King of the world!

How mankind leapt to the top of the evolutionary tree.

Recently as I gazed out my window I noticed a small flock of birds circling in the sky. “Bet they aren’t worried about Covid-19”, I thought to myself. I am sure the same could be said of the fox I heard howling in the field the other night. No, Covid-19 is a human preoccupation and our fellow creatures on this planet neither know nor care about it.

This set me thinking about the differences between mankind, Homo sapiens, us – and what we refer to as the “animal kingdom”, i.e. everything else that moves or crawls about. As far as I understand it – and I am not a scientist – we are all part of an evolutionary process which, if you go back far enough, leads us to a common ancestor. In other words we are all distant cousins, albeit very distant ones when you step outside our species.

Somewhere along the way we humans diverged from the rest of Creation. Having been part of the natural world for millennia, hunting and being hunted, our species took off on a different trajectory a long time ago. And the gap between Homo sapiens and other fauna has grown wider ever since.

Today we dominate the planet to an extent that no other species has or could. Even the most intelligent animals, such as orangutans or dolphins, don’t come close to us. They continue to live in harmony with their environment and, as far as I can judge, they want only to be left alone to do so.

We humans, on the other hand, have appropriated the land and the seas and plunder their riches with ever-growing efficiency and ferocity. We act like a demented burglar who trashes the house into which he has broken, stealing anything not nailed down and defecating on the carpets. By the time he is finished there will be nothing left but a ruined shell.

But wasn’t the supremacy of mankind over Creation ordained by God, at least according to Genesis, the first book of the Bible?

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

¹

Even if we accept that the “creation myth” in Genesis is not the literal truth about how the world and its inhabitants came into being, many people believe that humanity stands at the pinnacle of Creation because that’s how God arranged things.

A secular view can be found in Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 best-seller, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. In his book Harari tells the story of our species from its beginnings to the present day. He describes how the process of evolution led us from the cave to our present era of dizzying technological advances.

Central to Harari’s case is his assertion that the history of humankind was punctuated by three ‘revolutions’, each of which altered the course of our development in a fundamental way. He identifies them as:

1. The Cognitive Revolution

2. The Agricultural Revolution

3. The Scientific Revolution

Before the first of these revolutions, our species had been one of several types of human and, according to Harari, was nothing special. But about 70,000 years ago something changed inside the brain of Homo sapiens. This Cognitive Revolution enabled us to gradually eliminate our human rivals, including Neanderthals, and to dominate the Earth. Mankind developed language and began to exhibit extraordinary creativity and invention, producing domestic tools, weaponry, and various modes of transport (which enabled us to spread across the globe).

Harari attributes this leap in human development to a random event rather than some conscious external intervention.

The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.

²

As I have written elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick in his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, outlined a similar idea. However that movie attributed the fast-tracking of our evolution to the intervention of a superior alien intelligence.

Whatever may have been the trigger, our current dominion over all life on Earth is beyond question. As Harari writes:

Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

³

This mental obstacle is real. When the UN expresses concern about our stewardship of the planet through a seemingly endless series of summit meetings, committees, and reports, one fundamental assumption is made - as the title of a recent document makes clear.

Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The UN sees the Earth as “our world”. And “our” in this instance does not include all the other species with whom we share the planet, and it certainly does not include God. That much is plain from the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” delineated in the document. They are concerned with the fate of Homo sapiens. The planet and its other inhabitants are important only insofar as we need them to maintain our exalted position.

⁴

To go back to my analogy, it is as if our burglar decided to conduct his raids in a less rapacious manner so that he and his successors can continue to rob the same house over and over again without actually destroying it.

But is such a strategy feasible? Not if two recent documentaries, Planet of the Humans and Seaspiracy, are to be believed.

Each of these films depicts the horrors of 21st-century environmental exploitation in often graphic detail. The film-makers go beyond the official fixation on global warming as the only ecological problem we should be worrying about. Instead they burrow down into the environmental movement itself to expose the extent to which it is controlled by big business. In doing so they reveal the UN strategy of sustainability to be at best an impossible goal or – at worst - a colossal scam.

The conclusion voiced by writer/director Jeff Gibbs at the end of Planet of the Humans underlines the gravity of our current predicament.

We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. We must accept that our human presence is far beyond sustainability, and all that that implies. We must take control of our environmental movement, and our future, from billionaires and their permanent war on planet earth. They are not our friends.

⁵

The damage we are doing to ourselves and our environment is evident in other areas too. In 2019 alone total military expenditure across the planet was $1,917 billion.

⁶

That money was spent on guns, ammunition, and the various accoutrements of modern weaponry – all designed and used to slaughter human beings like us.

The main beneficiaries of the international arms trade are the big manufacturers like the United States, China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia. We benefit too. Without US investment in Ireland – totalling $444 billion according to one estimate – how could we continue to enjoy our comfortable lifestyles as part of the prosperous First World?

⁷

It is not tigers or bumble bees who are causing this mayhem. It is us, Homo sapiens. And despite what the Bible suggests, it was not God who decreed this terrible state of affairs.

According to an academic source, “the Bible is the most widely disseminated book in the world”.

⁸

It may be the most misunderstood too. It is tempting to either consume it whole as the word of God transcribed by holy men, or reject it completely as a grotesque distortion of all that is good. Neither approach requires much critical thinking and both are wrong.

If you accept this, then it is not difficult to see the biblical account of Creation as perhaps the most successful example of a phenomenon noted by George Orwell and others.

History is written by the winners.

⁹

There is no doubt that the Book of Genesis was written by the winners, i.e. Homo sapiens. How better for its writers to legitimise that victory than by presenting it as God’s will?

We think we are top of the heap but, as I argued in a previous post, it is really Satan who runs this world. As his encounter with Jesus suggests, Satan uses plutocrats and politicians to carry out his bidding on Earth.

But is there more?

Whether through blind fate, ET, or something else, perhaps it was also he who ensured that mankind as a whole separated from the rest of Creation.

To what end?

Well, look where we are today.

Now, in the uncertainty of a global crisis, there is an opportunity for Homo sapiens to change direction. To make a fresh start. To stop trusting our fate to someone who would lead us into Hell with a promise of Heaven.

1. Genesis, 1:26.

2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (London, 2014), p. 23.

3. Ibid., p. 20.

4. UN General Assembly, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 25 Sep. 2015.

5. The Planet of the Humans - FULL Documentary, YouTube, 28 Jun 2020.

6. reliefweb, ‘SIPRI Fact Sheet April 2020: Trends in world military expenditure, 2019’, [https://reliefweb.int/report/world/sipri-fact-sheet-april-2020-trends-world-military-expenditure-2019], 16 Apr. 2021.

7. American Chamber of Commerce Ireland [https://www.amcham.ie/About-Us/US-Companies-in-Ireland/Stats-Facts.aspx], 16 Apr. 2021.

8. Peter Calvocoressi, Who’s Who in the Bible (2nd ed., London, 1990), p. xii.

9. George Orwell, The complete works of George Orwell (20 vols, London, 1986), xvi, p. 89.