Cultural Influences on the Brain, Science and Theology on Human Specificity

What is it about?

This paper addresses the timely issue of human specificity in a multidisciplinary perspective. It first begins with a brief sketch of the relationships between science and theology in the last decades, and notes how the situation is changing at the very beginning of the 21st century. Then, the work assesses the most recent developments about the issue of human specificity, suggesting how those developments indeed open up fresh and concrete possibilities to acknowledge the human specificity also on the basis of scientific findings and approaches, especially when the real import of the human cultural complexion is taken into account. In a following section, two fundamental topics are addressed: the issue of neural learning and the approach in terms of gene-culture co-evolution. Here, both the importance of these topics for human uniqueness and culture, and their potential limits in supporting the specificity of the human being will be discussed. Furthermore, a novel approach, based on the notion of cultural neural reuse (i.e., cultural processes affecting brain anatomy), will be proposed. This approach seems able to acknowledge an irreducible role of cultural dynamics in human overall constitution. Cultural neural reuse suggests that humans are unique because they are able to shape and transcend themselves. Finally, the implications of this approach will be drawn for theological topics such as the imago Dei doctrine, the notion of self-transcendence, and the integral view of the human being emerging from Biblical and early Christian anthropology.

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Why is it important?

Examines relationship between brain and culture