This is the only interview in the Road Trip series conducted over the telephone. Neil was supposed to meet up with Ian Tattersall when he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but a late change in plans meant that the interview recorded from Neil’s hotel room in Chicago. Ian Tattersall was until his recent retirement a curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he co-curated the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. He is the acknowledged leader of the human fossil record, and has won several awards, including the Institute of Human Origins Lifetime Achievement Award. He has appeared on Charlie Rose and NPR’s Science Friday and has written for Scientific American and Archaeology. He’s been widely cited by the media, including The New York Times, BBC, MSNBC, and National Geographic. Ian Tattersall is the author of Becoming Human, and most recently Masters of the Planet: The search for our Human Origins.
Little Atoms 239 – Road Trip 19 – Ian Tattersall
Posted on August 17, 2012 by
Posted in: Road Trip
David Roemer
August 17, 2012
Tattersall states that the difference between modern humans (homo sapiens that appeared 200,000 years ago in Africa) and other hominids is the ability to engage in symbolic thought and ask questions. He also states that there is no evidence that this capacity evolved through natural selection. He used the word “random†to characterize the event that produced symbolic thought and inquiry.
Tattersall’s remarks promote the pseudoscientific theory that humans evolved from animals. True science is that the bodies of humans evolved from animals, but not their souls. While it is not a scientific truth, rational people judge that the human soul is spiritual.
Body and soul are the metaphysical categories of form and matter applied to human beings. The soul (form) is the principle that makes humans equal to one another, and the body (matter) is the principle that makes each human being unique. The human soul is spiritual because we can’t define what a human being is. We can comprehend what a human being is because we know everything that happens to us and every thing we do. We know we have free will, conscious knowledge, symbolic thoughts, concepts, dreams, images, and truths, but we can’t define or explicate these activities of the human mind. Humans are indefinabilities that become conscious of their own existence. In other words, humans are embodied spirits or spirited bodies. This is why the human soul is spiritual.