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.
Thematic Thread on What Is Man: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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