Thursday, September 16, 2021

Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man

The title of this post is the translation into English of a book of mine, published in 2017 by the publisher CEU Ediciones. As its name implies, the book is divided into three main parts, the first of which (the first four chapters) reviews the origin, evolution and history of life (biological evolution), while the second (chapters 5 and 6) focuses on the origin, evolution and history of man (cultural evolution). Finally, the third part (chapters 7 to 9) compares both types of evolution, emphasizing their similarities and differences; reviews the current situation of human evolution; and offers some ideas about the future.

As is often the case, this book did not come out of nowhere, but rather builds on previous works of mine. Especially in the first part, some of the titles of some chapters and subchapters may be familiar to the readers of my blog, because they are similar to some of my posts:

Introduction: what is life?

1. The origin of life

    Synthetic life

    Requirements and limits for life

2. Classification of living beings: clades and levels

3. Biological evolution: the history of life

    Evolution of the theory of evolution

    The history of multicellular life

    The curve of history

    Intelligent design and random evolution

4. Pending problems in the history of life

    How the genetic code was invented

    How sexual reproduction came about

    Sex and species, two related concepts

    The problem of the level change

The second part is based on a book of mine published in English 42 years ago (Human cultures and evolution), where I proposed the idea that cultural evolution acts in much the same way as biological evolution, although there also are a few differences. This book was published shortly after Richard Dawkins’s The selfish gene, which I had not read, although it was published three years before mine. As could be expected, Dawkins's version (who coined the term memetics for cultural evolution) was much more popular than mine.

Chapter 5 of my new book talks about the appearance of man and raises the question of whether man is just another animal, one of the most read posts in this blog. Chapter 6 summarizes in 70 pages all of human history, and includes the pertinent data to address the last part of the book.

The third part is divided into three chapters, with the following titles:

7. Parallels and differences between biological and cultural evolution

8. Current situation of human evolution

9. Where is evolution going?

This is the conclusion of the book:

A single evolution acts in the Earth, both on life and on culture, although its way of acting is adapted to the specific environment on which it is applied (genes, nervous systems or cultural elements). Man is a unique species without parallel in the history of life, since cultural evolution, which has now reached supremacy over biological evolution, is practically absent from other forms of life, even among those species closer to us. Finally, the dignity conferred on us by the fact that God has become man, together with the place and time in which this occurred (in the Roman Empire, at the confluence of Hellenic philosophy with Hebrew cosmology) is precisely what made the explosive advance of western science possible. The current loss of the Christian roots of this civilization does not bode well for the future of science.

The reasons why I’ve come to this conclusion are described in the remainder of the book.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on What Is Man: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

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