Brendan Purcell, adjunct professor in philosophy at Notre Dame University in Sydney, Australia, offers in this book a spirited defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy as the metaphysical underpinning for an explanation of human origins in evolutionary terms. His style of writing is more conversational than formally academic (and thus is presumably more attractive to undergraduates), but he still succeeds in reviewing a great deal of scientific theory about the place of the human in the cosmic process. His principal guides here are the political philosopher Eric Voegelin and the philosopher/systematic theologian Bernard Lonergan, SJ. But many other authorities from Christian theology, philosophy, literature, and the arts are likewise referenced.

The book itself is divided into five parts. In part 1, Purcell stresses the spiritual dimension of human life as found in the Hebrew and Christian Bible, but also in myth and the early history of Western philosophy (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle). In part 2, he first lays out his understanding of scientific method in terms of Lonergan's theory of knowledge (experience, understanding, and judgment), itself grounded in the metaphysical presuppositions of the God-world relationship espoused by Thomas Aquinas (e.g., the focus on primary and secondary causality in the ongoing interaction between God and the world of creation). He further offers in part 2 a critique of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in terms of later scientific developments such as punctuated equilibrium, evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) theory, and the hypothesis of the progressive convergence of different evolutionary trajectories. In part 3 he first reviews the archeological evidence for the hominid sequence: pre-australopithecines (6.5 million years ago), australopithecines (4.5 to 1.25 million years ago), Homo erectus (1.8 million to 200,000 years ago), Homo neanderthalensis (400,000 to 30,000 years ago), and Homo sapiens. While belonging to the hominid family, Homo sapiens, according to Purcell, was from the beginning significantly different even from the Neanderthals with whom humans cohabited southwestern Europe about 40,000 years ago. His point here is to claim that Homo sapiens is “an entirely unprecedented entity in the living world” (173). Yet this view of evolution clashes with the generally accepted belief among evolutionary thinkers that the evolutionary process is continuous, without dramatic discontinuities along the way. Purcell is seemingly dependent here on the distinction within Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics between form and matter in which form is active and matter is passive. The introduction of a new substantial form for the existence of Homo sapiens, accordingly, demands a supernatural intervention in the evolutionary process.

Part 4 is entitled “The Seven Grace Notes in the ‘Sonata for a Good Man.’” In four chapters Purcell discusses in succession the genetic African Eve and Adam, the human culture-oriented body plan, the meaning-oriented brain and vocal tract within humans, symbolization and language, understanding and freedom. Here too, while he assembles a vast amount of data from the natural and social sciences, his evaluation and critique of this data are more philosophically than scientifically based. This is certainly legitimate, but only if one makes clear in advance to the reader that one has thereby moved from science to philosophy and theology. Finally, in part 5 he sets forth his understanding of the human person as oriented to communion, initially communion with other human beings and the nonhuman creatures of this world, but ultimately with the divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Yet this too is a religious belief, not a scientifically grounded theory. In the concluding pages of the book, he claims that the human person is the “still point of a turning world uniting both cosmic and human history into one narrative” (327). Given the possibility, if not probability, of rational life elsewhere in the universe or in universes existing either before or after the present one, one should be more careful in making such a claim or at least make clear that it is not grounded in contemporary natural science.