As part of its “Big Questions Essay Series” the John Templeton Foundation put the question “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?” to a panel of prominent personalities from a range of fields. Having read the writing heads, what follows is my short retort.
Naturally…
… if by “evolution” we mean that set of processes underlying emergence and by “human nature” we mean that set of features—physiological, psychological, sociological, etc.—which all members of our species share in common. If by “evolution” we mean the extended synthesis, so much depends upon how much we expect from our cause to explain. By meaning our terms thus broadly we barely inch beyond Aristotle whose celebrated formulae took the shape of “man is by nature a _____ beast.” The small step which proves a giant leap forward was made when we substituted Darwin's has become for Aristotle’s is. This stride proves a step back toward the tutelage of Heraclitus.
Πάντα ῥεῖ , everything flows, nutshells the wisdom of Heraclitus. This formula employs the wisdom-traditional Pan-Sprüche, all-metaphors, presaging present-day physicists’ “all is energy,” their mechanisms of transformation echoing Heraclitus’s Logos of becoming. “All things come to pass in accordance with this Logos,” he is remembered to have uttered. In this story Heraclitus emerges as a PMH, a philosophically modern human.
Our understanding of the processes underlying change and the features which all the members of our species share is far far far from complete… but should we expect otherwise? The prevailing 4.6B year world metanarrative puts PMH at the tail end of a long story of becoming. If we were to condense the world-story to a 24-hour day, PMH emerges at 23:59:59.9. How much becoming ought we expect in a handful of milliseconds? In this context human sapiens appears in slime-mold stage.
No good metanarratives leave us in medias res. By all accounts a new day will dawn, another 24 dramatic hours will be played out upon the stage before, in the fullness of time (at the end of day two) stellar fire consumes our world with apocalyptic fury. Give us a second—53,240 years to those tending the metaphor—and let the logos of becoming take its course. By all statistical accounts our species has another second… 24-48 seconds to be precise.^ A second ago, according to the story, we were hunter-gatherers lacking modern language. By this reckoning, a second ago human nature was not modern human nature,* our species’ “great leap forward” taking place 8-9 deciseconds ago.
The real big question remains how well does the prevailing metanarrative explain us? While E.O. Wilson’s pragmatic ideal of a grand evolutionary epic, a chapter in Carl Sagan’s cosmic saga, enjoys its vogue status, its verses have yet to be written... nature is yet to be named, Logos is yet to be fluently spoken. The glory of this quintessence of stardust is our open canon.
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^ The average life-span of top-predator species on our planet has been a few million years.
* “Modern human behavior is observed in cultural universals which are the key elements shared by all groups of people throughout the history of humanity.” Wikipedia
bravo. well said. i might even advance a stronger (stranger) claim that, in any given case, "the set of all processes underlying emergence" explains an individual's features (or a gene-pool's...no matter where you draw the circle). in this stranger claim, "human nature" is extraordinarily diverse...individualized, even. thus, this claim remains non-reductionistic and non-deterministic: an individual's choices are part of "the set of all processes underlying emergence" (as is the set of all environments). "genes, memes, and temes" exists always already as a gestalt--as does the ever-unique petri dish of a "human nature" in which they live and move. when it comes to the evolution of "human nature," perhaps lamarck wasn't completely off after all.
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