The spiritual evolution of man in the light of physical evolution?

Mentioned the Psi side above, but wanted to note how parapsychology - paranthropology specifically - connects to the other side of the story ->

I actually think the other branch of evidence is going to go against the pseudo-skeptic narrative as well. Linguistics, Spirituality, Reason, Memory...the explanations spinning out from the Physicalist churches clearly aren't convincing as they have to depend ultimately on randomness.

Viruses responsible for memory, psychology responsible for odd commonalities in mysticism and spirituality, "just-so" explanations for the foundations of human society...the public isn't buying it, whether they are traditional church/temple goers or New Agers or even students doing proofs in the Math department....

From a review of Gordon White's Star.Ships ->

Magician Gordon White’s sharp and engaging Star.Ships weighs into this ongoing war with the hard-to-dispute claim that in many ways the field of combat has changed fundamentally. A ‘peace process’ may even have begun. Just two decades ago, those who were debunking claims of antiquity and keeping dates conservative seemed to have the upper hand. These days, headlines pushing back the date of Palaeolithic art or our emergence from Africa and settlement of Australia seem to be as common as those revising climate predictions in favour of the Four Horsemen. And beyond strictly archaeological dating, the study of culture has found that more sophisticated comparative methods, and a closer engagement with developments in the hard sciences, is pushing back the dating of things like fairy tales. To match the slight cooling of magic’s ardour for the archaic (most serious practitioners these days make concessions to recent debunking), science seems to be letting its icy resistance to the archaic melt a bit, and is following the evidence further and further into the past.

A genuine advance in this regard is the work that White’s argument leans on heavily: Sanskrit scholar Michael Witzel’s The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. (I’ve not read this imposing tome yet; there’s a useful review here.) Witzel’s approach marries the wide range of the comparativist to the historical framework provided by the latest research in genetics and geology. What emerges is a truly vast survey of myths around the world, with a branching timeline that traces a core mythical story — our ‘first novel’ — to origins around 40,000 years ago. This system of myth, dubbed ‘Laurasian’ by Witzel, is concerned with the creation and destruction of the world, and the separation of Heaven and Earth. Its linear narrative stands in contrast to ‘Gondwanan’ mythology, a less formal ‘forest of stories’ typified in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, and Australia. Both are supposed to have emerged from a primal ‘Pan-Gaean’ complex of myths.

White’s main contention is that a significant number of aspects of the Western esoteric tradition can be traced — not through direct transmission, but through varying cultural continuities — all the way back to the Laurasian wellspring. It’s not an especially bold claim in itself — at least not in the world of magic.2 What marks White’s work as being worthy of attention is his detailed grasp of recent scholarship. That, and the fact that this scholarship can be so easily rallied to support magic’s greatest claims about its primal heritage. Recent scholarship has affirmed that while the texts of the Hermetica were assembled between the first and third centuries CE, they contain much greater continuities with ancient Egypt than previously realised. White wields Witzel’s thesis to push straight through Egypt and right into the prehistoric depths. The magicians, it seems, were right after all.

This fascinating genealogy of esotericism is served up with a choice selection of other familiar topics — Atlantis and aliens being the most prominent — that will be taken as either juicy or sloppy, depending on your tastes.

"Juicy or sloppy" probably is a good description of White's work [as a whole], or at least the perception to it. I do admit to worry when he goes beyond the esoteric to try and speak about medical issues [on his blog] but don't want to throw the baby magician out with the bathwater.

And, of course, the idea that spirits helped us evolve culturally goes back to antiquity and continues into modernity. Ramanujan after all believed his mathematical insights were being communicated to him by his family goddess, whose consort Vishnu's blood he'd see in dreams as holding vast sums of knowledge...

...the nature of Ramanujan’s mathematical genius, and how he himself perceived it, tends to be less explored. Hardy called it some kind of deep ‘intuition’, but Ramanujan openly stated that he received the mathematical inspiration and sometimes whole formulas, through contacting the Hindu Goddess Namagiri while dreaming. Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, adept at dream interpretation and astrology. Growing up, he learned to worship Namagiri, the Hindu Goddess of creativity. He often understood mathematics and spirituality as one. He felt, for example, that zero represented Absolute Reality, and that infinity represented the many manifestations of that Reality.

“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

Ramanujan claimed to dream of blood drops, after which, he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.  “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”

“We proved that Ramanujan was right,” Ono says. “We found the formula explaining one of the visions that he believed came from his goddess… No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them.”