Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 1

The future of the human posture is in the spotlight. The 200-year-old locomotion paradigm can no longer resist the advancement of knowledge, yet 2,500 years of thinking on the place of verticalized human anatomy and its reflexive consciousness in the natural history of life and the Earth, is more relevant than ever.

This book retraces these reflections from pre-Socratic philosophers, focusing on the link between verticality and the most complex and consciously reflexive nervous system on the top rung of the ladder of living beings. The origin of animated forms, or animals, was considered metaphysical until the 19th century but reflection on their inception, from fertilization, paved the way for mathematics of infinitesimal geometry and dynamics. The simian filiation was inconceivable until Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck bridged the gap in 1802 with the locomotion postulate to explain the transition from quadrupedal to bipedal posture, sustained by the hypothesis of inheritance of acquired characteristics. This doctrine was overturned in 1987 by the discovery of the embryonic origins of the straightening - specific dynamics linked to neurogenesis - confirming the natural place of human verticality and nervous system complexity with its psychomotor and cognitive consequences.

Sapiens find themselves at the physical limit of the straightening while mechanisms of gametogenesis have never ceased in making neurogenesis exponentially more complex. Is the future exclusively terrestrial or does intrauterine hominization open up new perspectives for space exploration? Posturologists, occlusodontics, osteopaths, cognisciences - all anthropological sciences exposed to human verticality are concerned with this discovery, which allows Sapiens to face their natural destiny

Auteur

Anne Dambricourt Malasse is a Paleoanthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) attached to the National Museum of Natural History, at the Institut de paléontologie humaine, Paris. She studies the straightening of the nervous system in the primate lineage that leads to human posture and questions its future after having demonstrated its embryonic and phylogenetic origin in 1987.

Contenu

Preface xi

Part 1. The Vertical Human: Philosopher of Nature 1

Chapter 1. Anthropos, the First of the Animals 3

1.1. Introduction 3

1.1.1. Epistemology according to Georges Cuvier 5

1.1.2. From the metaphysics of beings to the physics of their matter 7

1.1.3. Mathematics, forms and women physicians 10

1.1.4. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: an anthropology of ideas or a certain idea of anthropology 13

1.2. Anthropos, the axis of the world 16

1.2.1. Man, a vertical anatomy 16

1.2.2. Apes and humans 17

1.2.3. The generation of anthropos: the father as a model, the mother by default 20

Chapter 2. From Aristotle to the 16th Century: The Eclipse of Science 27

2.1. Introduction 27

2.2. Comparative anatomy of apes and humans from Aristotle to Galen 27

2.2.1. The Museum of Alexandria 27

2.3. Decadence and rebirth of natural philosophy and human anatomy 31

2.3.1. Albertus Magnus, the Aristotle of a reborn Europe 31

2.3.2. The first lay schools of medicine in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries 33

2.3.3. Instant of grace: Leonardo da Vinci, from the elusive movement to the restitution of the soul 39

Chapter 3. The 16th Century: From Generation to Human Physiology 53

3.1. Ambroise Paré (15101590), father of French surgery with more than barbaric Latin 53

3.2. André Vésale (15141564), the audacity of objectivity in the face of Galen's anthropo-simian chimeras 55

3.3. Jacobus Sylvius (14781555): defending Galen body and soul 56

3.4. Gabriele Fallope (15231562): freedom of dissection, the fine anatomy of the ear and cranial base 59

3.5. Bartolomeo Eustachi (Bartholomaeus Eustachius, c. 15231562): the human fetus and the monkey 60

3.6. The embryo, the fetus and blood circulation with the maternal body 62

3.6.1. Arantius (15301589): the development of the human fetus 62

3.6.2. D'Aquapendente (15331619): the father of embryology 62

3.6.3. William Harvey (15781657): the demonstration of blood circulation, vital for the development of the embryo 63

3.7. On human generation and fetal development 64

3.7.1. Gabriel de Zerbis (14551505) 65

3.7.2. Volcher Coiter (15341576) 65

3.7.3. Félix Platter (Foelix Platerus, 15361614), the first optician 66

3.8. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (16081679): the dynamic geometry of the vertical body 67

Chapter 4. Centuries in Search of Light 69

4.1. Independent Academies of Sciences 69

4.1.1. Gerolamo Cardano: of the necessity and the form of Man, by spontaneous generation or by putrefaction? 71

4.1.2. Giulio Cesare Vanini (15851619), Prince of the libertines 75

4.1.3. Man absent from himself, God always as explanation 77

4.2. The beginning of Man and Russian dolls 77

4.2.1. From microscope to microcosm 77

4.2.2. The created species are not immortal 81

Chapter 5. The Century of Naturalistic Enlightenment 85

5.1. The Jardin royal des plantes: a new natural history of animals 85

5.1.1. Georges Leclerc, Count of Buffon 85

5.1.2. A research organization independent of biblical dogmatism 87

5.1.3. The history of the Earth as a premise of the natural history of Man 90

5.1.4. Man is the last internal mold created on the Earth 95

5.1.5. The species according to Buffon 100

5.1.6. A fundamental principle: the subordination of external parties to internal parties 105

Part 2. The Place of Humans among Current and Fossilized Primates 107

Chapter 6. From Natural Curiosity Cabinets to the First Primate Collections 109

6.1. Introduction 109

6.1.1. Conrad Gessner (15161565), the first great collector of natural curiosities 109 6.1.2. Ulisse Aldrovandi (15221605), the first natural history...