Fred Harding

Darwin's Enigma Fred Harding

Alfred Wallace the co-discoverer of Natural Selection wrote: "Man's Naked Skin could not have been produced by Natural Selection. It seems to me, then, to be absolutely certain, that 'Natural Selection' could not have produced man's hairless body by the accumulation of variations from a hairy ancestor. The evidence all goes to show that such variations could not have been useful, but must, on the contrary, have been to some extent hurtful." Darwin and Wallace argued about the issue of human hairless for a number of years but in the end Darwin conceded that Wallace had been right. Darwin wrote in his book "The Descent of Man" published in 1871 an acknowledgement to Wallace's arguments. "The loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man, even in a hot climate, for he is thus exposed to the scorching of the sun, and to sudden chills, especially during wet weather. As Mr. Wallace remarks, the natives in all countries are glad to protect their naked backs and shoulders with some slight covering. No one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man; his body therefore cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection. Nor, as shown in a former chapter, have we any evidence that this can be due to the direct action of climate, or that it is the result of correlated development." This issue of human hairlessness skin was to become a riddle that Darwin would never resolve. It is true that he did submit another theory which he called sexual selection which he believed resolved the problem, but the theory was not accepted in his day as a solution, and it has since been discredited as a result of a series of rigorous science testing in recent years. No other evolutionist since has been able to resolve Darwin's Enigma, although it has not been for the want of trying. It is the objective of this book to take an honest look at all the theories proposed by Darwin and those who followed him to see if there is indeed a solution through a naturalist mechanism that could account for the anomaly of man's almost hairless condition. But if there is no solution that can be found, then we will have to face one unavoidable conclusion. Man did not evolve from a hairy ape-like ancestor as is claimed by evolutionists but had in fact been created naked and hairless through the activities of Intelligent agency. Isn't that what the book of Genesis said?