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 very peculiar human being,
by studying the origins of Life, of species, of our genus Homo, of
language, of consciousness and of religiosity.
When
thinking about origins, we cannot always rely on natural selection.
Expanding
the principle of natural selection too far, or applying it inappropriately, may
lead to simplicism and just-so stories.
Origin of Life
I opt
for a process which is quite comparable to the current scientific process,
which enables free information exchange, whereby information is being
replicated by an underlying ‘metabolism’ (like the human society), without the
constraints that this information also needs to take care of its own
replication. Carl Woese (The universal ancestor. 1998. Pro. Natl Acad Sci. USA. 95:. 6854–6859) reaches a similar
conclusion, from a different line of reasoning: horizontal gene transfer was
initially more important than vertical transmission of genes.
Introducing
self replication too early limits the information space that can be explored: COSMIC-LOPER (Capability of
Searching Mutation Space Independent of Concern over Loss Of Properties
Essential of Replicaton: Benner, S. 1999. Old views of ancient events. Nature 283: 2026).
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
General semantics … Behaviour of information: Luc
Claeys
Origin of consciousness
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 not consciousness, which is just one of many possible experiences, but
experience itself 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. 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. The hard
problem is about the nature of experience, not about the nature of awareness or
consciousness.
Origin of mankind
Sir David Attenborough, The waterside Ape, on
BBC4:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v2ysg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v2ysg
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.
Origin of articulate language
Understanding
the many pecularities of mankind - including consciousness and religiosity, becomes rather easy when one can explain the origin of articulate language. After all, it is symbolic language
that makes possible reflection and reflexive awareness (i.e. consciousness) and
that makes speaking animals ask the endlessly repeatable question 'Why?', which
leads to religious solutions and believes in afterlife. 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. Accidentally (?), a semi-aquatic origin of our species (see below)
offers several preadaptations necessary for full-fledged articulate language,
such as vocal dexterity (possible because of closure of the naso-oral cavity,
voluntary breath control – as necessary for diving), musicality of aquatic
species, and even vocal learning.
Bringing
it all together:
Vaneechoutte,
M. 2014. The origin of articulate language revisited: The potential of a
semi-aquatic past of human ancestors to explain the origin of human musicality
and articulate language. Human Evolution 29:1-33. Link
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
Presentation
at the London Human Evolution Congress, May 2013.
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?
AAT starting page
…. Human Origins....Wateraaptheorie
Bird Song as a
Possible Cultural Mechanism for Speciation
