At the risk of bor­ing the read­er, I’m writ­ing again about Ivan the cat. There are things that Ivan and I share. Many of our bio­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics are the same. Accord­ing to the Dalai Lama, we both seek peace, com­fort and secu­ri­ty. Togeth­er, we devel­oped our habits and pat­terns, and there is def­i­nite­ly some com­mu­ni­ca­tion going on. The dif­fer­ences are also clear: Ivan is ath­let­ic and has a hunt­ing instinct; I can enjoy music, I am (usu­al­ly) sus­cep­ti­ble to rea­son and I have the abil­i­ty to worry.

I have this tal­ent because peo­ple are able to ask: “What if?”. Accord­ing to most the­o­ries, our con­scious­ness is what makes us such a spe­cial species. It has made us aware of our mor­tal­i­ty. And imag­i­na­tion is a pow­er­ful weapon because you can exper­i­ment in your mind before exe­cut­ing your plans. It leads to expres­sions of cul­ture, such as the use of sym­bols and language.

How did all of this come about? Pale­on­tol­o­gists and geneti­cists dig into the past, look­ing for fos­sils and DNA. The fos­sil record of hominids is still small. A sim­ple pedi­gree can­not be deter­mined, and each piece of bone that is found fuels a dis­cus­sion about its place in the evo­lu­tion­ary bush. Often, it leads to the def­i­n­i­tion of a new species. The old­est known human ances­tor is now a fos­sil from Chad that is 7 mil­lion years old.

Charles Fos­ter (in this book) con­nects the emer­gence of the moral­ly con­scious man to the ‘fall’ of man. Except that he does not inter­pret the sto­ry this way. Orig­i­nal sin is a con­cept that does not appear in the Bible and comes from Augus­tine. Fos­ter sees the ‘eat­ing of the tree of knowl­edge’ as the tran­si­tion from a human species with­out sym­bols (he men­tions Nean­derthals) to mod­ern humans. Accord­ing to him, the sto­ry may even have been an his­toric event. In any way, the effect was that man got a mature con­scious­ness and became respon­si­ble for his actions, unlike the animals.

I find this view of human evo­lu­tion a lit­tle shaky. It is like­ly that Nean­derthals buried their dead and wore jew­el­ry; expres­sions of under­stand­ing of sym­bols. The bound­aries between apes, extinct hominids and humans are some­times very vague, as described in the lat­est book by Frans de Waal. Is it nec­es­sary for the­ol­o­gy to have a clear dis­tinc­tion between moral­ly neu­tral and moral­ly respon­si­ble beings? 

Per­son­al­ly, I can live with the idea that my fam­i­ly is not lim­it­ed to Homo sapi­ens. At the same time, the large brained human has an unprece­dent­ed influ­ence on the plan­et. Every­where he goes, he leaves his cul­tur­al mark on the envi­ron­ment. This means a respon­si­bil­i­ty to care for the land and the water and all liv­ing beings. Includ­ing our fel­low human beings. For this, we need love — some­thing out­side the domain of sci­ence. We do not need to look for the source of self­less love in old sed­i­ments or our own DNA.