0010 Okay, so there is a off-chance that there is wisdom… or… superstitious nonsense… that is independent of science, comes from the realm of theology, appears in the mirror of science and provides a weirdly compelling impression.  After all, the start of the Developed Neolithic (projected into the mirror of theology) enhances the impressiveness of Genesis 1:30 (projected into the mirror of science).  How can it be superstitious nonsense, when the Genesis verse sounds like a sign of the corresponding evolutionary period?

0011 With this impressiveness in mind, I reiterate the following.

Currently, the biological sciences present all evolution as continuous developments in time, although there are moments of radical… um… “re-organization”, hence the theory of punctuated equilibrium.  When the evolutionary sciences cast their image of human evolution into the mirror, the theologian sees a picture that does not quite sync with the wild change of… um… “genre” that occurs the moment after God wraps up the Creation Story, by telling humans that they should give food to the animals (Genesis 1:30).

So, the question arises, “Is there a scientific proposal that would be in sync with this change in genre?

Yes, there is.  It is called the hypothesis of the first singularity.

0012 Both human evolution and chapters one through three of Genesis portray two phases.

0013 Razie Mah offers three scientific masterworks that project well in the mirror of theology.

The first work is titled, The Human Niche.  The human niche is the potential of triadic relations.  This e-book covers the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

The second work is titled, An Archaeology of the Fall.  It dramatizes the scientific discovery of the first singularity.  But, for those who prefer not to dally in fiction, there is The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace.  In the series, “Crystallizations of the Fall”, this essay is paired with Original Sin and Original Death: Romans 5:12-19.  

The third work is titled, How To Define the Word “Religion”.  The accompanying course includes ten primers, starting with A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form.  This course concerns our current Lebenswelt.  It introduces the category-based nested form, which encompasses three logics, corresponding to firstness, secondness and thirdness.  Thirdness brings secondness into relation with firstness.

Yes, these terms come from the philosophy of Charles Peirce.  The logic of firstness is inclusive and allows contradictions.  The logic of secondness is where the logics of contradiction and non-contradiction apply.  The logics of thirdness are exclusion, complement and alignment.

0014 In sum, human evolution comes with a twist.

That twist is mirrored in the sudden shift of genres in the first two chapter of Genesis.

0015 Our current Lebenswelt starts with the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.

Do the stories of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2.4 on) associate to the events early in the “history” of the Ubaid?

“History”?

The term, “history”, typically refers to written documentation that serves as evidence of trends and events.

Perhaps, I can qualify stories about trends and events of times before the invention of writing in the Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia as “pre-history”.

0016 Arnold prefers the term, “mytho-history”.

0017 Yet, even here, science adds to the picture.

No one in the world would know about the mythic origin stories of the ancient Near East were it not for intrepid archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (who, ironically, were funded by wealthy people interested in the origins of civilization, of the Bible, of the Iliad and Odyssey, and so on).  One could say that our knowledge of these origin stories is “fragmentary”, because it is read off of fragments of cuneiform-bearing clay tablets that were fired into bricks when royal libraries burned, thousands of years before the modern age.

Some tablets date over two-thousand years before Socrates.

Indeed, the start of our current Lebenswelt is nominally set at 7824 years ago at 0 U0′ (Ubaid Zero-Prime).  The Uruk invented writing around 1800 U0′.  The Sumerian civilization officially starts around 2800 U0′.  Christ lives around 5800 U0′.  Our year is nominally 7824 U0′, but maybe astrologers who hear about the hypothesis of the first singularity can cast for an appropriate celestial inauguration marking the start of the Ubaid, the first culture to practice speech-alone talk.

0018 The list of mythic origin stories of the ancient Near East and Egypt, is not long.  Arnold goes through the trouble of naming them and identifying them with Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian sources.  As it turns out, both the Creation Story and the Primeval History share the same genre of this “literature of the ancient Near East”.

Here is a picture of reflections in the mirrors of science and theology.

Remember that the theologian sees what science projects into the mirror of theology and the scientist sees what theology projects into the mirror of science.

Do I have that correctly?

Does the mirror of theology stand in the domain of theology?

Does science project into the mirror of theology?

Does the mirror of science stand in the domain of science?

Does theology project into the mirror of science?

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Now, where was I?

0019 During the past two centuries, the early stories of Genesis are liberated from a literal reading.  These tales do not explicitly reveal a beginning.  Rather, they portray the beginning of some sort of revelation.  If the Creation Story and Primeval History exhibit not only the style, but some of the content, of the excavated written origin stories of the ancient Near East, then some conclude that the Genesis text derives from these even more ancient written sources.

But, that is not the case.  One cannot confidently claim that the living oral traditions that give rise to the written Genesis text in, say 5200 U0′, are derived from a literary tradition among elites that was written, say as early as 2800 U0′.  No, the style and material are so entangled, that the family oral tradition and the elite written traditions, must have been already established by the time of Ur III.  Ur III is the last flowering of the Sumerian civilization.  After that, the Sumerian language is dead.  It is no longer a living language.

Terah leaves Ur of the Chaldeans.

And Abram leaves his father, Terah, in the land that his kin lived in for so many generations.

0020 A daring exposition of the implications of these two reflections is found in chapter 13C of An Archaeology of the Fall (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues).

Here is another example of the strange double-reflection between the hypothesis of the first singularity and the stories of Adam and Eve.  The infilling of the Persian Gulf occurs during the Wet Neolithic.

0021 One scholar proposes that the correspondences between Genesis and written origin stories of the ancient Near Eastare due to myth-making.  Myth-making produces certain literary characteristics, such as ascribing personality to nature, describing the world phenomenologically, rather than analytically, and a lack of interest in the linearity that we attribute to modern history and historiography.  Arnold adds one other literary feature to Oswalt’s list.  Arnold adds “the etiological dimension”.

0022 Etiology?

Etiology is the study of the world today in terms of what happened long ago.

The Ubaid, the Uruk and the Sumerian Dynastic have no interest in describing the world in a fashion that is acceptable to modern historians.  Why?  There are no modern historians.  Instead, there are people who are dealing with cycles of civilization that are really spirals of unconstrained social complexity.  These folks are caught in the tourbillion and are holding on for dear life.

0023 Indeed, if history is like matter, and myth is like form, the Arnold’s “etiological dimension” is the contiguity between real events as they would be recorded by a modern historian and the mythic telling of events from long ago that explain why the world is the way it is today.

Here is a picture.

0024 Indeed, Arnold calls the etiological dimension an “ideological substance”.

0025 Now, let me apply Oswalt’s and Arnold’s myth-making hypothesis to the thing that both Genesis and the written stories of the ancient Near East have in common.

0026 What is the thing?

The esse_ce, prehistory [etiology], consists of events corresponding to the emergence of unconstrained social complexity in a speech-alone talking culture.  It just happens that the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia is the first culture on Earth to practice speech-alone talk.  At the time, all other cultures practice hand-speech talk.  Soon, cultures adjacent to the Ubaidwill drop the hand-component of their hand-speech talk in order to imitate their civilizing brethren.  But, they will not be able to catch up in social complexity for thousands of years.

The essence, [etiology] ancient myth, consists of stories in oral, then later, written traditions.  The ideological substance that binds the matter of prehistory to the form of ancient myth, cannot be anything like the modern historian’s pretensions that history proceeds linearly.  In fact, if one looks at a recitation of events in modern times, one finds that the recitation does not grant the same insights as (even) the literature of the day, which wrestles with past, present and future.

Perhaps, that is why modern histories can be so boring.

0027 The question arises, “How do we understand this thing?”

In the 7750s, theologian William F. Albright makes an attempt.  He places the thing₂ into the normal context of evolution₃operating on the potential of phases of human reason₁.

Here is a diagram.

0027 Albright suggests that the thing belongs to the first of three phases: (1) the proto-logical, (2) the empirical and (3) the formally logical.

0028 Of course, seventy years later, scholars chuckle, but there is a doom to this first guess.

0029 By way of formal logic, we know that there are phases of human reason.

By way of the empirical, we know that each phase supports its own actuality₂, its own “thing”.

By way of the proto-logical, we all know that each phase is decreed by the gods. 

3, 2, 1 then 0?

0030 For moderns, matter is more like history.  Form is more like knowledge.  The contiguity is more like [explanation].

For those who live before the formalization of logic, matter is still like history, but flavored with the spice of fate.  Surely, fate is empirical.  Form is still like knowledge, but containing a degree of moralization that moderns are not accustomed to.  Surely, moral strength and weakness allows one to act wisely, rather than foolishly.

For those who live before the empirical phase, matter is all about fate and form is all about heroic strengths and weaknesses, along with wisdom and foolishness.

0031 That brings me to the doom of Albright’s initial guess.

If one tracks these phases back from say, the writing of the Bible (where formal logic is apparent in later writings), to the oral histories of Moses (where the law is written in a fashion that does not sound formally logical, but exhibits a certain empiricism), to the stories of Abraham and earlier, all the way to the mythic Adam and Eve (where each figure lives out a theological drama), there is one more story left.

Yes, it is the Creation Story.

0032 The Creation Story may tell of the construction of the tent of the heavens and the earth.  But, in terms of where Albright’s initial guess ends, the Creation Story is what stands before the manufacture of Adam and Eve in the Primeval History.

The Creation Story stands at 0, the null.

0033 Albright imagines that civilizational development is the same as human evolution.

It is not.

So, his guess is doomed.

Doomed to flower into another guess.

0013 What is “dici”?

0014 Most translate the word into English as “speech”.

What happens when I consider the English word, “talk”.

0015 For the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, hominins walk with their feet and talk with their hands.  The initial motivation is obligate collaborative foraging in mixed forest and savannah ecologies, during the late Pliocene and the Pleistocene.

Hominins forage in teams, as evidenced by Oldowan stone tools.  Oldowan stone tools are hastily constructed, on the spot, during a scavenging team-situation.  One rock is struck against another is such a fashion that the target rock fractures, creating a “referent”, a sharp edge, that indicates what is is capable of doing.  It is capable of acting like giant tooth.

To me, the Oldowan stone tool represents the occasion of a relationes secundum esse (a relation according to esse_ce).  There is a sharp edge hidden within the target rock.  A few well-placed blows from another rock reveals that edge.  The edge is its essence.  The edge is what the original target rock refers to, if that stone could talk.

0016 Hand talk within team activities evolves along the same lines.  Every team has needs for members to indicate what they intend to do.  Such indication requires reference.

At first, manual-brachial gestures pantomime or point to their referents.  Then, each particular pantomime and pointing gets routinized into a gesture word, distinct from other gesture words.  So, hand-talk in teams becomes sort of (or proto) linguistic.  The key?  The referent precedes the gesture-word and is imaged or indicated by the gesture-word.  Plus, the gesture-word is used sensibly and avoids confusion.

0017 For example, the raven may be pantomimed in a way that distinguishes it from other birds (such as sparrow or vulture).  

0018 Now, this looks like a relationes secundum dici that is very close to a relationes secundum esse.   So, maybe I should call it relationes secundum dici (hand talk).  Since hand talk images and indicates its referents, and since the referent precedes the gestural-word, dici (hand talk) is just about the same as esse.

0019 What about this “proto-linguistic” business?

Well, the hand-talk word, [RAVEN], can be used in a statement about a raven or ravens in the course of a team activity.  Here, the term serves as a noun.

The same hand-talk word may be used in a way that stretches sensible construction (until it becomes a habit within the team’s repertoire).  That is to use [RAVEN] as an adjective to indicate a color.

For example, black fruits from a particular plant are ripe and ready for a team to harvest.  So, the elder of the team hand-talks the following.

0020 Surely, hand-talk naming of [RAVEN], plus its use as color, associate to relationes secundum esse, but technically belong to relationes secundum dici (hand talk).

Compared to Aristotle’s hylomorphe, both esse and dici (hand talk) occupy the slot for matter and relationes go into the slot for form.  The contiguity is [secundum].

Perhaps, this business about hand talk is a surprising development for philosophers engaged in the application of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to various questions.

Thus begins the added layer.

0021 Where am I going with this?

According to Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) (by Razie Mah and available at smashwords and other e-book venues, also appearing in Razie’s Mah blog for January through March, 2024), hominin evolution can be divided into three stages.  The first corresponds to adaptation to the social circle of teams.  The second corresponds to adaptation to the social circles of community, mega-band and tribe.  The third corresponds to a twist in human evolution.

0022 Another way to imagine the three stages?

The first goes with the evolution of proto-linguistic hand talk, sensible construction and implicit abstraction.

The second goes with the evolution of fully linguistic hand talk, sensible and social construction, and implicit abstraction. Speech is added to hand talk at the commencement of our own species, Homo sapiens.  Our species practices a dual-mode way of talking, hand-speech talk, for over 200,000 years, until something happens.

The third goes with a recent twist in human evolution, social (and sensible) construction and explicit (and implicit) abstraction.

0023 A twist?

Before the first singularity, there are no civilizations (actually, there is only constrained social complexity).  Plus, all human cultures practice hand-speech talk, as they have for 200,000 years.

The hypothesis of the first singularity proposes that the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia is the first speech-alone talking culture, in a world full of hand-speech talking cultures.  Then, speech-alone talk spreads as nearby hand-speech talking cultures imitate the Ubaid, because the Ubaid has something that they don’t have (wealth and power, due to labor and social specialization).  Then, as these neighboring cultures drop the hand-component of their hand-speech talk, trends towards unconstrained social complexity increase their wealth and power.

Why does speech-alone talk facilitate unconstrained social complexity?

Speech-alone talk allows explicit abstraction. Hand-talk and hand-speech talk do not.

Today, all civilizations practice speech-alone talk.

0024 Here is a picture of the evolution of talk.

0025 The implications take this examination to a place that the author does not anticipate.

There is more than one meaning to the Latin term, “dici”.

0026 At first, there are only relationes secundum esse.  These relations inspire implicit abstraction.  If one imagines that every team operates according to its own set of relationes secundum esse, and adapt to those relations, then as the number of teams (or “ways of getting stuff to eat”) increases, so must the mental powers of the hominins increase.  One phenotypic expression for the multiplication of specialized mental modules attuned to sets of esse relations is the increase of neocortical size over evolutionary time.

Then, adding to the first, relationes secundum dici (hand talk) begins as members of each team uses manual-brachial gestures to “talk”.  The contiguity between a hand-talk word-gesture and its referent involves sensible construction and implicit abstraction.

Then, adding to the first and second, dici (hand talk) becomes linguistic.  The contiguity between a fully linguistic hand-talk statement and its meaning involves sensible (and increasingly, social) construction and implicit abstraction.

Speech is added to hand talk at the start of our species, Homo sapiens.  Implicit abstractions sing with symbolic accompaniments.

Finally, relationes secundum dici (speech-alone talk) introduces the possibility of explicit abstraction.

0027 Let me say that again, more slowly, starting with the first period.

0028 The top row concerns archaeological landmarks.  The word, “hominid”, is used to designate bipedal apes.  The word, “hominin”, designates hominids who belong to the family tree that ends with Homo sapiens.

In adding the term, “hominin”, to their vocabulary, archaeologists commit a funny sort of misdirection.  The further back in evolutionary time, the more difficult it gets to tell whether a particular fossil is ancestral.

0029 Nonetheless, evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, identifies a relation that holds for mammals.  Larger brain size (more or less) corresponds to larger group size (more or less).  For the brain size to body ratio of the australopithecines (the so-called “southern apes” who walked before 3.5Myr), the group size is 50.

0030 In Comments on Clive Gamble, John Barrett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2104) “Thinking Big”, Mah picks up on the anthropologists’ claim that the band (50) is a social circle, and that social circles seem to scale by a factor of three.  The idea of social circles places the family (5) and intimates (5) as the smallest social circle.  The band (50) is the largest social circle at the start of hominin evolution.  Plus, in the distant future, community (150) is the next social circle that will constellate.

0031 Of course, this leaves an unattended, yet theoretically anticipated, social circle of around 15.  Notably, most teams in contemporary sports consist in around 15 members.  Five may be on the field at any moment.  But, those five positions have two back-up players ready to go, at a moments notice.  To me, the number 15 associates to teams.  Once this association is made, then the obvious social circle to support obligate collabortive foraging is the team.

“Obligate collaborative foraging”?

Michael Tomasello coins the term, as far as I can see.

The term means that individual foraging is less successful than when a team forages together.  Team foraging makes sense when the foraging strategy is to figure out food that other predators and herbivores are either unaware of or ignore.  Teams opportunistically band and disband, depending on what is available at a particular time and location.  

Communication among team-members is required.

0032 So, proto-linguistic hand-talk is an adaptation.

The semiotic types of manual-brachial gestures are icon (images, picturing, pantomiming) and index (pointing, indicating, orienting).

0033 Now, a comparison between Aristotle (belonging to our current Lebenswelt) and a member of early Homo erectus(belonging to the Lebenswelt that we evolved in) may be configured in the following manner.

0034 For Aristotle, an inquirer encounters a thing.  Scientists might call it a noumenon.  The thing is a subject for implicit abstraction.  That implicit abstraction may follow the logics of firstness, secondness and thirdness.  

In firstness, the thing is an intuitive whole in the same way that the referent that is pictured or pointed to in hand talk is an intuitive whole.  So, for the hominin, a thing may be what can be pictured and pointed to with a manual-brachial gesture.

In secondness, the thing has matter and form.  But, hand talk cannot picture or point to these explicit abstractions. Nevertheless, the brain and body adapts to a distinction between esse_ce and essence.  This adaptation is the most likely basis for phenotypic propensities to recognize relationes secundum esse (relations according to existence) as both real and relevant.  Recognition does not involve explicit abstraction.  Recognition is an implicit abstraction.

In thirdness, a thing is an actuality₂ that occurs in a normal context₃ and arises from a potential₁.

0035 Now for an exercise, allow me to recall the example of hand-talk about ravens.

In the previous figure, as far as Aristotle is concerned, a thing is “a thing”.  This comports well with the first-phase hominin’s sense that a thing is “what can be pictured or pointed to using hand talk”.

0036 Aristotle, living in our current Lebenswelt, can use spoken language to label two real elements that belong to a thing, in the same way that a sharp edge resides in a ready-to-hand rock at a scavenging site.  The thing has two real elements, matter and form.

0037 The first-phase hominin, living in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, can use hand talk to refer to a raven through sensible construction and implicit abstraction.  Perhaps, if explicit abstraction is possible, the gesture-word would pertain to a relationes secundum esse, even though it is literally a relationes secundum dici (hand talk).

0038 Yes, the above dyad portrays a dici (hand talk) relation.

And, this relationes secundum dici (hand talk) calls to mind a continuum between Aristotle’s dyad and the dyad of esse relations (which are here, explicitly stated as dyads).  

Perhaps, I can say that naming “raven” is more on the matter [substance] form side of the continuum.

It is almost as if the left-side of the continuum is like a rock that may be a candidate for an Oldowan stone tool and the right-side is like the sharp-edge achieved by striking the rock.

0039 This sensibility is even more relevant to the next statement.

Clearly, the relationes secundum dici (hand talk) is sensibly constructed using implicit abstraction.

At the same time, the dyad may be characterized (by today’s inquirer) as resting on the sharp-edge side of the realist continuum.

0040 What am I saying?

Because hand talk is composed of routinized iconic and indexal manual-brachial gestures, it is as if its relationality points to a continuum between a thing encountered and the hand-talk word as a sign of the thing, itself.

Here is a picture of what I suggest.

0041 In sum, if I have a bucket labeled, “esse”, then I would put relationes secundum dici (hand talk) into that bucket.

0042 The next phase in hominin evolution starts with the domestication of fire and continues with the earliest appearance of humans.   For convenience, I divide this period into “the intention of humans” and “the creation of humans”.

Here a table for the intention of humans.

0043 What does the domestication of fire do?

Of course, cooking releases calories from raw food by degrading the collagen of animal tissues and cellulose of plants.  Also, cooking detoxifies many foods.

As a result, there are more ways to gather food and more successful teams.  The fulcrum of natural selection shifts from the social circle of teams to the social circle of community (which, at 150, is just about a team of teams).

0044 What else?

0045 In the first phase, proto-linguistic hand talk is practiced by teams, for situation-based sensible construction.

In the second phase, the domestication of fire allows hand talk to become its own activity, not subservient to team structures, but available to all… especially after… everyone eats a nice fire-cooked meal.  Hand-talk adapts by becoming fully linguistic.

Then, fully linguistic hand-talk has a trick up its sleeve.

Hominins start to produce grammatically correct nonsensical hand-talk statements.  This dramatically expands the range of implicit abstraction from sensible to social construction.

0046 Social construction is the meaning underlying the word, “religion”.

Consider the following example, where a fully linguistic statement demands social construction.

Yes, the statement is counter-intuitive.  How is a raven supposed to gather a pebble from the bottom of a creek then fly away?  Each gesture-word categorically expresses each referent within a grammatical structure.  Yet, the entire sentence defies sensible construction, so resulting the implicit abstraction (here, denoted with speech-alone words) transcendentally expresses the meaning of the counter-intuitive statement.

0047 Duma introduces two types of relations: categorical and transcendental.

Both types of relation appear to be in play in this example.

The relation between each gesture-word and its referent is categorical.  Both the gesture and the referent are real.  The gesture images or points to its referent.  Can images and indications also be called “categorical”?  

Similarly, the relation between the entire statement and whatever it is referring to is transcendental.  The statement’s meaning transcends the grammatically correct hand-talk utterance.

0048 Now, I ask, “How would Aristotle’s tradition deal with this whatever?

Well, here is one guess.

Aristotle would recognize that the translated statement is not really a sensible statement, because how does a raven swim?  The claim is counter-intuitive, even though every hand-talk word associates to mind-independent being.

If “matter” is material to a form, and if “being” is relational to a form, then one could imagine that the two contiguous real elements are being (relation as opposed to material) and form (the counter-intuitive image of a raven obtaining a pebble from the bottom of a creek).

Perhaps, the raven’s being is the one that swims, while the material raven cannot.

0049 Here is a picture.

0050 How would a hominin… er… human living before the first singularity deal with this whatever?

Well, the implicit abstraction engages in social, not sensible construction.  If each hand-talk word is sensibly constructed, the entire statement is still counter-intuitive and demands social construction.

Now, I can go one more step and ask, “If an observer of the hominin making this counter-intuitive statement has knowledge of Aquinas’s philosophy, what term would he use to refer to this occasion?”

0051 In this instance, the term, relationes secundum dici (hand talk), is more than sensibly guessing the referent given the gesture-word, it requires socially constructing a referent that cannot be pictured or pointed to in hand talk.

Each gesture-word pictures or points to its referent.  Without the gesture-word, one would not think of its referent.  So, I may say that the contiguity between dici (associating to being) and relationes (associating to form) is categorical.

However, the statement is counter-intuitive, creating an implicit abstraction of a… what?  Does the dyad, being [substance] form, apply?  Again, dici associates with being, since the relation would not be apparent without the statement.  Relationes goes with the form, which must be a social constuction.