"Over 150 years ago, the battle over the human mind sidelined Alfred Russel Wallace from the elite science group that gathered around his co-theorist Charles Darwin. Wallace was unwilling to concede that the human mind is merely an organ that has evolved like any other.
As University of Durham historian Neil Thomas explains, for Wallace, “on more mature reflection, no simple ape-to-human progression was any longer tenable and he could no longer assent to the ontological equivalence of humans and nonhuman animals proposed by Darwin.” Thus Wallace was largely forgotten and Darwin became the cultural icon of evolution.
Yet Wallace’s skepticism was well justified. We have no evidence to support the assertion that the human mind evolved over time by natural processes. No one knows how our ancestors began to think like humans.
Later paleontologists chose a less harmful approach: Trying to locate the not-quite-humans among long-deceased groups like the Neanderthals and Flores man. But neither group has proven as dim as the search for the missing link requires. The Neanderthal art “bombshell” has seen to that.
Here’s the challenge for those postulating an evolutionary history for the mind: If man is biologically an animal but cognitively so
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So let’s turn the question around: Why should we expect the human mind to have a history? Must immaterial things have evolutionary histories?
With respect to the origin of the human mind, traditional religious explanations shed more light than a science-based approach driven by materialist assumptions. That is, the traditional explanations begin by recognizing that humans are not just animals and offering an account for that fact."
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