Anthropology

Anthropology names two projects that seldom share a room. In the social sciences, it maps humanity across cultures, languages, and evolutionary time. In theology, it defines humanity by its arc: the origin of the soul, its present purpose, and its ultimate destiny.

Hedcut illustration of Latter-day Saint theology proposes an origin for intelligence that is not creation out of nothing, and it treats human nature as something organized and situated rather than fixed at the start. — Restoration theology decisively rejects *creatio ex nihilo*, teaching instead that all matter is spiritual and that intelligence is both uncreated and coeternal with God.

In Mormon Transhumanist thought, these two historically separate projects intersect. Restoration theology fundamentally unsettles the traditional boundaries of human nature. Doctrine and Covenants 93 declares that intelligence “was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” As Joseph Smith plainly reasoned, God did not summon souls into existence out of the void but rather organized preexisting intelligences.

Physical anthropology and eternal progression

Hedcut illustration of Physical anthropology traces how ordinary practices—like cooking and tool making—reshape bodies and minds over long stretches of time, pairing biological change with social habits. — Physical anthropology traces how ordinary practices⁠—like cooking and tool making⁠—reshape bodies and minds over long stretches of time, pairing biological change with social habits.

We once assumed the human body was a finished product onto which cultural customs were simply added. To the contrary. Physical anthropology reveals a lineage where cultural practices exerted direct evolutionary pressure on human biology. Over millions of years, our minds, bodies, and societies shaped one another: cooking transformed digestion, language rewired cognition, and domestication changed the domesticators.

That finding fits the theology of eternal progression better than it does the theology of fixed essence. Scripture calls humanity the image of God and also calls it dust, weak, and prone to error (Mosiah 4:11; Ether 12:27). Both descriptions stand. A creature genuinely in transition looks unfinished on close inspection, and the record shows exactly that.

Cultural Anthropology at the Threshold of Enhancement

Cultural anthropology has spent a century documenting how communities vary in their perception of kinship, gender, personhood, and death. The accumulated evidence points to a single conclusion: there is no default human arrangement. Practices we assume are biologically intrinsic inevitably turn out to be fiercely local.

That result bears on technologies now pushing the limits of cognition, lifespan, and embodiment. Longevity research, genetic editing, neural interfaces, and brain emulation raise the prospect that anthropology’s subject will change during anthropology’s own lifetime, and that the discipline will have to describe minds it did not evolve to recognize. Science fiction has rehearsed the problem for decades, usually by asking who counts as a person once the boundaries blur.

A Work in Progress

The concept of eternal progression in this tradition holds that human descriptions are not exhausted by a single static form, allowing scripture’s paired claims to coexist without canceling each other. — The doctrine of eternal progression resolves the apparent scriptural paradox between humanity’s divine potential and its present, fallen condition.

Mormon Transhumanists read the divine image as a statement about capacity rather than one about present form, which turns anthropology into an unfinished account of a family with a future.

The obligation runs backward too. Anthropology recovers the lives of people who left no record, and genealogy coupled with genomics extends that recovery toward named individuals. In this tradition, learning who the dead were and hoping to raise them are the exact same work at different stages.