Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2021 number 2

The lack of direct traces of significant anthropogenesis processes requires an appeal to the theory of evolution as well as to epistemology. Productive ideas of the Russian evolutionism make it possible to integrate the opposing directions: neo-Darwinism (synthetic theory of evolution) and the concepts of orthogenesis (or nomogenesis). The principle of multilevel selection is developed in many works where the analysis of selection processes is carried out at the individual, group, and species level. Main drivers of evolution take place not just in organisms and genes but in the interaction of living systems with environmental niches while consolidating the consequences in genetic structures. This basic principle allows to build a corresponding framework of systemic and functionalist concepts. Expanding the nomological scheme of the scientific explanation by K. Hempel it possible to include various indirect data into deductive logical forms. The universal hypothesis takes the form of ‘the provision principle’: a structure as a new sapient trait provides a care. If heterogeneous consequences of a hypothesis of this type are tested and occur to be true, they confirm it. The components of the empirical hypothesis are judgments about the initial conditions and effects: the appearance of a certain sapient trait in a particular period of the anthropogenesis. The combination of theoretical and logical-methodological approaches is used to analyze the morphological sapientization (from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens) and the evolution of language (from social conditions of verbal communication and first proto-words to successive stages of proto-language and full-fledged language development).