Was there a "magic moment" when truly human beings first appeared?

I think we need to distinguish between capacities, behaviour resulting from the exercise of those capacities, and the evidence that we have for that behaviour. Maybe it is possible that, at some point in the past, God endowed a group of hominids with the capacity to reason, or the capacity to have a relationship with God, and that this immediately produced a vast difference in their internal mental experience and made them full persons made in God’s image. Would this difference in internal mental life immediately have produced the kind of behaviour that would leave archeological evidence? I’m not entirely certain that it would. For example, maybe things like language and the technological and cultural advances enabled by our capacity to reason developed gradually, even though the capacity to reason was bestowed instantaneously. Or for another example, maybe those first image bearers began to pray to God, without engaging in ritual activities that leave any trace until later, and such archeologically-accessible ritual behaviour developed gradually even though the fundamental capacity to relate to God did not undergo any development.

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There are no natural categories. There are only conventional categories and private categories.

That’s my unconventional opinion.

Hi @nwrickert,

There are no natural categories. There are only conventional categories and private categories.

Seriously? The category of “elements” is a purely conventional one? The distinction between the particles in the Standard Model is a conventional one? I can at least understand someone denying the existence of natural biological categories (but see the quote from Jerry Coyne below). However, when it comes to physics and chemistry, the denial of natural categories appears to fly in the face of overwhelming evidence that these categories are mind-independent.

Hi @John_Harshman,

In practice, that’s far from a sharp boundary.

You’re a phylogeneticist, so I’m going to have to accept your statement that the boundary between biological species is not a hard-and-fast one. However, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who is an expert on speciation, has this to say about the biological species concept (BSC) in a recent blog article:

The BSC is not really a definition, but, as I emphasize in my book Speciation written with Allen Orr—an attempt to encapsulate in words the palpable lumpiness in nature that we see before us. And nature, at least in sexually-reproducing species, really is lumpy: it’s not the continuum, or “great interconnected web”, that Taylor sees. In Chapter 1 of Speciation , I give three lines of evidence for the reality of species: they aren’t just artificial constructs, or subjective human divisions of a continuum, but real entities in nature. Yes, there is some blurring in both sexual and asexual organisms, but by and large species exist as “lumps” in the pudding of Nature. If this were not so, biologists would be wasting their time studying species, and field guides would be of no use. There is no blurring, for instance, between our species, chimpanzees, and orangutans, nor between starlings, hawks, and robins on my campus. And so it goes for most of nature. Some hybrids may be formed between species, but they are often sterile or inviable, and so don’t blur the boundaries between groups.

Would you agree with this assessment?

Finally, I accept your observation that many human capacities don’t leave preservable evidence behind, but those that do include some fairly major ones (ethics, language, art, religion), and they appear to support gradualism.

Hi @structureoftruth,

Maybe it is possible that, at some point in the past, God endowed a group of hominids with the capacity to reason, or the capacity to have a relationship with God, and that this immediately produced a vast difference in their internal mental experience and made them full persons made in God’s image. Would this difference in internal mental life immediately have produced the kind of behaviour that would leave archeological evidence? I’m not entirely certain that it would… Or for another example, maybe those first image bearers began to pray to God, without engaging in ritual activities that leave any trace until later, and such archeologically-accessible ritual behaviour developed gradually even though the fundamental capacity to relate to God did not undergo any development.

Well, I’ll certainly grant that you might be right. But the notion that our ancestors were praying (and presumably believing in an after-life as well) for some 400,000 years, without even once performing a ritual burial for dead family members, is pretty mind-boggling.

For example, maybe things like language and the technological and cultural advances enabled by our capacity to reason developed gradually, even though the capacity to reason was bestowed instantaneously.

If we look around the world today, we don’t find any primitive languages, even in technologically backward societies. All languages are roughly equal, in terms of their complexity. But we have good scientific evidence that human language didn’t appear overnight: it evolved gradually. You suggest that our human capacity to reason may have been fully developed, even at a time when human language was still evolving, but it is hard to see how advanced reasoning would be possible without a well-developed language. The two seem to be inter-twined.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that while the archaeological evidence can (with difficulty) be reconciled with Christianity, it certainly doesn’t point that way. The gradualistic pattern we find in the archaeological record, even when it comes to language, art, ethics and religion, is the very last thing that Christian theologians a few decades ago would have predicted. And the fact that they all emerge at different times is even stranger.

In the main. But you must realize that I work on ducks, in which hybridization between species is much more common than in Jerry’s chosen taxon, Drosophila. There are many groups in which the species, though clear enough in the main, have a lesser degree of isolation than Jerry prefers. He makes a distinction between “species” and “good species”, the latter being the ones that form no fertile hybrids. There are huge numbers of species that don’t match the “good” criterion. Haldane’s rule, for example, relies on that.

I don’t think any of those other than art leaves significant evidence behind. Language ability (though not language) might leave genetic evidence if we can match genetics to phenotype adequately.

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You are echoing Quine’s metaphysical desert.

20 posts were split to a new topic: Are there “natural kinds”?

Good ol’ vjtorley and his walls of text. I must say he taught me how to skim pretty well back when he posted regularly at UD.

So, I realize that Catholic hylomorphism might be a problem here, but supposing substance dualism and God at some point in history gives the first human at a mostly arbitrary point in physical development, but still meeting the minimum requirements, endows him with a spirit. Might that not be the first man and might that not have essentially nothing to do with your wall of text?

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That is exactly what @jongarvey might say @BenKissling.

The problem with that is figuring out what affect having a spirit would have. Apparently none that’s noticeable by other people, including those with and without.

Or a special calling. But vocation isn’t visible in anatomy so that hardly a knock against it.

Is it having a spirit that produces a special calling and lacking one that prevents it? Otherwise, you’ve changed the subject.

Hi @swamidass, @BenKissling and @John_Harshman,

In response to the suggestion that what makes us truly human is the vocation we have from God, I reply: having a vocation from God presupposes the ability to understand what God wants of us (which means having a language), as well as the ability to recognize that there is a God (which means having the concept of an Agent Who cannot be perceived by the senses and Who transcends the cosmos). And scientists tell us that neither of these abilities emerged overnight. Moreover, the “vocational account” would imply that if there were two prehistoric hominins, both possessing identical abilities and both able to hear God’s voice, and if God decided to give a special calling to one while ignoring the other, the latter would never acquire human status. Such a view seems arbitrary in the extreme.

As for the suggestion that our spirit is what makes us human, I reply: fine, but what special abilities do spirits have? That’s the $64,000 question that needs to be answered. Cheers.

Do scientists tell us about either of them at all? There’s weak evidence that’s been claimed to be relevant to linguistic ability, but there’s nothing at all, as far as i know, about being able to have the concept of an Agent Who etc.

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Spirits have the ability to make free choices. Physical systems do not.

Ewww. I take back everything I said. I remember that dude from UD too. He must be pushing God’s limit for human lifespan by now.

How would that be detectable by other people? Is there a way to distinguish a person capable of free choice from a person who isn’t?

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@jongarvey is a great guy. You must be thinking of someone else.

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Actually, having a vocation of God implies being called by God and given a vocation.
That has to happen in an individual’s lifetime… Happens nowadays also. Someone is called to be a pastor…

And others are not.

Second point is that, having a vocation presupposes a knowledge of God (not just an ability to know God).

An ability or potential is not necessarily an actuality.

Sounds a bit like consciousness to me.

The bible Identifies Adam/Human beings as having language, and involved in worship.

I see that happened 70,000 years ago or so according to you. You peg symbolic behaviour “in the narrow sense” at about 130,000 years ago…
It seems obvious that something significant happened about 100kya.