silviozugarini.com

“Descended from the apes! My dear, let’s hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”   Remark attributed to the wife of the bishop of Worcester after Darwin‘s theory was explained to her.   

I have just finished reading an amazing book by Bill Bryson called ” A Short History of nearly everything”. The author searches for scientific answers to try and understand everything that has happened, from the Big Bang to the rise of civilizations, how we got here, what things and living beings are made of. For me this is possibly the greatest story ever told, from the beginnings of the universe, to the physical history of the Earth, to the development and evolution of life here. He, knowing himself very little about these matters and having the couriosity to understand how people figured them out, explains science in a very understandable, funny and witty way.   I was very taken by the book, and in particular by the last chapters where he tackles the subject of human evolution based on the fossil evindence recovered over the last century. It amazes me that possibly 90% of the world population are ignorant to this facts and believe that Homo Sapiens (Modern Man) is a divine creation.   Human Pre-history is so long (more than 3 million years) that it just makes no sense to me that divine intervention and design only started to play this active and bloody role some 2000 years ago (less than 0.1% of our existence).     

We modern humans are still 98.4 per cent genetically indistiguishable fro the modern chimpanzee. Come on think about it…..This creatures are still the ones our distant ancestors (homo erectus, homo neaderthal etc.) left behind when they set out to take over the world.