Dear Editor

Remember that there are many religions and that Christianity is just one; most likely invented by the Romans at the Council of Nicea in 325AD as a means to control the masses in the Eastern Empire. 

And this has been its role ever since, from the Crusaders to the Conquistadors to the European colonizers of Africa and elsewhere. Those people had their own religions but they were crushed and replaced by one which tells us of a God which created man in His own image. 

So God is a man in the sky with an anatomy bearing stark similarity to a chimpanzee’s. He created a man from dust somewhere near modern Armenia, and then a woman from the man’s rib, and from this all 7 billion people in the world are supposed to have descended and the story goes that there was a great flood and a man named Noah who managed to get a male and female of every species on the entire planet aboard one boat and save the lot! 

If you believe that, good luck to you. 

But little wonder Einstein, perhaps the smartest man who ever lived, described religion as ‘childish superstition.’

There is, of course, overwhelming scientific evidence of the evolutionary process. The nervous system in the human anatomy could not have been created by a logical mind, because it is far too complicated, but its many twists and turns are easily explained when we consider the changes our species has undergone. Up until 65 million years ago mammals were small and shrew-like, kept at bay by the dinosaurs. 

But everything changed after a giant meteorite hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs entirely. From that point on mammals began to evolve and diversify, and eventually some learned to climb trees, then walk on their hind legs and to carry objects with their now free forelegs. 

Humans can still climb trees, unlike the vast majority of species. But our ears remain sensitive to water because they once served as gills, and children remain terrified of the dark because for millions of years this was the time they were most vulnerable to predators. 

Male aggression and even the female penchant for shopping can be traced to millions of years as hunters and gatherers, respectively. & now DNA is providing it all. The many years scientists had believed chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimps) were the same species due to their almost identical appearance, but now they find the DNA of those two species is as different from one another as is human DNA to both. Guess what else they’ve discovered: Homo sapiens interbred with other hominids tens of thousands of years ago. 

European DNA is approximately 2.5% Neanderthal, while Asian, Austronesian and Native American DNA contains a similar amount from Denisovan man. It is believe we wiped our rivals out. 

Neanderthal had existed in Europe for around for 200,000 years but vanished completely within a few thousand years of homo sapien’s arrival, while Denisovan man suffered a similar fate in Asia. 

And even as modern man spread across the Eurasian continent and into Australia and the Americas tens of thousands of years ago, various species of large mammals began to disappear - from the mammoth and woolly rhino to their predators such as the sabertooth cats.

I. Wingman.