Viva la Evolution!

What a shock! Humans are not the crown of creation, claimed the naturalist Darwin boldly in 1858. And no: there was no divine creation either. Homo sapiens is nothing more than a product of evolution, a rather random further development of animals, or worse: primates! The fact that all other species did not originate from Noah's Ark, but also arose through selection and adaptation, was the lesser insult.

Well, most people today have recovered from this shock, and in 1996, the Catholic Church also recognized the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, it still represents a massive insult in the minds of various fundamentalists today – and is being removed from the curriculum in an alarming number of countries.

Yet we now know that divine teleology is not necessary to develop morality and humanity. Humans, if allowed to develop under reasonably normal circumstances, are intrinsically social, often even altruistic beings – purely on the basis of their genome and proteome, epigenetics and, surprisingly, their cooking habits.

But how did they develop? And why does the strict control of evolution allow such an energy waster as the human brain to exist? Ultimately, what makes humans so special? But let's start at the beginning, with the question of origin. Ute Eppinger has investigated this question.