IN THE BEGINNING. Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.
Chapter 1
THE BIG BANG
Let’s pretend, “in the beginning there was no planet called earth…” According to biblical scholars, Genesis falls into two unequal parts. One deals with the primordial history, which introduces the believers to the story of salvation, and they search back into the origin of the world and survey the entire human race as seen through the eyes of the bible. They tell of the creation of the universe and they tell of the great flood which destroyed all God had built except two of every living thing. The repopulation of the earth thus begins with Noah, the prototype ancestor of Israel but this is oxymoronic if you breathe the scientific view which says Noah sprang from an African.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, and there was darkness over the void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water.” That’s cool…but science takes a different view… it says that earth wasn’t the first planet in the universe and actually did not exist until some 13.5 billion years ago when matter, energy, time and space came into being as a result of what science calls, “The Big Bang,” and the story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics…not Genesis!
About 300,000 years after this experience and the newly formed planet Earth came to be as a shecht in the vast universe, nature began to coalesce into complex structures causing matter and energy to form atoms which then combined into molecules. These combinations and their interaction in science is called chemistry. Now, things are really jiving out there dude…left along for ten billion years, about 3.8 billion years ago, on this planet we call Earth certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures (get ready for this) called organisms and this process we label as biology! Think of that…WOW, physics, and biology, not Genesis!
But there is more as you might think skip forward 70,000 years ago these large structures, these organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens began to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is known in our world as history. And…there have been three important revolutions which have shaped the course of history: This is heavy dude…follow me now! Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago began the modern human. The point at which it is believed that man began to reason within a developing brain. Next up…Agricultural Revolution, next up some 12,000 years ago, and, finally the Scientific Revolution which got under way some 500 years ago which nearly didn’t happen because those creatures of Genesis would not believe God would create a world for them which was round! As a matter of fact, these “wise men” did not believe much of any thing which did not contain some element of voodoo.
God willing, the book I hope to write and share with you will follow the history of how these three revolutions have impacted humans and their fellow organisms in the 21st century.
Let us remember, according to the best science, there were humans before recorded history. But since it is the belief that animals first appeared about 2.5 million years ago, and Homo sapiens 70,000 years ago there is a question in this scribe’s mind about any connection between humans and chimps? It just doesn’t make sense to me that it would have taken that much time to interject the possibility that man transcended from an ape. Moreover, it is known that for countless generations animals did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats. I do not believe they shared their beds!
Long before the modern man’s lust for the safari…back some two million years ago you might well have encountered a familiar cast of characters: Mothers fretting about this and that…wondering about where she would scrounge enough food for the evening meal. Dirty children playing among the filth and old folks swatting flies as they attempted to catch a never-ending nap below a monster shade tree dripping monkey waste. No doubt young men flexing muscle in sight of some babe he hoped to lure into the bush as mother’s watched, knowing the babes would go since they themselves had done it all. Experience does not learn nor teach when there is little else to entertain.
These archaic humans lived life as we do, fussing, fighting, working, stressing, loving forming close bonds and fought for status and power. Just as the animals did, and in point of fact, before wisdom came there was nothing which set the human apart from the chimp. Not a single human at that time could conceive of man walking on the moon, split the atom to create devastation capable of ending all of life on earth and perhaps beyond. The most essential element to remember about prehistoric humans is that they were as insignificant as animals with no more impact on their environment as a jellyfish.
Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals they say belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring. But sometimes things go haywire…let us take a look at horses and donkeys as an example: They have a recent ancestor in common and share many physical traits, but they show little sexual interest in each other. They will mate if induced but the offspring, called mules…will be sterile! Mutations in donkey DNA may never crossover to horses or to the donkey. The two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along separate evolutionary paths. Could this be true in humans as well. Are there human species who can mate if induced but producing nurtured or biologically incapable of production or perhaps even worse, producing offspring capable of reproduction but passing a deadly gene?
Is this the reason the bible admonishes, “Stay in your father’s house?”
Species which evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading ‘genus’. Thus, lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are different species within the genus Panthera. Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species. Therefore, my guess is that everyone reading this intellectual treaty is a Homo sapiens- the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).
Homo sapiens belong to a family. This fact used to be one of history’s most closely held secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, not belonging to anyone, even lacking siblings or parents. But as we all know this just didn’t fit. Like it or not we must all “buy into” being members of a large family. Now, here is where the rubber hits the road and we get down to the rim of it…according to legend, six million years ago, Jane, a female ape was impregnated by someone or something and she had twin females. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees…and the other is our grandmother?
This of course flies in the face of earlier testimony that Homo sapiens came to be 70,000 years ago, not six million years ago. I suggest here, at the risk of being ostersized from all scientific luncheons at the Harvard Club, that Jane was impregnated by a deformity, delivered twin females, one an ape and the other became known as a chimp, todays modern negro!
This isn’t the only disturbing secret. Not only do we have a basement filled with troubled cousins, once upon a time we had an abundance of inbred brothers and sisters of mixed parentage. We are quite adept at thinking we are exclusively purely driven at copulation and that we are the only humans, because in fact for the last 10,000 years we have been the only species hitting the ball out of the park. Yet, the real meaning of the word human is an ‘animal belonging to the genus Homo and as I have cited there used to be many other species of the genus besides Homo sapiens. Prediction, just as nature found its door to Homo sapiens within Earth, it is entirely possible with all the universe exploration we may very well, once again, have to contend with the reality of non-sapiens humans here and on other planets yet to be discovered! (Welby Thomas Cox, Jr. October 15, 2020).
Though there is conjecture over the evolution of human, it is the majority of scientists who believe it took place in East Africa. The more daring suggest that the modern human evolved after the great flood in the Caspian Sea or ‘Ponto Caspian’ or Eurasian continental interior. Once again ‘scientific consensus’ does not yet recognize there was a flood. Yet there are whispers near Azerbaijan that human bones have been discovered in a deep hole which may be ‘the modern man.’
Chapter 2
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CARL SAGAN