MONOGENISM. — By m. is understood the unity of the human race, insofar as it derives its origin from a first man, Adam.
I. THEOLOGY
Sacred Scripture, taken in its literal and most obvious sense, everywhere affirms the unity of the human race’s origin. Gen. 2:5-7: “There was no man to till the ground... and man became a living soul”; ibid. 2:18: “And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper like himself”; ibid. 2:22: “Jahweh God formed a woman and brought her to Adam”; ibid. 3:20: “Adam gave his wife the name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living”; Wis. 10:10: “It was Wisdom that preserved the first man formed by God to be the father of the human race, the one created; she rescued him from his sin and gave him power to rule over all creatures.” In Acts 17:26-27 f. Paul, speaking at the Areopagus, affirmed: “From one man God brought forth the whole human race to inhabit the entire surface of the earth.” I Cor. 15:45: “The first man, Adam, was made a living soul.” Thus, in the Bible, Adam is understood as an individual name and not a collective one.But above all, in Rom. 5:12-19 f., Paul sets forth this doctrine at length in relation to original sin and the salvific work of Jesus Christ: “As through one man sin entered the world and through sin death, so death also spread to all men, because all sinned... And therefore, just as through the sin of one condemnation came upon all men, so through the justice of one justification that gives life comes to all men.”
Now, there can be no error in what is taught by Sacred Scripture, of which God is the author. Therefore, wherever Sacred Scripture is interpreted according to the rules of Catholic exegesis, every conclusion in favor of polygenism and against monogenism remains without foundation and must consequently be excluded.
The same must be said of the teaching of the Church, and particularly of the Council of Trent, concerning the first man, his state of original justice, his privileges (especially that of immortality), and original sin transmitted to all men insofar as they descend from Adam (Denz-U, 101, 133, 174, 176, 789, 791). The original unity of the human race is inseparable from the revealed doctrine of original sin. In the preparatory sessions of the First Vatican Council (1st schema, 15; Collectio Lacensis, VII, col. 516), the following canon had in fact been formulated with a view to definition: “Si quis universum genus humanum ab uno protoparente Adam ortum esse negaverit, anathema sit”. Many theologians consider the proposition “certa et proxima fidei”. A decree of the Biblical Commission of June 30, 1909 (Denz-U, 2121-23) places the unity of the human race among the points of doctrine that touch upon “the foundations of the Christian religion.” Pius XII, in the encyclical Humani generis (August 12, 1950: AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 561-78), explicitly confirms this by declaring inadmissible for a Catholic the polygenist opinion, which cannot be reconciled with the sources of Revelation.
For the polygenist theory and its refutation, V. POLIGENISMO.
As regards the origin of organisms in general, opinions in the scientific field are greatly divided. There are, in fact, sound arguments in favor both of m. (the uniformity of the fundamental biochemical and structural characteristics of all cells, both animal and plant) and of polygenism (the absence of transitional forms between the major types of organization, that is, between systematic types). For the most part, paleontologists currently limit their studies to reconstructing the individual phyla or lines of descent for the various groups of organisms (polyphyletic evolution), without investigating whether, as they go back through time, these phyla converge upon a single common stock; this is impossible to establish given the present state of science.
As regards specifically the origin of man, opinions are likewise divided. It may be said that by now the majority of scholars agree in considering the unitary origin of all present-day human races (homo sapiens) to be demonstrated; but the question is not equally clear with regard to extinct races, whose anatomical characteristics sometimes differ considerably from those of living races, to the point that they can be assigned to distinct systematic species or even genera (sinanthropus, pithecanthropus, africanthropus, javanthropus, palaeanthro-
Now, however, paleoanthropology too is tending toward monogenism. Indeed, the contemporaneity of the human races of the Early Pleistocene must be regarded as more apparent than real, if one takes into account that this period encompasses several hundred thousand years and that it is extremely difficult to synchronize deposits situated in regions very distant from one another and subject to very different climatic phenomena. For example, it is very difficult to demonstrate the exact contemporaneity of the man of Mauer in Europe, the Sinanthropus in China, and the Pithecanthropus in Indonesia. Moreover, and this is what matters most, human skeletal remains have recently been discovered that display intermediate characteristics between those of the Neanderthals (that is, of one of the most important groups of humans with pithecoid characteristics) and those of the human races of the modern type (homo sapiens). Examples include the man of Steinheim and the remarkable group of skeletons from Palestine (Tabun, Sukhul, etc.), whose mixed characteristics demonstrate direct or indirect genealogical relationships between the two stocks. Similar observations can be made concerning the relationships between the archaic Sinanthropus–Pithecanthropus group and the Neanderthals.
It follows from all this that, while truly compelling arguments in favor of human polygenism are lacking, the most recent discoveries decidedly support m.; consequently, the latter is finding ever greater acceptance even in scientific circles.