David Warren: Happy New Year - Nature reminds us who's in control

So: are we evolving or not? The issue resurfaced this year with the discovery of "Homo floresiensis" — which is to say, the grapefruit-sized skull of some hobbit-sized being — in the limestone cave of Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. She lived perhaps 18,000 years ago. The Indonesian, Australian, American, and Dutch palaeontologists found other bones, too, of her contemporaries nearly as short, but the media flourish was over the "woman" only one metre high.

She has been assigned the name "Hominid LB-1", but let's call her "Flora". By a series of inferences we gather that she was also comparatively long-armed, had thick eyebrow ridges, a sharply sloping forehead, almost no chin, and was around 30 years of age. She lived in her island world among pony-height elephants, rats the size of golden retrievers, and giant lizards (including the Komodo dragons that are still with us). Her people hunted and cooked the little elephants especially, judging from charred bones found on site, and the stone-hewn cutting, chopping, and perforating tools of their batterie de cuisine.

Very clever indeed: for in the geological time-frame we are discussing, they could only have arrived on the island by boat.

Unmistakably of the genus Homo, but the speciation is open to debate. Palaeontologists have lately been painting a museum diorama of our Homo-sapien ancestors, sharing a planet with Neanderthals and other eco-competitors who disappeared, probably because we did them in. But Homo floresiensis appears to have gone down below a major volcanic eruption on Flores about 12,000 years ago. Whereas the remains of all current hominids are to be found only above that ash level, so we probably never met.

Happy New Year

So: are we evolving or not? The issue resurfaced this year with the discovery of "Homo floresiensis" -- which is to say, the grapefruit-sized skull of some hobbit-sized being -- in the limestone cave of Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. She lived perhaps 18,000 years ago. The Indonesian, Australian, American, and Dutch palaeontologists found other bones, too, of her contemporaries nearly as short, but the media flourish was over the "woman" only one metre high.

She has been assigned the name "Hominid LB-1", but let's call her "Flora". By a series of inferences we gather that she was also comparatively long-armed, had thick eyebrow ridges, a sharply sloping forehead, almost no chin, and was around 30 years of age. She lived in her island world among pony-height elephants, rats the size of golden retrievers, and giant lizards (including the Komodo dragons that are still with us). Her people hunted and cooked the little elephants especially, judging from charred bones found on site, and the stone-hewn cutting, chopping, and perforating tools of their batterie de cuisine.

Very clever indeed: for in the geological time-frame we are discussing, they could only have arrived on the island by boat.

Unmistakably of the genus Homo, but the speciation is open to debate. Palaeontologists have lately been painting a museum diorama of our Homo-sapien ancestors, sharing a planet with Neanderthals and other eco-competitors who disappeared, probably because we did them in. But Homo floresiensis appears to have gone down below a major volcanic eruption on Flores about 12,000 years ago. Whereas the remains of all current hominids are to be found only above that ash level, so we probably never met.

On the other hand, it is a large, mountainous, densely-forested tropical island. And the present-day inhabitants have detailed legends about little metre-high people they call Ebu Gogo, who murmur among themselves, can parrot human language, and pilfer unattended crops. So maybe we have met, and might still meet, somewhere in the nearly impenetrable interior of the island. Whereupon we would most likely discover, that they are us.

Palaeontologists love to discover new hominid species: it means fame, and big money. So far, more than 50 have been named by them. The discoveries can also be used, as this latest has been in the media, to debunk the religious notion that humans are unique, and illustrate evolutionary hypotheses.

Yet I myself, wandering through the streets of Calcutta seven years ago, in the rain and early-morning darkness, encountered an indisputably adult human woman of about the same weight as Flora (25 kilos), and only slightly taller. She was also blind, and being led through the mire by a man whom I took to be her husband -- himself, though much taller, implausibly diminutive. Malnutrition can do remarkable things to the human form. There is anyway great diversity in race and type: witness pygmies.

So when a palaeontologist tells us he has discovered a new hominid species, I am sceptical. There are a lot of palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists: more, quite literally, than there are ancient humanid bones for them to gnaw upon. And as one of the more prominent and sensible of them, Dr. Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide, has said after examining and graphing more than 200 such specimens -- from Australopithecines forward -- they all fall within the bell-curve of normal variation within a single species, over place and time.

In short: adaptation yes, Darwinism no.

As one of my scientific advisers explains (a certain Peter O'Donnell of Vancouver, B.C.), you have to put your faith in science case-by-case. In his view: "Gravitation looks okay, although the constant-G may have its flaws. Chemistry looks golden. Relativity seems a better framework than Newtonian dynamics, but one suspects a new overturning ahead. Evolution? Probably a pile of crap. It seems to spring from the same faulty thinking reservoir as Marxism and other failed ideological constructs of the early 20th century."

Whereas God, creator of heaven and earth, is a single-case hypothesis, and of a different kind.

There was a huge volcanic explosion on Flores 12,000 years ago, killing who knows how many hominids of whatever description. And this Christmas, an earthquake undersea off Sumatra sent tidal waves racing across the Indian Ocean, drowning hundreds even on the distant coasts of Somalia -- a poignant reminder that a world we did not make, is also beyond our control.

Our science could not yet predict the earthquake, let alone the waves. And nothing we can imagine could ever stop such an event, whose vibrations were felt around the earth, and which slightly wobbled its axis of rotation.

The evolutionary hypothesis is the chief source of the illusion that somehow we can gain control -- and make God finally answerable to man, instead of vice versa. But in wishing you a Happy New Year, "Flora" and I would like to remind you that this will never work.

David Warren

© Ottawa Citizen

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