Was
Man more aquatic in the past? Bentham
e-book
Unique
features of Homo: are they compatible
with an aquatic past?
Thinking about origins needs
original thinking.
My
general interests concern trying to understand the peculiar beings we humans
are, by studying the evolution and the origins of Life, of species, of our
genus Homo, of language, of consciousness and of
religiosity. Raised as a convinced neodarwinist, it becomes more and more
clear to me that explaining "origins" requires nonconformistic
evolutionary thinking. Expanding the principle of natural selection too far, or
applying it inappropriately, may lead to simplisms and just-so stories.
My
ideas about the Origin of Life (pdf)
do not ignore the intriguing findings related to the RNA-world, preceding the
The
interaction of on the one hand a protometabolic chemical community (possibly
embraced by a membrane) with on the other hand newly developed nucleotide
strands (which enabled symbolic, encoded, PERMANENT information), perhaps
virus-like, might have lead to the semantic closure as we observe in the cell.
The
protometabolic chemical community that started to use permanent information
carriers (nucleotide sequences) might be compared to the interactions that
became possible when part of the present life, i.e. humans, started using
(spoken) symbolic language, which resulted in the use of symbolic, encoded,
PERMANENT information: printed/electronic texts, cfr. nucleotide strands.
In both cases, that of the
development of cell and that of the current scientific progress, the
availability of permanently encoded information (of permanent carriers of
encoded information) may be the clue to understanding how a biological mystery,
the first cell, ever came to be. This interaction between metabolism and
permanently encoded information has once led to the cell, the only
self-duplicating system known. Might something similar happen again as a result
of our metabolic activity in combination with permanently encoded – digital –
information?
Res.
Microbiol. Special Issue on the Origin of Life
My
ideas about Experience, awareness and consciousness were inspired by David Chalmers'
publication in J. Consciousness Studies (Chalmers, 1995), where he formulated the 'hard
problem' of consciousness, wondering about the inexplicability of conscious
experience. I agree that the essence of (conscious) experience is inexplicable
by current scientific knowledge. I only realized after reading Chalmers’
publication that experience is unexplainable: we can reason about how
chemical/neuronal interactions lead to an experience, but we cannot describe/understand
the nature of the experience, how it feels to be hungry, happy, sad,
frightened, depressed, ..., or why it should feel like something at all.
But
I argue that a more general and clarifying view on this problem is only
possible when experience itself (and not consciousness, which is just one of
many possible experiences) is considered as a basic inexplicable characteristic
of nature, already present at the atomic level. Consciousness can be understood
as reflexive awareness, a specific form of animal awareness, made possible by
symbolic language. The hard problem is
that of experience, not of consciousness. Animal awareness itself can be
considered as a specific form of experience, made possible by the development of
a central neurological control center, the brain.
In
my opinion, understanding the many pecularities of mankind - including consciousness and religiosity, becomes rather easy when one can explain the origin of language. After all, it is symbolic language
that makes fully possible reflection and reflexive awareness (i.e.
consciousness) and that makes speaking animals ask the endlessly repeatable
question 'Why?', which leads to religious solutions. In opposition to others
who see the advantageous characteristics of language itself as sufficient to
explain its existence (through natural selection driven by the advantages of
language (Pinker)),
John Skoyles and I argue that several preadaptations
contingently lead to the emergence of symbolic language. Our extreme
musicality, we claim, is very explanatory with regard to the phylogenetic (in Homo
sapiens as a species) and ontogenetic (in every child as an individual) origin
of language. There are related hypotheses, like that of Robin Allott, which put more emphasis on motoric
capacities (gestural equivalence). These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive,
and have in common that they point to what we consider a more plausible
explanation for the intriguing phenomenon of language.
It
is generally agreed that increased breath control is a precondition to human
speech. Marc Verhaegen and Stephen
Munro (a, b, c) think that increased breath control capacity
was an adaptation to a semi-aquatic/parttime diving past. Aquatic adaptations
like increased breath control may have increased our singing capacities as well
and in the first place, later leading to human speech. As such, a waterside past does not contradict, and in fact
strenghtens the argument for a musical origin of language.
See
also our e-book
(Was Man more aquatic in the past? Bentham Publishers) on the aquatic origin of
our species.
Modern
aquarboreal arguments in one chapter:
Marc Verhaegen, Stephen Munro, Mario
Vaneechoutte, Nicole Bender-Oser & Renato Bender. 2007. The original econiche of the genus Homo. Open plain or waterside? Chapter 6, pp. 155-186, In: Ecology Research Progress, Sebastian
I. Munoz (Editor). Nova Science Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-1-60021-807-1.
Marc
Verhaegen & Stephen Munro 2007.
New directions in palaeoanthropology.
Pp. 1-4 In: Ecology Research Progress, Sebastian I. Munoz (Editor). Nova
Science Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-1-60021-807-1.
Verhaegen M, Puech P-F. 2000. Hominid
lifestyle and diet reconsidered: Paleo-environmental and comparative data.
Hum Evol 15: 175-186. pdf
Desmond Morris on the aquatic
ape
An aquatic past and our musicality
might as well explain why we feel the urge to sing under the shower J
Origin of mankind: link to programme, proceedings and
summary of the Symposium 'Water and Human Evolution', held in Gent, Belgium 30
April 1999, discussing a possibly more aquatic past for humans than generally
accepted. And a link to Marc Verhaegen's
heretic, provocative, but well developed ideas about Australopithecines: not our ancestors, but those of Pan
and Gorilla? And recently (2007), his view has been corroborated: Lucy
is not our ancestor, but more Gorilla-like.
AAT
starting page …. Human Origins....Wateraaptheorie
Bird
Song as a Possible Cultural Mechanism for Speciation
General semantics … Behaviour of information: Luc Claeys… Serendipity.... Serendipiteit...Petition Online
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6444/pdf/365290a0.pdf