Darwin and Evolution: The Missing Link-Critique-Part III

When Darwin published his famous work “Origin of Species”, little did he realize that his work would make people jump to too many conclusions too soon on the issue of evolution. When Darwin suggested that humans evolved from primates, his studies were dubbed as heretical. But as paleontologists began searching and studying human fossils, they shared Darwinian zeal to prove that humans evolved from a bunch of primates and grew more intelligent with each successive stage (as evident from the larger brain size).

As some contradictory finds were made like Lucy or the little China man, they were termed as aberration in the seemingly straight chain of fossil finds that showed the trend of evolving humans with larger brain sizes. As paleontology could never be an absolute science that depended solely on absolute results, the story of human evolution is considered to be complete with lots of gumption, assumption and deduction providing fillers in the gaps of evolution sequence.

One such gross assumption is that human intelligence was part of human evolution. While Darwin studied evolution, he noted how certain species evolved different traits in a different environment and how the most adaptive survived the longest. Similarly, while studying human evolution, we assume that humans evolved with a given set of intelligence parameters and these continued to grow to the present day.

We study Australopithecus, Neanderthals and the so-called modern human beings and we assume that they all were evolving intellectually at the same time. We never tried to separate intelligence from the physical evolution of the humans. Modern theories of evolution suggest that human evolution began some 1.5 million years ago and several sub-species evolved before the emergence of modern humans some 30-40K years ago. They also suggest how modern humans emerged first in Africa and spread across Europe and other continents, causing perhaps the extinction of their counterparts in Europe, the Neanderthals, along the way.

If evolution is all about the survival of the fittest, could it be possible that modern humans were more intelligent than their predecessors were? Could it also be possible that they were really the first and the only truly intelligent beings on earth? After all, what proof do we have of intelligent activities before the emergence of modern humans? The earliest expressions of human intelligence are perhaps cave paintings, pottery making, development of special tools and the modicum of social interaction that led to settlement of humans in colonies and groups. And all this evidence dates back to perhaps 40-30,000 years or even less. The use of languages is perhaps as late as 15-10,000 years old or less. The written scripts came about 5500-3000 years ago. Earliest civilizations are also about 10-5,000 years or so old. All this evidence amply suggests that human intelligence 'suddenly' appeared some 40-30,000 years ago and made humans the most advanced species on this planet within a relatively short period of time.