The Wise, the Naive, and Those Below

When we surrender our fate to the will of the anesthesiologist, to render us completely unconscious, and when we accept that the surgeon will cut open our abdomens, chests, and even our skulls with his scalpel, treating or replacing our internal organs, and when we undergo nuclear or chemotherapy and consume large quantities of medication, we often do so out of our confidence in the progress achieved by science. It is the same confidence that leads us to willingly place ourselves in a sealed metal box, to be lifted tens of thousands of feet into the air and carried to distant lands. This same science informs us that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. It tells us that the first human walked on four limbs, and that the beginning of bipedalism, and his distinction from other great apes, occurred around 6 to 7 million years ago, based on the oldest clear fossil evidence. Two million years later, new fossils were discovered that confirmed, with clearer evidence, his increasing capabilities. The most famous example is the fossil “Lucy,” discovered in Ethiopia, who lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. Her skeleton clearly shows adaptation to upright walking. Based on the fossil record, or the discovered skulls and skeletons, the evolutionary path can be summarized in an approximate chronological order: Humans began with a small brain and arboreal traits. Then appeared Homo habilis, credited with making primitive stone tools. Next came Homo erectus, approximately two million years ago. He was the longest-surviving human species, the first to leave Africa, the original homeland of humankind, and spread across Asia and Europe. He mastered the control of fire and produced more advanced stone tools, and his brain was larger than that of his ancestors. His skeletal structure was also closer to that of modern humans. Then came Homo heidelbergensis and his relatives, approximately 300,000 to 700,000 years ago. They are a potential common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans. Neanderthals lived in Europe and the West, and went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Then came Denisovans, a human group recently discovered through DNA extracted from bones in a cave in Siberia. They partially interbred with modern humans before going extinct. Finally, modern Homo sapiens appeared for the first time in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago, based on skull discoveries in Morocco in 2017, which revised the previous timeline. Their great migration from Africa began approximately 60,000 years ago, gradually spreading to settle almost the entire world. By about 40,000 years ago, our human species was the only one remaining on Earth after all other human species went extinct. It is worth noting that documented fossils have shown significant differences in head size, limb lengths, and height between each stage and the next. * * * Based on this concise and highly complex scientific narrative, comes someone who describes himself as an “Arabic language scholar” and states, with complete confidence and insistence, that he has proof that “Arabic” was born with the creation of “Adam.” He claims that the name “Adam” has no meaning, derivation, conjugation, connotation, plural, or dual form except in the Arabic language, despite the existence of the same word in “all” languages of the world (!!). Anyone is free to say what they wish; the problem is not in what is said, but in what is disseminated and the readiness shown by millions—naive individuals, educated people, and professors—to believe this “nonsense,” which is inconsistent with any scientific truth. The major problem is that this belief extends to many other “imaginary” matters. Ahmed Al-Sarraf