DESCRIPTION: Grzegorz Bugajak was a long-time member of the Institute of Philosophy at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw and editorial secretary of SPCh. He died suddenly on May 17, 2020. Issue No. 4 of Volume 56 of SPCh from 2020 was dedicated to him. In addition to presenting Grzegorz Bugajak's academic profile and research achievements, this issue includes an article that is a previously unpublished text by him, found in his private archive after his death. The editors modified the title and structure of the text and partially supplemented the footnotes. In it, the author notes that the question of the origins of man, posed in the field of biological sciences, is a question about the phylogenetic line leading to the emergence of the species Homo sapiens. With a hypothesis about the course of this line, biologists can try to determine when and where a change occurred that was decisive enough to be considered equivalent to the emergence of our truly new species. The problem, however, is that the criteria for clearly distinguishing one species from another seem difficult, if not impossible, to formulate. This means that the very concept of a “truly new” species is, in a sense, empty. This article highlights the key methodological problems in physical anthropology that are relevant to its findings. "It is not surprising that the ‘definition of man’ depends on the method used to study the human past—it is the method that determines the set of characteristics that are considered typically human. However, it is worth emphasizing that even if proponents of different anthropological methods could reach some kind of agreement and consequently formulate a consistent ‘definition of man,’ such a definition would necessarily be conventional. The choice of criteria (whether morphological, archaeological, genetic, or any other) according to which fossil forms can be classified as human representatives of our ancestors will always be arbitrary. This does not, of course, indicate the weakness of research methods, but is a consequence of the fact that, when classifying anthropological finds in one way or another, we attempt to impose a discrete grid of concepts on evolutionary phenomena that are continuous in nature. Our species emerged as a result of precisely such continuous phenomena. The phylogenetic line leading to humans, regardless of the fact that we do not know the details of its course, runs smoothly—there are no objective boundaries or “points of discontinuity” that we could point to as the “time and place” of the emergence of humans" (pp. 25-26).
SUMMARY: 1. Introduction. 2. The continuous nature of evolutionary processes. 3. The concept of species in paleontology. 4. Genetic boundaries between species? 5. Natural anthropology and its methods. 6. Conclusion.
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