I haven’t read the book, but assuming that it is based on the same sort of thinking that is to be found in your essay “MUST HUMAN EVOLUTION CONTRADICT GENESIS?”, then, although I applaud your attempt to reconcile Holy Scripture with what we know scientifically, I have to say that much of your speculation is commonplace. Moreover it is inconsistent with what we know from the study of the human genome
There are many points that we can agree on. However, there are several places where I think you fall short of making your case. Let’s look at three different sorts of error in your thinking.
First of all, you propose the emergence of the Acheulean culture as the point at which what you call humans with intellective souls emerge. You base this conclusion almost entirely on the symmetry and aesthetics of the Acheulean tool. To quote you directly: “They are perfected on all sides, requiring the maker to conceive the geometrical properties on the unseen side that he seeks to perfect on his “working” side. This requires an intellective grasp of geometry and proportion exceeding mere sensible imagination. These half-million-year-old hand axes appear to offer the first unequivocal evidence of genuine intellective activity, indicating the presence of true man with a spiritual intellective soul. Could this then be the population in which Adam appears?” So you speculate, based only on a technology that hardly changed for 700,000 years, that this represented the emergence of modern cognition. No evidence of art, decoration, invention, progress, language or abstraction - merely the beautiful symmetry of a tool. On that basis, a wasp’s nest is evidence of the intellective soul of wasps, and a more powerful example, because not only is it as symmetrical and beautiful as an Acheulean axe, but it is the product of a cooperative society, not just an individual.
Second, with regard to the possibility that humans descend from a single couple, whom we call Adam and Eve, whether or not they are indistinguishable from what you call sub-human primates, you speculate that once God had ensouled Adam and Eve, their descendants did not interbreed with “non-human primates” - which is the equivalent of a bottleneck of two in the lineage leading to the extant human population. That notion is completely excluded by studies of the human genome. Variation within the extant human population is not consistent with the idea that the lineage leading to modern humans passed through a severe bottleneck in the time since the divergence of the human and chimpanzee lineages. There was no literal Adam and Eve - either 6,000 years ago or 500,000 years ago.
Third, you claim that possessing human cognition is a binary quality - an individual either has it or he/she doesn’t. On that basis you claim that becoming human had to occur at a single point and time without intermediate stages. But you have no warrant for these claims. There is no reason at all why human congnition should not arise piecemeal (ie some elements in advance of others - in fact, the evidence is that this just how it happened) and gradually (ie, with non-discontinuous development of human faculties). We know, from observing modern humans that their possession of human abilities lies on a continuum - there is nothing binary about human abilities - we range from idiots to geniuses. This is not to deny the fact that there is a substantial gap between the cognitive abilities of most humans and that of other animals - however, that does not mean that human cognition must have developed instantaneously, or that it arises from anything other than natural causes.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
