Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Just So Stories

A little over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, published a series of children's stories called Just So Stories. Recently, in an anthropologist Dr. Nina G. Jablonski explains the importance of man's "sweaty skin" to evolution:

"On an evolutionary level, there are three remarkable facts about skin. It comes in colors, of course. Compared to other mammals, our skin is relatively hairless. And it’s sweaty. In the last few million years, humans became the sweatiest of mammals.

Q. Is that important?

A. Absolutely. It’s often said that our large brains are what made it possible for us to evolve from ape to human. But those big brains could never have developed if we didn’t have exceptionally sweaty skin.

It happened this way. There was a tremendous takeoff in human evolution about two million years ago when primates who could no longer be called apes appeared in the savannahs of East Africa. These early humans ran long distances in open areas. In order to survive in the equatorial sun, they needed to cool their brains. Early humans evolved an increased number of sweat glands for that purpose, which in turn permitted their brain size to expand. As soon as we developed larger brains, our planning capacity increased, and this allowed people to disperse out of Africa. There’s fossil evidence of humans appearing in Central Asia around this time."


Mr. Kipling had nothing on this lady! This story may make logical sense if such changes came about according to the conditions. However, according to theory, these changes take way more time than a few hot summers in Africa. But give it ten years and this story "It happened this way ..." will be standard fare in the science texts read by our impressionable young people.

Is it any wonder that our young people are leaving the church in droves. The "public " schools push the evolutionary dogma and persecute children that seek to pray on school time. The church is lucky to have them two hours a week! Most parents, if the truth be told, probably have them for less time than the church!

Indeed, Jesus could not stand such hypocrisy. When will we learn??

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