Lecture 4: Becoming Human: The Continuing Mystery

Animals may navigate by the stars or use the Earth’s magnetic field, but only humans wish to map the celestial heavens or probe the atomic structure of magnetism.

Products of evolution, with a four billion year history imprinted on all parts of our bodies, humans have passed a threshold that means we now transcend our animal origins.

Yet this is strange for two reasons.

First, incipient “human-ness” is clearly visible in a wide variety of animals, be it expressed in terms of tool-making, singing or even awareness of death. Yet in no case has it “crystallized”. We stand alone, feet on the ground, head towards the stars.

Second, whilst the trajectory of hominid evolution allows insights into our unfolding self-awareness the crucial steps remain strangely elusive. Clearly it has some link to the increase in brain size, but direct correlations are surprisingly elusive.

One approach is to re-trace the hominid trajectory: suppose we found some living australopithecines? How should we treat them? A nice cup of tea or a short trip to the zoo?

Ironically our transcendence of evolution has obscured our Darwinian roots. We need to climb back down our phylogeny and re-visit some evolutionary cousins. Not surprisingly, evolutionary convergence offers some very interesting clues, and especially relevant is the emergence of music. Birds, whales and humans all converge in song, suggesting that perhaps there really is a harmony of the spheres. With ears re-opened, we may be willing to see that far from being the pinnacle of Creation we are still mere juveniles.

This lecture has been recorded on MP3: