All That Monkey Business

Do you believe in evolution?

I do. No amount of tub-thumping can change my mind about it. It's this fairly obvious thing: through the millenia creatures change. Not everyone believes it though, because some say the actual evolutionary mechanism is unobservable. If you don't know how it works, then it must not exist.

Weird. Not all people know how automobiles work, but you can't argue the fact that they exist. Non-evolutionists will cite biblical, mystical and divine facts, some of which I also believe in. But science is not exclusionary of faith. Christian science has given an explanation I have come to believe is true.

Not everything you read is accurate. The Bible, holy and sacred as it is, is not a factual account of what transpired through the years. So when in Genesis, you read, "The Lord created man on the sixth day", it does not have to be taken literally. As a writer, it is understandable that to write good fiction, the ordinary must be extremely glorified. No one would read the Bible if the hallowed men who wrote it chose to expound the developments of animals year per year for each of the seven hundred or seven thousand years. And frankly, I don't think they can even if they wanted to. Thus, I believe the seven days stated in the bible it took God to create the universe can mean a wide range of time from one million to nth million of years for things to settle down and take form.

I don't find myself disillusioned to think that we have the same ancestors as other living primates does. Beyond the monkey comparison, we all came from fish anyway. And before we were fish, we were microbes. Then unicellular beings. Before that, we were minerals and chemicals. And way before that, we were part of the dust of the universe, ancient ingredients that makes up the stars we now see when we look up at the sky at night.

That's not so bad.

Well, I am only discussing this because while pondering on these issues fairly recently, I realized that there's a sci-fi story in there somewhere.

When the Greek philospher Aristotle made a ladder of life back in his times, he showed that Man is on top of the ladder (something we can refute nowadays, what about the viruses which can instantly wipe us out?). Just below us are the monkeys. But what if the great philosopher did not just show us a classification system, but rather an evolutionary system as well? Scientific tests nowadays prove that chimpanzees are just one aberrant gene away from being man. Their brains are also four times smaller than the average human being, but seeing their bodies are much smaller than ours, that can just be taken as a case of proportions. The only thing lacking from most monkeys is Speech. Speech is different from communication, as the former just pertains to the ability to control mouth, tongue and throat movements to create sounds upon which meaning can be dictated and thus gleaned upon. Monkeys and all animalia can communicate, just not with the same words we use. Their survival depends on it.

In 1966, Beatrice and Allen Gardner at the University of Nevada taught a young female chimpanzee (whom they names Washoe) how to use sign language. And do you know that Washoe amazed everyone with her quick grasp of the non-speech language?

She learned the signs with speed and agility, and even tried to teach other chimpanzees how to use it. Other monkeys were also trained to arrange and rearrange magnetic letters on a board and it wasn't long before they can compose phrases and sentences that makes sense. Sometimes, their teachers would create nonsense sentences, and the chimps wouldn't be fooled by it.

It proves that some monkeys know what they are doing. Just like Man does. They can easily have been our ancestor. But what if they are our progenitor as well?

Now, let us leave the logical shores of Science and delve into the fantastic. What if a millenia ago, we were akin to chimpanzees (not actual chimpanzees but like-chimpanzees) who were taught language by, let's say, Atlanteans (c'mon, stay with me here, hehe)? What if we are repeating the pattern by teaching the modern day chimpanzees a language? Today, I read in the newspaper that this year was the hottest year for the last 2,000 years. The last time it was this hot, the ice caps melted and earth life was drastically alterred. What if, Man will be wiped out in some future era, and the monkeys we taught would evolve into the next homo-sapiens-like species on earth?

And would they have tales of Atlantis and of gods who taught them magic ? It would be their explanation for airplanes and trains and cell phones and elevators. Would they talk of sagely monkey-like creatures who taught them the language of the hands?

Fantasy, yes. Fiction, yes yes yes.

But all fiction is fantasy and all fantasy have a grain of hard, cold truth in it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be very interesting fantasy.

Oh! This strange game, this play on the would be's and what would have-beens, this course on the What Ifs!

Such fun we have. :) Someday, let's play it again.