• Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    Imagine if you will a proto-human species with brains small enough that they didn't have the problems that we have with squeezing our baby heads through the birth canal. Imagine that that species has, on account of their limited cognitive capacity, very little in the way of long-term planning capability, and like I would imagine most animal species do, mostly just live their lives day to day, reacting only to immediately observable threats, and then when those threats are gone, going back to blissful ignorance and not worrying about when the next threat is going to come along.

    Imagine that a mutation happens in some individual of this species that causes him to have unusually large brain size and comparably increased cognitive capacity. This poor individual is, on behalf of that, cursed with what is effectively anxiety the likes of which none of his species has ever known. Instead of just relaxing and being happy, this individual is constantly thinking ahead about what the next threat is going to be, and planning on how to deal with it in advance. He looks around at all the other members of his species and sees that these people aren't working their asses off like he is, they're just coasting along all happy and innocent, because they have no idea of the signs of danger that he can see, they can't tell safe from threatening at all unless it's right up in their damn faces.

    On account of that nigh-paranoid existential dread, this individual does manage to survive and reproduce better than other members of his species. Maybe this mutation came at a time when the changing environment made the caloric requirements of such a big brain and the difficulties in giving birth to such smart babies worth the trade off. In time, more and more of their people are descended from this lineage of big-brained folks. But they haven't speciated yet. There's still the big-brains and the little-brains living together in the same population. And at least the big-brained one can see the difference between them. They know what's a bad sign and what's a good one, while the others don't. As a consequence, they know that death is coming for them eventually, and they feel compelled to work their asses off to ward it off as long as possible, instead of just coasting along blissfully ignorant until unforeseen death takes them. They also notice that their big heads make childbearing a major pain in the... lets say "ass"... compared to their little-brained brethren.

    Imagine at least some form of proto-language is around by this time, if not having been recently invented by the big-brained folk. So accounts of this observation were passed down, of the anxious workaholic big-brained folk gradually displacing the blissfully ignorant little-brain folk, their people gradually changing from the old kind to the new as differential survival odds changed the distribution of genes in their population... accounts of that passed down, with the inevitable distortions, over time unmeasured.

    Until eventually someone wrote down the account as the first peoples having not known death, until they learned to tell good from evil, becoming as gods in the process thanks to such foresight, but being cursed to work hard their entire lives in exchange, in contrast to their former ignorance; and their women cursed to a painful childbirth as well.

    And also something about a talking snake and a pair of trees, but that stuff's irrelevant decoration of the core story.
  • I like sushi
    4.3k
    I could actually say Humpty Dumpty is a story like this too. Originally we were unaware of all our problems and just mucked about on a wall. Then one day we fell off the wall - an unlikely and immediate evolutionary leap - and released we were fractured creatures and so started to stay in one place and ‘put ourselves back together again’ and then other tribes joined in - ‘all the King’s horse and all the King’s men’ - but we couldn’t make ourselves not know what we know.

    Ergo Humpty-Dumpty is merely another rendition of Genesis.

    That said there are a number of creation myths that tend to have common themes and most narratives in movies or books also repeat a certain common themes and characters.
  • BrianW
    999
    Imagine if you will a proto-human species with brains small enough that they didn't have the problems that we have with squeezing our baby heads through the birth canal.Pfhorrest

    Earlier human species had bigger skulls than we do.

    image-asset.png?format=750w
    Left: homo sapiens skull.
    Right: Neanderthal skull.

    Through evolution from neanderthals to homo sapiens, brain size increased while skull size decreased (jaws, teeth, etc, also decreased).
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    I don't know. That doesn't really seem like an interpretation of Genesis to me.

    Especially since you didn't even mention Phil Collins.
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    That is a point, but homo sapiens didn't evolve from neanderthals, we were close relatives, that apparently interbred (and so were possibly subspecies of the same species? I'm not clear on the current consensus about that).

    And also, my hypothesis was not necessarily about the last step from pre-homo sapiens to homo sapiens specifically, but just some unspecified step along the evolutionary ladder. Neanderthals already had intelligence comparable to homo sapiens (as evidenced by tools, clothes, burial, etc), so on my hypothesis would also be descendants of the big-brained folk in the story.
  • I like sushi
    4.3k
    It’s ‘hypothetical’. There is no evidence, or consensus, that we all of a sudden developed language. There is hard evidence that shows certain language capacities we have scattered among other animals.

    Your scenario is interesting but hardly applicable to reality. If you were just generalising about human evolution, then yeah, at some point we progressed - likely due to a build up of cultural traditions selected for a more ‘intelligent’ communicative capacity.

    Some of us, likely most of us, carry DNA from various human relatives (Neanderthals and Devonians). Genesis came from Babylonia. A great number of creation myths are similar and a great many are quite different.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    I think you're on the right track though I think you may not like the destination. :up: :clap:
  • frank
    14.5k
    Love it. Are you familiar with the epic of Gilgamesh? Think about the time between now and when Genesis was first written and go backward that same amount again: that's when Gilgamesh was written about. It's the oldest piece of literature we have. Elements of Genesis are sort of scattered through it, which suggests that Genesis may be the final resting place for certain images (like the snake, the guy being made out of clay, the fall from innocence involving sex, the flood, etc.)

    I don't think there's anything about knowing good from evil, but mortality is a central theme in it. The cultural background is Sumerians, Akkadians, and their neighbors throughout the Bronze Age. To see the gulf between our time and the Bronze Age, read about the Bronze Age collapse. Somebody told me the book by Finkelstein is excellent, but I haven't read it yet. The one by Cline: 1177 BCE, The Year Civilization Collapsed, is awesome.
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    I was not hypothesizing that language suddenly evolved, and I'm not making any particular claims about human evolution at all.

    I'm just noting that certain elements of Genesis are interpretable as a distorted retelling of certain consequences of uncontroversial things about human evolution. The first part of my thought process was the idea that that bit of Genesis could have been originally meant to be somewhat existentialist, or have been a distortion of an originally existential lesson: that it's a metaphor for how knowledge brings with it awareness of death and with that a loss of innocent naivety. (That's an old thought that I've had for a long while). Then the night I posted this, I thought about how the loss of that naivety brings with it the drive to struggle against that foreseen doom, and how that meshes with the cursed-to-work-the-land aspect of Genesis too.

    That then made me think of the bit about how women are cursed to a painful childbirth, and how we humans do have rather difficult childbearing thanks to our unusually large heads, and that made me think that perhaps the origin of the story that eventually morphed into Genesis (me already being aware of influences like Gilgamesh, thanks @frank) is much older than even that, perhaps passed down from a time when some proto-humans with big brains and heads were living alongside others who did not have such big brains, and heads, and so did not have the difficulties of childbirth that we have, and also didn't have the cognitive capacity to worry about the future like we do.

    The idea does depend on at least some kind of proto-language existing as far back as then, but I'm not making any specific claims about exactly how or when language (or big enough brains to worry about the future, or cause trouble in childbirth) developed. Just that if some proto-language was around when those big brains and heads did develop, some recounting of those events could have survived, mutated, and made their way into the myths that eventually got recorded once writing was invented.
  • I like sushi
    4.3k
    Mythos are clearly the expression of human psychology. I’m not sure exactly what in Genesis you think says this compared to the hundreds of other myths around the world?

    Is there anything specific? Where does Genesis mention head size metaphorically or otherwise?
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    You would probably like the book this review was about - Daniel Dennett's 'Breaking the Spell', an attempt at a naturalist account of religion. (Personally, I'm with the reviewer.)
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    I’m not favoring Genesis over any other myths, I just had a thought about that one.

    And as I said, Genesis claims that women are cursed with difficult childbirth as a consequence of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and men are cursed to toil and work the land. I’m just suggesting that both of those elements of the story could have arisen as a mutated account of the prehistoric increase in brain and thus head size, because large brain size increases cognitive capacity and as already elaborated could facilitate worrying about the future and thus driving a harder-working less carefree lifestyle, and large brain size is why humans have comparably more difficult childbirth than other animals. I feel like I’m just repeating myself here.
  • I like sushi
    4.3k
    Yes, because I’m trying to figure out what is ‘philosophical’ about this musing? What is your point exactly?
  • I like sushi
    4.3k
    We could shift this into another area maybe? Essentially you’re doing highly speculative hermeneutics (in the true sense of ‘hermeneutics’). This then turns into an epistemic problem combined with theology.
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    The main philosophical angle of this thought is the existentialist interpretation of that part of Genesis. That the story can be taken as a metaphor for knowledge of "good and evil" (foresight of potential danger or safety) bringing with it existential dread. That, coupled with possibility of that kind of knowledge deriving from an increase in brain size and the commensurate problems in childbirth we humans have.

    This isn't supposed to be any especially deep or rigorous philosophical thesis, it's just a broadly philosophical thought I had that I thought people might find interesting.
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