At the Dawn of Humanity: The First Humans

WHAT HAPPENED when humanity emerged? It depends on whom you ask. Many scientists will say that nothing really changed: it was just another step in the long, gradual process of mutating genes. Many religious people will respond that everything was new: God breathed a special kind of life into the first man and set him apart from, and over, the rest of living things. In general, scientists tend to minimise, and the religious to maximise differences between the non-human animal world and the human world. Who is right? In this book, geneticist and philosopher of science Gerard Verschuuren argues that neither extreme is correct, but that the truth lies in a harmonious synthesis of the real but limited discoveries of modern science, the perennial insights of natural philosophy, and the illumination offered by great religious traditions. First, he examines the question of how—before, during, and after the dawn of humanity—genes may have changed from generation to generation. Then he explores just how capable such genetic mechanisms could be of explaining the features most distinctive of humanity: the faculties of language, rationality, morality, self-awareness, and religion. Are these traits really unique to man, or do they in some way derive from the non-human animal world? Were the first humans able to use language, think rationally, act morally, know who they were, and know there is a God? The answers may surprise you. At the Dawn of Humanity is a scientifically open-minded and well-informed tour de force against material reductionism and totalitarian scientism. Readers will come away with a new found appreciation of the connectedness of Homo sapiens with the rest of the natural world and, at the same time, of the unbridgeable gap that separates the essentially human from the pre-human and non-human.

Additional Information