In fact, the discovery was a problem since the Neanderthal skulls are larger than human skulls. Darwin had argued that the advancement of evolution proceeded through “slight, successive changes”.

The Neanderthal fossils created a dilemma for Darwin, how could a larger brain precede a smaller brain? Darwin cautiously noted, that “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious [large]”. For Darwin, the Neanderthal skulls were too large to have preceded humans.

As the fossil evidence for the Neanderthals continued to be discovered throughout Europe, the evidence seemed to point to the Neanderthals as a big game hunter transitional species leading to humans. With the goal of discovering our human evolutionary ancestors, the possibility that the Neanderthals represented a previously unknown ethnic group of humans was marginalized within the evolution industry.

During the twentieth century, at stake is whether the Neanderthals are a transitional species different from modern humans, or simply a human ethnic group.

Darwin, as we know now, was right to be cautious. Technology is answering the question. Just last year, a team lead by Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany eroded the genetic difference between the Neanderthals and modern humans after publishing the full Neanderthal genome.

Commenting on the findings, John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News that “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.” Since different species cannot interbreed, the Neanderthals can no longer be considered a transitional species.

Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow in New York concluded that the “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” Genetic evidence is clear−the Neanderthals are not genetically distinct from modern humans.

This past week, Bruce L. Hardy of Kenyon College in Ohio and Marie-Hélène Moncel of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has further eroded the differences between the Neanderthals and modern Humans using anthropological evidence.

In the journal PLoS ONE this past week, Hardy and Moncel in the article “Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago”, further dispels anthropological differences between the Neanderthals and Humans.

Hardy and Moncel dispels the Neanderthal big game hunter myth: the “Neanderthals are most often portrayed as big game hunters who derived the vast majority of their diet from large terrestrial herbivores while birds, fish and plants are seen as relatively unimportant or beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals.”

At the fossil site in Payre, France, after evaluating 182 Neanderthal plant, fish and bird processing tools based in the wear and adhering biological residues on the tools, Hardy and Moncel  concluded that contrary to the once popular big game hunted paradigm, the Neanderthal diet “was quite diverse, including plants, large and small animals, fish, and possibly birds.”

“Neanderthals practiced what has been considered exclusively modern human behavior”,  Hardy and Moncel concluded. In other words, the diet of the Neanderthal is not different from modern Human.

These discoveries using previously unknown technologies continue to erode the differences rather than supporting the concept that the Neanderthals are an ancestral transitional link to human. The evolution industry is now tasked with discovering a better potential ancestral transitional link to humans.

Amazingly, birth control was a hot topic during the elections of 1868 in England. Segments of Victorian liberalism lead by Charles Bradlaugh, one of the most famous atheists of the nineteenth century, drove his election campaign in Northhampton on the platform of electoral reform and birth control.

As founder of the National Secular Society established in 1866, Bradlaugh promoted birth control as a means to rescue English working people from poverty. The National Secular Society represented a radical segment liberalism. Poverty was considered the result of over-population based on Thomas Malthus principle of economics. Branded as vicious obscenity, methods for birth control were promoted in his sixpenny pamphlet entitled The Fruits of Philosophy.

The British Parliament was not amused. Charges of blasphemy and sedition were served against Bradlaugh and co-publisher, Annie Besant, by Parliament. Bradlaugh and Besand were tried at London’s Central Criminal Court for their “doctrine of the limitation of the family” and the reckless promotion of do-it-yourself contraception. Like today, birth control was center stage in the popular media.

Bradlaugh challenged the Victorian liberalism movement. Darwin was appalled when he was subpoened to testify two weeks before the trial in favor of the defense. Assuming that the author of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man would defend them, Bradlaugh and Besant were surprised when Darwin informed them that “if forced to testify,” in the words of Adrian Desmond and James Moore, “he would have to denounce the defendants, for he had ‘long held an opposite opinion’ on birth control.

As proof, Darwin sent the defense a quote from The Descent of Man: “our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils must not be greatly diminished by any means.”

Darwin further explained that any “artificial means of preventing conception,” would likely “spread to unmarried women & w destroy chastity on which the family bond depends; and the weakening of this bond would be the greatest of all possible evils to mankind.”

Darwin’s position against the Bradlaugh and Besant defense was emphatic: “my judgment would be in the strongest opposition to yours.”

Bradlaugh and Besant eventually withdrew their subpoena. Even though they were found guilty and sentenced with heavy fines and six months of imprisonment, the conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal on a legal technicality. Twenty years later, Bradlaugh eventually gained a voting seat in the Parliament long after Darwin had been laid to rest in 1882.

Darwin was clearly against the forerunner of Planned Parenthood. Unless the Descent of Man was re-written, Darwin would have stood in sharp opposition to the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger—a fact clearly avoided by the current liberal establishments.

I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.

Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography,

My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law

The chimp, since the nineteenth century, has been the poster-child missing link to humans. In twenty-first century terms, the mammalian Y chromosomes were expected to be similar, as speculated by Darwin. However, new evidence demonstrates Darwin’s speculation to be wrong—the chimp Y chromosome differs radically from humans.

The British journal Nature published a paper in January 2010 titled, “Chimpanzee and Human Y Chromosomes are Remarkably Divergent in Structure and Gene Content,” found that Y chromosomes in the chimp and humans “differ radically in sequence structure and gene content”. In fact,

More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome

Jennifer F. Hughes led the research team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, one of the world’s leading centers for genomic research, is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The research team concluded –

By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content

“By conducting the first comprehensive interspecies comparison of Y chromosomes,” ScienceDaily noted, “Whitehead Institute researchers have found considerable differences in the genetic sequences of the human and chimpanzee Ys… The results overturned the expectation that the chimp and human Y chromosomes would be highly similar. Instead, they differ remarkably in their structure and gene content.”

The original chimp genome sequencing completed in 2005 largely excluded the Y chromosome because its hundreds of repetitive sections had typically confound standard sequencing techniques. The chimp Y chromosome is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively sequenced.

 Wes Warren, Assistant Director of the Washington University Genome Center, noted

These findings demonstrate that our knowledge of the Y chromosome is still advancing.

Earlier comparative studies between the chimp and human genome had centered on DNA regions that only result in the production of proteins. In addition, not only is the chimp DNA 12% larger than human DNA, the Chimp has 23 chromosomes while humans have only 22 (excluding sex chromosomes in both species).

While the researchers advance the concept that “divergence” from the Chimp occurred 6 million years ago, the more logical explanation is that the chimp is simply a distinct species.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

Just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, in 1856, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.  

In The Descent of Man, however, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were the ancestors to humans based on the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

“Nevertheless,” Darwin noted, “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious”—the skull was too large to be a human ancestor.

Darwin was right. The journal Science on May 7, 2010, published an article entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” confirming Darwin’s position that the Neanderthal could not be an ancestor to humans. According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” 

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany led the study team. “[Neanderthals] are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said. “In some of us they live on, a little bit.”

John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

This interbreeding finding is a monumental discovery since interbreeding is a defining factor for defining a species. Our current modern definition of species was developed by Ernst Mayr—Darwin’s Bulldog of the twentieth century.

In the 1942 book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr established the Biological Species Concept (BSC): species consist of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Since humans and Neanderthals are now known to be isolated reproductive populations, they represent a single species—”They’re us. We’re them.”

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is a landmark scientific achievement. The sequencing is a culmination of a four-year investigation led from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Use of efficient “high-throughput” technology allowed the numerous DNA sequences to be processed at the same time from the bones of three different Neanderthals found at Vindija Cave in Croatia.

A major obstacle overcome in the study was the retrieval of quality DNA material from remains Neanderthal DNA contaminated with vast quantities of bacterial and fungal DNA. Even, the Neanderthal DNA had broken down into very short segments and had changed chemically. Since the contamination, breaks, and chemical changes were thought to be of a predictable nature, the researchers developed a software program to estimate the original DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genes.

The DNA evidence from the Neanderthal clearly aligns with the biblical account—the Neanderthals are human, descendants of Adam and Eve. Worldwide dispersion after Babel followed by environmental pressures afterward resulted in people groups with different physical characteristics, including humans with “Neanderthal” Characteristics.

Cellular biologist, David DeWitt, noted that the research was an “amazing feat” of science that continues to demonstrate the validity of the biblical record. “Finding Neanderthal DNA in humans was not expected by evolutionists, but it was predicted from a creation standpoint because we have said all along that Neanderthals were fully human: descendants of Adam and Eve just like us”.

The “vestige” status of the appendix originated with Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). In Chapter 1, Darwin writes -

“With respect to the alimentary canal I have met with an account of only a single rudiment [vestige], namely the vermiform appendage of the caecum… It appears as if, in consequence of changed diet or habits [disuse], the caecum had become much shortened in various animals, the vermiform appendage being left as a rudiment of the shortened part… Not only is it useless, but it is sometimes the cause of death”

Darwin’s concept of the appendix continued unchallenged until late in the twenteth century when clinical research began to demonstrate that not only does the appendix function to balance the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, the appendix plays an important immunological function. 

Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, stated in Scientific America -

“Among adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions. Lymphoid tissue begins to accumulate in the appendix shortly after birth and reaches a peak between the second and third decades of life, decreasing rapidly thereafter and practically disappearing after the age of 60. During the early years of development, however, the appendix has been shown to function as a lymphoid organ, assisting with the maturation of B lymphocytes (one variety of white blood cell) and in the production of the class of antibodies known as immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies. Researchers have also shown that the appendix is involved in the production of molecules that help to direct the movement of lymphocytes to various other locations in the body.”

Martin continues noting, “the function of the appendix appears to be to expose white blood cells to the wide variety of antigens, or foreign substances, present in the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, the appendix probably helps to suppress potentially destructive humoral (blood- and lymph-borne) antibody responses while promoting local immunity. The appendix–like the tiny structures called Peyer’s patches in other areas of the gastrointestinal tract–takes up antigens from the contents of the intestines and reacts to these contents. This local immune system plays a vital role in the physiological immune response and in the control of food, drug, microbial or viral antigens.”

Jerry Coyne (2009), professor at the University of Chicago, writes in his new book, Why Evolution is True that, “We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most popular is the appendix.” Coyne claims that: “our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but is of no real value to use.”

Classifying the appendix as “no real value” exemplifies how evolution adherents persist to be woodwinked by ideology. Mounting scientific evidence continues to demonstrate why evolution is NOT true.