Publisher's Synopsis
Recently, genetic biology discovered a stunning gender asymmetry in the history of mankind. All Neanderthal genes carried by Eurasian and American peoples are due to Neanderthal males only. Why is there no evidence of hybrid progeny from Neanderthal females? An even more spectacular gender asymmetry occurred in the history of Neanderthals. In contrast to the previous example, this horizontal gene-transfer event occurred only once, about 300.000 years ago. Anatomically modern mothers bore hybrid progeny to Neanderthal fathers, and were adopted in a Neanderthal tribe. From all Neanderthals to survive until 30.000 years ago, none were children of Neanderthal mothers living at the time of the gene-transfer event. These two discoveries are mind-boggling for geneticists, focused as they are on point mutations in genes. The latter cause structural mutations in the organism, because genes code for the biological structure of the individual, at all stages of its development. On its own turn, structural innovation opens up avenues for novel behavioral characteristics. As genetic biology stands today, it has hardly come of age, in the sense that nobody is able to tell, from a given genome, whether its owner is good looking or ugly; has talent for playing piano, climbing mountains, doing business, or solving complex mathematical problems; will get cancer at age 40, and so forth. Geneticists know basically nothing of all this, and probably will not, for at least one full century to go. This state of the art explains the reluctance of geneticists to consider behavior in the scientific evaluation of gender asymmetry.Geneticists do not realize what everyone else around them already realize since long: the explanation for the fact that all hominins have gone extinct, except us, must be found in how genetic mutations determine behavioral capacities. Consequently, geneticists time and again voice their perplexity with respect to Neanderthal extinction, while that is hardly an issue. Not a scientifically relevant issue, that is. The scientifically relevant issue concerns the exceptional status of anatomically modern humans among hundreds of other hominin (sub)species: we not only survived evolution, but with an exponentially growing population over 100.000 years. Although genetic biology has not yet come of age in the quite demanding sense mentioned above, its procedures are thoroughly scientific, and have led to many important discoveries, which completely transcend the reach of anthropology. These discoveries allow for straightforward conclusions, which Abaelardus tries to present in a systematic way, in the course of nine chapters. The conclusions are interdisciplinary, as they are drawn not only from genetic biology and anthropology, but also from scriptural hermeneutics and theology (chapters 4 and 7), behavioral biology (chapter 6), and metaphysics (chapter 8 and appendix). The first chapter shows how modern science succeeded in realizing one of Darwin's dreams. The second chapter stresses an intelligent design aspect of nature, which is codification. Humanity only knows about codification since 1949, with the realization of the first computer. Nature had everything in place 3 billion years ago, at the birth of the first replicating biological cell. Chapters 3, 5, and 7 give a detailed overview of the origin of species, with a special focus on the last one million years of evolution. The fourth chapter gives a biological translation of theological monogenism, or the Christian tenet that all humanity descends from a single ancestral couple. The sixth chapter delves into the evolutionary origin of behavior, with a special focus on intentionality. The eighth chapter discusses the philosophical requisitions for causality, a deplorably undervalued and misunderstood topic. The appendix presents a synthesis of quantum mechanics and Thomism.
