0079 Thomas Aquinas has no knowledge in regards to the scientific construct of evolutionary theory.

He has no idea about the impending “discovery” of a new continent, standing to the west, between Europe and India.  He has no idea that this new continent is filled with people that start trending towards civilization around 3000 U0′, rather than 0 U0′.

He has no information about ancient civilizations that lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, in the Near East, only to leave dusty hills containing royal libraries of cuneiform clay tablets, fired into bricks.

0080 What does Aquinas know?

The Genesis stories of Adam and Eve offer clues.

Aquinas portrays Adam and Eve as individuals, in the state of original justice.  Original justice manifests as a rectitude of order among the parts of the sovereign person, who is ultimately wholly grounded in the rectitude of an order towards God.

This seems like a metaphor for royalty to me.

There is no rebelliousness within the kingdom.

The passions among the parts (the people) do not conflict with the soul’s (the king’s) dominion.

Indeed, the reasoned judgment of the soul (the king) cultivates and trains the expression of passions (among the people) in order for the person (the kingdom) to survive and flourish.

0081 How does the double (personal and political) vision of Aquinas key into the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?

0082 In Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues), the authors of the reviewed book make great hay over Robin Dunbar’s formula correlating mammalian brain size to group size.  The hominin brain to body mass ratio increases significantly in the millions of years from the southern apes to Homo sapiens.  So does group size.  Hominins start as bands (50) and end up with communities (150), with higher resonances, all the way to tribe (1500).

The idea of group size resonances occurring at factors of three plays a role in their argument.  However, the authors of the reviewed book do not realize that the evolution of talk might occur within one social circle (the team), then later expand to the entire group (the community) when circumstances change.  Hand talk is locked within the team for over a million years, until the domestication of fire offers a platform for talking itself: gossip after a fire-cooked meal.

Well, hand talk covers more than gossip.  Over time, hand-talk becomes fully linguistic, allowing the proclamation of grammatically correct yet counter-intuitive statements, such as “the raven gathers pebbles from the creek”.  In hand talk, the statement is grammatically correct.  But, it does not make much sense, because ravens don’t swim.

0083 Here is a picture of the various social circles in operation in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

0084 Each social circle exhibits its own relational logic.  Each social circle is a site for natural selection of individuals suitable for that social circle.  This includes diverse teams.  Over generations, each long-lasting successful exercise of obligate collaborative foraging selects for adaptations, including neural and muscular, that make the team activity more productive and more fun.  For example, the physics of rock fragmentation becomes intuitively natural, for some, eventually leading to the invention of a new stone tool technology, the Acheulean stone tool, that is made ahead of time and carried along in the team activity.

0085 Team activity?

Hominins figure out all sorts of ways to obtain food that does not conflict with the interests of other creatures.

For example, bury a lot of overripe fruit, then wait a few weeks.  The hole is now full of delicious edible bugs.  The creativity of our ancestors must have been incredible. Their range of culinary traditions may put our own to shame.   Each successful team selects for its own adaptations, both anatomical and physiological, making its exercise of obligatory collaborative foraging more… um… “natural”.  No wonder the size of the hominin neocortex expands over time, along with group size.  It’s like a giant menu of what and how to eat.

As well as what and how to avoid being eaten.

0086 Is this where Aquinas comes into the picture?

Aquinas’s double vision is both personal and political.  The prelapsarian adamah is both a kingdom of parts and a sovereign over a kingdom.  Plus, this sovereign answers to the order of God.

Consider each social circle to be an individual writ large.  Consider the individual hominin as a social circle writ small.  Each social circle has its own nature and grace.  Each person has his or her own nature and grace.

0087 Does Aquinas know that the term, “Adam”, in Genesis, is a pun, meaning both “humanity” (adamah) and “an individual’s name” (Adam)?

Certainly, his political-personal approach calls to mind a harmony of the social circles, where higher social circles operate as sovereign, and lower social circles operate as the kingdom of parts.  Plus, the higher social circles are always aware of an order higher than their own.

0088 Now comes the kicker.

A perfect or complete justness within the souls of the social circles associate to a more perfect or complete governance of the bodies of the social circles, so that the whole and the parts are (relatively speaking) immortal.  Surely, the people who compose the social circles are mortal.  But, the bodies of the social circles are not mortal.  So, adamah is immortal, even though Adam is not.  Yet, adamah is Adam and Adam is adamah.

0089 To me, the immortal harmony of the social circles, selected through cultural (for each expression of a social circle) and natural (for individuals with aptitudes for being productive and having fun within social circles) selection, corresponds to the tree of life, in the garden of Eden.  The mortality of the person resides within the immortality of the tree of life.  We (hominins) are the roots.  We are the fruits of the tree of life.  Plus, the tree of life grows in a garden ordained by God.

Culture and hominins co-evolve.

0090 Yes, this evolution-informed vision is different than an immortal Adam, as some sort of philosopher king, ruling over all the parts of his body, while remaining ordered to the rectitude of God.

Certainly, it sounds different and more research is needed.

But, my goal is only to establish a principle that is intimated by John Paul II’s theology of the body.

The ethos of the gift is a phenotypic expression of our species, because the trait is an adaptation to the gift, as a triadic relation.

0091 Once one starts to fill in the cognitive blanks about human origins that have been opened during the past eight centuries…. as soon as one tries to translate what Aquinas says about the prelapsarian Adam into the evolution of adamah, humanity, in the double framework of the souls and the bodies of mortal beings participating in the souls and bodies of intergenerational beings, composed of diverse and nested (not so much hierarchical) social circles that promote the survival and flourishing of its participants… does one begin to appreciate the intellectual daring of John Paul II’s proclamation of a blessed, holistic and Christian theology of the body.