ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relation between our evolution as a species and our capacity for knowledge. It discusses evolution on three levels. Most fundamentally, what is organic evolution—what process, with what causes and dynamics? A second level is specifically human evolution, from the first hominids 4 or 5 million years ago to modern Homo sapiens. A third level is the evolution of knowledge, or cultivated artifactual performance. The chapter argues that the evolution of our species is not the evolution of knowledge, whose origin is post evolutionary. The idea of a marriage between Darwin and epistemology was discussed among neo-Kantians in the later nineteenth century and led to the evolutionary epistemology of Konrad Lorenz. Three moments of human evolution have attracted a lot of thought: bipedalism, the first stone tools, and language. The cultivation of knowledge as a cultural ethos in the Upper Paleolithic pursued an adaptation natural selection withheld.
