 “At one time, science said man came from
apes. Did it not? Every time I read or hear that, I think to
myself: You just didn’t read the same Bible I did. Well, this is
what’s interesting, though. If that is true, why are there still
apes? Think about it.” – Herschel Walker, Senatorial candidate
from Georgia, 2022.
I thought about it; we all thought about it. Many who heard
Walker’s comments during his debate with Raphael Warnock,
dismissed his incoherent ramblings as the words of a victim of
CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) - brain injuries he
suffered during his football days. However, aside from the
obvious truth that this level of ignorance among our elected
officials is easily as dangerous as Vladimir Putin playing with
nuclear weapons, I was struck by the other obvious truth: most
of the Republican Party shares Walker’s views on how and when
Homo sapiens emerged on earth. These guys are medieval
chowderheads.
Shortly after retiring from the NFL, Walker was diagnosed with
severe dissociative identity disorder which produces “a lack of
connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions,
or sense of identity. For Walker it meant blacking out during
episodes of intense rage”. The Democratic critique of Walker as
a senatorial candidate is primarily focused on his hypocrisy
concerning his opposition to abortion, and perhaps that’s good
strategic politics in Georgia. But Walker’s psychiatric
disabilities are singularly relevant because his mental
processes are severely impaired. He is manifestly unqualified to
hold any public office, much less, the office of an American
Senator.
According to Evangelical Christian doctrine, the earth was
created ~6,000 years ago. Homo sapiens didn’t evolve at all;
they were magically created by a supernatural entity known as
God. The famous teleological argument made by William Paley in
the late 1700’s was an attempt to prove the existence of God by
claiming that only an intelligent designer, the Biblical God,
could have designed and created a human eye. His argument was
that a human eye could not have emerged incrementally because an
imperfect eye could not see. The eye had to have been designed
all at once by a Creator. Paley’s argument was further
illuminated by his famous “watch analogy”, where he argues that
“just as the function and complexity of a watch implies a
watch-maker, so likewise the function and complexity of the
universe implies the existence of a universe-maker”. William
Paley was the father of today’s Creationism and Intelligent
Design. He died a half century before Charles Darwin published
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.
And even though the world that humans have designed is much more
complex and intricately connected than Paley’s world was - a
world where functioning eyes are found in most species, and
watches keep time by using a constellation of 24 orbiting
satellites that are accurate to within three nanoseconds -
three-billionths of a second, - this theological nonsense
underlies much of American culture these days. And nobody says a
word. It’s not that everyone agrees with the tenets of
Evangelical Christianity; it’s that we have been conditioned not
to criticize any religion whatsoever. But the ground rule has
always been that religion is a private matter that is not
permitted to hold sway in a secular government like ours. But
now the Republican Party has delivered us a theocratic majority
on the Supreme Court, a court with medieval Christian
tendencies, and it feels like The Venerable Bede all over again.
Since the western world inherited the Abrahamic body of
theological thought, replete with End Times eschatology, it is
reasonable to assume that what lies at the root of our current
decline might be a suicidal tendency to view events through the
lens of both the Old and New Testament - through the Bible. It
is the Bible that Herschel Walker referred to in his debate and
that Donald Trump waved in a naked political effort at virtue
signaling: It is the book that prophesizes an impending
Apocalypse.
Fear of death is a seminal emotion in human beings, and the
Republicans routinely exploit this evolutionary warning signal
in modern Homo sapiens to whip up votes. We are terrified by
pandemics – so let COVID rage on and encourage antivaxxer
denialism. We are anxious at the suggestion of nuclear holocaust
– so let’s tear up the Iran Nuclear Accord so that the Middle
East remains a dangerous caldron of geopolitical conflict. We
are fearful of the manifest consequences of climate change - and
by the descent toward ecological catastrophe and the
displacements caused by mass migrations – so, bring on the
climate deniers and suppress the means by which we can reduce
our reliance on fossil fuels. Our fear is that our society is
slowly lumbering toward collapse, so make sure that every person
in America has a gun to protect himself when it does. The
Republican attempted takeover of the United States is nothing
but a fraud conceived by a notorious conman.
This coming week on November 8th, 2022, our nation appears to be
deciding whether to remain a modern liberal democracy or the
fulfillment of an ancient prophesy of Armageddon. We are America
in a time of massive fear promulgated by those who are morally
bankrupt.
During the Walker/Warnock debate, Walker assumed a
holier-than-thou posture by saying anyone who disagreed with his
analysis of human origins was misinformed: “You just didn’t read
the same Bible I did”. One book - the writings of which are
thought to have begun in the early Iron Age (c. 1200 BCE) - is
the only book read by well over one billion people on earth. It
is at once both a beautiful historical artifact - and an
impermeable membrane that retards the progress of human inquiry.
We cannot afford to permit this archaic style of thinking to
have sway in the government of the United States. Americans have
morphed into Cheese Whiz lotus eaters; pluralism has failed to
establish a polity unified under Enlightenment values and,
instead, has constructed a Tower of Bable where no person
understands the other; educational standards have ceded
authority to fringe religious cults; our preoccupation with
consumerism has supplanted most other productive pursuits in
life. Grievance has replaced motivation. A rejection of
science-based thinking has led to superstition and to our
current flood of conspiracy theories.
Instead, we must find an argument that can convince ½ of the
American population to maintain a sustainable world where
frauds, conmen, and the extraordinarily wealthy are not given
perverse incentives to parasitize an undereducated population of
believers.
The title of this essay refers to The Doomsday Clock established
in 1947 by former scientists of the Manhattan Project and
members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Bulletin
(https://thebulletin.org/about-us/board-of-sponsors/ ) claims as
supporters over 40 Nobel Laureates. The Doomsday Clock was
intended to be a metaphor for the imminence of a man-made global
catastrophe that kills all life on earth – an apocalypse. In
1947, the Doomsday Clock was set at seven minutes to midnight
following the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was
reset at two minutes to midnight on January 24, 2018 due to the
nuclear threats of North Korea and the administration of Donald
Trump. The scientists concluded that the "Hyperbolic rhetoric
and provocative actions by both sides have increased the
possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation".
The clock will be reset in January of 2023.
Herschel Walker and most Republicans in the 117th U.S. Congress
are proof that, as Christopher Hitchens observed: “Our
prefrontal lobes are too small, and our adrenal glands are too
big.” Most current Republicans are unqualified to serve as
legislators or Justices of the Supreme Court because their
worldview is informed by mythology and not by science. And
throughout the Bible, the drone of Apocalypse is a central
theme. “Think about it”, as Herschel Walker suggests.
Climate denialism, anti-Covid reality, anti- vaxxers, anti-gun
control, and anti-government, are all political positions
espoused by the guy who asks: “Why are there still apes?”. The
answer is not Jesus, but his question does deserve an answer.
The answer is evolution through the process of natural
selection. The answer is mutation.
“Mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation, and
is essential for evolution by natural selection: indeed, most of
our genome has been shaped primarily by mutation and random
drift” - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871826
We are the sole survivors of the genus Homo. The genus Homo
diverged from great apes ~5-8 million years ago. Homo sapiens
are believed to have originated ~100,000 - 200,000 years ago.
Modern Homo sapiens are referred to as Homo sapiens sapiens and
are the subspecies of Homo sapiens. They comprise modern humans
only.
To arrive at our exalted position in the web of life, a mutation
occurred (a substitution) of a single nucleotide (a basic
building block of nucleic acids RNA and DNA) in the brains of
Homo sapiens that was not present in either Neanderthals or
Denisovans, our most recent ancestors. This unique mutation
caused an increase in the neurodevelopment in Homo sapiens that
resulted in advanced cognitive abilities. Apes exist today
because we evolved and out-competed them. Apes cannot destroy
life on earth, but we can.
“Modern humans differ from apes and Neanderthals and Denisovans
by this single amino acid change… Transketolase-like 1 (TKTL1)
It is one of the few proteins with a single amino acid
substitution found in essentially all present-day humans but
absent from extinct archaic humans, the Neanderthals and
Denisovans, and other primates… This human-specific amino acid
substitution in TKTL1 is a lysine in apes and archaic humans but
an arginine in modern humans. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abl6422
A serendipitous mistake.
The point of this is to show that, while our Legislators and
Supreme Court Justices cannot be required to be familiar with
current neuroscience, they must be familiar with modern science
and the impact it has had and will have upon life on earth.
There must be barriers to entry for positions in our federal
government so that our liberal democracy does not slip into
another Dark Age – an age where Satan was everywhere, and
religion was a tool in support of theocracies and monarchies.
Claims of religious affiliation must be eliminated from our
public discourse. These are the shibboleths of an ancient world
of superstitions and remain symbols for contemporary political
manipulation.
I write this essay as a critique of Evangelical Christianity and
the political party that exploits the credulity of its
followers. I have not been fearful because, over the years, I
have asked myself: “Who in America would break into the home of
an elderly person and attack that frail body with a hammer
because of political zealotry? What man in America would do such
a barbarous thing to a defenseless person?” But today, this
confidence no longer exists.
I have felt safe until this week. America was not intended to be
the nursery of enraptured psychopaths, missionaries of God, or
Christian soldiers. But it has evolved into this because these
zombies are bedeviled by the lies of the Republican Party. We
may, indeed, lose our liberal democracy to these fools; and the
earth’s fragile ecosystems may, indeed, collapse because of the
barbaric and ruthless zealots of business in the Republican
Party.
Homo sapiens sapiens might die out because of this species’
greed and brutishness – its atavistic nature, its savagery in
the face of beauty. Life on earth will renew, but perhaps
without us.
But I am not afraid to speak out now in this year of moral
bankruptcy because I know that life does not need us. Life on
earth is a self-rocking cradle. |
