Chapter Three
Evolution and transcendence
The late A.L. indicated Kroeber, who was the dean of American anthropology for many years, believed that the word evolution had become a household word. And Kroeber certainly had no illusions that the majority of “householders,” even in the most civilized countries, had the vaguest ideas about what evolution is. However, as Sorkin (1937) pointed out, evolution has become “the dominant category of mental perception.” And (looking at things from the standpoint of their origins, growth, and development is our view of everything from religion to the stock market. This perspective has become rooted in our minds and has become so profound that many of us cannot imagine any non-historical, non-evolutionary, or non-developmental approach to studying any phenomenon.)
For most people, the word “evolution” refers to the biological theory proposed by Charles Darwin. Biological evolution had been studied by many before Darwin, but it was Darwin who amassed an overwhelming body of evidence to support his theory. However, evolution applies to much broader areas than biological evolution. The evolution of the solar system, the Earth, and human societies before biological evolution has been acknowledged or at least debated. There is no generally accepted definition of the word evolution. The expression “continuous, i.e. sustainable change” comes closer to the meaning than others at the present time. This concept can be modified in the case of biological evolution to “continuous change over successive generations”, in order to distinguish the development of the group “phylogeny”, i.e. the history of the species or species, from the development of the individual “ontogeny”. Huxeley (1955) proposed a more detailed and, in his estimation, a more general definition of evolution: “Evolution is a self-propelled, self-transforming, self-transcendent process, time-bound and therefore irreversible, generating in its course renewed creativity, increasing diversity, complex organization, a higher level of consciousness, and an increasing conscious mental activity.” Unfortunately, this definition is not sufficient for biological evolution alone. Cases of evolutionary stagnation show that evolution is not self-propelled; Evolution is basically a process of touching, and it is a directive process only in the second place. Sometimes development is regressive instead of progressive. Evolutionary fission “increased diversity” is repeated to the same degree as evolutionary fission “change within the same group”; Consciousness and self-awareness, as we know, arose in a single evolutionary line that leads to man.
Complete denial of the occurrence of evolution is almost impossible, although Parmenides believed that change was merely a deception of the senses. In any case, even if there is an eternal, transcendent reality that does not change, the question arises about the extent of the changes that our senses have led us to believe will occur. All peoples, even completely primitive ones, have composed creation myths that tell the origins of the world and the human race. These myths are often covered with wonderful emotional feelings that stem, as some theories say, from the deepest recesses of the human soul (Long 1963). Creation myths tell the actions of sacred figures that resulted in today's world. These heroic deeds and stormy events occurred essentially at the beginning of the world. Once these events are completed, the world is depicted in a relatively stable state that does not accept change.
The story of creation in the Book of Genesis, taken alone, can and has been interpreted as a basis for a non-evolutionary view of nature, the universe, and man. This non-evolutionary view prevailed until it was shattered by the influence of scientific discoveries in the era following the Renaissance. He really did not deny every change, but the supposed very close date for the beginning of the world, the year 44004 BC. According to Bishop Usher's estimates, it was implied that the world had not been able to change much since the beginning of creation. Hence the clerical words: “What has been is what will be and what custom requires is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Other creation accounts assume an eternal repetition of the world's creation and dissolution. In some way, it includes both the evolutionary and non-evolutionary views of the world. The cosmology of the Vishnu Purana is a good example of these narratives. The universe repeats in cycles, each of which is exactly 4,320,000 billion years. This is a staggering number even for about fifteen billion years, which is the current estimate of the age of the universe. These major cycles are interspersed with minor cycles lasting 432,000 years that undergo radical changes from the beginning of creation (Karta Yuga) to its destructive end (an era like the one we are in the middle of now). The Pythagoreans were also fond of cyclic theories, the length of whose cycles (Enos Magnos) varied from 5552 to 100,020 years. Nietzsche was one of the most ardent advocates of belief in eternal repetition. Cyclical theories of history found favor with Danilevsky, Spengler, and to some extent Sorokin.
Christianity is considered one of the great religions that is most aware of history, and in this sense it is evolutionary. It confirms that the history of humanity and the world is not just an illusion and is not an irredeemable evil. History is the vehicle of creation. The world had a beginning and will have an end. A pivotal event occurred at a certain moment in history when God took human form and lived among people. Therefore, man is placed at the center of meaning in history. In the words of Tillich (1963) history is confirmed in the call to Christian inner consciousness in such a way that the answer to the questions suggested by the ambiguities of life in its historical dimension lies in the symbol of the “Kingdom of God.” This does not necessarily mean a doctrine of progressive development towards a state of perfection; In fact, Christianity inherited from Judaism the principle of man's tragic fall from a state of primary perfection.
It is not a coincidence, then, that the idea of progress grew and flourished in the Christian-Jewish cultural background, despite the secular framework, not the religious framework in which it arose (Bury 1932). The Encyclopedists believed that “the total mass of the human race is always moving slowly forward.” Voltaire believed that man was progressing from “barbaric, clumsy simplicity” to “the refinement of our time.” Then the first mature theory of humankind's evolutionary progress appeared at the end of the Enlightenment, that is Condorcet's theory. It is a hymn to unbridled optimism composed in the shadow of death. The evolutionary ideas of Herder, Kant, and Fichte led, on a different philosophical basis, to the system of Hegel, in which history is viewed as the continuous manifestation of the spirit. Marx places production and economics in the place of the spirit to arrive at an alternative to the Kingdom of God called socialism and communism. Marx discovered the “evolution” of his society at approximately the same time that Darwin published his account of biological evolution. Marx was so insightful that he discovered in Darwin an evolutionary colleague, an affiliation that Darwin desired. It was not long before Spencer, Taylor, Morgan, and others began to establish a science of social anthropology based on explicitly Darwinian premises.
Theories of inorganic cosmic and terrestrial evolution appeared some time before theories of organic evolution. In his young age, before he became the prince of philosophers, Kant (1755) advanced the theory of the primordial nebula. Kant believed that Newtonian gravitational forces led to the collection of the already scattered matter of the universe and its condensation into the sun and planets. In 1796 and 1808, Laplace imagined that the primary sun was a rapidly rotating gas ball. Parts of that gas ball separated and condensed due to strong centrifugal forces, forming planets and moons. In the nineteenth century, Leal developed the principle of symmetry, which was presented by Buffon and Hutton in the eighteenth century, and made it a basis for studying the geological changes of the Earth. Lyell inspired and supported Darwin, after he initially doubted the theory of biological evolution.
But modern cosmological theories are completely new. It is a product of the progress of physics and astronomy in the twentieth century. It boils down to two theories that seem different and contradictory, at least to a non-specialist. A final resolution of these two theories does not seem possible now, and this gives the study of cosmology great excitement at the present time. Bondi, Gold, and especially Hoyle developed the steady state theory. The basic assumption of this theory is that new matter is constantly being created in the expanding universe. There is a proportionality between the rates of expansion of the universe and the creation of new matter, and this leads to the density of matter in the universe being in a constant state almost all the time. Thus, new galaxies are constantly being formed. The other theory assumes that the universe arose about five to ten billion years ago, from a state of compression in which the density of matter and radiation reached one hundred million times the density of water. The beginning was a huge explosion (hence the name of the “Big Bang” theory, which was especially associated with the theory proposed by Gamow). Atoms of chemical elements began to form during the first five minutes after the Big Bang, when the temperature reached about one billion degrees Celsius. The relative availability of elements in the universe now is attributed to the product of this process, which is estimated to have lasted for only twenty-five minutes. Steady-state theories, by contrast, assume that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are constantly being “cooked” inside very hot stars.
Thus, the evolutionary origin of matter either occurred in the very distant past or it is a process taking place under certain conditions and conditions at the present time. On the other hand, while stars were considered a symbol of stability and endless time, it has now become certain that stars are subject to evolutionary changes. Moreover, if we at least adopt these theories, the course of these changes is completely predictable. It is expected that the glow of our Sun will become more intense due to an increase in its size linked to a decrease in its surface temperature. At the peak of its expansion, the Sun will reach two hundred to three hundred times its current size. This expansion will be followed by contraction, but not below its current size, accompanied by a significant increase in temperature. At that time, the nuclear “fuel” is approaching exhaustion and energy production eventually stops.
Biological evolution is the intermediate element in the evolutionary triad - cosmic, biological and human. It has been pointed out that the discovery of biological evolution was later than other developments. Darwin was the real discoverer. He was preceded by others who made important contributions, and Lamarck was the most prominent and controversial of them. Identifying and studying these contributions is an interesting thing. However, saying that Darwin only sorted out ideas he borrowed from his predecessors, as some say now, is not true. Darwin's theory has stood the test of time well. Modern theory is, of course, very far from being identical with Darwin's theory, which has passed more than a century, but there is an uninterrupted intellectual continuity between them. The new theory is called “biological” or “synthetic” because it represents an intersection and synthesis of discoveries from almost all of the biological sciences. This is creativity in itself because geneticists, taxonomy, paleontology, embryologists, and others were formulating theories that seemed to them to be consistent with their own subject matter, without giving sufficient consideration to the sciences neighboring them.
The essence of biological theory is quite simple, and will be discussed in a different framework in Chapter VI. We do not need more than brief planning here. The basic hypothesis is that evolution consists mainly of the response of a biological species to the challenges of its environment. Life is generally an improbable state of matter; It is an achievement indicative of ingenuity achieved against all odds and odds of annihilation on the path of slow evolutionary ascent. In order for unfavorable environments to put an end to its existence, life had to maintain its adaptation to the surrounding environments and improve it all the time. Changing environments pose the greatest challenges, because it is very unlikely that the genetic pool formed in response to the challenges of the ancient environment will be coincidentally equally suitable for new environments.
Natural selection is the way organisms respond to challenges from the environment. This is what Darwin clearly envisioned, but the new understanding of natural selection is coming from new biology. Evolutionary variants are variants that arise through genetic mutations. A striking feature of the mutation process is its adaptive ambiguity. Mutations arise regardless of their usefulness or potential to become useful, rather than appearing when necessary and where they are needed. Most mutations are actually harmful. Mutation alone, without controlling natural selection, only leads to deterioration, decay, and extinction.
Natural selection has often been likened to a sieve because it keeps out the few beneficial mutations and lets the many harmful ones pass through. But this analogy is very misleading. It ignores sex and the interaction of genes. Sexual reproduction always creates combinations of genetic variants that originally arose as mutations. This synthesis is much, much more important than simply mixing and remixing independent units; Adaptation often depends not on the mutation itself, but on the genetic pattern in which it exists. A mutation that is beneficial in one genetic combination may be harmful in other combinations.
In order to make the sieve analogy true, we must imagine a “sieve” of an unusual type. This sieve is designed in a way that enables it to filter or retain individual granules, not on the basis of their size alone, but rather by taking into account the characteristics of all the other granules present. What we have in this case is not a sieve, but rather a cybernetic control tool that transmits to the organism “information” about the state of the environment. This tool also makes future evolutionary changes consistent with previous ones. Therefore, the genetic makeup of a living species contains a record of its previous environments and the imprint of its current environment. Therefore, the genetic gift that results is not a “mosaic” of genes, each of which retains its independent influence; Rather, it is an integrated system that does not qualify for survival if its parts are not compatible with each other.
It is very strange that the idea that man and the world in which he lives are the product of evolutionary growth seems shameful to some people, “degrading” them. But in reality, on the contrary, it is a basic condition for humanity in Tillich’s sense (p. 2), because in order for a human being to have realizable potential, he must have the potential for development in the first place. Man, individually and collectively, must be a shifting process, not a fixed state. The universe must have a formation. In the words of Teilhard de Chardin (1964) “We see more clearly with every increase in our knowledge that we are participants, all of us, in the process of formation which culminates in the centering of the universe around man and on which depends in some way our ultimate self-realization – indeed our eternal happiness.”
The question that arises here is: Are cosmic, biological, and human developments separate processes, or are they parts, chapters, or stages of a single cosmic development? Asking this question is another way to raise major questions about how living bodies arise from non-living matter, and how the river of consciousness and self-realization springs and flows from the direct physiological processes of our animal ancestors. The difficulty of these questions is evident from the following statement by a prominent biologist: “What is completely mysterious acquires a mystical dimension for many people, that life arose from inanimate matter, and that the human race began its journey on that path that takes it further and further away from its animal origins (Dubos 1962).” It is important to be careful here of two cases of oversimplification, which are opposite in meaning but equally misleading. The first assumes a complete break in the evolutionary continuity between life and non-life and between humanity and animals. The second ignores the difference between cosmic, biological and human developments, thus escaping the vision of the source of creativity. Using the concept of levels and dimensions of existence, which was developed by Marxist dialectics on the one hand and by the great theologian Paul Tillich on the other hand, is, in my opinion, the ideal solution to this problem.
Quite simply, phenomena at the inorganic, organic, and human levels are subject to different laws specific to those levels. It is not necessary to assume that these laws are not subject to reductive generalization, but it is not useful to describe higher-level phenomena with laws of lower levels. One of the high priests of Soviet Marxism, Present 1963, puts it quite clearly as follows:
(Wherever it arose, human society must have come from the animal world, and it was work, the process of production, that made the human animal a human. In any case, the one who transferred humans from the animal way of life and gave their new life its specificity became the essence of history and its subsequent foundation... The same is true in the world of living nature. The one who transferred the new form of movement of matter from its non-living pre-history is the one who necessarily became the essence of life and its basic basis.)
According to Tillich (1963),
(The organic dimension cannot be achieved unless the inorganic dimension is achieved, and the spiritual dimension remains a latent possibility unless the organic dimension is achieved. All of these potentials have been achieved in man as we know him, but the specific nature of this world is determined by the spiritual and historical dimensions... The organic dimension exists primarily in the inorganic; its actual emergence depends on conditions determined by biology and biochemistry.)
Inorganic, organic and human developments lie in different dimensions or levels of the growing evolutionary universe. To be sure, these dimensions or levels are not completely separate from each other; On the contrary, there are feedback relationships between the living and the non-living and between the human and the animal. However, the different dimensions are distinguished by their different laws and patterns, which it is advisable to understand and examine within the framework to which each of them belongs. The change in the level of organic development is faster than its inorganic counterpart. But inorganic evolution does not stop with the emergence of life; Because organic evolution is compounded on top of inorganic evolution. The biological evolution of the human race is slower than cultural evolution; Biological changes did not stop when culture emerged; Cultural evolution is a composite of its biological and inorganic counterparts. As we mentioned, evolutionary changes in different dimensions are linked to feedback relationships.
The attainment of a new evolutionary dimension is a critical event in evolutionary history, which I propose to call evolutionary transcendence. It is clear that the word “transcendence” is not used here in the sense of transcendent philosophy; To go beyond means to go beyond or to exceed the limits of the capabilities that were used or passable in a system. This is the meaning referred to by Hallowell (1961) when he wrote, “The psychological basis of culture lies not only in the acquisition of very complex forms of learning but also in the acquisition of the ability to go beyond what has been learned, and the possibility of innovation, creation, reorganization, and change.” Erich Fromm (1959) wrote that man is “motivated by the drive to transcend the animal role,” and that he “transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of someone or something greater than himself.”
Cosmic evolution transcended itself when it produced life. Although the physical and chemical processes that take place in living bodies do not differ fundamentally from those that take place in organic nature, the patterns of these processes differ in organic and inorganic nature. Inorganic evolution transcended the limits of previous physical and chemical patterns when it gave rise to life. In the same sense, biological evolution surpassed itself when humans emerged from it. It is clear that there are phenomena and processes ranging from self-awareness to human forms of society and history that exist exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the human level alone. It does not seem necessary to exert ourselves much to ensure that there is great potential available to man.
It is understood that the origin of man and the origin of life are among the most challenging and difficult issues in evolutionary history. It is unwise to give a deceptively simplistic appearance to these exceptionally complex issues. On the other hand, we have learned a lot new about these issues in the past fifty to ten years, which makes a quick overview of these issues useful (for more detailed information see Calvins 1964, Fox 1965, Oparin 1961, Urey 1952, and especially Sullivan's widely read book of 1964). Attempts to discover life outside Earth may not be far from achieving and succeeding. Regardless of one’s assessment of the chances of this success, one must agree with Lederberg (1965) that this project embodies, by all standards, the beginning of a new era: a unique event in the history of the solar system and the human species, and a focus of tremendous dedication and dedication of effort and capabilities.”
The age of life on Earth is estimated to be about two billion years or more. Life arose for the first time in environmental conditions completely different from those that exist now, and these conditions cannot be recreated artificially now except with great difficulty. When the Earth cooled cold enough to condense water vapor and form oceans, the atmosphere formed from gases such as hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, with smaller amounts of nitrogen and a little bulk oxygen. The possible reactions that may occur in such mixtures have been extensively studied in laboratories, indicating the possible formation of formaldehyde, acetic acid, succinic acid, and about ten amino acids. These and other more complex substances are not formed essentially or definitively now except in living organisms. They arose and accumulated in a solution of ocean water completely devoid of life, making it a kind of “soup” of organic compounds. It is as if it were possible for these compounds, according to Ponnamperuma (in Fox 1965), to include purines, adenine, canonicals, ribose sugar, hypoxic ribose sugar, and the nucleoside adenosine. These compounds in particular are particularly important because they are among the components of the two nucleic acids, DNA and RNA.
Haldane (in Fox 1965) described life as “an infinite reproduction of the patterns of macromolecules.” Great ingenuity was expended to model the processes that could lead to the assembly of small molecular components into large molecules that could facilitate self-replication, such as DNA. The best that can be said about these models is that some of the processes they assume could have occurred but did not necessarily actually occur in Earth's evolutionary history. Also, there is no general agreement that self-replication is a necessary and sufficient condition for a chemical system to be considered alive, although there is agreement that it is a necessary condition. The reason for this is as follows: Self-replication does not only mean that a species ingests a certain substance from its environment (food) and turns it into something similar (breeding), but it also means that any changes that may occur in the process of self-replication (mutations), can be reflected over time in the relative frequencies of the patterns that have changed and those that have not changed (natural selection). In other words, the beginning of self-replication gives way to biological evolution. This development can be progressive, although it does not have to be. The development of this system can be stopped due to environmental exhaustion or the occurrence of changes that reduce its efficiency (extinction). It is possible that, if patterns of self-replication appeared repeatedly, most of them would have been lost without leaving any traces behind. What matters is that at least one lineage survived and “inherited the Earth” by becoming the starting point of biological evolution.
Thus, we can imagine an explanation of the evolutionary transcendence that arose at the inorganic level or dimension and was transferred to the organic dimension in scientific language, specifically in biological and biochemical language. But that does not mean that an interpretation in that language has actually been achieved. As Warren Weaver (1964) said, “A person usually considers a statement to have been interpreted if he feels intellectual satisfaction about the subject as a result of that interpretation.” Current accounts of the origin of life do not bring us that much satisfaction, not because of the lack of available information, but because that information contains errors known as small principles. Hence, it is said that at the biological level, the process of natural selection can achieve what is completely impossible to achieve without it. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the human being is composed of atoms and molecules, of transformed “groceries,” and that these transformed grocery stores come together in the development of the individual in exactly the right way to form a human being. It does this because the individual is a link in a chain of generations that begins with the beginning of life, and because natural selection deposits in those generations the necessary instructions for individual development to occur.
If natural selection has achieved this remarkable feat of biological evolution, it is difficult to resist the temptation to resort to it to explain the origin of biological evolution itself. Was there some form of pre-biological natural selection to invent the simplest organisms from chemical compounds that achieved a degree of complexity in the diluted “soup” of the ancient oceans? Oparin, Bernal, and Fox devised a number of clever projects for “the beginning of selection elements” that could have been “the starting point for the emergence of Darwinian selection.” Bate (in Fox 1965) speaks of chemical evolution, “which suggests only total interactions, without a hereditary system or reproduction,” and of heredity as “any process by which information is transmitted from one structure (the father or mother) to a second structure (the recipient of the inheritance) such that it results in a net increase in the physical system of the entire system,” and of evolution as “generation and the gradual reproduction of hereditary information over time.” After redefining the concepts to suit him, Patti concludes that “it is useless to ask when the reproduction of a system becomes reproduction or self-replication, when direct feedback relationships with the environment become natural selection. The difference here is only a degree of difference, and the two cases have developed continuously.” Unfortunately, this circular argument avoids the issue; The difference in degree grows into a difference in kind. The heart of the question of the origin of life is the question of how and when natural selection arose. Natural selection is differential breeding; When two life forms reproduce in different proportions, natural selection plays its role. However, for natural selection to perform its role, there must be reproduction. Reproduction is the key to life.
The question of the origin of life has suddenly become very attractive in these days of space exploration. The belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life and the existence of rational, non-terrestrial beings is an intense romantic fascination. Books have been published, and at least one conference was held to seriously discuss the most effective ways to capture messages that may be directed to us from the inhabitants of cosmic space, and the best ways to attempt to contact them. To refute such an amazing idea is almost a cruel matter that calls for pity and pity. But what are her evidentiary qualifications? Perhaps the most important of these is the confirmation that there are at least about one hundred million planets in the universe whose environments are believed by reliable astronomers to be reasonably similar to terrestrial environments. With the opportunities available to this degree, the least likely event can happen more than once. This argument would be strong if we knew the extent of the possibility or improbability of the event under discussion, but we do not have a sufficient basis for judgment in this regard.
The second argument, which is the assumption that once life appears, its development will be approximately similar to its development on Earth is less dependent than the first. This possibility may not seem unlikely at first glance; Many of the physical structures of current living organisms are adaptations that help solve problems posed by the environment in order to survive. It may seem that natural selection could call for them when they are needed in the same way as it was done on Earth. But this is not necessarily so; In the first place, the adaptive issue may never be resolved, and the species may become extinct; Moreover, and this is crucial, many evolutionary questions may be resolved in more than one way. It does not guarantee that the solutions we know that organisms have used on Earth are the best solutions, or that they are solutions that would be repeated here on Earth if the same conditions were repeated (see for further arguments regarding the possibility of quasi-human life outside Earth, Dobzhansky 1960 and Simpson 1964).
I do not want to be understood as believing that the origin of life includes factors or processes that ceased to be effective on Earth previously or later. The flow of evolutionary events is not always calm and regular; It includes crises and transition points that, in retrospect, seem like breaks in continuity. The origin of life was one of those fundamental crises whose depth and rootedness qualified them to be transcendence. The origin of man was another transcendence. It should not be concluded from this that the origin of life and the origin of man was sudden or very rapid. Events that seem very rapid geologically, or more precisely paleontologically, may appear to be prolonged and slow on the scale of the life of an individual or generation. The emergence of life and man were the decisive transgressions that marked the beginning of new evolutionary epochs. Both events were distinguished by the rootedness and depth of their creativity, but there are many other well-known examples. The migration of terrestrial fish-like vertebrates opened a new world of adaptive radiation in terrestrial environments that had been closed to aquatic organisms. The result of this was what Simpson (1953) called “quantitative evolution,” which brought about a sudden change in the ways of life and in the structure of bodies. The humanization of fire and the discovery of agriculture were serious events that opened new horizons for human development. In a narrower context, the highest realization of an individual human life is self-transcendence.
While the origin of life on Earth is an event in the distant past, man is a newcomer (although his age estimate has nearly doubled as a result of recent discoveries). Indeed, the fossil record is still fragmentary, but it is possible to identify at least the broad outlines of the external aspects of human emergence. At least two species of Australopithecus, a human race (hominid) from the human family, lived in East Central Africa and its southern parts during the Pleistocene era, one to two million years ago. It was the larger of these two species, representing a closed evolutionary alley that later became extinct. As for the second species, which was smaller in size and softer in structure, and its name is Australoithecus africanus, it may have been one of our ancestors.
The structure of the pelvic bones of these two species was strong evidence that they walked upright; Their teeth were much closer to our own than to those of human-like great apes. Although the cranial capacity was large compared to their size, it was within the range of capacity characteristic of great apes. These two types, or one of them, may have made and used primitive stone tools. The remains of a very curious creature have recently been found in the Flavranian deposits of East-Central Africa, and have been given the name. The name indicates the opinion of its discoverers that this creature was transferred from the genus Australopithecus to the genus Homo, to which we also belong. On the other hand, it is very closely related to Australopithecus africanus. In fact, it may have been one of its descendants. It is clear that, regardless of the name it is called, it clearly constitutes one of the “missing links” that is no longer missing.
Later, in the Middle Pleistocene period, several subspecies of the genus Homo erectus lived, which is agreed to be the ancestor of modern humans, Homo sapiens. Remains of Homo erectus have been found in Java, China, Africa, and perhaps Europe as well. During the last snow age, approximately one hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthal man species, which belong to the Homo sapiens species, lived and occupied the area extending from Western Europe to Turkestan, Iraq, and Palestine.
Rough stone tools associated with the remains of the southern organism have been found in both eastern-central and southern Africa. The erect creature found in China is considered the first to use fire, just as the Neanderthals buried their dead, and after that, it is a sign of humanization. All animals die, but man is the only animal that knows this. As we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, burial is a sign of awareness of death and perhaps concern for fate. Perhaps human ancestors began to transcend their animality about one million and seven hundred thousand years ago. We ourselves are still in the process of this transgression. No one diagnosed this process more clearly than Bidney (1953), who wrote: (Man is a self-contemplating animal, because he is the only animal capable of standing apart from himself, and contemplating the kind of being he is, the thing he would like to do, and the state he would like to be. Other animals may be aware of their feeling and of the things they perceive with their senses; but only man is capable of contemplation, self-awareness, and thinking of himself as an object). As Hallowell (1960) says, the major innovation in primate evolution was not simply the development of a cultural adaptation per se, but rather the psychological restructuring that not only made the new mode of existence possible but also provided it with the psychological basis for readaptation and cultural change.
Darwin wrote in 1871 that: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, though great, is certainly a difference of degree and not of kind.” This is roughly the current state of the issue. Estimation of this difference has varied greatly. He is belittled by those who assert that man is nothing but an animal, and magnified by those who place him outside the system of nature. As for the first category, there is no great difference between a fish and a philosopher, and there is nothing that makes the philosopher’s brain’s secretion of ideas a great exception to his liver’s secretion of bile. The anthropologist Leslie White believes that: (Whether a person - the average person representing his group - believes in Christ or Buddha, management or choice, this is not due to his choice. His philosophy is nothing but the response of his nervous-sensory-muscular-innate system to the stream of cultural influences that affect him from the outside.) But the same author says in the same book (White 1949) that because human behavior is symbolic behavior and because the behavior of lower species is not symbolic, it follows therefore that we cannot know anything about human behavior from observations and experiments conducted on lower animals.
Wallace, who co-discovered the role of natural selection in evolution with Darwin, believed that the human mind was infused with unseen forces. Lack (1975), one of the most prominent contemporary evolutionary ecologists, believed the same thing: “The Christian who accepts the principle of man’s evolutionary origin through natural selection must be cautious about man’s spiritual characteristics and the good and evil tendencies in him that did not result from this evolution but are of unseen origin.” Brunner (1952) can be considered an example of the style of thinking of theologians who acknowledge the evolutionary origin of man, but adhere to the uniqueness of the human being, or the element of humanity that distinguishes man from all other creatures: “The human being is characterized by something that other animals completely lack, it expresses itself subjectively in the spirit and objectively in the creation of culture... It is a dimension that does not exist in biology, the law of norms, the ability to perceive meaning, freedom and responsibility” (criticism of Brunner’s ideas in Birch 1957 and 1965).
Lists of the distinctive anatomical, physiological, and psychological characteristics of the human species have often been prepared. Man is an erect animal that walks on two legs. His brain is large when measured in relation to his physical size. His hands are suitable for handling machines, making them, and carrying tools. He is engaged in playing and is able to think abstractly, laugh, compose and use symbols, learn and use symbolic language, learn to distinguish between good and evil, and feel reverence and piety. At least some of these characteristics belong to the humanoid. How did they arise evolutionarily? It is certainly difficult and perhaps impossible for us to reconstruct the exact sequence of events during that critical period of man's emergence from his pre-human ancestors, even if we had more detailed information than we have now. But a general understanding of the main trends in human evolutionary history is no longer impossible, thanks to some comprehensive biological patterns that have shed a ray of light on it recently.
The difference of a species in several characteristics from the ancestor from which it descended does not mean that those characteristics are independent of each other in terms of origin. These characteristics may vary for at least two reasons. They may be multiple effects of a change in the same genetic factor, as in the case of multiple symptoms and deformities associated with a hereditary disease caused by a single gene mutation. These characteristics may also be functionally related. Controversy has arisen among anthropologists as to whether the acquisition of erect stature and manual skill preceded or followed the use and manufacture of machines. A similar issue can be raised regarding the ability to think symbolically, compose symbols, symbolic language, and cultural inheritance. But these issues defy logic in their entirety, if not in all the points they raise. The product grows with the tool and the tool grows with the output. Hands freed by erect posture from the task of walking are better able to develop the dexterity necessary to manipulate machines. But upright stature is no guarantee that the forelimbs will be able to use machines; The giant kangaroo in Australia does not use its front limbs for walking or manipulating machines. In contrast, some monkeys and monkeys have very fluent hands, but they do not walk upright. It is clear that an animal which proceeds to machine processing makes use of the skill acquired by its fore limbs by that processing; The opposite is true, as an animal that develops bipedalism may benefit from using its front limbs for another task. The crux of the matter is that the rapid use of machines confers a selective advantage on the evolution of bipedalism, and vice versa.
Human languages are behavioral forms different from the so-called “language” of animals, although both serve a communicative function. Hockett (1959) and Hockett and Ascher (1964) provided a convincing explanation of this complex issue that many have puzzled over. Animal calls or signals are mutually exclusive, meaning that an animal may respond to a situation with one or another from its repertoire of calls, or it may remain silent. While language is productive, meaning that a person makes utterances that were not previously made by him or by anyone else, and yet they are intelligible to those who speak the same language. People can talk about things that are not within their scope of vision, about the past, the future, and imagined things. This is what is known as displacement. In addition, the language has what is known as the double stereotyping feature. It consists of units or phonemes that do not have meaning on their own, but can be grouped into meaningful phrases. The ability to learn a particular language is biologically inherited; It is the ability to learn a human language, at least in childhood. The chimpanzee cannot do this despite the apparent ability of its larynx to produce all the necessary sounds. This inability is due to the absence of some necessary mental mechanisms. Human languages consist of expressions whose meaning is rooted in social custom. New expressions and changing dialects never fail to appear.
The signals, calls, and “dances” of honeybees are impressively efficient means of communication, but only within the narrow scope of the needs of the particular species in which they are found. It is self-evident that human language is characterized by unlimited fluency when compared to those signs, calls, and dances. This is because human language is symbolic. Cassirer (1944) and others consider man's ability to compose and use symbols to be his most important characteristic. "
Signs and symbols belong to two different worlds of discourse: the sign is part of the natural world of existence; The symbol is part of the world of human meaning. This is what Cassirer wrote, who added:
The principle of symbolism, with its comprehensiveness, sincerity, and generality of application, is the password, Open Sesame, which allows entry into the privacy of the human world, into the world of human culture. Subsequent development became guaranteed once man possessed that magic key.
The ability to compose and live out abstractions and symbols is developmentally, if not physiologically, intertwined with the use of language. Here too the output grows with the tool, and vice versa. These abilities are in turn linked to the ability to make machines. We must note that using machines and making them are two different activities, just as profound as the difference between signs and symbols. Building a machine for future use requires more than just manual dexterity; It requires forming a mental image of a situation that is likely to occur in the future but is not given to the senses. All of these capabilities were linked to feedback relationships in the evolutionary process. This led to the improvement in any of them increasing the adaptive value of all other abilities associated with it, and the improvement of the latter conferring an exceptional selective value on the further development of the former. The primary human species, gradually transitioning from animalism to human ways of life, has reached the point of evolutionary no return as a result of intertwined cybernetic control relationships. The return from evolving humanity to ancestral animalism has become genetically impossible, even if it has become adaptively feasible. In that case, extinction becomes more likely than evolutionary regression.
We need to restore here some evolutionary principles that were mentioned previously in another context. Evolution arises as a result of natural selection in response to the requirements of the environment. Natural selection becomes a utilitarian process; Because it maintains and improves environmental adaptation. He is not some kind of benevolent ghost, he is an automatic machine without sight and insight. It is a hunter of opportunities, meaning that it adapts the organism to the environments available here and now and is unable to take future environmental changes into account. Extinction, as we alluded to, may be the result of this opportunistic and desperate horizon. Adaptation is vulnerable to pushing the species into a closed, one-way alley (see Chapter Six).
There is another consequence of this opportunism that is more applicable to human evolution. The fitness that is selected is not the fitness of individual organs, processes, and capabilities separate from each other, but rather the general fitness of the living organism to survive and reproduce. Because of this, the result is, especially in cases of radical evolutionary reconstruction, a confusing mixture of superiority and weakness. The application of this fact to human evolution is quite clear. In the words of Hockett and Asher (1964):
Language and culture, as we have witnessed, have led to the selection of larger brains. Big brains mean big heads.
Larger heads mean more difficult labor. Even in our current situation, the head is a cause
Major birth difficulties. This difficulty can be overcome by expelling the fetus at an early stage
Stages of development. Premature ejaculation of the fetus has already been selected. But premature ejaculation of the fetus is prolonged
The duration of childhood disability is at the same time a period of maximum plasticity during which the child acquires the heritage of his society
Complex non-biological. Childhood helplessness calls for longer and more careful care, which makes male help
Adults for mothers are essential. Some of the skills that young males must learn can only come from adult males. All of this leads to the feminization of fathers.
The structure of the human psyche discovered by Freud and his followers is considered a bundle of contradictions and dissonances that appear at first glance
As if it were the product of anything but adaptive evolution. However, we must look at this structure not in itself, but in the overall evolutionary framework. In this context, man is not only a successful biological species, but also the most successful species that biological evolution has ever produced. In the words of Hockett and Asher again:
The humanoid creatures became humans once they gained an upright stature and used their hands
To manipulate and make machinery and to carry objects; And when I knew the language. Then the human revolution was completed.
Biological evolution has transcended itself in the human "revolution", in which it has reached a new level and dimension, and in which the brilliance of the human spirit has been taken to shine. Humanum has given birth to the element of humanity.
Finally, it remains to briefly consider the doubts that may arise in connection with this summary of the evolutionary transcendence that leads to man. Those who see the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the humanum and the previous state of humanity doubt even the mere existence of the beginnings from which the humanum could arise in animals. Now, what is missed by those who believe in the gaps that are impossible to cross is that the qualitative novelty of the human condition is the novelty of that pattern and not the novelty of its components. Transcendence does not mean that a new force or energy descended from nowhere; Rather, it means that a new form of unity and harmony has emerged.
In any case, although it is no longer possible to deny the existence of any components of the human form in animals, the entire constellation of these beginnings is certainly not remembered. This issue has recently been studied by conducting many cleverly conceived and accomplished experiments (see Rensch 1960 and Thorpe 1962, 1963). It is possible to demonstrate that birds and mammals can form “abstract non-verbal concepts” such as number, as these experiments indicated. In experiments conducted by Koehler, a bird (crow) learned to choose the plate containing food from among five plates on which colored dots were placed, from two to six dots, in order. After training, the bird was able to pick up the correct plate after the sign containing that number was shown to it, among other signs. Another bird (a parrot) was able to choose the correct dish after it was exposed to the correct number of auditory stimuli on which it had been trained.
The "language" of bee dancing is symbolic, in which the informant bees indicate with their movements on the honeycomb the direction of a source of food. Of course, it does not have any of the characteristics of human languages that were previously discussed. Kohler, Ladgna-Coates and others have demonstrated “insight learning” in chimpanzees. Thorpe wrote:
The sensory perceptions of the mature experimenter, whether in birds or people, are built in a learning process
Perceptual-sensory, in which primary sensory perceptions are composed and built into more complex images (gestalts); And really
There are no fundamental differences that can be distinguished in the rules on which the two processes are based.
True play exists in animals as well as in people, and performs the same function of training young children and preparing them for the activities of mature individuals. The existence of rudiments of “primary-aesthetic” impulses has been shown in apes and monkeys, which can be prompted to engage in decoration with color, with results that may not differ very greatly from the work of some of the avant-garde pioneers. It has been repeatedly reported that there are early signs of cooperative, moral, and even altruistic behavior in some animals, but these cases are of course difficult to prove beyond suspicion (see Thorpe for a critical review of these cases).
There is another difficulty of a more general nature faced by evolutionary explanations of human origins. The occurrence of genetic mutations and natural selection is often attributed to “chance.” Is it possible to believe that humanum originated through the accumulation of a series of coincidences? The French researcher De Cayeux (1958) strongly objects to this:
“Lottery selection is not sufficient. Mutationism is a double failure. The origin of species cannot be attributed to chance alone, even after natural selection corrects it.” Writers such as Joseph, Kartsch, Barzun, and others have presented similar objections with great eloquence. Now, a large number of these objections are based on mere misunderstanding. What is the real meaning of “chance” and “randomness” in evolution? We have already pointed out the fact that genetic mutations are adaptively ambiguous. Nature did not see fit to make desirable genetic mutations arise where and when they are needed. It is very difficult for a geneticist to imagine a reasonable way to achieve this. But even mutations are not random because it is clear that what mutation occurs in a particular gene is determined by the structure of that gene. Then mutations are not evolution; Rather, it is the raw material that natural selection processes to achieve development.
Natural selection is not a coincidence except in the sense that most of the genetic combinations in a population are not absolutely distinct from other genetic combinations, but rather are distinguished from them only relatively (this is despite the superlative “fittest” in the phrase “survival of the fittest”). Natural selection is effective if a genetic combination produces one hundred individuals, compared to ninety-nine produced by carriers of another combination that differs in the presence of a specific mutant gene. Other than that, natural selection is an antidote to chance. It gives adaptive meaning to the relative chaos of infinite combinations of mutant genes. He does this without any will, intent, or insight. The analogy between the act of natural selection and the sieve in the classical literature of genetics is misleading, as we mentioned earlier. The best counterpart to natural selection is a cybernetic control mechanism that conveys to the genetic staff “information” about the state of the environment.
The central point that should be emphasized is that natural selection is a creative process in a very real sense (see Chapter 6 for more). It brings true creations into existence - genetic talents that have never existed before. Moreover, these groups, or some of them at least, are internally consistent and balanced and are suitable for survival in some of the environments it enriches. Writers, poets and naturalists who think to praise the splendor, fertility and exciting creativity of nature rarely realize this. Natural selection is the subject of their duet. But the creative process is inherently exposed to the risks of failure and creative dysfunction. Which in biology means annihilation and extinction, and here creativity seems less secure than relying on mass production from a pre-formed genetic pool. Paleontology is full of evidence indicating that extinction is the natural fate of most evolutionary lines. Some biologists who saw natural selection as a mechanical, soulless process believed in the theory of orthogenesis. It is a theory according to which evolution is merely the unfolding of formed and predetermined forms (see Chapter Six). But this development never creates anything new in the case of prior creation, and extinction becomes either a mystery or nonsense.
The issue of inevitability constitutes another aspect of the problem of creativity and creation, which we also address in Chapter Six, and I will suffice with making some observations here. Atkin (1964) asks why humans are the only organism that has been able to achieve a mode of adaptation through culture: “What is it that the ancestors of man (the primates) possessed to the exclusion of all other animals that gave them the ability to solve their evolutionary distress?” The answer is that the mode of human adaptation was one of several possible options available to our distant ancestors, but the specific pattern followed by any of the primate evolutionary lines was not predetermined. It was an evolutionary creation and not destiny. There are generally two types of explanations for evolution. One type assumes that any and all evolutionary changes that occurred were inevitable. The second type acknowledges that there are several ways to solve adaptation dilemmas to the same environment; He believes that choosing one of them or avoiding any of them is not predetermined. Because of my rejection of this prior assessment, I am inclined to object to the common belief that if life exists in other parts of the universe, it must produce rational beings similar to humans or similar to Superman. I share the opinion of Simpson (1964) and Blum (1965) that this is not only questionable, but so improbable that it would mean rejection of any scientific theory.