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

In 2018, Nicanor Austriaco, OP, publishes an argument in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. A philosophical bias in biology rules out the realness of Adam. If that bias is overcome, then what might the realness of Adam look like? These comments use the category-based nested form and other relational models developed within the tradition of C.S. Peirce. More

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.

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