Human Evolution: What For?

I have recently been listening to a very interesting university-level course entitled “The Darwinian Revolution” published by The Teaching Company with Frederick Gregory, lecturer.

As Professor Gregory emphasizes, the concepts of evolution certainly did not originate with Darwin, but had been proposed for at least 100 years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859.  It is fascinating how the many thoughtful scientists and philosophers, all over Europe and in other parts of the world, for decades read each other’s work, criticized it, and wrote their own rebuttals and proposed their own explanations of how things really happened.  It was impossible for any two authors to totally agree with each other’s explanations.

The most sensitive topic among these theories was, even in Darwin’s day, the question of human evolution.  Had humans evolved through processes of “natural selection” similar to the animal and plant species?  Darwin did not bring up the topic of human evolution in his ‘Origin” but others edged around it carefully knowing the enormous resistance they would encounter with such a declaration.

In the midst of all this speculation and theorizing I was suddenly impressed that Joseph Smith had given a complete and incontrovertible answer to the entire question of human evolution in one simple revelatory sentence.  “The Father has a body of flesh and bones, as tangible as man’s; the Son also . . .” (D&C 130:22).

This simply stated truth, supported by Joseph’s visits from The Father and The Son on at least two occasions, puts to rest the entire issue.   Our tangible bodies of flesh and bones are used to clarify our understanding of The Father’s tangible body of flesh and bones.  Our is in the image of His.

But how old is The Father’s body?  We cannot conceive of its age.  His body surely existed for many eons of time before this earth was even thought of.  We are told that our earth is patterned after countless previous earths, all created by the same God who surely had his body, in a perfected state, before all of those creations (Moses 1:33-35).

That being so, there would have been no need for any progressive development of a physical human body in conjunction with the creation and population of this earth.  There doesn’t seem to be any need for human evolution.  Human bodies had been perfected long before this time and it would have been a simple matter for The Father to produce more of them, in the likeness and image of His (Moses 2:26-27).

And if human bodies had been perfected long before this planet was thought of, it is reasonable to suppose, although we probably can’t be sure, that all the animal and plant bodies were likewise perfectly developed, perhaps on some of those other worlds, long before our world was conceived.