Reading Garden of Eden story as a parable , an allegory, a symbolic story , it has the same idea of human origin as anthropology; human origin is the invention of symbolic communication within and down through generations; language and culture. <


Eating the fruit of the Tree of the Fruit of knowledge of Good and Evil is a parable , symbolic representation, of inventing Culture -Custom-Rules of Behavior-Manners .<


A parable is a succinct, didactic (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism) story, in prose (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose)or verse (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verse_(poetry)), that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable) in that fables employ animals (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal), plants (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant), inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters.[1] A parable is a type of metaphorical (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor) analogy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy) .[2] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_Harmensz_van_Rijn_-_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)The Return of the Prodigal Son (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_(Rembrandt)), by Rembrandt ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt), 1660s

Some scholars of the canonical gospels (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_gospels) and the New Testament (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament) apply the term "parable" only to the parables of Jesus (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parables_of_Jesus) ,[3]need quotation to verify (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) [4](page needed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources)] although that is not a common restriction of the term Bible, King James Version


Genesis Lecture - Anthropology - My hypothesis is that several parables at the beginning of the Jewish- Christian Bible and Muslim Koran in the Book of Genesis are ancient discoveries of several truths concerning the origin of human beings; truths which have been discovered by anthropological science in both ethnology (cultural anthropology) among living Stone Age Peoples and paleo-anthropology (study of human evolution from ancient hominin fossils and artifacts from the Stone Age and the pre-Stone Age periods)


Essentially, the hypothesis concerns the story that the Garden of Eden has two trees: The Tree of Life and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. " Knowledge of Good and Evil is reasonably interpreted as a system of Morals, Ethics, "Do's and Don'ts", Custom of Behavior, Rules of Peoples" Conduct or CULTURE. I infer from this that the human origin described _is_ the origin of Culture, in the same way that anthropology has found that Genus Homo's origin is specifically in the origin of Culture (and Language). So, anthropological evolutionists and Biblical Creationists might be seen to agree in a way.


The Tree of Life is the very same term that Charles Darwin used as a metaphor or parable for the portrayal of his theory that all life is related to all other life through common ancestor species out of which they evolved by way of Natural Selection. A Tree's typical branching form is a way to portray the logic of Darwinian evolutionary phylogeny. _Furthermore I hypothesize, that the ancient authors of the Tree of Life parable, had discovered Darwin's principles of evolutionary phylogeny ! They used the parable to express the same scientific truth that Darwin did !


Not only that: Tree logic is exactly category-classification logic of increasingly inclusive categories. This is a fundamental property of LANGUAGE. So, this part of the story or parables of human origin expresses that same idea as modern anthropological science's discovery that Genus Homo ( the Stone Age) begins with LANGUAGE.


Elsewhere in the Bible is expressed that idea that "In the Beginning was the Word," which I would interpret as that same idea as human origin is in language.


Thus, these parables can be interpreted to express the same ideas that I taught in earlier class sessions, that the human species are distinguished from all other animals and life by having Culture or Custom and Language. <



A larger hypothesis I have is that the_ Alphabetically Written_ Bible is a recording of what at the time were Memorized and Orally presented Stories-Myths from the Stone Age of 100's of thousands of years (we have studied the Stone Age extensively in this class).

Alphabetic Writing originates with so-called Civilization, approximately 6, 000 year ago simultaneously with origin of Male Supremacism, Private Property-Slavery and the State-Hierarchy-Military capturers and controllers of slaves.

And, hypothetically, this newly founded priesthood of alphabetic writers make some changes to the ancient stories. They found what I term Religion (which is different than Stone Age Ancestor Veneration ) in order to have a culture -ideology that controls said slaves. <


Religion's signal characteristic is GODS, defined as _immortal INDIVIDUALS_. Stone Age Ancestor Veneration recognized that Ancestor Generations were in fact DEAD, MORTAL But, the Dead Generations attained a certain type of immortality by leaving the legacy of Culture and Language to future generations. This is Culture and Language as _Natural_ Soul or Spirit, Material Soul, _ not_ super-natural or mystical soul. Language is a material thing or process in the form of spoken words and vibrations of air molecules or ink on paper or grooves in stone.<


This material is what is" immortal", able to be passed down through the generations because DISPLACEMENT capacity of symbolic signs (as discussed in previous lectures); immortal in the sense that it survives the deaths of many people over the many generations.<


Getting back to God in Genesis, I am hypothesizing that the originators of Religion transform/distort the Messages from Ancestors of Many Generations, _many_ Individual People who pass on Wisdom in Stories and Myths , distort that into one imaginary Individual, GOD. And the priests are the only one's of knowledge of God's Word.<


The Ancestors in Dead Generations wanted their children and grandchildren to "eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil", learn their culture-moral system. The Religious Priests turned this into a disobedience of God as a basis for claiming that all "men" are born in sin ( and Eve, a woman, committed the first sin), and so must earn their living by the sweat of their brow. IN OTHER WORDS, WORK, LABOR, TOIL IN THEIR MASTERS' FIELDS, in the newly originated large scale agriculture and animal husbandry of the newly arising so-called civilization. As opposed to the less toilsome foraging, hunting and gathering of wild food that was the way of making a living in the Stone Age (in the Garden of Eden).


"God" as Dead Ancestors, as a father wanting children Adam and Eve to gain knowledge of Good and Evil, and become "GodS" (plural) like the Dead Ancestors had been when they were alive with all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, they had from earlier Dead Ancestors. In a later, Chapter of Genesis, Cain kills his brother Abel. However, God tells people not to take revenge on Cain. This is the same advice Darwin would give a species. Don't start a revenge cycle as this would lower your species Darwinian fitness. ///


“Lecture notes on Creationists /Evolutionists points of agreement” In some of today s popular discourse, there is a debate between Biblical Creationists and Scientist/Evolutionists; Christians vs Darwinists. My thesis that there is agreement between some of my ideas of Human Origin and some key sections of the Bible interpreted as Parables or even literally.


Please recall the following section of my essay "Is Human Nature Social or Selfish?, which I gave you as part of the first lecture of the class several weeks ago:<


The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems as super-organic bodies; the human social group as harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies, were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower sprinters , too !<


The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social, super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively frail _ individual_ bodies, and needed each other's support.



It is dear to me that ratural selection picked hominin groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against through the whole Stone Age


Importantly, to the question " is human nature social or selfish, this is when humans became "hardwired" genetically, establishing our NATURE!


Here is Jesus on the Greatest Commandment: 36 Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? 37 Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Ta] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.'[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these


((( DARWIN AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS WOULD SUBSTANTIALLY AGREE WITH THE ESSENCE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WHICH JESUS SUMMARIZED AS “LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF “ AS FOLLOWING THOSE PRINCIPLES WOULD RAISE HOMO SAPIENS DARWINIAN FITNESS.

You shall have no other Gods before me You shall not make for yourselves an idol You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy Honor your father and your mother (that thy days may be long) <


(CB: This is filial piety. It is through filial piety that ancestor veneration is practiced. Recall how I have argued that ancestor veneration as symbolic inheritance has raised humans Darwinian fitness)

You shall not murder ( CB: Clearly this bolsters species Darwinian fitness And all the following are preventive of internal species conflict and struggle. Darwin would give the sam advice)


You shall not commit adultery You shall not steal You shall not give false testimony You shall not covet ((((

Other sections of the Bible with advice that raises our species Darwinian fitness or shows scientific knowledge:

Making the Heaven and Earth as Almighty DEAD Ancestors _Named_ them. The Sky is created by naming it.

Garden of Eden a) Work Ethic vs Garden of Eden toil; b) Mortality; C) Snake lies; only with symbolic communication can there be lying ;it's a lie because snakes can't lie, can't use words, so can't use words falsely. It's a lie about a "lie." <


Jacob and the Lambs; knowledge of Mendelian genetics.<


Faith, Hope, Charity; the greatest of these is charity.


Man doeth not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth from the Mouth of God<


(CB: Anthropologists agree; if every word from the Mouth of God is interpreted as Custom-Ancestral Symbolic Legacy .)<



Love thy Neighbor as thyself; Darwin would say the same because it tends to species population growth; See my essay " Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?'below<


Blessed are the Peacemakers; Darwin would say same.<


Give your money and riches to the Poor: Would tend aid species population growth

See discussion of Ten Commandments in Lectures.


((&&&&&

FROM _THE ESSENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY_ "BIology, Genetics, and Evolution Evolution and Creation Stories The mythology of most peoples includes a story explaining the example, explains human origins. The Nez Perce, American Indians native to eastern Oregon and Idaho, provide us with a vastly different story. For the Nez Perce, human beings are the creation of Coyote, a trickster-transformer. Coyote chased the giant beaver monster Wish-poosh over the earth, leaving a trail to form the Columbia River. When Coyote caught Wishpoosh, he killed him, dragged his body to the riv-erbank, and cut it into pieces, each body part transforming into one of the various peoples of this region. The Nez Perce were made from Wishpoosh's head, thus conferring on them great intelligence and horsemanship (Clark, 1966)."

Creation stories depict the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, sometimes reflecting a deep connection among people, other animals, and the earth. In the Nez Perce creation story, groups of people derive from specific body parts-each possessing a special talent and relationship with a particular animal. By contrast, the story of creation in Genesis-shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims— emphasizes human uniqueness and the concept of time. Creation takes place as a series of actions over the course of six days. God's final act of creation is to fashion the first human in his own image before the seventh day of rest.

Like creation stories, evolution, the major organizing principle of the biological sciences, accounts for the diversity of life on earth. Evolution provides mechanisms for change and explanations for how the variety of organisms, both in the past and today, came into being. Evolution differs from creation stories in that it explains the diversity of life in a consistent scientific language, using testable ideas (hypotheses). Scientists make comparisons among living organisms to test hypotheses drawn from evolutionary theory. Scientists have deciphered the molecular basis of evolution and the mechanisms through which evolutionary forces work on populations of organisms." ((((()))


((())

Human Nature Social or Selfish ? by Charles D. Brown One student asked "what does anthropology matter ? what difference does it make ?". Good, mature questions for a high school student.


One way that anthropology might help us in the here and now is to bring scientific and biological paleontological evidence, from the Stone Age 100,000's of years ago, to bear on the question of what is human nature today ? Is it human nature to be greedy and selfish like Wall Street billionaires ? Or is it human nature to share and "love thy neighbor as thyself" ? _Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin. Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise human" ) is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominin; H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which differentiates us as a sub-species from our closely related sub-species Homo sapiens Neanderthal. Some living humans have Neanderthal genes; this means that we are the same species as Neanderthals, who you have probably heard of.


What is humans' unique nature ? What is culture ( custom) ? For anthropology, culture is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture" is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. <


Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture, stone tools made through culture, etc, raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth, out of what is now Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life forthe vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99% or more. <


The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; Original human societies were ancient kinship/culture systems , super-organic bodies; the human social group was a harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies, were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners in sprints , too !<


The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social, super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony ans balance , not competition and "savage" rivalry because they had relatively frail_ individual_ bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominid groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against through the whole Stone Age; war , savage rivalry only arises with so-called Civilization . <


Importantly, to the question " is human nature social or selfish, " the Stone Age is when humans became "hardwired" genetically, establishing our NATURE ! When our Nature was established we were NOT warring , male supremacist or greedy. So, our nature is social not selfish. <


Nat king Cole, Nature Boy Nat king Cole, Nature Boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qOXJC/1Srw <



Some one commented :OK, both. I could make arguments either way. People are social animals, but they also act in their best (often selfish) interests.


Charles Brown No, original humans relied more than other species on each other, on kinship relations. Human individual bodies were relatively frail and weak, and bi-pedalism made them slow runners. So, humans were very interdependent and highly social by nature. Our species name should be _homo socialis_. Selfishness and greed would have been selected against in the Darwinian sense. So, the answer is not both, but social. Greed and selfishness arise with civilization, after hundreds of thousands of years of "love thy neighbor as thyself" as the central principle of human societies, and the key to our adaptive advantage and ticket to the top of the food chain. Love thy neighbor as THYSELF is not self-less.


It is wise in that the best way to love yourself is to get along with others well. Now individual mortal beings, animals, do have an instinct of self-preservation, to avoid death. But dangers of death or injury did not come from other individuals of the same species. War is against our individual instinct and our species's original nature, which was peaceful toward other members of the species.

" The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality.... Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex.... In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." - Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76-87.