On Tue, 08 Jul 1997 20:59:22 -0500, Glenn Morton wrote:
GM>At 11:33 PM 7/7/97 -0400, Rick Becker wrote:
RB>There is evidently a new book out on this cousin of the chimp.
>They are matriarcial and have a _very_ interesting social structure,
>and have displayed empathy and intricate negotiation skills. I just
>caught a flash of it on NPR this morning, and recollect seeing
>something similar-sounding on one of the cable channels sometime
>last year, but didn't catch the name of the critters. Such humanoid
>behaviors, but without the quality of Sin about it all.
>Metaphysically fascinating thought to ponder?
GM>Bonobos are a relatively newly recognized form of chimp. They
>have only been known for about 10-15 years if I am not mistaken.
>They are very sexually promiscuous and have, as you note, lots of
>humanoid behaviors.
Diamond says the have been known since 1929:
"At the opposite extreme but equally unsurprising, the most similar
DNAs are those of common chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees, which are
99.3% identical and differ by only 0.7%. So similar are these two
chimp species in appearance that it was not until 1929 that
anatomists even bothered to give them separate names. Chimps living
on the equator in central Zaire rate the name 'pygmy chimps' because
they are on average slightly smaller (and have more slender builds
and longer legs) than the widespread 'common chimps' ranging across
Africa just north of the equator." (Diamond J., "The Rise and Fall
of the Third Chimpanzee", 1992, p18).
They do indeed have what might be called "humanoid behaviors":
"Unlike common chimps but like ourselves, pygmy chimps assume a wide
variety of positions for copulation, including face-to-face;
copulation can be initiated by either sex, not just by the male;
females are sexually receptive for much of the month, not just for a
briefer period in mid-month- and there are strong bonds among females
or between males and females, not just among males." (Diamond J.,
"The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee", 1992, p18).
Diamond, as a good scientific materialist (as the title "Third
Chimpanzee" indicates), regards in one sense an animal, but in
another sense as not an animal, because of our unique qualities:
"It is obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It is also
obvious that we are a species of big mammal, down to the minutest
details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the
most fascinating feature of the human species. It is familiar, but
we still have difficulty grasping, how it came to be and what it
means. On the one hand, between ourselves and all other species lies
a seemingly unbridgeable gulf that we acknowledge by defining a
category called 'animals'. It implies that we consider centipedes,
chimpanzees, and clams to share decisive features with each other but
not with us, and to lack features restricted to us. Among these
characteristics unique to us are the abilities to talk, write, and
build complex machines. We depend completely on tools, not just on
our bare hands, to make a living. Most of us wear clothes and enjoy
art, and many of us believe in a religion. We are distributed over
the whole Earth, command much of its energy and production, and are
beginning to expand into the ocean depths and into space. We are
also unique in darker attributes, including genocide, delight in
torture, addictions to toxic drugs, and extermination of other
species by the thousands. While a few animal species have one or two
of these attributes in rudimentary form (like tool use), we still far
eclipse animals even in those respects. Thus, for practical and
legal purposes, humans are not animals." (Diamond J., "The Rise and
Fall of the Third Chimpanzee", Vintage: London, 1992, p1)
But before you jump in with your usual "Homo erectus could use tools
and therefore he was human" routine, remember that Jared is a
*materialist*. He does not even consider (indeed he *cannot*
consider -- 1Cor 2:14) the possibility that what makes Homo sapiens
really unique from animals and hominids is something not material,
something that does not fossilize, namely an indwelling spirit:
"...if a man is nothing but a Natural organism...all thoughts would
be equally nonsensical, for all would have irrational causes. Man
must therefore be a composite being-a natural organism tenanted by,
or in, a state of symbiosis with, a supernatural spirit." (Lewis
C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study", 1963, p130)
Diamond writes in materialist puzzlement at what he calls "The Great
Leap Forward". He asks:
"What happened at that magic moment in evolution around 40,000 years
ago, when we suddenly became human? As we saw in Chapter One, our
lineage diverged from that of apes millions of years ago. For most
of the time since then, we have remained little more than glorified
chimpanzees in the ways we have made our living. As recently as
40,000 years ago, Western Europe was still occupied by Neanderthals,
primitive beings for whom art and progress scarcely existed. Then
there was an abrupt change, as anatomically modern people appeared in
Europe, bringing with them art, musical instruments, lamps, trade,
and progress. Within a short time, the Neanderthals were gone. That
Great Leap Forward in Europe was probably the result of a similar
leap that had occurred over the course of the preceding few tens of
thousands of years in the Near East and Africa. Even a few dozen
millenia, though, is a trivial fraction (less than one per cent) of
our millions of years of history separate from that of the apes.
Insofar as there was any single point in time when we could be said
to have become human, it was at the time of that leap. Only a few
more dozen millenia were needed for us to domesticate animals,
develop agriculture and metallurgy, and invent writing. It was then
but a short further step to those monuments of civilization that
distinguish humans from animals across what used to seem an
unbridgeable gulf- monuments such as the 'Mona Lisa' and the Eroica
Symphony, the Eiffel Tower and Sputnik, Dachau's ovens and the
bombing of Dresden." (Diamond J., "The Rise and Fall of the Third
Chimpanzee", 1992, p27)
Interestingly Tattersal uses the same term "great leap forward" as
Diamond and refers to "something very...different. Something
extraordinary" that "happened with the birth of our species":
"Given the general pattern of changelessness that characterizes the
bulk of the Paleolithic archaeological record, then, it is hard not
to conclude that there was but one truly great leap (forward?) in
human evolution: the one that gave rise to our own species, Homo
sapiens. If you'd been around at any earlier stage of human
evolution, with some knowledge of the past, you might have been able
to predict with reasonable accuracy what might be coming up next.
Homo sapiens, however, is emphatically not an organism that does what
its predecessors did, only a little better; it's something very-and
potentially very dangerously-different. Something extraordinary, if
totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species. And
although the human biological past stretches back over five million
poorly known years or more, it is the nature of that very recent yet
still obscure happening that poses the true enigma of human
evolution." (Tattersall I., "The Fossil Trail", 1995, p246)
Elsewhere Diamond says that his "best guess" was that "the leap was
riggered by the perfection of our modern capacity for language":
"Whatever caused the leap it must have involved only a tiny fraction
of our genes, because we still differ from chimps in only 1.6% of our
genes, and most of that difference had already developed long before
our leap in behaviour. The best guess I can make is that the leap
was triggered by the perfection of our modern capacity for language."
(Diamond J., "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee", Vintage:
London, 1992, p328)
Diamond doesn't say what caused that sudden "perfection" in Homo
sapiens "capacity for language". Mithen has referred to a "redesign"
or "rewiring" of the brain:
"But many see the idea that Neanderthals decorated the Chauvet cave
as far-fetched. Steven Mithen, a lecturer in archaeology at the
University of Reading, rejects the possibility outright. "They were
physically but not mentally capable," he says. The Chauvet cave, he
adds, is testimony that modern humans, with their more highly evolved
brains, were capable of the type of symbolic thought and
sophisticated visual representation that was beyond Neanderthals.
Mithen believes that the brains of Neanderthals were divided into
distinct, isolated cognitive domains. He calls this "domain-specific
intelligence". Neanderthals had language and social skills, he says,
and they could produce things like stone tools and infer meaning
about the migration of animals from hoof prints. But structural
limitations in their brains meant that they were unable to bring
these elements together as an artistic representation. "The
Neanderthal mind was like a Romanesque cathedral with different
chapels of intelligence and thick walls in between," he says. "The
modern mind is more like a Gothic cathedral with sound and light
flowing freely." Mithen believes modern humans emerged after a final
redesign of the brain, resulting in a "big bang" of cultural advances
that started 40,000 years ago in Europe with the production of
objects such as beads, pendants, statuettes, paintings and
engravings. Rock art appears to have been most prolific in Europe,
after this cultural big bang, but Mithen and others point out that
some wall engravings in Australia may date back around 40,000 years
and painted slabs found in southern Africa date to about 27 500 years
ago....Other prehistorians are more sceptical of Mithen's proposal
that rewiring in the brain allowed humans to begin decorating walls
and making beads. Conkey believes something else about the way
people were living provided the catalyst which led to image making.
She doesn't deny that the brains of Neanderthals and early humans
were different, but says the rewiring theory fails to explain why
visual representations were absent in the Middle East for so long,
even though modern humans appeared there as early as 90,000 years
ago." (Patel T., "Stone Age Picassos", New Scientist, 13 July 1996,
p34)
I take this to be the nearest materialist equivalent to the the advent of
the indwelling of a real, though non-material spirit, in a being who
had been physically prepared for it over billions of years. I am coming
to the view that the stories in Genesis 1-6 are an accurate (though
partly synbolic) record of this real space-time series of events,
between 100-50 kya, when man was finally finished (after a billion-
year process) in the image of God, enjoyed communtion with God,
was granted freedom to chose to obey God, but chose to disobey and
go his own way.
God bless.
Steve
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