At the end of the last century, the misnomer “mitochondrial Eve” was popularized to refer to a common ancestor that, according to our mitochondria, all present-day humans would share. A denomination as sensational as it is inappropriate, since it suggests the idea of a primal mother of the human species that never existed nor could exist. Talking about a “first person” does not make any sense, not even as a dream, and only serves to promote a mythical-religious vision of humanity that, unfortunately and despite scientific evidence, is far from having been overcome.
Suppose for a moment that we grant this “mitochondrial Eve,” or the famous Australopithecine Lucy, or any other possible ancestral mother, the title of first human being. What about her parents? Were they less human than her daughter? Evolutionary changes are so small and gradual that thousands or millions of years are needed for their accumulation to be significant, so they are totally imperceptible on our time scale, and it would be absurd to consider members of generations close to each other to belong to different species. . If Lucy was human, or humanoid, so were her parents, and her grandparents, and her great-grandparents… How far back would we have to go to find a clearly non-human first ancestor? The question has no answer: we have come across, once again, the old and ubiquitous sorites paradox or heap paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus. If we remove grains one by one from a pile of sand, at what point will it stop being a pile? Is it possible that a single grain makes the difference between being a lot and not being a lot?
Dawkins’ paradox
In the fascinating book of Richard Dawkins the magic of reality, there is a chapter entitled “Who was the first person?”, in which he raises the paradox of classification by species. In response to his question, Dawkins proposes the following thought experiment: imagine a huge pile of photographs starting with your own photo, followed by your father’s, your grandfather’s, your great-grandfather’s… and so on until one hundred and eighty-five million. of generations. What would we find?
“We have the paradox that there was never a first person,” says Dawkins, “because each person belongs to the same species as their parents, and you can go as far back in time as you want, pull a photograph from the pile, and find that your grandfather Millions of years ago it was a fish. The term “species”, therefore, is nothing more than a convention to refer to the genetic differences between individuals separated by thousands of generations.
The chicken or the egg?
Ultimately, Dawkins’s is an update/generalization of the old chicken-and-egg paradox/aporia.
What came first the chicken or the egg? For creationists, the answer is clear: God created the chicken in his image and likeness (it is not for nothing that the Holy Spirit is represented as a dove), and this primordial brood laid the first (chicken) egg, followed by all those necessary to give rise to a first generation of chicks and chicks capable of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the species. But for non-believers prior to Darwin, the question led them into the bottomless abyss of an infinite regress, since it seems evident that every (chicken) egg is laid by a chicken and every chicken hatches from an egg.
And yet, if we replace the question with an equivalent one, the answer is obvious. What comes before, childhood or maturity? Childhood, of course. And the egg is the childhood —or pre-infancy— of the chicken. Issue settled: Since the egg is the embryonic stage and the chicken is the mature stage of the same individual, the egg predates the chicken. But all we have done is substitute one mystery for another. Where did the egg destined to become the first chicken come from?
A mystery that the so-called theory of evolution (since it is not a theory but a well-proven fact) solves by saying that there was no first chicken, in the same way and for the same reason that there was no first human person. If we looked for a photo from about two hundred million years ago in a chicken’s family album, we would find a dinosaur.
the first egg
And the first egg? Not the first chicken egg, but the first egg in general, the father (or rather the mother) of all eggs. Is it possible to speak of a primal egg? May be. Because an egg, ultimately, is a very large cell. And, reciprocally, microscopic cells are very small eggs, which, like those of a chicken (or any other animal), divide over and over again, giving rise to new cells, more or less differentiated depending on the case. And it is possible that all life forms on our planet come from the same primordial cell, even if those who do not admit that we are related (and also very close) to chimpanzees and gorillas, much less can admit that we are also relatives of flies, earthworms and carrots.
And it is really hard to believe that an accumulation of small mutations has led from the primitive unicellular beings, which for about three billion years were the only living beings on the planet, to us. It is so difficult to conceive that it is not only religious fundamentalists who resist accepting biological evolutionism. Someone as cultivated as the Nobel Prize in Literature Isaac Bashevis SingerFor example, he went so far as to say that admitting evolutionism is like believing that if we leave a piece of glass and a bit of iron on an island, they will eventually become a clock.
The difficulty in assimilating the idea of the evolution of species has to do with the fact that our time scale – the duration of human life – is insignificant compared to the time elapsed since life appeared on Earth, more than four billion years. Over such an inconceivably long period of time, the accumulation of small changes, however slow and imperceptible, can and has led to amazing transformations.
golden middling
He said Protagoras of Abdera, one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, that man is the measure of all things. And someone ironically added that man is the measure of all small things. Which is not exact either, since the very small is as remote and inconceivable to us as the very large. And that goes for both space and time. Nanometers are as far from our direct experience as light-years, and picoseconds of atomic processes are as alien to us as eons. We are somewhere in between on the spatial and temporal scales, halfway between the inconceivably large and the inconceivably small, between the unimaginably fast and the unimaginably slow. A Middlehow would Horaciowhich, in addition to inviting us to humility, is not without certain adaptive advantages.