Teilhard de Chardin, in The Phenomenon of Man, (PHEN), expresses the same thing.

[I]t is the characteristic of minerals (as of so many other organisms that have become incurably fixed) to have chosen a road which closed them prematurely in upon themselves. By their innate structure the molecules are unfitted for growth. (p. 69)

In the world, nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different thresholds successively traversed by evolution (however critical they be) which has not already existed in an obscure and primordial way. (p. 71)

Nothing is so delicate and fugitive by its very nature as a beginning. As long as a zoological group is young, its characters remain indeterminate, its structure precarious and its dimensions scant. It is composed of relatively few individual units, and these change rapidly. . . . What, then, will be the effect of time on this area of weakness? Inevitably to destroy all vestiges of it. Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility. . . . (pp. 120-121)

Returning to Poppelbaum's MAA (pp. 65-66; fns mine):

Man alone continues to abide in those parts of the earth in which he can still remain plastic, until at last for him too the hour has come. He makes his geological appearance in the later Atlantean epoch (glacial drifts), and has . . . from the beginning all the essential human characteristics together with signs of a developed culture. The fossil remains which the paleontologist finds today are not indeed those of men of the highest races (who carried on the Atlantean civilization) they belong to side branches; even Neanderthal man, as Rudolf Steiner has expressly shown, is not a direct ancestor of the civilized humanity of today. Years after Rudolf Steiner, contemporary research has arrived at the same conclusion, and has placed Neanderthal man on a side branch of the genealogical tree. The culture and life of the Atlantean, even his speech and his manners, have been described by Rudolf Steiner in his book, "Atlantis and Lemuria."¹⁰ In this book he depicts the wonderfully high culture of the true "primeval man" of which Natural Science, with its "cavemen," the contemporaries of mammoth and cave bear, knows only the degenerate descendants. [Here he quotes from that book.]

With the Atlantean epoch begins the history and pre-history of man. This was the time, first of the oracle and later in the post-Atlantean epoch, of the mystery centers; from which all civilization comes forth. The post-Atlantean sub-epochs, of which ours is the fifth, have it as their task to develop, from the original clairvoyance of man, clear objective consciousness, and from the tribe-bound will of early times to evolve the free activity of self-conscious individuality.¹¹

In the reluctance, so to speak, of Atlantean (Tertiary) man to proceed to mineralization, we perceive the secret of the absence of older traces of man in the geological record, and of their sudden appearance in the Diluvial (Glacial) periods. This solves the darkest problem of evolution, one which has presented extraordinary difficulties to Natural Science and provided the opponents of the theory of evolution with a welcome argument.

In the later Atlantean Epoch then, when the descending spiritual and soul powers of man united with the ascending physical vehicle, the spiritual and the physical processes of evolution come into contact. The human "I" is now received as a kernel into the matured sheath of the body.¹² Before this the bodily development was only a kind of shadow of the soul and spiritual kingdom; now the two halves have united to form a single process.

Here Poppelbaum gives us the following diagram illustrating the descending human being and the ascending physical form (p. 67):

Geologic Time Per I-5¹³

We have here the most graphic portrayal of the principle "the first shall be last, and the last shall be first." The first (earthly being) in the spiritual world was the human being, who came last into materiality, while the first into materiality (the mineral kingdom) will be the last ultimately redeemed (spiritualized) from the material world (cf. Rom 8,19-23). In no true sense can the human being be said to have evolved from any of the lower kingdoms. The converging lines in Poppelbaum's diagram result from the active agency of the descending "I Am," being at one and the same time both the germinal human soul and the descending Christ (the "image" and "likeness"¹⁴). While all of the three lower kingdoms are in some way reflected in the human being's makeup,¹⁵ both physical and sensate, those elements remained plastic in the human so as not to predominate or entrap, but to be mastered and purified by the human being over time as it seeks on Earth the perfection of its own "I Am," its merging with and into the higher "I AM" of Christ.

Kranich, a paleontologist and biologist as well as anthroposophist, shows in his Thinking Beyond Darwin (TBD) how the Goethean idea of the archetypal form must be applied, and how it emerges from the workings of the soul, the "I AM." He threads the process through the transitions from class to class, from fish to amphibian, from amphibian to reptile, from reptile to mammal, and from mammal to human. The "I AM" is always there in the course of physical evolution, pulling the form forward until the time is right for the "I AM" to enter. Kranich's work is highly cognate to Poppelbaum's, and in fact he says near the end, "I could conclude our considerations at this point with the reference to Poppelbaum and Kipp, were it not for several new aspects that have emerged in the foregoing discussion" (relative to the "main trunk of vertebrate phylogeny").¹⁶

With the beginning of the critical analysis of the Bible and the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century, Christendom has been torn asunder on the issue of the origin of the human being. "Progressives," Christians as well as others, and scientists have accepted its descent from the ape,¹⁷ while fundamentalists and anti-intellectuals have insisted on the doctrine of creationism.¹⁸ So the battle in the Scopes trial early in this century rages even today in school systems across the country. It would appear that we are at a most critical fork in the road both in our attempt to understand evolution and in our hope of reconciling the widely divergent views of it in science and religion.

Classical Darwinism is essentially dead, even among scientists, relying as it does upon the concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest. But scientists in general ascribe to neo-Darwinism, which includes at least one additional element, the idea of adaptability. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the term "Darwinism" to include both.

Charles Darwin and those who have labored in his camp have performed an important and noble task for humanity. They began to look at phenomena and were willing to break with outmoded religious dogma where the two appeared in conflict. That their conclusions may have been in error does not detract from the major step forward they took on behalf of humanity.

That said, Darwinism seems to have been completely and effectively refuted. The foremost spokesman in this development is probably Phillip E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor and an obviously conservative Christian who nevertheless disdains what he calls "creation-science," the "young-earth, six-day special creation." The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 1999 (p. A14), published his article "The Church of Darwin," a succinct torpedo against Darwinism. But his real contribution is his Darwin on Trial (1st ed. 1991, 2nd ed. 1993) in which he systematically demolishes the various arguments science has put forward in both paleontology and molecular biology.¹⁹