So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27)
Steven Peck (aka StevenP from BCC) is a BYU biology professor that has written about religion and evolution. One of his articles (based on the views of Henri Bergson) on his website (split into three parts: part 1, part 2, I couldn’t find part 3) was about how the process of evolution often causes certain forms of life to arise just by virtue of the fact that the evolutionary process must solve certain problems.
For example, the eye has evolved in relatively the same manner multiple times on entirely independent lines of organisms. And it is not mere coincidence that fish and whales get confused a lot. Despite being completely different species all together, the similar forces of evolution forced them to look quite similar.
Is it possible that there is some similar type of what we might call ‘directed evolution’ going on with humans? Here, the evidence is thin at best, but let’s play around and have a little fun with hypotheses:
- Evolution may favor intelligence and sentience. The wild success of the human race compared to other species attests to how this might be true.
- All intelligence races to evolve would need to be able to first manuplate tools, therefore they must have something like an opposable thumb.
- All intelligent races to evolve would therefore need to be able to do something like standing erect
- All intelligent races would need brain power and the human brain is actually optimized for brain power. Any bigger or any smaller and its either got too small a capacity or becomes too slow.
- Therefore all intellgent races would need to be approximately the same size.
- In fact, they’d need to have about the same body to brain ratio as well.
Okay, this is as far as I can go at the moment. It’s not much, but it might be a start to suggest how StevenP’s musings could turn out to be correct.