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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

> In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis. Yet in all instances, the position confers on Homo sapiens a unique status, thereby separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Ha ha ha, no. That’s a wild misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, that humans are somehow “more evolved” than other current species. Modern apes are our siblings, not our ancestors. And nothing fundamental “separates” us from other animals: we’re yet another species, granted with some unique features that we ourselves consider very important.

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It's also incorrect about the biblical story of Genesis. Because Genesis contains two creation stories (though biblical literalists prefer to brush away that fact).

Quoting a bit more from the article:

> Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis.

Genesis 1 indeed puts humans last, but Genesis 2 puts them first. And Genesis 2 is the older story of the two. Maybe that explains why it's more in line with those folk zoologists? Genesis 1 (a poem, structured by the days of the week) was written later, possibly during the Babylonian exile, and may be more informed by the science of the Babylonians; it addresses not just the creation of the Earth and the creatures on it, but also the sun and stars, and the passage of time; topics that the Babylonians were very interested in.

Well, regarding the story of creation in the Bible, it's not clear that humans come "first" even in Genesis 2, if we follow the story. Here's how it goes: God creates Adam, then Eve, then they have two children, Cain and Abel. Then Cain kills Abel.

And then Cain says to God: "I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." And God responds: "Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over." And God "put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him." (Genesis 4, 14-15)

But who are they? (whoever, anyone, no one) At this point in the story there should only be three people on earth: Adam, Eve and Cain. And in the following verse it says that "Cain made love to his wife".

Where does she come from?

One possible explanation is that the story of creation talks about one specific tribe, among other tribes that would pre-exist to the family of Adam, or at least co-exist.

Which is kind of relevant to the debate of different species of humans.

That's true, but that's Genesis 4. A continuation of the story in Genesis 2, but not really that creation story itself anymore. My comment is more about the structural similarity of the creation in Genesis 2 story to those "folk zoologists", than about what it means in the context of the rest of Genesis.

The fact that according to Genesis 4 other people did exist is a very good but in my opinion completely different issue.

Why can't both be correct? Genesis 2 puts them first because they are the most important creation, Genesis 1 puts them in chronological order.

If one of them was not correct nobody would have put them in the same bible.

> If one of them was not correct nobody would have put them in the same bible.

Focusing on "correct" is the wrong approach to reading these old mythological parts of the Bible. People put these stories in the Bible because of their story and meaning, not because of any kind of historical correctness. (Because how could they know?)

Neither of them are correct. Genesis is a synthesis of the mythology of the region. The meaning is vastly more important than the message.

Genesis 2:5 begins with: "When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up...". "Bush of the field" and "small plant of the field" were not part of the list of vegetation created on day 3 in Genesis 1 ("plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit"). The explanation can be found in Genesis 3:18. As part of the curse for eating forbidden fruit, the Lord says to Adam: "cursed is the ground because of you [...] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field." The bush/plants of the field were not created until after man was made. We can conclude that these plants did not produce food in the form of grain or fruit like the vegetation created on day 3. Because of man's sin these plants became thorns and thistles. There is no need to assume a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2.

I'd be careful connecting anything from Genesis 1 to elements from Genesis 2-4. They're different and unrelated stories written at very different times. Reading too much into these sort of connections could easily lead you to completely different conclusions than what the authors intended.

Although it's certainly true that Genesis 3 suggests thorns, thistles and other nastier parts of nature weren't around at first, which again fits the "man came first" aspect of the Genesis 2 creation story.

What if we assume skilled authorship which made connections purposefully in order to emphasize important points? Genesis is full of such connections.

If we assume harmony between Genesis 1:11-13 (fruits/grains) and Genesis 2:5 (bush/plants of the field) then it is clear that fruit was the chief food in the garden and agriculture came later.

Your point that the two creation accounts are different stories written at different times is well taken, and many people underappreciate that fact.

However, it is also important to recognize that they were brought together and redacted by an editor (or committee of editors, perhaps even spread out over time) that arranged and tweaked the stories. At the very least, it is easy to glean from the text that they are intended to form a whole "collection," with connections between the various myths. The textual evidence suggests that the connections are stronger than that.

So while it is the more common error to underappreciate the differences between the accounts, it is a less common but equally erroneous mistake to underappreciate the "unity" (of a sort) that they have.

This argument is always really odd to me. You'll hear people say things like "if evolution is real then why are there still monkeys?"

As if anyone is claiming we're derived from modern chimps...

Meanwhile the ancient apes that we share as common ancestors with modern apes are long extinct.

Not to mention evolution doesn't require an extinction as far as I know. See polar bears

Also even the population of brown bears that polar bears are descended from didn't go extinct either. They're still here, they're just polar bears.

"The population of brown bears that polar bears are descended from" are presumably dead, right? The current population of brown bears are likewise descended from the same population of brown bears.

It doesn't seem far off to me to interpret evolution as meaning that specific lineages didn't go extinct.

The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche.

The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?

> Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable?

Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.

"if evolution is real then why are there still monkeys?": For the same reason there are different species of mammals < vertebrates < animals

Monkeys are on the decline since clever and mostly hairless apes took over.

The latter might be too clever for their own good however, having invented carbon-fueled industry, super-powered AI, and various hyper-destructive weapons. Also Twitter. And NFTs.

> You'll hear people say things like "if evolution is real then why are there still monkeys?"

The only person I've ever met in my life who did not believe in evolution was a catholic priest. It's honestly bewildering to me that evolutionary sceptics are common enough to warrant a note in mainstream media or even just normal conversation. To me it's comparable to finding out there are still geocentrism apologists.

Although from what I've read it's more common in US. I'm in Europe so that may be the source of my bubble.

It is very common for "Christians" in the US to believe that evolution is not real. There have even been efforts in some schools demanding that "creationism" (the bible) be taught next to evolution as another scientific possibility of the Earth's creation with the scientific proof being the Bible.

I went to college at a public university here in the states. When we got to the evolution chapters of Biology, multiple kids walked out in the middle of class sessions.

One day the professor came in and very sternly told us something along the lines of "If you disagree with this and you want to walk out, that's fine - remember, you're the ones paying to be here, and you're adults and that's your choice. But I'd like to re-emphasis the 'you're adults' part - it is unacceptable for me to be receiving angry letters from your parents. If you don't pass this class because you walk out, that's on you and you need to own that consequence." ~ oof, it was a rough Monday.

Wow, well that was well handled by the professor. Some people never learn the lesson that some things are true whether you believe them or not.

In my experience it's not rare among Catholics. Source: I grew up Catholic.

In my experience, it's extremely rare among Catholics, whether or not it was when you were growing up.

Source: I'm Catholic today.

Here’s some 2019 and 2013 polling data

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/06/how-highly-...

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/12/30/publics-view...

Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution. Evangelicals tend to express the opinion that humans have existed in the same form forever.

I would ask both of you where you grew up Catholic, because I suspect that the prevalence of such beliefs is much more regional than strictly denominational.

Specifically, from what I've read, they're likely to be much more prevalent in the US Bible Belt and other places with strong concentrations of evangelical fundamentalists, because despite Catholicism being extremely different doctrinally, the actual Catholics in that area are almost invariably going to be more influenced by the culture around them, including the attitude toward religion and science.

I didn't grow up Catholic. I converted as an adult from a fundamentalist Evangelical background, and one of the criticisms well-intentioned friends had for me at the time was that "the Catholics believe in evolution."

And that's very much the case. Formal Church documents confirm the belief, and the very large majority of Catholics believe it. There isn't anything contradictory in believing evolution may have been the means by which God created people.

Whether that was the case when or where anyone else was growing up, I can't attest. I'm only speaking to the commonality of the belief in the present.

Its rare with european catholics. US , I dont know

I think the important thing to note though, is this was not always the case? Catholicism and evolutionary theory have a rather strange history where it has changed stance several times. The recent Catholic church has not been opposed to it and has priests who work on evolution just at there are priests who work on physics and the large hadron collider.

It's kind of strange to say but if anything Creationists believe in a hyper evolution - for starters there is a complimentary geological theory which holds that most changes are catastrophic e.g. canyons, islands are the result of wildly destructive volcanos, primordial floods (think massive post iceage lakes breaking through a mountainside, or extreme and constant hurricanes and tidal waves).

As for evolution, the Christians literally believe man was made whole, along with every other living thing - a more sci-fi explanation would be massive viral and bacterial mutation, like a lichen growing legs and arms (bacteria and viruses both evolve at breathtaking speeds, so it is possible if unlikely).

Creationists do actually acknowledge evolution, they usually downplay its significance or spend a lot of time pointing the current scientific inconsistencies in mainstream evolutionary theories.

I think they are both a bit wrong - obviously Creationism is wildly optimistic about both an all powerful entity who creates things then mysteriously vanishes, never to be heard from again (discounting the delusions or child-exploitation of near death "I met god" accounts). There is a wide amount of expression our genes already afford us - it only takes a couple generations for most animals or plants to express very different visible traits. Couple that with invasive viral infections permanently mutating the gonad materials (eggs, sperm, spores) and wild environmental fluctuations (meteors hitting the ocean), you could experience evolutionary forces in a very short time frame. I don't know that you require billions or trillions of years in the margins of carbon dating.

Ignoring questions of whether the astrophysicists have it right with the age of the known universe (is the big bang truly the beginning of the universe or just an event in a multidimensional cosmos?), a middle ground where the evolutionists and Christians are both wrong seems more plausible to me - hominids have been around for a very, very long time, perhaps even coexisting hundreds or billions of years ago with dinosaurs. We just happen to exist post some set of climactic events, cutting us off from our history.

I should clarify - I am not pro Creationism, I used to appreciate having been taught a different theory, however apologist doesn't make for good science, especially when the mainstream theories have the easy out of calling anything else "Christian nonsense". E.g. in physics there is the standard model, and various competing alternative models, crucially there are no major appeals to authority and so competing theories can thrive. Evolution is almost political on the other hand, much the same as climate science.

I guess we had Christian physics, we called that witchcraft. Ironically, with some of the immoral things modern tech has enabled, perhaps the claims of beezlebub in your tech weren't off the mark wholly. They are plenty of angels in tech though too...

People outright rejecting evolution I have met very few (I'm also outside the US). But I think it is a somewhat common view that evolution was kicked off and being shaped by a god. While the gist of evolutionary theory is simple to grasp for everyone, the results and involved timespans are mind-boggling.

As nuclearnice1 has noted... "Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution." I am a practicing Catholic, happily formed and informed. There is nothing in Church teaching that prevents the faithful from studying and defending evolution(1) (or any of the natural sciences, for that matter--contrary to popular belief, the Church does not condemn science that is true to its discipline). Some will reject it (often out of ignorance of what evolution actually teaches(2) or simply as a matter of choice) while others will prayerfully accept it. Myself, I am fascinated by science and always in appreciation to those who genuinely "stick to the science."

(1) But there is an important provision to be considered by the faithful: the teaching of evolution cannot patently claim that there is no God. It is outside the scope of any science to disprove (or prove) the existence of God. And thus it is a misrepresentation of the science for any of the faithful to claim otherwise. The Church respects science in its endeavor to sincerely discover truth; Pope John Paul II once put it as such in his writings (I am paraphrasing here): "Faith forms reason, reason informs faith."

(2) Darwin's work was in fact not motivated by a sense of atheism [1]. In fact, I believe that I once discovered that in the Forward to On the Origin of Species, he references God in a positive note. The exact comment escapes me--perhaps someone with the actual text can verify this.

[1] https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-12041.xml

Georges Lemaître - father of the Big Bang theory and Catholic priest.

Gregor Johann Mendel - father of modern genetics and Catholic friar.

This sort of teleological and "ranked" view where what we ourselves consider "most developed" we assume must also be "last" or "have undergone more evolution" reminds me of our some of our views of human social patterns too.

Like thinking a "culture" that some people have labelled/categorized as "hunter gatherer" therefore somehow is "less developed" or even has "less history" than other social groupings, and reveals the way humans were a long time ago -- whereas in fact any human culture on the planet at the same time has the same amount of history and development behind them.

Some of this is covered in Graeber and Wengrow's recent _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_.

We really want to impute a direction to changes over time (whether biological or social); to think that the changes always go in the same direction; that it's a direction of "better"; that the things we currently value as 'better' are that directional 'better'; and that therefore anything we think is 'not as good' is somehow "earlier" or "less developed". None of those are accurate ways to understand actual historical changes over time, whether biological/evolutionary or social or anything else really.

Well, at least we have 'undergone more evolution', possibly, arguably.

But if you want to deconstruct the argument fully, evolution actually isn't really anything at all - shifting genes in a shifting environment.

Like a rock rolling down a hill, bouncing off of other rocks.

It's not even a 'process' and it probably should be called:

'Species Drift' or something like that.

And taken even further - you and I are just 'lumps of material bouncing around'.

The term 'intelligence' has no scientific meaning either.

How can a bag of random particles be 'intelligent' or 'create'?

You're not 'reading' this, you're randomly bouncing through the universe. It just seems like you are 'doing' something.

But you're not 'doing' anything more than the chair you are sitting on. It's there, you are there. You both got there the same way.

But the matter of fact is, we do have metaphysical foundations:

Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human 'Kindgoms' in which we believe that the 'Human' condition is more evolved, at very least Han the 'Mineral' and likely 'Vegetable'.

We basically take that, and the presence of life as 'matter of fact' and a kind reality.

It just doesn't jive well with Scientific Materialism.

And if we do accept those basic principles, well, we are 'pretty much 'more' evolved than chimps', even though technically I do understand it's also reasonable to just say 'we are siblings with common ancestors' and that's that.

Every species in existence right now has the same number of years of evolutionary history, right?

So on what basis are you saying it makes sense to say humans have had "more" evolution than chimpanzees? What does it mean for one species to have "undergone more evolution" than another, if both have the same amount of evolutionary history?

Just on the basis that you believe the result of that evolution for humans is an organism you consider more sophisticated? That is, I'd think, dependent on the assumption that evolution always leads in the direction you consider "more sophisticated", and, I guess, that it takes so much evolution to get so much sophictiation so something that is "more sophisticated" just must be "more evolved". That is also not true.

You can make a "metaphysical" value judgement that humans are more sophisticated, sure! I'm not trying to say that is inappropriate to do. But "evolved" is the wrong word for this, if you think it means the same thing we're talking about when we're talking about biological species evolution as formulated by Darwin etc.

Oh yes, everything alive has the same level of evolution, that said, things evolve and adapt at different rates.

The term 'evolved' I think can be used in English to describe something 'more advanced' by the crude and arbitrary manner in which we generally apply it.

Maybe in a Scientific context it wouldn't be correct, I admit that.

Yeah, I mean the whole point I'm working on here (going off of codeflo who I was replying to, who was making much the same point) -- is that we believe that the biological process of evolution always leads in the direction of "advancement", and something that is "more advanced" (which is to some extent both subjective, and a value judgement rather than a descriptive one) has "more evolution" behind it (the biological kind).

Yes, the word "evolved" can be used in a non-scientific way that has nothing to do with the origin of species or natural selection or genetic change over time too. I don't know if this the cause of our confusion, or that it's the result of our confusion, because so many of us, since Darwin, have had these assumptions that "evolution" functions teleologically and in a certain direction at a certain rate.

So that leads the wrong idea that, as codeflo points out, "evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last" over chimpanzees, or humans undergone "more evolution" than chimpanzeees.

When we understand the biological process of evolution more clearly, we can understand the natural world and the species in it and the relation between them more clearly.

I think „adapted“ is a better word

There's a sharp difference between being more evolved and being better (e.g. smarter). We have "drifted" from a common ancestor for the same billions of years as, say, slime molds, so we cannot possibly be more evolved.

We are last in the sense that we are leaf nodes on the tree of life (at least for the moment)? But of course that is by no means a unique trait, the tree would have many many leaf nodes.

And all of them are currently "good enough", so roughly at the same level of fitness. Of course, models that have been relatively stable for 400M years, like sharks, are in some sense "better" than the fad of the day, like us.

"good" shouldnt be conflated with "most evolved."

To be more evolved, means to be more changed from the source. It means specialization for a specific scenario. Often "more evolved" can be "worse" once the environment changes, and that specialization becomes a disadvantage instead of an advantage. Or that a change brings one benefit but another potentially larger pitfall in the long run.

The amount of evolution should be measured in iteration cycles, how much change over how much time. It's also possible that something iterated many many times quickly long in the past and then stopped, vs something that just started making changes more recently.

>We are last in the sense that we are leaf nodes on the tree of life (at least for the moment

Who said that? There are tons of newer than us leafs (organisms that evolved after we did).

If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.

I think you misunderstood parent. There is a natural order on the tree of life starting in the first living organism (the root node) and ending in organisms that are still around (the leaf nodes).

With 'last' parent meant 'last with respect to that order', not necessarily in the sense of 'older' and 'newer' (which correlates with this order, as you pointed out).

> Who said that? There are tons of newer than us leafs (organisms that evolved after we did).

I meant leaf nodes in the sense of the tree data structure, so I think we are saying exactly the same thing.

> If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.

Yes that's exactly what I meant with the second part of my comment.

I think this is supposed to mean that humans appeared relatively late in Earth's history ("two minutes to midnight"), instead of being there from the very beginning. Or to put it in a different way: much more species appeared before humans existed than after they already existed.

> that we ourselves consider very important

I was with you until that statement. The concept of "importance" itself is also something we ourselves consider ie. you're not a monkey therefore you don't know if importance is even a thing for a monkey, or if it is and that it appears that they prefer bananas over AK 47's you're still not a monkey so you won't be able to be sure.

Therefore to attribute having the same concept of importance as us to another species is absurd.

I don’t think we disagree, if I understand you correctly, that’s more or less what I wanted to express.

Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale Nature of History does an excellent job explaining why the textbook visualization of the evolutionary tree reenforces this notion and why it needs to be done away with. It may be a wild understanding, but when every middle schooler is shown "The March of Progress" can it be any surprise that folks think we're more evolved?

Arent we the only species that has a prefortal cortex and can make plans as group for the future?

What separates us afaik is - in bible terms - that we left the paradise, by becoming conscious.

In biblical terms this doesn't make sense to me because before they left the paradise Adam and Eve already had the task to step down to the animals and name them (step down as in: take care of them).

What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.

If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?

Octopus and dolphins seem likely to be conscious. Ravens too.

But are they sentient? Can an octopus sit on a board of directors?

They can’t communicate with humans, and their thought patterns are likely very different to ours. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just as complex. Whales and dolphins especially.

I'm not a big believer of thought complex thought patterns that fail to manifest in any meaningful way. If they are as sentient, they should have to make a difference.

Just because we don't, or can't understand the way those patterns manifest does not imply that they are meaningful.

> fail to manifest in any meaningful way

To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)

One of our major advantages against other animals are versatile hands with opposable thumbs.

I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.

Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.

The same attitude was shown by humans towards other humans a thousand years ago. If they couldn't understand the language of another tribe, they considered that tribe inferior and called them names signifying that.

The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".

Maybe they’re just wiser than us.

How complex are a humans thoughts if not raised by other humans? How much of complex thought is transferred generationally through example and language. An octopus biology may be capable of extremely complex thought, but as a species they are limited by their inability to document and propagate information in written form, unless they have some kind of telekinesis and can beam and download memories from each other.

I thought it was nothing but octopuses on those.

It's sharks. You don't need that much sentience to sit on the board of directors.

The vampire squids are usually busy doing M&A and securities underwriting.

Of course, the true test of sentience is whether you can direct a SV startup.

They can pick stocks better than we can. Imagine if they could read.

I feel like the main difference is that we shape the world around us to a degree far greater than any other being, to the point where it affected our evolution tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I mean yeah, some animals use tools like sticks or rocks to get food, or build rudimentary shelters like nests, or even plant or store food for next year, but they don't build fires and cook their food, they don't produce more than they need for themselves and their immediate families, etc.

I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.

The first oxygen producing organisms altered the planet way more than us. In a way, they terraformed Earth.

Beavers were arguably greater engineers than humans when modern humans first emerged several hundred thousand years ago.

>If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?

Well, they don't seen to have that great of a civilization

You mean I have to do 9 hours of excel a day because a monkey ate a mushroom millions of years ago.

Was it a mushroom or a black monolith?

You just picked the new brand name for my shrooms.

"Black Monolith"

I will email you royalty checks next week.

Nice euphemism you’ve got there. We didn’t leave paradise. We got thrown out on our bare behinds :)

(Good point though.)

Where's the evidence of that?

I think the poster is clearly speaking within the context of the biblical narrative, and not asserting the factuality of it.

I thought it was Original Sin.

And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.

By some interpretations, sentience is the original sin (or at least the consequence of it.) Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, after all, and if you take the serpent at its word, the knowledge was to "be like God, knowing both good and evil."

Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.

Yep, the two are intertwined. This is actually some deep philosophy related to the determinism/free will debate and how it relates to morality, embedded in religious scripture.

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