DEPTH
Creation in Rig Veda 10:129
The paradox of origin, according to an Indian myth.
Genesis 1
The first creation story of the bible scrutinized.
Enuma Elish
The ancient Babylonian creation myth.
Xingu Creation of Man
The insoluble solitude of gods and humans.
ON MY OTHER WEBSITES
Psychoanalysis of Myth
What Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung thought about myths, their origins and meanings.
Myth of Creation
An introduction to the subject of creation myths and the patterns of thought they reveal.
Cosmos of the Ancients
What the Greek philosophers believed about the cosmos, their religion and their gods.
Life Energy
The many ancient and modern life force beliefs all over the world explained and compared.
Taoistic
Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy of life explained. Also, the complete classic text Tao Te Ching online.
My Books:
Cosmos of the Ancients
The Greek philosophers and what they thought about cosmology, myth, and the gods. Click the image to see the book at Amazon.
Life Energy Encyclopedia
Qi, prana, spirit, ruach, pneuma, and many other life forces around the world explained and compared. Click the image to see the book at Amazon.
Sunday Brunch with the World Maker
Fiction. A brunch conversation slips into the mysterious, soon to burst beyond the realm of possibility. Click the image to see the book at Amazon.
Fake Lao Tzu Quotes
Erroneous Tao Te Ching Citations Examined. 90 of the most spread false Lao Tzu quotes, why they are false and where they are really from. Click the image to see the book at Amazon.
Stefan Stenudd
About me
I’m a Swedish author and historian of ideas, researching the thought patterns in creation myths. I’ve also written books about Taoism, the Tarot, and life force concepts around the world. Click the image to get to my personal website. .
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EXPLORATIONS: AN OPEN INVITATION TO BIOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Editors: Beth Shook, Katie Nelson, Kelsie Aguilera and Lara Braff
American Anthropological Association
Arlington, VA
2019
ISBN 978-1-931303-63-7
www.explorations.americananthro.org
Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
International License, except where otherwise noted.
2. Evolution
Jonathan Marks, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Learning Objectives
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Discuss differing perspectives about how the human species descended from a primate ancestor
Discuss pre-Darwinian perspectives on the nature of the earth and evolution
Explain the process of natural selection
Describe what is meant by the biopolitics of heredity
Examine and correct several misconceptions about human evolution
Discuss Darwins theory and contributions to our understanding of evolution
THE SCIENCE OF WHO WE ARE AND WHERE WE COME FROM
As we discussed at the end of Chapter 1, all peoples tell stories about their ancestors. Scientific stories about our
ancestors are constrained by the assumptions of science, which developed out of 17th-century European philosophy.
The first of these scientific assumptions is that the universe is divisible into (a) the natural world of matter and law and
(b) the supernatural world of spirit and miracle, and we can focus our attention solely on the former. The second is that
miracles, or capricious suspensions of the laws of nature, are not explanatory in the natural world; rather, historical
processes are. The third is that we learn about nature by principally collecting data, under controlled circumstances, so
that anyone, anywhere, can come to the same conclusions. We call such fundamental cultural assumptions like these
epistemes, and we can label these as naturalism, rationalism, and empiricism, respectively. Our fourth assumption is
that maximum accuracy is the only goal of a good scientific explanation. All of these are quite unusual cross-culturally;
after all, the basis of most polite conversation universally is the assumption that maximum accuracy is not desirable. For
example, when someone in the United States asks how you are, they generally do not really want to know, and if you
insist on telling them, they will probably think you are a freak and not talk to you again.
Nevertheless, as these particular epistemic assumptions began to dominate European scholarly research in the 1600s,
traditional ideas about how the world works began to fall away. Many of these ideas had theological implications. For
example, it was generally believed by medieval European scholars that Heaven was a place up in the sky, and it was
fundamentally different from Earth; after all, Heaven is where God lives. Things on Earth tend to move in straight lines,
but in the sky they move in circles. Things on Earth decay; things in the sky seem to be eternal. Things here are ugly and
uneven; things in the sky are perfect crystalline spheres. Things on Earth are made of four elements (earth, air, fire, and
water), but things in the sky partake of a fifth element, the quintessence, which gives them those different properties.
Nevertheless, by 1700 it was clear that the same basic rules of gravity and motion govern things up in Heaven and here
on Earth. An apple falls from a tree by virtue of exactly the same laws of matter and motion that keep the moon revolving
around the earth, as Isaac Newton showed.
1 | Evolution
Figure 2.1 Tysons
orang-outang.
Figure 2.2A Ring-tailed
Lemur.
Figure 2.2B Ruffed Lemur. Figure 2.2C Red Ruffed Lemur. Figure 2.2D Blue-eyed black
lemur.
The earth itself is a body in space revolving around the sun, just as the other planets in the
solar system do. Things up in the sky and down here on Earth really arent so different, after
all.
Scholars began trying to reconstruct the history of the earth naturalistically. Around 1700
Thomas Burnet speculated that perhaps a comet smashed into the earth, which set off the
Great Flood related in the Bible. At about the same time, the English anatomist Edward
Tyson published the first anatomical study of the animal we now call a chimpanzee,
demonstrating that it was physically more similar to us than to any other creature known.
He even counted up its similarities: the chimpanzee resembled humans in 48 ways, but
monkeys in only 34 ways (see Figure 2.1).
PRE-DARWINIAN INTELLECTUAL TRENDS
Three general problems were especially vexing to pious Christian biologists of the 1700s. First, extinctionthe loss of a
species from the face of the earthbecame grudgingly accepted as a fact, even though it seemed to diminish the power
and wisdom of God, by making His creation and plan more transient than had traditionally been imagined. Yet not only
was there extinction in the present (notably, a bird known as the dodo, hunted and eaten by Dutch colonists on the
island of Mauritius, the only place it lived), but there was extinction in the past as welland a lot of it, the evidence of
which was being recovered as fossils. Moreover, the extinctions implied by the fossils were not contemporaneousthe
extinctions were patterned, as if different kinds of creatures had lived and died at different times, embedded in distinct
geological formations. What might that mean?
The second problem involved a great discovery by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. Where animal species had
traditionally been linearly conceptualized in terms of how similar to humans they areforming a Great Chain of
BeingLinnaeus identified a distinctly different pattern. After all, there was no clear basis on which to say that an elk is
more like a human than a tiger or a walrus is. Linnaeus, rather, argued that species should be arranged not according to
how similar they are to us but, rather, by how similar they are to one another. In so doing, Linnaeus found that warm-
blooded, hairy, lactating vertebrates formed a natural group that he named Mammalia in 1758 (in contrast to, say, fish
or birds). Within that group was a cluster of species he called Primates, and among them, according to our physical
features, was our own species, which he named Homo sapiens. These physical correspondences among diverse kinds of
creatures later came to be known as homology. But why did such a pattern of nested similarities exist, and what did it
mean?
The third problem involved the relationship between adaptation and biogeography. Even through the Bible doesnt
exactly say so, it was understood that animals are adapted to their surroundings because God made them that way. The
Bible does say that all living species of animals started out together in the same placethe mountains of Ararat, where
Evolution | 2
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Figure 2.3 Cave painting in the Grotte de Rouffignac.
Figure 2.4 Trilobite fossil.
Noahs Ark landed. Yet those animals would not have been adapted to Ararat; so how did polar bears get to the Arctic,
koalas to Australia, and bison to the Great Plains, where they are each well adapted, without going extinct first? How
could all the lemurs have ended up in Madagascar and nowhere else (see Figure 2.2)? An explanation for adaptation that
was historical, rather than miraculous, would be very valuable.
These were the questions that dominated the field of natural history by the beginning of the 1800s. But of course the
big questions of the day werent even about fossils or polar bears at all but, rather, about the biopolitics of slavery.
Were all people of one stock, the descendants of Adam and Eve? That would seem to afford a moral argument against
treating some people as property, if we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, and would seem to accord well with
the biblical narrative as well. This position, however, required the development of a biological theory to explain how
Adam and Eves descendants could have morphed into the diverse peoples of the world. In other words, if you imagined
Adam and Eve to be white, then how did black people arise? (Or vice versa.) This position, known as monogenism, was
biblical, socially progressive, and generated the earliest modern evolutionary theoriesmicroevolutionary, to be sure,
but theories intended to explain the naturalistic production of difference, or what we would now call evolution.
Others believed that Africans and Europeans shared no common ancestry at all, being the products of separate creations
by God. Perhaps in Adam and Eve, the Bible was merely recounting His most recent creation, but the peoples of the rest
of the world were fundamentally and unalterably different and had always been so. This position, known as polygenism,
was attractive to those looking to rationalize slavery as well as to radical intellectuals who did not feel constrained by
biblical literalism. Paradoxically, however, in holding that peoples are as they always have been and could never change,
the polygenists had more intellectual continuity with modern-day creationists.
By the mid-1800s, the discovery of stone tools in the ground implied a
remote period in ancient Europe when the ancestors lived like the
savages who still used stone tools, whom Europeans were
encountering in more remote places of the world. This in turn implied
an ancient European stone age before the invention of metals, which,
like many of the new discoveries, was not part of the information in the
Bible. It was increasingly becoming apparent that a long time ago, very
primitive Europeans had lived with some extinct animals, like woolly
mammoths. They even drew pictures of the extinct animals on the walls
of their caves (see Figure 2.3).
Further, even a Stone Age seemed relatively recent in the larger context of
the new geology. All those extinct fossil remains were being found in
geological formations far more ancient than any known human evidence
(see Figure 2.4). Just how ancient was not very clear, but judging by the pace
of geological processes we can see today, those processes seem to have
been going on for a very, very long time. You simply cant get fossilization or
fossil fuels made in the ground over the few thousands of years of biblical
time. The most rational interpretation of the geological evidence, argued the
pious Scottish lawyer/geologist Charles Lyell is that the earth is very, very
oldthus stimulating a revolution in both geological and ethnological time.
Lyell himself argued that the earth was very old in the 1830s but waffled on
how old the human species was until the 1860s.
Finally, educated Europeans were taking their biblical stories more and more loosely, as the field of biblical studies
matured. The Bible was being understood as a collection of sacred Jewish and early Christian writings composed at
different times and selected from a much larger corpus. Thomas Jefferson had privately distinguished between the
things Jesus probably said and did and the things Jesus probably did not say and do. In 1835, a German biblical scholar
3 | Evolution
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named David Strauss scandalously interpreted the life of Christ without miracles; his work was published in English
in 1846, translated by the aspiring novelist Marian Evans (aka George Eliot). We should focus, argued Strauss, on the
meaning of the stories of the Bible, not on whether they really happened or not, for their meaning lies in their narrative
content, not in their historicity. This launched a revolution in the area of biblical scholarship.
THE TRANSMUTATION HYPOTHESIS
The publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 became an intellectual flash point in European
intellectual life (Darwin 1859). It was focused on a significantly narrow point: Where do new species, adapted to their
surroundings, come from? The Bible says God made all species. However, the Bible also says that God made all languages
at the foot of the Tower of Babel; and yet, half a century of historical linguistics had showed clearly that such was not
the case (French and Spanish had only been different languages, having diverged from Vulgar Latin, for a matter of a few
centuries), and nobody seemed to get too upset about it.
Moreover, the suggestion that species came from other species was not all that radical. The celebrated French naturalist
Lamarck had said as much in 1809 and an anonymous 1844 English bestseller called Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation had sensationalized itto the consternation of both theologians and naturalists. Indeed, by the 1850s European
biologists were very confident that cells were fundamental units of life and that the only way you could get new cells
was from old cells. While this begged the question of where the first cell came from, it nevertheless was not too much
of a stretch to see species as fundamental units of life as well and to ask whether new ones arose miraculously, or
just from older species. The idea that species had their beginnings in other, older, similar species was known as the
transmutation hypothesis.
Charles Darwin had come to think about the origin of species upon returning from a long voyage around the world in
the early 1830s on the H.M.S. Beagle. In South America, Darwin had observed that the unusual species he saw alive there
were very similar to the unusual extinct animals in the same area. This suggested some sort of historical continuity
between themdescent with modification, he called it. The problem was how to make sense historically, rather than
miraculously, of the particular adaptations that differentiate species. The engine of adaptation, Darwin realized, was
competition. This did not necessarily entail face-to-face competition but simply the fact that not all members of a
species are equally likely to survive and breed. Which ones are more likely? The ones that randomly are a bit more
in sync with their environment. Those creatures will disproportionately thrive and breed, and the next generation of
the species will come to look just a bit more like them, on the average. The core of Darwins thought is thus a two-
step process: the random generation of variation, and the nonrandom process by which the environment subtly favors
organisms with certain features to thrive and breed.
The biology that Darwin learned in college had invoked a famous simile: a species is like a watch, meticulously crafted
by a wise watchmaker, implying a heavenly species-maker. Darwin substituted a more powerful simile, arguing that a
species is actually like a breed or strain of animals, rather than like a watch. But we know that a breed or strain of animals
arises naturally, historically, by the actions of breeders who select certain features to characterize populations.
Whether dogs, pigeons, or roses, the properties of living beings can change, and have changed, in quite dramatic ways
by virtue of human activity in rather short periods of time. If people could make beagles and greyhounds and bulldogs
by selecting the progenitors of particular stocks, then maybe nature could work to select progenitors as well, although
more subtly and over vastly longer periods of time (see Figure 2.5).
Evolution | 4
Figure 2.5C Greyhound.
Figure 2.5B Bulldog. Figure 2.5A Beagle.
Darwin called this principle
natural selection and
planned to write a long
book about it someday. But
in 1858 he received a
manuscript from a fellow
naturalist, Alfred Russel
Wallace, who had come up
with quite similar ideas to his own while working in the Malay archipelago. Darwins friend,
the geologist Charles Lyell, had papers by Darwin and Wallace read into the record, The
Transactions of the Linnaean Society, July 1, 1858, so they could share credit for the discovery,
and Darwin set about to publish the work he had done on natural selection. The result was called On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published on November 24,
1859.
Darwins central thesis was that the differences among breeds or strains or varieties of animals and plants were the same
kinds of differences that exist between species, only smaller and formed over short periods of time. The origin of new
species lay in the long-term biases of survival and reproduction in older species. The result was a convincing naturalistic
explanation for adaptation. Moreover, it finally explained the nested pattern of similarities among species that Linnaeus
had discovered a century earlier but couldnt explain. Those nested patterns were the legacy of common ancestries;
they were literally family resemblances.
Darwin was especially careful to omit any discussion of people from his book. He wanted the discussion to be about
the general process; consequently he wrote just a single line, near the end, about people: Light will be thrown on the
origin of man and his history (Darwin 1859, 488). He was willing to acknowledge the possibility that life had been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one, but he was satisfied with having described the mechanism by which
adaptive change has taken place in the organic world since thenin parallel with Isaac Newton, who famously refused
to speculate on where gravity came from, focusing instead only on how it works (Darwin 1859, 490).
People, however, were bound to be the central issue. A British scholar named Herbert Spencer had also come up with
a similar idea, which he called survival of the fittest and he convinced Darwin that his phrase was synonymous with
natural selection. And of course, who was more fit than wealthy, British white men? This confusion of human history
(that is, the construction of social and political hierarchies) for evolutionary biology would prove to be a consistent
irritation for students of human diversity and ancestry. Indeed, this issue eventually led Darwin and Wallace to part
ways. Wallace asked: if natural selection does not produce useless organs, then why does the savage have a brain as
big as a civilized Europeans, if the savage doesnt use it? This seeming paradox led Wallace into spiritualism and the
possibility that all species of organisms had evolvedbut human intelligence had had a little divine help. Darwin wrote
him, I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child (Darwin, 1869). In 1871, the early British
anthropologist Edward Tylor formally separated the evolution and study of culture from the biological properties of
people. Of course the so-called savages brain was as good as the Europeans, and he does use it fully, but it was filled
with different informationknowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired
by man as a member of society (Tylor 1871, 1). Furthermore, this cultural information was the product of historical
process, not miracle. This understanding marks the beginning of modern anthropology.
Within the academy, there was not too much reaction against the proposition that humans had descended with
modification from an ape stock, and had then differentiated from that stock over the eons as a result of the differential
preservation of favorable variations. The heart of Darwinism as applied to humans is simply ape ancestry and adaptive
divergence.
5 | Evolution
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Figure 2.6 The frontispiece to Ernst Haeckels (1868) popular German
book on Darwinism. The English translation lacked this illustration.
Figure 2.7 Blending inheritance in color.
But the early Darwinians were faced with a dilemmain
1860, there was no fossil evidence linking humans to apes.
The German biologist Ernst Haeckel solved this problem
by fatefully arguing that we dont need a fossil record to
link us to the apes, because Europeans are linked to the
apes through the nonwhite peoples of the world. He
envisioned 12 different species of living peoples, each at
different distances from the apes, thus sacrificing the full
humanity of most people on the altar of Darwinism (see
Figure 2.6). Scientists of the 1860s thought the full
humanity of Africans was less important than evolution,
Today that is morally repugnant. While Darwin and his
English colleagues did not agree with these details, they
nevertheless saw Haeckel as an ally in the broader
struggle to get evolution accepted. With hindsight, we
can judge this to be a morally questionable decision:
Today we would hopefully universally consider the full
humanity of Africans to be more important than whether humans are descended from apes, and thoroughly repudiate
anyone who denied it.
POST-DARWINIAN THEORIES AND DISPUTES
The immediate theoretical weakness of Darwinism lay in its reliance upon a pool
of undirected variation for nature to select from. The dominant theory of heredity
