EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Anne Dambricourt-Malassé, National Museum of Natural History, France

The Human Lineage: A Macro-Evolutionary Process Acting During Embryogeny with Emergent Macro-Evolutionary Implicationse

The morphological transformations that mark the major stages of the human phylogeny among the primates, may be seen as successions of embryonic patterns, structurally stable during long geological periods, the transition being that of discrete changes, i.e. punctuated equilibria. Not only macro-evolutionary processes underlay human origins, but also, the iteration of morphogenetic changes such as the sphenoïdal rotation at the cephalic pole of the embryonic axis, reminding the irreversible and deterministic chaotic processes (non-linear dynamics, selforganized criticality, stranges attractors). This replicable evolutionary trajectories of embryonic morphogenesis (neural tube rolling up generating the sphenoïdal flexion, homeotic genes acting along the cerebro-spinal axis), supposes the existence of conservative regulatory mechanisms when the system was traversed by a flow of stochastic or dissipative genetic informations (source of numerous spontaneous abortions, fetal teratology and post-natal abnormalities). The emergence of hominids (i.e. permanent bipedalism) c.a. 5 millions years, depends on favourable environmental factors (water at least for long pregnancy, freeding), but the natural mechanism is that of discrete and neguentropic macro-evolutionary process, characterized by epigenetic effects of increasing complexity, canalized on the psychomotor control of postural balance. This neural and vascular growing complexity has allowed the development of different reflexive consciousnesses emerging in neo-cortical territories (different hominids species). At present time, in their cells, human beings are a stage of an irreversible macro-evolutionary process.

This was the case for any species of great apes between 18 millions and 5 millions years ago, but devoided of a singularity which now characterizes Homo sapiens in front of the fragility of any form of life, the sense of freedom and responsibility. In the era of Quantum Mechanics which underlies any macroscopic dynamic process, itself printed by the first instant of the proto-universe, it does not seem any more possible to support a nihilistic assertion of the origins without taking into account its major implications. Either the sense of the values is a pure utopia, and the notion of crime against humanity is a total illusion, either the illusion concerns certain scales of time and space of the evolution devoid of sense.