More News on Polygenesis

This past summer came news of possible interbreeding between early Homo sapiens (modern humans) and other groups, possibly of different but related species.  This is in addition to the possible and much-disputed hybridization with Neanderthal Man.  Admittedly I’m a little late on this–I was deep into “Legends of the Fall” at the time, and somehow overlooked this fascinating news, which I should have incorporated at the time.  Oh, well–better late than never.

The first story indicates a possibility of mixing between modern humans and the so-called Denisovan hominin.  Denisovans were discovered only four years ago, and the remains are still fragmentary.  Nevertheless, DNA analysis indicates the Denisovans to be distinct both from modern humans and from Neanderthals, though they seem more closely related to the latter.  This analysis also indicated Denisovan DNA exists in modern populations, too, especially Melanesians and Australian Aborigines.  This would indicate some interbreeding between early modern humans and Denisovans.

The second story indicates hybridization between early modern humans and one or more unknown species or subspecies in Africa.  In this case there are no physical remains such as bones; rather, patterns of DNA unlike any other human (or Neanderthal) DNA have turned up in some African populations.  This is interpreted as indicated hybridization with some other unknown group or groups–quite likely, given the large number of early hominids in Africa.  What is surprising is the relative recentness of this interbreeding–as recently as 20,000 years ago, long after other populations had already left Africa.

This is still more evidence that while all humans today have common ancestors in the relatively recent past, there were nevertheless many different groups that contributed to the human genome, and not all original populations necessarily had a single origin.  More and more we see the need to rethink traditional theology in regard to the Fall and the origin of humanity.

Part of the series Legends of the Fall.

Also part of the series Polygenism Revisited.

Legends of the Fall: Unraveling the Sweater

When I began this series over five months, forty posts, and (conservatively) 30,000 words ago, it seemed as if it would be a short, straightforward series.  It seemed to me that the Genesis narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the Fall of Man, given our knowledge of biology, archaeology, anthropology, and so on was obviously  mythical.  It also seemed to me that conservatives who insisted on the literal, historical accuracy of the account were being hysterical and over-the-top when they argued that not just abstruse points of theology but Christianity itself hung on the account being really historical, and not mythical.  The argument was that if you reduce the story of the Fall to myth, all the rest of Christian theology unravels, as when one pulls a bit of yarn from a sweater.  I still think the Genesis account is mythical.  However, I have changed my mind on the second issue.  I have decided that the conservative critics of a mythical genus are actually correct.  Christian theology as we know it–as it has traditionally been understood–actually does depend on a more or less literal Adam/Eve/Fall narrative.  They were right; I was wrong.

Now there are two things this does not mean.  It does not mean that I have embraced Biblical literalism.  Far from it–the more I study the relevant areas, the less likely it seems possible to understand large parts of the Bible–particularly Genesis–in anything like a literal fashion.  If anything, I have reduced the number of things I’m willing to take (or which I think it necessary to take) literally to one–the Resurrection.  I’ve discussed that at much greater length in “The Pretty Good Book“.  On the other hand, all this also does not mean that I have lost faith, rejected Christianity, or even tossed out all concepts of a Fall (of some sort) and Atonement.  I think that the traditional theology on these issues cannot be maintained; therefore, I think we need to adopt a new theology.  I don’t see this happening in official venues any time soon; but that’s no reason not to put in some small effort in that direction here.

The Atonement: Index

The Atonement

Some Theories of Atonement, or Love, not Honor or Substitution  This post, by Father Nathan O’Halloran, S. J., is reblogged from Vox Nova.  I’ve touched on the idea of the Atonement in the course of this series insofar as it has implications for the concept of the Fall and the interpretations of the Fall which I have been discussing.  Thus I’m adding this as a sort of guest post that goes into more detail on that particular aspect of the issues I’ve been dealing with here.  Update:  Since I originally reblogged this, Vox Nova has moved to Patheos; thus, the reblogged link no longer works.  I’ve deleted the reblogged post from this blog, and put the link to the original post by Fr. O’Halloran at the new Patheos site in the link above.  Thus, clicking there will take you to Patheos, not to my blog. 

How Not to View the Atonement

Atonement Theology  This post was reblogged from the blog Triangulations, and gives an excellent summary of various schools of thought on the Atonement.

Saved from What?

The Atonement:  An Overview of the Traditional Perspective

The Apple and the Multiverse

Hell’s Angels and Looking for God in All the Wrong Places

Original Sin:  Is the Fault in the Manufacturer?

Penal Substitution

Polygenesis: Breaking News

Courtesy of here.  These bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) have been observed making stone tools on their own initiative.  The tools are remarkably similar to those made by by early hominids.

This is relevant to my ongoing series on the Fall, particularly my follow-up on polygenesis, because it emphasizes once more how much closer so-called sub-human primates are to us than previously thought.  I’m not suggesting that humans ever have–or even could have–interbred with bonobos.  Despite their genetic closeness to us, there is no evidence that such has ever happened.

Nevertheless, that a primate that is, relatively speaking, farther from us than the early members of the genera Homo and Australopithecus, is able to perform actions previously thought restricted to the latter genera gives indirect but strong evidence of the possibility of the interbreeding of various humanoid species.   That many different species besides H. sapiens were adjacent in time and location to it is ever-clearer from the fossil record.  If even members of the genus Pan (pygmy and common chimps), which split from the common lineage we both share over six million years ago,  have human-like tool-making capacities, it is even more likely that closer species and genera, with a closer date of lineage split, may have been sufficiently similar in behavior and physiology to interbreed, perhaps frequently.

In my mind, this gives even greater motivation to work out the theological implications of a possible polygenetic origin of humanity.  News like this makes the issue ever less abstract.

Part of the series Legends of the Fall.

Also part of the series Polygenism Revisited.

Polygenesis Revisited: The Theology of Cavemen

Now that we’ve seen what polygenesis–hard polygenesis, specifically–actually is, let’s look at its theological ramifications.  I’m not going to rehash the whole series heretofore, but it will be useful to look at the main issues briefly.

Christianity traditionally has taught that all humans descend from one primal couple, Adam and Eve.  As a result of their sinning in Eden, Adam and Eve  passed Original Sin on to all of their descendants, down to us.  On the other hand, the scientific evidence is that modern humans descend not from a primal couple, but from a primal population.  Thus, there would be several primal lineages, some of whom would not have been descended from Adam and Eve, and thus, presumably, to transmission of Original Sin.  This seems to conflict with traditional Christian theology.

It’s important to point out that this is also closely tied in with the Christian concept of the soul.  Dharmic religions  posit that all sentient beings have souls (Buddhism doesn’t actually posit a soul at all, but that’s a nuance for another time), and that a given soul may incarnate as human, animal, god, demon, etc.  The Abrahamic faiths, however, have traditionally held that only humans have immortal souls, and that only human souls are sapient and in the image of God.  In this perspective, a being, such as an animal, which lacks a soul is not a subject.  In other words, it has no sense of self-awareness, no perception of “I”, no internal monologue.  It is a thing, no different from a machine (at least in the extreme Cartesian conception) except that it’s furry, feathered, or scaled.

A  human–or humanoid–that lacked a soul, even if it were intelligent, even if it seemed exactly like one of us, would also be a thing–in effect, a human-appearing, walking, analogue computer.  It would not be a true human, but what is referred to as a philosophical zombie; or to put it another way, it would be a mere animal that just looked and acted like a human; or perhaps it could be thought of as an organic robot.  As such, it would no more have intrinsic human rights than would a kangaroo or an iPad. 

Polygenism Revisited: Terminology (Updated)

This comment thread is what made me realize that I hadn’t addressed all the I should have issues in the original Legends of the Fall series.  I’ve been laying the groundwork for dealing with these issues, and now we can start that process.

The whole thesis of the original series was that with our knowledge of human origins, it is not possible to maintain the traditional account of the Fall of Man and Original Sin as they have been held in Christian thought.  I attempted, in the original series, to look at different Christian paradigms of the creation of the cosmos and mankind that have surfaced throughout history, and to give some thought to how these paradigms could interact with our scientific knowledge of the world and human origins.  The idea was to find a meaningful way of viewing humans, their relationship to God, and their imperfection in light both of Christian theology and modern science.  I don’t claim to have done so, but I think I was able to suggest some possible directions for theology to take in seeking such a reconciliation.

The main problem that I now realize I failed to address was the issue of hard polygenism. 

Excursus: Genesis–Mono or Poly?

I was actually working on what’s going to end up being the next post when it occurred to me that there was one issue I hadn’t touched on.  I don’t think it’s as important to the discussion here as some of the other issues.  Still, I think it does need to be addressed–the issue of monegenesis vs. polygenesis of humanity.

The literal meaning of these terms is “one origin” and “many origins”, but the way in which they’re used is subtly different in different contexts.  In anthropology “monogenesis” means that modern  humans–Homo sapiens–evolved once only, probably in Africa, and that all humans descend from that original population, the different races having evolved after the original humans left Africa and dispersed around the world.  This is sometimes known as the “Out of Africa” theory.

Polygenism, also known as the “multiregional origin theory”, holds that H. sapiens evolved more than once, separately, from separate populations of more archaic hominids that had moved out of Africa at an earlier date.  Thus, Homo erectus or some such similar species diffused out of Africa, and different populations evolved into anatomically modern humans in Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia.  These groups are close enough genetically to be considered the same species, and they have obviously interbred since then, but they are originally of separate origin. 

Excursus: Hypotheses, Theories, and Squirrels

I was going to break the flow of posts to address a theological issue which I thought germane to the series on the Fall that I’ve been running.  Then a comment on my last post struck me as worthy of an entire post, rather than a combox reply.  It touches on science and the scientific method, and (as a sometime science teacher) I think it’s always good to make use of opportunities to discuss misconceptions about how they work.

In the original post, remarking on the things we know for certain (or as certain as we can know) regarding the origin of the world and humanity, I said the following:

3.  Humans, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, evolved from other hominids; any other account must be considered metaphorical, whether it be the molding of man from the soil in Genesis or the creation of man by a committee of demons in The Secret Book of John.

In commenting on this post, commenter Christopher C. Randolph says, with my emphasis added:

#3 can be jettisoned, I think. It’s a cool theory but hasn’t been proven. I don’t think it can be proved. Nor can God creating humans and everything else be scientifically proved either. The most that can be legitimately concluded is that the fossil record suggests…. it’s unscientific to say that evolution is a fact, I think.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think it should be taught in science class. But it should keep to its “theory” status.

The rest is great! But I thought that the accepted age of the earth was 10,000,000 years?

First, on a smaller note, the age of the Earth is estimated at about 4.54 billion (4,540,000,000) years old.  This is based on studies of the half-lives of various radioactive substances;  a good, non-technical discussion of this is here.  

Legends of the Fall, Part 2: In the Know

In the last post, I discussed the orthodox Christian story of the Creation of the world and the Fall of Humankind.  I want to discuss the Gnostic take on these now.

Since it’s not my purpose to define or discuss Gnosticism as such here, especially when scholars debate even the usefulness of the term, I’m going to leave it to those who are curious about it to go to the linked article or to research it elsewhere (the books of Elaine Pagels and Karen King are good places to start).  Let me give just an extremely brief outline of Gnosticism, and then we’ll move on to the mythos.

Gnostic comes from the Greek gnostikos, “knowing”.  Gnosticism was a branch of Christianity (at least for our purposes here–there were Jewish and possibly pagan Gnostics as well, though scholars debate these) which, observing the nastiness and evil in the world, concluded that matter–the stuff of which the visible cosmos is made–is evil, and only spirit–of which our souls are made–is good.  As such, they were dualists.  Combining this insight with the great and  oft-noted differences between the portrayal of God in the Old Testament as opposed to the New, Gnostics posited that the wrathful, jealous, punitive God of the Old Testament (henceforth OT) was not, in fact, the true God.  This god, known variously as the Demiurge, Samael, Saklas, and Yaldabaoth, among other names, did create the physical world; this merely underscores his evil, since matter is evil.

Meanwhile the True God is the God of love, compassion, and mercy taught by Christ in the New Testament (NT).  This God is pure spirit and has nothing whatsoever to do with the material cosmos.  For this reason he is often referred to as the Alien God.  He created our spirits, not our bodies; and it is to him that we strive, according to the Gnostics, to return by mystic knowledge (gnosis–hence the name “Gnostic”) of our true selves.

Having outlined Gnosticism, let’s look at its creation story.  I’ll follow the bullet format of the last post here and in future installments to make parallels and differences clear.

Legends of the Fall, Part 1

Yeah, so I used the title of an old Brad Pitt movie (back when he was dating Gweneth Paltrow–how the years go by….) as a lead-in to a series of posts about the Fall–the theological one.  Hopefully the series will be interesting (though I doubt Brad Pitt will be involved).

Last year in my off time–usually when students in my class were taking tests and I had nothing to do but sit there–I wrote (with an actual pen on paper–blogging heresy!) some reflections on difficulties with the traditional model of the Fall in light of modern knowledge of science, anthropology, and such.  I never really brought it to a conclusions, but I’ve thought about it of late, and some discussions I’ve been having on other blogs have kept it in my mind, so I thought, since I’m starting back to blogging, that I’d try to develop some of the ideas here and see where they go.

I want to start by laying out three different paradigms or theological views, if you will, on the Fall itself:  the orthodox, the Gnostic, and the paradigm of Evagrius Ponticus, which has affinities to that of Origen and some of the Alexandrian theologians.  Then I want to compare and contrast these theories, and then see what looks likely, or unlikely, or just weird.