Where evolution meets Christian life

Beeple continues the human trait of artistic exploration - NFT detail

Ruth Schuster is a senior writer on archaeology and science at the Haaretz newspaper in Israel. She had an interesting opening paragraph on a story this week about the news just out that a key set of human-like skull bone fossils is now reckoned to be thousands of years older than first thought. She begins:

When did modern humans begin to evolve? And from who? Once upon a time it was thought that, OK, we began from a monkey but then there was a linear progression to the wonder that is us, starting about 200,000 years ago. It is now abundantly clear that we are mongrels, admixing merrily with other human species until they all died out, and now an early modern human previously found in Ethiopia has been redated with the help of a volcano to 233,000 years ago. 

The previous date for the human ancestor referred to as Omo 1 was 197,000 years ago.

Schuster quotes one of the leaders of the study that produced the new dates as saying:

In my opinion, Omo 1 is the oldest unchallenged fully modern specimen, the oldest Homo sapiens as we morphologically define the species nowadays. This is why this new dates are important. They may not tell us much about how modern humans evolved, but they tell us that before 200,000-230,000 years ago, hominins that are by our current standard recognizable as Homo sapiens, were already present in Eastern Africa.

That leader is Professor Aurélien Mounier, a paleoanthropologist with the Museum of Mankind in Paris. His comment that there was still a lot unknown "about how modern humans evolved" underlines the still rudimentary state of knowledge concerning human prehistory. He goes on to discuss the doubts and debate arising because of  "the complexity of the evolutionary processes which gave birth to our species". 

Dark areas in this reconstruction show the Omo1 fossils found by Richard Leakey in Ethiopia over 50 years ago. The Natural History Museum, London

The main body of Christianity accepts evolution in general and of the human species. Pope John Paul II declared presentation to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996 that evolution is more than a mere hypothesis or theory – it has significant arguments to commend its truth. However, as Pope Pius XII had noted in 1950 in his encyclical Humani Generis, physical evolution is not all there is to the story.

To explore the unique feature of human evolution, I pick up the examination of this issue by Robert Spitzer PhD, an American Jesuit priest who has written extensively on scientific matters.  I like reading his writings because he believes in giving proofs for his statements. In giving a Christian context to the study of human evolution, he states:

A pure physical, organic evolution is only part of the truth of human origins because God has given every human being an individual and unique transphysical soul  – something that is not reducible to physics or to a physical evolutionary process.

[But] there is considerable evidence from all these rational domains [science, medicine, anthropology] to corroborate the existence of our transcendental souls. 

Spitzer provides evidence that, added to the physical element of human evolution, which can leave fossils across the hundreds of thousands of years, is the spiritual element, which he refers to as "transphysical". Therefore, the only thing about evolution Christians cannot accept is "a pure reductionistic physical evolution which precludes the existence of a unique human soul".

At some stage of human evolution God intervened and endowed the human species, through our first parents, a spiritual capability. However, Spitzer points out that the woman geneticists call “Mitochondrial Eve” was probably not the first woman (biblical Eve) having a soul – a non-physical capability – necessary for free choice and moral decisions , and the man geneticists call “Y-Chromosome Adam” was probably not the first man (biblical Adam) having a soul capable of free choice and moral decisions. 

Evidence of the spiritual ability in the human person comes from a scholarly work: 

There is a new book from the foremost linguistic theorist in the country, Noam Chomsky, and an MIT professor of computational linguistics and computer science and engineering named Robert Berwick, entitled, Why Only Us (published by MIT Press in 2016).

Without delving into the complexities of their analysis, I will give their main point – that between 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, human beings developed a capacity for abstract, syntactical, and universal communication that no other species – not even our most proximate ancestors – developed.

First, there is no known or probative biological or genetic explanation for this unique development in human beings, [which provokes] the questions, “What caused it?”, and “Was this cause physical or transphysical?”

Second, it seems that the progeny between mitochondrial Eve/Y chromosome Adam (200,000 years ago) and their progeny who were invested with this abstract and syntactical linguistic ability (70,000 years ago) did not seem to do anything more significant than use stone tools, live in community, and hunt in tandem – and then suddenly, after 130,000 years, an explosion of language, discovery, religion, symbolism, art, and geographical exploration. What happened? And what caused it?

It seems that our genetic ancestors did convey a genetic-biological-physical profile to us, but they did not give everything to us that makes us human.

Something else was added 130,000 years after them (70,000 years ago) that gave rise to the explosion of universal syntactical language, religion, art, mathematics, and the precursors to complex civilization.

I would submit that this “something” is a transcendent soul, and that such a soul is the condition necessary for all of the above powers and characteristics – syntactical language, abstract mathematics, religion, symbolic art, and the free choice and moral awareness necessary for law and civilization.

First, Spitzer looks at what Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick have to say about "the sudden and unique occurrence – explosion – of universal syntactical language".

Thus, very small children can understand the difference between “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” – and even see the humor in it.

But no chimpanzee – which can learn 200 individual signs in American Sign Language – can make this distinction.

They simply do not have the capacity for abstraction (necessary to relate distinct objects to one another in various categories) required to differentiate between subjects (in general) and objects (in general).

Chomsky and Berwick believe that there might be a physical explanation linked to a special genetic switch affecting the brain, but they are far from showing how such a genetic switch or a patterning of brain modalities could give rise to the power of abstraction (necessary for relating objects to one another in various categories).

The ability to distinguish that some things are in a relationship with each other and to apply the questions why, how, how many, what, where, and when show the power of our (spiritual) intellect.

These big general ideas could not have been abstracted from experience or from wiring or patterns in the brain, and this is what has caused philosophers like Bernard Lonergan, or the Nobel Prize winning physiologist, Sir John Eccles, to declare that they must have a transphysical status and origin – a soul.

The universality of the uniquely human capacity to pass the syntax test comes next:

What is remarkable about human beings is that we could take a child from an African culture which has a rather unique way of expressing syntax and grammar, and place him, say, in a Chinese culture which has a totally different way of expressing syntax and grammar, and that child will be able to learn the syntax and grammar of that completely different language almost immediately – as if there were a universal syntax underlying every particular expression of it which young children understand from birth!

No other primate, no matter how sophisticated, has ever crossed the syntax threshold according to the studies of not only Chomsky and Berwick, but also Herbert Terrace and a variety of others.

Along with this capacity for universal syntactical abstraction (and universal abstract language), humans received five other capacities/tendencies as well. The first was the spirit of discovery:

What explains this radical transition from a rather sedentary human community on the border of Namibia and Angola, to world exploration? Was it simply a lack of food? Simply a desire to escape tribal enemies?

Though this may have been part of the reason, it does not explain the rapid and world-wide expansion of the human population even on the oceans to Indonesia and even Australia.

I would submit that there is something more than simple need – there was a “spirit” of curiosity and adventure – something absent in our most proximate ancestors – that engendered the spirit to discover and explore.

Burial of the dead is another feature of this period about 70,000 years ago:

Something else also happened in this period: human beings started burying their dead, treating the remains of their deceased with respect, and burying them with rituals and objects indicating a belief that they would survive their physical death (see, for example, a burial site with these objects from this period in the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel).

If humans did not believe in their spiritual nature or life after death, we might ask, “Why did they bother to bury their dead with great respect – and with rituals and objects?”

And if they did have an awareness of their spiritual nature and life after death, we might ask the further question, “Where did they get this awareness from?”

After all, 130,000 years of ancestors did no such thing – and then suddenly, human beings seem to be doing it as a universal practice.

Did this spiritual awareness – this awareness of something beyond the physical world also come from our transphysical soul?

An additional quality that makes us human is the desire to express ourselves through what we call art, and symbolic representation:

There are cave drawings dating back to at least 35,000 years ago (see Jo Marchant in Smithsonian January 2016) that have been more recently dated at 44,000 years ago (see Ewen Callaway in Nature December 2019) on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

Many scholars believe that the animal drawings have sacred and cultural symbolic significance (see Ghosh, Pallab, “Cave paintings change ideas about the origins of art”). 

We come to numbers, which play a big part in human life:

There is no evidence of abstract numeration in any other species except human beings. Did this originate from our heuristic notion of “how many?” – And can this innate heuristic notion (standing at the foundation of all quantitative relationships) be explained by programming of the brain?

It is quite unlikely. For it is one thing to program a brain (or computer) to count, but quite another thing to understand counting itself and its significance.

It is these abstract concepts that elude mere programming or patterning of the brain. As Gödel's theorem reveals, humans do mathematics very differently from computers.

The latter follow programs while the former invent them. The former have an abstract understanding of numeration itself in all of its permutations, while the latter lack all such understanding.

The development of advanced social norms is also on our list of attributes anthropologists have noticed in our human ancestors from about 70,000 years ago:

Human communities having durable structures, some specialization of labor and commerce, and a sense of social norms began to arise as a result of migrations, differentiated linguistic systems resulting from those migrations, and the ability to barter and exchange on the basis of counting and tallying.

It seems that as migration occurred, some groups stayed behind while others continued to migrate. Those who stayed behind used their linguistic and numeric capacities to specialize labor, and their religious instincts to solidify basic social norms and rules.

Evolution within the physical world is one thing, but as we have seen here, our human experience makes a compelling case that there is more to the human person than the blind outcome of various environmental stimuli.

However, there is harder evidence for God's intervention at a point in the development of human ancestors, a historical point in time that stands alongside the original spark of creation launching the universe on its way, and the overwhelming arrival of God in our midst in Jesus, God uniting with the human as a single person.

But, please, pursue these issues by either going to Robert Spitzer's text, The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason (2016) or the article that gives a fuller  account than what is possible here of what science tells us about how modern humans are uniquely different from the rest of the natural world. Go here for Spitzer's article.

💢 See also: What about similarity to Chimpanzees?

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