Table of Contents: PTSc 3/2 The Evolution of Wisdom Editorial . 111 Celia Deane-Drummond, Neil Arner, and Agustín Fuentes The Evolution of Morality: A Three-Dimensional Map . 115 Jonathan Marks A Tale of Ex-Apes: Whence Wisdom? . 152 Robert Song Play It Again, but This Time with Ontological Conviction: A Response to Jonathan Marks . 175 Thomas A. Tweed On Narratives, Niches, and Religion: A Response to Jonathan Marks . 183 Julia Feder The Impossible Is Made Possible: Edward Schillebeeckx, Symbolic Imagination, and Eschatological Faith . 188 Marc Kissel and Agustín Fuentes From Hominid to Human: The Role of Human Wisdom and Distinctiveness in the Evolution of Modern Humans . 217 Book Reviews Joshua M. Moritz. Science and Religion: Beyond Warfare and Toward Understanding (Michael Berhow) . 245 Peter Harrison. The Territories of Science and Religion (Benedikt Paul Göcke) . 249 Brent Waters. Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture: From Posthuman Back to Human (Anne Kull) . 253 Eduardo Kohn. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Whitney Bauman) . 257 Editorial 10.1628/219597716X14696202742019 The Evolution of Wisdom My remarks in this editorial are necessarily very brief, but I have to say that the essays contributing to this special issue are some of the most fascinating I have had the privilege to read as part of our ongoing project on the evolu- tionary origins of wisdom. This research* has not been attempted quite in this way before and represents some years of working and discussing issues together as part of a project team since the summer of 2014. My conversa- tions with Agustín Fuentes on this topic go back further to around 2010. We deliberately intend to present something of the liveliness of discussion by including two formal responses to Jonathan Marks’ article, along with a number of shorter responses to articles by Julia Feder, Marc Kissel, and Agustín Fuentes. The discussion element of this special issue will become obvious when reading the first article, which reflects an ongoing dialogue between Agustín Fuentes, Neil Arner, and myself. I have placed this article first for a number of reasons, not least to highlight the different kind of methodology we are intending to showcase here. In the first place, wisdom, as understood by many classical philosophers, was that which emerged through debate, dia- logue, and listening to each other’s perspectives. Second, our topic in this discussion is related to what could be termed the broader framing in which wisdom is discussed, namely, that of morality. So, according to our argu- ments presented in this paper, practical wisdom can be understood as a virtue focusing on the social goods of that community and, when translated into religious language, wisdom includes the transcendent dimension and thereby ultimately points to God’s divine wisdom. Such a rendering might imply that divine wisdom is simply emergent in the human imaginary and arises from a translation of human wisdom onto a divine agent. This kind of materialist reduction is resisted by theologians, who insist that divine wisdom is metaphysically prior to any human becoming. If we explore the moral discourse, a similar pattern ensues, namely, the extent to * This research is supported by two grants from the John Templeton Foundation, The Evolution of Wisdom and Human Distinctiveness projects led by Celia Deane-Drum- mond and Agustín Fuentes. The opinions in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. We are very grateful for their support and interest in this work. PTSc 3 (2016), 111–114 DOI 10.1628/219597716X14696202742019 ISSN 2195-9773 © 2016 Mohr Siebeck 112 Editorial which the moral sense builds on prior evolutionary patterns of behavior, and how far is it locally or contextually dependent on cultural, religious, or other factors. Our discussion on the evolution of morality highlights com- mon ground among us, but also some interesting tensions arising from our different scientific, philosophical, and theological commitments. This dis- cussion is important, since it sets the stage for a discussion of the evolution of wisdom that has not yet been tackled in a serious way in the literature to date. Wisdom, like morality, is notoriously difficult to define; so we all agree that much of the confusion in the literature can be cleared up by seeking to be clear on the particular meaning of morality in each case. The work of pri- matologist Frans de Waal, especially on primate empathy and inequity aver- sion, and his argument against what he terms the ‘veneer theory’ or morality, also featured in all our accounts. Perhaps wisdom is not simply a subset of morality, but much more than that, including human imagination more broadly understood in terms of a nexus of relatedness more generally, as well as obligation and morality. This is the position taken by Jonathan Marks in the second article in this issue. He argues, convincingly in my view, that secular origin myths on the human privilege continuity rather than discontinuity in a manner that has some resonance with the continuity / ​discontinuity dialectic in our discus- sion of the evolution of morality. For him, the background to such assertions is that scientists may be reacting to creationist ex nihilo accounts of human origins. Or maybe genetics has high status and so helps reinforce the conti- nuity thesis? But for him what is particularly interesting is the human ten- dency to make things seem rather more robust than they really are, namely by insisting on scientific precision over accuracy. But, at root, what he seems to think of as having solidity relates to his evolutionary biological presup- positions, namely, whether something leads to us acquiring the necessities of life or reproducing. Something like human wisdom, morality, or even marriage is ‘fictive’ not because it is not real for those involved, but because it is constructed as part of our narratives about ourselves. But this is where Robert Song presses his case, for even the ability to recognize other kinds as different and make the necessary biological judgments requires a particular ontological commit- ment. He, as a theologian, eschews an emergentist thesis if this implies a residue of philosophical materialism. Thomas A. Tweed, on the other hand, points to the epistemic, aesthetic, and moral values embedded in the con- struction of narratives, even scientific ones. So, as Marks implies but does not spell out, it is false to claim there is a fact / ​value dichotomy between science and the humanities. The imaginary that Marks points to in human The Evolution of Wisdom 113 becoming is also parsed out in Tweed in terms of cosmic crossings between this world and the next as well as embodied crossings in life style stages, both of which are specifically found in religious discourse. Julia Feder’s paper develops the evolutionary theory of niche construc- tion that both Marks and Tweed discuss, but puts this to a new use, namely to engage with the literature on the emergence of religion, but now in dia- logue with the work of Roman Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. For her, as Marks, it is the human symbolic imagination that is particularly pertinent in considering what might be in the background of a distinctively human form of wisdom. In particular, the ability of humans to imagine the seemingly impossible is a distinctly human act, and, through the lens of the theologian of hope (Schillebeeckx) opens up a gulf between what is and what could be in a negative contrast experience. How such negative contrast ex- periences begin to build a symbolic imagination captures Feder’s attention as she weaves her way through interpreting Schillebeeckx in a fresh light. Moreover, and in a credible way, her analysis probes the extent to which symbolic thought as parsed through the thought of Terrence Deacon has captured the imagination of anthropologists, asking how far a sacramen- tal theology that Schillebeeckx typifies can correct or at least question the earthen characteristics that lie behind symbol making. In other words, has anthropology, ironically perhaps, itself committed the error common to many theologies by becoming too abstracted from the world of the earthly and everyday? The final article in this issue takes the discussion further again by prob- ing a new way of considering the transition from human-like things to what eventually becomes recognizably modern humans. Like the other authors in this issue, niche construction features heavily again, but now Marc Kissel and Agustín Fuentes use that mode of becoming to probe the very deep history of the Homo lineage. I find this work particularly astonishing considering the time scales being investigated. More important, perhaps, the rhetoric of wisdom has opened up a fresh perspective on questions presupposed in the standard anthropological literature to be resolved. The out-of-Africa model for human origins, and the assumption that the transition to behaviorally modern from anatomically modern humans happened in a cluster around 200,000 years ago, starts to look more fragile than originally supposed. It is as if, to use Jonathan Marks’ language, that accuracy has given way to preci- sion. Though it would be hard to be precise at all about these scanty remains, that is, to insist on confidence in their solidity in terms of research, the cu- mulative evidence is still highly suggestive. 114 Editorial Although Kissel and Fuentes do not go into these aspects, it is tantalizing for theologians to consider the variety and traces of what seem to be more than practical workings out of the human mind. We are touching here on deep questions of the origins of a particularly human form of consciousness, but now cast in a different light from the standard brain / ​mind problem.