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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 178
Part V — Making It Testable (Six-Step Cycle in Action)
Chapter 16
From Beacon to Proxy
Science begins with lights that guide attention; beacons become proxies, and hypotheses take form.
Science does not begin with raw data. It begins with beacons: orienting insights
that guide attention before measurement is even possible. Charles Darwin was
guided by the beacon of “natural selection,
” a simple metaphor of breeders
choosing traits, which later expanded into population genetics and molecular
evolution. Albert Einstein was guided by the beacon of “spacetime curvature,
”
an invisible abstraction that became measurable through the bending of starlight
in 1919.
The Adam Paradox Hypothesis (APH) stands in this same tradition. The Qur
ʾān
provides beacons, orienting lights that direct inquiry toward specific features of
human origins. These are not technical formulas, but they signal domains that
science can operationalize. The task is to translate them into scientific proxies—
observable, measurable traces in fossils, genomes, and artifacts.
Beacon 1 — Ṣalṣāl-in ka-l-Fakhkhār (The Ready Genome)
“He created man from clay, like pottery.
” (Q 55:14)
This metaphor of fired clay suggests something formed, durable, but not yet
animated. APH interprets it as the ready genome: Homo sapiens bodies fully
modern in anatomy, their genomes consolidated, but symbolic cognition still
dormant.
Logical Support: Fossils from Jebel Irhoud (~315kya), Omo Kibish
(~195kya), and Herto (~160kya) reveal human-like skulls and brain sizes
indistinguishable from today (Hublin et al., 2017; McDougall et al., 2005).
Yet no symbolic artifacts accompany them.
Scientific Proxy: Y-chromosomal Adam (~254kya) and mtDNA Eve
(~200kya) represent the genetic convergence of humanity (Poznik et al.,
2016). The genome was ready, but cognition had not yet ignited.