The Origin of Man

Part Four of Some Answered Questions is titled "On the Origin, Powers and Conditions of Man." Several of its chapters take up a question much debated when these table talks were given in 'Akká between 1904 and 1906: whether, as some European philosophers held, man is descended from the animal.

'Abdu'l-Bahá did not deny that humanity's development on earth had been long and gradual. He compared it to the growth of a child before birth:

...man, in the beginning of his existence and in the womb of the earth, like the embryo in the womb of the mother, gradually grew and developed, and passed from one form to another, from one shape to another, until he appeared with this beauty and perfection, this force and this power.

But the embryo, however strange its early forms, is from the first the embryo of a human being, "and not of the animal." So it is, He taught, with humanity as a whole: "from the beginning of man's existence he is a distinct species." Even if traces of organs that have since disappeared are found, this proves only that the form and organs of man have progressed — not that the species itself changed. "Man was always a distinct species, a man, not an animal."

What distinguishes man from the animal, He explained in another chapter, is a spiritual power the animal lacks — the power that discovers the realities of things and produces the sciences, arts and inventions, and that can grasp realities which cannot be seen, such as mind, love and sorrow.

Asked whether mind and spirit were present in man from the beginning or were the outcome of his evolution, He answered with the image of a seed. All the perfections of the tree are in the seed from the first, "potentially, though not apparently," and appear only by degrees. In the same way mind and spirit existed in man from the beginning of his formation in the womb of the world, but were concealed, and appeared later. The earth itself, He added, was created with all its elements, but its kingdoms appeared gradually — "first the mineral, then the plant, afterward the animal, and finally man."

A retelling based on Some Answered Questions. For the fuller account, see the original.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/