What did people do in prehistoric times if something was lodged in their teeth? Surely animal sinews and husks of grains ended up crammed in between hominid teeth, tightly packed and relatively flat as they are.
My love for popcorn sparked this thought on the drive to work. Anyone who loves popcorn knows that it comes with a downside: getting tiny bits of kernel husk caught between the pearly whites (or the coffeed yellows, as the case might be). When brushing after eating popcorn, I’m a bit ashamed by the amount of kernels loosed from their cozy, gummy embedding.
It got me thinking further: humans are really poorly adapted to live in wilderness conditions. Yes, the Darwinists would argue that our big brains make up for our lack of power jaws, razor-sharp teeth, venomous chin sacks, natural swim fins, quick gazelle legs, and the like. As with many things, the Darwinists are half-right: our big brains do give humans a massive advantage over all other forms of life. Where the Darwinists are wrong is in how we got here.
In pondering the problem of prehistoric dental hygiene, it occurred to me that there is zero incentive in the context of Darwinian evolution for a species to favor the kind of hyper-complex intelligence that humans possess. “But Portly,” the Internet atheists will say, “you just said that our big brains give us a huge advantage! You’re contradicting yourself!” Look more closely: there’s zero incentive for a species to develop gradually over alleged millennia great intelligence if they already have some other natural advantage. If I’m a shark and I’ve already (allegedly) evolved to being an apex predator in the ocean, why do I need to risk the billions of invisible mutations to become more clever? There’s no upside to abandoning my current form factor.
The Darwinist will likely point to environmental factors. Fair, but what happens when there’s a sudden change in environment? The same people who argue that favorably adaptive traits will pass on to surviving members of that species will also decry extinction-level events caused by humans, claiming that these poor creatures can’t survive even delicate changes to environment. Well, how does evolution work if the only incentive to pursue new traits or mutations comes from major ecological and/or environmental shifts, but those shifts are so destructive they cause entire species to go extinct?
Perhaps a remnant survives and passes on the good genes that allowed them to weather the ecological storm. Certainly that happens, and we see it in humans: humans who survived the Black Death passed that resistance on to their offspring. Those who were overly susceptible to the disease died out. But a new species of human didn’t evolve; the same species merely weeded out members unable to withstand the plague (which was about one-third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century).
But the alleged change into entirely new species is nonsense. Adaptation is real, but Darwinists point to it as evidence that evolution occurs. One could just as easily argue that adaptation is evidence for design: God Created animals, plants, fungi, etc., to exist in certain conditions and in certain places for a reason. Rather than slowly evolving over millions of years to fit specific ecological niches, they were designed to live in them. Certain alleles might be more successful than others and, therefore, survive to the next generation, but they’re morphing into new species.
So we return to the teeth. Human teeth aren’t super sharp. Our jaws aren’t massively strong. Yes, our bites hurt and we can bite through quite a lot. If you’ve ever bitten down on an unpopped kernel of corn, though, you understand how fragile our bony calcium deposits are. We have had to develop tools specifically to maintaining them and our bloody gums just so we can enjoy fresher breath and healthier teeth.
If we evolved—and if evolution worked as advertised—we would have developed sharper teeth and more powerful jaws. Or we would have claws or venom or the like. Hands are amazing for creating and using tools, but don’t make sense if the whole goal is day-to-day survival. The fact that we have opposable thumbs, bland teeth, and massive brains suggests we had to be designed, because these things just don’t make sense in the context of Darwinian evolution.
God Made us in His Image. We are imbued with souls. We possess animal characteristics, yes; but we are both animals and something more. Our mastery over God’s Creation—really the stewardship He Gave us over it—is a reflection of God’s mastery over us. It’s a massive responsibility.
The more I dwell on Darwinian evolution, the less it makes sense. The profound abundance and variety of life simply seems too broad to be the result of random chance over millions of years. It takes far less a leap of faith to see God’s Creative Hand in Creation than it does to believe that new species morphed out of old ones without someone catastrophically dying (just read about the theory that dolphins and whales evolved from seaside wolves/rats/hippos and you’ll see how ludicrous this stuff sounds).
Reject evolution; embrace Christ.