I'd like to put three hypothetical questions to my readers. They might sound rather silly, but as we'll see, they have profound implications for the very concept of what it means to be human. Let us assume that the very first creatures on Earth who possessed a natural capacity to reason - i.e. the first people - had primate parents who lacked this capacity. Let us also assume for argument's sake that there were only two people in the beginning - Adam and Eve - who later went on to have several children. Adam and Eve's parents were therefore non-rational animals. Here are my three questions:
(1) Would it have been possible for Adam to have had an identical twin brother, Brad, who was physically identical to him, but who lacked the capacity for rational thought?
(2) Would it have been morally wrong for Adam's eldest son, Cain, to start a family with Brad's lovely daughter, Diana, who (like her father) lacked the capacity for rational thought, instead of starting a family with his younger sister Flora, the only other female of his generation who possessed the capacity to reason?
(3) If Cain had had intercourse with Diana, would this have constituted bestiality on his part?
Associate Professor Kenneth Kemp is the author of a recent article on Adam and Eve, entitled, Science, Theology and Monogenesis (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2011, Vol. 85, No. 2, pp. 217-236). The article has attracted quite a bit of online discussion, both pro and con, garnering a positive review from a Thomist philosopher, Associate Professor Edward Feser (Monkey in your soul, 12 September 2011 and also Modern Biology and Original Sin, Part I) and a thumbs-down from an atheist mathematician and Science Blogs contributor, Associate Professor Jason Rosenhouse (see here and here). Professor Kemp's paper was written with the intention of harmonizing science and theology on a point where they seem to conflict: according to recent scientific findings, the human race sprang from a stock of no less than 5,000 hominid progenitors, whereas Judeo-Christian theology has traditionally taught that we are descended from just two people: Adam and Eve. (Note: the current technical term for human beings and their immediate ancestors is not "hominid" but "hominin". However, I shall defer to popular usage in this post.) Kemp's proposed solution is that the human race is descended from only two people with rational souls (Adam and Eve), in addition to several thousand individuals who were biologically human - i.e. of the same species as Adam and Eve - but who lacked the capacity for rational thought, since they did not possess spiritual souls. Thus Kemp attempts to combine theological monogenism - the belief that we are descended from a single pair of individuals who were rational and in communion with God - with biological polygenism, which says that the human stock never numbered less than about 5,000 individuals at any stage in its history. Kemp proposes that Adam and Eve's descendants continued to inter-breed with their sub-rational animal contemporaries for an extended period of time, and he suggests that any offspring resulting from matings between sub-rational hominids and people with spiritual souls were automatically endowed with a spiritual soul by God. Because rationality confers a biological advantage, Kemp argues that humans with a rational soul would have completely supplanted sub-rational individuals within the hominid population after about 300 years or so.
So how would Professor Kemp answer my three hypothetical questions? If I read him aright, the answers that he would give are as follows:
(1) Yes - as Kemp puts it in his article, "God did not owe Adam and Eve's cousins a rational and therefore immortal soul" (p. 233), and he adds that the same principle would have applied to "their siblings" as well;
(2) Yes - for as Professor Kemp rightly points out, "the relationship between the individual mates would be incapable of having any personal dimension" (p. 232); and
(3) No - because in Kemp's opinion, "The sin involved would be more like promiscuity - impersonal sexual acts - than like bestiality" (p. 232).
In this essay, I shall argue, contra Kemp, that the answer to question (1) is "No", which means that questions (2) and (3) are completely irrelevant.
From an Intelligent Design perspective, it does not matter how many progenitors the human race had. However, in the next three posts, I will be arguing that Professor Kemp's attempted reconciliation of science and theology suffers from philosophical, scientific and theological flaws. I would like to acknowledge at the outset that Professor Kemp's synthesis is a bold one, and I have the greatest respect for his academic integrity, even though I also believe that the solution he puts forward is an unsatisfactory one.
In this post, I will be arguing that Professor Kemp's attempted harmonization of scientific polygenism and theological monogenism comes at a terrible price: he achieves his goal only by rending asunder the seamless concept of humanity. According to Kemp, there are no less than three distinct concepts of humanity: biological (belonging to the human species, genetically speaking: i.e. being able to readily inter-breed with people), philosophical (having an ability to reason) and theological (having the opportunity to be in a state of eternal friendship with God). The third is a subset of the second, which is a subset of the first; hence every rational human being is a genetically human animal, but not vice versa. (Actually, Kemp is not sure whether the second and third groups coincide, but he insists that the second group is smaller than the first. Thus he believes that not all genetically human animals are naturally capable of reasoning; only those genetically human animals that have been endowed with spiritual souls possess this capacity.) I will argue below that Kemp is committing a major philosophical error here. I recognize only one concept of humanity, and I shall argue that of necessity, anything which is biologically human also possesses a rational nature (and hence, a spiritual soul).
In my opinion, Kemp's three-way fragmentation of the concept of humanity is philosophically flawed on several counts.
First, it would render meaningless the traditional philosophical question: "What is man?" Kemp would have to reply: "Which kind of man are you talking about – biological man, philosophical man or theological man?" In his paper, Kemp even distinguishes between three species of man: "biological man" (a population of inter-breeding individuals having the same kind of body that we have), "rational man" (a species whose members all belong to the species "biological man", but also possess spiritual souls, with a capacity to reason), and "theological man" (a species whose members are all rational human beings, and who have also been offered eternal friendship with God). Kemp can tell me what biological man is, and philosophical man and theological man as well; but he cannot tell me what man is. Kemp evidently considers himself a philosophical disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas. I'm not so sure that Aquinas would agree. For Aquinas, unlike Kemp, can tell us what man is: he tells us that "the proper operation of man as man is to understand; because he thereby surpasses all other animals" (Summa Theologica I, q. 76 art. 1), and in the same passage, he adds:
[T]he difference which constitutes man is "rational," which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle. Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.
This brings me to my second objection: Kemp's fragmentation of the concept of humanity would make it impossible to affirm the statement: "Man is a rational animal," which Aquinas (following Aristotle) understood as a proper definition of what it is to be human. On Kemp's account, this statement becomes either false or trivial. It is false when applied to biological man, for it is not true (according to Kemp) to say that having a body like ours is a sufficient condition for having a rational, spiritual soul. And it is trivial when applied to philosophical man, for then all it says is: "Every human being possessing a rational soul is rational." In either case, the sentence, "Man is a rational animal," fails to say anything genuinely informative.
My third objection to Kemp's fragmentation of the concept of humanity is that it lends itself very readily to a false anthropology, in which our rationality (which we possess by virtue of being endowed by God with spiritual souls) is envisaged as something which is added onto our animality (which we possess simply by virtue of being "biologically human"). According to this false anthropology, every human person is an animal plus a rational agent. It is as if we had two souls: an animal soul which handles bodily functions and has various sensory capacities and appetites, and an immaterial soul which thinks and chooses. Let me hasten to add that Professor Kemp does not subscribe to this flawed anthropology; however, the distinction he draws between what he calls "biological man" and "philosophical man" certainly seems to invite that way of thinking about man. Such a conception of man is radically mistaken, as The Catholic Encyclopedia points out in its article on Man:
According to the common definition of the School, Man is a rational animal. This signifies no more than that, in the system of classification and definition shown in the Arbor Porphyriana, man is a substance, corporeal, living, sentient, and rational. It is a logical definition, having reference to a metaphysical entity. It has been said that man's animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though they are inseparably joined, during life, in one common personality. "Animality" is an abstraction as is "rationality". As such, neither has any substantial existence of its own. To be exact we should have to write: "Man's animality is rational"; for his "rationality" is certainly not something superadded to his "animality". Man is one in essence. (Bold emphasis mine - VJT.)
Our rationality is part of our human biology, not something separate from it. Or as Fr. John O'Callaghan puts it in his perspicuous essay, From Augustine's Mind to Aquinas' Soul:
...Aquinas is effectively eliminating any suggestion that to be human is to be anything other than an animal whose form of life is rational. So the duality manifest in the definition rational animal does not correspond to a duality in the thing defined. On the contrary, the unity of the two elements of the definition corresponds to the absolute unity of the form of human life. The unity of intellect and will is not preserved in a special power that separates man from animals. Rather it is preserved in the unity of the soul that unites man to animals, insofar as it specifies the form that animal life takes in being human. (Bold emphases mine – VJT.)
To be a human being, then, is to be an animal whose form of life is rational. But according to Professor Kemp, our animality is something which is separable from - and at times actually separate from - our rationality: for according to him, the original population of 5,000 hominids consisted of animals who were of the same biological species as Adam and Eve (i.e. biologically human animals), but who lacked rationality. There is thus a real distinction between human animals and rational animals! By now, it should be readily apparent to readers that this proposal is totally alien to the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Kemp quotes in his article to bolster his case.
I should add that Professor Kemp's terminology at times inconsistent: thus he refers to Adam's hominid ancestors as "biologically human" (p. 232), but he also says that "Only beings with rational souls (with or without the preternatural gifts) are truly human" (p. 232). I'm sorry, but that makes no grammatical sense. If I'm a happily married man, then I’m a married man; likewise, if I'm a biologically human being, then I'm a human being. It's as simple as that.
It is also puzzling that on page 232 of his article, Professor Kemp refers to Adam's ancestors and relatives who lacked a rational spiritual soul as "genetically human-like" (which is unobjectionable), but also as "biologically human" (italics mine). Well, which is it? Human or human-like? You can't have it both ways.
Kemp also discusses an article by Andrew Alexander, C.J., entitled "Human Origins and Genetics" (Clergy Review 49, 1964), which makes a somewhat different proposal to the one Kemp is making. According to Alexander, Adam and Eve belonged to a larger population of hominids, but unlike the others, they both possessed a final crucial mutation, which crossed a philosophically or theologically critical threshold. Unfortunately, in my view, Alexander spoiled his account by going on to say that this mutation did not establish biological barriers to reproduction, i.e., did not give rise to a new biological species. If he had proposed a mutation that created a barrier to reproduction, making it very unlikely that Adam and Eve would interbreed with their companions, but not impossible for them to do so, then it could have been truly said that they would have been the only biologically human animals in the original population of hominids, in addition to being the only rational animals in the group. Personally, I would have no problem with such a proposal, from a philosophical perspective, although I shall argue in my final post on Kemp's article that even this modified proposal is extremely difficult to square with Scripture and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Professor Kemp's misreading of Aquinas constitutes a very powerful fourth reason to reject his proposed fragmentation of the concept of humanity. Incredibly, Professor Kemp argues that his distinction between biological humanity and philosophical (or rational) humanity is fully in keeping with the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who taught that while a certain kind of body is necessary for rational activity, reasoning itself is not the act of any bodily organ; rather, it is an incorporeal operation performed by the human soul, apart from the body (Summa Theologica I, q. 75 art. 2). Aquinas also taught that because the human soul is capable of performing some actions (e.g. reasoning) without the body, it is impossible to generate a human soul simply by making a being with a human body. Instead, the human soul can only come into being as a result of a special creative act of God (Summa Theologica I, q. 90 art. 2).
Quite so; but Aquinas also taught that the human soul is essentially the form of the human body (Summa Theologica I, q. 76 art. 1); which means that nothing can be said to have a human body unless it also possesses a human soul. The ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311-1312), which was convened a few decades after Aquinas' death, took the same view, for it declared in no uncertain terms: "[W]e define that anyone who presumes henceforth to assert defend or hold stubbornly that the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of the human body of itself and essentially, is to be considered a heretic." (This council was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church.) However, Professor Kemp maintains that Adam and Eve had "biologically human ancestors" (p. 232), who belonged to a "biologically (i.e., genetically) human species" (p. 231), so it seems that he must therefore hold that these pre-Adamite hominids had human bodies; yet he also says that these hominids lacked rational souls - which means that for Kemp, the rational soul is not essentially the form of the human body. Now, Professor Kemp is a loyal and devout Catholic, and I do not wish to question his orthodoxy, but I think he owes his readers a better explanation of how he would reconcile his declared views with the official teaching of the Catholic Church than the brief and rather cryptic remark he makes in a passage near the conclusion of his article. In that passage, Kemp attempts to reconcile his position with the statement of the Council of Vienne by declaring that "Adam's non-intellectual cousins would have had a sensitive soul sufficient to engage in all the acts of image apprehension and manipulation of which other animals are capable, without the power to abstract from those images the concepts that distinguish human from animal cognition" (p. 235). All well and good; but on Kemp's account, Adam's cousins still had human bodies, yet they lacked rational souls – which entails that the rational soul is not essentially the form of the human body.
Professor Kemp might attempt to respond by saying that Adam's immediate ancestors were biologically human, but did not have human bodies – an assertion that I find altogether unintelligible. For although Adam's ancestors lacked the power of reason, which is a spiritual capacity, their bodies still possessed exactly the same set of capacities that our bodies possess, according to Kemp. Hence they must have been human bodies. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you're a biologically human being, then you're a human being. And if you're a human being, then you must have a human body.
But perhaps what Professor Kemp has in mind can be better illustrated by the following example. Imagine a creature with natural capacities A, B and C, which arise from its form - i.e. that which makes it the kind of thing it is. Now imagine another kind of creature with the same natural capacities, plus another capacity D. Since this creature has a different set of natural capacities, it must be a different type of entity, and must therefore have a different form. Now suppose that A, B and C are the bodily capacities which make a creature biologically human, and D is the capacity to reason, which is a non-bodily capacity. Professor Kemp would argue that "philosophical man" (i.e. man the rational animal) is the second kind of creature, and that the human soul which the Council of Vienne is referring to is simply the form of this kind of creature, and not the first kind (biological man). Problem solved, right?
Well, I don't buy that "solution", for two reasons. For one thing, both of these creatures have exactly the same bodily capacities: A, B and C. Consequently, if the second creature (philosophical man) has a human body, then so does the first creature (biological man). However, if biological man has a human body but lacks a rational soul, then the human soul cannot be the essential form of the human body - which (once again) seems to put Professor Kemp's position at odds with that of the ecumenical Council of Vienne.
For another thing, it is simply absurd to suppose that there can be two different kinds of creatures, possessing exactly the same bodily capacities (A, B and C), but different non-bodily capacities (none at all for biological man, versus capacity D for philosophical man). Once we understand what an Aristotelian soul is, we can immediately see why this idea makes no sense. On Aristotle's account, the soul is not only the formal cause of the body (i.e. that which makes it the kind of body it is), but also its final cause (i.e. that which endows a living thing with a "good of its own", or telos). In other words, the powers of the soul are precisely those powers which it should fittingly have, given the kind of body it has. Consequently, if two creatures have the same kind of body, then they must have the same kind of soul.
Now, the really odd thing about human beings is that they are animals with two non-bodily capacities (the capacity to reason coupled with the concomitant capacity to make free choices), in addition to their bodily capacities. How, the reader may be wondering, can there be a kind of animal which, by its very nature as an organism, should possess non-bodily capacities, in addition to its bodily capacities? The answer, as I'll argue below, is that if the body's physical powers alone are insufficient to make an organism suitable for its biological role or niche, then it must rely on additional, non-bodily powers in order to fit into that role. So, what's the role of a human being? Following Aristotle, Aquinas would say: we are not solitary beings; thus the human telos is essentially social. At the very least, it involves being a committed member of a monogamous nuclear family, as well as an active member of a local political community - be it a tribe or a nation-state. Both the domestic and political roles of a human being require the use of reason - in particular, an ability to engage in long-range planning, as well as an ability to put oneself in another person's shoes (or else we could not follow the Golden Rule). Both of these abilities are rational abilities. As primates, human primates are social animals, who are physically well-adapted to fulfilling their domestic and political roles; however their bodily capacities alone are insufficient to allow them to fulfill these roles. Professor Kemp and I would both agree that having a big brain doesn't automatically give you empathy or the ability for long-range planning. Thus the human primate is an organism that naturally requires the use of incorporeal reason, in order to be the kind of thing it is.
Incidentally, I'd like to note in passing that back in July 2000, Professor Kemp delivered a lecture entitled, The Theory of Evolution as part of a series of three talks given at the Thomistic Summer School in Birstonas, Lithuania, in which he put forward essentially the same hypothesis that he recently published in his 2011 paper, Science, Theology and Monogenesis, but without the awkward terminology that distinguishes between three different types of man (biological, philosophical and theological). In his earlier talk, given in 2000, Kemp simply says that the population of 5,000 hominids consisted of "beings which look rather like human beings, but lack an intellect". If he had simply said that in his recent paper, without inventing a spurious distinction between "biological man" and "philosophical man", he might have saved himself a lot of bother.
Nevertheless, readers may still be wondering whether Professor Kemp had a valid point in his recent paper. After all, if (as Aquinas maintains) each human person's soul is created by a special act of God, then it would seem to follow that if an individual could be generated with a body like ours, but without a rational soul being infused by God, then it would have a human body without a rational soul. In Professor Kemp's terminology, it would be "biologically human" without being "philosophically human" (i.e. rational); and it would certainly not be "theologically human" (i.e. able to be on friendly terms with God).
My reply to this objection is that the antecedent is impossible: no individual could ever be generated with a human body, but without a human soul. "Why not?" you may ask. The answer is that a human body is the kind of body that requires a rational soul in order to properly flourish; human beings, as a race, require the use of reason for their very survival, and without the ability to reason, the human race would not be viable and would swiftly perish. (I'll explain why in more detail in my next post. All I'll say for now is that given the kind of bodies that human beings possess, an extraordinary level of co-operation would have had to develop between members of each human community, in order that they could satisfy their energy requirements and feed themselves adequately. This level of co-operation would have required the ability to reason.) As a devout Catholic, Professor Kemp would surely hold, as I do, that God intended the process - whether it was natural or supernatural is irrelevant here - by which the human body originally came into existence. Since human beings, as a biological life-form, require the use of reason for their very survival (as I shall attempt to show in my next post), then God could never intend that human beings, as a life-form, should come into existence without also intending that they should have a soul which is suited to their biological nature: namely, a rational soul, which (unlike the soul of a non-rational animal) requires a special act of creation by God. Since this generic intention on God's part would apply to the entire human species, it must apply to each of its members. Consequently, it is impossible that God could allow a human creature to come into existence without endowing it with a rational soul - for if He did, He would be contradicting His own will for the human species as a whole.
A fifth reason for rejecting Professor Kemp's three-way fragmentation of the concept of humanity is that it is morally hazardous in its implications. For it seems to imply that we can never know for sure whether any human being who has never exercised, or who can no longer exercise, his/her reason is actually a person with a rational soul or merely a sub-rational, biologically human animal. I have recently argued, in my online essay, Embryo and Einstein: Why They're Equal, that the human rights of the embryo are grounded in its biological humanity, which is why an effective pro-life case can be effectively made even when arguing with atheistic materialists, so long as they are prepared to grant at the outset that rational human adults have a natural right to life. Given that admission on their part, it can be demonstrated that embryos also have a right to life. (If you're a materialist, then of course, you'll hold that our capacity to reason is ultimately grounded in the developmental program in our genome, which is present from the moment of conception; and if you reject materialism, then you'll still hold that it is grounded in human nature, which is also present from the very beginning.) Sadly, many pro-choice proponents have, in recent years, attempted to argue that the human capacity to reason is imparted to the developing fetus from its external environment – a position I have refuted in my online essay. These pro-choice advocates acknowledge that the embryo/fetus is biologically human, while denying that it possesses a rational nature – hence, they say, it is not a person. As I see it, the danger of Professor Kemp's fragmentation of the concept of humanity is that it is vulnerable to being misused by pro-choice proponents to further their cause.
Kemp, who is ardently pro-life, would doubtless respond by saying that if the embryo/fetus lacked a rational nature, then it would have to undergo a change of nature at some subsequent stage of its development, when God gave it a rational soul - a philosophically unparsimonious hypothesis - and that it makes more sense to say that it possesses a rational nature from the moment of conception. Indeed, Kemp does explicitly state, in a footnote on page 233 of his article, that God's giving an existing individual a rational soul "would make it a different kind of being and a fortiori a different individual." However, a pro-choice advocate could reply that when a human person acquires his/her capacity to reason, it is merely superimposed on its existing biological humanity, without changing the fetus' underlying biological nature. On this proposal, when a new human person emerges at some time subsequent to conception, it still remains the same individual animal as it was before becoming a person. I am sure that Professor Kemp would strongly object to this response, but it is difficult to see how he could rule it out, given the real (and not merely logical) distinction he has drawn between our biological humanity and our rationality.
The only way to decisively refute the pro-choice line of argument described above is to show that our rationality and our animality both spring from a common source: our human nature. As Aquinas would say, to be a human animal is to be an animal which is by nature rational. (This was a point which Aquinas never lost sight of: for even though he was misled by the faulty biology of Aristotle into believing that the fetus did not become an animal until several weeks after conception, he nevertheless insisted that the fetus acquired rationality at the same time as it became an animal. Thus for Aquinas, our rationality is part and parcel of our animality.) But Professor Kemp cannot argue in this manner, because he believes that being biologically human does not entail having the capacity to reason. On his view, rationality is something which can be tacked onto an existing biologically human animal. Thus Kemp's proposed distinction between three concepts of humanity (biological, philosophical and theological) severely hampers the pro-life case – needlessly, I might add, since the very unity of human nature attests to the fact that our rationality and our animality both spring from a common source. It is one and the same "I" who reasons, chooses, senses, desires and obtains nourishment.
In this post, I have been chiefly concerned to argue that the concept of humanity is one which we rend asunder at our philosophical peril. Human beings are rational animals, and our rationality is precisely what characterizes us as animals, for our whole way of life, as a species, requires us to be able to engage in reasoning, as I shall argue in my next post.
When did human rationality first appear? Is our ability to reason a single, universal capacity that appeared all at once, or a cluster of capacities which appeared gradually over the course of human evolution? Who were the first human beings, and what can science tell us about them? Was there a single original pair, or did the human stock never fall below 5,000 individuals, as many biologists claim? These are the questions that I'll be addressing in my second post on Professor Kemp's recent article, Science, Theology and Monogenesis (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2011, Vol. 85, No. 2, pp. 217-236). In my previous post, I focused on the philosophical flaws arising from Kemp's attempt to distinguish three different concepts of humanity: biological (belonging to the human species, genetically speaking: i.e. being a member of a population which inter-breeds with people), philosophical (having a natural ability to reason, by virtue of possessing a spiritual soul) and theological (having the opportunity to be in a state of eternal friendship with God). In this post, however, I'll be assessing Kemp's article strictly on its scientific merits.
Let me say at the outset that as someone who has had an interest in prehistoric man since childhood, I was quite impressed with the breadth of Professor Kemp's reading and the fairness of his reporting of scientific findings. Kemp has made a commendable attempt to do justice to his subject matter, and his argument therefore warrants serious scientific evaluation.
Professor Kemp's article, although well-researched, suffers from three scientific flaws. The first is a mild bias towards methodological naturalism. Underlying Kemp's paper is an implicit assumption that even if (as he believes) evolution is guided by God, evolution must always be an entirely natural process, requiring no extraordinarily unlikely occurrences that would need to be "specially arranged" by an Intelligent Being - whether by directly manipulating certain individuals' genes, or by pre-arranging that certain mutations should occur through some kind of "front-loading" process (e.g. at the Big Bang, or at the dawn of life). Unfortunately, Kemp’s methodological naturalism leads him to overlook scientific evidence suggesting that intelligent engineering of the human genome did indeed occur in our evolutionary past. In particular, there is strong prima facie evidence of intelligent engineering of the genes that regulate the development of the human brain over the past few million years. It is a pity that Kemp does not consider this possibility. The irony here is that Kemp himself believes that God infused a spiritual soul into two hominids at the dawn of human history, and that He has been infusing souls into the bodies of all their descendants ever since. That makes him what philosopher Daniel Dennett would call a "mind creationist". In the view of today's Gnu atheists, this position is simply "a form of Intelligent Design", as evolutionary biologist Professor Jerry Coyne pithily put it in a recent post entitled, Simon Conway Morris becomes a creationist (14 February 2009). If Professor Kemp already holds to a position that orthodox evolutionists dismiss as "creationism" and/or "Intelligent Design", then surely the old adage, "One might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb", applies here. What does Kemp have to lose by investigating the possibility that the evolution of the human brain was engineered by God, and that the critical mutations which gave our hominid ancestors human brains and bodies were intelligently planned?.
My second scientific criticism of Kemp's article is that his definition of a biological species is a little muddled. The definition of a species is an important matter, for it has bearing on the question of whether Adam and Eve's descendants would have been able to inter-breed with other hominids. I shall argue below, on the basis of paleontological evidence, that the first hominids that could be called rational - and hence human - probably possessed various genetic and physical attributes that would have inhibited their mating with other hominids, and that if they did, these features could fairly be described as barriers to reproduction. I shall contend that the combined effect of these barriers would have meant that if there were only two rational individuals (Adam and Eve) at the beginning of human history, there would have been little likelihood of them or their descendants successfully inter-breeding with other hominids. Thus even if Adam and Eve were not already a biologically distinct species from their sub-rational hominid contemporaries, the barriers to reproduction separating them from other hominids would have led to their descendants becoming a distinct biological species within a relatively small number of generations, simply as a result of reproductive isolation.
The third and most important flaw in Kemp's paper is that he overlooks a number of scientific facts, which suggest that for the first human beings, the ability to reason would have been absolutely critical for their survival. Without this incorporeal capacity, the first human beings would have ceased to be biologically viable and would have swiftly died out as a race. My argument is based on the empirical fact that having a human body comes at a very high evolutionary price, and that additionally, many features of the human body are biologically disadvantageous as such: for example, the large human brain, which consumes an inordinate amount of oxygen; the human pelvis, which is not always wide enough for a baby's head to pass through; naked skin, which offers inadequate protection against the cold; small canines, which are of no use in fighting; and feet which are adapted for bipedalism rather than gripping, making it impossible for human infants to cling to their mothers' bodies with their feet, as chimpanzee infants do. Indeed, I shall argue that so great are the biological drawbacks associated with having a human body that only the possession of reason could adequately compensate for these drawbacks.
Next, I shall examine three objections that might be raised to the thesis I am proposing here - first, the various biologically disadvantageous traits distinguishing human beings did not appear simultaneously, but gradually, over millions of years, giving our hominid ancestors plenty of opportunities to adjust their lifestyles in order to cope with these deleterious traits; second, that these disadvantageous traits may have been offset by biological benefits; and finally, that even if a cognitive benefit were needed to compensate for the appearance of these biologically disadvantageous traits, it need not have involved a qualitative change in our ancestors' mental capacities, but merely a quantitative one - and hence, there would have been no overnight leap in our ancestors' cognitive abilities, as believers in an immaterial soul would maintain.
I shall respond to these objections by providing evidence that around 2,000,000 years ago, human evolution reached a critical threshold in terms of our ancestors' food and energy requirements. This is the time when Homo erectus emerged. (Note: In this post, I will be using the term Homo erectus fairly broadly, to include the earlier specimens of Homo ergaster from Africa, as well as the Homo georgicus fossil remains from Dmanisi, Georgia.) Following the work of authors such as Mathias Osvath and Peter Gardenfors (see their 2005 paper, Oldowan culture and the evolution of anticipatory cognition) and also Kit Opie and Camilla Power (vide their 2008 article, Grandmothering and Female Coalitions: A Basis for Matrilineal Priority?), I argue the food and energy requirements of Homo erectus could only have been satisfied if adult males and females had the capacity to make long-term family commitments held together by strong bonds, which pre-supposes an ability to plan for the long-term future. In other words, Homo erectus must have been rational – or else he would have starved to death as a species. The foregoing considerations would apply even more strongly to Heidelberg man (Homo heidelbergensis), who lived from 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, and who was built like Homo ergaster (African Homo erectus), but who was somewhat taller (1.8 meters), with an average brain size of 1225 cubic centimeters, placing him well within the modern human range. In the interests of journalistic accuracy, I would like to point out that none of the authors whom I will be citing believe that human rationality appeared overnight, as Professor Kemp and I both do; indeed, Osvath and Gardenfors, who endorse a materialistic account of human cognition, envisage that our ability to plan for the future developed gradually during the Oldowan period, over a period of about one million years, when early Homo made tools, before making itself unambiguously manifest in Homo ergaster/erectus. However, the key point that I wish to make in quoting these authors is that at some stage in human history, a critical threshold was crossed in terms of our ancestors' food and energy requirements, which made the possession of human rationality a practical necessity.
To buttress my case, I shall also argue that the Acheulean toolswhich were often used by Homo erectus, starting from at least 1.8 million years ago, display very strong indications that their makers were capable of taking a carefully controlled sequence of steps in order to achieve a long-range goal (e.g. A->B->C->D), which means that they were rational individuals. For instance, it takes about 45 minutes of sustained, focused activity to make an Acheulean hand axe. Only a creature that was capable of performing various steps in a specified order in order to realize a long-term goal would have been capable of such a task. (I would like to note in passing that Professor Kemp is also impressed by the tools made by Homo erectus, and I am happy to see that he apparently shares my view of Homo erectus's tool-making capacities, judging from his remarks on page 234 of hisarticle.) Finally, the later Acheulean tools made by Heidelberg man 500,000 years ago were even more elegantly fashioned, leaving absolutely no doubt as to the intelligence of their designers. Thus we can be reasonably confident that rational human beings existed nearly two million years ago, and absolutely certain that they existed half a million years ago.
I shall also discuss other activities engaged in by Homo ergaster/erectus which give us good reason to believe that this species was rational: first, the controlled use of fire for cooking meat (dating back to at least 1,900,000 years ago); second, the ability to catch fish (at least 750,000 years ago); third, the ability to make either boats or rafts for sea voyages (at least 850,000 years ago); fourth, the creation of tools that were evidently designed to be objects of beauty (at least 750,000 years ago); and fifth, the care that was given to sick individuals over a prolonged period of time, demonstrating the existence of human compassion (1,800,000 years ago). Taken together, these practices very strongly suggest that Homo ergaster/erectus was a rational creature, and therefore a human being.
Next, I shall critique scientific evidence which has recently been put forward, suggesting that human rationality is not a single capacity, but a cluster of related capacities which appeared at different times in human history, and that our ancestors did not become mentally human overnight. In a ground-breaking article entitled, Paleolithic public goods games: why human culture and cooperation did not evolve in one step (Biology and Philosophy, 2010, 25:53–73, DOI 10.1007/s10539-009-9177-7), Dr. Benoit Dubreuil has argued that while hominins from the early Pleistocene period (about 2,500,000 to 800,000 years ago), such as Homo erectus, possessed the capacity to form mental representations of complex social norms, emotions and goals, and were also capable of collaborating for the realization of future goals, it is only with the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis, about 700,000 years ago, that we see the true emergence of the characteristically human abilities of sticking to abstract goals, in the face of conflicting motivations - i.e. exercising self-control and foregoing short-term individual gain for the sake of a larger long-term reward which benefits the group as a whole. Dubreuil argues that this ability would have been essential in order for individuals to adhere to the very demanding co-operative requirements involved in big-game hunting and life-long monogamy. Finally, Dubreuil contends that at an even later phase, somewhere between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago (i.e. approximately the time when modern Homo sapiens emerged), human beings developed new cognitive abilities – namely, a capacity for symbolism, art, and a properly cumulative culture, which was able to build on previous innovations. Dr. Dubreuil believes that Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis lacked these distinctively human abilities. Thus Dubreuil would argue that the possession of distinctively human cognitive capacities is not an all-or-nothing affair, but one admitting of several degrees; hence our ancestors could not have become rational overnight. However, Professor Kemp and I would both maintain that our hominid ancestors did become rational literally overnight, when the first human soul was infused into a human body.
Contra Dubreuil, I shall first argue that any convincing attempt to isolate the various capacities that we commonly classify together as "rational" requires a clearly defined procedure for grading these capacities into different levels of rationality, as well as a detailed cognitive model of the human mind, which predicts exactly which of the various cognitive capacities we associate with human beings should be capable of existing independently of the other capacities, which capacities should always be associated together, and finally what order these capacities should appear in, during our evolutionary history. (For example, could there have once been a hominid who was naturally capable of creating art, but inherently incapable of religious beliefs, or of making scientific observations?) Neither the required procedure nor the detailed cognitive model has yet been developed, so I remain skeptical of Dr. Dubreuil’s attempt to fragment the human capacity to reason. (To be sure, Dubreuil proposes a plausible neurological model, based on a posteriori reasoning coupled with some good scientific guesswork; but what I am looking for is a model of the mind as such, rather than the brain. I want to know why we would expect the emergence of cognitive capacity X to precede that of capacity Y in human history.)
Second, I shall contend that there is in fact considerable evidence suggesting that large-scale, long-term co-operation, which Dr. Dubreuil claims first appeared with Homo heidelbergensis, was already present in Homo erectus, and that the ability to create symbolic art, which he regards as unique to modern Homo sapiens, was already present in Homo heidelbergensis.
Third, I shall suggest that if Homo erectus and/or Homo heidelbergensis were deficient in any mental ability, it was not the ability to reason or to understand the intentions of other minds, but more likely, a much lower-grade ability: the ability to ascribe a symbolic significance to objects. Perhaps Homo erectus was unable to think thoughts like: "This object symbolizes individual A, while that object represents individual B." This limitation would have meant that Homo erectus was unable to create symbolic art; nevertheless, he would still have been able to create objects of beauty (such as elegantly crafted Acheulean tools).
Finally, I shall propose a definition of human reason which provides grounds for thinking that it is indeed an all-or-nothing ability: we ascribe reason to someone who is capable of adhering to sequentially ordered rules for the sake of achieving a distant goal, which he/she is able to share with other people. I shall argue that anyone who is capable of doing this must also be capable by nature of engaging in practices such as science, art and religion.
As a Catholic philosopher, Professor Kemp, like myself, is committed to the belief that the human ability to reason appeared at a definite point in human history, and that it is an all-or-nothing affair. Scientific proof to the contrary would, as I shall argue, be absolutely fatal for both Judaism and Christianity: a spiritual soul (which is required for reasoning) is something that you either have or you don't, and it does not come in "grades" - which is why all human beings are equal. In my opinion, the attempted fragmentation of the human capacity to reason by prominent cognitive scientists and anthropologists presents a far greater threat to the Abrahamic faiths than the difficulty of reconciling human genetic diversity with the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. I might add that if Professor Kemp is willing to maintain (as I do) that the human ability to reason appeared overnight, in the face of archaeological and neurological evidence suggesting the contrary, then he has no good reason to jettison the traditional Judeo-Christian belief that all human beings are descended from one and only one couple, simply because the genetic evidence strongly suggests otherwise. If Professor Kemp wants to take his epistemic lead from science and modify his understanding of Christian doctrines in the light of modern discoveries, he should be consistent about it.
Next, I will argue that among the biological features that distinguished Homo erectus - the first hominid for whom the ability for abstract reasoning became vital to its survival – from other hominids, were changes which dramatically affected its genetic make-up and its appearance. I discuss three changes in particular, which may have coincided with the emergence of Homo erectus, 2,000,000 years ago: first, a change from 48 chromosomes per body cell to 46, which occurred somewhere between 740,000 and 3,000,000 years ago and may well have coincided with the appearance of Homo erectus 2,000,000 years ago; second, a massive increase in the number of sweat glands (enabling our ancestors to run long distances in pursuit of prey, without getting over-heated), which probably occurred at the time when our ancestors acquired smooth, hairless skin; and third, a total loss of body hair (which would have also helped our ancestors to radiate excess body heat), a process which was fully completed by 1,200,000 years ago at the latest. I argue that the sudden change in chromosome number would have hindered (but not totally prevented) inter-breeding between humans with 46 chromosomes and other hominids, who had 48. I then speculate that if the other changes (a profusion of sweat glands and a loss of body hair) occurred at the same time, they may well have rendered Homo erectus individuals sexually unattractive to other non-rational hominids, creating a pre-copulatory barrier to reproduction. (For instance, a hairy australopithecine female, with relatively few sweat glands, would probably have been strongly repelled by a hairless and very sweaty Homo erectus male, and vice versa.) The combined result of these genetic and physical changes is that rational and non-rational hominids would have been strongly disinclined to inter-breed from the very beginning. Thus I tentatively suggest that an evolutionary bottleneck occurred around 2,000,000 years ago - a date which was originally proposed by paleoanthropologist John Hawks et al. in 2000 (see "Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution," Molecular Biology and Evolution 17 (2000): 2–22). However, unlike Hawks, who is an orthodox evolutionist, I hold that this bottleneck consisted of just two individuals: Adam and Eve.
The notion that the human race is descended from a single original couple is now widely discredited, following studies conducted by Professor Francisco J. Ayala ("The Myth of Eve: Molecular Biology and Human Origins," Science 270 (1995): 1930–6; and, with A. A. Escalante, "The Evolution of Human Populations: A Molecular Perspective," Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 5 (1996): 188–201), which supposedly demonstrate that humans could never have descended from a stock of just two individuals. According to his research, at no stage in our hominid past did the population ever fall below 15,000 individuals. Professor Kemp is evidently impressed by Ayala’s work, for he devotes considerable space in his article to explaining the scientific reasoning underpinning Ayala's studies. Professor Ayala bases his conclusion on his studies of variation in a particular gene in the human population: the DBR1 gene, which is one of many genes that make up the human leukocyte antigen complex. However, I shall argue below that this particular gene is under very strong selection for increasing diversity, making it a poor choice for making estimates about genetic events in our distant past.
Professor Kemp also points out in his essay that other studies have backed Ayala's conclusions. These studies are handily summarized in an article written for the Biologos Foundation, entitled, Genesis and the Genome: Genomic Evidence for Human-Ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Hominid Population Sizes, by Dr. Dennis Venema, a biochemist who is also an evangelical Christian. In his article, Venema attaches great significance to the fact that gene trees in human beings don't always match species trees: the chimpanzee is our nearest relative, but a few of our genes are more like those of gorillas than those of chimps. Venema explains this fact by positing that the ancestral population from which humans and chimpanzees sprang was large enough, and genetically diverse enough, to transmit a few gorilla-like genes to us without passing them on to chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and humans are both descended from this large, diverse ancestral population, whose effective size is now estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 individuals. What Venema is doing here is arguing from naturalistic assumptions: he is assuming that some random event is responsible for the fact that some of our genes are more gorilla-like than chimp-like, and his effective population size estimates also assume that gene flows are random, rather than intelligently guided. An Intelligent Design proponent would ask why some of our genes are more gorilla-like than chimp-like, and consider the possibility that humans were deliberately designed that way - a fact which is perfectly compatible with common descent. In short: you can only rule out monogenism if you have already adopted methodological naturalism. Intelligent Design proponents reject this methodology, as it attempts to put science in a box: super-human intelligent causal agents are excluded on an a priori basis from the domain of legitimate scientific explanations.
The foregoing genetic arguments do establish, however, that a human genetic bottleneck of two individuals could never have arisen as a result of unguided natural processes. Additional reasons for positing intelligently guided genetic engineering in our evolutionary past include the large number of genetic changes that would have been required to produce a brain that was compatible with a rational soul, and at the same time inhibit inter-breeding between rational humans and non-rational human-like hominids at the dawn of human history - assuming that our Creator meant to actively discourage humans from inter-breeding with other creatures Personally, I am agnostic as to whether this genetic engineering was achieved by some sort of "front-loading" at the dawn of life (thus avoiding the need for subsequent Divine "intervention") or whether our Creator directly manipulated the hominid genome two million years ago, although I incline toward the latter hypothesis.
Some religious believers find the notion of Divine genetic engineering deeply distasteful. For my part, I believe that we should keep an open mind. We might find such a notion messy and inelegant, but God is not bound by our personal "aesthetic" preferences, which are often merely disguised theological biases - and in any case, that may have been the least inelegant way for Him to accomplish His objectives for the human race.
Lastly, supposing that some kind of Divine genetic engineering did take place at the dawn of humanity, I shall attempt to describe what kinds of processes might have been involved. Here, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Gnu atheist Professor Jerry Coyne, who recently put up a mocking post (11 June 2011) describing exactly what kind of miracle would have been required in order for monogenism to be true. Unlike Coyne, I see no reason to doubt that such a miracle occurred, and I would like to add that I find it ironic that the atheists who balk at this miracle seem to have no trouble believing that the most complex machine in the universe emerged by an unguided process. Now that's a miracle, if ever I heard of one.
1. Why is Professor Kemp willing to adopt methodological naturalism when discussing our biological origins, when modern science is completely unable to explain the evolution of the human brain?
Diagram showing the lobes of the human cerebral cortex and the cerebellum (blue). The brain is seen from the right side, the front of the brain (above the eyes) is to the right. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
On pages 230-231 of his article, Professor Kemp evaluates a proposal put forward in 1964 by Andrew Alexander C.J., ("Human Origins and Genetics," Clergy Review 49 (1964): 344–53), in which he suggested that "while it is true that all men are descended from Adam, the race nevertheless had a broad origin." Like Kemp, Alexander envisaged inter-breeding between the first humans and their hominid contemporaries; unlike Kemp, Alexander believed that a final mutation was required to make Adam and Eve biologically human, before God could infuse them with a soul. Kemp rejects this hypothesis as scientifically unlikely:
In Alexander's account, the material condition of this ensoulment was the appearance of a suitable body (rendering the account compatible with the demands of hylomorphic philosophy), which he interprets genetically as the result of a final crucial mutation. This mutation, he suggested, crossed a philosophically or theologically critical threshold, but did not establish biological barriers to reproduction…I think that Alexander's distinction between the biological species (the population of beings capable of interbreeding) and the philosophical and theological species "human being" is the key to the solution of this problem, but that his emphasis on genetics (a crucial mutation) may be misplaced. It creates for him the necessity to posit a not impossible but extremely unlikely co-occurrence of exactly two instances of the same mutation (one in a man and one in a woman) at roughly the same time. (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
Professor Kemp's argumentation in this passage reveals a bias towards methodological naturalism, when attempting to account for our biological origins as human beings. Like Kemp, I accept the fact that human beings and chimpanzees share a common ancestry – for I can think of no other satisfactory explanation for the pervasive similarities humans and chimps share at the genetic level, notwithstanding the pronounced differences that also exist. Unlike Professor Kemp, however, I see no reason to infer, from the mere fact of our common ancestry with the chimpanzee, that secondary causes, conserved by God and operating in their usual manner, should be sufficient to account for the origin of the human body. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't.
Looking at the human body, I can see plenty of reasons for doubting a purely naturalistic account of our biological origins. Consider, if you will, the origin of the human brain – easily the most complex structure known to exist in the entire universe. No machine that human beings have built comes close to matching it in processing power. And now compare the brain of a chimp, a gorilla or an orang-utan with a human brain, and ponder the profound differences between the human brain and those of the great apes. How did we get to be the way we are? And why can our brains do so much more than those of the great apes?
Unfortunately, many contemporary scientists have a tendency to glide over the evolutionary difficulties of generating a human brain from the chimp-sized brain which the common ancestor of humans and chimps must have possessed. Popular scientific explanations for the evolution of the human brain include: incremental growth at a steady pace over the last few million years; neoteny, which kept our brains growing longer during infancy and thereby made them much bigger when mature; an enlargement of Broca's area, which is related to language production; and a couple of mutations in our FOXP2 genes, giving us the ability to make grammatical sentences. Here is a fairly typical example of a "Just so" story about how the human brain evolved, taken from a recent post by Professor Jerry Coyne, entitled, Is the human mind like a skunk butt? (30 May 2011):
So long as advantageous mutations occur, regardless of their rarity, natural selection can build a complex brain without "catastrophe." And it had about five million years to turn a chimp-sized brain into ours. Just looking at volume, and assuming an ancestral brain of 500 cc, a modern brain of 1200 cc, and a generation time of 20 years, that's a change in brain volume of 0.0028 cc/generation, or an average increase of 0.00056% per generation. Where's the evidence that this change - at least in volume - was too fast to be caused by selection? We know that current observations of selection, such as that seen in beak size in Darwin's finches, can be much stronger than this without catastrophic effects! The finches, after all, are still here, and behaving like finches.
This is an illegitimate extrapolation: the chasm between the chimp-sized brain of Australopithecus and the modern human brain was not traversed by growing in cubic centimeters, but by growing neurons - and about 250,000 extra neurons must have been added per generation, if evolution proceeded at a uniform rate. Alternatively, we might suppose that every so often, neurons were added to the evolving human brain, in one fell swoop - say, a sudden burst of 2.5 billion neurons, every 100,000 years. Both scenarios have their problems, as Marshall Brain points out in an unusually candid article entitled, How Evolution Works: How Can Evolution Be So Quick? on How Stuff Works:
We see no evidence that evolution is randomly adding 250,000 neurons to each child born today, so that explanation is hard to swallow. The thought of adding a large package of something like 2.5 billion neurons in one step is difficult to imagine, because there is no way to explain how the neurons would wire themselves in. What sort of point mutation would occur in a DNA molecule that would suddenly create billions of new neurons and wire them correctly? The current theory of evolution does not predict how this could happen.
This isn't an argument from ignorance that I'm putting forward here. If I see a device that's better built than anything that our best scientists could have come up with, then it's entirely reasonable for me to infer that some super-intelligent agent designed it – especially if I am unable to come up with a not-too-improbable pathway whereby the device might have assembled itself without intelligent guidance. The human brain is such a device. Nothing we've built comes close to matching its awesome power – and everything we learn about it increases, rather than diminishes, our awe.
See also Why the human brain is not an enlarged chimpanzee brain:
Comparative neuro-anatomical studies (e.g., Barton et al., 1995) show that primate brains not only differ in size, but also in internal organization and structure. Interestingly, this organization reflects a species’ ecology and social structure, rather than its cladistic relatedness. For example, woolly monkeys (Lagothrix poepigii), a species of New World monkeys, have an energy-rich diet consisting mainly of fruits and insects. As a result, the internal organization of their brains looks vey similar to that of chimpanzees and differs considerably from that of other closer related New World monkeys (De Winter and Oxnard, 2001). Rilling and Insel (1999) compared the brains of 44 primate species using magnetic resonance imaging. Their research indicates that the human brain is not simply an enlarged ape brain: some areas have grown allometrically in humans, such as the prefrontal and temporal cortices, which are involved in language and theory of mind, whereas others, such as the cerebellum, which deals with locomotion, are reduced when compared to orang-utans and gibbons. Interestingly, the corpus callosum, which connects areas of similar function between the hemispheres, is reduced in humans compared to other apes. This reduced connectivity allows for greater autonomy and divergent evolution of different brain regions which may have enabled left-lateralization of language and cognitive functions (Hopkins and Rilling, 2000).As a matter of empirical fact, then, the human brain does not appear to be an enlarged chimpanzee brain. (p. 170) (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
The authors go on to argue that "both ecology and social structure are important factors in cognitive evolution" - a fact which I do not doubt for a moment. However, the question at stake is whether they are sufficient to account for the cognitive specializations of the human brain, and this I am strongly inclined to doubt. The very evidence which Hogh-Olesen et al. provide for their claim undermines it: for instance, when discussing the unique ecological niche occupied by human beings in distinction to the other apes, they write that "humans prefer food that is harder to obtain - through hunting and extraction - but that is high in energy and nutritive value", and that "Humans are unique among primates in their obligatory reliance on tools to extract food" (p. 172). But this begs the question: how did the ancestors of humans acquire the mental wherewithal to make these tools? Darwinian evolution is a process that lacks foresight. The idea of a hominid's brain evolving in a certain direction in order that its descendant might become smart enough to make tools that would allow it to extract certain foods isn't Darwinian evolution. It's Intelligent Design.
So when I hear theologians telling me that the human race descended from an original couple, and geneticists telling me that such a scenario is at odds with a naturalistic account of human origins, I don't believe we should automatically assume that human evolution has been an unguided naturalistic process. Professor Kemp's acceptance of the geneticists' verdict is therefore a rush to judgment, in my opinion.
2. What is a biological species?
The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Image courtesy of Andre Karwath and Wikipedia.
One scientific flaw of Kemp's paper is that his definition of "biologically human" is somewhat inconsistent: on page 230, he declares that "The biological species is the population of interbreeding individuals" (which is reasonably accurate), while on page 231, he defines a "new biological species" as "a new population of organisms incapable of interbreeding with the remainder of the larger population among which they appeared" (italics mine). This definition implicitly assumes that the mere ability of one individual to inter-breed with another makes them both members of the same species, which is not the case. It is quite possible that humans are still able to inter-breed with chimpanzees (see this article), despite having diverged from them six million years ago; yet no-one would say that they were of the same species.
The late Professor Ernst Mayr defined a biological species as follows: "species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups." For instance, two identical-looking birds – the Western meadowlark and the Eastern meadowlark – are classified as different species, simply because their distinct songs prevent inter-breeding. It is therefore the absence of barriers to reproduction which makes two individuals to be of the same species. Now, Kemp does mention barriers to reproduction on page 231 of his paper, but he goes on to claim that barriers create "a new population of organisms incapable of interbreeding with the remainder of the larger population among which they appeared." This is not quite correct. A reproductive barrier between two species does not have to make their members incapable of interbreeding, or even incapable of producing fertile offspring; all it needs to do is prevent interbreeding in almost all cases. Such prevention need not be infallible: the two fruit-fly species Drosophila pseudoobscura and Drosophila persimilis are capable of inter-breeding, but a variety of mechanisms (different habitats, different mating times and different mating behavior, as well as reduced inter-fertility) work together to severely restrict the genetic interchange between the two species of fly in the wild. Reproductive barriers may be pre-copulatory, tending to discourage mating; or they may be post-copulatory, preventing matings from producing fertile offspring.
Readers may be wondering: what relevance does all this have to the origin of man? The point I wish to make here is that if the first rational human beings (Adam and Eve, in the Genesis account) had possessed any genetic or physical attributes whatsoever that would have effectively prevented their peers from inter-breeding with them, this would have constituted a pre-copulatory reproductive barrier, setting them apart from their peers and making them the first representatives of a population that would (after a few generations) become so reproductively isolated from its parent population that biologists would classify it as a new species. As I shall argue below, there are grounds for believing that such a reproductive barrier may have appeared nearly two million years ago, with the emergence of Homo ergaster.
3. The evolutionary drawbacks of having a human body
Picture of a Homo erectus male. Image courtesy of Steveoc 86 and Wikipedia.
A more significant scientific flaw in Professor Kemp's paper is that he ignores the numerous evolutionary drawbacks associated with having a human body. Since human infants are the only primate infants who are unable to cling to their mothers with their feet, which are adapted for bipedalism, their mothers would have been forced to carry their babies in their arms while they were foraging for food. Another human drawback is our naked skin, which severely limits humans' ability to withstand the cold. In addition, the increasing size of the human body over the course of our evolutionary history would have undoubtedly increased our energy requirements, which meant that humans would have needed more food in order to survive. On top of that, there is the large human brain, which consumes 20% of the body's oxygen and takes a very long time to mature, compared with that of a chimpanzee. Finally, there is the human pelvis, which is only just wide enough to deliver a human child. Professor Kemp's suggestion that our ancestors may have been biologically human long before they became rational beings presupposes that a non-rational being with a brain and body like ours would be viable, in the evolutionary sense. However, the foregoing considerations suggest that a non-rational being built like us may not have been viable, after all.
Given these biological disadvantages associated with the human body and especially with its large brain, there must have been some compensatory benefit associated with having a larger brain; otherwise hominids having big brains would have been eliminated long ago, by natural selection. I shall argue below that this compensatory benefit was the human capacity for anticipatory cognition (the ability to plan ahead for future needs, requiring abstract reason), and that it was vital to their survival as a group. But abstract reasoning requires a spiritual soul. A large human brain might be necessary for such an ability, but it is certainly not sufficient (a point on which Professor Kemp and I are in perfect agreement). Hence, I would maintain, if significantly larger-brained individuals suddenly appeared in a population of hominids, and if the mutation that generated these larger brains was something planned by God, then He must have also intended to give them a rational soul - for if He hadn't, they would surely have died out.
4. Three objections to the argument that the first humans needed the ability to reason in order to survive
A reconstruction of Homo Habilis, a species that may have preceded Homo erectus. Image courtesy of Lillyundfreya and Wikipedia.
There are three objections that could be made to the line of argument which I am putting forward here: (i) one might hypothesize that the evolutionary drawbacks associated with having a human body did not appear all at once, but gradually, over millions of years, and that humans had time to adapt to these drawbacks; (ii) one might argue that these evolutionary drawbacks were offset by compensatory biological advantages; (iii) one might grant that these drawbacks had to be offset by compensatory cognitive advantages, but argue that these advantages were quantitative rather than qualitative, and that they did not require the possession of abstract reason.
In response to the first objection: it is certainly true that hominids did not become anatomically human all at once. Fully fledged bipedalism (which would have required mothers to carry their infants in their arms) probably appeared around four or five million years ago and was certainly present in Australopithecus afarensis, 3.4 million years ago. Naked skin seems to have emerged much later, with the appearance of Homo ergaster, nearly two million years ago (see here and here), along with sweat glands that made it possible for human beings to run long distances in pursuit of prey without getting overheated. Meanwhile, the human brain, with its high oxygen consumption, has steadily increased in average size over the course of time, from 450 cubic centimeters in Australopithecus africanus (who appeared 3,000,000 years ago) to slightly under 600 cc in early Homo (2,400,000 years ago), to 870 cc in Homo ergaster (who appeared 1,900,000 years ago), to 1250 cc in Homo heidelbergensis (who appeared about 600,000 years ago) and 1360 cc in modern Homo sapiens (who appeared nearly 200,000 years ago). Finally, the large size of a newborn baby's brain would not have rendered childbirth hazardous until the time of Homo heidelbergensis, who emerged about 600,000 years ago. Homo erectus apparently did not have to contend with this problem. (See this press release: "The First Female Homo erectus Pelvis, from Gona, Afar, Ethiopia" , later published in the journal Science, 14 November, 2008.)
My reply to this objection would be that the mere fact that these evolutionary changes appeared at different times in human history does not tell us whether they were viable, from an evolutionary perspective. Was there a critical physical change, a "straw that broke the camel's back", which would have disadvantaged the hominid possessing it to such a degree as to necessitate the emergence of reason? I shall argue below that there was such a change, and that it was associated with the food and energy requirements of infants.
The second objection, like the first, is valid up to a point. The physical changes that occurred in the ancestors of human beings conferred advantages as well as disadvantages. For instance, bipedalism would have made it possible for hominids to travel long distances to get obtain food. It would have also freed hominids' hands for tool use and carrying, in addition to reducing the amount of skin exposed to the tropical sun. Naked skin would have helped prevent the build-up of excess body heat, as well as ridding man's ancestors of a very annoying problem in one fell swoop: fleas. However, the human brain is a very expensive organ to maintain, as it requires a large amount of food. From a strictly biological standpoint, a larger brain would have been a major liability, not an advantage. Similarly, a mother with larger-bodied infants is also biologically disadvantaged, as she has to find more food in order to adequately nourish them.
As regards the third objection: it is certainly true that a large brain confers quantitative cognitive advantages, and a materialist might be tempted to argue that an accumulation of quantitative changes, over millions of years, can explain the differences between human beings and other animals. But the materialist would be mistaken. There are objective, qualitative differences between human beings and other animals, which are scientifically observable. One of these distinguishing features is anticipatory cognition - capacity to form mental representations of the distant future, and plan for future needs. I shall argue below that if we adopt a "tighter" and more rigorous definition of anticipatory cognition than the one which is commonly found in the scientific literature, it does indeed qualify as a capacity which is unique to human beings. I shall also explain why this capacity would have been vital to the survival of Homo erectus.
5. Why growing energy requirements necessitated long-term bonding in our ancestors, which points to the emergence of reason
A scientific reconstruction of Homo erectus, arguably the first rational human being. Image courtesy of Lillyundfreya and Wikipedia.
In this section, I will attempt to show that around 2,000,000 years ago, when Homo erectus emerged, human evolution reached a critical threshold in terms of our ancestors' food and energy requirements, and that their mothers would no longer have been able to forage for their infants on their own. They would have needed assistance from the infants' grandmothers, as well as the infants' fathers. This need would have radically transformed the nature of society for our hominid ancestors. Mothers changed from being self-sufficient foragers to members of a family unit held together by long-term bonds. In other words, the food and energy requirements of Homo erectus infants could only have been satisfied if adult males and females had the capacity to make long-term family commitments held together by strong bonds, which pre-supposes an ability to plan for the long-term future. This means that Homo erectus must have been rational - or else he would have starved to death as a species. The emergence of Homo erectus thus constitutes a biological threshold, at which the possession of human rationality became a practical necessity for survival.
In their paper, Grandmothering and Female Coalitions: A Basis for Matrilineal Priority? (in Allen, N. J., Callan, H., Dunbar, R. and James, W. (eds), Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford, UK, 2009), Kit Opie and Camilla Power identify four distinct stages in hominid evolution. In the first stage, energy requirements were relatively low, and mothers were self-sufficient foragers:
"Among early hominins prior to 2 Ma [million years ago - VJT] who retained significant climbing abilities, brains and bodies were relatively small, with high size dimorphism between sexes." (2009, p. 181)
In the second phase, as babies' brains grew bigger and required more energy, mothers required the assistance of grandmothers, in caring for their infants. Here we see the beginnings of sustained female co-operation, between two generations. However, they would have still been able to care for their babies without paternal assistance:
"From about 2.5 Ma, these species began to encephalize while bodies remained quite small and apparently still highly dimorphic (McHenry, 1996). This suggests increasing costs for females, indicating more pressure for female-female co-operation, while males still had high body-size costs and were less likely to be co-operative." (2009, p. 181)
In the third phase, with the emergence of Homo erectus, adults (especially females) had considerably larger bodies, with much higher energy requirements. By now, the contribution of a father who was committed to the care of his offspring had become a practical necessity:
"These encephalized early Homo species led to the emergence of early African Homo erectus after 2 Ma., the first hominin with body proportions like ours, bodies that were bigger and designed for walking not climbing (Wood and Collard 1999). Sexual size dimorphism had been reduced, largely because female H. erectus increased body size proportionately more than males (McHenry 1996). With female costs rising relative to males, significantly more co-operation by males with females can be expected from this time. But this is based on the prior evolution of inter-female co-operation." (2009, pp. 181-182)
In the fourth and final phase, with the emergence of Heidelberg man (who was as tall as we are and who had a brain capacity averaging around 1250 cc.), the human brain finally reached a size that fell within the modern range of 1000 to 1500 cc. The bigger brains of children placed an even greater load upon mothers, who would have been utterly unable to provide for their infants without the presence of a committed father. As Opie and Power put it:
"In the final phase of encephalization, from 500,000 years ago among H. heidelbergensis, female costs again rose steeply as mothers had to fuel the energy-hungry, larger brains of their offspring." (2009, p. 184)
Opie and Power contend that grandmothers (who first appeared in the second phase of human evolution, about 2.5 million years ago) played an essential role in shaping human evolution and creating matrilineal kinship systems:
Grandmothering appears vital to our evolution... (2009, p. 186)Under the reproductive stress of encephalization, female kin coalitions developed ritual strategies underpinning the first sexual division of labor and the first rule-governed kinship systems. We conclude that our ancestors, from early African H. erectus, through H. heidelbergensis to early moderns, were biased to matrilocality, forming a basis for matrilineal priority in the earliest symbolic kinship systems. (2009, p. 186)
Does help from grandmother demonstrate the existence of rationality? I think not. After all, grandmothers, mothers and infants share strong ties of biological kinship, so mothers and grandmothers have a powerful drive - namely, the drive to protect their lineage - which might account for their co-operating in child-rearing. It seems, then, that they would not have required the use of reason in order to arrive at such an arrangement. Thus I would argue that in the second phase of human evolution described by Opie and Power, hominids were probably not yet human.
However, Opie and Power go on to argue that with the emergence of Homo erectus 2 million years ago, mothers came to rely on both grandmothers and fathers in order to care for their offspring. They base their claim on their estimates of the daily energy requirements of Homo erectus mothers with young infants. Using highly plausible estimates for the age at the first birth of a child (16.8 years), age at last birth (33 years) and total lifespan (45 years), Opie and Power demonstrate that even with an interval of five years between successive births, mothers of Homo erectus infants would have been unable to raise enough offspring to replace the population and provide for their infants' energy needs on a day-to-day basis without assistance from other adults. They calculate that neither a grandmother nor a father could have supplied enough food on their own; both would have been required:
"If African human forager populations provide an accurate model, Homo erectus females, in a stable or growing population, may have been producing four or five offspring (to self-sufficiency) in their lifetimes. This would require them to produce food at 17 or 27% (respectively) above the forager women's average, for the majority of their adult lives, even with the support of post-reproductive females. In addition, fewer post-reproductive females would have meant less infant care, so that a Homo erectus female might have had to produce at this level with a number of offspring to care for as she worked. She would have also lacked modern technology and the skills available to a female with a modern human-sized brain. These production levels would have most likely been very demanding, if not impossible. It seems more likely that Homo erectus females would have found some mechanism for procuring provisioning from males." (2009, pp. 179-180)However, "The model being developed here suggests that the energy required by a Homo erectus female for her offspring would be more than she and a Homo erectus male could provide." (2009, p. 180)
Thus "Homo erectus females may only have gotten enough calories for their offspring if they were helped in provisioning by both males and older females." (2009, p. 180)
Grandmother and man the co-operative scavenger became mutually reinforcing, able between them to provide children with regular supplies of energy and high-quality nutrients. (2009, p. 186)
This invites the obvious question: how did men and women make such co-operative arrangements in the first place? For men, a long-term investment of care for an infant would have made no biological sense without a reasonable degree of certitude regarding paternity - which in turn presupposes a public commitment to long-term monogamy on the part of both partners. However, making such a commitment would have required the use of symbolic language. This is one major reason why Dr. Mathias Osvath and Professor Peter Gardenfors argue, in their paper, Oldowan culture and the evolution of anticipatory cognition (Lund University Cognitive Science, 122, 2005), that Homo ergaster and Homo erectus were rational beings with an ability to anticipate and refer to long-term future events – an ability which is known in scientific circles as anticipatory cognition. As Osvath and Gardenfors point out, language is only required for effective co-operation between two individuals if the common goal they are working to achieve is distant in time or space. In their words: "symbolic language makes it possible to co-operate about detached goals" (2005, p. 11). They argue:
"For many forms of co-operation among animals, it seems that representations are not needed. If the common goal is present in the actual environment, for example food to be eaten or an antagonist to be fought, the collaborators need not focus on a joint representation of it before acting. If, on the other hand, the goal is detached, i.e. distant in time or space, then a common representation of it must be produced before co-operative action can be taken. For example, building a common dwelling requires coordinated planning of how to obtain the building material and advanced collaboration in the construction. In general terms, co-operation about detached goals requires that the inner worlds of the individuals be co-ordinated." (2005, p. 10)
Osvath and Gardenfors then discuss an interesting proposal originally put forward by Professor Terrence Deacon, that marriage agreements between prehistoric men and women constituted the first form of symbolic communication. First, they argue that both sexes had good evolutionary motives for establishing a long-term bond:
"To show the evolutionary importance of cooperation for future goals, Deacon (1997, pp. 385-401) suggests that the first form of symbolic communication is marriage agreements, that is, deliberate commitments to pair bonding. The ecological conditions of the early hominids made meat a prominent part of their diet. At the same time, a nursing female hominid, with a baby that is much more dependent on its mother than those of the other primates, cannot efficiently participate in hunting and scavenging. A female who cannot count on at least one male supplying her with meat, will suffer from a high probability of losing her children. On the other hand, a male who cannot be reasonably sure that he is the father of the children he is supporting, runs a serious risk of investing in the genes of other males. Thus both sexes have evolutionarily motivated reasons for establishing a long-term bond between woman and man." (2005, pp. 10-11)
Next, Osvath and Gardenfors contend that for long-term pair-bonding agreements to work, there must be a way of publicly referring to an agreement, either by symbolic miming or by speech, in order to remind individuals of its binding nature and in order to justify sanctions directed at individuals who cheat on their partners:
"Deacon (1997, p. 399) argues that for these reasons there was strong evolutionary pressure in hominid societies to establish relationships of exclusive sexual access. He says that such an exclusive sexual bond "is a prescription for future behaviors." Even if we do not know of any evidence that marriage agreements was the first form of symbolic communication, we still find this example important in the discussion of early anticipatory cognition. A detached pair-bonding agreement implicitly determines which future behaviours are allowed and not allowed. These expectations concerning future behaviour do not only include the pair, but also the other members of the social group who are supposed not to disturb the relation by cheating. Anybody who breaks the agreement risks punishment from the entire group. Thus in order to maintain such bonds, they must be linked to social sanctions. With the aid of some form of ritual, one can mark out a loyalty bond for the rest of the group and that the appropriate sanctions are now at function. It should also be noted that episodic memory is required to be able to refer to the established loyalty bond later on, by miming or by speech, and to remind group members of the sanctions (Atran, 2002, pp. 159-160)." (2005, p. 11)
An interesting picture is now emerging: at some stage in human evolution, our ancestors would have needed to make long-term commitments for the purpose of raising offspring. This capacity presupposes not only the ability to plan for the long-term future but also the ability to use symbolic language to refer to abstractions like the marriage bond. Osvath and Gardenfors (2005) agree with Opie and Power (2009) that the emergence of Homo ergaster/erectus, approximately 2,000,000 years ago, marks the most likely date of this important social transition.
6. Tool making in Homo erectus clearly points to the emergence of reason
Acheulean hand-axes from Kent, England, probably made by Homo erectus. Taken from the Victoria County History of Kent Vol 1, p. 312, published London, 1912 and therefore now in the public domain. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Beauty in Acheulean tools
http://drbonnette.com/Evolution_vs_Genesis.html
Dennis Bonnette Evolution vs. Genesis
The First Appearance of Symmetry in the Human Lineage: where Perception meets Art by Dr. Derek Hodgson. In Symmetry, 2011, 3, 37-53; doi:10.3390/3010037
Discusses Acheulean aesthetic Symmetry
Quote:
"A typical Acheulean stone handaxe consists of the classic teardrop shape that displays an obvious concern for symmetry (see Figures 1 and 2) with considerable quantities having been found throughout the world, including Africa and the Middle East [34]. Although first appearing around 1.6 million years ago, such tools endured up until approximately 200,000 BP and, in some instance, even later, and therefore represent the longest known "tradition" [1]. The shape of earlier Acheulean tools seem, however, to be less refined than those from about 500,000 BP (although what are termed "occasionals" appear before this period [35] (see, for example, Figure 1), when not only was there a greater concern for mirror symmetry but also more complex kinds of symmetries began to appear, such as twisted and broken symmetry [4]. One remarkable feature of this concern was that it continued for a prolonged period over such a vast area, which has led some scholars to suggest that symmetry arose coincidentally from the knapping or resharpening procedure [6,36-38]. A growing consensus nevertheless contends that, with the arrival of more refined handaxes, symmetry became somewhat more detached from functional dictates in that a disinterested or more derived awareness toward symmetry tended to come to the fore [4,5,39-43]. As will be demonstrated, this consensus is supported by evidence from perceptual theory and brain functioning. (pp. 39-40)"Figure 1. Two sides of an Acheulean handaxe from South Africa (ironstone 127 x 248 mm) showing the prodigious symmetry - the right-hand view incorporates a mirrored Bezier curve to highlight the degree of symmetry. This example represents an "occasional" that predates the symmetrical handaxes which began to appear with greater frequency after 500,000 BP. Dated by association with tooth-plates of the extinct elephant Elephas Reckii Reckii, or Reck's elephant to approximately 750,000 BP. (p. 40)
"Stout [63] and associates investigations using brain scans suggest that the making of Oldowan tools by expert rather than novice knappers requires a greater interaction of pathways, involving enhanced visuo-spatial and motor coordinates, that seem to come together in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) in inferior parietal cortex. Importantly, this interaction would have been increasingly important for the production of the more complex symmetries of late Acheulean bifaces in that such symmetries required a greater involvement of the inferior parietal area. This suggests that, in order to produce the later more refined Acheulean bifaces, further integration of visual information initially arising from the occipital area (which projects to the ventral premotor area initially through the ventro-dorsal pathway) eventually led to interconnections forming between AIP and SMG (see Figure 3). This scenario has recently received support from a study showing how, not only is the intraparietal sulcus involved in simply tool use in humans, but also the aSMG (anterior supramarginal gyrus) — a cortical area that does not seem to exist in non-human primates [64]. It is therefore no coincidence that Stout and associates found that SMG became more active when expert knappers were engaged in making tools. The ability to produce early to late Acheulean tools may therefore have been contingent on the primitive ventro-dorsal IPS to inferior frontal pathway, which initially formed links with the ventral pathway of the temporal cortex by way of aSMG as Peeters et al. [64] suggest, that later interfaced with fronto-parietal structures as part of the mirror neuron system as illustrated in Figure 3...
As the ventral premotor cortex in the forward area of the fronto-parietal system has strong reciprocal links with IPL to which the ventro-dorsal pathway (i.e., the where/how stream) converges by way of fronto-parietal connections [65], this has obvious implications in terms of the increased abilities afforded to humans thanks to a fuller interlinking of the various contingencies identified with a greater level of control. As a result of the more complete level of integration of these various pathways, the action affordances arising allowed objects to be manipulated and acted upon with greater effectiveness, as is demonstrated by the distributed neural networks in humans involving the above cited areas with regard to the planning and execution of actions when using tools [66]. Figure 3 illustrates the extent of the connecting neural tracts in humans. This is further supported by the fact that, in order to be able to use tools beyond which chimpanzees are capable, involving increased ability to shape materials with more structured strategies, skills are required that recruit the fronto-parietal circuit. The inferior parietal area may therefore represent a crucial point where the "what" and "where/how" as well as the mirror system intersect to enable the production and use of more complex tools, including those with greater symmetry, as part of a left lateralized system employing conceptually mediated abilities [66-68]. The interaction of such factors seems to have become particularly prominent during the late Acheulean that eventually led to the ability to intentionally direct the course of innovation in ways that increasingly benefitted those involved [69], which is obvious in the ability to produce more complex handaxes with twisted symmetry and the highly crafted javelin-like 400,000 year old wooden spears from Schoeningen [4,5]. Thus, symmetry as well as being an important lower order perceptual feature for discriminating objects, is also crucial in a more general sense at later processing stages of the brain for achieving object constancy in the face of change-especially when mental rotation is required, which is vital for producing the refined symmetry of later Acheulean tools." (pp. 41-43)
"The makers of later symmetrical Acheulean handaxes, although not fully aware of the significance of symmetry, were at least sufficiently alert to begin to respond to its attributes in a way that did not completely rely on preattentive processes. This indicates that the symmetry of Acheulean tools was first exploited on a purely practical/functional level after which a non-functional interest became apparent that arose out of the demands of the perceptual system as embodied in the early visual cortex. The fact that the first glimmerings of an "aesthetic" concern occurred at least 500,000 BP in a species that was not fully modern (either late Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis) suggests that the aesthetic sensibility of modern humans has extremely ancient beginnings. This propensity, however, was based on a predetermined sensory bias that engendered feelings of pleasure [102] that eventually led to what Dissanyake [103,104] has termed "making special" or "artification", and is a conclusion that supports the long held belief of Oakley [105] and others [106] that some Acheulean tools were concerned with more than just functional considerations." (p. 47)
"Acheulean tools represent the first occasion when symmetry became detached from adaptive perceptual constraints or functional determinants. This augmented interest seems to have evolved as a by-product of enduring perceptual mechanisms for the detection of important forms in that such symmetry came to transcend practical concerns. Such interest appears to have derived from an assimilation of the implicit visuo-spatial/motor ventro-dorsal pathway with the more consciously derived ventral pathway for processing visual information." (p. 47)
End of Quote
The tools used by Homo erectus display very strong indications that their makers were capable of taking a carefully co-ordinated sequence of steps in order to achieve a long-range goal, which means that they were rational individuals. For instance, it takes about 45 minutes of sustained, focused activity to make an Acheulean hand axe. Only a creature that was capable of performing various steps in a specified order in order to realize a long-term goal would have been capable of such a task.
Osvath and Gardenfors envisage that anticipatory cognition developed gradually during the Oldowan period, over a period of about one million years, but was clearly present in Homo ergaster/erectus.
One important qualitative difference between humans and other animals relates to anticipatory cognition. As Mathias Osvath and Peter Gardenfors point out in a paper entitled, Oldowan culture and the evolution of anticipatory cognition in Lund University Cognitive Science, 122, (2005). The authors define the term as follows:
"A distinctive feature of human thinking that contrasts with the cognition of other primates is our capacity to form mental representations of the distant future - humans can engage in "mental time travelling" (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; Suddendorf & Busby, 2003). We will call this general capacity anticipatory cognition. In particular, we shall focus on the capacity to plan for future needs, what we (following Gulz, 1991) call anticipatory planning, and its role in the evolution of humans. Existing evidence as regards planning in primates and other animals suggest that they can only plan for present needs (this is dubbed the Bischof-Kohler hypothesis by Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). At the end of the article, we shall argue that anticipatory planning is needed for the evolution of human co-operation and social structuring as well as for language. This indicates that anticipatory cognition plays a key role in the evolutionary transition from the cognitive capacities we share with the apes to the thinking of humans..." (p. 1) (Bold emphases mine - VJT.)
In their 2005 article, Osvath and Gardenfors argued that while other animals can indeed engage in planning, they can only do so in relation to present needs, and that planning for future needs appears to be a trait unique to human beings:
"There are several clear cases of planning among primates and less clear cases in other species (see e. g. chapters 5, 7, 8 and 9 in Ellen & Thinus-Blanc, eds., 1987; pp. 58-61 in Gulz, 1991; Byrne, 1995; Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; and Hauser, 2000). The termite-fishing chimpanzee mentioned earlier is one such example. In passing, it should be noted that this is an example of planned tool making." (p. 4)"The plans of apes and other animals depend on their current drive states: They plan because they are hungry or thirsty, tired or frightened..." (p. 4)
"According to the Bischof-Kohler hypothesis, humans are the only extant animals that can plan for future needs. Gulz (1991, p. 55) calls planning for present needs immediate planning while planning for the future is called anticipatory planning. This is a special case of what has been called "mental time travelling" (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; Suddendorf & Busby, 2003). Humans can predict that they will be hungry tomorrow and save some food, and we can imagine that the winter will be cold, so we start building a shelter already in the summer..." (p. 4)
"The squirrel or nuthatch that is gathering and storing food for the winter is not engaged in anticipatory planning because it is not planning at all. It has no representation of the winter, let alone its needs. The gathering behaviour is an innate complex behaviour pattern that is stereotypical without sensitivity to varying circumstances (cf. Gulz, 1991, p. 62)." (p. 4) (Bold emphases mine - VJT.)
So if planning for the future is a distinctively human trait, at what point do Osvath and Gardenfors think it emerged in the human line? The authors date the advent of anticipatory planning to about 2,600,000 years ago, with the appearance of the Oldowan tool industry. Later, with the arrival of Homo ergaster/erectus, we encounter a hominid whose tools display unmistakable signs of anticipatory planning.
"From the point of view of evolutionary theory, the central question is: what has generated the capacity for anticipatory cognition in the hominid line? Our main thesis is that the cultural niche that was created by the use of Oldowan tools, including transport of tools and carcasses (Plummer, 2004), has led to a selection for anticipatory cognition, and in particular anticipatory planning..." (2005, p. 1)"As additional support for the general thesis [that anticipatory cognition is a distinctively human trait - VJT] we note that in Homo ergaster/erectus one finds several innovations that clearly depend on anticipatory planning. In the final section, we shall argue at that anticipatory cognition opens up for the evolution of human co-operation and social structuring, as well as for the evolution of symbolic communication." (2005, p. 1)
The brain of Homo habilis
"The brain of Homo habilis: A new level of organization in cerebral evolution" by Phillip V. Tobias
Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 16, Issues 7–8, November-December 1987, Pages 741-761
Abstract
New studies have been made on endocranial casts of Olduvai specimens of Homo habilis. The results have been compared with those on other East African H. habilis and other hominoids. The mean absolute endocranial capacity of H. habilis is appreciably larger than the mean for australopithecine species: on the new estimates, the H. habilis mean is 45.1% greater than the A. africanus mean and 24.8% greater than that of A. boisei. New data for relative brain size, expressed by Jerison's Nc and EQ and Hemmer's CC, strongly confirm that it was with H. habilis that there appeared the remarkable autapomorphy of Homo, disproportionate expansion of the brain. Encephalometric studies reveal marked transverse expansion of the cerebrum, especially the frontal and parieto-occipital parts, in H. habilis and increased bulk of the frontal and parietal lobes, a derived feature of Homo. There is moderate cerebral heightening, but little or no cerebral lengthening. The sulcal and gyral pattern of the lateral part of the frontal lobe of H. habilis differs from those of Australopithecus and resembles the derived pattern of Homo. The inferior parietal lobule is prominently developed - an autapomorphy of Homo. The two major cerebral areas governing spoken language in modern man are well represented in the endocasts of H. habilis, a functionally important autapomorphy of Homo. The pattern of middle meningeal vessels is more complex with more anastomoses than in australopithecines: H. habilis shares this derived feature with later forms of Homo. In all these features, the brain of H. habilis had made major advances, beyond the more ape-like australopithecine brain. With H. habilis, cerebral evolution had progressed beyond the stage of "animal hominids" (Australopithecus spp.) to that of "human hominids" (Homo spp.). In functional capacity, in particular, its possession of a structural marker of the neurological basis of spoken language, H. habilis had attained a new evolutionary level of organization.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_parietal_lobule on the left anterior supramarginal gyrus (aSMG). May not be unique to humans.
Update - Can animals plan for the future?
Things change fast in the field of animal cognition, and I should point out that Osvath has modified his views on anticipatory cognition since co-authoring this article: he now believes that chimpanzees are capable of planning for the future (see Spontaneous planning for future stone-throwing by a male chimpanzee in Current Biology Vol. 19 No 5, 2009, pp. 190-191).
Forward Planning in apes:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chimpanzee-plans-throws-stones-zoo
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16726-missilethrowing-chimp-plots-attacks-on-tourists.html
http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364468162&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
But see http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16726-missilethrowing-chimp-plots-attacks-on-tourists.html
A chimp that deliberately fashions discs of concrete to later hurl at zoo visitors is being hailed as definitive proof that the apes plan for future events…"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," says Osvath. "It implies they have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of days to come. I would guess that they plan much of their everyday behaviour."...
However, Nicholas Newton-Fisher of the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, cautions that with observations of a single individual it is difficult to generalise.
"A sceptical reader might question whether there is a causal link between the caching and the throwing. The location of the caches may simply be a function of retrieving them from the water." He adds that Japanese macaques are also known to cache stones – although they don't generally throw them at passers-by.
In his article, Osvath notes that planning for the future has also been reported for Western scrub-jays, which belong to the same family of birds as crows (corvids). Recent experiments seem to suggest, at first blush, that Western scrub-jays can predict that they will be hungry tomorrow, and plan accordingly. (See Raby, C.R., Alexis, D.M., Dickinson, A., and Clayton, N.S. (2007). Planning for the future by western scrub-jays, in Nature 445, 919–921; see also Correia, S.P.C., Dickinson, A., and Clayton, N.S. (2007). Western scrub-jays anticipate future needs independently of their current motivational state, in Current Biology 17, 856-861.)
A more modest interpretation of these findings is that chimpanzees and scrub-jays have expectations regarding the future, and are capable of taking prospective action in order to prevent negative consequences that they have learned to expect. In a recent article entitled, "Are Animals Stuck in Time or Are They Chronesthetic Creatures?" (Topics in Cognitive Science 1, 2009, pp. 59-71), authors N. S. Clayton, J. Russell, A. Dickinson discuss the ability demonstrated by Western scrub-jays to store a particular food that they knew they would not receive the following morning, in order to supplement their breakfasts. Discussing the significance of the finding, the authors acknowledged that there was no reason to suppose that the jays had a concept of the future as such, or that they were able to project themselves into the future:
...in the absence of language there is no way of knowing whether the jays' ability to plan for future breakfasts reflects episodic future thinking, in which the jay projects itself into tomorrow morning's situation, or semantic future thinking, in which the jays act prospectively but without personal mental time travel into the future. In the latter case, all the subject has to do is to work out what has to be done to ensure the implement is at hand, be it a spoon, some other tool, or a food-cache. In no sense does this task require the subject to imagine or project one's self into possible future episodes or scenarios. As Raby et al. (2007a) have argued, however, what these studies do demonstrate is the capacity of animals to plan for a future motivational state that stretches over a timescale of at least tomorrow, thereby challenging the assumption that this ability to anticipate and act for future needs evolved only in the hominid lineage.
See also http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/pages/staffweb/clayton/Scrub_jays.html
"It takes a thief to know a thief" by Dr. Nicola S. Clayton, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, 22 November 2011/12/03
"Are some birds as clever as chimps?" – BBSRC News, 24 September 2009
At what point in hominid evolution did true anticipatory cognition emerge?
"The language-trained bonobo (Pan paniscus) Kanzi showed some remarkable craftsmanship when making Oldowan tools, but he is not really at the cutting edge with the hominids (Toth et al, 1993, Schick et al, 1999). He seems to lack some of the precision and power control, which are two of the main components in a good throw.... Still, Kanzi is fully capable of producing sharp stone edges that are just or almost as useful and functional as the original Oldowan flakes." (pp. 5-6)"One of the oldest direct evidence of transporting was found at Lake Turkana where 2.3 mya old Oldowan tools have been transported about 1 km (Kibunja, 1994). There are several finds from Oldowai interpreted as tool transports: 2-3 km transports at 1.7-1.85 mya ago (Potts, 1984), 1.8 m.y.a. old transports for 10 km (Hay, 1976) and 13 km transports at the same age (Ohel, 1984). Bunn (1994) notes later tool transports with distances about 15-20 km undertaken at Koobi Fora 1.64 m.y.a. ago." (p. 6)
"The main components of the Oldowan culture can thus be recognized as: (1) the manufacturing and use of stone tools; (2) the transport of artefacts (at least the stone tools); (3) the transport of pieces of carcasses; (4) and the use of accumulation spots. The most significant advantage of this culture is that it enabled a much wider exploitation of meat resources than is observed in any other primate species..." (p. 7)
"Once the period of Acheulean tools is reached it is apparent that anticipatory cognition was used. We agree with Savage-Rumbaugh (1994) that the 45 minutes it takes to produce an Acheulean axe is a clear sign of anticipation beyond a current drive state. From our point of view it is also obvious that anticipatory cognition was present in the first hominid long distance migrates." (p. 10)Plummer (2004, p. 128): writes: "The emerging picture of H. erectus is of a creature that was large and wide-ranging, could efficiently transport burdens, had a high total energy expenditure, and ate a high-quality diet." Each of the behavioural features we have considered could perhaps be explained in more cognitively minimal terms, but this would not account for the broader picture and the flexibility of this species. (p. 10)
"Anticipatory cognition is a key feature in the cognition of humans and is essential for behaviours identified as unique for our species. This cognitive trait is fundamental in cooperation for distant goals as well as for symbolic communication. We have argued that, anticipatory cognition created a need for a new form of communication in order to be able to cooperate for distant goals. The required form of communication is most likely symbolic since otherwise it would have been difficult to communicate about detached needs and goals." (p. 12)"The behaviours of the first migraters and the Acheulean tool makers cannot be satisfactorily explained in other terms than by some form of anticipatory cognition. This makes us believe that anticipatory cognition began evolving in Homo habilis or early ergaster/erectus populations." (p. 12)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/03/language-hand-toolmaking-evolution?intcmp=239
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013718
A stone 'core' (A) is struck with a hammerstone (B) in order to detach sharp stone 'flakes'. In Oldowan toolmaking (C, top) the detached flakes (left in photo) are used as simple cutting tools and the core (right in photo) is waste. In Acheulean toolmaking (C, bottom), strategic flake detachments are used to shape the core into a desired form, such as a handaxe. Both forms of toolmaking are associated with activation of left ventral premotor cortex (PMv), Acheulean toolmaking activates additional regions in the right hemisphere, including the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) of the inferior parietal lobule, right PMv, and the right hemisphere homolog of anterior Broca's area: Brodmann area 45 (BA 45)Hypothetically, these include task-set switching and inhibition of contextually inappropriate actions [23] in right inferior frontal cortex (BA45), and the regulation of complex action sequences in right parietal cortex [39], [58]. These functions are consistent with the distinctive behavioral organization of Acheulean toolmaking, which involves switching between different subordinate task-sets in pursuit of superordinate goals to an extent that Oldowan toolmaking does not [6], [34]. For example, properly thinning a Late Acheulean…
http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/04/making-choices-how-your-brain-decides/
http://drbonnette.com/Genisis_A_Fairy_Tale.html
Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology... (Stout)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606694/
... expert Oldowan toolmaking performance depends more upon enhanced sensorimotor representations of the tool+body system than upon stored action semantics of the kind recruited by normal subjects planning the use of everyday tools (Johnson-Frey et al. 2005)...It had been hypothesized that such action sequences might involve a strategic element similar to that assessed by neuropsychological tests of motor planning (Dagher et al. 1999), and supported by similar prefrontal action planning and execution systems. This does not appear to be the case (table 3; electronic supplementary material, table 1). The current results instead support the idea that expert Oldowan toolmaking is enabled by greater sensorimotor control for effective flake detachment, supported by enhanced representations of the body+tool system and particularly of the larger scale spatio-temporal 'frame' provided by the RH–left-hand system. This is consistent with ethnographic accounts emphasizing the perceptual–motor foundations of many strategic regularities in stone toolmaking action organization (Stout 2002; Roux & David 2005)...
The most striking result of the comparison between expert Oldowan and Late Acheulean toolmaking was an increase in the RH activity, including both SMG and new clusters in the right ventral premotor cortex (PMv, BA 6) and the inferior prefrontal gyrus (BA 45) (table 2, figure 5). This probably reflects an increasingly critical role for the RH–left-hand system in hand axe production as well as the involvement of more complex and protracted technical action sequences (cf. Hartmann et al. 2005)...
The activation of right inferior PFC (BA 45) during Acheulean toolmaking is of particular interest because PFC lies at the top of the brain's sensory and motor hierarchies (Passingham et al. 2000) and plays a central role in coordinating flexible, goal-directed behaviour (Ridderinkhof et al. 2004). Thus, PFC activation during hand axe production probably reflects greater demands for complex action regulation in this task. Ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) in particular (including BA 45) seems to be involved in associating perceptual cues with the actions or choices they specify (Passingham et al. 2000), particularly when these actions are subordinate elements within ongoing, hierarchically structured action sequences (Koechlin & Jubault 2006). This underlying function may help explain the apparent overlap of language and praxis circuits in the inferior prefrontal gyrus. It is also consistent with the distinctive technical requirements of hand axe making, which include the skilful coordination of perception and action in pursuit of higher order goals (figure 3). In contrast, hypothesized dorsolateral PFC and ACC 'action planning circuit' activation was not observed. Dorsolateral PFC has been associated with the prospective (Passingham & Sakai 2004) monitoring and manipulation of information within working memory, and is commonly activated in tasks that separate planning from execution (e.g. Dagher et al. 1999; Johnson-Frey et al. 2005). The activation of ventrolateral, but not dorsolateral, PFC indicates that Acheulean toolmaking is distinguished by cognitive demands for the coordination of ongoing, hierarchically organized action sequences rather than the internal rehearsal and evaluation of action plans.
7. Other indications pointing to the existence of rationality in Homo erectus: prolonged care for the sick, cooking with fire, fishing, boat building and art, plus possible language use.
In recent years, scientists have developed a much clearer picture of the rich mental life of Homo erectus. Unlike the great apes, Homo erectus cared for sick individuals over a prolonged period of time, suggesting that he had a concept of a life-time commitment. Additionally, he was capable of cooking meat with fire, in order to soften it and make it more palatable. He also engaged in fishing, and was even capable of building boats or rafts (we're not sure which). His tools reveal a concern for aesthetics: he apparently wanted to create something beautiful. Finally, he was vocally capable of speaking a language, though we have no direct evidence that he did. Taken as a whole, the evidence indicates very strongly that Homo erectus was indeed a rational being, and hence a human being.
Cooking with fire
Scientists now have direct evidence from studying the molars of Homo erectus, that this species was cooking with fire 1.9 million years ago. In short: Homo erectus had smaller molars than the hominids from whom he evolved. These molars were too small to be explained by the fact that his jaw was also smaller than that of his ancestors. The only satisfactory explanation for this shrinkage in Homo erectus’molars is that he was already cooking his food 1.9 million years ago. Homo erectus used cooking to soften his food, so that he didn't have to spend as much time chewing it. Once this innovation occurred, Homo erectus no longer required large molars. The following abstract, summarizing the latest research in this field, is taken from a recent paper entitled, Phylogenetic rate shifts in feeding time during the evolution of Homo, by Chris Organ et al., in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 22, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1107806108:.
Unique among animals, humans eat a diet rich in cooked and nonthermally processed food. The ancestors of modern humans who invented food processing (including cooking) gained critical advantages in survival and fitness through increased caloric intake. However, the time and manner in which food processing became biologically significant are uncertain. Here, we assess the inferred evolutionary consequences of food processing in the human lineage by applying a Bayesian phylogenetic outlier test to a comparative dataset of feeding time in humans and nonhuman primates. We find that modern humans spend an order of magnitude less time feeding than predicted by phylogeny and body mass (4.7% vs. predicted 48% of daily activity).This result suggests that a substantial evolutionary rate change in feeding time occurred along the human branch after the human–chimpanzee split. Along this same branch, Homo erectus shows a marked reduction in molar size that is followed by a gradual, although erratic, decline in H. sapiens. We show that reduction in molar size in early Homo (H. habilis and H. rudolfensis) is explicable by phylogeny and body size alone. By contrast, the change in molar size to H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens cannot be explained by the rate of craniodental and body size evolution. Together, our results indicate that the behaviorally driven adaptations of food processing (reduced feeding time and molar size) originated after the evolution of Homo but before or concurrent with the evolution of H. erectus, which was around 1.9 Mya. (Emphases mine - VJT.)
A report in The Guardian by Ian Samples (Cooking may be 1.9m years old, say scientists, 22 August 2011) explains the significance of these findings:
Early humans cooked up their first hot meals more than 1.9m years ago, long before our ancient ancestors left Africa to colonise the world, scientists claim.Researchers at Harvard University traced the origins of cooking back through the human family tree after studying tooth sizes and the feeding behaviour of monkeys, apes and modern humans.
They concluded that cooking was commonplace among Homo erectus, our flat-faced, thick-browed forebears, and probably originated early in that species' reign, if not before in more primitive humans...
Compared with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, humans spent remarkably little time eating. Chimps typically spent more than one third of their day feeding, while for humans it was about 5% of their waking hours....
According their report in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Homo erectus, which emerged in Africa around 1.9m years ago, spent 6.1% of its time eating. Neanderthals, the authors claim, spent 7% of their time feeding. "We think that Homo erectus and Neanderthals were spending about as much of their day feeding as we do, which implies that they were both cooking," Organ said.
More primitive species, such as Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, which emerged before Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, spent 7.2% and 9.5% of their day eating. If the estimates are right, it suggests they may have been less accomplished cooks than Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.
A key point which emerges from The Guardian's report is that cooking requires the controlled use of fire. Prior to the publication of the paper by Organ et al., the ability of Homo erectus to opportunistically use fire was widely acknowledged, but the ability to control fire was hotly disputed, with the earliest claimed instance going back to only 790,000 years ago (see http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge122510374832688760) . The discovery that Homo erectus cooked his food 1.9 million years ago therefore strengthens the case that this hominid was capable of anticipatory cognition, and hence of fully rational thought.
Fishing
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100112-modern-human-behavior/
http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=211013
Boating
Homo erectus was perhaps capable of traveling by boat (see here).
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ecology/home-erectus-crosses-open-ocean/10658
Art & Aesthetic sense
The First Appearance of Symmetry in the Human Lineage: where Perception meets Art by Dr. Derek Hodgson. In Symmetry, 2011, 3, 37-53; doi:10.3390/3010037
An aesthetic explanation for the symmetry of Acheulean Handaxes: Some Neuropsychological Insights by Derek Hodgson.
Une explication "Esthetique" de la symetrie des bifaces Acheuleens: Qualques Eclairages Neuropsychologiques by Derek Hodgson.
http://www.cope.co.za/Archaeo/masterhandaxe.htm
750,000 years ago
The care and elegance with which Homo erectus fashioned his Acheulean tools points to some sort of artistic ability on his part (see ).
The Master of the Masek Beds: handaxes, art and the minds of early humans by Gregory Currie, University of Nottingham. [Forthcoming in Goldie and Schellekens (eds) Aesthetics and Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2010.]
Language
Symbolic reference to marriage contract (see above)
According to the Wikipedia article on Homo ergaster:
Compassion and Care for the sick
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/101005_compassion
The most comprehensive recent review of the archaeological evidence for compassion in prehistoric man can be found in a thought-provoking essay entitled, From Hominity to Humanity: Compassion from the earliest archaic to modern humans (Time and Mind 3 (3), November 2010) by P.A. Spikins, H. E. Rutherford and A. P. Needham. In chapter one of their essay, the authors begin by acknowledging the existence of compassionate feelings in non-human animals:
However, Spikins et al. go on to highlight the fundamental differences that exist between human compassion and the compassion shown by non-human animals:
Most particularly we notice that unlike in other primates, compassionate motivations in humans extend into the long term. We can both feel compassion and be motivated to help someone, and at the same time 'think through' what to do. That is, we are able to 'regulate' compassion, to talk about how we feel, and to bring compassionate motivations to help others into rational thought and plan ahead for the long term good of someone we care for.
This invites the obvious question: at what stage in evolutionary history did hominids start displaying compassion in a uniquely human sense? In chapter three of their essay, Spikins et al. propose a four-stage model of the evolution of human compassion. In the first stage, individuals are aware of one another's feelings and immediate intentions, and assist one another. However, their compassion is not yet rational; it is a short-lived emotion in response to another individual's distress:
In the next phase, rationality makes its first appearance. Assistance is given to individuals in need over a prolonged period of time: pregnant females, mothers with young infants, and elderly and incapacitated individuals:
In the above passage, Spikins et al. seem to be hedging their bets as to whether Homo ergaster/erectus was capable of truly human compassion: they acknowledge the existence of long-term assistance, but suggest that only when we get to Homo heidelbergensis can it properly be called love. However, the facts which they set forth in chapter two of their essay seem to contradict their thesis of a gradual evolution of compassion. The first example that Spikins et al. provide is that of a Homo ergaster woman, suffering from the advanced stages of a disease, who was fed and protected from predators by the members of her community over a period of months, because she was no longer able to take care of herself:
"There is no way she could have survived alone for long in the African savannah…someone must have been feeding her, protecting her from carnivores... The group dynamics of early Homo must have been based on some form of mutual support"
Spikins et al. go on to describe another documented case of compassion, this time dating from 1.77 million years ago:
Let the reader note that this individual would have required assistance in the form of specially prepared food for several years before her death - far longer than the "several weeks" posited by Spikins et al. in Level Two of their model of the evolution of compassion. I should mention, however, that some critics have pointed out that chimpanzees can sometimes survive the loss of some teeth for a while.
The fossil remains discussed above fit a broad picture of sick and/or injured fossil individuals dating from the Early and Middle Pleistocene period, who were obviously taken care of for an extended period of time, by members of their community. (Most of these sick and injured individuals belonged to the species Homo ergaster/erectus and Homo heidelbergensis.) Until recently, evidence for this uniquely human kind of compassion was largely confined to the late Pleistocene period, when Neandertal man and Homo sapiens lived. Anthropologists Hong Shang and Erik Trinkaus summarize this new, emerging picture in their paper, An Ectocranial Lesion on the Middle Pleistocene Human Cranium From Hulu Cave, Nanjing, China (American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135:431-437, 2008), in which they describe the case of a healed lesion in the skull of an unfortunate individual living in China about 577,000 years ago, who suffered a very severe, localized head trauma caused by "a traumatic alteration of the anterior scalp, a serious neurocranial burn some time before death, and/or (but less likely) a large scale periosteal reaction." Commenting on the specimen, the authors write:
Together these remains document the probably high level of risk to which these pre-Late Pleistocene humans were subjected. These remains also document their ability to survive both minor and major abnormalities, since all of these lesions document some degree of survival. (p. 435) (Emphases mine – VJT.)
In chapter two of their essay, Spikins et al. also discuss the case of a Homo heidelbergensis girl (known as Cranium 14) from Sima de los Huesos, Spain, who lived 530,000 years ago, and who suffered from lambdoid single suture craniosynostosis, a premature closing of the bony elements of the skull. This would have caused an increase of pressure within the brain of this child, which would have stunted her brain growth and probably her mental capacity as well, in addition to altering her facial appearance. Despite these severe afflictions, the girl received care for at least five years before dying. Commenting on this case, Spikins et al. observe that "by 530,000 years ago, long term care was not limited to those people old enough to have already made a contribution to society", thereby implying that the earlier and smaller-brained Homo erectus would have denied care to a little child. I have to say that the authors' reasoning here is at once biased and illogical: biased, because we don't have a large enough sample of diseased fossil Homo erectus individuals to say whether sick and injured children were cared for over an extended period, or whether only mature adults received such care; and illogical, because Spikins et al. themselves acknowledge that in Homo erectus, "pregnant females and those with young infants [were] likely to have been provisioned with food", showing that care was given to children by third parties (grandmothers and/or fathers).
Spikins et al. go on to posit a third stage in the evolution of human compassion, lasting from 300,000-50,000 years ago (the time of the Neanderthals in Europe). During this period, they hypothesize, human existence was characterized by "a long period of adolescence and a dependence on collaborative hunting"; hence "compassion extends into deep seated commitments to the welfare of others." In Neanderthal society, shared beliefs and effective long term planning capacities facilitated the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. I have to say that I can see no persuasive case for differentiating Neanderthal compassion from that shown by the earlier prehistoric human, Homo heidelbergensis - especially as Spikins et al. acknowledge that Heidelberg man was an excellent hunter, as far back as half a million years ago. As they put it: "By around 500,000 years ago, evidence from the British site of Boxgrove shows that people were hunting and collaborating very effectively, in the hunting of large and potentially dangerous animals, and were continuously subjecting themselves to risk in the process." Spikins et al. also point out that Homo heidelbergensis was already caring for mentally handicapped children as far back as 500,000 years ago, in addition to building mortuaries and mourning for his dead. I therefore see no convincing reason to believe that Neanderthal man was any more or less compassionate than Heidelberg man.
In their final stage in the evolution of human compassion, Spikins et al. hypothesize that human compassion took a new turn: it was now directed at objects in addition to being directed at people.
A point I'd like to make here is that compassion, by definition, cannot be directed at objects. Care for an object or an abstract ideal may be a fine and virtuous thing; but it is not compassion. The evolution in our sense of compassion posited by Spikins et al. is more likely an evolution in our ability to attach totemic significance to objects - i.e. to say, "Object X symbolizes Y." That's an essential ability if you want to create symbolic art. But it has nothing to do with compassion.
8. Is the human capacity to reason a single capacity or a cluster of capacities which appeared at separate times in human history?
Dr. Benoit Dubreuil has argued, in a recent volume entitled, Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2010), that long-term co-operation in human beings is possible because human beings are capable of adhering to social norms in the face of competing motivations. Dubreuil argues that the human ability to adhere to norms is supported by the human brain's executive functions, which are localized in its prefrontal cortex, notably in the dorsolateral region. He proposes that a functional reorganization of the prefrontal cortex took place during the Mid-Pleistocene around 500,000 years ago, at the time when Homo heidelbergensis appeared, and he argues that the organization of the prefrontal cortex in Homo heidelbergensis was probably not very different from that of Neanderthal man or modern Homo sapiens.
Dr. Dubreuil considers the alternative hypothesis that the functional reorganization of the prefrontal cortex which would have been required for human beings to be able to adhere to social norms took place around 2,000,000 years ago, when the genus Homo first appeared, but he does not find this hypothesis convincing:
It is thus unnecessary to postulate a reorganization of the executive functions of the brain to account for the behavioral transition observed in Plio-Pleistocene hominins. This obviously does not mean that such reorganization can be excluded. The Plio-Pleistocene behavioral transition might have come with a transformation of the human brain at both the affective and cognitive levels....
Quotes from Paleolithic public goods games: why human culture and cooperation did not evolve in one step by Benoit Dubreuil, in
Biology and Philosophy (2010) 25:53–73, DOI 10.1007/s10539-009-9177-7 (need to edit these quotes)
From the abstract:
[page 55]
p. 57
In sum, nonhuman primates have some capacity for inhibitory control, but there is still an impressive cognitive gap between them and humans. All normal human adults succeed in the "less is more" task after a few trials, even when the reward is salient. This flexible and powerful inhibitory control is necessary to secure everyday participation in long-term and often risky cooperative projects. To be sure, longterm and risky cooperation can be mutually beneficial but only if our partners have the capacity to resist the temptation to make defection. Think of founding a family or of starting a business. How many opportunities for defection are there before the venture really becomes rewarding?
As for affective evolution, there was certainly a point in our lineage when our ancestors evolved human-like executive functions. Here again, the question is how such a change would have impacted on hominin behavior and what kind of neural rewiring might have accompanied it. We know that the prefrontal cortex plays a central role in executive functions. The dorsolateral cortex, more particularly, one of the latest maturing parts of the prefrontal cortex in children, is associated with inhibitory control and goal maintenance in all kind of social tasks (Sanfey et al. 2003; van 't Wout et al. 2006; Knoch et al. 2006). I explain in [the] Section "Brain evolution and the case for a change in the PFC" why I think that a change in this part of the brain can be parsimoniously linked to the behavioral evolution found in Homo heidelbergensis.
p. 58
In humans, representing the intentions of others activates a wide range of brain areas. One of them is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which, as mentioned above, is involved in the representation of social events and abstract goals. Another is the superior temporal sulcus (STS), associated with the representation of goal-directed actions. More complex tasks of perspective taking, such as the explicit ascription of a false belief, also activate another area of the brain that has come under close scrutiny in recent years: the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the region at the junction between the temporal and parietal cortices.
The exact role of the TPJ in perspective taking is still controversial. Two broad views exist in the literature. For some, the TPJ is a region that processes high-level domain-general computations in tasks requiring a reorientation of attention in response to salient stimuli (see Decety and Lamm 2007; Mitchell 2007). For others, the TPJ is the locus of a mechanism that selectively processes mental states (see Saxe and Kanwisher 2003; Saxe and Powell 2006). Although this debate is unlikely to be settled soon, two remarks are relevant for the rest of my discussion. The first is that there is little doubt that the TPJ broadly construed is activated in high-level cognitive tasks that go beyond the ascription of mental states. Visual persective taking, autobiographic memory, prospection, and navigation all activate the TPJ (Aichhorn et al. 2006; Abraham et al. 2008; Spreng et al. 2009). These tasks commonly involve a capacity to shift attention or to look at things from different viewpoints. The second remarks is that, even if the TPJ can reliably be associated with different tasks involving attention shifting, there still can be a region within the TPJ that selectively processes mental states (Scholz et al. 2009).
I have argued elsewhere that a change in the high-level attentional and social-cognitive mechanisms realized in the TPJ explains well the behavioral transition associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens and especially the evolution of a symbolic and stylistic element in material culture (Dubreuil 2008; Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009). The argument, put briefly, is that engaging in artistic and symbolic behaviors implies the attentional capacity to contrast different perspectives on objects and actions, that is, to understand how things can look from someone else's
[page 59]
perspective or how appearance can differ from reality.
[page 61]
Another important change in Mid-Pleistocene hominins is linked with the appearance of the controlled use of fire in hearths, an innovation that was probably concomitant with the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis (James 1989; Goren-Inbar et al. 2004). Some evidence of burnt animal bones has been found at Plio-Pleistocene sites (e.g. Swartkrans in South Africa), but there is no indication that hominins prior to the Mid-Pleistocene were able to keep a fire burning for several hours. The controlled use of fire is also a form of PPGG. Cooking makes meat easier to masticate and facilitates the digestion of various plants (Wrangham and Conklin Brittain 2003), and fire is a useful protection against predators, but keeping a fire burning for several hours requires a significant amount of work. Everyone has an interest in seeing the fire fueled with sufficient firewood, but also no personal incentive to fuel it. Humans can find cooperative solutions to such dilemmas, because they can represent complex divisions of labor, ascribe value to long-term cooperative goals, and resist the temptation of free riding.
My point here is not that the diet of early members of the genus Homo was identical to that of apes or australopithecines. The increasingly frequent evidence of tool use and butchery during the Plio-Pleistocene (between about 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago), as well as dental evolution in Homo habilis and early Homo erectus, suggests increased dietary versatility and a capacity to adapt to changing and unpredictable environments (Ungar et al. 2006). But the presence of cooking and large-game hunting in Homo heidelbergensis implies the capacity to switch to a mode of subsistence that is only possible given extensive resource and risk pooling.
p. 64 ff.
Brain evolution and the case for a change in the PFC
Paleoanthropological evidence points toward a major reorganization of social life during the Mid-Pleistocene. I have argued that the kind of PPGG in which Homo heidelbergensis engaged implies modern-like capacities for representing and ascribing value to abstract goals, as well as for inhibitory control and goalmaintenance. This suggests that hominins became capable of securing contribution in risky and long term cooperative projects much before the appearance of behaviors generally presented as the Pinnacle of human cultural creativity (e.g. art, symbolism, cumulative culture). I now want to argue that what we know of brain evolution also supports the link between Homo heidelbergensis' cooperative abilities and a reorganization of executive functions realized in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In the next section, I will show that this argument also support the idea that subsequent behavioral transitions in the human lineage — and especially the one associated with the evolution of art, symbolism, and cumulative culture in Homo sapiens - was not caused by a reorganization of the PFC, as often proposed.
There are serious and well-known limitations to the reconstruction of brain evolution. The functional organization of the brain cannot be read in fossils. Endocasts provide no information on the internal structure of the brain, and what we know of the outer layer of the cortex is drawn from a handful of specimens. Our conclusions must thus remain relatively modest. Consequently, I will not claim that there has been a single reorganization of the PFC in the human lineage and that it happened in Homo heidelbergensis. I will rather contend that, if there is only one point in our lineage where such reorganization happened, it was in all likelihood there. By contrast, if there were many phases of reorganization, this one was most probably centered on the dorsalateral areas of the prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Why the DLPFC? I mentioned in [the] Section "The cognitive foundations of specifically human cooperation" that the prefrontal cortex is involved in the representation of complex goals, values, social events and emotions, as well as in executive functions such as inhibitory control and goal-maintenance. Properly executive functions are generally associated with the DLPFC, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are more closely link to the integration of representations of goals and events with affective values (Ardila 2008).
There are different reasons to think that the functions associated with the DLPFC evolved more recently than those connected with the VMPFC and OFC in the human lineage. One reason is that the DLPFC contributes to the realization of
[page 65]
long-term goals, but it cannot have this function if long-term goals are not represented and ascribed value in the first place. A second reason is that the capacity for inhibitory control and goal-maintenance is one of the latest to develop in infancy, much after children are able to represent complex social norms, emotions and goals. Although ontogeny does not always recapitulate phylogeny, it provides a useful heuristic for identifying evolutionarily more recent mechanisms. A third reason is that a convincing argument could be made that Plio-Pleistocene hominins were capable of collaborating for the realization of future goals, an ability that allowed them to engage in group defense, passive or active scavenging, and the transportation of stone tool and carcasses over some kilometers (Gardenfors and Osvath 2009). By contrast, there is no evidence that Plio-Pleistocene hominins engaged in more risky or long-term cooperative ventures - such as those described in [the] Section "Public goods games in Homo heidelbergensis" for Homo heidelberghensis - that require the lasting capacity to resist the temptation for defection.
But there are other reasons to think that the PFC was reorganized along with the evolution of Homo heidelbergensis. Some of them come from paleoneurology. Our brain is about three times as large as expected for a primate of our size, and we have a fairly good idea of the most important phases of encephalization in the human lineage. The first phase of expansion is associated with Plio-Pleistocene hominins and with the emergence of the genus Homo. In early members of the genus Homo, average brain size departs from the average of 300–500 cm 3, found in australopithecines, and reaches an average of 600–900 cm3 (McHenry and Coffing 2000). The second phase occurs during the Mid-Pleistocene, especially in Homo heidelbergensis, whose brain size slowly reaches the modern range of 1,100–1,400 cm3 (Rightmire 2004).
The cognitive implications of encephalization are far from clear. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that the expansion of the brain was under positive selective pressure, given the enormous metabolic costs of a larger brain (Aiello and Wells 2002). On the other hand, we do not know if cognitive changes should be related to relative or absolute brain growth. The problem is simple. There is a general correlation in primates between body and brain size and this correlation is not obviously related to cognitive differences. Hominins may have grown larger brains simply because they were growing larger bodies. This is why paleoanthropologists often prefer to discuss relative rather than absolute brain growth in the human lineage and pay more attention to hominins' encephalization quotient (EQ), which exxpresses a ratio of brain mass to body mass, rather than to brain size properly.
Relative encephalization provides a slightly different picture than absolute encephalization. Plio-Pleistocene encephalization, more particularly, is less significant when considered in relative terms. The reason for this is that larger-brained Plio-Pleistocene hominins (Homo ergaster/erectus) also have larger bodies. The encephalization quotient, estimated between 2.5 and 3 for australopithecines and paranthropus, increases modestly to 3.1-3.6 with Homo habilis, Homo rudolfsensis, Homo ergaster (McHenry and Coffing 2000, p. 127). These estimates also face serious uncertainties because of the limited sample of fossils, the difficulty of assessing body size for most of them, and the high degree of variation in size found Paleolithic public goods games
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in early members of the genus Homo. If one adds to these problems the general difficulty of reconstructing the behavior of various Plio-Pleistocene hominin populations, it becomes almost impossible to identify a correlation between behavior and relative and/or absolute cortical expansion in early members of the genus Homo.
But the case of Homo heidelbergensis is easier to assess. The first reason for this is that encephalization in Homo heidelbergensis is significant in both relative and absolute terms. Absolute brain size in this group ranges between 1,100 and 1,400 cm3 and, despite the persistent difficulty of estimating body size for many specimens, EQ enters the range of variation found in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (5-6.5) (Rightmire 2004). The second reason is that encephalization in Homo heidelbergensis can be more securely linked with behavioral changes, because there is no evidence that this taxon coexisted with other taxa, while at least three hominin taxa coexisted in Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene (Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Paranthropus).
My suggestion is that the behavioral changes in Homo heidelbergensis were linked, at a minimum, with a functional reorganization of the PFC. But I want to make clear what evidence makes the suggestion plausible. On the one hand, there is no indication that encephalization benefited the frontal lobe more than other regions of the neocortex. Despite the dramatic enlargement of the frontal lobe during human evolution, its overall place in the human brain is still comparable in proportion to what is found in apes (Semendeferi et al. 2002). The frontal lobe benefited from encephalization, but so did the temporal, parietal and occidental lobes.
Besides size, some structural differences have been documented between the frontal lobe of humans and nonhuman primates, but these differences are for the most part related to size and are likely to have evolved along with encephalization. Rilling (2006, p. 73), for instance, argues that the human PFC is proportionally larger than that of apes because the non-prefrontal parts of the frontal lobe (the primary motor and premotor cortices) did not benefit equally from encephalization. Similarly, Semendeferi et al. (2001, p. 232) argue that the frontopolar cortex, the most anterior part of the PFC, associated with complex planning, benefited more from encephalization than other areas. Other distinctive features of the human frontal lobe include a higher level of cortical folding (gyrification) and a higher proportion of white matter, two features that suggests increased connectivity and functional differentiation and that probably also evolved along with encephalization (Rilling 2006, p. 72; Schoenemann et al. 2005; Schoenemann 2006).
The argument in favor of a functional reorganization of the PFC in Homo heidelbergensis is thus supported by different lines of evidence: the evolution of new public goods, the presence of the most important phase of encephalization in human evolution, and the fact that the most specific features of the human prefrontal cortex are related to size. I do not claim, however, that there was no reorganization of the PFC earlier in human evolution. As mentioned above, an argument can be made that Plio-Pleistocene hominins were already cooperating about future goals on an unprecedented scale (Gardenfors and Osvath 2009). This capacity could be realistically linked to mechanisms realized in the VMPFC and OFC and dedicated to the integration of affective value and abstract social goals.
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Implications for Homo sapiens
The argument proposed in the previous sections has important implications for the evolution of behavior and cognition in Homo sapiens. If Homo heidelbergensis had a modern-like capacity for representing abstract goals and sticking to them in the face of competing motivations, and if this capacity is explained by a modern-like functional organization of the PFC, then subsequent cognitive and behavioral changes in the human lineage are unlikely to be related to a change in this area of the brain. This goes against several accounts that have related the evolution of art, symbolic, and cumulative culture to the expansion and reorganization of the PFC (Mithen 1996; Noble and Davidson 1996; Deacon 1997; Coolidge and Wynn 2001; Cela-Conde et al. 2004; Amati and Shallice 2007; Noack 2006, 2007; Ardila 2008). It is impossible to definitively rule out hypotheses about the evolution of the brain, but I will propose in this section two additional lines of evidence to add weight to my interpretation.
The first is that the evolution of the cranium in modern Homo sapiens was not related to a distinctive transformation of the size and shape of the PFC. Externally, the frontal bone of Homo sapiens does exhibit important specific features. It is, for instance, more vertically oriented in Homo sapiens than in Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis (Guipert and Mafart 2005). But things are different when one considers the internal shape of the frontal bone. In the inner profile of the frontal bone is surprisingly stable in Homo sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, and Neanderthal (Bookstein et al. 1999). By contrast to Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens' frontal lobe is generally wider, but this widening is also present in Neanderthal and can be linked to a general allometric trend connected with encephalization (Bruner 2004). In sum, behavioral innovations associated in modern Homo sapiens do not coincide with any specific transformation of the PFC. It is obviously impossible to rule out the possibility of a functional change that would have been unrelated to changes in shape and size. But the stability of the frontal lobe adds plausibility to the hypothesis defended above and according to which a modern-like functional organization of the PFC was in place in Homo heidelbergensis.
The relative stability of the PFC during the last 500,000 years can be contrasted with changes in other brain areas. One of the most distinctive features of Homo sapiens' cranium morphology is its overall more globular structure. This globularization of Homo sapiens' cranium occurred between 300,[000] and 100,000 years ago and has been associated with the relative enlargement of the temporal and/or parietal lobes (Lieberman et al. 2002; Bruner et al. 2003; Bruner 2004, 2007; Lieberman 2008). Paleoneurological reconstructions are currently insufficient to identify the precise regions that benefited from globularization. It is not unreasonable, however, to link this change with a functional reorganization of the higher association areas of the temporal and parietal areas (including the crucial region of the TPJ, discussed in Section "The role of perspective taking"). Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from the functional organization of the temporal and parietal cortices. Comparative neuropsychological studies of humans and nonhuman primates indicate a displacement, in the course of human evolution, of the ventral and dorsal streams of working memory. In modern humans, the ventral
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stream, associated with object recognition (the "what" stream), is located more inferiorly in the temporal cortex than in nonhuman primates, while the dorsa stream, associated with spatial perception (the "where" stream), has been displaced more superiorly in the parietal cortex (Ungerleider et al. 1998). The displacement of these streams coincides with the expansion of the late-maturing higher-association areas of the temporal and parietal cortices located in between.
I am perfectly aware that there is no consensus among archaeologists on the moment of appearance of the modern cranium and of properly "modern behaviors," including the earliest evidence of symbolism, art, and cumulative culture (for a complete review of the various interpretation, see the contributions to Mellars et al. 2007). My point is simply that, if there is a coincidence between the biological and behavioral modernization of Homo sapiens in Africa between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago, as an increasing number of students of human evolution tend to think, the neurological correlates of this evolution are not likely to be found in the PFC, as generally argued, but in the higher association areas of the temporoparietal cortex.
The temporoparietal cortex is certainly involved in many complex cognitive tasks. It plays a central role in attention shifting, perspective taking, episodic memory, and theory of mind (as mentioned in Section "The role of perspective taking"), as well as in complex categorization and semantic processing (that is where Wernicke"s area is located). Although there is little doubt that these areas underwent functional and structural changes during human evolution, and although paleoneurology suggests that a change in these areas was concomitant with the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, the discussion remains quite open regarding the exact functional and neuronal changes that might have led to the evolution of the modern mind. This discussion will have to give a central role to the archaeological reconstruction of behavior.
I have argued elsewhere (Dubreuil 2008; Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009) that a change in the attentional abilities underlying perspective taking and high-level theory of mind best explains the behavioral changes associated with modern Homo sapiens, including the evolution of symbolic and artistic components in material culture. It might be useful to emphasize that the debate sketched above (Section "The role of perspective taking") about the more specific organization of the TPJ has no real incidence on my argument at this point. It would have an impact only if one could provide some reason to think that some populations of archaic humans (Homo heidelbergensis or Neanderthal) had sufficient attentional flexibility to engage in prospective thinking, autobiographic memory, or visual spatial perspective, but not to process false beliefs (or the opposite). At this point, I see no reason to think this is the case.
Conclusion
A biologically informed view on human cooperation can only be reached by integrating data from various behavioral and brain sciences. This article is a modest attempt to link contemporary research on the evolution of cooperation and culture with what we know of extinct hominins’ brains and behavior. As human cooperation
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and culture are specific in many ways, and as distinct behavioral patterns have existed in our ancestors, the reconstruction of the evolution of cooperation and culture in the human lineage is a real scientific challenge. Despite the serious difficulties facing the study of extinct hominins' brains and behavior, I have tried to show in the case of Homo heidelbergensis that the space of plausible evolutionary hypotheses can be constrained in some significant and useful ways. This is a necessary step in the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human cooperation and culture. Speculation about how specifically human cooperation and culture might have been selected for in our evolutionary history can only be useful when regimented by Paleoanthropological frameworks linking ecological, morphological and behavioral data.
The explanation proposed in this article entails two corrections to influential accounts of the evolution of human cooperation and culture. The first is that the human mind did not evolve in a single step, as accounts that focus on general phenomena such as "imitation", "conformism", or "cultural learning" seem to imply (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Henrich and Henrich 2007; Heath 2008). Homo heidelberghensis' capacity to secure cooperation in the feeding and breeding public goods games implies not only that it could represent long-term goals and values, but also that it was able to stick to cooperative arrangements in the face of competing motivations. At the same time, the absence of evidence in favor of symbolic, art, or cumulative culture suggests that its mind was not entirely modern and that its capacity for cooperation and norm following did not translate into open-ended cultural creativity.
The second point is that emphasis on the executive functions of the PFC in influential accounts of the evolution of culture in modern Homo sapiens is probably misplaced (Mithen 1996; Noble and Davidson 1996; Deacon 1997; Coolidge and Wynn 2001; Cela-Conde et al. 2004; Amati and Shallice 2007; Noack 2006, 2007; Ardila 2008). Homo heidelbergensis' evident capacity for cooperation, in conjunction with what we know of the evolution of the brain, suggests a modern-like organization of the PFC much before any evidence of symbolism, art, and cumulative culture. By contrast, paleoneurological evidence suggests that the temporoparietal areas changed significantly along with the evolution of the cranium, which is noteworthy given the implication of these regions in complex categorization and semantic tasks, attention shifting, perspective taking, episodic memory, and theory of mind.
Evidence that reason has always been regarded as the distinguishing hallmark of man, in the Jewish and Christian religious traditions:
Psalm 32: "Be not like horse and mule - unintelligent, needing bridle and bit"
St. Gregory of Nyssa writes, in his classic work, On the Making of Man, writes that "since man is a rational animal, the instrument of his body must be made suitable for the use of reason," that "the mind is a thing intelligible and incorporeal," and that "though a certain further animate power exists in the brutes, neither does this attain perfection, since it does not contain in itself the grace of reason and intelligence." Man alone, of all the animals, is said to have incorporeal capacities, by virtue of his reason; man alone is said to have a foot in both the spiritual and material worlds, by virtue of his rational, spiritual soul. The existence of a species of creature with a rational (and hence incorporeal) soul, who was nonetheless incapable of knowing its Maker, would constitute an absurdity, from the perspective of the Judeo-Christian theological tradition. If the existence of such a creature were proved, it would shatter in a single stroke the concept of a universal faculty - reason - which is capable of knowing all manner of things, from algebra to atoms to animals to angels - and most importantly of all, God, its Maker. A fragmentation of the various abilities we associate with reason would also blur the distinction between humans and other animals in an unacceptable fashion: for instance, is a creature who is capable of entertaining abstract, immaterial concepts (like triangle) and looks after sick members of his tribe, but has no art or religion of any kind, made in the image of God or not? For these reasons, I regard Dr. Dubreuil's article as a full-frontal attack on the notion of a unified concept of reason, which he seems to want to replace with a disparate set of several abilities.
9. Barriers to reproduction that may have simultaneously appeared at the time when Homo erectus emerged: a change from 48 to 46 chromosomes per body cell, a profusion of sweat glands and a loss of body hair
In this section, I shall argue that the first members of the species Homo erectus seem to have possessed a number of physical characteristics which marked them off from other hominids. Instead of having 48 chromosomes in each body cell as chimpanzees and gorillas do, they appear to have had 46. Additionally, they probably looked strikingly different from other hominids: they would have had naked skin, and their bodies would have been covered with sweat glands, to help them dissipate excess body heat while traveling on the savanna. I would like to emphasize that scientists are not sure of the exact time when all these traits emerged, and that scientific estimates can and often do change, but current thinking seems to be that the change from 48 to 46 chromosomes per body cell occurred between 740,000 and 3,000,000 years ago (making Homo erectus a likely candidate for the first hominid possessing this trait), and that the first appearance of hominids with naked skin and a body covered with sweat glands occurred approximately two million years ago, when Homo ergaster/erectus emerged.
I provide evidence below that a mutation resulting in an individual having 46 chromosomes in their body cells instead of 48 would have constituted a biological barrier to reproduction, reducing the viability of offspring. By itself, however, this genetic difference, being invisible, would not have deterred hominids with 46 chromosomes in their body cells from attempting to mate with other hominids with 48. I tentatively suggest that the physical changes in appearance mentioned above (naked skin and a profusion of sweat glands) which seem to have occurred at around the same time, might have served as pre-copulatory barriers to reproduction, marking Homo ergaster/erectus off from other hominids and making them repugnant to hominids not possessing these traits (and vice versa). On strictly scientific grounds, then, it would be reasonable to believe that our ancestors passed through an evolutionary bottleneck with the emergence of Homo ergaster/erectus around two million years ago. (The size of that bottleneck is another question.)
For many religious believers, there are additional theological grounds for believing that there must have been barriers to reproduction between the first human beings (whom I tentatively identify with Homo ergaster/erectus) and other contemporaneous hominids. If, as Professor Kemp and I both believe, the emergence of the first rational hominids was a Divinely guided process, and if we assume that the first human beings were intended by their Creator to mate with each other and not with sub-rational hominids, then we would expect these sub-rational hominids to be readily distinguishable from human beings, by virtue of visible barriers to reproduction, which would deter rational human beings from coupling with sub-rational animals.
Thus from both a scientific and a theological standpoint, there are grounds for thinking that the likelihood of large-scale interbreeding between Homo ergaster/erectus and other hominids would have been low.
Why the emergence of individuals with 46 chromosomes in their body cells would have constituted a biological barrier to reproduction
At some stage in our evolutionary past, ancestral chromosomes 2A and 2B fused to produce human chromosome 2. This would have caused a reproductive barrier between the early humans who had 46 chromosomes in their body cells and closely related hominids who had 48. This reproductive barrier is described in a paper entitled, "A Genetic Model for the Origin of Hominid Bipedality" by Dr. Evelyn J. Bowers (Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana), in New Perspectives and Problems in Anthropology, edited by Eva B. Bodzsar and Annamaria Zsakai, 2007, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (pp. 4-5):
It is reasonable to suppose, then, that the sudden appearance of a hominid with 46 chromosomes per body cell, instead of 48 as in chimps and gorillas, would have constituted the emergence of a new species. (Bowers believes that this species could have propagated rapidly, as a result of a single male breeding with multiple females.)
One flaw in Bowers' bipedality hypothesis is that the fusion of chromosome 2 seems to have occurred much later than the origin of bipedality, which occurred at least four million years ago. According to recent research, the ancestors of modern human beings underwent a change from 48 to 46 chromosomes per body cell, somewhere between 740,000 and 3,000,000 years ago - i.e. probably around the time when Homo erectus emerged, although it could have coincided with the date of Homo heidelbergensis. (Reference: Biased clustered substitutions in the human genome: The footprints of male-driven biased gene conversion by Timothy R. Dreszer, Gregory D. Wall, David Haussler and Katherine S. Pollard. In Genome Research 2007. 17: 1420-1430.) Nevertheless, Bowers’ point that the change from 48 to 46 chromosomes would have given rise to a major barrier to reproduction remains a valid one.
Curiously, the emergence of Homo ergaster/erectus approximately 2,000,000 years ago seems to have coincided with two drastic changes in the physical appearance of human beings, which may have constituted pre-copulatory barriers to reproduction, deterring the first members of the species Homo ergaster/erectus from mating with other hominids lacking these traits (and vice versa):
Two pre-copulatory reproductive barriers that may have isolated Homo ergaster/erectus from other hominids: a profusion of sweat glands and the appearance of naked skin
The hominid ancestors of human beings probably had relatively few sweat glands, like chimpanzees, and those would have been mainly located on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. By contrast, human beings have about two million sweat glands spread over their entire bodies. The profusion of human sweat glands appears to have been biologically advantageous, because it allowed early human beings to dissipate excess body heat. The first hominid displaying the human pattern of sweat glands was probably Homo ergaster/erectus, as Mathias Osvath and Peter Gardenfors argue in their paper, Oldowan culture and the evolution of anticipatory cognition (Lund University Cognitive Science, 122, (2005):
The profusion of sweat glands in early human beings went hand-in-hand with another major evolutionary innovation: naked skin. Naked skin certainly has its biological drawbacks, rendering humans particularly vulnerable to damage from sunlight. On the other hand, these drawbacks would have been outweighed by the thermoregulatory advantages of naked skin with highly developed sweat glands. The four-part BBC documentary series "Walking with cavemen", released in 2003, described these advantages in episode three ("Savage Family"), which dealt with what it called the first true Homo species: Homo ergaster / Homo erectus. Allow me to quote a brief excerpt from the program's online page on Homo ergaster / Homo erectus:
It is reasonable to suppose, then, that if individuals with naked skin and a profusion of sweat glands had suddenly appeared in a tribe of hairy hominids with relatively few sweat glands, the other members of the tribe would have been strongly averse to mating with them. The aversion may well have been mutual, with naked skinned individuals finding the hairier hominids repellent. Unfortunately, the scientific evidence to date does not tell us whether the appearance of these biological traits was gradual or rapid; however, it is interesting to note that the hominid in which these features emerged (Homo ergaster / Homo erectus) is the same hominid to first possess body cells with 46 chromosomes, as modern humans do, instead of the 48 found in the great apes.
The upshot of the facts which I have assembled above is that a plausible argument can be made for the occurrence of an evolutionary bottleneck at the time of the emergence of Homo ergaster / erectus around two million years ago, on purely biological grounds.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r25946621680811l/
10. Why the genetic evidence for polygenism is considerably weaker than popularly believed
In his article, Professor Kemp attaches great significance to recent studies conducted by Francisco J. Ayala ("The Myth of Eve: Molecular Biology and Human Origins," Science 270 (1995): 1930–6; and, with A. A. Escalante, "The Evolution of Human Populations: A Molecular Perspective," Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 5 (1996): 188–201) purporting to demonstrate that humans could never have descended from a stock of just two individuals. Here is how Kemp reports the study in his article:
Since no individual can carry more than two such variants, the absolute minimum human population in every generation after the evolution of man from a common human-chimpanzee ancestor is sixteen. (The other twenty-seven variants could have arisen from later mutations.)
This genetic diversity precludes very narrow population bottlenecks as well as very long-lasting ones, as such bottlenecks are too small to transmit the observed range of variation to succeeding generations. Maintenance of sixty variants requires a long-term mean human population of 100,000. All that does not, however, preclude short-lived bottlenecks as long as they are not too small.
So the question is, how small can a bottleneck be, and how long can it last if it is to maintain the level of diversity actually observed in the DRB1 gene? Ayala calculates that the minimum bottleneck sufficient to maintain that level of diversity (and then to return to the mean population size) is about 4,000 synchronously reproducing individuals, or perhaps slightly less. That suggests an actual population of some 15,000-20,000 individuals. (p. 224)
Professor Kemp notes in passing that Ayala's study "has not won universal acceptance" (p. 224). That would appear to be something of an under-statement. I have been informed by Dr. Ann Gauger, a Harvard-trained zoologist and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute, that Professor Ayala's study is severely flawed. The key flaw in Ayala's study is that it analyzed genetic variation from just a single gene (HLA-DRB1). However, according to Dr. Gauger, it turns out that the particular DNA sequence from HLA-DRB1 that Ayala used in his analysis was guaranteed to give an overestimate of population size, as HLA-DRB1 is one of the most highly variable genes in the human genome. It appears to be under strong selection for heterozygosity. What that means is that an individual possessing two different versions of the same gene will have a better chance of combating parasites and disease. Not only that, the particular region of the gene Ayala studied is a hotspot for gene conversion – a kind of mutation which is especially likely to confuse assumptions of common descent and parsimony in tree-drawing.
Dr. Gauger points out that a later study (Bergstrom et al. 1998. Recent origin of HLA-DRB1 alleles and implications for human evolution. Nature Genetics 18:237-242) examined the same HLA-DRB1 gene, but used a portion of the gene where mutations were more likely to occur at a baseline rate. This study concluded that only 7 versions of the gene (alleles) existed in the ancestral population at the time when the lineages leading to human beings and great apes diverged, somewhere between 4 and 7.4 million years ago. By the time the genus Homo appeared, about 13 versions existed. There are currently more than a thousandvariants of the HLA-DRB1 gene. It would be fair to conclude, then, that this particular gene is under very strong selection for increasing diversity, making it a poor choice for making estimates about genetic events in our distant past.
At any rate, 7 alleles is a much lower estimate for the number of variant HLA-DRB1 alleles that were present at the time of chimp/hominid divergence than the 32 alleles which Professor Ayala estimated in his study. Seven alleles can be carried by as few as four individuals- a number which might be reduced even further if some degree of parallel mutation took place.
I would like to add that relying on purely random population genetics to maintain diversity will yield a higher estimate of ancient populations of human beings than an alternative account which is open to the possibility of intelligent intervention. I am sure that Professor Kemp, as a committed Christian, would hardly wish to exclude this possibility.
11. Why it is nevertheless likely that some intelligent genetic engineering took place in our evolutionary past, leading to the emergence of Homo erectus
In the previous section, I explained why common scientific arguments against the possibility of monogenism are flawed. Having said that, I would acknowledge that the large number of simultaneous genetic changes that would have been required to effectively inhibit inter-breeding between rational and non-rational hominids at the very beginning of human history (not only body cells with 46 chromosomes instead of 48, but also visible barriers to reproduction such as naked, sweaty skin, to deter humans from coupling with other hominids) would have probably required some sort of Divine genetic engineering - assuming that the Intelligent Being responsible for human evolution was God (an assumption which Professor Kemp and I both accept) and that He meant to actively discourage humans from inter-breeding with other creatures (an assumption that Professor Kemp apparently does not make). The requirement for intelligent intervention is even stronger if we also take into account the fact that the first human beings would have had larger brains than those of other hominids, which were neurologically suited to the requirements of rational thought. On my proposal, there must have therefore been an extraordinary confluence of genetic events at the dawn of human history; hence the demand for intelligent engineering of the human genome appears inescapable. Personally, I am agnostic as to whether this genetic engineering was achieved by some sort of "front-loading" at the dawn of life (thus avoiding the need for subsequent Divine "intervention") or whether direct manipulation of the hominid genome took place two million years ago, although I incline toward the latter hypothesis.
So, why not posit a miracle then? Professor Kemp appears loath to do so: he advises believers to pay heed to St. Augustine's famous injunction, in which he warns his Christian readers against making misinformed public statements on scientific matters, and rhetorically asks how likely it is that unbelievers will take the writings of Christians seriously, "when they think that their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., New York: Paulist Press, 1982, Book I, chapter 19, section 39.) But it is important to note that St. Augustine, in this passage, regards reason and experience as the only sure sources of knowledge. The scientific inferences made by Professor Ayala and other researchers who have argued against the possibility of a primeval couple do not fall under the category of either reason or experience: they are neither logical truths nor experimentally replicable facts, but inferences about the distant past, made from a set of naturalistic assumptions which exclude Divine intervention at the outset. Anyone who has read Book XII, Book XIII and Book XV of the City of God will realize that St. Augustine had little regard for such inferences. For in these books, St. Augustine resolutely maintained, in bold defiance of the arguments put forward by pagan skeptics of his day, that that the world was created only 6000 years ago; that creatures of all kinds were created instantly at the beginning of time; that Adam and Eve were historical persons; that Paradise was a literal place; that the patriarch Methusaleh actually lived to the age of 969; that there was a literal ark, and that the Flood covered the whole earth. Readers who care to examine Book XV, chapter 27 of St. Augustine's City of God will see at once that many of the arguments put forward by skeptics against the Biblical account of Noah's Ark haven't changed a bit since the fifth century: no Flood could possibly have covered the whole Earth; no-one could have built such an Ark back in the time of Noah; the Ark wouldn't have been big enough to hold all the animals; there would have been no way for Noah to collect all the animals in order to put them on the Ark; and there would have been no way for Noah to feed the carnivorous animals while they were on the Ark. In replying to these arguments, St. Augustine did not hesitate to invoke Divine intervention when necessary: thus, he argued that God (and not Noah) collected the animals to go on the Ark, and that God miraculously provided the carnivorous animals with enough food to last them for the duration of their stay on the Ark. Professor Kemp will be even more dismayed to find that the great Christian allegorizer, Origen, upheld the literal historicity of Noah's Ark in his writings as well.
Were these Christian Fathers to come back to life today, I think they would be more than a little shocked at the timorousness shown by Professor Kemp and other theistic evolutionists in too readily adopting the naturalistic assumptions made by skeptics. There are issues on which one should be prepared to defy the Zeitgeist. Monogenism is one of these issues, as I'll argue in my next post, in which I attempt to show that it has always been regarded by Jews and Christians as a core doctrine of the faith.
Some modern religious believers find the notion of Divine genetic engineering deeply distasteful; for my part, I believe that we should keep an open mind and let God be God. We might find the thought of Divine genetic engineering messy and inelegant, but our aesthetic preferences don't matter to God – and in any case, that may have been the least inelegant way for Him to accomplish His objectives for the human race.
12. What kind of miracle are we talking about, if Adam and Eve were the products of Divine genetic engineering?
I have argued above that unguided natural processes are unlikely to be able to account for the simultaneous appearance of changes in the human chromosome count (from 48 to 46), in conjunction with anatomical changes resulting in naked skin and a profusion of sweat glands in human beings, and finally, neurological changes leading to the expansion of the prefrontal and temporal cortices in our brains, rendering them fit for a rational spiritual soul. Human biological evolution thus appears to have been intelligently engineered. This invites the further question: what kind of engineering took place? And in particular, what kind of Divine genetic engineering would have been needed to reconcile the findings of modern genetics, which suggest that the human stock always numbered in the thousands, with the theological datum that the human race sprang from two and only two people?
The evolutionary biologist, Professor Jerry Coyne, has described the kind of miracle that would be required in order to reconcile Adam and Eve with the findings of genetics, in a humorous online post on the Multi-Germic Theory, which was proposed by a reader of his Website named Drew. The theory won the first prize in a wacky contest announced by Coyne for his (mostly atheist) readers: "What is the best way to reconcile the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the genetic facts?" Drew's entry was the winning answer, for overall theological and biological plausibility:
Roughly 140,000 years ago God slightly tinkered with the genes of two existing hominin pairs to ensure that the next baby they each had would have brains which were capable of interacting with a soul. These two individuals, one male and one female were Adam and Eve. God then imparted them both with many germ line cells each carrying a different genome, this allowed that each of Adam and Eve's children would not be genetic siblings so that there would be no loss of fitness due to sibling interbreeding. Each distinct gene set was based roughly on the genomes of various human-like beings that had preceded Adam and Eve, which had evolved through natural processes, but was distinct enough that it allowed for the brains of the offspring also to interact with a soul. One consequence of this modification was that it gave the F1 generation enough genetic diversity to appear as though they sprang up from a large pool of existing ancestors. It may also have been necessary that for a few generations following F1 that the individuals continued to have the variable germ cells to further protect the offspring from inbreeding defects.
Actually, I'd personally prefer to locate the miracle at around 2,000,000 years ago rather than 140,000 years ago, as I am inclined to think that Homo ergaster and Homo erectus were rational creatures, but that's neither here nor there. Professor Coyne is an outspoken Gnu atheist, but he has graciously acknowledged that from a religious standpoint (which he obviously does not share), the miracle described above "made good biological sense: that added genetic diversity was there to prevent inbreeding depression among the incestuously-produced descendants of Adam and Eve."
Some religious readers find the very thought of Divine genetic manipulation distasteful. In response, I would argue that if (as I'll argue in Part III of my reply to Professor Kemp) there was a very good theological reason for the human race to descend from one original couple, and if natural processes would have been insufficient to accomplish this task, then it makes perfect rational sense for religious believers to posit the kind of miracle described by Professor Coyne. Of course, the miracle would have had to have been even more complicated than he describes: it would have involved God producing mutations at the same time in the embryos of Adam and Eve, causing them to develop body cells with 46 chromosomes, as well as alterations in their brain structure and some brain enlargement, in addition to naked bodies covered in millions of sweat glands.
I deliberately used the term "miracle" in the preceding two paragraphs, because I think it is an accurate one; nevertheless, I do not wish to exclude the possibility that God may have fine-tuned the initial conditions of the cosmos at an earlier date - say, the dawn of life, or for that matter, the Big Bang, making the subsequent emergence of Adam and Eve inevitable without further intervention on His part. All I can say is that the degree of fine-tuning required to produce this result would have been extraordinary, and that it might have been more "economical" (if one measures the difficulty of a task by its descriptive complexity) for God to have directly manipulated the genomes of Adam's and Eve's embryos, two million years ago. Sometimes a miracle is simpler than doing things the natural way.
Adam and Eve, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). Beech wood, 1533. Bode-Museum, Berlin (Erworben 1830, Konigliche Schlösser, Gemaldegalerie Kat. 567. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Calvin references
http://www.ewordtoday.com/comments/genesis/calvin/genesis1.htm
In my previous post, I have focused my critique of Professor Kemp's paper on his radical re-definition of the concept of humanity. In this post, I would like to address Kemp's proposed scenario regarding Adam and Eve. First, I shall argue that in admitting the scientific impossibility of monogenism (descent of the entire human race from two and only two human individuals), Kemp has conceded to science an expertise that it does not and cannot possess. At most, all that science can demonstrate is that given standard, naturalistic assumptions about human genetics, descent from an original couple is ruled out by the available evidence. That's quite different from establishing that Adam and Eve never existed. Second, I shall endeavor to show that the scenario Kemp puts forward regarding Adam and Eve is at odds with the Genesis account on at least ten points, and that it is manifestly incompatible with what the writer(s) of Genesis intended to convey. Thus Kemp's scenario is ruled out on Scriptural grounds. Third, I will show that even if the evidence of Scripture be deemed inconclusive, the testimony of 2,000 years of Jewish and Christian tradition demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Jews and Christians alike have regarded belief in an historical couple as the sole original progenitors of the human race as an indispensable part of their faith.
Adam and Eve according to Kemp
On pages 231-232 of his paper, Science, Theology and Monogenesis (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2011, Vol. 85, No. 2, pp. 217-236), Kemp puts forward his proposed reconciliation between, as he puts it, "a theologically conservative (monogenist) account of anthropogenesis and the scientific insights of evolutionary biology and modern genetics." Professor Kemp suggests that there were just two rational human beings at the dawn of human history, but that their descendants inter-bred with thousands of biologically human creatures that lacked the capacity to reason. In other words, people mated with sub-rational animals at the beginning of history. The scenario Kemp envisages goes as follows:
This theory is monogenetic with respect to theologically human beings but polygenetic with respect to the biological species. Thus, the distinction resolves the contradiction.
Kemp's fatal concession to science
Professor Kemp's irenic paper is motivated in large part by a desire to avoid an unnecessary conflict between theology and what he refers to as "the scientific insights of evolutionary biology and modern genetics." Truth, as Kemp correctly perceives, is one: there can be no conflict between scientific truth and theological truth. But there could only be such a conflict if a theological teaching were at odds not only with the available scientific evidence, but with the principles of sound epistemology as well. For any scientific claim that an event described by theology could not have happened is conditional upon an (often unspoken) uniformitarian assumption that the laws of nature continued to operate in their usual fashion, and that no laws were violated. However, theology makes no such assumption: since it deals with an Infinite and Unbounded Reality (God), it is by definition open to the possibility of supernatural violations of the laws of Nature, and Divine interventions into the course of human history. Such a belief is at odds with the principles of sound epistemology only if it makes the mistake of incorrectly describing an observed, regular, natural occurrence as a supernatural occurrence – or invoking supernatural occurrences to account for an event which regular, natural occurrences are known to be able to explain perfectly well.
In his paper, Kemp seems to be arguing that because the natural process of speciation is fairly well-understood by scientists, thanks to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, there is no need to have recourse to supernatural explanations when discussing the origin of the human body. To invoke such explanations would be faulty epistemology – a failure to let science do what it is good at. Hence if theology claims to describe the generation of the first human beings at the dawn of human history, then we should automatically be wary of any description which invokes the supernatural in order to account for the origin of the human body, as scientists already have a good understanding of that process. (Kemp acknowledges, however, that the origin of the human soul is a matter beyond the ken of science, and that each human soul is separately created by God.)
Now, I would acknowledge that scientists have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that once we grant the common descent of humans and chimpanzees, as well as the standard, naturalistic assumptions that scientists make about human genetics, descent from an original couple (Adam and Eve and no other individuals) is ruled out by the available evidence. On this point I agree with Professor Kemp. Personally speaking, I am also impressed with the evidence for the common descent of humans and chimpanzees. But I see no reason to suppose that because speciation in general is a fairly well-understood natural phenomenon, we should therefore infer that the origin of the human species was a purely natural event, and I can think of one weighty reason why we should resist such an explanation as an unwarranted claim.
In my previous post, I looked at the scientific evidence regarding human origins, and argued that there were good grounds for believing that by 2,000,000 years ago, our hominid ancestors had reached an evolutionary critical point, where biologically, they would not have survived had they not possessed the capacity to reason, which made them able to engage in forward planning and long-term commitments, as well as genuine empathy, based on an understanding of how other people will feel if one acts in a certain way. I suggested that the first rational human beings were these hominids who lived two million years ago – in particular, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. I argued that had there been hominids with bodies like that of Homo ergaster, but lacking the ability to reason, as Professor Kemp suggests, they would rapidly have died out - not as a result of competition from more advanced human beings, but simply because they could never have met their energy needs. This fact tells heavily against Professor Kemp's proposed scenario, in which two members of a population of biologically human creatures were endowed by God with spiritual, rational souls, while the other 5,000 or so were not.
In my final post on Professor Kemp's theory, I will examine the evidence from one other source: Scripture and the Judeo-Christian tradition which follows from it. I will endeavor to show that Professor Kemp's proposed scenario, which endorses a form of polygenism, cannot be reconciled either with the Bible or with more than 2,000 years of Jewish and Christian tradition regarding Adam and Eve and their children. For those religious believers who maintain (as Professor Kemp does) that the Bible and/or tradition do not teach any errors, the sheer weight of evidence that I have assembled here should definitively rule out any kind of polygenism as a viable theological option.
A. Eight reasons why Kemp's biological polygenism is unbiblical
Professor Kemp acknowledges that his proposed theory is biologically polygenistic: although he believes that there were just two rational human beings at the dawn of human history, he also believes that their descendants inter-bred with thousands of biologically human creatures that lacked the capacity to reason: in other words, people mated with animals. One weighty reason for rejecting Kemp's polygenistic scenario regarding human origins is that it is at odds with the Genesis account on at least eight points, and that it is manifestly incompatible with what the writer(s) of Genesis intended to convey.
The interpretation of Scripture is anything but a straightforward enterprise, principally because of the difficulty of ascertaining the intent of the human author – and for that matter, the Divine Author inspiring him. Among Jews and Christians generally, there seems to be broad agreement that the first few chapters of Genesis were intended to be some sort of narrative of human salvation history: that is, they in some way describe events that really happened, and are not pure allegory (though they may of course contain allegory). Genesis is also believed to be a very rich text, containing within itself many layers of meaning. It is therefore extremely difficult to definitively establish that a particular interpretation of Genesis is incompatible with the text. Nevertheless, I would argue that if there are no fewer than eight points in the Genesis narrative which are at odds with the polygenistic interpretation proposed by Professor Kemp, that we can rule out Kemp's scenario of human origins with a fairly high degree of confidence.
OK, so what are these eight points, you may ask? Happy to oblige.
1. In Genesis 1:25, we are told that God made "all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds", before making mankind in His own image (Genesis 1:26), and telling them to "rule over ...every living creature that moves on the ground" (Genesis 1:28). The image of God cannot exist without a rational soul. From a Genesis perspective, then, any sub-rational hominids existing at the dawn of humanity would have been of a different kind from Adam. What's more, Adam ruled over them. The idea, then, of Adam's descendants mating with these creatures, as Professor Kemp has suggested they did, would have seemed ridiculously incongruous to the human author of Genesis 1.
2. In Genesis 2:18, God says, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him" (NIV). This does not fit with Professor Kemp's suggestion that there were biologically human women lacking rational souls who were contemporary with Adam - for these could have assuaged his loneliness. Professor Kemp might object that these females would have been poor conversationalists, since they lacked the use of reason, and that Adam would still have been unsatisfied. But here again, the Genesis account contradicts him. For in Genesis 2:23, upon seeing Eve for the first time, Adam exults, "At last! This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh" (Complete Jewish Bible). In other words, according to the human author of Genesis, the mere fact that Eve shared a common physical nature with Adam was enough to make her a suitable companion. On Professor Kemp's account, that makes no sense: a biologically human female is not necessarily rational.
3. In Genesis 2:19, God brings all the animals to Adam to name them, "and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name." Since Adam's biologically human contemporaries were of a different kind than himself, what did he call them? Humans? Obviously not - that was the name of his kind. If Adam didn't call them human, then why does Professor Kemp?
4. In Genesis 3:14-19, God puts curses on the serpent and on the human race. Obviously the curses would not apply to Adam’s biologically human contemporaries because they did nothing wrong. God says that he will put enmity between the serpent's seed (or offspring) and the woman's seed (i.e. the human race). Were Adam's biologically human contemporaries unafraid of snakes, then? Then God tells the woman that she will suffer pain in childbirth and that her husband will rule over her. Are we supposed to believe, then, that Eve's biologically human sub-rational contemporaries, whose pelvises were the same size as hers, did not suffer pain in childbirth? Finally, in Genesis 3:19, God tells Adam, "By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground." Are we supposed to believe, then, that Adam's biologically human sub-rational contemporaries managed to obtain their daily food without breaking a sweat, while Adam, despite his superior intelligence, is forced to work for a living?
5. In Genesis 3:20, Adam calls his wife Eve, "because she would become the mother of all the living." But if Kemp's biological polygenism is correct, then Eve would have merely been a mother of all the living, rather than the mother.
6. In Genesis 4:13, after being found out for his crime of murdering Abel, Cain laments that whoever finds him will kill him. But this only makes sense if the person who finds Cain hates him for murdering his brother. To hate someone for committing a murder presupposes rationality. In Genesis 4:14-15, God declares that anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance - again indicating that they are rational beings, or otherwise they could not be punished. Incidentally, these verses serve to utterly refute Professor Kemp's "Scriptural" argument for polygenism. Kemp argues that "the account of the exile of Cain (Gen 4:14–17) assumes the existence of other men in the world without giving an account of their creation." But the men spoken of in Genesis 4:14-17 are clearly rational; hence according to Kemp's own account, they must be descendants of Adam and Eve, as he admits that they were the only two rational human beings in the beginning.
7. In Genesis 4:16, Cain is banished from his community, and chooses to dwell in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. Now, we are told in Genesis 5:4 that Adam and Eve had many other sons and daughters. If Cain did not take one of his sisters with him, then how, on Professor Kemp's account, did God intend him to find a wife? Or was he meant to start a family with a sub-rational animal? Is that what God wanted?
8. In Genesis 6:19, Noah is told to take into the ark a pair of every kind of creature. Since Adam's biologically human contemporaries were of a different kind from Adam, who was made in God’s image, then are we to presume that they were taken on the Ark too, as beasts?
Finally, in Deuteronomy 22, God describes bestiality as an abomination which deserves nothing less than stoning. Professor Kemp argues that the world was inundated by sin after the Fall. But are we supposed to believe that our rationally human ancestors mated willy-nilly with sub-rational beasts for hundreds of years? And does Professor Kemp really believe that the human author of Deuteronomy would have been prepared to accept that Adam's son Seth, from whom the author of Deuteronomy would have traced his descent, engaged in bestiality? My guess is that his blood would have boiled at the thought.
B. Why Professor Kemp's version of biological polygenism is irreconcilable with both Jewish and Christian tradition
I have identified six points which are clearly affirmed by the traditions of both Judaism and Christianity, and which are relevant to the theological controversy between monogenism and polygenism:
1. Adam is the father of the entire human race.
2. Adam had a spiritual soul, created by God.
3. Eve was made from Adam's side, precisely in order that the entire human race should derive from one individual, Adam.
4. Eve is the mother of all the living.
5. Cain (and later, Seth) married their sisters.
6. The Nephilim (giants) of Genesis 6 were generally regarded by commentators as having been generated as a result of the descendants of Cain inter-breeding with the descendants of Seth, and not as a result of humans inter-breeding with angels.
Let's go through each of these points in turn.
1. Adam is the father of the entire human race.
Adam as father of the human race in Jewish tradition:
On the Jewish side, here's what Philo says about Adam and Eve, in Book 1 of his work, A Treatise on the Account of the Creation of the World, as Given by Moses:
The Jewish Rabbinic tradition also regarded Adam as the individual who represented the unity of the human race, by virtue of his common fatherhood of all, according to the article on Adam in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia:
"Why was only a single specimen of man created first? To teach us that he who destroys a single soul destroys a whole world and that he who saves a single soul saves a whole world; furthermore, in order that no race or class may claim a nobler ancestry, saying, 'Our father was born first'; and, finally, to give testimony to the greatness of the Lord, who caused the wonderful diversity of mankind to emanate from one type. And why was Adam created last of all beings? To teach him humility; for if he be overbearing, let him remember that the little fly preceded him in the order of creation."
Adam as father of the human race in the Christian tradition:
The early Church Father Origen (185-254 A.D.) was renowned for his allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Nevertheless, he firmly believed in the existence of a literal person named Adam, who was the father of the human race, as he makes clear in his De Principiis Book IV, section 21:
In the fourth century, St. Epiphanius (c. 310- 403 A.D.), Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, forcefully asserted the truth of monogenism in his Panarion Book I, Section III, section 39 (Against the Sethians):
Adam was also described as the unique source for the propagation of the human race by the fourth century saint and bishop, St. Ambrose of Milan (c. 339-397 A.D.), in chapter 10 of his work, "On Paradise" (c. 375):
(Cited in Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian and Muslim readings on Genesis and gender by Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 138.)
The fact that every human being is descended from a single individual (or protoplast), Adam, is described as something that "no Christian can doubt" by St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.), in his City of God, Book XVI, Chapter 8. In this chapter, he addresses the question: Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah's Sons, and concludes:
Professor Kemp could concur with these statements from the Jewish and Christian tradition about Adam; nevertheless, the numerous patristic references to Adam as the unique source of the unity of the human race sit very awkwardly with Kemp's proposal that all human beings, while descended from a single pair of individuals with rational souls, are also biologically descended from a population of 5,000 sub-rational hominids.
2. Adam had a spiritual soul, which was created by God.
Both the Jewish and Christian traditions consistently teach that Adam, unlike the beasts, had a spiritual soul which was specially created by God. On this point, Professor Kemp is in complete agreement with the proponents of monogenism.
The creation of Adam's spiritual soul in the Jewish tradition:
Philo (20 B.C. – 50 A.D.) refers to the excellence of Adam's spiritual soul in his work, A Treatise on the Account of the Creation of the World, as Given by Moses:
XLVIII. (139) And that he is superior to all these animals in regard of his soul, is plain. For God does not seem to have availed himself of any other animal existing in creation as his model in the formation of man; but to have been guided, as I have said before, by his own reason alone...
XLIX. (140) The first man, therefore, appears to me to have been such both in his body and in his soul, being very far superior to all those who live in the present day, and to all those who have gone before us...
(142) And we shall be only saying what is the plain truth, if we call the original founder of our race not only the first man, but also the first citizen of the world...
Josephus (37-100 A.D.) is even more explicit about the soul of Adam, in his work, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, Chapter 1. Although he cautiously states that Moses was talking "philosophically" rather than literally when he wrote Genesis 2, he clearly regards the immediate creation of Adam's spirit and soul by God as part of the core meaning of the passage:
From the above passage, we can see that Josephus, like many of the ancients, regarded man as a compound of spirit, soul, and body, (cf. St. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:23), which is why he also said that the blood of animals was forbidden to be eaten, as having in it soul and spirit (Antiq. B. III. ch. 11. sect. 2).
The creation of Adam's spiritual soul in the Christian tradition:
The early Church Fathers were unanimous in their agreement that Adam's spiritual soul had been created by God. Here, for instance, is how St. John of Damascus (d. 749) describes the creation of Adam in his work On the Orthodox Faith 2.12:
Further, body and soul were formed at one and the same time, not first the one and then the other, as Origen so senselessly supposes.
The most explicit treatment of the creation of Adam's soul can be found in the writings of the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.), also known as the Angelic Doctor. In his Summa Theologica I, q. 90, art. 2, Aquinas addresses the question: Whether the [first man's] soul was produced by creation?
Later on, Aquinas addressed the origin of human souls in general. He was well aware that in earlier centuries, some of the Christian Fathers had proposed that the human soul might be transmitted from father to offspring, through the semen (Traducianism), or that it might be somehow generated from the souls of the parents (Generationism). By Aquinas' time, however, most Scholastic philosophers regarded the creation of each and every human soul by God as theologically certain, and Aquinas even went so far as to characterize the Traducian view as heretical. Here is what he writes in his Summa Theologica I, q. 118, art. 2 on the question, Whether the intellectual soul is produced from the semen?
Again, since the intellectual soul has an operation independent of the body, it is subsistent, as proved above (Question 75, Article 2): therefore to be and to be made are proper to it. Moreover, since it is an immaterial substance it cannot be caused through generation, but only through creation by God. Therefore to hold that the intellectual soul is caused by the begetter, is nothing else than to hold the soul to be non-subsistent and consequently to perish with the body. It is therefore heretical to say that the intellectual soul is transmitted with the semen.
Professor Kemp is in complete agreement with Aquinas here. Let us now move on to the formation of Eve.
3. Eve was made from Adam's side, precisely in order that the entire human race should derive from one individual, Adam
The Creation of Eve. Marble relief on the left pier of the facade of the cathedral at Orvieto, Italy. Courtesy of Georges Jansoone and Wikipedia.
The formation of Eve in Jewish tradition:
The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia contains a useful summary of Jewish teaching and traditions on Eve, in an article by Emil G. Hirsch, Solomon Schechter and Hartwig Hirschfeld, from which the following brief excerpts are taken:
In Rabbinical Literature:
Eve was not created simultaneously with Adam because God foreknew that later she would be a source of complaint. He therefore delayed forming her until Adam should express a desire for her (Gen. R. xvii.). Eve was created from the thirteenth rib on Adam's right side and from the flesh of his heart (Targ. Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen. ii. 21; Pirke R. El. xii.).
Josephus (37-100 A.D.) describes the formation of Eve in his work, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, Chapter 1. Although he warns the reader that Moses was talking "philosophically" rather than literally when he wrote Genesis 2, he apparently regards the formation of Eve from Adam's body by God as part of the essential meaning of the passage in Genesis:
On the other hand, the Jewish philosopher Philo (20 B.C. – 50 A.D.), whose approach to Scripture was more allegorical than that of most Jewish commentators, is noteworthy for rejecting the literal interpretation of the Genesis account of Eve's formation in Book 3 of his work, A Treatise on the Account of the Creation of the World, as Given by Moses:
About one thing, however, Philo is quite clear: Eve was a unique and historical individual. Here is Philo’s slightly misogynistic account of the creation of Eve, in Book 1 of his work, A Treatise on the Account of the Creation of the World, as Given by Moses:
The formation of Eve in the Christian tradition:
In a thought-provoking online article entitled, Did Woman Evolve From the Beasts?, Fr. Brian Harrison summarizes the unanimous witness of the Christian Fathers to the literal truth of the Genesis account of the formation of Eve from Adam's side, as follows:
(Fr. Harrison goes on to argue in the second part of his article that in his opinion, the doctrine that Eve was formed from Adam's side is infallible teaching which is binding on Catholics. Not being a theologian myself, I do not consider myself qualified to comment, so I shall simply invite readers to judge Fr. Harrison's argument for themselves.)
I can find only one Church Father who interpreted the Biblical account of the formation of Eve from Adam's side allegorically: the Christian theologian Origen (185-254 A.D.). In his work, Contra Celsum, Book IV, chapter 40, Origen maintained that "in the Hebrew language Adam signifies man; and that in those parts of the narrative which appear to refer to Adam as an individual, Moses is discoursing upon the nature of man in general... and what was spoken with reference to the woman is spoken of every woman without exception." In Contra Celsum, Book IV, chapter 38, he argues that the words of the Genesis narrative describing the formation of Eve from Adam's side "are spoken with a figurative meaning." However, none of the Church Fathers seems to have followed Origen in his allegorical interpretation of this passage.
According to the fourth century saint and bishop, St. Ambrose of Milan (339-397 A.D.), Eve was formed from Adam's side as a sign that of the unity of the human race, in which can trace his or her origin back to Adam. As he explains it in chapter 10 of his work, "On Paradise" (c. 375):
Not without significance, too, is the fact that woman was made out of the rib of Adam. She was not made of the same earth with which he was formed, in order that we might realize that the physical nature of both man and woman is identical and that there was one source for the propagation of the human race. For that reason, neither was man created together with a woman, nor were two men and two women created at the beginning, but first a man and after that a woman. God willed it that human nature be established as one. Thus from the very inception of the human stock He eliminated the possibility that many different natures should arise.
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) voiced similar sentiments in his City of God, Book XII, Chapter 21, which is fittingly titled: That There Was Created at First But One Individual, and that the Human Race Was Created in Him:
Later, in chapter 27, St. Augustine adds:
The medieval theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.), went even further: he listed no less than four reasons why it was fitting that Eve should have been formed from Adam's side, in his Summa Theologica, I, q. 92, art. 2, where he addressed the question: Whether woman should have been made from man?
First, in order thus to give the first man a certain dignity consisting in this, that as God is the principle of the whole universe, so the first man, in likeness to God, was the principle of the whole human race. Wherefore Paul says that "God made the whole human race from one" (Acts 17:26).
Secondly, that man might love woman all the more, and cleave to her more closely, knowing her to be fashioned from himself. Hence it is written (Genesis 2:23-24): "She was taken out of man, wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife." This was most necessary as regards the human race, in which the male and female live together for life; which is not the case with other animals.
Thirdly, because, as the Philosopher [Aristotle - VJT] says (Ethic. viii, 12), the human male and female are united, not only for generation, as with other animals, but also for the purpose of domestic life, in which each has his or her particular duty, and in which the man is the head of the woman. Wherefore it was suitable for the woman to be made out of man, as out of her principle.
Fourthly, there is a sacramental reason for this. For by this is signified that the Church takes her origin from Christ. Wherefore the Apostle says (Ephesians 5:32): "This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church.
Professor Kemp is a devout Catholic, so he is surely familiar with the words of Pope Leo XIII regarding the formation of Eve, in his 1880 encyclical Arcanum (On Christian Marriage). In the passage below, Pope Leo XIII describe the formation of Adam's side as a fact which is known to all, and "cannot be doubted by any":
Fr. Brian Harrison's comments on the evolution controversy in the Catholic Church in the late 19th century are particularly germane here:
4. Eve is the mother of all the living
Both the Jewish and Christian traditions are unanimous in their affirmation that Eve is the mother of all the living. Professor Kemp could only affirm this in a theological sense: Eve was the only woman possessing a rational soul, from whom we are all descended. From a biological perspective, however, Eve would be better described as a mother of the entire human race, rather than as the mother.
Eve in Jewish tradition:
As we saw above, the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, in its article on Eve by Emil G. Hirsch, Solomon Schechter and Hartwig Hirschfeld, notes that "According to Gen. iii. 20, Eve was so called because she was "the mother of all living" (R. V., margin, "Life" or "Living")."
The Jewish historian Josephus (37-100 A.D.) described Eve as the mother of all the living, in his work, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, Chapter 1, section 2. After describing the formation of Eve, he goes on to add:
Eve in the Christian tradition:
St. Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 202 A.D.) contrasts Eve, the mother of all the living, who brought death upon the entire human race, with the Virgin Mary, the "New Eve", whose obedience to God untied the knot of Eve's disobedience:
The fourth century theologian and bishop, St. Ambrose of Milan (c. 339-397 A.D.), also links Eve, mother of the human race, with Mary:
5. Cain and Seth married their sisters
In his article, Science, Theology and Monogenesis (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2011, Vol. 85, No. 2, pp. 217-236), Professor Kemp argues that the story of Cain's exile counts as evidence against monogenism:
Kemp would probably be dismayed to find that the entire Jewish and Christian tradition disagrees with him on this point. Both traditions unanimously affirm that Cain and Seth married their sisters. Jewish tradition even mentions their names and tells us when these sisters were born.
Cain and Seth in Jewish tradition:
The Book of Jubilees, an ancient Jewish text written by an anonymous Pharisee and dating to somewhere between 135 and 105 B.C., describes how Cain married his sister Awan (see Book of Jubilees 4:1-10). The abbreviation A.M. in the text refers to Anno Mundi, a Hebrew calendar based on the Biblical creation of the world (thus 1 A.M. refers to the year in which Adam and Eve were created):
The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, in its article on "Abel", by J. Frederic McCurdy, Kaufmann Kohler, Louis Ginzberg and Richard Gottheil, has a very interesting slant on Cain's motive for killing Abel, according to later Jewish tradition. According to this Rabbinical tradition, it was because Cain coveted Abel's beautiful fiancee, who was also his twin sister:
...Woman was at the bottom of the strife between the first brothers. Each of the sons of Adam had a twin-sister whom he was to marry. As Abel's twin-sister was the more beautiful, Cain wished to have her for his wife, and sought to get rid of Abel (Pirke R. Eliezer, xxi.; Gen. R. xxii. 7, according to Ginzberg's emendation; Epiphanius, "De Haeresi," xl. 5, "Schatzhohle," ed. Bezold, p. 34; compare, too, "The Book of the Bee," ed. Budge, pp. 26, 27).
The Wikipedia article on Cain and Abel supplies more detail:
[41] Brewer, E. Cobham (1978 (reprint of 1894 version)). The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Edwinstowe, England: Avenel Books. p. 3. ISBN 0-517-259-21-4.
Whatever one may think regarding the historicity of these ancient Jewish traditions, they do establish one thing very clearly: from the earliest times, the Genesis account was interpreted by the Jews as implying that Cain and Seth married their sisters, and not some other race of human beings - whether rational or sub-rational.
Cain and Seth in the Christian tradition:
The early Christian Fathers also explicitly taught that Cain and Seth married their own sisters, and not some other race of human beings.
In the fourth century, St. Epiphanius (c. 310- 403 A.D.), Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, narrates how Cain and Seth married their sisters in his Panarion Book I, Section III, section 39 (Against the Sethians):
6, 1 But as we find in Jubilees which is also called "The Little Genesis," the book even contains the names of both Cain's and Seth's wives [Jub. 4.9; 11], so that the persons who recite myths to the world be put to shame in every way. (2) For after Adam had sired sons and daughters it became necessary at that time that the boys marry their own sisters. Such a thing was not unlawful, as there was no other human stock. (3) Indeed, in a manner of speaking, Adam himself practically married his own daughter [Eve – VJT] who was fashioned from his body and bones and had been formed by God in conjunction with him, and it was not unlawful. (4) And his sons were married, Cain to the older sister, whose name was Saue; and a third son, Seth, who was born after Abel, to his sister named Azura. [Jub. 4.9-11]
6, 5 And Adam had other sons and daughters too as the Little Genesis says, nine after these three [Jub. 4.10], so that he had two daughters but twelve sons, one of whom was killed but eleven survived. (6) You have the reflection of them too in the Genesis of the World, the first Book of Moses, which says, "And Adam lived 930 years, and begat sons and daughters, and died." [Gen. 5:3-5]
7, 1 But when humanity had expanded an Adam's line was growing longer, the strict practice of lawful wedlock was gradually extended. (2) And then since Adam had had children and children's children, and daughters were born to them in direct descent, they no longer took their own sisters in marriage. Even before the written Law given by Moses the rule of lawful wedlock was reduced to order, and they took their wives from among their cousins. (3) And now, while humanity was expanding in this way, the two stocks were commingled - Cain's with Seth's and Seth's with the other, and so were the other stocks of Adam's sons.
(Translated by Frank Williams. Copyright 1987 and 1997, by Koninklijke Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands)
St. Augustine, in his City of God, Book XV, chapter 16, asserts that at the dawn of humanity, men married their sisters, and argues that it was permissible for them to do so, as it was necessary for the continuation of the human race:
As, therefore, the human race, subsequently to the first marriage of the man who was made of dust, and his wife who was made out of his side, required the union of males and females in order that it might multiply, and as there were no human beings except those who had been born of these two, men took their sisters for wives - an act which was as certainly dictated by necessity in these ancient days as afterwards it was condemned by the prohibitions of religion... Therefore, when an abundant population made it possible, men ought to choose for wives women who were not already their sisters; for not only would there then be no necessity for marrying sisters, but, were it done, it would be most abominable. For if the grandchildren of the first pair, being now able to choose their cousins for wives, married their sisters, then it would no longer be only two but three relationships that were held by one man, while each of these relationships ought to have been held by a separate individual, so as to bind together by family affection a larger number. For one man would in that case be both father, and father-in-law, and uncle to his own children (brother and sister now man and wife); and his wife would be mother, aunt, and mother-in-law to them; and they themselves would be not only brother and sister, and man and wife, but cousins also, being the children of brother and sister... Now, all these relationships, which combined three men into one, would have embraced nine persons had each relationship been held by one individual, so that a man had one person for his sister, another his wife, another his cousin, another his father, another his uncle, another his father-in-law, another his mother, another his aunt, another his mother-in-law; and thus the social bond would not have been tightened to bind a few, but loosened to embrace a larger number of relations.
And we see that, since the human race has increased and multiplied, this is so strictly observed even among the profane worshippers of many and false gods, that though their laws perversely allow a brother to marry his sister, yet custom, with a finer morality, prefers to forego this license; and though it was quite allowable in the earliest ages of the human race to marry one's sister, it is now abhorred as a thing which no circumstances could justify.
6. The Nephilim of Genesis 6 were generally regarded by Jews and Christians as the offspring of the descendants of Cain and Seth, and not of humans inter-breeding with angels
Chapter 6 of the book of Genesis opens with a fascinating little passage (Genesis 6:1-4) which describes how the "sons of God" inter-bred with the "daughters of men":
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. (NIV)
Who were the sons of God? And who were the daughters of men? If it could be established that this passage was referring to some primeval coupling between rational human beings and some other group of beings, then this would surely lend legitimacy to Professor Kemp's contention that the earliest human beings with rational souls may have inter-bred with biologically human beings who lacked rational souls. From very early times, there were some Jews and Christians who interpreted this passage as referring to angels (or demons) having intercourse with women. However, this interpretation attracted wide censure within both the Jewish and Christian traditions, and the more orthodox view was that the sons of God were human. According to many commentators, the sons of God and the daughters of men were the descendants of Seth and Cain, respectively; according to others, the sons of God were the aristocratic sons of nobles. However, even in an age where fabulous myths of half-human, half-animal creatures abounded, no commentator, Jewish or Christian, interpreted the passage as lending support to the idea that men with rational souls were capable of inter-breeding with biologically human females who lacked rational souls. I would like to emphasize that Professor Kemp has nowhere proposed such a bizarre interpretation of Genesis 6 in any of his writings; however, if there is one passage of Scripture which might be construed as lending support to Professor Kemp's proposed scenario regarding Adam and Eve, this would be it. (As we saw above, the reference to other men in the Biblical account of Cain's exile [Genesis 4;14-17] actually contradicts Kemp's interpretation, as these men are clearly rational.) In order to demonstrate that Kemp’s scenario is devoid of all Scriptural support, I have therefore put together the following material regarding the interpretation of Genesis 6, in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The Nephilim in Jewish and Christian tradition: an overview
The Wikipedia article on the Nephilim provides the lay reader with a good overview of the two rival interpretations of Genesis 6:
There are effectively two views[15] regarding the identity of the Nephilim, which follow on from alternative views about the identity of the sons of God:
Offspring of Seth - The Qumran (Dead Sea Scroll) fragment 4Q417 (4QInstruction) contains the earliest known reference to the phrase "children of Seth", stating that God has condemned them for their rebellion. (Nonetheless, a few commentators dispute the interpretation of this reference.)… Other early references to the offspring of Seth rebelling from God and mingling with the daughters of Cain, are found in rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Augustine of Hippo, Julius Africanus, and the Letters attributed to St. Clement. It is also the view expressed in the modern canonical Amharic Ethiopian Orthodox Bible.
Offspring of angels - A number of early sources refer to the "sons of heaven" as "Angels". The earliest such references[16] seem to be in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek, and Aramaic Enochic literature, and in certain Ge'ez manuscripts of 1 Enoch (mss A-Q) and Jubilees[17] used by western scholars in modern editions of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.[18] However, "Angels" in this context has sometimes been considered to be a sarcastic epithet for the offspring of Seth who rebelled (see above). The earliest statement in a secondary commentary explicitly interpreting this to mean that angelic beings mated with humans, can be traced to the rabbinical Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and it has since become especially commonplace in modern-day Christian commentaries.
Others do not take either view, and believe that they are not historical figures but are ancient imagery with questionable meaning.[19]....
The descendants of Seth and Cain interpretation
Despite the apparent prevalence of Enochic interpretations such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Philo,[32] in Second Temple Judaism, and at Qumran (e.g. Ogias the Giant), orthodox Judaism has always taken a consistent line against the idea that Genesis 6 refers to angels or that angels could intermarry with men. Shimon bar Yochai pronounced a curse on anyone teaching this idea. Rashi and Nachmanides followed this. Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 3:1-3 may also imply that the "sons of God" were human.[33] Consequently, most Jewish commentaries and translations describe the Nephilim as being from the offspring of "sons of nobles", rather than from "sons of God" or "sons of angels".[34] This is also the rendering suggested in the Targum Onqelos, Symmachus and the Samaritan Targum which read "sons of the rulers", where Targum Neophyti reads "sons of the judges".
Likewise, a long-held view among some Christians is that the "sons of God" who fathered the Nephilim spoken of in the text, were in fact the formerly righteous descendants of Seth who rebelled, while the "daughters of men" were the unrighteous descendants of Cain, and the Nephilim the offspring of their union.[35] This view dates to at least the 3rd century AD, with references throughout the Clementine literature,[36] as well as in Sextus Julius Africanus,[37] Ephrem the Syrian[38] and others (see below, "In other texts"). Holders of this view[39] have looked for support in Jesus' statement that "in the days before the flood they (humans) were marrying and giving in marriage"[40]
The Nephilim in Jewish tradition:
The Jewish Virtual Library summarizes the history of Jewish scholarly exegesis on the Nephilim of Genesis 6 in its article, Nephilim by Bernard J. Bamberger, (source: Encyclopedia Judaica, The Gale Group, 2008):
In apocryphal writings of the Second Temple period this fragmentary narrative was elaborated and reinterpreted. The angels were then depicted as rebels against God: lured by the charms of women, they "fell" ..., defiled their heavenly purity, and introduced all manner of sinfulness to earth. Their giant offspring were wicked and violent; the Flood was occasioned by their sinfulness. (None of these ideas is in the biblical text.) .... As this dualistic myth does not appear in the apocalypses of Baruch and Esdras nor in the aggadah of the talmudic period, it was apparently rejected as incompatible with Jewish monotheism. The "sons of God" are explained in the Targum to Genesis 6:4 and the Midrash (Gen. R. 26:5) as young aristocrats who married the daughters of commoners. ... The Babylonian Talmud mentions the names of Shamhazzai, Uzza, and Uzziel, the leaders of the fallen angels in Enoch, but does not say that they were angels... The Palestinian Targum gives the orthodox rendering of Genesis 6:1, but translates verse 4 as: "Shamhazzai and Uzziel fell from heaven and were on earth in those days" - identifying the Nephilim as the fallen angels rather than their children... The Zohar (1:58a) also identifies the Nephilim with the fallen angels. The standard medieval Bible commentators generally followed the classical aggadah in rejecting the mythological interpretation and asserting that the marriages in Genesis 6 were human. Some variant opinions about the "sons of God" are offered - e.g., that their distinction was not only social, but physical and even moral, and that the offspring were called Nephilim because they "fell short" of their fathers in these respects (Nahmanides, Abrabanel).
The interpretation of the term "sons of God" as angels is admittedly a very old one in the Jewish tradition, and can be found in the Book of Jubilees 5:1, which states:
However, if we look at Chabad.org's online Complete Jewish Bible with a commentary by Rashi (1040-1105 A.D.), the greatest Jewish commentator of the Middle Ages, we will find a very different translation of Genesis 6:1-4:
Rashi, in his commentary on this passage, interprets "the sons of the nobles” as either "the sons of the princes (Targumim) and the judges (Gen. Rabbah 26:5)" or as "the princes who go as messengers of the Omnipresent. They too mingled with them (Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 22)." Rashi adds that these "sons of the nobles" were sexually indiscriminate, taking for themselves "[e]ven a married woman, even males and animals (Gen. Rabbah ad loc.)."
The Nephilim in Christian tradition
The best treatment of the Nephilim among the early Christian Fathers can be found in the writings of St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.). What makes St. Augustine's treatment of the subject interesting is that he was writing in an age when stories of incubi and demons having sexual relations with women were widely credited. So prevalent were these accounts in Augustine's day that he felt compelled to acknowledge that there might be some truth in them: "From these assertions, indeed, I dare not determine whether there be some spirits embodied in an aerial substance... and who are capable of lust and of mingling sensibly with women." However, he goes on to add that while demons might be capable of such assaults, "certainly I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen." Instead, he preferred the view that the sons of God were godly men, descended from Seth, who forsook the path of righteousness.
Here is what St. Augustine says on the Nephilim in his City of God, Book XV, chapter 23:
Giants therefore might well be born, even before the sons of God, who are also called angels of God, formed a connection with the daughters of men, or of those living according to men, that is to say, before the sons of Seth formed a connection with the daughters of Cain. For thus speaks even the canonical Scripture itself in the book in which we read of this; its words are: And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair [good]; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord God said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became the giants, men of renown ...
But that those angels were not angels in the sense of not being men, as some suppose, Scripture itself decides, which unambiguously declares that they were men. For when it had first been stated that the angels of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose, it was immediately added, And the Lord God said, My Spirit shall not always strive with these men, for that they also are flesh. For by the Spirit of God they had been made angels of God, and sons of God; but declining towards lower things, they are called men, a name of nature, not of grace; and they are called flesh, as deserters of the Spirit, and by their desertion deserted [by Him]....
There is therefore no doubt that, according to the Hebrew and Christian canonical Scriptures, there were many giants before the deluge, and that these were citizens of the earthly society of men, and that the sons of God, who were according to the flesh the sons of Seth, sunk into this community when they forsook righteousness. Nor need we wonder that giants should be born even from these...
Summary
In my previous two posts, I endeavored to show that Professor Kemp's proposed scenario, which attempts to reconcile the data of science (in support of polygenism) with the teachings of theology (in support of a single original pair), is philosophically incoherent, and that it overlooks a number of interesting scientific facts suggesting that in the absence of a rational spiritual soul, humans would have ceased to be viable as a biological species around 2,000,000 years ago. In this post, I have been chiefly concerned to show that Kemp's proposed scenario is at odds with Scripture, as well as Jewish and Christian tradition.
The upshot of my research is that the notion of a race of biologically human beings, some of whom had rational souls while others did not, is philosophically, scientifically, Biblically and doctrinally insupportable.
Having said that, I would like to thank Professor Kemp for putting forward his scenario, which he has been carefully developing for the last dozen years. It is a very interesting view, and if there were a way of reconciling theological monogenism with biological polygenism, this would have to be it. Professor Kemp deserves to be congratulated for making a valiant attempt to harmonize these two notions. However, I believe that the two notions are irreconcilable, and that Kemp's proposal occupies a half-way house which cannot stand.
For those religious believers who take the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, monogenism appears to be the only tenable position. Intelligent Design theory, as I have stressed above, has no views on the matter; however, from a Design perspective, the evidence which I put forward in my second post of a quantum leap in human cognitive abilities around 2,000,000 years ago is of obvious relevance to the study of human origins.
Finally, this controversy highlights the fact that scientists have only just begun to uncover the secrets of how we began and where we came from. There is much which remains to be discovered.
END
Supplementary Material
Mike Flynn:
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/09/adam-and-eve-and-ted-and-alice.html
Dr. Coyne's primary error seems to be a quantifier shift. He and his fundamentalist bedfellows appear to hold that the statement:
A: "There is one man from whom all humans are descended"
is equivalent to the statement:
B: "All humans are descended from [only] one man."
But this logical fallacy hinges on an equivocation of "one," failing to distinguish "one [out of many]" from "[only] one." Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors…..
Genesis tells us that the children of Adam and Eve found mates among the children of men, which would indicate that there were a number of others creatures out there with whom they could mate. Perhaps no fewer than 9,998 others. So even a literal reading of Genesis supports multiple ancestors, over and above a single common ancestor. …
Poetically, we might say that a God "breathed" a rational soul into a being that had previously been little more than "red clay." How long after the red-clay man was formed was the rational soul breathed in? The texts do not say. It may have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years,…
Homo ergaster was probably the first hominid to "use a human voice", though its symbolic cognition was probably somewhat limited compared to modern humans. It was thought for a long time that H. ergaster was restricted in the physical ability to regulate breathing and produce complex sounds. This was based on Turkana Boy's cervical vertebrae, which were far narrower than in later humans. Discoveries of cervical vertebrae in Dmanisi, Georgia some 300,000 years older than those of Turkana Boy are well within the normal human range.[11] It has been established, furthermore, that the Turkana Boy probably suffered from a disease of the spinal column that resulted in narrower cervical vertebrae than in modern humans[12] (as well as the older Dmanisi finds). While the Dmanisi finds have not been established definitively as H. ergaster; they are older than Turkana Boy (the only definite ergaster vertebrae on record), and thereby suggest kinship to ergaster. Turkana Boy, therefore, may be an anomaly.
Important report – four stages of compassion (news report)
Spontaneous and specific altruistic helping, motivated by compassion rather than any instinctive behaviour, is recorded in dolphins, elephants and higher primates. Dolphins have been known to aid human swimmers in distress. Elephants have such close knit ties that they clearly suffer grief at the loss of a group member, they may spend much time handling the body of the diseased after death... We can see how chimpanzees routinely 'hug' the loser of a fight, and orang-utans might move aside leaves to let another pass by more easily. Acts of 'selfless courage' have also been recorded in chimpanzees, such as the case of an adult chimpanzee that died rescuing a drowning infant from the moat around a zoo enclosure. Chimpanzees have even been recorded adopting unrelated infants whose parents have died.
.
Human compassion seems to be qualitatively and quantitatively different than in other animals and far more integral to how all of society works. Compassion in other animals is comparatively fleeting, for example chimpanzees don't make allowances for individuals who are slow or who cannot keep up with the group, nor do they 'think through' how to help others in the long term. Yet in contrast compassion is fundamental to human social life. Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright call it 'the glue that holds society together' and it is fair to say that compassionate responses and reciprocal altruism forms the basis of all close human social relationships...
Level One: At approximately 6 - 1.8 million years ago we might expect to see compassion in archaic humans as a fleeting response to another's distress. In common with other higher primates the common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees (at about 6 million years ago) for example would have been likely to have been able to conceive of another's intentions, empathise with another's feelings and be motivated to help them. This 'helping' might have taken the form of an immediate gesture of comfort (eg 'hug') to one in distress, or a very limited 'thinking through' of an immediate problem such as moving obstacles in an individual's path. By the time of species such as Homo habilis (2.3-1.6 mill years) or Homo rudolfensis (1.9 mill years) transport of carcasses is likely to have been a group activity as well as collaborative defence against predators. Though it is difficult to judge we might assume that a propensity towards collaboration in food procurement and defence begins to be crucially important for early humans to survive in relatively open savannah environments.
Level Two: Emerging from 1.8 million years compassion begins to be 'regulated' as an emotion which is integrated with rational thought. Within Homo erectus (1.9-1.6 mill years), and later Homo heidelbergensis in Europe the acquisition of meaty carcasses and body size energetics suggests that meat was shared extensively, with pregnant females and those with young infants likely to have been provisioned with food. 'Helpers' with the care of offspring, whether these be males, siblings or grandmothers may have played an important role in evolutionary success. Compassion thus gradually became extended widely into non-kin and in potentially extensive investments in caring for offspring and equally for ill individuals. Those who were incapacitated might be provisioned with food for at least several weeks if not longer. By around 500,000 bp [years before the present – VJT] with the emergence of mortuary treatment such compassion, and grief at the loss of someone cared for, emotions which bind us to others might be able to be symbolised in communication and recognisable as something akin to 'love'.
The evidence for 'care' of others in archaic humans shows a particularly interesting pattern. The most well known early example of long term support for someone who couldn't look after themselves comes from a site in Kenya where KNM-ER 1808, a female Homo ergaster dated to around 1.5 million years ago, was discovered. Examinations of the skeletal remains of this early woman have led to suggestions that she was suffering from hypervitaminosis A, a disease caused by excessive intake of vitamin A (perhaps due to eating excessive quantities of liver or bee larvae). Symptoms of hypervitaminosis A include a reduction in bone density and the development of coarse bone growths, both of which are present in KNM-ER 1808's skeleton. The pathology present would have taken weeks or even months to develop, accompanied by symptoms such as abdominal pain, nausea, headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, lethargy, loss of muscular coordination and impaired consciousness. Symptoms of this type would have greatly hindered her capacity for independent survival, yet she survived long enough for the disease to be identifiable in her skeletal pathology, something which only occurs in the advanced stages of hypervitaminosis A. Alan Walker and Pat Shipman suggest "someone else took care of her", and David Cameron and Colin Groves add:
A capacity for compassionate support by providing food for several weeks in early hominins is confirmed by similar evidence elsewhere. An even earlier example of long term care comes from Dmanisi in Georgia, 1.77 million years ago. One of the Dmanisi hominins had lost all but one tooth several years before death, with all the sockets except for the canine teeth having been re-absorbed. This person could only have consumed soft plant or animal foods, thus probably necessitating support from others.
The Hulu 1 cranium therefore joins a growing series of Pleistocene human remains with nontrivial pathological alterations. There is a number of cases of such skeletal changes among Late Pleistocene archaic and modern humans (e.g., Trinkaus, 1983; Duday and Arensburg, 1991; Berger and Trinkaus, 1995; Kricun et al., 1999; Tillier, 1999; Schultz, 2006; Trinkaus et al., 2006). In addition, such cases are becoming increasingly documented for Early and Middle Pleistocene human remains. These earlier ones include probable dietary deficiencies in KNM-ER 1808 and Eliye Springs KNMES 11693, developmental abnormalities in Sale' 1, Singa 1 and probably Berg Aukas 1, and an infectious disorder in Broken Hill 1 (Walker et al., 1982; Hublin, 1991; Montgomery et al., 1994; Spoor et al., 1998; Trinkaus et al., 1999; Brauer et al., 2003). These are joined by traumatic (or probably traumatic) cranial lesions on Lantien (Gongwangling) 1, Ceprano 1, Zuttiyeh 1, at least eight of the Atapuerca-SH crania, and several of the Zhoukoudian Locality 1 remains (Keith, 1927; Weidenreich, 1943; Caspari, 1997; Pe'rez et al., 1997; Manzi et al., 2001) and by serious dentoalveolar abnormalities on Atapuerca-SH 700/721/888, Aubesier 11, Broken Hill 1, Dmanisi 3444/3900, and Ehringsdorf 6 (Carter, 1928; Vlcek, 1993; Pe'rez et al., 1997; Lebel and Trinkaus, 2002; Lordkipanidze et al., 2005).
Level Four: Within Modern humans (from 120,000 in Africa, 40,000 in Europe) the capacity for compassion extends into strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts, and becomes flexible to context. These developments, shown as a 'branch' in the model, are perhaps best seen as a difference in the expression of compassion, rather than a progressive extension...
[T]he case for this is weaker than for Homo heidelbergensis for three reasons. The first, as earlier mentioned, is that absolute brain size might have less functional significance than relative brain size. The second is that co-operation among early Homo habilis and Homo erectus apparently did not extend to long-term and risky public goods games. The third is that the emergence of co-operative feeding among early Homo erectus can be advantageously explained by the emergence of the social emotions and motivations underlying gaze following and joint attention. Unfortunately, such a change at the affective level would be largely undetectable in the fossil record because basic emotions and motivations are largely realized in subcortical structures that leave no traces on endocasts.
...This article argues that cooperation and culture did not evolve in one step in the human lineage and that the capacity to stick to long-term and risky cooperative arrangements evolved before properly modern culture. I present evidence that Homo heidelbergensis became increasingly able to secure contributions form others in two demanding Paleolithic public good games (PPGGs): cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. I argue that the temptation to defect is high in these PPGGs and that the evolution of human cooperation in Homo heidelbergensis is best explained by the emergence of modern-like abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance. These executive functions are localized in the prefrontal cortex and allow humans to stick to social norms in the face of competing motivations. This scenario is consistent with data on brain evolution that indicate that the largest growth of the prefrontal cortex in human evolution occurred in Homo heidelbergensis and was followed by relative stasis in this part of the brain. One implication of this argument is that subsequent behavioral innovations, including the evolution of symbolism, art, and properly cumulative culture in modern Homo sapiens, are unlikely to be related to a reorganization of the prefrontal cortex, despite frequent claims to the contrary in the literature on the evolution of human culture and cognition.
[page 54]
This article focuses on a specific population of large-brained hominins, generally regrouped under the label Homo heidelbergensis, which lived in Africa and Europe between about 700,000 and 300,000 years ago and which is thought to be the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal (Rightmire 2004). My objective is to show that, although there is no evidence of the most definitive traits of properly human culture in this period of human evolution (e.g. symbolism, art, cumulative culture), Homo heidelbergensis was able to stick to very demanding
cooperative arrangements in connection with feeding and breeding. The fact that such behaviors appear in our evolution much before art or symbolism, I contend, implies that human culture and cooperation did not evolve in one step. Consequently, understanding their evolution implies integrating more specific data about the evolution of the brain and behavior in extinct hominins.
Philo on reason
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book1.html See 69, 72 and 77 on reason and the image of God
Reconstruction of Lucy, a female Australopithecus afarensis who lived about 3.5 million years ago. Australopithecus probably had 48 chromosomes, as well as hairy skin. Early humans, who were naked and had 46 chromosomes, would have been disinclined to breed with this creature, and if they had, only a few of the offspring would have been viable.
I have previously proposed that the origin of our lineage and the origin of bipedality coincide and are the consequence of the chromosomal fusion which produced our second chromosome from what are the 12th and 13th chromosomes in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (Bowers in press 2004). Some years ago Mary-Clare King and colleagues proposed a highly plausible mechanism for rapid speciation based on chromosomal fusion (King and Wilson 1975, Wilson, Bush, Case and King 1975). If a chromosomal fusion occurs in the male in an inbreeding single-male-multiple-female social group in which the young disperse, the stage is set for an abrupt speciation event. Only a third of gametes formed by an individual with a fusion carry a normal chromosome compliment (Stine 1989). Zygotes formed by the other two thirds will be inviable (sic). Of the viable third, half the offspring by a non-fusion individual will be expected to carry the fusion. Figure 1-1 shows what happens in the next generation, when both the male and some of the females carries the fusion. Of 36 possible chromosome combinations in their zygotes, eight can be expected to be viable where both parents carry the fusion. Of these, seven will have at least one copy of the fusion chromosome. This looks to be a prescription for abrupt speciation. I think this kind [of] chromosomal fusion is what produced our line.
Homo ergaster/erectus was a long ranging species, fuelled by a high quality diet, and adapted to transporting fairly heavy burdens. Ergaster/erectus's gracile physique and more prominent stature gave this hominid a thermoregular advantage (Wheeler, 1992), which implies a capability for long ranging day time excursions in hot open lands. Plummer (2004) suggests that there are several indications pointing towards a modern human thermoregulation, which mainly means sweating. This could very well have proven to be an advantage, since large predators are fairly inactive in the heat of the day. Furthermore, the proportions of the ergaster/erectus body made it far more efficient in carrying loads on the back or in the hands (Wang & Crompton, 2004). These adaptations presumably made the ergaster/erectus a better scavenger/hunter (as a primate), since it could patrol larger areas comparatively quickly in the daytime heat and efficiently carry pieces of carcasses back to the accumulation spots. Such a long range behaviour demands a lot more energy than living like an australopithecine, at least an increase with 40-45% and perhaps as much as 80-85% (Leonard & Robertson, 1997). (pp. 7-8)
Professor Peter Wheeler of Liverpool John Moores University has done much work on thermoregulatory selection pressure on human evolution. His research suggests that naked skin with highly developed sweat glands enabled ergaster to lose heat by evaporation at a rate between 10 and 100 times faster than they could using their respiratory systems alone.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/381006
http://dictionary.sensagent.com/human+skin+color/en-en/
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/science/why-humans-and-their-fur-parted-ways.html?pagewanted=4&src=pm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110106164616.htm
Professor Francisco Ayala, who claims to have shown that Eve is a myth. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
This argument is based on variation in the DRB1 gene in the human population. This gene, one of one hundred or so that make up the human leukocyte antigen complex, is very old. The fact that thirty-two of the fifty-nine variants found in man are also found (in similar, though not identical form) in chimpanzees shows that these variants arose before the phylogenetic divergence of chimpanzee and man, some 6 mya [million years ago - VJT].
Vitruvian man, by Leonardo da Vinci. Are human beings genetically modified organisms? Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel, 1511.
The Multi-Germic Theory
Adam, Eve and the Necessity of Monogenism: A Reply to Professor Kemp (Part III)
http://www.weswhite.net/2011/12/biologos-and-calvins-view-of-inspiration/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=biologos-and-calvins-view-of-inspiration
[My proposed] account can begin with a population of about 5,000 hominids, beings which are in many respects like human beings, but which lack the capacity for intellectual thought. Out of this population, God selects two and endows them with intellects by creating for them rational souls, giving them at the same time those preternatural gifts the possession of which constitutes original justice. Only beings with rational souls (with or without the preternatural gifts) are truly human. The first two theologically human beings misuse their free will, however, by choosing to commit a (the original) sin, thereby losing the preternatural gifts, though not the offer of divine friendship by virtue of which they remain theologically (not just philosophically) distinct from their merely biologically human ancestors and cousins. These first true human beings also have descendants, which continue, to some extent, to interbreed with the non-intellectual hominids among whom they live. If God endows each individual that has even a single human ancestor with an intellect of its own, a reasonable rate of reproductive success and a reasonable selective advantage would easily replace a non-intellectual hominid population of 5,000 individuals with a philosophically (and, if the two concepts are extensionally equivalent, theologically) human population within three centuries. Throughout this process, all theologically human beings would be descended from a single original human couple (in the sense of having that human couple among their ancestors) without there ever having been a population bottleneck in the human species…
(Professor Kemp could affirm this in a qualified sense, because he holds that Adam was the first and only male to be endowed with a rational soul, among the population of 5,000 hominids. From a biological perspective, Adam would be better described as a father of the entire human race, rather than the father – even if he was the only one possessing a rational soul.)
(Professor Kemp affirms this unequivocally, as do proponents of monogenism.)
(This point is totally incompatible with Professor Kemp's thesis.)
(Professor Kemp could affirm this, although from a biological perspective, Eve would be better described as a mother of the entire human race, rather than the mother – even if she was the only one possessing a rational soul.)
(This point is totally incompatible with Professor Kemp's thesis. Kemp maintains that they would have inter-bred with a hominid population of several thousand individuals that were biologically human, but were not endowed with rational souls.)
(Note: The possibility of rational human beings inter-breeding with biologically human but sub-rational beasts is not even considered in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That doesn't bode well for Professor Kemp's thesis, I'm afraid.)
XLVII. (136) But the original man, he who was created out of the clay, the primeval founder of all our race, appears to me to have been most excellent in both particulars, in both soul and body, and to have been very far superior to all the men of subsequent ages from his pre-eminent excellence in both parts. For he in truth was really good and perfect…
-In Apocryphal and Rabbinical Literature:
While the generic character that the name of Adam has in the older parts of Scripture, where it appears with the article ("the man"), was gradually lost sight of, his typical character as the representative of the unity of mankind was constantly emphasized (compare Sanh. iv. 5; the correct reading in Tosef., Sanh. viii. 4-9):
For every beginning of those families which have relation to God as to the Father of all, took its commencement lower down with Christ, who is next to the God and Father of all, being thus the Father of every soul, as Adam is the father of all men.
4 (2) Two men were not formed (at the beginning). One man was formed, Adam; and Cain, Abel and Seth came from Adam. And the breeds of men before the flood cannot derive from two men but must derive from one, since the breeds all have their own origins from Adam. (3) And again, the whole human race since the flood derives from Noah, one man. It does not derive from different men but from one, Noah, Seth's lineal descendant; and it is not divided into two, but is one stock. (4) Therefore Noah's wife, his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and the three wives of his sons, all trace their ancestry to Seth, and not to the two non-existent men of the Sethians' invention.
(Panarion. Translated by Frank Williams. Copyright 1987 and 1997, by Koninklijke Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands)
Chapter 10 (48)
... Not without significance, too, is the fact that woman was made out of the rib of Adam. She was not made of the same earth with which he was formed, in order that we might realize that the physical nature of both man and woman is identical and that there was one source for the propagation of the human race. For that reason, neither was man created together with a woman, nor were two men and two women created at the beginning, but first a man and after that a woman. God willed it that human nature be established as one. Thus from the very inception of the human stock He eliminated the possibility that many different natures should arise.
...But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast [original progenitor - i.e. Adam - VJT]. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful.
XLVII. (136) But the original man, he who was created out of the clay, the primeval founder of all our race, appears to me to have been most excellent in both particulars, in both soul and body, and to have been very far superior to all the men of subsequent ages from his pre-eminent excellence in both parts. For he in truth was really good and perfect...
2. Moreover, Moses, after the seventh day was over begins to talk philosophically; and concerning the formation of man, says thus: That God took dust from the ground, and formed man, and inserted in him a spirit and a soul. This man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth, compounded together; for of that kind is virgin and true earth.
He [God] creates with His own hands man of a visible nature and an invisible, after His own image and likeness: on the one hand man's body He formed of earth, and on the other his reasoning and thinking soul He bestowed upon him by His own inbreathing, and this is what we mean by after His image. For the phrase after His image clearly refers to the side of his nature which consists of mind and free will, whereas after His likeness means likeness in virtue so far as that is possible.
I answer that, The rational soul can be made only by creation; which, however, is not true of other forms. The reason is because, since to be made is the way to existence, a thing must be made in such a way as is suitable to its mode of existence... [T]he rational soul is a subsistent form, as above explained (75, 2). Wherefore it is competent to be and to be made. And since it cannot be made of pre-existing matter – whether corporeal, which would render it a corporeal being – or spiritual, which would involve the transmutation of one spiritual substance into another, we must conclude that it cannot exist except by creation.
I answer that, It is impossible for an active power existing in matter to extend its action to the production of an immaterial effect. Now it is manifest that the intellectual principle in man transcends matter; for it has an operation in which the body takes no part whatever. It is therefore impossible for the seminal power to produce the intellectual principle...
Biblical Data:
The wife of Adam. According to Gen. iii. 20, Eve was so called because she was "the mother of all living" (R. V., margin, "Life" or "Living"). On the ground that it was not "good for man to be alone" God resolved to "make him an help meet for him" (ib. ii. 18), first creating, with this end in view, the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air and then bringing them unto Adam. When Adam did not find among these a helpmeet for himself, Yhwh caused a deep sleep to fall upon him, and took one of his ribs, from which He made a woman, and brought her unto the man (ib. ii. 22). Upon seeing her, Adam welcomed her as "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (ib. ii. 23), declaring that she should be called "ishshah" because she was taken out of "ish" (man.)...
2. Moreover, Moses, after the seventh day was over begins to talk philosophically; and concerning the formation of man, says thus: That God took dust from the ground, and formed man, and inserted in him a spirit and a soul. This man was called Adam… God also presented the living creatures, when he had made them, according to their kinds, both male and female, to Adam, who gave them those names by which they are still called. But when he saw that Adam had no female companion, no society, for there was no such created, and that he wondered at the other animals which were male and female, he laid him asleep, and took away one of his ribs, and out of it formed the woman; whereupon Adam knew her when she was brought to him, and acknowledged that she was made out of himself. Now a woman is called in the Hebrew tongue Issa; but the name of this woman was Eve, which signifies the mother of all living.
VII. (19) "And God cast a deep trance upon Adam, and sent him to sleep; and he took one of his ribs," and so on. The literal statement conveyed in these words is a fabulous one; for how can any one believe that a woman was made of a rib of a man, or, in short, that any human being was made out of another? And what hindered God, as he had made man out of the earth, from making woman in the same manner? For the Creator was the same, and the material was almost interminable, from which every distinctive quality whatever was made. And why, when there were so many parts of a man, did not God make the woman out of some other part rather than out of one of his ribs? Again, of which rib did he make her? And this question would hold even if we were to say, that he had only spoken of two ribs; but in truth he has not specified their number. Was it then the right rib, or the left rib?
LIII. (151) But since nothing in creation lasts for ever, but all mortal things are liable to inevitable changes and alterations, it was unavoidable that the first man should also undergo some disaster. And the beginning of his life being liable to reproach, was his wife. For, as long as he was single, he resembled, as to his creation, both the world and God; and he represented in his soul the characteristics of the nature of each, I do not mean all of them, but such as a mortal constitution was capable of admitting. But when woman also was created, man perceiving a closely connected figure and a kindred formation to his own, rejoiced at the sight, and approached her and embraced her. (152) And she, in like manner, beholding a creature greatly resembling herself, rejoiced also, and addressed him in reply with due modesty. And love being engendered, and, as it were, uniting two separate portions of one animal into one body, adapted them to each other, implanting in each of them a desire of connection with the other with a view to the generation of a being similar to themselves. And this desire caused likewise pleasure to their bodies, which is the beginning of iniquities and transgressions, and it is owing to this that men have exchanged their previously immortal and happy existence for one which is mortal and full of misfortune.
It is well-known that the unanimous consensus of those many Fathers of the Church who commented on the account of Eve's formation from Adam's side testifies that this passage is to be understood as literal history, and as part of the doctrine of faith concerning Creation. The only ancient ecclesiastical writer to give a symbolic or allegorical reading to the Genesis account was Origen (cf. Contra Celsum, 1, IV, ch. 38, in Migne, PG, vol. VIII, n. 530, p.631), who of course is notorious for his excessive penchant for such free departures from the literal sense of a great many biblical texts. In any case, Origen, not being a saint, is not strictly to be considered among the Fathers, especially when their consensus is being considered to establish the certainty of a given Catholic doctrine from Scripture.
Chapter 10 (48)
... Now that we have solved, as well as we could, this very difficult question about the eternal God creating new things, without any novelty of will, it is easy to see how much better it is that God was pleased to produce the human race from the one individual whom He created, than if He had originated it in several men…. And therefore God created only one single man, not, certainly, that he might be a solitary, bereft of all society, but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man.
But from the fact that the woman was made for him from his side, it was plainly meant that we should learn how dear the bond between man and wife should be.
I answer that, When all things were first formed, it was more suitable for the woman to be made from man that (for the female to be from the male) in other animals.
5. ...The true origin of marriage, venerable brothers, is well known to all. Though revilers of the Christian faith refuse to acknowledge the never-interrupted doctrine of the Church on this subject, and have long striven to destroy the testimony of all nations and of all times, they have nevertheless failed not only to quench the powerful light of truth, but even to lessen it. We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time.
It is noteworthy that no censure was even necessary, during this period, either of a polygenistic account of human origins or of the thesis that the body of the first woman was also a product of evolution. This is because no Catholic author, it seems, had yet dared advocate these theses, in opposition to truths which were so firmly established in Scripture and Tradition.
Creation of Eve, sandstone from Montbenon (Lausanne), circa 1515. Formerly part of Montfalcon porch, built in 1515 and demolished in the 19th century. On display at the Musee historique de Lausanne. Image courtesy of Rama and Wikipedia.
Now a woman is called in the Hebrew tongue Issa; but the name of this woman was Eve, which signifies the mother of all living.
Just as Eve, wife of Adam, yet still a virgin, became by her disobedience the cause of death for herself and the whole human race, so Mary, too, espoused yet a Virgin, became by her obedience the cause of salvation for herself and the whole human race.... And so it was that the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by Mary's obedience. For what the virgin Eve bound fast by her refusal to believe, this the Virgin Mary unbound by her belief.
(St. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, Book 3, paragraph. 32, I; PG 7, 958-959.)
It was through a man and woman that flesh was cast from Paradise; it was through a virgin that flesh was linked to God... Eve is called mother of the human race, but Mary Mother of salvation. (St. Ambrose, Epistle 63, No. 33, Patrologia Latina (PL) Migne, 16, 1249-1250; Sermon 45, No. 4; PL, 17, 716.)
Cain by Henri Vidal, in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1896. Image courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen and Wikipedia.
[T]he account of the exile of Cain (Gen 4:14-17) assumes the existence of other men in the world without giving an account of their creation. This inconsistency should serve to emphasize the fact that the intent of the Protohistory of Genesis 1–11 is not to provide a positivist narrative history, but to relate a mythos - a story in which, as Edward Yarnold put it, "a truth too deep for straightforward expression is formulated in symbolic terms."
1. And in the third week in the second jubilee [64-70 A.M.] she [Eve - VJT] gave birth to Cain, and in the fourth [71-77 A.M.] she gave birth to Abel, and in the fifth [78-84 A.M.] she gave birth to her daughter Awan.
2. And in the first (year) of the third jubilee [99-105 A.M.], Cain slew Abel because (God) accepted the sacrifice of Abel, and did not accept the offering of Cain.
3. And he slew him in the field: and his blood cried from the ground to heaven, complaining because he had slain him.
4. And the Lord reproved Cain because of Abel, because he had slain him, and he made him a fugitive on the earth because of the blood of his brother, and he cursed him upon the earth.
5. And on this account it is written on the heavenly tables, 'Cursed is he who smites his neighbour treacherously, and let all who have seen and heard say, So be it; and the man who has seen and not declared (it), let him be accursed as the other.'
6. And for this reason we announce when we come before the Lord our God all the sin which is committed in heaven and on earth, and in light and in darkness, and everywhere.
7. And Adam and his wife mourned for Abel four weeks of years, [99-127 A.M] and in the fourth year of the fifth week [130 A.M.] they became joyful, and Adam knew his wife again, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Seth; for he said 'GOD has raised up a second seed unto us on the earth instead of Abel; for Cain slew him.'
8. And in the sixth week [134-40 A.M.] he begat his daughter Azura.
9. And Cain took Awan his sister to be his wife and she bare him Enoch at the close of the fourth jubilee. [190-196 A.M.] And in the first year of the first week of the fifth jubilee, [197 A.M.] houses were built on the earth, and Cain built a city, and called its name after the name of his son Enoch.
10. And Adam knew Eve his wife and she bare yet nine sons.
11. And in the fifth week of the fifth jubilee [225-31 A.M.] Seth took Azura his sister to be his wife, and in the fourth (year of the sixth week) [235 A.M.] she bare him Enos.
(From The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament by R.H. Charles, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.)
In Hellenistic and Rabbinical Literature:
Though Genesis depicts Cain's motive in killing Abel as simply being one of jealousy concerning God's favour for Abel, this is not the view of many extra-biblical works. The Midrash and the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan both record that the real motive involved the desire of women. According to Midrashic tradition, Cain and Abel each had twin sisters, whom they were to marry. The Midrash records that Abel's promised wife was the more beautiful. Cain would not consent to this arrangement. Adam proposed to refer the question to God by means of a sacrifice. God rejected Cain's sacrifice, signifying His disapproval of his marriage with Aclima, and Cain slew his brother in a fit of jealousy. [41]
5(9) And that Cain and Seth, at least, took wives is plain – for Abel was killed in his early youth, not yet married.
Chapter 16. - Of Marriage Between Blood-Relations, in Regard to Which the Present Law Could Not Bind the Men of the Earliest Ages.
Church icon of Seth. According to orthodox Jewish and Christian tradition, the Nephilim were descendants of Seth and Cain. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
1 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years."
Genesis 6 - two interpretations
NEPHILIM ...a race of giants said to have dwelt in pre-Israelite Canaan (Num. 13:33). Genesis 6:1–2 relates that the "sons of gods," i.e., divine or angelic beings, took mortal wives; verse 4 continues, "It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared [lit., were] on earth – when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes [Heb. gibborim] of old, the men of renown." This could mean that the Nephilim were contemporaneous, but not identical, with the offspring of divine beings and earthly women, who were called gibborim... The above translation, however, follows an ancient tradition in equating the Nephilim and the gibborim as offspring of the union of angels and mortals.
And it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the angels of God saw them on a certain year of this jubilee, that they were beautiful to look upon; and they took themselves wives of all whom they chose, and they bare unto them sons and they were giants.
1. And it came to pass when man commenced to multiply upon the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them.
2. That the sons of the nobles saw the daughters of man when they were beautifying themselves, and they took for themselves wives from whomever they chose.
3. And the Lord said, "Let My spirit not quarrel forever concerning man, because he is also flesh, and his days shall be a hundred and twenty years."
4. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of the nobles would come to the daughters of man, and they would bear for them; they are the mighty men, who were of old, the men of renown.
[H]oly Scripture affords the most ample testimony that even godly men have been called angels; for of John it is written: Behold, I send my messenger (angel) before Your face, who shall prepare Your way (Mark 1:2). And the prophet Malachi, by a peculiar grace specially communicated to him, was called an angel (Malachi 2:7).