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| Homo erectus, female, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History model |
EARLY MAN
The
materials on human evolution presently available on the Internet are scientifically
informative and fascinating. Here is one example on YouTube that I found scientifically
cogent and detailed:
—Chad
Ryan Thomas, University of Southern Indiana, “Anthropology 131: Introduction to
Physical Anthropology, Lecture 09 Homo erectus,” YouTube video, 25:39 minutes, July
7, 2020
I’ve
been tracking human evolution research since college and have witnessed some
dramatic changes in knowledge and interpretation. New, important fossils have
been discovered, including the Denisovans, H.
floresiensis, and Lucy, the famous Australopithecus
afarensis. At this point it is possible to plausibly establish continuity
between early Homo about two million
years ago and the present H. sapiens.
Homo erectus is believed to be the
species that we can begin to describe as behaving in a recognizably human way
with, for example, use of fire, transmittal of sophisticated stone tool
technology, and even care of the elderly. H.
sapiens directly evolved from H.
erectus, which directly evolved from H.
habilis. We probably wouldn’t describe H.
habilis as human. H. habilis is
the transition between Australopithecus and
Homo.
Our
Roman Catholic faith asks us to believe in non-intuitive religious truths.
Monogenesis is authoritatively taught by the Roman Catholic Church. The human
family begotten by Adam and Eve—it has been described as a “theological species”—arose by saltation, that is, an eternal individual human soul was infused by
God into Adam and then into Eve, who are the progenitors of the entire human
family. Science in contrast tells us that Homo
sapiens evolved gradually.
The
Roman Catholic Church should not repeat the mistake of the condemnation of
Galileo, advancing geocentrism as a scientific claim rather than a theological
one. Monogenesis is a theological claim. It is not a scientific claim. Careful
examination will show that monogenesis is not incompatible with evolutionary
science. Both accounts of human development—one theological, the other
biological—can be maintained without direct contradiction.
When
I was in college, I donated a Time-Life book on Early Man to Opus Dei. The book
popularly documented the most current scientific knowledge about human evolution,
today decades-old and which has since been superseded. This book was
burned in the garden at the back of the Opus Dei center.
Photo courtesy of Tim Evanson
ReplyDeletePhoto link:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/timevanson/7283200708
Gonzalinho
The story of Adam and Eve, specifically, monogenism of the human race, does not make sense biologically.
ReplyDeleteA species survives through genetic variation. They don't survive proceeding from a two-person bottleneck with practically zero (relatively speaking) genetic variation.
“Genetic variation describes naturally occurring genetic differences among individuals of the same species. This variation permits flexibility and survival of a population in the face of changing environmental circumstances.
“...inbreeding can lead to a reduction in genetic variation...”
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-genetic-variation-in-a-population-is-6526354/
—“The Genetic Variation in a Population Is Caused by Multiple Factors,” Scitable by Nature Education, 2014
We have to treat monogenism in its current form as a theological doctrine and accept it in Christian faith.
However, monogenism is scientifically insupportable. It requires theological elaboration.
Gonzalinho
DARWINISM IS NOT SOCIAL DARWINISM
ReplyDeleteDarwinism is a scientific explanation for the origin of species, which according to scientific definition is a group of living organisms that are capable of interbreeding among themselves, resulting in the sexual reproduction of members of their own group.
Darwinism’s principal purpose is scientific explanation. It answers the question, “How did the diversity of life arise on the earth?”
Strictly speaking, Darwinism does not concern itself with the origin of life. It does answer the question, “How did living organisms arise from inanimate matter?”
A basic principle of Darwinism is “natural selection.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it this way:
“Some individuals [individual members of a species] will have variations that give them a slight advantage in this struggle [to survive in a particular environment], variations that allow more efficient or better access to resources, greater resistance to disease, greater success at avoiding predation, and so on.
“These individuals will tend to survive better and leave more offspring.
“Offspring tend to inherit the variations of their parents.
“Therefore favorable variations will tend to be passed on more frequently than others and thus be preserved, a tendency Darwin labeled ‘Natural Selection’.
“Over time, especially in a slowly changing environment, this process will cause the character of species to change.
“Given a long enough period of time, the descendant populations of an ancestor species will differ enough both from it and each other to be classified as different species, a process capable of indefinite iteration. There are, in addition, forces that encourage divergence among descendant populations, and the elimination of intermediate varieties.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/
—James Lennox, “Darwinism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 14, 2019
Darwinism’s theory of natural selection explains speciation—the emergence of species, their variation, and their survival over time.
Darwinism is not a theory of human society or social development, even less is it a social or political ideology.
Darwinism is a scientific theory of biology.
To be continued
Gonzalinho
DARWINISM IS NOT SOCIAL DARWINISM
DeleteContinued
Social Darwinism, in contrast, is an ideological extrapolation of Darwinism. Social Darwinism is, if you will, a corruption of Darwinism. Social Darwinism isn’t Darwinism at all but rather a social and political ideology.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica provides a concise account of Social Darwinism.
“Social Darwinism, the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and cultural influence over the weak. Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by ‘survival of the fittest,’ a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer.
“The social Darwinists—notably Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States—believed that the process of natural selection acting on variations in the population would result in the survival of the best competitors and in continuing improvement in the population. Societies were viewed as organisms that evolve in this manner.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-Darwinism
—Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “social Darwinism,” Brittanica, April 19, 2024
The ideological character of social Darwinism is very apparent when it is used to rationalize and justify the ruthless, cold-blooded domination of one social group by another, an ethos which is unchristian and immoral.
Social Darwinism was one of the tenets of Nazi ideology, and we all know where that ended up.
“The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of ‘natural’ inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the ‘unfit’ and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.”
—Ibid.
Darwinism, a legitimate scientific theory of speciation, is categorically not social Darwinism, which is a social and political ideology illegitimately claiming scientific character.
Darwinism and social Darwinism are entirely separable and unambiguously distinct.
Darwinism is not social Darwinism.
To be continued 2
Gonzalinho
DARWINISM IS NOT SOCIAL DARWINISM
DeleteContinued 2
Unfortunately, Father Joseph Iannuzzi confuses the two in his exposition. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW35i00xEI
—Armor of God: Spiritual Warfare, “A Catholic priest shares how St. Jude was the exorcist during a recent exorcism,” YouTube video, 18:56 minutes, March 16, 2024
“…there are cities and countries in the world that have adopted…[Darwin’s] approach to survival of the fittest, which is…a very bloodthirsty ethic.”
“The teaching of Charles Darwin and his disciples…claims that that all living systems struggle to survive and out of this conflict, the strongest emerge. …The stronger survive.”
Darwin doesn’t say that the “strongest” survive, but rather that those better adapted to changes in the environment survive in their offspring.
“Darwin espoused the theory of evolution that has increasingly emerged in many scientific communities as the way to make metaphysics disappear and to explain our existence in sole terms of physics, that is, bereft of all transcendent purpose.”
“Darwin [proposed] the theory that man may have…evolved through time from a cousin, a distant cousin of an ape. …The teaching of Charles Darwin and his disciples…claims that rational creatures, humans, have evolved from a cousin to the ape.”
Father Iannuzzi misinterprets Darwinism as denying the transcendent constitution of the human being.
Darwinism is a theory of evolution of species. Applied to human beings, it is a theory of the evolution of the human organism, materially considered, and the theory is entirely plausible in this respect.
The distinction between rational and irrational [nonrational] creatures is originally Aristotelian. It is philosophy and not, strictly speaking, science. Darwinism does not make this Aristotelian distinction.
Darwinism makes no statement about the existence of a transcendent human soul or about the transcendent purpose of the human being. It makes no statement about the evolution of the human soul, and it does not even consider it.
Darwinism is a scientific theory, so that by definition, it deals only with what is empirical and directly observable. It does not deal with transcendent questions, at least not directly. If it did, it would no longer be science but rather philosophy or possibly even theology.
Unfortunately, Father Iannuzzi misunderstands and misrepresents Darwinism. He advances a straw man argument, which is a rhetorical fallacy.
Gonzalinho
DARWINISM IS SCIENCE, NOT RELIGION
ReplyDeleteDarwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific theory of the origin of species. It is not a theological exposition but rather a scientific argument. Those who condemn Darwinism on religious grounds are recapitulating the same mistake as the Roman Catholic Church when it condemned the heliocentrism that was propounded by Galileo Galilei in the first half of the seventeenth century. Galileo was expounding a scientific claim, not a religious one.
Gonzalinho
THEORY OF EVOLUTION AS AN EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORK
ReplyDeleteWhy don’t penguins exist in the Arctic?
See 10:43:
“Thanks to… geography, the north-south direction penguins need to move in means migrating from polar to sub-polar to temperate to sub-tropical to tropical back to sub-tropical back to temperate back to sub-polar and finally back to polar—each step along the way requiring adaptations to the changing environment. …adapting to literally every single climate zone takes time.”
https://youtu.be/A7cWtICGgHE?si=c57uzg-3TueGlZ-n
—Atlas Pro, “Why There Are NO Penguins in the Arctic | Island Biogeography 2,” YouTube video, 24:43 minutes, September 2, 2021
This YouTube video illustrates well that Darwinism is science, not religion. The video shows how the theory of evolution works powerfully as an explanatory framework—the speaker argues that penguins do not exist in the Arctic because, among other reasons, their populations have to migrate from the Antarctic and evolve across multiple climate zones.
Gonzalinho
SCIENCE AS A WAY OF KNOWING
ReplyDeleteScience is a way of knowing. It proceeds in a specific way. The Roman Catholic Church proceeds differently and is inevitably hostile toward science as a result.
Short illustration
Religion: “There are two biological sexes. God made them male and female.”
Science: “What is biological sex? Are there only two sexes? What are they? Should we accept this assumption as empirical reality? Is it a useful assumption? In what way is it useful? In what sense?”
Gonzalinho