It’s been said and cited again and again that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. Whether or not that’s true, the universe, and all it contains, like us, is surely strange indeed.
EXTINCT ANCESTORS: Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved from other primates, most probably from chimpanzee stock in Africa when DNA relationships are analyzed. We have a 98% compatibility with chimpanzee DNA. However, there was a long chain of in-between hominoid species twixt chimpanzees and modern humans. Modern humans didn’t evolve willy-nilly in one jump from chimps. The interesting thing is that while all the numerous in-betweens have gone extinct, our ancestral primate chimpanzee stock didn’t. The anomaly is, why should ALL of our in-between ancestral species have gone extinct? We’re not talking one or two or three here, but dozens. It’s stretching credibility to the breaking point that one ancestral species should survive and thrive just long enough for the next in line ancestral species to evolve, and in turn survive and thrive, before going the way of the Dodo, and that this scenario was repeated again and again. There’s no real logical reason why some of our ancestral species couldn’t have survived to ultimately end up coexisting alongside modern humans to this very day.
HUMAN CULTURE & CIVILIZATION: There are two relatively unexplained turning points in the evolution of modern man when contrasted with our more primate-like ancestors. One is the acquisition of what we call culture. Culture (like art appreciation and abstract ideas like an afterlife) happened within a fairly narrow timeframe, roughly 50,000 years ago, wherever nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers gathered. Why the sudden transition? The second great leap forward, again, within a narrow timeframe, some 9000 years ago, was the transition from nomadic lifestyles to settlements – farming crops and herding now domesticated wildlife. Settlements rapidly became villages became towns became cities. While some nomadic hunter-gatherers still roamed the plains, like the Australian aboriginal, what was once that nomadic rule now became that exception to that rule. In both cases, culture and civilization, the observational evidence is rock-solid; theory can’t really explain the transition, or at least the relatively rapid transition, around the world, from the tried-and-true before-the-fact pre-cultural nomadic lifestyle to the unknown leap of an untested experiment with culture and settlements.
CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. The anomaly is between what our ancient ancestors couldn’t have been expected to know, logically, with what they knew. Their knowledge, often expressed in their mythologies and religions, that there were in fact creations – the universe, stars, solar systems, life, and the human species - therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than they could have possessed. Who passed that information on down the line?
GIFT OF FIRE: In mythologies around the world, one common tale is that some junior deity nicked off with fire belonging to the senior gods, a hot technology that the senior gods had decreed humans shouldn’t have. These junior deities, Prometheus being the best known, in defiance of their superiors give the stolen fire to humans as a gift, usually at quite some considerable peril to their own life and limb. The anomaly here is exactly why presumably humans would come up with such a tall tale in the first place, not once but often and independently in cultures around the globe. The anomaly is because humans don’t need to receive fire as a gift from the gods; fire is a natural part of the human environment. It’s as logical as saying that the gods gave the gift of animals and plants for food, or air and water to humans and prior to that the human species didn’t eat or breathe or drink. At the time humans from many cultures invented the tale of fire from the gods, they had been using fire for tens of thousands of years! Perhaps the gift of “fire” wasn’t really “fire” at all but something more dangerous that the senior gods in their wisdom knew we shouldn’t have, like a parent knows better than to let their very young child play with matches.
HUMAN UNIQUENESS: The anomaly here is that we humans are not just a different species to all others past and present, but vastly, vastly different. Four vastly different differences in particular strike me as odd.
We alone of all the mammals are bipedal. We alone of all the primates are ‘furless’ – the “Naked Ape” as Desmond Morris described us. We alone of all species that are and have ever been, are top of the pops in IQ; king of the hill by an extraordinary wide margin in intelligence or the ability to figure things out, call it what you will, plus the use of tools and technology way above that of any other species. Lastly, humans have very distinct facial features – it’s usually how we recognize the identity of another human we’ve seen before. With all other animal species, you’re hard pressed to tell one individual from another based on facial features. You see one sheep’s face, you’ve seen them all. You tend to recognize individuals of other species by size, color and colored patterns, some sort of deformity or abnormality, not by their distinctive facial features which don’t really exist.
If it suits all the other mammals to adopt a four-legged gait and be quadrupeds; if it suited our nearly 200 other primate cousins to retain their fur; if all other species can exist, survive, even thrive without screwdrivers, the automobile, plastics, central heating, the dishwasher, the Internet and the atomic bomb then we have an anomaly here. Every animal species is different from every other animal species, obviously, but there are differences and then there are DIFFERENCES! The human species is so far out in left field as to be nearly out of the biodiversity ballpark.
MORE NAKED APE: Humans of all mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of freshwater. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was so extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s where we get our word, salary from. It would appear that in this case, Mother Nature goofed! Not only did this backwards evolutionary step make us more highly dependent on freshwater and salt than would otherwise have been the case, but since we lost our hairy covering in order to sweat, we’ve been forced to replace that hairy covering with artificial coverings – clothes. If only we’d kept our fur, but then clothing manufacturers and the fashion industry wouldn’t have ever existed!
INTELLIGENT DESIGN: THE EYES HAVE IT: Presumably, in the wild, animals that are active in the daytime need as close to perfect eyesight as makes no odds. They need near perfect vision to find prey, to avoid predators, to navigate, especially those animals who navigate in all three dimensions like flying birds and other creatures (like monkeys) that have an up-and-down as well as a front-back and a left-right lifestyle.
I’m not aware that any of the great apes, and that includes chimpanzees (our closest living ancestral species), are often in need of corrective lenses – they exist perfectly well without glasses, or at least that would be the case with the vast majority. Yet the reverse seems to be the case with humans, their descendents. A very large percentage of the human species have problems with their vision yet require (if they want to read, drive a car, watch TV, sew or play video games) acute vision made possible by glasses, contact lenses, surgery, etc. Presumably, before the invention of corrective lenses, people employed for certain tasks had to undergo an eye exam – like those transcribing by hand onto parchment, say the Bible; an archer in medieval times; a chariot driver in pharaoh’s army. And if you were part of the Mayan emperor’s ball team and couldn’t see very well, well you wouldn’t live to have bad vision for long.
So, why do many humans have less than 20/20 vision, yet wildlife, even domesticated animals, seem to be able to see with visual acuity for whatever passes for their 20/20?
SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION: The anomaly here is that, albeit very rare, the human body can spontaneously burst into flame, killing the victim and turning the body into ash. It’s anomalous in that 1) the human body is composed mainly of water which you don’t tend to associate with fire or spontaneous combustion; 2) the body’s temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is hardly scorching heat; 3) this anomaly isn’t noticed in animals; 4) the fire is localized to just the body and immediate surroundings despite the intense heat needed to consume a human body, and obvious sources of external fire, say a burning candle, are usually lacking. The closest theory is that perhaps the victim’s body was saturated with alcohol from excessive drinking, and alcohol of course can burn, but that rarely fitted the lifestyle of the victim and it would take one hell of a drinking binge to saturate bodily tissues with alcohol in high enough concentrations to cause the body to combust. Since animals don’t spontaneously combust, that tends to rule out body fat as a fuel source.
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