The Anti-Human Age: The Slowest Miracle

 

Restoration of Neanderthal Flintworkers, Le Moustier Cavern, Dordogne, France by Charles R. Knight

Welcome to The Anti-Human Age: essays about the human animal living in the modern world. Read on, you sexy ape.

How long is a miracle allowed to take? A second? A day? A week, maybe, if God is feeling patient?

What about three billion years?

That’s about how long life has been evolving on planet Earth, one successful reproduction after another, one generation passing something forward to the next.

The number is easy to say and almost impossible to feel. Human beings can understand seasons, decades, and maybe a few generations of family history, but things become abstract beyond that point. For example, I can picture my maternal grandparents with clarity. It’s 1941, and Grandpa has enlisted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He’s training to be an Airborne Ranger in Texas. Grandma is there with him, on the cusp of beginning her family, grieving the recent loss of her mother, preparing to see Grandpa off to Europe to fight the Nazis. Not only can I picture this, I can feel it in my heart.

But my grandparents’ grandparents? I don’t have a point of reference. Ancient human history? Man, that takes science, speculation, and quite a bit of imagination. Microbial life thriving in the volcanic soup of early Earth? I can’t imagine. Billions of years exceed the scale of my ordinary imagination. The human brain can count the years but not process the scale. This is where evolution skepticism and denial often begins.

Religious dogma steers the conversation around evolution, of course, but deep time is simply unintuitive. When considering the subject, skeptics sometimes expect transformation to look dramatic. They imagine one creature turning into another in some visible, obvious, undeniable way. When evolution does not offer that kind of spectacle, skeptics mistake its sluggish pace and gradual nature for absence.

The argument becomes, “There are no transitional forms.” That is a deep misunderstanding of the process. All forms are transitional. A species does not step onto the stage as a finished category. Populations change through reproduction, mutation, selection, isolation, environmental pressure, and time. A trait that helps one generation survive or reproduce can become more common in the next. A small anatomical difference may matter in one environment and not another. Some changes disappear while others persist. Some accumulate until later observers give the result a new name, but nature does not care about our filing system, dude.

Take human ancestry. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) have historically been classified as a separate species from ours, an evolutionary sister or cousin as opposed to a direct ancestor. However, it’s complicated. Denisovans, who may be connected to fossils classified as Homo longi, complicate the picture further. These folks were not cleanly separated by a classroom chart. They may have been a kind of Neanderthal. Regardless, both Neanderthals and Denisovans looked much like we do today, and seen from a distance, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from your family or friends. They made clothes, jewelry, and painted their faces. Sound like anyone you know?

Today, some scientists believe that these two closely related species may have been subspecies of Homo sapiens, and here’s the thing: all three of us lived at the same time, and there were other hominids doing their thing at this moment in history as well. Remember, “Homo” means “human.” These weren’t alien creatures, they were people, not unlike us in many aspects. Sure, their brains were different sizes than ours and were organized differently, but the same regions were there, evolved to different degrees. All of them had tools, some amount of symbolic thought, language, and family dynamics we’d probably recognize today.

I’m not saying our fellow Homos of the Pleistocene Epoch were exactly the same as you and I. Our sapiens filing system illustrates this without ambiguity. However, we know even more primitive-seeming people like Homo naledi of South Africa had brain regions associated with language, and there’s contested evidence that they buried their dead and decorated cave walls.

Here’s the best part, dude. All of these Homos traversing the Pleistocene together weren’t just competing, they were fucking and raising families together. Evolution isn’t limited to survival, it’s closely tied with attraction and desire.

The story of evolution is told too cold. Mutation and natural selection are crucial aspects of the process, but so are sex, attachment, care, protection, and dependence. Bodies desired other bodies. Mothers held infants. Communities helped to raise children. Before science, before religion, before people spoke French and Hindi, humans at different stages of becoming responded to one another with need.

Love did not suddenly appear in Homo sapiens.

Let’s be careful with how we define “love” here. I’m not talking about writing sonnets or a modern understanding of love. When I say love, I’m talking about the basic emotional state of one creature’s bond with another. If you’re a dog person, you know your pup loves you. That attachment has a biological history. Somewhere deep in mammalian time, before anyone had a word for it, one animal recognized another as worth staying near. Our last common ancestor with the modern dog split from our lineage around ninety million years ago. If dogs love and you love, that means that the emotion we know and call love is at least one hundred million years old.

The signal repeated across generations.

Stay.

Protect the young. Feed the group. Grieve the absence of loved ones together. Seek warmth. Continue.

Behind you is a constellation of lovemaking and attachment. Bodies found bodies, protected and cared for each other, and survived long enough for the next generations to begin. It wasn’t easy, dude, the Pleistocene was fucking nuts. You are here because life kept continuing under conditions that could have ended it.

Folks sometimes say God is love. Well, if God is love and love is a driver of evolution, then God lives in the evolutionary process. If you believe in God, that shouldn’t threaten you. It should overwhelm you. 

I’m not making an argument that evolution proves God. I’m an atheist at worst, an agnostic at best. Regardless, I believe that evolution should set the religious imagination ablaze rather than shrink it. What kind of creator would need creation to be instant in order for it to count as sacred to us? What kind of God would be diminished by a Universe with creative power embedded in the process of becoming itself?

Mutation, selection, sex, death, survival, extinction, divergence, convergence: all of it unfolding across billions of years, and still life keeps becoming. That is not less than miraculous. It is miraculous. Denying evolution does not defend God’s power. It limits it. It insists that creation must be quick, clean, and recognizable to our modern eyes in order to count as sacred. It asks the miracle to fit inside a human attention span, a fucking box.

Evolution refuses that demand.

Evolution offers no simple answers and refutes design. It does not reveal itself on our schedule. It works through the ordinary fact of continuation. Love. One successful reproduction after another. You are not the end of that chain. You are one link inside it.

You are a transitional form.

Evolution denial does not only get the science wrong, it shrinks the story we are living inside. It takes a vast, ancient, unfinished process and replaces it with something smaller, cleaner, and easier to imagine.

If God is love, then love cannot be confined to one moment of creation. Love must be acknowledged as the patient engine of life itself. That’s how you got here. It’s not magic, it’s process, time, survival, desire, and love.

The slowest miracle imaginable.