Human Ancestors Tell Dawkins to Shove It Up His Ass

Richard Dawkins, famous for his "selfish gene" theory, clearly knows almost nothing of human nature. That's the problem of living in the ivory tower. Like Doctor Manhattan, you lose touch with humanity. Although, I don't think Dr. Dawkins will be walking around ass-naked with his non-Jewishness hanging out and about.

The depth of Dawkins' ignorance can be seen in a particular archeological finding (full PDF version here) in Spain. At first glance, it seems like any other archeological finding from a region relatively rich in archeological artifacts. In this case, it is the skull of a little girl, 530,000 years old, who seems to have been born with a severe genetic defect known as lambdoid single suture craniosynostosis (SSC), which causes frightening deformities and mental retardation. The significant passages (from the full PDF version) are these.

Here, we discuss a Middle Pleistocene case of a serious congenital skull deformation that may have required extra conspecific care for the individual to survive for a number of years before he/she died at the end of childhood.

If brain development of SH hominids is similar to that of modern humans, as it has been suggested in some studies (14–16), the individual represented by Cranium 14 was at least 5- to 8-years-old, because it had reached an adult brain size by the time he/she died.

It is obvious that the SH hominin species did not act against the abnormal/ill individuals during the infancy, as has happened along our own history many times and in many cultures...

Even these barely human ancestors of ours, already carrying signs of the uniqueness of our creation, are capable of telling whatever "selfish gene" exists in their system to go take a nosedive off a cliff. Here, we have evidence of an early humanity already growing beyond the paradigm of natural selection and "survival of the fittest", caring for a severely, frighteningly (just search for pics of people with SSC nowadays) deformed member of their own family. For a child to reach 5 to 8 years old with a condition this debilitating implies extraordinary care on the part of the early human hunter gatherers, who could be slowed down and starved by such a "burden". And yet, where was the "selfish gene" that would demand the termination of this survival-threatening "burden"? It seems to have developed magically among human beings around the time when they started building civilizations. In terms of care and recognition of human dignity, it seems that these hunter-gatherers are superior to the Spartans. It seems that human arrogance and human achievement go together like frequent dance partners. But, don't tell that to Dr. "Genes Made Me Do It" Dawkins. 

The extraordinary implications of these kinds of discovery show a humanity who, even in the dreaded state of nature, is capable of a divine goodness unseen anywhere else. The closing stanza of A. D. Hope's poem "Meditation on a Bone", used in the MercatorNet article where I first discovered this find, seems an appropriate eulogy for these people.

And, in a foreign tongue,
A man, who is not he,
Reads and his heart is wrung
This ancient grief to see,
And thinks: When I am dung,
What bone shall speak for me?