A Mutant Ape?
How dry bones kick up the dust!
Did ape evolve to man or not?
What is the real issue here? It is, first and finally, holistic versus materialistic interpretation of the evidence. It is between a simply grasped, progressive theory and an equally simple, conservative interpretation of the facts.
After elaborating on the issues of philosophical mind-set, scientific methodology and the nature of archetype this book disentangles facts and fictions of an ape/ man saga that has lasted 150 years. In complementing Science and the Soul it deals comparatively with fossil and molecular evidence for both materialistic and holistic interpretations.
Mind-dust will swirl. Are you ready for some turbulence?
In summary, is your personal pedigree an evolutionary fact? All Hail, then, to everyone’s Bacterial Patriarch!
Or perhaps not. The basis of biology is information (expressed in and from the form of DNA). What, Science and the Soul asked, is the source of all informative potential, that is, of any program that’s symbolically and digitally expressed in code? Some, irrationally, posit chance; others, rationally, claim mind. If mind, then you may reasonably argue that the theory of evolution (not of variation) is today’s phlogiston theory and its oxygen is immaterial information.
Below are listed this book’s Contents. Headings and sub-headings outline the order in which both materialistic and holistic cases for the origin of humankind are formulated. The latter case involves information and the program called an archetype; and archetype, like all symbolically expressed ideas including your own, is metaphysical. No doubt, however, wise materialists impatiently, implacably insist, this feature is not only theoretically impossible, it is materialistically IMPOSSIBLE…
Of course it is. So see what this denial means for you.
1. For Starters
2. Troublesome Irrationality
6. The Imperative of Law
7. Racism, Slavery and All That
8. An Instructive Analogy
9. When Is a Man a Man?
10. Man as Opposed to Ape
11. Fossils (Not Molecules)
12. Ages of Rock
13. Years of Palaeoanthropology
15. Homo erectus/ Java Man
- The Selenka Trinil Expedition
- von Koenigswald’s Research
17. Homo erectus/ Peking Man
18. Other erecti (upright men)
19. Broken Hill Man
20. Australopithecines (and antecessors)
21. Muddle in the Middle
22. Molecules (Not Fossils)
- Autosomal DNA
- Hot-Spots and Humans
- Human Leukogen Antigen (HLA)
- Skin Colour
- Non-protein-coding (ex-junk) DNA
- Fusion of Chromosome 2
- Human Accelerated Regions (HARs)
- The Male Chromosome: Y-DNA
23. African Eve
24. Adam and Evolution
- Rival Suitors
- First Principles
25. Mythological Mirage
Fossil Catalogue Abbreviations
Hominoid Classification Reference
Uniformitarian (Evolutionary) Chronology