Human Evolution: Intelligence, Classification, and Traits
The Process of Humanization and Intelligence
The process of humanization begins the moment intelligence manifests. Humanization acts on the natural evolution occurring within the human species, consisting of the development of the human species through intelligence. It is believed that intelligence is deployed in practice, communication, and the transmission of knowledge. This awakens the potential of intelligence, and its further development is both biological and cultural. Human intelligence develops and changes morphologically. The human species will progressively develop its intelligence and body, along with techniques for obtaining food and expression. This will impact its life and its mastery of the environment, which can then be manipulated.
Human Species Classification
The human species is classified within the animal kingdom as follows:
- Animal Kingdom (Animalia): Beings with proper motion.
- Phylum Chordate (Chordata): Animals that possess a notochord.
- Subphylum Vertebrates (Vertebrata): Chordata with a vertebral column. Although humans walk on two legs, they are considered tetrapods, like reptiles, amphibians, and other mammals.
- Class Mammals (Mammalia): Vertebrates with hair and mammary glands.
- Subclass Placental (Eutheria): Mammals whose gestation originates in the mother’s uterus.
- Order Primates: Placentals who have five fingers and toes, an opposable thumb, flexed fingers, and are fitted with nails.
- Suborder Anthropoid (Anthropoidea): Primates with a highly developed brain.
- Infraorder Catarrhini: They have a narrow nasal septum and 32 teeth.
- Superfamily Hominoid (Hominoidea): They have a face without a prominent snout, a wide chest and pelvis, and can stand upright.
- Family Hominidae (Hominidae): Have forelimbs smaller than hindlimbs and a bipedal gait.
- Genus Homo: Hominids with a cranial capacity between 500 and 1500 cubic cm, capable of making stone tools.
- Homo Sapiens: Possesses a cranial capacity greater than 1000 cubic cm. This is the human species.
Defining Human Characteristics
Key characteristics that define human beings include:
The Hand
The hand is a tactile instrument with which one can feel objects and transform them to create the world of objects. It is not exclusively technical; the prehensile hand is also open to understanding and shaping reality.
The Face
The face is an expressive medium that allows for abstract communication with other humans. The human face evolved from the animal snout.
Language and Speech
Language also reveals reality, showing that a body must be understood in correspondence with a peculiar psyche. Speech, uttered by humans, manifests their characteristic symbolic capacity, through which they are open to all reality and relate intellectually and emotionally with other humans.
Key Concepts and Definitions
- Mental Personification: The process of attributing human mental characteristics to animals and inanimate objects.
- Ethology: The science that studies animal behavior.
- Umwelt: The perceived world or environment of an organism.
- Taxa (plural of Taxon): A group of organisms in a classification considered a unit. Each group is given a Latin name and description.
- Biological Species: A group of organisms with similar structural and functional characteristics that, in nature, reproduce only among themselves and produce fertile offspring.
- Scientism: A form of materialism that asserts that only what can be measured, touched, or grasped by a measuring instrument exists.
- Creationism: A perspective that uses theories of evolution to support ideas that are beyond science.
- Intelligent Design (Scientific Hypothesis): A hypothesis that holds that there are biological processes that cannot be explained solely by chance, but must admit a purpose in nature and are a result of intelligent design.
- Saltationism: Maintains that mutations are the main factor of change, determining that evolution is discontinuous and not gradual.
- Punctuated Equilibrium Theory: Attempts to address the impossibility of proving the assumption that evolution proceeds by the accumulation of small variations.
- Biological Evolution: The process of anatomical and physiological change in living populations, resulting in the formation of new species.
- Humanization: The sequential process for the emergence of cultural elements that constitute a way of life or conduct that can be called truly human.
- Binomial Nomenclature: Serves to designate species in a univocal and universal manner.
- Philosophical Anthropology:
- Panpsychism: Attributes intelligence to living beings, to machines equipped with artificial intelligence, and to the universe as a whole.