EVOLUTION OF MAN

The Urantia Book tells us that just over 1 million years ago, three mutational ‘jumps’ gave rise, firstly to the dawn mammals, then the mid-mammals, followed by a group it calls the primates who were the immediate ancestors of man. These events occurred in an isolated Mesopotamian peninsular since inundated.

Anthropological work presently occurring in Africa has uncovered fossils that may go back as far as 3.5 million years and which bear evidence of the evolution of bipedalism in a species, the Australopithecines, that may be related to modem man.

This work is reviewed in an accompanying paper and compared with the story given in The Urantia Book. It is concluded that there is no definitive evidence for the claim that Africa was the cradle of mankind. It is possible that the Australopithecines and the group called Homo habilis, were related to the dawn mammals, but neither group fit the role of direct ancestors of mankind as described in The Urantia Book.

The account in The Urantia Book tells us that even the loss of the first two humans, Andon and Fonta, though delaying human evolution, would not have prevented it. It tells us that subsequent to the appearance of this pair, there evolved no less than seven thousand favorable strains which could have achieved some sort of human type of development. It appears then that the genetic pool was ripe for the emergence of man, and that many dead end paths were followed. Perhaps the African fossils may represent some of those dead end pathways.

The Urantia Papers were received at a time when the possible evolution of mankind was a popular topic among the educated classes of that day, and the search for the missing link’ received much publicity. Java man, Peking man, Heidleberg man, Piltdown man, Cro-Magnon man, and Neanderthal man were well known Though Piltdown man was the best known specimen and was accredited in 1934 by such prominent figures as Louis Leakey of Olduvai Gorge fame, and though all of the other famous fossils receive mention in The Urantia Book, nevertheless mention of Piltdown man was avoided. The fact that Piltdown man was a fake did not surface until the 1950’s.
REFERENCES: J. Reader 1981. “Missing Links” (Little, Brown and Co. Boston and Toronto); Lovejoy, L. Owen 1988 “Evolution of Human Walking” Scientific American 295(5) 118; The Urantia Book, Papers 61, 62, 63.

The Urantia Book account in the Light of Modern Anthropology

The Urantia Book tells us that the just over one million years ago, three mutational ‘jumps’ gave rise to, firstly, the dawn mammals, then the mid-mammals, followed by a group it calls the Primates who were the immediate ancestors of man. These events occurred in an isolated Mesopotamian peninsula bordering the Mediterranean Sea and cut off from the north by glaciers. A fourth mutation resulted in the birth of extraordinary twins, Andon and Fonta who were the ancestral parents of all mankind.

The immediate ancestors of the first mutation, the dawn mammals, had life plasm from both the American and the central life implantation, the latter having evolved in Africa. However there is no reference to when that mixing occurred and it may have been very early in the evolutionary story. These ancestors are described as early lemurs types.

Historical Anthropology

The word lemur appears to have had a quite different connotation during the period leading up to the receipt of the Urantia Papers than it does today. A book written by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) had enormous influence upon students of anthropology and biology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that has carried on into modern times. Haeckel introduced the concept of a phylum, the words phylogeny and ontogeny, and proposed his fundamental biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, ideas that most schoolchildren still learn. Haecket also created the concept of an evolutionary tree leading from what he called the Monera and the Amoeba upwards to man. He gave the name Lemuroidea to the group that were ancestral to the apes, the chimpanzee, gorilla, gibbon, and orang, ultimately leading to man. He also speculated that the location for man’s evolution was a land-mass now submerged below the Indian ocean which he called Lemuria after the ancestral primates, the lemurs, that would have characterized the fauna of this ancient continent. Supposedly, from this cradle of the human race came the ancestor that Haeckel called Pithecanthropus alulus (speechless ape-man) who would have spread out to Africa, the Middle East and Europe, northward to Asia and over the landbridge to the Americas, and eastwards via Java to Australasia and Polynesia.

Haeckel’s book was translated into a dozen languages, and drew the comment from Darwin that “all the conclusions that I arrived at in ‘The Descent of Man’ I find confirmed by the naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.”

The Urantia Book tells us that the immediate ancestors of the dawn mammal were superior descendants of the lemur type of mammal, not related to pre-existing gibbons and apes, and not the offspring of the modem type of lemur, though springing from an ancestor,common to both, but long since extinct. We are not told for how long these ancestors had existed nor how wide spread they were, The dawn mammals originated a little more than a million years ago.

It is quite possible that the ancestors of the dawn mammals had already spread into Africa and may have been ancestral to Australopithecus, also to the group called Homo habilis (which really cannot be distinguished from the Australopithecines), and possibly to the African Homo erectus type represented by the skull found by Louis Leakey in Tanzania, Africa, which he considered was related to the Java and Peking man, but which had an especially thick-boned skull.

Louis and Mary Leakey

Louis Leakey was the driving force that gave rise to the extensive anthropological investigations in the Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Leakey was African-born of missionary parents and became a student of Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent British anthropologist who was a firm believer in the antiquity of Homo sapiens.

Prior to World War 1, Professor Hans Reck from the University of Berlin had claimed that a human skull and skeleton found in the lower deposits of the Olduvai Gorge was as old as the extinct animal fossils from the same level. He announced the discovery in March, 1914, stating that the ribs and breast were akin to those of an ape while the skull was unmistakably human. Skeptics suggested that it was of recent origin, but Reck affirmed his belief that the skeleton was contemporary with extinct animals of the Lower Pleistocene age. As a result of the interruption of World War 1, nothing was resolved until Leakey led an expedition in 1928-9 and skulls were discovered in a cave near Elmenteita which were very like the Olduvai skull but were associated with much younger fossil fauna. Leakey also found a number of hand axes that he was certain were from deposits of the same age as the Olduvai site.

In the August 1985 issue of Scientific American, on pages 88-86, three scientists from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, present an article entitled “Young Supernova Remnants.” This article is of particular interest to scientifically inclined readers of The Urantia Book, since it presents a discussion of the nova of 1572 in terms of current thinking about the causes of such events.

The story begins in November of 1572, when, as a young man, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe found a “new star” in the constellation Cassiopeia. Tycho observed the star from its appearance, when it was as bright as the planet Venus, until its disappearance in March 1574. Tycho drew an important philosophical lesson from his observations that the ancient Aristotelian dogma, which asserted the immutability of the realm of “fixed stars” was false. This realization, supported by an observed event, contributed to the intellectual climate from which sprang the later work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton.

In 1935, the Indian astrophysicist, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, showed that a star which is at least 40% more massive than the sun will, after exhausting its sources of energy, eventually collapse into an extremely dense sphere of matter which explodes violently.

Current theory holds that one class of novas, called Type 1, are actually explosions occurring in double star systems. One member of such a double star system is an old, energetically exhausted, and very dense white dwarf star. If the white dwarf orbits close to a normal companion star, its intense gravity will draw matter from the surface of the second star. Eventually, the mass of the white dwarf will grow beyond Chandrasekhar’s limit leading to a violent explosion which disrupts both stars. Another class of novas, called Type 11, do not arise from double stars, but occur as natural events in the evolution of single massive stars.

In 1952, the remnant of Tycho’s nova was discovered with the 250-foot radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. In the years since its discovery, Tycho’s remnant has been extensively mapped by radio telescope and, most recently, by the orbiting Einstein X-ray Observatory. These observations show that Tycho’s remnant resulted from the explosion of a double star, as stated in The Urantia Book.

The Scientific American article is accompanied by a number of dramatic images of supernova remnants, as well as by a charming period engraving illustrating the location of Tycho’s “new stat” in the heavens.
REFERENCES: The Urantia Book p. 458; Urantia Brotherhood Bulletin.

Homo habilis

Later, at Olduvai, when New fossils came to light in bed 1, below where Zinjanthropus was found, Leakey promptly downgraded Zinjanthropus to the status of a non-tool making aberrant offshoot from the human line, and labeled the New fossils as derived from Homo habilis (handy man). The fossils were lighter in tooth and bones than Zinjanthropus. The major find was at site labeled FLK NN and included a large collection of bones of many kinds. Among them, anatomists identified hominid bones belonging to three individuals — the corpses of which may have been devoured by scavengers. John Napier found evidence of two hands, one juvenile and the other adult with an opposable thumb thought to be capable of tool manufacture. Michael Day reconstructed an almost complete adult left foot with no sign of an ape’s divergent big toe. Philip Tobias reconstructed a skull with an estimated cranial capacity of 680 cc. The scanty remains appeared to represent a hominid with a relatively large brain, thin human-like skull bones, Homo-like dentition, manipulative hands, and the ability to make stone tools.

The extensive researches of Mary Leakey on stone tools had indicated that two different cultures had existed simultaneously at Olduvai. One of these was associated with certain types of hand tools and called the Olduvai or Oiduwan culture, while the other was associated with what were called Archeulean hand axes. Only tools of the Oldowan culture were found with Homo habilis fossils, never the Acheulean handaxes. Fossils were eventually unearthed throughout beds I and 2.

More recent investigation of Homo babilis and its relation to stone tools was brought to light by author Marvin Harris. According to Harris, the discovery of limb bones of a female habilis in Olduvai Gorge in 1986 forced a re-examination of the whole question of whether stone toolmaking is an adequate basis for identifying members of the genus Homo. Habilis turns out to be only a little over three feet tall -just like the diminutive afarensis ‘Lucy’ — and it still had curved toes and fingers, long arms, and short legs indicative of a life in which tree-climbing continued to play some kind of role. Except for its bigger brain and association with stone tools, babilis is virtually indistinguishable from the earliest Australopithecines. While stone tools have never been found in close association with a gracile Australopithecine, there is compelling reason to conclude that at least some of them did make such tools. The earliest simple stone choppers and flakes are from sites in the Omo Valley and at Gona in the Hadar region of Ethiopia. The Omo tools are dated at 2.5 million years and a provisional date for the Gona tools is 3.1 million years, long before Homo babilis arrived at Olduvai. The Australopithecines seem to have been the only hominids alive those times, so presumably made the tools.

Harris concludes that despite the mote elaborate tools and bigger brains of habilis, there is no evidence that it was a hunter of large game. Its small size and curved fingers and toes — needed to for effective tree-climbing — do not bespeak of boldness of the hunt, and the tools, though they could be useful in butchering large animals show no signs of being useful in hunting them. Our ancestors must have remained primarily scavengers.

In 1970 Louis Leakey discovered what was claimed to be a Homo erectus skull (but with especially thick bones) in upper Bed 2, and it was thought that this species may have been responsible for the Acheulean hand axes. (note: The skull has been assigned an age of 500,000 years but no data appear to be available for the skull capacity of this H. erectus material from Olduvai).

Many do not agree that Homo babilis is truly a species of Homo but believe it may be a representative of the Australopithecines. A skull capacity of 680 cc. is less than the 700-800 cc. that was considered to be a boundary for defining Homo. Others (including Louis Leakey) believe that skull size has to be related to body size in defining Homo, but this seems to be dubious. For example if we could reduce a man to the size of a sparrow would he still have the same intellect?

Corroboration of Age

Louis Leakey died in 1972 and the reins were taken over at Olduvai by his son, Richard, who supported his father’s view that the ancestors of Australopithecine and Homo split from a common ancestor perhaps 6 or 7 million years ago. Others believe that the Australopithecines were direct ancestors of man, the split occurring about 2 million years ago. The evidence for both views is the same — additional fossils found at East Turkana and in Ethiopia.

In 1968, Kay Behrensmeyer found stone tools at a site called KBS at Turkana and Richard Leakey found an Australopithecus skull in the same year at a site thought to older than KBS. A second skull was too fragmentary for conclusions to be drawn but Leakey thought it was nearer Homo. In 1970, 16 hominid fossils were found, in 1971, 26 more, and in 1972 a skull that came to be known as 1470 was found by Bernard Nguni who was part of a team that unearthed 150 accompanying fossil pieces. Three extra anatomists joined a team that included Richard and Mary Leakey, and Des wood and Walker by whom the skull was reconstructed. Walker thought it was a large-brained representative of Australopithecus, but Richard Leakey insisted that it was Homo. Initially 1470 was thought to be 2.6 million years old, but doubt gradually arose.

It is no easy matter to relate stratigraphy in different areas and nowhere is this better demonstrated than at the KBS site — a tuff which is a layer of solidified volcanic ash and the reference point against which 1470 and other important fossils were dated. A sample was sent to the team of Fitch and Miller for radiometric dating by the potassium-argon method. The answer given was 221 million years of age which was clearly impossible. This was put down to contamination and further samples were sent to Fitch and Miller which were assigned ages 2.4 million years and later 2.6 million years. Fitch and Miller then did series of samples including some which they took themselves — all said to be KBS tuff — and giving results ranging from 290,000 years to 19.5 million years! Paleomagnetic determinations (which relate the earth’s magnetic field to the magnetic properties of rocks) gave a date of 3 million years of age for the KBS site. Dr Garniss Curtis, University of California, Berkeley also using potassium-argon analysis assigned an age to the KBS tuff of 1.8 million years.

Further evidence of the age of the KBS site came from a quite different procedure. A general rule is that fossils of the same kind indicate rocks of the same age. Professor Basil Cooke, a geologist, presented a report on the fossil pigs of the Turkana basin which he compared with similar fossils from the Omo region 150 km away. Cooke was able to trace an identical line of evolutionary development in the pigs at Omo and Turkana which suggested that the KBS tuff should be of the same age as the Omo F strata of about 1.8 million years.

The’Oldest Man’

By dint of media interviews and magazine articles, the specimen called 1470 had been made ‘famous’ by Richard Leakey as the ‘oldest man’ with an age of 2.6 million years. Author John Reader has said, “The trouble is that paleo- anthropology is an interpretative science that depends upon expensive research, and publicity-conscious paleoanthropologists find that the title of the ‘oldest man’ is a most valuable asset in their quest for funds.” The problem of getting backing for research has obviously put enormous pressure upon the various personalities involved.

In 1973, the ‘oldest man’ scene shifted to Ethiopia. There, Dr Donald Johanson had worked mainly at the Afar region of N.E. Ethiopia — along the ravines and valleys of the Hadar River. The region is a fractured depression of the Earth’s crust that links the African Rift Valley and the rift systems of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

In October 1973, four pieces of hominid leg bone were found, two of which belonged together and formed a perfect knee joint. These were considered to have belonged to a small adult, who unquestionably was capable of walking upright. The fossils came from deposits said to be over 3 million years old, hence Johanson had found the earliest conclusive evidence for bipedalism.

In 1974 the Afar group made headlines with the recovery of about forty percent of an entire skeleton — a female about 20 years old but very small — between 107 and 122cm. This is the famous “Lucy”, to be discussed later, whom Johanson classified as either a small Homo or Australopithecus. In 1975, a family” of bones was found consisting of perhaps 13 individuals. Johanson thought they were Homo, the bones being larger than Lucy. However there were no skulls to provide evidence of a relatively large brain.

Later in 1974 the scene shifted back to Lactoli, near Olduvai, where Mary Leakey and her son Philip recovered fossils said to be 3.5 million years old that included teeth, one juvenile mandible, and one adult mandible which resembled the Afar fossils about 20OOkm away. This find allowed them to reclaim the “oldest man” title. Mary Leakey also came across some remarkable hominid footprints by two individuals, one smaller than the other -just like Lucy would have made. These also were dated as about 3.5 million years old.

Later Johanson and Dr White and Yves Coppens from the Leakey camp collaborated to analyze the fossils from both sites and finally they assigned both sets to Australopithecus afarensis. The considerable size variation was assigned to sexual dimorphism with relatively large males and small females. However the classification is controversial, the Leakey’s claiming that two species are involved at both sites, one ancestral to Australopithecus and the other to Homo. Another authority, Pro EP. Tobias classed both species as Australopithecine but labeled one A. afarensis ethiopicus and the other A. afarensis tanzanensis. The cranial capacity of the A. afarensis species is said to be barely larger than an ape of comparable size, such as the chimpanzee.

Bipedalism

In considering the evidence arising from the African fossils with the account of the evolution of man as presented in The Urantia Book, it is of interest to read the comments of Professor Owen Lovejoy. Prof. Lovejoy has expertise in anthropology, biochemistry, and anatomy, and was one of two who reconstructed, the pelvis of the famous Lucy. Prof. Lovejoy states that all primates other than man are basically quadrupedal and with good reason: walking on two limbs instead of four deprives us of speed and agility and all but eliminates the capacity to climb trees which yield important primate foods such as fruits and nuts. The evidence is indicative that bipedality preceded both tool making and increased brain size. Lovejoy has proposed that bipedality accompanied a set of behavioral adaptations that became the key evolutionary innovations leading to humans: lasting monogamy; care of offspring by both parents with the male providing high-energy food. According to Lovejoy’s hypothesis, bipedalism freed the hands of the male thus permitting it to carry food gathered from far away to its mate and their offspring. These developments must have come long before the current fossil record begins.

The Lucy skeleton includes many bones of lower limb, pelvis, and an intact sacrum. The pelvic features of a biped reflect the very different mechanics of two and four legged locomotion. Bipedalism requires a New role for most of the muscle groups of the lower limbs that in turn require changes in muscle structure and position, and changes in the design of the pelvis and hips.

In many ways Lucy’s pelvis is better designed for bipedalism than humans. Her ilia flare outward more sharply than those of the modern pelvis and her femoral necks are longer. Thus her abductor muscles enjoyed a greater mechanical advantage than for modern females, exerting less force to stabilize the pelvis, which reduced pressure on the hip-joint surfaces. However the flaring ilia and long femoral necks yield a pelvis that, in top view, was markedly elliptical resulting in a birth canal that was wide but short front to back. This construction was tolerable because Lucy predated the dramatic expansion of the brain; her infant’s cranium would have been no larger than a baby chimpanzee (note: Lucy was about 3 ft tall). Prof Lovejoy’s analysis of some of the anatomical changes involved in going from an habitual quadrupedal to bipedal mode of walking, and from an arboreal to a terrestrial habitat, illustrates just how vastly complex are the changes involved in these final stages of the evolution of mankind.

Prof Lovejoy also points out that as our human ancestors evolved a larger brain, the pelvic opening had to become rounder, to expand from front to back, and at the same time contract slightly from side to side. Nevertheless the difficulty of accommodating in the same pelvis an effective bipedal hip joint and an adequate passage for a large infant brain remains acute and the human birth process is one of the most difficult in the animal kingdom.

Basic evolutionary principles indicate that a species cannot develop detailed anatomical modifications for a particular behavior such as bipedality unless it consistently employs that particular behavior. The design of the human femoral neck is poorly engineered for climbing and arboreal acrobatics where it would be frequently subjected to bending stresses without at the same time being compressed by the abductors. The femoral neck in Australopithecus (includes Lucy) was even longer than humans and hence subject to even greater bending stress if Lucy took to the trees. Prof Lovejoy concludes that Lucy’s femoral neck was suited exclusively for bipedality — she was not just capable of walking upright; it had become her only choice. A review of the rest of the skeleton of Lucy and others of Australopithecus would reveal equally dramatic modifications that favor bipedality and rule out other modes of locomotion such as to the knee, the great toe, the foot. Lucy’s ancestors must have left the trees and risen onto two limbs well before her time, possibly at the very beginning of human evolution. Lovejoy thinks that provisioning by the male was the strategy that enforced bipedalism and that it occurred, despite its many disadvantages, long before our ancestors could.

Comparison with The Urantia Book Account

The speculation that the driving force behind human evolution was bipedalism combined with lasting monogamy, care of offspring by both parents, and male provisioning of the family with high-energy foods is of great interest when compared with the description in The Urantia Book of the three major mutational jumps that culminated in the birth of the parents of mankind. Describing the dawn mammals, The Urantia Book tells us that while they did not habitually walk on their hind legs, they could easily stand erect. They were flesh eaters. Food hunger and sex craving were well developed, and a definite sex selection was manifested in a crude kind of courtship and choice of mates. They would fight fiercely in defense of their kindred, and were quite tender in family associations.’They were affectionate and loyal to their mates. It is interesting that the dawn mammals were about the same size as ‘Lucy’ the bipedal Australopithecus, the study of which helped formulate Lovejoy’s conclusions. However, ‘Lucy’ and her kinsfolk could not have been directly related to the dawn mammals. Even if the dating of Lucy’s time on earth is hopelessly wrong (which is perhaps quite possible), The Urantia Book tells us that the dawn mammals were completely eliminated by their successors, the mid-mammals, and this would mean that their fossils could only have been found on the Mesopotamian peninsula.

The mid-mammals were about four feet in height, and match the description of Lucy in respect to habitually walking upright, having feet almost as well suited for walking as humans, perfectly opposable thumbs, and longer legs and shorter arms than their predecessors. They had the emotional attributes of the dawn mammals plus an instinct for food hoarding, and they had started to use pebbles as offensive and defensive weapons. They built both arboreal and underground shelters. From a pair of very superior mid-mammals came the twins that gave rise to the next mutation, which The Urantia Book calls the Primates. This group attained an adult height of about five feet, and the cranial capacity was markedly larger than the mid-mammals. They had little hair on their bodies, could walk and run as well as their human descendants, and resorted to the tree tops only as a safety measure at night. They learned to communicate through signs and symbols at a level that was beyond the comprehension of the mid- mammals. They used stones and clubs in fighting, and also made use of sharp spicules of stone, flint, and bone.

The description in The Urantia Book of the four stepwise mutations that initiated the dawn and mid- mammals, the primates, and then humans are indicative of each being large sudden jumps, and not like the slow laborious procedure of environmental selection and accumulation of single, point mutations. Indeed, the description coincides much better with the modern concept of ‘punctuated equilibria’ by which entirely New species emerge without going through the gradualism of ‘natural selection.’

When we compare the account in The Urantia Book with the speculation based upon the fossil finds of Tanzania and Ethiopia we would have to conclude that neither the Australopithecines nor the Homo habilis or Homo erectus species proposed by the Leakey group were on the direct pathway of evolution leading to man. Likewise the species represented by Lucy is unlikely to have been directly on this pathway as her skeletal characteristics from the pelvis down to the feet appear to have been more human- like that the parents of the dawn mammals whom she long preceded. A clue to what may have been occurring is given on page 734 of The Urantia Book which says, “Even the loss of Andon and Fonta before they had offspring, though delaying human evolution, would not have prevented it. Subsequent to the appearance of Andon and Fonta and before the mutating potentials of animal life were exhausted, there evolved no less than seven thousand favorable strains which could have achieved some sort of human type of development. And many of these better stocks were subsequently assimilated by the various branches of the expanding human species.”

Conclusions

The most common scientific concept of the evolution of humans is that of a sequential accumulation of random favorable mutations which were selected through environmental pressures. The picture presented in The Urantia Book is that of planned evolution based upon previous experience gained on millions of planets prior to its occurrence on this earth. The full genetic potential that gave rise to humans was already present in the original life implantation, and the eventual emergence of human beings was inevitable. Apparently the several million years prior to the birth of Andon and Fonta could have been a period when humans were due to emerge from the genetic pool, a period in which large mutational jumps continually emerged from the base genetic pool giving rise to New species with the potential to give rise to humanity. That there could have been many dead end pathways is not at all surprising. It would appear that the African fossils may represent some of those dead end pathways, there being no direct evidence that any of the fossil Australopithecines and similar creatures of Africa were on the direct line of man’s ancestry. Indeed it would be very difficult, and probably impossible, to establish such a relationship for any fossil.

It is also of interest that the Urantia Papers were received at a time when the possible evolution of mankind was a well discussed topic among the educated classes of the day, most of whom would have been familiar with Java man, Peking man, Heidleberg man, Piltdown man, Cro-Magnon man, and Neanderthal man. Of these, the Piltdown man was one of the best known, and of him, Louis Leakey wrote in 1934 in his book, Adam’s Ancestors that, “the Piltdown skull is probably very much more nearly related to Homo sapiens than to any other yet known type,” and commented that he would have granted it full ancestral status if it had been vastly more ancient than the Kanam mandible he had recently found in East Africa. Piltdown man was not debunked as a fake until 1950, long after the Urantia Papers had been received in the mid-1930’s. The Urantia Book makes mention of all the above types of man’s ancestors or close relatives but avoided the mention of perhaps the best known of the time — the Piltdown man.
REFERENCES: Reader, J. 1981. “Missing Links” (Little, Brown and Co. Boston and Toronto); Lovejoy, C. Owen, 1988. “Evolution of Human Walking” Scientific American 295(5) 118; The Urantia Book, Papers 61, 62, 63.

EVOLUTION — GRADUAL OR EPISODIC

The Urantia Papers were received in the mid 1930’s when the concept that gradualism is the major mode of evolutionary change had become dogma for the great majority of paleontologists. Despite being against firmly entrenched current opinion, the Urantia Papers made this statement: “From era to era radically New species of animal life arise; they do not evolve as the result of the gradual accumulation of small variations; they appear as full-fledged and New orders of life, and they appear suddenly.” There are not less than twenty five statements in The Urantia Book that cite the sudden appearance of radically New and different species of plant and animal life. Hence there can be no doubt that the book , while not rejecting gradualism as a means of adaptation, places complete emphasis on sudden and radical change as being a major tool for the achievement of evolutionary advance. There is a qualification to this assertion which states: “The sudden appearance of New species and diversified orders of living organisms is wholly biologic, strictly natural. There is nothing supernatural connected with these genetic mutations.”

On the day before his revolutionary book “Origin of Species” was released in 1859, Charles Darwin received a letter from his friend, Thomas Henry Huxley, containing the warning; “You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting ‘Natura non facit saitum’ so unreservedly.” This Latin phrase means that “nature does not take leaps.” Huxley felt that natural selection required no postulate about rates of evolution, that it could function at varying, even very rapid, rates. However Darwin portrayed evolution as an orderly process, proceeding at virtually imperceptible rates. He argued that ancestors and their descendants must be connected by infinitely numerous transitional links forming the finest of graduated steps. There is almost no evidence in the geological record to support the concept of gradualism. Darwin admitted the imperfection of the geological record, and the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists even today as the trade secret of paleontology. However a substantial group of scientists are now prepared to believe that Huxley was right, and that the theory of evolution and natural selection does not necessarily require gradual change. Hence it is gradualism, not Darwinism, that is being rejected. An alternative concept to gradualism is that evolution proceeds in two major modes, firstly phyletic transformation by which a population changes suddenly from one state to another, and secondly speciation by which variation is introduced into a new population. This concept was put forward by Eldridge and Gould in 1972, and although at first it received considerable opposition, the view that evolution can proceed by sudden changes is now widely held among paleontologists.
REFERENCES: Eldridge, N., and Gould, S.J. 1972. “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.” in “Models in Paleobiology,” ed. T.J.M. Schopf (Freeman, Cooper and Co. San Francisco); The Urantia Book, p.669.