The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin: Human Nature and the Third-Cause Axiom

By Michel Bergeron

Scientist Charles Darwin discretely opened the possibility of a purely animalistic origin for the human species. He repeatedly insisted that the differences between humans and others were a question of degree only. Sciences were, however, taken in the opposite direction, where these differences cannot have been generated by the natural processes of biological evolution.

In The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin, author Michel Bergeron discuses the effects on the sciences caused by the presence of questions on humanity only answerable with religious beliefs. His investigation suggests that significant elements of perceived humanity have remained sufficiently narrowly defined to continue to agree with religious beliefs over the entire period starting with the scientific revolution centuries ago and reaching the present. Instead, he questions, could we be the simple animal who can only live on the belief not to be a simple animal?

To alleviate these biases on the sciences of life, Bergeron advocates a different synthesis between Darwinism and Lamarckism. He further asks: How can sciences pretend to a cosmology neutral in term of religious influence since all of its complex mathematical developments were made under the constraint that we can link the present directly to the Big Bang?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450292054

Michel Bergeron

MICHEL BERGERON is a scientist who moved away from his field of Economics to revisit the most basic foundation of his own humanity. He delivers here the result of his fifteen years quest for substantially different sciences, through a different perception of humanity.

Book preview

The Animal

in the

Secret World

of

Darwin

Human Nature and the Third-Cause Axiom

Michel Bergeron, PhD

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin

Human Nature and the Third-Cause Axiom

Copyright © 2011 Michel Bergeron, PhD

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover picture Le Grand Bleu acrylic 24X36 (1993) by Jean-Marie Bergeron; photography Francis Bergeron; arrangement Vanessa Bergeron Laperrière; reproduced with permission.

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iUniverse rev. date: 2/25/2011

To my children,

my grandchildren,

and their descent

First there is religion,

and then there is power.

Victor Azerad 2005.

Light will be thrown on

the origin of man and his history.

Charles Darwin (1859)

Worst than ignorance …

is the illusion of knowledge.

George Bailey (1990)

‘[T]he whole of science’ might err.

Karl R. Popper (1934)

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Starting in Front of the Mirror

2. Methodology

3. The Scientific World We Supposedly Live In

4. Darwin’s Secret World

5. The Human Animal and the H Axiom

6. Let the Will and the Hand of God Play

7. The Basic Paradigm

8. Conclusion on ‘Living under the Hand of God’

9. Removing the Playing of the Hand of God

10. A Closed Context for Reality and Life

11. Lamarckian Darwinism: Ontogeny

12. Lamarckian Darwinism: Phylogeny

13. Simple as ABC

14. Acquisitions through Uses and Uses through Acquisitions

15. The Newtonian Mind, Facts, and Beliefs

16. Newton’s Secret World

17. Let the Future Be with Certainty

18. Neutrality or Independence between Sciences and Religion?

Bibliography

Preface and Acknowledgements

In 1995, primarily as an economist deeply disillusioned with his own science, I started considering a simple idea but one full of consequences. In explaining our behavior, the sciences were not explicitly taking into account our intensity to live. I gradually suspected that behavior had been important not only for our own evolution, but also for evolution in general. This different perception of reality rapidly got complicated, for, according to the dominant paradigms in life’s sciences, not only is behavior not supposed to influence evolution, but also, for a large majority of scientists, behavior cannot be explained by its history. To the contrary, they explain behavior as the result of deep forces, never the other way around. Then, disillusion slowly invaded my whole being.

During the following years, I found the modern version of these ancient visions where secret, unknown, and external forces drove life, instead of life being driven under its own dynamic impulse. As a bonus, this attempt to modernize ancient myths still comes with this notion going back to Antiquity: any living organism is constructed following an archetype. It is now named an algorithm or a model, but the principle behind the concept has basically remained the same. Moreover, though this characteristic of the archetype, going back to the Greek thinkers, was and still is applied everywhere, these particularities always introduce special considerations for humanity. Thus, what can only be the proper domain of religious beliefs is now, as always, exclusively kept in a silenced, though extremely influential scientific background.

To my greatest concern, I slowly and painfully realized that, in regards to the transformation of the scientific discourse over the past centuries, we must make a clear distinction between the technical aspects and the conceptual founding stones of human knowledge: if the former shows a tremendous transformation, an extremely strong and positive evolution, the latter’s evolution has been, to the contrary, more about form than about content. What was at first a better logical way to explain the playing of the Hand of God towards our little infatuated selves has been basically split down the middle: sciences remained only with facts, but exclusively properly restricted in their understanding, and religious beliefs were supplying the missing parts, including this natural tendency to support religious beliefs with facts.

It started to spin around in vicious circles: how can the belief about humanity, which could have biased the scientist’s vision of reality, be evaluated from an unbiased perspective by the same scientist, but as if he/she were from planet Mars? Nevertheless, I kept hoping it would get simpler and it did. To my greatest surprise, simplicity returns when we leave God out of the discussion and concentrate on the belief humans have about having a special relationship with the supernatural world, or the belief to be a third cause, which intimately associates with a belief in an after-life. Taking this tortuous path will lateron allow us to introduce into sciences the third-cause hypothesis: the main phylogenetic element in shaping our humanity comes from the emergence of this particular belief about what can only be defined as a quest for an after-life by a living animal, without reference to the content of the belief itself.

But sciences have always refused to consider such a hypothesis. The possibility of being a third cause has remained a personal belief with no scientific counterpart. As we will demonstrate, sciences were never able, through this refusal, to properly get free from a religious stronghold.

The objective of this study was at first to elaborate scientifically on a completely animalistic origin for our species. This latter possibility raises many issues, especially how did we become the humans that we are if there was no intervention at all from an assumed supernatural world? This approach shows the construction of the animal in the mirror as a beast of beliefs. Furthermore, such a gradual transformation without any special exogenous help can only have been done over millions of years.

But what cannot be avoided is the transformation of the image in the mirror. It cannot strictly remain a scientific possibility always having been denied to the sciences themselves. Not surprisingly, every time a scientist would have considered positively that our species is only part of the animal kingdom, it must have affected for the same scientist the vision about himself/herself. It could become a class five devastating force of nature, or it could open a more proper and deeper sense to living for the human animal. We need to add the following here: it opens the future, for us to realize that we do carry a future, but not the ‘eternal future’, which belongs to religion only.

If looking this way at The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin removes the tempest or the hurricane in front of the mirror, there are still dangers present. The easiest way to question the bias introduced in sciences by positive religious beliefs will be shown to be an implicit use of negative ones, and this is the main danger. The reader will be driven on a long tour before reaching the final chapters of this book, where the more proper quest for independence between sciences and religions is addressed.

For more than a decade, other scientists’ ideas were investigated by scavenging the scientific bookshelves of a few bookstores with a proper popular scientific section and, thanks to its generosity, McGill University’s libraries. I have consulted many books, but few people. Could this kind of scientific inquiry only be undertaken by staying away from mainstream sciences, in isolation as in a cocoon? It could get to the point where one cannot reenter. I did get valuable help: my beloved son Nicolas Bergeron was extremely useful in providing comments, suggestions, and encouragement. He read so many different ‘close to final’ versions: through all my gratitude, there must be room for an unavoidable apology. I did get very interesting and challenging discussions with two of my friends who accepted to listen to me: Victor Azerad and Angelo Teolis. My daughter Vanessa provided many interesting comments and questions. I also thank Nicolas Marceau, and two referees who commented papers on related topics. I finally want to extend my deep gratitude to Professor Edwina Taborsky.

Guido De Volder provided valuable proofreading of the text and I also want to thank the various people of Iuniverse for their comments and quality of professional services. Patricia Françoise Bergeron and Madeleine Bergeron provided valuable help in setting the text. Any remaining error is my sole responsibility. But most of all, I primarily thank my children and my grandchildren: they brought me to consider, understand, and accept that a future without me brings a different but proper sense to my life.

Michel Bergeron,

November 7th, 2010.

Nevertheless the difference in mind

between man and the higher animals,

great as it is,

is certainly one of degree and not of kind.

Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man p. 837)

Chapter 1

Starting in Front of the Mirror

Darwin stands as one of the highest among our major scientific icons for his extraordinary legacy, though a significant part of the latter has not yet received proper recognition. First, his relationship with Lamarckism needs to be more positively revisited and, secondly, he should receive more credit for having sustained an attitude all future scientists should follow, an attitude of independence and not compromising towards dominant social groups. Nevertheless, such an attitude does not have to be one where all ties are removed or an expression reduced to a staggered refusal, since there is a strong difference between being independent and being a recluse.

Darwin’s Lamarckism and his different attitude can be properly understood only if the third aspect of his now misunderstood legacy is spelled out. In the closing pages of The Origin of Species he writes: Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history (1859, p.759[1]). Do we have there the exact point on which Darwin and Darwinism have parted from each other? Darwin has introduced a theory of evolution where heredity at conception plays a very little role, an ignored contribution, while, to the contrary, Darwinism sustains that conception is the source for all possible variability in living organisms. There should be a relationship between this divergence, Darwin’s precautions with the human animal, and Darwinism’s implicit but systematic submission to religious requirements.

The misunderstanding on Darwin’s legacy relates to all three aspects simultaneously. Our icon’s incapacity to properly and completely settle the human case is directly related to the too-easy rejection of his Lamarckism and a strong under-estimation of his rebellious attitude. But most importantly, it can be made a question exclusive to Darwin only artificially: to the contrary, the questioning needs to simultaneously address our own humanity.

The actions of Darwin’s contemporary dominant groups were strongly colored by the influence of Christian religions. For anyone seeking recognition then, the non-compliance route with religious beliefs would easily and rapidly have taken the shape of a dangerous course. Furthermore, our icon’s attitude of independence cannot be independent of his more general quest. Steven Jay Gould writes: Darwin was a complex man who wrestled with deep issues, sometimes in contradictory ways, throughout his life (1993, p. 266). This raises three questions: first, the possibility of an unfinished general quest for Darwin must be addressed and the deep impacts on his science need to be spelled out. Secondly, our understanding of his quest should have to remain partial. Finally, since some of his unanswered questions had a strong relation to religious beliefs, the mere act of survival must have commanded on his part an unavoidable general discretion through covering up and ambiguous but elegant metaphors, if not through silence.

To sustain a more general discussion on sciences, religions, and humanity, this text will argue that Darwin had a secret world still to be unveiled. This world was kept secret since it was made of the elements to pursue in the direction of our icon’s uncompleted search for the human animal, while the ensuing dominant Darwinian visions were systematically built away from this disturbing possibility.

However, the question is deeper than to simply ask if Darwin has been misunderstood, primarily from the ambiguity we will later notice in his treatment of a possible purely animalistic origin for our species. Could it be possible that the tools of scientific analysis are not proper for such an inquiry? What is the intimate relationship between sustaining the role of natural selection and sustaining such a purely animalistic origin for our species?

1.1 Facts, Beliefs, and Certainty

This task to revisit The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin will be done by reviewing the scientific interaction between facts, beliefs, and certainty, as they were tightly kept intertwined after Darwin, while he only partially untangled them.

There seems to be a clear cut difference between what a fact is and what a belief is. However, a closer inspection reveals that a pure fact not resting on some form of belief is only wishful thinking. We will lateron establish that perception needs to be based on beliefs. To be clear, ‘a fact’ in the ensuing discussion represents a statement not resting directly on religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the distinction between facts and beliefs is far from being rid of imprecision: how do we penetrate the indirect role of religious beliefs on the perception of facts?

Our presentation starts from a redesigned story about a famous magic mirror.

The Magic Mirror

When I met the magic mirror, I promptly asked:

"Mirror, mirror, please tell me, what do you see in front of you?

Is it just flesh and blood, producing me as a consciousness?

Will it simply vanish when I die?

Or is there more, an immaterial thing,

A prisoner of this body, a prisoner waiting to be released?"

The mirror answered: "My dear friend,

You want to know about the soul and life after death.

This is the question I cannot answer,

Since I am limited to considering facts,

While your question can only be answered with beliefs."

But I continued the interrogation of the magic mirror:

Then how can sciences claim that they restrain to facts while also speaking about humanity?

The magic mirror has been silenced ever since.

This book concerns the effects on sciences caused by the presence of questions on humanity only answerable with positive or negative religious beliefs. It introduces a distortion between the facts the human animal analyzes and the beliefs the human being must generate and use, a distortion caused by the natural habit to give some of these beliefs the certainty otherwise reserved to facts. This distortion is too easily imported from religion to the sciences and it has its main impact at the intersection between sciences and religions, affecting both sides of the divide.

The misuse of certainty is ever-present and can be found in the Crusaders slaughtering the innocent Infidels, in the suicide bombers of Japan during the Second World War, or those now conducting their jihad, in the Nazis towards the Jews, with the Tutsis and the Hutus, etc.., etc.. It must also be recognized with the pious and capitalistic religious believers who have siphoned and still siphon almost all of the economic juice from a poor nation, leaving its inhabitants in despair. Furthermore, this attitude to misuse certainty can still be found everywhere into sciences, as will be sustained below.

This distortion can be presented in a different way. The most universal characteristic of being a scientist is to be human. Meanwhile, sciences are plastered with the advantage of neutrality between the analyst and the content of the analysis, best illustrated in the statement ‘every scientist should aim to be part of the Martian observers’ team’. But Martians are not humans! Does it mean no human can be part of their team? Is it possible that some form of compromise between beliefs and facts about humanity has made its way at the root of sciences?

We can find towards this distortion three attitudes that normally are mutually exclusive. The first one is to play the ostrich and to ignore the problem. It will often be presented as sciences with facts on the one side and religions with beliefs on the opposite. It can reach the point of denying any metaphysical question to sciences and, in some cases, also denying any relation with facts to religions. But to make it so easy, to argue for non-overlapping magisteria (Gould 2007), is equivalent to evacuate the problem in favor of a dubious compromise. To the contrary, there must be some unavoidable overlapping from humans with their metaphysical questions to be part of the analysis.

The second attitude could be to place an axiomatic trust into a consensus, arguing it is impossible for everybody in sciences to be wrong. However, is it possible for sciences today to be wrong, as when the unanimity of scientists before Galilei Galileo and Nicolaus Copernicus would argue for the Earth to be flat? The oncoming discussion will sustain this contention, precisely from the improper role given to certainty in the scientific coverage of the human animal.

As a third attitude, one can openly submit sciences to religious beliefs, as for ‘creationist sciences’. Anyone rejecting such a submission of sciences to either positive or negative religious influence should reject much of the foundations of the current sciences of life and cosmology, for exactly the same reasons.

Since the analyses of life and cosmology contain the analyst, the whole scientific adventure over past centuries was made consistent with each scientist’s vision of his/her interior self. Any unresolved or unquestioned discrepancy would be quite surprising, if not impossible. It does not mean a single, universal vision, since there is variability in the perception of humanity’s foundations. Nevertheless, elements exclusively from the domain of beliefs about the scientist’s humanity transform themselves in the scientific domain as facts and axioms held with certainty in an unclear, if not mysterious way.

This book thus concerns the biasing effects caused by some significant elements of perceived humanity to have remained sufficiently narrowly defined to continue to agree with some religious beliefs over the entire period starting with the scientific revolution centuries ago and reaching the present. By never being questioned, let alone being discussed, while it allowed these religious beliefs to seemingly disappear in the immensity of scientific facts, they have become implicit axiomatic supports for the whole scientific adventure.

As a first illustrative case, consider human speech. Since the latter had been assumed as a special gift from a supernatural origin for such a long pre-scientific period of time, it has also maintained itself afterwards as one of the main scientific cornerstones to sustain the ensuing scientific human uniqueness. Our species’ mean of verbal communication carries in scientific discussions a unique aspect impossible to apply to other cases, such as the sonar of the bat or the dolphin. How have the limits on beliefs about human nature affected the scientific conclusions on speech? What dyeing can we detect from questioning the otherwise appearance of natural coloring around the scientific analysis of speech? And how is this effect present all over the scientific understanding of our species and other species?

The scientific revolution with its main roots in Europe started and gradually evolved from an already present vision about what we now refer to as cosmology, ontogeny, phylogeny, and our humanity. This pre-scientific vision was dominated by two related elements: the playing of the Hand of God and the belief about the special purpose this divine playing carries for our species, the third-cause axiom. For our purpose here, this third-cause axiom primarily concerns two related aspects: firstly, there should be visible effect(s) on human biology from a supernatural intervention or what we will discuss later as a divine infusion. It will often be conveniently expressed at best in the form of a forbidden limit: humanity cannot be without such visible differences, opening the convenient possibility that the necessary differences appear instead through the perception of other species. Secondly, on all the possible consequences, we must concentrate on the belief in an after-life, the capacity to cheat on biological death.

With so much attention given to a change in the understanding of how the Hand of God played and plays, with the passion and glory by which multiple acts of creation were challenged to favor a possible single act, accepting the constraining conditions so the possibility of no act of creation remained inaccessible to sciences, the whole discussion in mainstream sciences simply avoided the second question about the third-cause axiom being only an axiom, which would then have been analyzed as an hypothesis. However, the way the third-cause axiom is used by humans precludes it from being placed as a scientific hypothesis: the belief in being a third cause is always sustained by any human as a positive or negative fact. A scientific hypothesis means that a choice is possible, while, to the contrary, the religious belief must imply that a choice has been made before. This fact has not been addressed yet, though it touches one of the deepest foundations of sciences.

Thus, how could a vision about humanity have been maintained through centuries so that fixed elements originating from religious beliefs are still to be detected into current sciences? It must be presented as what has not changed through this large transformation towards sciences and can initially be summarized as in the two following manners: first, before modern sciences were born, we were supposedly living at the center of the universe and also at the center of the expression of the assumed will behind the unfolding of reality through time. While sciences were able to show our planet not to be the center of anything, so we are lost in space, we are scientifically not lost in time or among other species. This will be shown to be the precise effects of not considering and certainly not challenging the third-cause axiom, of not making it a proper scientific hypothesis.

Secondly, what has not changed in general with the arrival of sciences can be summarized in particular for the sciences of life. The following statement, simply phrased in our scientific terminology, must have been universally true for a period starting long before writing was introduced and reaching the initial steps of the scientific revolution: ‘the dynamic expression or development of any ontogeny is directed from conception by the Hand of God(s)’. After a few centuries of scientific inquiries, the first part, namely ‘the dynamic expression or development of any ontogeny is directed from conception’, has remained universally unquestioned. With much attention always but exclusively given to what should appropriately replace ‘by the Hand of God’, the innovative aspect of the limited-information approach proposed here will be to challenge the unchanged first part, while explaining why it has not been possible to do yet, from how the human case has been restrictively handled.

The liberation of sciences from a previous religious stronghold is still incomplete. But the question will not simply be on how to complete it, since we also need to raise the following complex issue: can it be completed?

The major difficulties of the analysis to come can be introduced. It first and foremost concerns the protection of religiously based scientific beliefs by now using ‘the double negation route’. The pre-scientific statements concerning humanity’s unique and privileged link with the supernatural were gradually transformed into the statement ‘we cannot reject that we are not just another animal’, without affecting the deep concerns. Secondly, it gave rise to what will be introduced shortly as a burden-of-proof problem. Finally, as the most devastating effect, it brings undeserved certainty and it must lead us to avoid replacing this kind of certainty with a different one. We need to argue for the superiority of uncertainty at the intersection of sciences and metaphysics.

This last element will make the discussion much more complex, yet substantially richer. It concerns the advantages of uncertainty to carry sciences, as it should be done by a human being who will not simultaneously hold some form of religious beliefs with uncertainty. To the contrary, our individual integrity demands positive or negative religious beliefs to be held as if certain, as if facts.

Consider, as a first example towards a different understanding of perception, all the scientifically based discussions on the Exodus of the Israelites and the plagues in Egypt. We find numerous different hypotheses about these being natural phenomena rather than direct external interventions, only interpreted afterwards through either positive or negative religious beliefs, or in a discussion with an apparent position of neutrality. The next case is a dominant male in a group of primates. It should be easy to capture that the belief in dominance has built itself from behavior over many generations: any new member of this society is brought towards dominance from the presence and success of the latter during the animal’s ontogeny. Thus, dominance has built itself from the continuous practice of dominance and its rewards. Finally, consider the following: ‘The people of Easter Island wrongly believed in a reward from the god(s) behind these statues, so they removed all trees from their island.’ Such a parallel to today’s cargo cult is also easy to understand.

But easiness magically disappears with the following: ‘Our ancestors have built the foundation of humanity simply and only on the belief they were a third cause.’ The difficulty here has little to do with understanding and the bulk of the problem comes from simply considering the possibility, since it will not limit itself to the past only, but it will also and instantly reach the mirror. The metaphorical route is somewhat easier when we are not concerned, nor can any of the consequences reach the present. Yet, why can we not argue for the third-cause axiom to have built itself just as dominance for alpha males? And, how has this problem with the scientist’s mirror affected dominance itself in its understanding?

Since the perception of humanity is based on beliefs and sciences on facts, how can beliefs have been transformed as facts to maintain the required consistency between scientific facts and the mirror? If axioms are the scientific equivalent of beliefs, how can an axiom become a fact, if not by arbitrarily accepting only one of its alternatives? What are the consequences that the third-cause axiom cannot easily be turned into a scientific hypothesis? This discussion will open this fourth possible attitude currently not considered, the sciences where uncertainty is allowed and where our species could be yet just another animal. But, this also is the difficulty: how can we show the advantages of the sciences where we could be just an animal species, but where we cannot be such with certainty, over the other accepted ones where our position is covered through this double negation route ‘we cannot reject that we are not just another animal species?’

The forthcoming chapters establish that for any organism perception is self-centered and that for any organism with a brain this self-centered aspect has the biological property to define the self, this famous ‘I’. So beliefs about the self condition every aspect of perception and this must include religious beliefs. Furthermore, the circularity in the discussion immediately reveals itself: in a scenario of non-intervention from outside reality, religious beliefs, if held for a sufficient number of generations, have shaped not only religions but also our entire humanity.

1.2 Leave God out of the Discussion

The suspicious reader should already wonder: Is this book another of these endless discussions about God? Is the third-cause axiom just yet another excuse for this real subject to come out? No, no, and a trainload of no’s! This book is about the badly misunderstood human animal. It restrictively is about what each one of us sees in the mirror. God comes in the story only in the believed role of making what is in the mirror. Furthermore, this huge literature aiming at the intersection between religions and sciences is never really about God exclusively, since it also concerns both our species and the third-cause axiom. Have we ever seen a discussion about God not including special considerations for humanity?

We need to leave God out of this discussion. Our scientific concern is not about whether major religious beliefs could be true or false. It will first permit to isolate per se the effect of any belief being held with certainty. Under this approach only, the effect of some religious beliefs being maintained as true with certainty for a sufficiently long time could be one of the main elements to understand our ontogeny and phylogeny, that is the way we are and how we came to be this way. Instead of the endless debates concerning whether our ancestors received or not, it becomes sufficient to consider they simply and only took a differential phylogenetic path: by learning and adapting to the presence of such beliefs concerning the super-natural, the latest branches of the hominids’ tree produced beasts of beliefs, with the latest addition in front of a mirror. Secondly, it will permit for the third-cause hypothesis to be introduced into sciences with both alternatives simultaneously.

The understanding of the past cannot be independent of the understanding of the present. Ian Hodder writes: The past is subjectively constructed in the present, and … the subjective past is involved in power strategies today (1991, p. 166). Mario Biagioli presents the last point as: "knowledge is necessarily produced through partial perspective" (1996, p. 194, italics in the text). It could be required by our past to elaborate a proper perspective tackling the effect of the beliefs in the existence of God and the third-cause axiom, before considering whether they are true or false. The bulk of the difficulty is not in the historical record, but in front of the mirror. This is the retro-active effect of religions on sciences, from religions’ own influence: is a religion based on a God using revelation and presenting His words and His choices to the living humans still currently sustaining sciences where He implicitly acts mysteriously from the conception of the organism, with a special attention for our species? If it sounds like the catechism of our youth, our later discussion will nonetheless answer this question positively.

Concentrating the interaction of religions and sciences on God is first of all a delusive quest: the only way sciences can prove religions wrong on this issue is by making the same mistakes they attribute to religions, when these same religions claim a room in the city of scientific cathedrals under creationist sciences. Secondly, this standard point of view shadows a more promising alternative: the scientific question can be limited to evaluating the effect of the third-cause axiom, by stating the alternatives as hypotheses. Furthermore, this belief about being a third cause opens the possibility to cheat on biological death, followed by an indefinite after-life. This is where biology becomes impregnated at its deepest root from implicit religious beliefs.

This is the essence of the impossible to avoid interaction coming out once again: to question the possibility that our distant ancestors were or were not a real third cause rapidly becomes identical to questioning our own. Then the circle closes itself: the absence of scientific discussion about a possible third-cause effect in our phylogeny is no more than to refuse discussing the possibility it is only an axiom in front of today’s mirrors, but an axiom held with certainty. How much biasing has been introduced into sciences from this limitation?

It must be confusing! It must remain confused, since only by this route can we unveil the effects undeserved religiously-based certainty has placed on sciences. Much of the discussion to come could be alternatively presented as how has wrongly been eliminated from sciences the necessary uncertainty in the human quest every single one of us carries. Moreover, it cannot be independent from how we solve this quest as if certain.

1.3 The Burden-of-Proof Problem

On all questions restricted to be axiomatically grounded, especially those at the intersection of sciences and religions, there will be a strong burden-of-proof issue. The main difference is where the burden falls when axioms are inevitable: practically in some cases, one has either to accept a proposition from being unable to reject it or to reject another one if its acceptance is not possible. Furthermore, it always is as much about pressure as about logic. In a case where we are no more involved, we can remember all the strong debates to move from geocentrism and a flat Earth to heliocentrism. Much more important than facts versus other facts, there was also a strong burden-of-proof issue, the kind of issue people, such as Galileo, were courageous enough to face at a much greater risk than not getting tenure. We should also understand why Galileo had to limit only to a whisper "Eppur si muove (And yet it [the earth] moves").

To capture the depth of this problem, we can address the following phenomenon. After having captured a baby seal, while keeping the prey alive, a killer whale will play with it before eating its meal. In the series of videos The Blue Planet: Sea of Life produced by the BBC in 2001, it is added for the game to sometimes last for half an hour. The unanswered question is why this game, which looks useless and cruel? We obviously have no answer, but we can raise the following issues: first note how easily it is accepted as a game, instead of properly opening possible alternatives. Secondly, consider the alternative possibility: the killer whale is paying this way a tribute to a favorable intervention by a supernatural force. If we were truly Martian observers, this possibility could at least be easily argued. But we are neither Martians, nor simple observers. All the strongly negative considerations easily raised against this second statement must be related to the perception of ourselves. To avoid endless discussions, if there is no proper answer, the second alternative could nevertheless be properly addressed, but only in front of a mirror.

Another relevant case to the burden-of-proof issue is the origin of life. When the burden falls on sciences, it can be sustained for life on Earth not to have come from a divine intervention only if it can be proven how life came without exogenous intervention. It could be the exact opposite: if no one can show divine intervention at the origin of life, it would ‘prove’ for life to be a self-sufficient process and the burden of proof gets reversed towards religions. What we should find curious, but properly human, is to try to stay on a neutral ground in between the two cases, since it is an empty set.

This particularity about sciences and religions can also be viewed from these earlier scientific discussions sustaining the Biblical Flood as a fact. It was believed God brought water to the top of the mountains rather than for some other possible force(s) to bring the given floor from below the sea level to the top of mountains. Saying an unknown force did it would have meant simultaneously removing the Hand of God from playing and the particularity of playing for us with a Flood. It would be blinding oneself to argue that the scientists involved were only looking for an explanation to the presence of sea shells on top of the mountains. The main difficulty must have come from the already present religious explanation, coupled with the religious attitude to sustain as much as possible religious beliefs from an interpretation of facts.

In most cases where axioms are inevitable, the issue turned into a problem since the burden of proof has systematically been favoring the religious side in opposition to sciences. When transformed in their scientific counterpart, these numerous religious beliefs become as many axioms held with certainty.

1.4 What Is in the Mirror?

To capture the impact of the particular belief on humanity, one would normally start from the simple duality: ‘we are’ or ‘we are not’ a third cause. The double negation route however opens itself up: to go from ‘we are’ to ‘we are not’, one must first be able to reject ‘we are’, only from where the burden systematically falls. Placing on sciences the burden to reject ‘we are’ has conveniently allowed a large group of scientists to stay away from the question, since none effectively rejects the third-cause axiom for our species, though few will either sustain it. The discussion however rapidly covers up this theme and instead moves around the following axiomatic statement: some exceptions for our species cannot be rejected as unique compared to other animals. Worse, the same attitude concerning our species is found among those questioning or rejecting God Himself.

As will be the main themes of the third chapter, first, we find everywhere in today’s sciences the syndrome of scientifically undefined human uniqueness, sustained as characters available only to our species, in the past, present, and future. It started in sciences as such a long list. Now this delusive list is gradually shrinking. But, our objective will be deeper than to remove all these elements of alleged uniqueness. It will be to negate any such use of uniqueness, since equivalent to scientifically sustain a privileged relationship for our species with the supernatural outside reality. Secondly, the icing on such a cake is the following still dominant scientific vision: our species cannot evolve anymore. The forthcoming discussion will sustain the contrary: our species is in an active movement of speciation.

We thus find two possibilities in the mirror when we consider the side of ‘we are a third cause’: some will be under ‘yes we are’ and the rest of sciences will be under ‘we cannot reject that we could be’. This second category leaves the ‘we are not’ defined in a sufficiently restrictive way to produce an empty set among scientists today. This set however now includes yours truly. Furthermore, it is very delusive to believe that this set has always been empty in the past. To the contrary, many questionable elements were introduced into sciences in order to drive the previous non-empty set towards emptiness.

We must do the same with ‘we are not a third cause’ as was done with ‘we are’. It is impossible to avoid another dichotomy for this scenario also, directly related to the presence of humans as object of the scientific analysis and as suppliers of the analysis. The third case is to consider the possibility ‘we are not a third cause’ as an axiom. What could be the effect on our understanding of humanity if we axiomatically postulate the absence of any external intervention from outside reality for our ancestors? It will force us to explain without the use of positive religious beliefs all possible elements of humanity currently attributed to human uniqueness, including religion and language.

This is where the alternative approach sustained here gets a precious help, since it has on its side one of the giants of sciences, namely Darwin. It will be argued that many of his important insights have been misunderstood so he could be made to artificially reintegrate a modernized version of the previous cosmology based on religious beliefs. To the contrary, his concentration on the living end of any organism must be associated with self-sufficiency in the dynamic process of living: what organisms use to live and how they live has been shaped together by living. (We will show that Darwinian natural selection remains a valid concept, but comes out as a result.).

Darwin had to keep his world secret: he extended his interrogation of evolution in general to the human animal in particular, summarized in the 1842 statement And man is no exception, followed by its reduced version in The Origin: Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history, and this small but evocative statement buried in Darwin’s notebook ‘B’: Man is derived from Monad (reported in Robert J. Richards 2008).

We need to remember the required steep uphill battle: the distance between a possibly special creation for us and one of no intervention whatsoever for our species simply was too wide to fill. Unspecified intermediary positions between these two extremes took sciences in a confused, foggy situation, but one where they could endure for a better future.

Furthermore, the uncertainty concerning Darwin’s position on our evolution should be represented by the incapacity to properly place his thoughts between the presence and the absence of a third-cause possibility for our species. Staying confined to the intervention side wisely allows avoiding considering the possible results. Everybody seemed content to remain in the large grey zone between ‘the absence of intervention’ and ‘the absence of direct biological intervention’: only the second statement can allow introducing an animalistic origin for our species and simultaneously avoiding any negative implication for the third-cause case.

Therefore, we need to present Darwin on a different quest. One can easily understand the external pressure on our icon, so strong it will usually be self-imposed. If such an axiom concerning our species must certainly raise a burden-of-proof problem, we will also encounter a second problem: there is a built-in difficulty in the sciences themselves when based on an axiom about us being no exception or no third cause. It is the impossibility to avoid confusion between exceptions as they manifest towards behavior and a third cause as it also goes to the root of ontogeny to generate the finality link assumed to follow the completeness of human ontogeny.

Highlighting Darwin’s genius, our third possible image in the mirror is the world where humans are axiomatically no exception. The experience of Darwin will open the need of a fourth possibility. Our last image in the mirror is also one where ‘we are just an animal’. It is however no more from assuming that we are not an exception, but by instead resting on a global understanding of reality where there cannot be any such exception.

As being a third cause can only be understood as an element at the root of ontogeny, the only possible information will be in the results from this axiom, which will thus seemingly be identical to our being an exception. We can argue not to be an exception through the analysis of behavior, but it will never reveal whether we are or are not a third cause. In our third possibility, it is introduced as a limit imposed on our lineage and its particular phylogeny. To form the forth possibility, the limit introduced axiomatically must be applied to all of reality. Even if ‘we are not a third cause’ is not available to sciences, when there is no possible exception there also is no possible third cause.

As we prepare to summarize the possible answers to the question ‘What do I see in the mirror?’, we must insist that it does not only concern the reflection of our image only but also the impact on seeing itself: by questioning the image we also question unquestioned limiting aspects of perception affecting everything we see, including scientific observations. We thus have these four possible images to be considered in the mirror:

To be an exception and a third cause.

To be in a reality where humans cannot be ‘no exception’.

To be just an animal, for we can assume our ancestors to the present were ‘no exception’.

To be just an animal, for there cannot be any exception.

Current sciences are limited to the first two possibilities and Darwin was likely aiming at the third one. After discussing these points at length, the need and properties of the fourth possibility will become clear. From the presence of the analyst in the analysis, it is impossible to avoid the requirement for all sciences to necessarily be based on some axioms held with certainty. It becomes even more central when introducing the possibility that the human animal is biologically built to ask this fundamental question about being a third cause. This fourth possibility can be sustained on three axioms needing to be held with certainty. They are astonishingly simple, as simple as ABC. The difficulty has so little to do with understanding. It is almost exclusively with acceptance.

This book is for a different story of humanity, from a reality based on three axioms required to sustain a cosmology where there can be no exception and we could thus be simply animals. It is not a proof we are not a third cause. First and foremost, it is about the effect on current sciences from the strong limits about human perception in the mirror.

1.5 My Story

I was raised under the Roman Catholic faith, from a positive believer’s perspective. I received all these images we must believe in, in order to get the rewards of being part of the lucky ones living by the truth of these revelations. Having been imprinted before I could even speak properly, they all looked natural and beautiful. However, there also were some freak shows eventually moving me away from religion. The first important one was at the age of six or seven. Standing high above the complying audience, the parish priest just pounded it on all of us. The reader’s memory must be accurate enough to get my inside terror: it was on the Apocalypse, and the term metaphor was clearly excluded! Oh God, I said to myself, let me live some normal life before all of this! I afterwards spent some troublesome periods secretly wondering if this thought could be a sin, and maybe one of the major ones. Imagine the anguish of simultaneously carrying such a potential major sin while preparing this immaculate white soul for First Communion! No wonder it later made ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ a viable alternative.

Then, other explanations were found where many of these stories were labeled as metaphors, meaning they do not represent reality but are made to extract some principles, with the fundamental requirement of being tied to the core of positive religious beliefs. If this is the place where sciences seemingly take over religion, it was quite long before I could realize it however never reaches the end of the process, namely the possibility that we could be just another animal. Moreover, this attitude to accept the presence of metaphors in sacred texts excludes the Apocalypse.

We open a parenthesis on this difference between Genesis and the Apocalypse as metaphors, since this is an important part of our discussion. Any religious belief introduced into sciences must transform into an axiom. Therefore, considering religious beliefs as an explanation for possible facts should simply be axioms against axioms or alternatives. But these religious beliefs certainly cannot be questioned on a daily basis: they become axioms held so strongly that their alternatives could only be sustained by first rejecting the religious beliefs themselves. This is restating the role of faith with religious beliefs.

Furthermore, there is a huge biological difference in what these two books bring to any positive believer. If both connect with the supernatural, only the Apocalypse adds the possibility to cheat on biological death for the few chosen ones without going through death. The more general but delusive possibility of cheating on biological death either through resurrection or living through the Apocalypse is, for our purpose here, the main biological consequence of the third-cause axiom. The scientific questions to be raised are on the effects produced by such a belief when held for a sufficiently long phylogenetic period. Moreover, whatever the effect from the positive general belief in an after-life, avoiding death altogether through the Apocalypse must represent a tremendous surge, since, under whatever name, the fear of death or, more appropriately in the general animal case, the urge to live is a strong animalistic characteristic. Finally, the pinnacle can only