Both Oars In That exact human moment

Sep 30, 2011

I read a lot on planes. Even though I usually have work to do on most flights, the mandate at takeoff and landing to turn off “everything with an on-off switch” ensures at least one hour each flight of guilt-free leisure reading. I cherish that time. I always have a magazine or newspaper ready.

On a recent flight, while flipping through The Economist, I ran into an article on the growing attention being given to the Australopithecus sediba fossils discovered in 2008. The article reported that this new, older australopithecine is shaking our anatomical evolutionary tree. At risk of falling out of our family tree is Homo habilis, the hominid that evolutionary scientists heretofore have regarded to be the transitional link from Australopithecus to Homo erectus.

Being a bit foggy on our extended family tree, I decided to do a little research on how evolutionary scientists are currently drawing it. I found the Smithsonian website What does it mean to be human? very instructive. The site’s interactive evolutionary timeline even includes an overlay of climate changes over the past 8 million years.

What I found most interesting about this timeline is the number of ne’er-do-well cousins it suggests we’ve had. Remarkably, there were four coexistent branches of hominids that didn’t make it to modern times. It is nice to be the winner, but one has to ponder what happened to these near-human Edsels.

Any discussion of evolution is liable to stir up trouble even without a climate change chart overlay. I myself am not wholly comfortable with calling it a fact that we developed entirely from a single cell organism by way of a flatworm. On the other hand, I have observed behaviors in verbally non-responsive teenagers that suggest we may in fact be cousins.

To be serious, there is an inherent problem with representing human evolution in such clean, linear theories. At the very least, it muddles the difference between form and substance, as demonstrated by the choice of title for the Smithsonian timeline. Proof of this intellectual blurring can also be found at the end of The Economist article which states, “Slowly, then, the origin of the strange assemblage of characters that makes a human being human is emerging.”

Pope Benedict XVI, who appears from his voluminous writings on creation to spend nearly as much time contemplating our origin as he does where we are headed, has provided several eloquent retorts to the oversimplification of our complex origins. Long before he was elected pope, he began defending the special creation of man which he feels is evidenced by our unique sentient nature. Without denying the general claims of evolutionary science, he stated as a young theologian, “…anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel.”

I agree with the Pope. Regardless of how our form developed, I do not believe that we are as we are only out of nature’s brute force or by winning the biological lottery. Rather, our unique qualities as a species are a result of God’s direct and specific creative act. Each birth is a continuation of that act. As the pope points out, you would be hard pressed to find this truth with a spade—long-handled or short.

As further proof of God’s direct participation in our origin, there is the fact that we are all descended from one common ancestor. Given the sociopolitical mess we have made over centuries out of the minutest differences between ourselves, imagine what we would have done to each other if modern science instead proved that we are from different branches. God knows—so he made it be that we are not.

There is no denying that evolutionary science can convincingly trace the morphological development of our hand. Equally undeniable is the fact that evolutionary science has always come up short when it comes to describing exactly how we became sentient beings or pinpoint when that exact human moment occurred. Humbling as that is, it is understandable since that involves a different science—the science of knowing how a much more mysterious hand works, God’s.