 remain essentially on the same level.
In reply we may remark that while great oaks from little acorns grow, great mountains do not grow from little grains of rock that organize themselves from within. Self-replicating molecules are the elementary stuff of life; non-self-replicating ones are not alive. Plants reproduce themselves but feel no pain; animals both reproduce and feel pain. Higher animals are aware of an outer world through such senses as they have; a virus presumably is not, although it is a living organism. There is such a thing as animal intelligence, but it has several observable levels. Soaring above them all is human intelligence. All of these differences would seem to require some explanation other than the chance formation of the necessary organs.
The once famous Lucy, a chimpanzee, was able to order items of food and drink by punching buttons on an electronic board, but that is as far as she went. I have read that the differences between the chromosomes of chimpanzees and humans amount to a variation of only 1.9 percent. That certainly suggests a common ancestry of ourselves and our very remote cousins, the chimpanzees. It does not suggest that the difference between the two species is a slight one.
It is fashionable in certain circles to decry as arrogant the claim that man is superior to beasts. Stephen Jay Gould has said, "it is so arrogant of us to think of dinosaurs as unsuccessful because they are dead." They lasted far longer on this earth than we have so far done, he asserted, and we don't know how long we shall last. This makes sense if, but only if, success is measured solely in terms of longevity.
But there may be other criteria of success. Off the top of the head one can think of Mozart and Beethoven; Praxiteles and Michelangelo; Sophocles and Shakespeare; Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas (and let us throw in Hegel); Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus, not to mention the great names of non-Western cultures. No dinosaurs of which we have records rivaled them. The difference between men and dinosaurs, or even chimpanzees, is measured in light years, and is a difference in kind, not merely in degree. That only human beings use language that employs universal and common terms like nouns and verbs should indicate that.
But is the difference reducible to previously existing material causes? Sir Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA, is sure it is reducible: "you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast multitude of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
This is sheer reductionism. When I was in high school, it was considered sophisticated to say that a human being is nothing more than 98 cents worth of chemicals. Apparently nothing has changed since then except that, at today's inflated prices, the chemicals would cost $19.98 or perhaps even $49.98. All things can be explained by analyzing them down to their material parts and the evolutionary process by which they have come to be arranged. On his own terms, the very thoughts by which Francis Crick and his collaborator discovered DNA were "nothing more than" the firing of neurons in their brains.
Darwinists speak of higher species "emerging" from lower ones by random variation and natural selection. Any other explanation, as Dr. Eugenie C. Scott asserted in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, is not science but religion. "Science," she said, "is limited to only natural explanations. Yes, theoreticians in this area rely on materialist explanations; they are doing science." But if "natural" is a synonym for "materialist," she is assuming that matter, whatever it may be, is a stuff of such kind that from within itself, by a process of accidental change and adaptation, it can produce the entire range of living beings on earth. Her science, it seems, rests upon a belief in scientific materialism that could qualify, by some definitions, as a religious faith. For she implies that non-living matter has the potentiality, given enough time and the n