Shatner‘s revelation may be interpreted as an environmentalist creed, but I rather see it as a poetical formulation of the fine-tuning of Earth for life.
The fossil hominin Homo habilis was described 1964 by Louis Leakey and his colleagues from the 1.9 million year old Olduvai Gorge locality in Tanzania.
Feathers, which are the most complex integumental structures known in the animal kingdom, without doubt required coordinated changes in numerous genes.
Such explosions and revolutions dominate the history of life, which was rather a series of abrupt saltations than the gradual change predicted by Darwinism.
He had rather secretly always been a devout Protestant Christian and he too had some doubts about the causal adequacy and sufficiency of neo-Darwinism.
The theory has been made immune to empirical falsification because it is simply assumed to be true by default as the only viable option for materialists.