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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 218
A Philosophical Weakness
Gradualism also falters philosophically.
Popper’s challenge (testability).
Karl Popper (1902–1994). A philosopher of science from Austria. He’s
famous for saying that a real scientific theory must be falsifiable.
Imagine a student who always has an excuse —
“The computer
crashed,
” “The dog ate it.
” No matter what happens, they claim they
’re
right. Gradualism works the same way: every outcome has a ready
excuse, so it can never really be proven wrong.
Gradualism explains silence by claiming “the record is incomplete,
”
explains scattered finds as “early accumulation,
” and explains sudden bursts
as “cultural tipping points.
”
Kuhn’s warning (paradigm blindness).
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). An American historian and philosopher of
science. He wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where he argued
that science doesn’t just progress step by step. Instead, it works in
paradigms (shared worldviews) until anomalies pile up and trigger a
paradigm shift — a scientific revolution.
Think of someone wearing tinted glasses. Everything they see looks the
same color, even when the world changes around them. Gradualism is
like those glasses: it sees fossils clearly but fails to notice the oddity of
modern humans with silent minds for millennia.
Gradualism is today
’s paradigm. It explains bones well but blinds us to the
anomaly of cognition: fully modern bodies with mute minds for 200
millennia.
Dennett’s caution (over-explaining).
Daniel Dennett (1942–2023). An American philosopher, known for his
work on evolution, mind, and consciousness. He described Darwin’s idea
of natural selection as a “
universal acid”
— so powerful it eats through
almost every mystery, reducing complex things into simple evolutionary
steps.
Picture a friend who explains away every special moment —
“That
sunset is just light scattering,
” “Your love is just chemicals.
” True in
one sense, but it drains the meaning.
Applied to cognition, gradualism dissolves not just mystery but meaning,
reducing the human leap to background noise.