DESCRIPTION: Prof. Bernard Hałaczek (1936-2025) was associated with the ATK in Warsaw (now UKSW) since 1973. In 1981-1984, he served as vice-dean, and in 1987-1993 as dean of the Faculty of Christian Philosophy. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of the SPCh (1982-2020) and deputy editor-in-chief (1988-1993). He published 24 texts in the SPCh, including 17 scientific articles. In these, he addressed issues from five thematic groups: 1) human phylogeny; 2) the history of paleoanthropology; 3) demographic anthropology; 4) eco-philosophy and bioethics; 5) the history and philosophy of science. In addition to a critical presentation of the current state of knowledge in the field of natural anthropogenesis, based in part on his own research, he uses paleoanthropology to illustrate the historical, social, and methodological mechanisms of the development of natural paradigms. On the basis of empirical research, he revealed typical changes and primary determinants in the reproductive behavior and attitudes of modern humans. In addition, he analyzed bioethical dilemmas and ecological threats arising and growing with the contemporary potential of scientific and technological possibilities. In the article in question, the author considers the origins of human intelligence, characteristic of the Homo sapiens species. "The fact that humans are beings endowed with the capacity for abstract thought and symbolic speech is not learned by biologists from the study of human morphology or anatomy, but from the analysis of human behavior. Therefore, if a paleoanthropologist detects morphological features characteristic of humans in fossilized bone material and, on this basis, determines the spatio-temporal origins of bipedalism or the large brain, this does not yet mean that the creature he has identified was actually human. (...) The impossibility of direct studies on the behavior of beings classified or classified on morphological grounds as belonging to the genus Homo means that any scientific statement about the origins of humanity can only claim to be a more or less probable hypothesis" (pp. 187-188). The author concludes that since there are no biological grounds for attributing higher intelligence to modern Homo sapiens than to his fossil ancestors, great caution should also be exercised when assessing the intelligence of humans from the Lower Pleistocene. In this assessment, natural factors that prevent the full manifestation of their intelligence must not be overlooked. It should be remembered, for example, that these humans lived in small, scattered groups and that they lived much shorter lives than humans today. Both of these factors were not conducive to the cultivation or transmission of individual talents and achievements. For these two reasons alone, the mental abilities of our distant ancestors must be assessed much higher than the fossil evidence of their intelligence would suggest. "Does this picture of the human past indicate that modern humans are more intelligent than fossil humans, and incomparably more intelligent than pre-humans? It would certainly be unreasonable to deny the evolutionary development of intelligence within the population classified as Homo and to claim that the intelligence of humans 2 million years ago did not differ from that of modern humans" (p. 201).
SUMMARY: 1. Introduction. 2. The concept of intelligence in biological sciences. 3. Paleontological criteria for intelligence. 4. Spatio-temporal location of the origins of intelligence. 5. Final conclusions.
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