The Two Human Transgressions: Ecological-System Transgression and Genetic Transgression in Human Evolution
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Where do we come from, and what in that history distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animals? Philosophy has long answered the latter question through a single capacity—reason, language, or soul. Natural Human Philosophy (NHP) answers it through historical processes that can be checked against evidence. In 2020, NHP introduced a specific concept of human transgression, divided into ecological-system transgression and genetic transgression, with a shared core: a partial breakthrough in two natural frameworks, ecosystem regulation of species and the control of hereditary mechanisms. This paper reconstructs the construct using current evolutionary, archaeological, ecological, comparative-cognitive, and genomic evidence, stating its strongest defensible and testable form. It retains the 2020 thesis that transgression marks a decisive difference between Homo sapiens and all other animals, and recovers the original two-marker process model and its explanation of dispersing humans escaping coevolved ecological constraints. Ecological-system transgression is the large-scale, sustained, intergenerational partial breakthrough in ordinary species–ecosystem regulatory relations achieved as Homo sapiens expands and reconstructs its realized niche through cumulative culture, technology, and social organization, changing the conditions and feedbacks that shape it. Genetic transgression is humanity’s systematic and historically expanding redirection of the evolutionary and hereditary trajectories of many other species, from cultivation and domestication, through deliberate breeding and induced variation, to direct genome editing and synthetic-genome construction. Partial breakthrough is the phenomenon; constraint reconfiguration is its realization mechanism. Both processes operate within ecological, natural-selection, and biological constraints, and their components are shared with other lineages: niches change dynamically, niche construction is widespread, other animals possess cumulative culture and high-fidelity social transmission, insect agriculture has evolved repeatedly, and several taxa build infrastructure that regulates constraints using non-metabolic energy. NHP defends a configurational claim: cross-taxon component continuity is established, and the distinctiveness of the human configuration holds on current reliable support; both judgements hold at their respective levels. The ecological configuration is organized into five separately measurable dimensions—the generative mechanism of ecological capacity, compression of the timescale of capacity change, breadth of conditions supporting population persistence, conversion of ecosystems into human-maintained eco-technological systems, and magnitude and scope of human-to-ecosystem causation—each acknowledging non-human comparators. No documented non-human system approaches the human joint profile on these dimensions in the evidence reviewed. This paper holds that profile to be unmatched, and specifies systematic cross-taxon measurement to test the comparative claim and correct it if a match is found. In the genetic dimension, one human intervention capacity is documented without an identified non-human counterpart: specifying a target hereditary state before the corresponding heritable variant exists, then deliberately constructing genetic material to that specification. Its mechanism is established, and its standing as a distinct intervention node holds on current reliable support. Even the nearest natural analogue, prokaryotic CRISPR immunity, records an already existing sequence rather than specifying the hereditary state before it exists. Both transgressions share a description: conditions formerly operating on the species as given conditions of survival and evolution increasingly become objects of systematic intervention. Weak forms also apply to beavers, termites, megapodes, and fungus-farming insects. The human form is distinguished by culturally driven, open-ended expansion of the intervention repertoire across constraints, taxa, and scales, a property the comparative literature itself identifies as distinctive of human culture. Neighbouring theories are classified by level. Niche construction, plasticity, animal culture, gene–culture coevolution, demography, and technological diffusion are incorporable mechanisms. Climate-driven extinction, a single continuous niche-construction framework, and convergent insect cultivation are local rivals to specific claims. In its exclusive form, leaving no residual, the complete ecological portfolio is a full rival, compared under a symmetric burden of proof. Each claim specifies discriminating empirical consequences, research obligations, and failure conditions. The proposed cognitive driver, Third Nature, is investigated in NP4, The Third Nature of Homo sapiens, and NP5, Is Third Nature the Principal Internal Generative Driver of Human Gene–Culture Coevolution and Transgression? Evidence for transgression here is independent of it. The paper concludes that, on present evidence, the Two Human Transgressions hold, as trajectories, on current reliable support: from dispersal into one unfamiliar ecosystem after another, reaching a peak from approximately 60,000–50,000 years ago, to large-scale intervention in plant and animal heredity from approximately 12,000–10,000 years ago, without a single boundary date. On current evidence, their configuration marks a decisive difference between Homo sapiens and all other animals.
Authors: Yuan, Xihao, Yuan, Haidan
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222894026
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