Saturday, January 13, 2018

Evolution and Soul

Today I'd like to respond to this person.


 I mean, I already did, but I feel as though I can do a more satisfactory job in a blog post.
"Why are all apes not humans?"
This is a fairly common question.   There's many reasons for this, but it's simplest to think of the various species of ape (including human) when compared with the various species or sub-species (breeds) of dog. Other apes still exist for the same reason that more than one kind of dog exists.  First, there's not a selection pressure against having more than one type of ape.  Hyenas and wolves still exist together, in the same way Dalmatian and fox terrier dog breeds exist together.

There is, for example, no special selection pressures that caused one or the other to die off. As long as both can survive, both will survive.  For a striking modern example of how species diverge, you can look at the horse and donkey.  They are very recently diverged, as we were at one time from Neanderthals, for example.  Horses and donkeys can breed to produce mules or hinnies, or the horses can breed only with other horses and produces horses.  The fact that donkeys exist doesn't stop horses from also existing.  Eventually, horses and donkeys will become isolated enough (through genetic changes) that they will be two completely distinct species.  Humans and the other remaining great apes have already passed this point some 100,000 years ago perhaps.  If there were still neanderthals, we might be able to breed with them, but it would be at least as difficult as a horse/donkey producing a mule.

"Thank You....., you said that the same reason there are different species and subspecies of dog. But the question is, is one species of dog smarter than the other species. Humans clearly surpasses apes, what cause it, if not an evolution of the soul ?. Thank you.........."
 Intellect doesn't really matter in evolution.  Sure, it helps, but so long as a species can keep producing offspring, it will tend to do so.  The question of why humans are smarter can be answered by a few points.  First, humans managed to walk upright by some chance more readily than most other apes. We also seem to have worked together in a different way from the other apes.  This allowed us the opportunity to make chance discoveries (like how alcohol is made) that led us to become a more social species than the other apes in this regard.  We also discovered something the other apes don't seem to have figured out, which is agriculture.  Once we learned that we can reliably produce our own food in this way, we found time to learn things not strictly related to survival.

This general trend happened because smarter individuals had some advantage in regards to producing more offspring.  For example, this also introduced a massive amount of sexual dimorphism which is also mainly only present to this extent in humans.  This is to say, for example, perhaps among early male hominids, the male who could reliably create functional shelter happened to mate more often with more female members, thus passing on his genes that led to better shelters being developed.  Thus, the offspring who did the best of the next generation would amplify this effect a tiny bit, and so on.

This was further amplified when agriculture and education became widespread, as it meant that ever more time could be devoted to things which were not strictly relating to survival.  Perhaps a particularly attractive male would happen to have to work less and would get a longer life and thereby more chances to procreate than some competitors.  All of these things work together, not individually.


I explained in response that not all snowballs move equally fast.  If one species appears later, for example, but happens to have a very distinct advantage over another, it will generally use that advantage to the fullest to ensure progeny.

I then also asked what relevance intelligence has to a soul.  Are people who aren't as smart as another ape, perhaps through mental disability or misfortune of accident, or perhaps just a significantly smart other ape, do they lack a soul also?

 I'm honestly not sure where she's going here, but an individual from a species doesn't tell us much about how it is evolving.  Evolution is generally a slow process which takes many generations to observe.  You don't have to take my word for it, though.  Every time you get sick, it's due to some phage mutating and your body being unable to deal with it to some degree.


Bacteria don't actually appear first.  Simple amino chains appear much earlier.  To the general point, however, humans are comprised entirely of simpler things.  We are 90% things that most people wouldn't call human. 

The simplest organisms appear earliest because it doesn't make any sense for a building to exist before we discover building materials.

Bacteria still exist, after all, even incredibly simple ones, and the things they're made of are in everything that we call living. 

Similarly, humans don't appear last, any more than your cat or dog does.  Every species is transitional, including us.  Our ancestors were not humans, and our descendants some day will not be, either. Some very old species still exist, and every one of them shares a common ancestor with us. All animals and plants have a simpler relative that they shared in common.

Imagine if you will, we send people to space to live forever, and they start a colony.  Eventually, the humans that left, and the humans that didn't, will have ancestors who will not be able to breed together.  It may take a few hundred thousand years, or it could be relatively rapid.

We can see some traces today, even, of how some traits were inherited from those common ancestors a long time ago.  HIV, for example, formed when one of our ancestral ape/monkey forebears ingested two different strains of SIV and then passed on this to its offspring. 

If we want to see a somewhat more modern example of a selection pressure, we can look at something like polio.  Polio prevented a great many humans from producing children.  This is an example of a selection pressure that can give an advantage to non-human species who aren't susceptible to Polio.  Today, it's unlikely that humans would lose dominance to another group of apes, but when we were still diverging from them, if something had affected one of our competing species of apes, we would have filled in that vacuum.

This is part of the reason why so much of the human expansion has happened across the world in the past 10,000 years or so, when the Neanderthals went extinct.  Remember, they were able to breed with us.  However, something happened that cause them to no longer be a selection pressure against us. Maybe we just happened to be more aggressive and wiped them out. Maybe a disease affected them that didn't affect us.  Either way, this vacuum allowed us to gain dominance over them and build up society as we have.  This sort of thing happened many times before as well, for example when the dinosaurs grew to epic proportions because the carbonaceous environment favored them and did not favor mammals.  Dinosaurs and plants grew to be very diverse, while mammals had very few variations. 

Did the Tyrannosaurus Rex have a soul simply because it was the dominant species at that time?  Did it become dominant by being smarter?  WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX?!

Sorry, got carried away.

Thanks for tuning in!
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