10/4/25

Adam and Eve and Original Sin: The Subject Matters (Part 2 of 2)

AEOS 0011 Yes, there is more.

Here is another online course on the same subject matter. All parts appear in Razie Mah’s blogs. Click on the month, then scroll downwards.

0012 These are sample courses. So, one may pick and choose points and reviews as one pleases.

Plus, there are lots of pictures. Pictures can be interesting and informative.

How so?

For the most part, the pictures are diagrams of purely relational structures.

0013 What am I selling?

Three online courses that cover the topic of human evolution. All are offered by Razie Mah. All are available at smashwords and other e-book venues. Merely purchase the e-books, print the pdf or read on a tablet. Each point can be discussed. The texts are designed to read and discuss.

A Course on the Human Niche contains the masterwork, plus four commentaries. This course introduces the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

A Course on An Archaeology of the Fall, contains the masterwork, plus outside reading (Paul’s letter to the Romans and Sura 5). An instructor’s guide is available. This course pertains to the hypothesis of the first singularity.

A Course in How To Define the Word “Religion” contains the masterwork, plus 10 primers. This course concerns our current Lebenswelt, which is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. A “how-to” instruction appears in Razie Mah’s blog in December 2022.

0014 With that said, here is the second online course on this topic.

One: Looking at William Lane Craig’s Book (2021) “In Quest of the Historical Adam”

(September 31-1, 2022, 21 blogs, 120 points)

Two: Looking at John Walton’s Book (2015) “The Lost World of Adam and Eve”

(August 30-1, 2022, 22 blogs, 192 points)

Three: Looking at Andrew Kulokovsky’s Overview (2005) “The Bible and Hermeneutics”

(May 27-16, 2022, 10 blogs, 85 points)

Four: Looking at Carol Hill’s Article (2021) “Original Sin with Respect to Science”

(February 25-7, 2022, 15 blogs, 72 points)

Five: Looking at Roy Clouser’s Article (2021) “… Support of Carol Hill’s Reading…”

(March 8-1, 2022, 6 blogs, 34 points)

Six: Looking at Mark S. Smith’s Book (2019) “The Genesis of Good and Evil”

(January 31-13, 2022, 16 blogs, 100 points)

0015 Total: 90 blogs, 603 points, 10 hours at 1 minute per point.

Maybe, this online course lasts around 2 weeks.

Enjoy this sample and consider purchasing Razie Mah’s online courses.

10/3/25

The Evolution of Talk: A Note on How to Proceed (Part 1 of 1)

EOT 0001 The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.

Language evolves in the milieu of hand-talk.

So, what is the story?

0002 A course on the topic of human evolution is already on the market.

See Razie Mah’s, A Course on the Human Niche, consisting of the masterwork, plus four commentaries.

The Human Niche

Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big

Comments on Derek Bickerton’s Book (2014) More Than Nature Needs

Comments on Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s Book (2016) Why Only Us?

Comments on Steven Mithen’s Book (1996) The Prehistory of Mind.

0003 The works are available for purchase at various e-book venues. In order to conduct the course, purchase the e-book to read on a tablet (or as a PDF to print). The class is not didactic. It is Socratic. The style is read and discuss. The text is broken into points. Each point can be discussed. So, a leisurely class may open the text, read out loud and ask what the point suggests.

0004 The masterwork came out in 2018 and is still highly relevant to inquiry into the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

How so?

The human niche is the potential of triadic relations.

No other course on human evolution poses this ground-breaking hypothesis.

0005 Nonetheless, six years later, Razie Mah adds to the first course with a second, consisting in two sequences of blogs. This blog-inclusive (as well as e-book exclusive) course serves as a supplement to the master course, especially in regards to the evolution of talk.

0006 The first sequence is collated and rounded out in a compilation, titled, Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019), making the blogs and the compilation ideal for a guided- and home-schooling course.

Michael Tomasello worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology for twenty years. He wrote a series of books on the evolution of human cognition, communication, thinking, morality and so on. In short, his books cover the evolution of the stuff of talk.

0007 Here is a list of the five commentaries in this first sequence.

One: Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (1999) “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”

(January 18-31, 2024, 12 blogs, 0-82 points)

Two: Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2008) “Origins of Human Communication”

(January 17-4, 2024, 12 blogs, 83-186 points)

Three: Looking at Michael Thomasello’s Book (2014) “A Natural History of Human Thinking”

(February 29-5, 2024, 22 blogs, 187-388 points, completes Part 1 of Comments, see below)

Four: Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2016) “A Natural History of Human Morality”

(March 26-1, 2024, 22 blogs, 389-600 points)

Five: Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Book (2019) “Becoming Human”

(points 601-793 are in Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) Part 2, by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues)

0008 Yes, to complete the course, one needs to purchase Part 2.

How sneaky is that?

So, that is the meaning of “blog-inclusive and e-book exclusive”.

0009 The second sequence is collated in the compilation, titled, Synaesthesia and The Bicameral Mind in Human Evolution. This compilation packages two commentaries on human evolution and sets the scene for a study of the first singularity.

This list continues the previous numbering.

Six: Looking at Steven Mithen’s Book (2024) “The Language Puzzle”

(September 29-4, 2025, 23 blogs, 0-235 points)

Seven: A First Look at Julian Jaynes’s Book (1976) “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

(October 31-8, 2025, 21 blogs, 235-525 points)

0010 Overall, this hybrid online-onsale course on the evolution of talk, by Razie Mah, are available for sampling (on the blog) and may be purchased at any e-book venue.

Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019), Parts 1 and 2 contains 753 points.

Synaesthesia and the Bicameral Mind in Human Evolution contains 525 points.

0011 Total: 1278 points, 21 hours at 1 minute per point.

Perhaps, this online course lasts around 4 to 5 weeks.

Enjoy this sample and consider purchasing other Razie Mah’s online courses, especially the one on the human niche.

09/30/25

Looking at Steven Mithen’s Book (2024) “The Language Puzzle” (Part 1 of 23)

0001 The full title of the book before me is The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together The Six-Million-Year Story Of How Words Evolved (2024, Basic Books, New York). Dr. Mithen is a Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. He has published before. More on that later.

The book works on the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle. Fourteen chapters present the pieces. The introduction and conclusion stage and arrange them.

0002 This current metaphor is very different than a glorious historical metaphor used in a book published almost three decades earlier. The Prehistory of The Mind (1996) offers the historical development of the architecture of cathedrals in Europe as a lens for considering cognitive evolution. The metaphor works well because the nave associates to general intelligence and side chapels associate to specialized mental modules.

0003 From the genetic divergence from chimpanzees to the start of bipedalism, the simple nave of general intelligenceadapts to cognitive challenges.

From the appearance of bipedalism to the domestication of fire, specialized modules are added to general intelligence, but the two do not integrate. Indeed, both specialized modules and general intelligence are supported by their own, thick, walls. The metaphor is the Romanesque cathedral.

From the domestication of fire until the first singularity (think, “the potentiation of civilization”), general intelligence integrates with specialized modules, presumably due to talk becoming fully linguistic. Language becomes the walls, supported by flying buttresses of automatic decoding. The metaphor is the Gothic cathedral.

0004 Here is a picture.

0005 The metaphor is so wonderful that Razie Mah publishes the e-book, Comments on Steven Mithen’s Book (1996) The Prehistory of The Mind as one of the readers that accompanies the masterwork, The Human Niche, in the series A Course On The Human Niche (available at smashwords and other e-book venues).

0006 Mithen’s approach is also echoed in the work of another evolutionary anthropologist, Michael Tomasello, working at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, as discussed in Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) (by Razie Mah, also see blogs for January through March, 2024).

0007 Mithen’s approach is also reflected in another review that belongs to the series, A Course On The Human Niche. The title is Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big. In this review, social circles turn out to be very important in hominin evolution. Mammalian brain size roughly correlates to group size. So, the larger the hominin brain grows, the larger the group.

Not surprisingly, Mithen’s metaphor indicates the social circle under the most intense selection pressure, irrespective of group size.

0008 What does this imply?

Obviously, group size is not the crucial factor in hominin evolution.

Whatever is increasing hominin brain size is.

0006 To me, it is not surprising that Mithen has not encountered Razie Mah’s review of his 1996 work, even though it is one of the few more-than-surface reflections on The Prehistory of The Mind available.

Perhaps, the same will go for this blog, which will take Mithen’s metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle quite literally.

09/4/25

Looking at Steven Mithen’s Book (2024) “The Language Puzzle” (Part 23 of 23)

0229 So, what is The Language Puzzle about, in an implicit sort of way?

It is about how speech gets added to hand talk after the domestication of fire.

The irony of the work is found in Mithen’s explicit denial of the gestural origins of language, while…

… at the same time, the author provides a solution to a question that he cannot even pose.

0230 Examinations don’t get better than this.

This examination adds value to Mithen’s work in a surprising fashion.

0231 This examination suggests that a tremendous amount of theoretical reformulation needs to be done. In particular, the following juxtaposition of events is suggestive.

0232 I ask, “Does Homo sapien’s encounter, love affair, then divorce from the Neanderthals create a condition where speech becomes more and more independent as a mode of talking? Does speech become capable of operating linguistically, independent of hand talk, yet remain integrated into the natural-sign references of hand-talk?”

0233 Take a look at the artifact of the lion-man, pictured in figure 3 on page 28 of Mithen’s text.

Maybe, we can ask him.

Do you think that he has something to say to us?

Surely, he cannot perform hand-talk.

So, the lion-man must speak for itself.

0233 Yes, it’s like synaesthesia gone wild.

0234 But, “wild” is not even close to this last implication, which tells me that our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

What about the item in red?

See Razie Mah’s e-books, The First Singularity and It’s Fairy Tale Trace (for a technical proposal) and An Archaeology of the Fall (for a dramatic rendering), available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0235 With that said, I thank Steven Mithen for publishing a book that can be fruitfully read both explicitly and implicitly.

Also, the story does not end here, because this examination plays a prominent role in the next commentary, Looking at Julian Jaynes’s Book (1976) “The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

07/31/25

Looking at Hugh Ross’s Book (2023) “Rescuing Inerrancy” (Part 1 of 25)

0001 The full title of the book before me is Rescuing Inerrancy: A Scientific Defense (2023, Reasons To Believe Press, Covina California). The author, Hugh Ross, is an excellent writer and a Christian scientist. The qualifier is crucial here, because biblical inerrancy is mysteriously conjunct the modern construct of scientific inerrancy. “Conjunct” means “stuck with”.

0002 The book has both a greek and a semitic architecture. As noted in The Instructor’s Guide to An Archaeology of the Fall (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues), the two literary styles represent different types of recognition.

The greek argument presents a variety of opinions, weeds out the inadequate ones, then proclaims the one left standing, the winner. One might call it “linear thinking”. The greek style dominates the second half of the book (chapters 12 through 20), concluding with the proposal of a “model approach”.

The semitic style presents various rhetorical tricks, aiming to induce the reader to recognize a possibility. Am I saying that the Bible is full of rhetorical tricks? I suggest the reader look at the appendix of Ross’s book on that one. Or, consider the Genesis use of the word, “day”, in the Creation Story. The word leads to a flight of fancy, so to speak, asking the reader to recognize that the reported events are themselves, a flight of… what?… not of fancies, but of revelations… or significations… that become more and more esoteric (or hidden) even as they appear more and more exoteric (or obvious).

0003 What about Adam and Eve, fashioned from dust and rib, respectively?

Oh, they end up getting fooled by a talking snake.

0004 Christians are fine following the exoteric lessons and scratching their heads about some of the esoteric implications.

The problem is that Christians are stuck with the sciences. Conjunct! Science is all about truncated material and efficient causalities. Truncated? Scientific causalities are shorn of formal and final causation. Formal and final causes are metaphysical (a step beyond physics) because they concern triadic relations. It is like being able to account for all the motions (the truncated material and efficient causes) of a mechanical clock without acknowledging that the clock has a design (formal cause) and purpose (final cause)

And, the purpose has ‘something’ to do with us!

0005 The positivist intellect has a rule. Metaphysics is not allowed.

So Christians are conjunct with a positivist intellect who has no idea that the purpose of the Genesis text may have something to do with us, right now, not as we once were at some time in the not-so-distant past. The positivist intellect cannot consider that the first chapter of Genesis may be like a clock or whatever mechanical analogy one wants to use. Is it a story designed to set the “time”? The time of what?

Truncated material and efficient causalities cannot ideate what Christians observe (and sort of… measure, in the sense of “weighing”) in Scripture. Christians struggle to discern what the early chapters of Genesis could possibly reveal. Plus, those possibilities are not obvious at all. Even a plain reading of these stories tells the inquirer, “A plain reading of this text is not enough.”

0006 The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, published in 1982, says as much. Ross lists the relevant articles in chapter three.

For example, in article eighteen, the convening theologians confirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatical and historical exegesis, so that Scripture is used to interpret Scripture. Then, they reject the legitimacy of various modern quests, including postulating extra-Biblical civilizational sources, relativizing the text by comparing it to evolutionary science, demonstrating that the accounts are not “historical” in the modern sense of the word, and rejecting the Bible’s claims to authorship.

Here is a picture.

0007 I ask, “Are these theologians affirming that Genesis 1-11 confronts the reader with the possibility of ‘something’, and that ‘something’ is not obvious from a plain reading of the text?”

They say, “Look at the grammar. Look at what the stories are saying in regards to history, in the widest sense of the term.”

0008 I ask, “Are these theologians denying that Genesis 1-11 can be assessed, compared to, and explained by scientific empirio-schematic inquiry?”

It sure looks that way.

And, that is a problem in a civilization where science appears triumphant.

07/5/25

Looking at Graham Langdon’s Book (2024) “The Mystery of the Navel Idols” (Part 1 of 4)

0001 The book before me is published by Archaic Lens Publishing (North Carolina). The author posts podcasts on youtube, writes on twitter, and has a website, www.archaiclens.com. The book’s subtitle is The Thread that Connects the Ancient World.

0002 The author documents navel idols that are readily identifiable to the human eye on the basis of several characteristics, as shown below.

0003 They appear at the dawn of history, in regions that will end up civilized, but before any advances in the direction of labor and social specializations. Later, the idols will associate to the Chalcolithic (the Copper Age), corresponding to the era before the Bronze Age (when copper is mixed with other ingredients to create effective weapons).

The oldest navel figure is Urfu man, recovered from Gobekli Tepe in Turkey (Anatolia) and dating to around 10,000 B.C. This is long before the end of the last interglacial. The megastructure site associates to the pre-pottery Neolithic, which comes before the pottery Neolithic. Subsequent Neolithic cultures throughout southwestern Asia will be labeled and identified on the basis of their pottery.

Also, Gobekli Tepe is not associated with a sedentary settlement, such as the contemporaneous Catal Huyuk.

0004 So, what am I saying?

Gobekli Tepe, Catal Huyuk and similar sites do not end up constellating into a tangle of unconstrained social and labor specializations, where social circles transmogrify into networks of economic and political-religious affiliations.

0005 In the section on Turkey, the author makes an interesting point. The body habitus of Urfu man appears in statuary and figurines in early civilizations around the world. The further from Gobekli Tepe, the later in time these navel idols appear.

Ironically, this point is precisely the rule of thumb held by archaeologists during the early twentieth century. The further from southern Mesopotamia, the later an early civilization forms.

0006 Coincidence?

Or is one observation swept up in the other?

0007 In the section on Turkey, the author includes a watercolor image of an awkward looking small artifact, with enormous alien-like eyes, v-neck adornment and hand on either side of navel. This clay figurine dates to around 5,000 B.C., during the copper age, according to the British Museum.

This artifact dates to 5,000 years after Gobekli Tepe.

The prehistoric cultures associated with the later artifact occur on the cusp of civilization, where the term, “civilization” is characterized by unconstrained labor and social specialization.

0008 A look at the sections on the Kosovo, Serbia and the Balkans support this association. The navel idols of the Vinca culture (5850-5750 B.C.) appear similar to the latter Turkey artifact. The Vinca culture practices farming, animal husbandry and copper smelting. A similar pattern occurs in Bulgaria. These cultures are on their way to increasing social complexity.

0009 The pattern will hold for all navel idols found to the west of the Aegean Sea. The navel idols and the Chalcolithic and other features, such as astronomy-related megalithic arrangements, spread west from southwestern Asia.

Since Gobekli Tepe is pre-pottery and pre-Chalcolithic, it cannot be the direct inspiration for the navel idol figures located the West, five millennia later. So, the old archaeologists’ saying of the early 20th century applies. Something from southern Mesopotamia sends out emissaries bearing the news of not talking with one’s hands, as well as copper manufacture and astronomy.

Indeed, it may be that the cultural efflorescence that builds Gobekli Tepe and other Anatolian sites spreads into northern, then southern Mesopotamia as the glacial climate gives way to the Wet Neolithic of southwestern Asia and northern Africa.

0010 The sea-level rise serves as a good way to demark the navel idols before pottery and copper and the navel idols after.

07/5/25

Looking at Graham Langdon’s Book (2024) “The Mystery of the Navel Idols” (Part 4 of 4)

0030 To the immediate west of Mesopotamia, the navel idols of Israel, dating to 4500-3500 B.C., look like they correspond to the first message. The Canaanite coffins of 1300-1200 B.C. look as if they are inspired by the latter message. The coffins do not contain emissaries from Mesopotamia, they contain Canaanite elites who benefitted from trends towards unconstrained social complexity.

0031 In Sardinia, the messages separate into more than one style of navel icon..

0032 Here, this examiner leaves the reader to use the speculative structure of two messages to appreciate the many navel icons that the author presents in this well-appointed art-book.

To me, the overall picture is clear for the West and for the East (as far as Eurasia is concerned).

The navel icons, as well as their speech-alone talking emissaries, are next involved in establishing a foothold in South America, but the messages are confounded with a trend already occurring in China. The same pose and adornment of the original navel icons are adopted as indications of elite status.

0033 Here is a picture.

0033 The conclusions… er… speculations of this examiner now set forth, I wonder whether the author will agree.

Of course, in this book, the author never entertains the idea that the navel icons are associated with either the bicameral mind (message 1) or the first singularity (message 2).

However, the author hints that intentional diffusion may be a reasonable explanation. The navel icons spread at the cusps of early civilizations throughout Eurasia and the Americas. Plus, there are other novel trends associated with the spread of the navel icons. These include copper metallurgy and… well… something to do with tracking celestial bodies. Oh, I should not forget v-shaped neck adornments.

0034 My thanks to the author for gathering evidence that is obvious to the eye, yet very difficult to account for. Perhaps, this examination, based on two works by Razie Mah, may assist.

07/1/25

Looking at Hugh Ross’s Book (2023) “Rescuing Inerrancy” (Part 25 of 25)

0211 This examination adds value to Ross’s project in five ways.

First, it introduces a history that encompasses the modern conundrum presented in this text.

Hugh Ross and the Reasons To Believe Team are actors in a theodrama that is at least 800 years old.

Plus, that theodrama is about to undergo a pivot that is captured in the following figure.

0212 Yes, the redemption_2c offered by the party that exalts grace_3c over nature_3c and the protocols_2c offered by the party that exalts nature_3c over grace_3c, are now entangled because, on the content level, the Creation Story is a sign of the evolutionary record and the Primeval History is an insider’s view of the start of our current Lebenswelt.

0212 Second, this examination offers a semiotic way to view what Ross is trying to articulate. Theologians should be interested in sign-relations. Scientists take sign-relations for granted. Ross’s book is titled as if a scientific defense will rescue Biblical inerrancy. This makes no sense unless its taken from a semiotic point of view. Inerrancy draws the Bible, especially Genesis 1-11, into hitherto unimagined triadic relations with scientific inquiry. The empirio-schematics of artistic concordism and the first singularity are variations of what ought to be for the Positivist’s judgment.

When, you think about it, signs tend to share certain characteristics with the term, “inerrancy”. Every sign-vehicle stands for its sign-object in regards to its sign-interpretant. Even if the interpretant is camouflage, the sign-relation purports to be flawless and honest in its own way. Indeed, all signs are “inerrant” in the eyes of God.

0213 Third, this examination offers a way of appreciating how Ross’s efforts aesthetically derive from the Positivist’s and the empirio-schematic judgments. Indeed, Ross’s project towers head and shoulder above other projects in the Venn diagram of science and religion because his aesthetics are one step away from the ways that scientists operate.

0214 Fourth, this examination offers a slightly different version of concordism than Ross. Mah’s artistic version may assist Ross’s moderate version in future research. In particular, I pray for a science book on the Earth’s evolutionary history to accompany Exercises in Artistic Concordism. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Fifth, this examination offers a wonderful endpoint, in the form of a label for the single actuality implied by the intersection of redemption_2c and protocols_2c. The early scholastics knew this label well. And now, perhaps, the following dyad will be born again.

0215 My thanks to Hugh Ross and this team at Reasons To Believe for publishing a book worthy of examination.

02/29/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2014) “A Natural History of Human Thinking” (Part 1 of 22)

0187 In the preface, the author notes that this book is a prequel to The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999, Harvard University Press). The question is the same. What makes humans unique? The answer is the same. Humans think differently than great apes, their closest biological kin.

In 1999, researchers in evolutionary anthropology could say, “Only humans think of other humans as intentional agents. Plus, my cat and my dog are intentional operators, as well, say nothing of the weather.”

Okay, I added the second sentence for dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, research conducted after 1999 introduces a problem. It turns out that great apes recognize intentionality in others.

Uh oh.

0188 This book is the third marker in Tomasello’s intellectual journey. I start following his trek with Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (1999) “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” (appearing in Razie Mah’s January 2024 blog). The second marker that I examine may be found in Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2008) “Origins of Human Communication” (appearing later in the same blog for the same month).

0189 In the publication before me, A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts), Tomasello explicitly abstracts three cognitive processes in order to distinguish humans from apes. The processes are cognitive representation, inference and self-monitoring. He then proposes that all three components were transformed in two key steps during hominin evolution. He labels his claims, “the shared-intentionality hypothesis”.

0190 Does this follow the trajectory set by previous works?

Here is a theme that appears in the second marker, pre-emptively modified with the above propositions in mind.

0191 This modified picture allows me to offer slogans for movements zero and one.

For zero, the slogan is “I work for food.”

For one, the slogan is “We work for food.”

01/31/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (1999) “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” (Part 1 of 12)

0001 In 1999 AD, Michael Tomasello, then co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, publishes the work before me (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

To me, this work marks the start of the author’s twenty year journey, culminating in a theory of human ontogeny, published in 2019. The word, “ontogeny”, refers to human development and associates to the human phenotype.

0002 What interests me in Tomasello’s journey?

As noted in Comments on Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Book (2017) Adam and the Genome (available at smashwords and other e-book venues), “phenotype” and “adaptation” are not the same. Instead, these labels apply to distinct actualities that coalesce into a single actuality. One may call that single actuality, an individual, a species or a genus. One may also call that single actuality, “a mystery”.

I am interested in the natural history side of the mystery of human evolution. However, the genetic (or ontogenetic) side cannot be ignored. Plus, natural history cannot be reduced to genetics, or visa versa

0003 Chapter one of Tomasello’s book is titled, “A Puzzle and a Hypothesis”.

Of course, a puzzle is not a mystery. A puzzle can be resolved. A mystery cannot.

The puzzle starts with genetics. Geneticists have examined the DNA of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and predict that the last common ancestor lives 6 or 7 Myr (six or seven million years ago).

In contrast, physical anthropologists (natural historians) propose the fossil record noted in the following figure. With terminological sleight of hand, they refer to human ancestors as “hominins”, even though the old term for any bipedal primate (ape or human) is “hominid”.

0004 Hmmm. Does the puzzle concern time?

According to genetics, the last common ancestor (LCA) between chimpanzees and humans lives 7 Myr (millions of years ago). But, little significant shows up in the fossil record until 4 Myr. Our lineage obviously evolves feet first. As it turns out, starting around 5 Myr, the extent of tropical vegetation in Africa decreases due to desiccation. Bipedality is an adaptation to mixed forest and savannah.

0005 The fossil record provides other clues, especially stone tools.

The first stone tools are Oldowan. Oldowan stones tools are constructed on site. They are used to scrape meat off of bone and to crack long bones (that are full of fatty marrow).

Acheulean stone tools appear later in the archeological record. Acheulean stone tools are made beforehand and carried with some intention in mind. They have the appearance of a giant tooth. Notably, Acheulean stone tool technology remains unchanged for over a million years. Innovations in stone-tools follow the domestication of fire.

0006 Surely, these two tables are puzzling. In the first, the fossil record pertains to changes in hominin phenotypes. In the second, the fossil record pertains to hominin adaptations, but these adaptations are not phenotypic. They are artifacts. Are these adaptive artifacts cultural? Are they behavioral? I wonder, “Do the words, ‘culture’ and ‘behavior’, capture the matter and the form of these artifacts?” It is as if an adaptation recognizes matter and generates form.

0007 What is the nature of the adaptation that maintains (and occasionally changes) artifacts, as if these artifacts are phenotypes?

Tomasello suggests that an adaptation is a novel form of social cognition. Our lineage adapts to a new way of thinking about one another, eventually allowing sociogenesis, new styles of learning and cultural evolution.

0008 Tomasello proposes that there is one adaptation that potentiates subsequent adaptations.

Razie Mah proposes that there is one ultimate niche for our lineage. The hypothesis is presented in the e-book, The Human Niche (available at smashwords and other e-book venues).

0009 Do Tomasello (in 1999) and Mah (in 2018) propose that our lineage is defined by the same adaptation… er… niche?

What is the difference between an adaptation and a niche?

To these questions, I next attend.

An Archaeology of the Fall

A Horror Story by Razie Mah

Tag Archives: evolution of talk