42 ~ ONE HUMAN FAMILY


basis, for understanding how animals had progressively turned into humans. The ‘hard science’ of those like Isaac Newton had achieved amazing transformations in understanding and harnessing nature. And now the well-deserved glamour of all that scientific progress could rub off to the benefit of Darwin’s (not-so) new idea.


Darwinism also meant that one could drop polygenism, and accept a single origin for mankind (to which a lot of evidence could already be seen to point)—without abandoning one’s desired belief in huge ‘racial differences’. And, even better for many, without having to go back to the long-abandoned belief in a divine, recent creation of Adam and Eve. Darwinism’s substitute way of having one’s cake and eating it too was simple. For one thing, the point of origin was pushed way backwards in time from the biblical 6,000 or so years. The obvious physical differences between the various ‘races’ of mankind were explained as the result of many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years of physical separation, while evolving in isolation from one another.


Darwinian evolution was not supposed to have any fixed


speed. And Darwin also understood that there was no inevitable progress involved in his theory. It was being driven by random factors such as natural variation. (Darwin did not know about mutations, used in modern evolutionary theory as the only ultimate source of variation available that could potentially create real novelty. But these are not guided by any goal or purpose either.) Natural selection,23


though unguided, could perhaps be


said to effect non-random change, in the sense that only traits suited to an environment prevail. But the environments that give rise to various selection pressures arise and change at random. So with nothing but randomness behind it all, groups separated from each other would naturally evolve in different directions and at different rates.


23. As seen later, in this book natural selection is taken as a straightforward logical consequence of biological variation and reproduction. But it is a culling, not a creative process, incapable of the type of change microbes-to-man evolution demands. See creation.com/muddy.


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