Cavemen are popular once again.

No, I’m not talking about those successful Geico commercials that won their own series on ABC starting October 2, (view the trailer here).

I’m talking about the two discoveries that came out in August that should force all those “man evolved from apes” evolution charts in schoolbooks to be redrawn. You know the ones. You’ve got the knuckle-dragging, club-wielding ape on the left hand side and a businessman carrying a briefcase on the right hand side, with all the hypothetical evolutionary links filled in between (as in this one).

What’s been discovered is a 10.5 million year old gorilla and that two of our “ape men” ancestors actually lived together.

Let me explain.

See, the problem is—these two discoveries render all previous human evolution charts wrong.

But, the bigger problem is—unless you’re a scientist—you’ve likely never have heard about it outside of this column or at least until you’d see the trailer for Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” coming out in February 2008.

As Stein exposes, there’s been a virtual Inquisition by Darwinian fundamentalists against anyone who dares challenge The Book—Darwin’s infamous 1859 “Origin of the Species.” No longer about following the bread crumbs of inquiry in pursuit of truth, Big Science is now all about enforcing doctrinaire dogmatism.

Dare question the problems with naturalistic evolution—as I do here—and be guilty of blasphemy.

Ask for explanations about the still missing “missing links,” the absence of transitional forms, the sudden Cambrian Explosion, or the gaping gaps in the fossil record, and be branded an unbeliever—one who must repent of their sins, recant and do penance or be damned to academic hell for all time.

As I learned long ago, if you can believe the first sentence of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” you won’t have much trouble with the rest of the 66 books.

Make no mistake. Fundamentalists are those who censure skeptics and prohibit inquiry. Today’s fundamentalists are not the Christians who, like me, are eager to examine the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution, but those who deny that opportunity from ever happening.

The real fundamentalists are those who chair the various science departments at our major universities—those unwilling to allow dissent.

Nonetheless, they’re losing. Their program to indoctrinate students into scientism is failing. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll (here), 66 percent of Americans believe man is the product of creation, not evolution.

“Evolution” is a term that can be so broad so as to mean simply “change through time,” which no one disputes. Or, it can be so narrowly construed so as to mean “all life originated from a single living cell,” and “man evolved from apes,” which Americans reject by a margin of two to one. Continued...