Comments on Nicanor Austriaco’s Essay (2018) "Defending Adam After Darwin"

By Razie Mah

An intrepid Dominican, Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, publishes an article in The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (volume 92(2), 2018, pages 337-352). The full title is “Defending Adam after Darwin: On the Origin of Species as a Natural Kind”.
The question is, “Why is natural kind so important?”
Austriaco proposes that the problem is the anti-essentialist stance of current evolutionary biologists. These comments agree. He proposes that an essentialist paradigm will return us to the concept of natural kind.
These comments diagram the proposal using Aristotle’s hylomorphism, Peirce’s secondness and the category-based nested form.
An apparent contradiction arises. Natural kind belongs to the noumenon of biology and pertains to the eternal now. The biological evolutionary sciences focus on phenomena and change over time. The here and now is not the same as evolutionary time.
Thus, Austriaco’s single natural kind is not a species, because the former belongs to the here and now and the latter goes with evolutionary time. Once associates to noumena. The other attends to phenomena.
How crazy is that?
Still, Austriaco finds something that characterizes our genus irrespective of the selection of here and now. That trait is language.
Ah, here is the rub. Talk is different than language. The evolution of talk differs from the evolution of language. In the distant past, our biological capacity for language develops in the milieu of hand talk.
This is crucial. In the evolution of the Homo genus, we hand talk. Currently, in all civilizations, we practice speech-alone talk.
One corresponds to creation of humans as the image of God. The other corresponds to an openness to the Word of God.
In sum, Austriaco locates his exposition on the terrain illuminated by the master-works, The Human Niche, An Archaeology of the Fall and How to Define the Word “Religion”. His feet stand directly on Comments of Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s Book (2016) “Why Only Us?”. What a remarkable location.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Aug 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942824886

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on Nicanor Austriaco’s Essay (2018) Adam After Darwin

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2020

Notes on Text

This work comments on an article by Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, OP, appearing in 2018 in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. The title is Defending Adam After Darwin: On the Origin of Sapiens as a Natural Kind. My goal is to comment on this work using the category-based nested form and other relational models within the tradition of Charles Peirce.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction

Recommended: Comments on Marie George’s Essay (2020) Aquinas’s Teachings on Concepts and Words, Comments on Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s Book (2016) Why Only Us: Language & Evolution

Table of Contents

Introducing the Dilemma

Contra The Anti-Essentialist Argument

The New Essentialism

Here Is The Hang Up

A Novel Approach To Human Evolution

'Something' of a Surprise

Introducing the Dilemma

0001 In 2000 AD, the Catholic theologian, John Haight, publishes God After Darwin.

In 2016, the Protestant theologian, Ron Cole-Turner, publishes The End to Adam and Eve.

0002 Against these, Dominican Nicanor Austriaco defends classical doctrines on the origin of humankind, including original sin.

What is his defense?

The modern narrative of human evolution uncritically embraces anti-essentialist presuppositions.

0003 What does this imply?

Current views of human evolution do not envision adaptation into an ultimate niche.

Rather, biologists picture a sequence of proximate niches, parading as environments of evolutionary adaptation. These proximate niches entail material and instrumental challenges. They are purely circumstantial. They have no essence. Therefore, all humans