Crown of creation
The crown of creation is a term for people - often only used ironically today . Possible origins are in ancient Greece and the Old Testament .
Antiquity
The origin of the phrase can be up to the Scala Naturae of Aristotle , that is in a very early attempts to animate and the inanimate, to arrange traced systematically. The most complicated living beings were classified as the highest forms of life, and so the human being sat at the top of the system as the “crowning achievement” of creation.
Old testament
The creation story in Genesis 1 according initially was the rock, the plants, the animals, and finally - as the final point of creation - the human being created, which - like a crowned head - the earth "subject to" make and "rule" to “About the fish in the sea and about the birds under the sky and about all animals that crawl on the earth” ( 1 Mos 1,28 LUT ).
The Old Testament in Ps 8,6 LUT also contains a designation of man similar to the formulation crown of creation , which is passed down as praise of man in the form of David's address to YHWH : “You made him a little lower than God, with honor and You have crowned him glory. "
According to the teaching of the Catholic Church , "man [...] on earth is the only creature willed by God for its own sake" ( Gaudium et Spes 24: 3).
18th and 19th centuries
In modern Europe, this gradation of forms of life, supported by the biblical story of creation, was taken up. It can be found in a modified form in many evolutionary family trees of the 18th and 19th centuries. With the advent of the theory of evolution , the image of a human family tree is differentiated. From the point of view of evolutionary research today, there is no excellent species that stands out from the others as the “crown of creation”.
Modern times
Once in April 2007 in the journal Science the results of the detailed DNA sequencing of the rhesus monkey - genome was announced, it was first possible, the two previously sequenced genomes of humans and chimpanzees with that of more distantly related primate to compare. According to this, 93.5% of the DNA base pairs of rhesus monkeys match those of humans and 98% of the base pairs of humans and chimpanzees. However, a comparison of 13,888 genes from humans, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys showed that 233 chimpanzee genes, but only 154 genes in humans, differ so greatly from the rhesus monkey genes that they code for modified proteins . This means that, in the course of tribal history, chimpanzees have diverged quantitatively further from the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans than humans. The journal New Scientist wrote: "The fact is that chimpanzees are the more sophisticated species."
As the initiators of the Great Ape Project, the philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer go so far that human rights should be extended to orangutans , gorillas and chimpanzees .
swell
- ^ Rhesus Macaque Genome Sequencing and Analysis Consortium: Evolutionary and Biomedical Insights from the Rhesus Macaque Genome. Science, Volume 116, Issue 5822 of April 13, 2007, pp. 222-234, doi: 10.1126 / science.1139247 .
- ↑ MA Bakewell, P. Shi, J. Zhang: More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104, 2007, p. 7489, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0701705104 .
- ^ " The fact is, chimpanzees are the more highly evolved species. “In: Who is the most refindes ape of them all? New Scientist, Volume 195, Issue 2600, April 21, 2007, p. 17.
- ↑ Cavalieri / Singer (1996): Human Rights for the Great Apes: The Great Ape Project.