There were so many distractions while working on this post, it was hard for me to stay in rhythm. It’s all over the place. Oh well. We'll try to recover the groove tomorrow.
Just as there is no adult human who doesn’t arise out of the mother-infant matrix, so too there is no isolated human being outside a social context. Man is a “community,” both inside and outside his head. If that sounds strange, what is that endless conversation inside your head, and to whom is it addressed?
Which is why it makes no sense to imagine a literal Adam at the root of humanness, since a human without other humans is not and could not be one. The best evidence suggests that modern humans arose some 100,000 years ago “within an interbreeding population that never shrank below approximately 10,000 individuals.”
However, Ramage highlights a point we are always making, that there is a significant lag between the emergence of genetically modern human beings and evidence of their humanness, and there is no scientific, empirical, or logical reason to conflate the two, since the most essential attributes of man did not, and could not have, come about by any material process. The process could be a necessary cause but never a sufficient one.
Obviously we need a brain to think, but this doesn’t mean thinking is reducible to brain activity.
Likewise, to show how little difference raw genetics can make, they say that humans and chimpanzees share something like 98% of the same DNA, nearly as much as that between us and our nearest relativists (i.e., progressives). A little bit goes a long way, but a material process can go on forever and never give what it doesn’t have, in this case, an immaterial soul.
If we look at the same data from the inside, anthropogenesis is obviously a key juncture in cosmic history. It is as consequential as the genesis of the material cosmos itself, because what is a cosmos with no one there to know it? Just more nothing.
Nor is there any reason whatsoever to regard these two as radically separate and unrelated, any more than the budding of a flower is unrelated to the seed. Or, if you say there is no connection, at least provide a better explanation.
Don’t be like David Hume, whose ridiculous philosophy maintained that we couldn’t know about causality, rather, only notice that two events were constantly conjoined. If I hit you in the head with a hammer and you get a headache, best we can do is notice that headaches and blows to the head often occur together.
Which reminds me of drumming. It’s obvious when you think about it, but they say keeping a slow and steady tempo requires more skill than a fast one. For example, if I ask you to tap your finger every second, you can come pretty close to it. But what if I ask you to do it every minute? Every ten minutes? How about once a year? A billion years?
Is there a cosmic rhythm? If so, is there a drummer? According to Steven Wright, the speed of time is one second per second, but according to less serious physicists, time has no speed because it doesn’t move at all. Clocks and drummers only measure space, not time. Okay, what is the shortest space? Last I checked, 10-35 meters, AKA Planck distance.
But there’s more to time than what physics can say. Obviously, physics cannot tell us whether the state of the cosmos at T=0 has an interior relationship to any other time. Like Hume, it can notice that here is a seed and there is a flower, but not any causal connection between them.
There is the time of physics, which is really no time at all, since it is defined out of existence. This is quite different from biological time. You could say that biological time doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but then again, if you have a good time studying physics, physics can never tell you why.
Likewise, maybe you like studying natural selection. I suppose that doesn’t violate natural selection, but then again, what can biology really tell us about the joys of the intellectual or spiritual life?
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