Prizing our uniqueness enough, the animals we’ll distance!
Jeeves: This begs the question: if the life of quality -
Attributed by the ‘clever’ to owning pots of money
And by the ’simple’ to having a large brain - is a gift quite separate
From animal mentality, how did the human mind originate?
Bertie: I would venture to guess that the mind of man either mushroomed
Among the ape-like grandchildren of Prosimia, or was primally groomed
For a fuller, more blessed life by the power of Venus,
The mother of creation, and so of the Homo genus.¹
Jeeves: Your Venusian theory of the origins of Reason, sir,
Is as plausible as anything an evolutionary biologist has to offer,
Who infers from the threads, still intact in the moth-eaten strata,
A tapestry of evolutionary sequences and links without data. ²
Now a primitive fish, amphibian and reptile gird
For aeons of frustration, as they play their parts...
Landwards,
The fish must swim to grow legs, a crossopterygian,
(‘Not yet,’ says Ichthyostega, the oldest amphibian,
‘You’ve not even a pelvis!’) and the supposed steps of metamorphosis
Would have littered the Devonian floor with peg-leg chrysalises,
Had the sea not been acid to transitional forms.³
Swampwards,
The amphibian must climb towards reptilian ancestry, laying duds,
Until shell-suits, yolk, secretions to liquidize albumen
Could evolve one fine morning, with allantois for oxygen,
When the transition to terrestrial egg would be finally complete
And the emerging, reptilian sexuality of the parents could meet
¹ Venus, the goddess of love, is here standing for the Christian God., Yahweh.
² Evolutionary biologists claim (in their branching diagram of descent) to be able to specify all missing links. H.Gee doubts whether Paleontology substantiates the claim, as the fossil evidence is too patchy (“moth-eaten”) to support evolutionary narratives. His alternative theory, Cladistics, is now mainstream science. “Classification should not be a search for ancestry,” Gee writes. Jeeves now proceeds to show the absurdities to which “the story-telling mode of evolutionary history” leads us.
³ For the fish-to-amphibians transition, read “Yet Another 'Missing Link Fails to Qualify” a paper by A.A. Snelling. But Neil H Shubin’s team at Chicago Uni. claimed to have discovered a link in 2006, Tiktaalik roseae. T. Roseae has rudimentary “limbs” - but still no pelvis.