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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 182
Beacon 4 — Trust (Q 33:72)
“We offered the Trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains, but they refused… and
”
man undertook it.
This beacon signals moral responsibility—cooperation, law, and accountability.
Its archaeological proxy is structured networks that require symbolic contracts.
Logical Support: Dunbar’s number predicts that without symbolic
frameworks, stable groups cannot exceed ~150 individuals (Dunbar, 1998).
Symbolic law enables thousands to cooperate.
Scientific Proxy: Standardized beads, engraved ostrich eggshells, and trade
systems indicate symbolic “contracts” (Stiner et al., 2013).
Mathematical Clarity:
Logistic population models describe growth:
where K is carrying capacity. With only foraging and no symbolic law, K is low
(~few thousand). With symbolic trust, K rises sharply, matching observed
expansions after ~70kya (Powell et al., 2009).
Mathematical Clarity Made Simple
Scientists sometimes use a logistic growth curve to describe how populations
grow. Think of it like this:
A group can only grow as big as the environment allows — this upper limit
is called the carrying capacity (K).
If people only survive by hunting and gathering, without much cooperation
or shared rules, that limit stays very low— maybe just a few thousand
individuals.
But once humans develop symbols, language, and shared trust (like
agreements, laws, or rituals), they can cooperate in much larger groups.
That makes the carrying capacity jump sharply upward.
The archaeological record matches this: after around 70,000 years ago, human
populations began expanding much more quickly. The math shows that the key
was not just food, but the ability to trust and organize through symbols.