God and Evolution Save for later Reblogpost

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An unnecessary conflict exists between many evolutionary biologists and theologians. Whilst much has been written about the evolutionary utility of religious beliefs and possible explanations for how religious belief evolved (or the neurobiological processes that allow for those beliefs) far less research has focused on the study of religious belief with the underlying premise that spiritual beliefs are true and therefore evolution merely developed a mechanism to distinguish what is already there. There are notable exceptions to this paradigm[1], nevertheless, many scholars have taken the apparent or implied stance that because a biological explanation for Spiritual belief exists, the beliefs themselves must not be true. This is not rational, however, it is akin to saying because an evolutionary explanation exists for the development of light receptors in biological organisms photons are not real. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Spiritual beliefs not only have evolutionary utility, they are the result of a biological mechanism that perceives the Universe as it is. Placing the thesis in more specific terms I will demonstrate that Religion has evolutionary utility, the ability to engage in Religious practices and the results of those practices are the results of Darwinian selection on physiological structures in the brain and that those underlying neurophysiological structures allowed for Darwinian selective pressure accompanied by Lamarckian Forces working in a feedback loop to manifest a set of conditions through which Hominins could more thoroughly perceive reality as it is.

            To be sure, religious beliefs and organized religion have a great deal of social utility from an evolutionary perspective, the concept of absolute right and wrong, which is not a cultural universal, is derived from organized religion. It would be impossible to derive large, complex societies, superorganisms, in evolutionary terms, if it were not for the belief that certain actions are always wrong under all conditions, even when in taken against members of a group one does not know[2]. Ancient religious texts may make allowances for certain actions to be taken against members of a group that are not of one’s own religious practice, however, these are far less harsh than we see in tribal societies and of people, though they have spiritual beliefs, lack the codified system of practice that those of us living in State societies would recognize as a religion[3]; more specifically, considering the Latin root religio, which appears to denote careful consideration of man’s relationship to the forces of the Universe and implies those forces have definite rules with which they abide[4].

            There are, of course, definite rules in an apparently chaotic though truthfully ordered Universe[5]. Just as Sir Isaac Newton could not have written his treatise on the refraction of light if he could not perceive photons with his eyes, hominins could not have the ability to grasp and implement a moral framework that allows us to create superorganisms the likes of which the world had never seen if we did not have the ability to perceive those underlying structures that create and necessitate the moral rules. In effect, our brains needed the ability to “see” the will of God. At this point it is necessary to engage in a bit of teleological housekeeping. Definitions of religion vary, and there is not one unified definition that any of the social sciences can agree on. Setting that aside, as a general rule these definitions involve a belief in the spirit world and rituals and activities intended to engage practitioners with this world. Often the word “supernatural” is used. I am specifically avoiding that word because my argument solidly rests on the idea that the Realm of the Spirit is part of nature, or, more accurately, nature is a part of it. Just as in the Platonic forms, spiritual attunement is more accurately understood as the individual leaving the Cave and knowing that it is but a small part of a Great Whole; one in which the forms are nestled in the spiritual world, not the other way round.

            Few animals even have the ability to perceive a sense of self. There is some ontological argument as to what a sense of self consists of, and there are scholars that argue that most, if not all, vertebrates possess a primitive sense of self to varying degrees. This line of reasoning makes sense, basic movement and foraging behavior would need a neurological structure that allows the individual (or the thing the brain is controlling) to differentiate the body from the rest of the world. This does not change, however, the fact that few animals can pass the so-called “mirror test,” in which an animal responds to its own reflection in ways that indicate that it is looking at itself. These animals are only the Great Apes, bottlenose dolphins, Orcas, Eurasian Magpies, and the Asian Elephant. Of these, many (including, occasionally, humans) individuals that are especially young or old cannot pass the test.[6] This may also be because these animals to do not possess the capability to look at themselves externally. In both a metaphorical and literal sense they are not possessed of the cognitive capacity for self-reflection. In hominins the posterior superior parietal lobe monitors the body’s physical spatial location. Also known as the orientation association area (OAA), the OAA discerns where the physical body is, and where the rest of the world begins. During intense periods of meditation and religious experience, the OAA stops receiving input from the rest of the brain. These are the moments that the Spiritually attuned describe as “timeless,” or being in a state of “oneness.”[7]

            This effect of the OAA in a trance-like state makes more sense, even from a Darwinian perspective, than one might assume upon first consideration. All morality, is, in effect, considering the implications of one’s action through time. Being slow to anger prevents lashing out in such a way that invites retribution. Controlling one’s sexual urges prevents bringing individuals into the world that cannot be cared for, attending to another’s spouse, and causing group discord generally. The Bible’s general proscription of debt is because it trades future labor for present desire. Debt is the exact opposite of the Biblical concept sacrifice, which trades present labor (or possession) for future security. Thus, we can see how debt is, in effect, anti-morality from a conceptual standpoint. It would be impossible for hominins to create the superorganisms of civilizations if it were not for codified morality, and the OAA’s evolved capacity to orient the individual both temporally and spatially is just part of the reason this is possible. Temporal as well as spatial cognition is likely part of the reason hominins are such prolific toolmakers whilst the Great Apes and other primates are not.[8] The inferior parietal lobule, responsible, in part, for sensory interpretation and linked to the interpretation of facial stimuli in hominins, appears to be more developed in monkeys and the pan species than it is in humans. The development of the inferior parietal lobule without a corresponding increase in the OAA or the parietal cortex as it is in hominins (but not other primates) likely explains why monkeys do not engage in anywhere near the sort of construction activity hominins do (now or over the last nine million years) and why chimpanzees can be taught to build flint axes in captivity but will not unless prompted. Nor do chimpanzees, despite having the cranial capacity to do so, build them in the wild.[9] Cranial capacity is but a part of the puzzle, actual neurophysiological organization is one of the great differences between the pan lineage and australopithecines.

 For at least 2.5 million years hominins have been making more sophisticated tools than those created by chimpanzees today, considering that early tools were probably made of organic materials that were not preserved in the fossil record, tool making activity likely started far earlier. In some instances chimpanzees will use wood or stone hammers to crack nut shells, yet they do not seem interested at all in the sharp flakes that come off of these hammers as they are used. Chimpanzees create simple, “one off” tools in the wild; picks for bone marrow, levers, termite and ant probes, stick brushes to remove honey, and hammer and anvils.[10] Complex tool creation requires an understanding that an object is being manufactured for beyond the immediate. It requires the expenditure of calories to store and transport materials for later use and an understanding of why that is important. Fracturing flint is a multi-step process in which the flint axe’s physical shape does not vaguely resemble the flint blank’s, and certainly not the rock the blank was drawn from.[11] Fracturing stone requires the maker to engage in several steps in which, because of the unusual (compared to organic material) properties of mineral construction, do not appear to be directly related to the final product or even each other. For humans today, the idea that a block can be turned into something sharp may seem obvious, but that is exactly the point, it isn’t to chimpanzees. The pan species lack the capacity to nurture an object through time or to see the new created object’s potential utility under non-immediate circumstances. Only a creature with an enlarged capacity to engage in temporal reasoning would create such things of the animal’s own volition. Darwinian selective pressures that existed in Africa’s Great Rift Valley over the last several million years would have been at play to favor our ancestors ability to plan (and therefore need temporal reasoning) to survive in the milieu they found themselves in. Hominins are not very large compared to the other predators they would have been competing with or defending against predation from. To be able to stave off the big cats, to butcher game without the attendant powerful jaws that most predatory mammals have, all this required tools and tools require planning.

It may seem a happy accident of history or at the very least a weak argument that OAA developed in such a way to allow for that planning that it made religion inevitable. It would seem a fair criticism that planning is nothing more than stringing a series of events together, this by no means delineates something perceptual, time is, after all, a construct of our imagination. More than once I have observed scrawled about as graffiti the cliché, “Time does not exist, clocks exist.” This is simply a poor understanding of physics. Time does in fact exist, it is a thing (as much as anything can be considered a thing), and it is a fundamental part of the Universe. Time is the fourth dimension, in fact, it is more accurately known as spacetime. Gravitational fields effect time, time changes dependent on the velocity at which one moves, and objects moving at the speed of light do not experience time at all.[12] Time does not pass at same rate everywhere at all times, and this is a measurable reality; in fact, anything that is connected to a satellite relies on this principle. Global Positioning System satellites that are now ubiquitous in navigation have software that accounts for their atomic clocks keeping time 38 microseconds per day faster than the GPS receivers on the ground. This is mathematics predicted by Special Relativity, the satellites “gain” 45 seconds relative to terrestrial objects because they are farther from the Earth’s mass (and thus the mass’ effects on spacetime) and “lose” another 7 seconds because they are travelling at 14,000 km/h. If time were not a real “thing,” GPS systems would be off 10 kilometers every day because their programming is designed to account for this change.[13] Therefore, we can say that temporal perception is really no different than the perception of light, sound, heat, physical pressure, or, in the case of a shark’s nervous system, magnetic fields.

Temporal perception is, however, what truly orients one toward the Divine. Hominins are not the only superorganisms that create semi-permanent structures, they are, however, the only superorganisms that create them in such a way that they can evolve and adapt to various conditions without a necessary change in the underlying physiology of the constituent organism.[14] This is an adaptive manifestation of temporal consciousness, a cognitive reaction to physical reality that conditions can and will change and behaviors attuned to one specific set of conditions may be better or worse than another. Not all hominin superorganisms do this with equal efficacy, it is true. This fact does not change that we are getting far better at doing so all the time. Increasingly, genetic lineages are preserved without the total destruction once incumbent on species faced with radical environmental change. Genes group together to form complex organisms, making the genes more adaptive, and in the case of some species, such as our own, individuals group together to form superorganisms that make the individuals more adaptive. These superorganisms are subject to Lamarckian forces; characteristics acquired through human agency that have the ability to be institutionalized over time. These forces have the ability to be extremely powerful, last thousands upon thousands of years, and transform and adapt underlying physical architecture and profound ways that often make it appear that the underlying architecture was purpose built or Darwinian selected for its newfound use. This has profound implications for this writing’s thesis and on our neurophysiology in general, so please allow me a moment for a bit of digressive explanation.

One of my least favorite idiosyncrasies of the social sciences is the tendency of serious scientific work to have personal vignettes or the academic equivalent of café chatter included in order to buttress scientific points. Pray as I might, Our Creator has not seen fit to remove all my hypocrisy, so I will include one here. Last summer I visited the Battleship U.S.S. North Carolina with my children (the battleship is now a museum). At some point, whilst in the skin of the ship my two youngest children needed some fresh air. I had been a U.S. Marine for just shy of a decade (though I left several years ago) and have spent quite a bit of time on Naval vessels, though battleships were decommissioned before I joined the Marine Corps. I was able to point out several things that only someone who has actually lived on a ship would understand, and though I did not realize it, always knew exactly where I was even though I had never served on this specific type of ship. When my oldest asked where we needed to go to find our way to the outside (a weather deck), I told him to head toward the bow. He immediately began walking aft, and I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was headed forward and I explained to him that he was not. I saw this look of confusion on his face and I immediately recognized it. There’s this phenomena that occurs the first few weeks one is on one of these large vessels, particularly the interior where there are no visual cues as to direction. It is akin to vertigo, horizontal direction appears unknown and unknowable. We then went outside following my lead and his confusion appeared to subside.

This is the Lamarckian trick of maritime navigation, which should be absolutely impossible. There is no reason for homo sapiens to be able navigate at sea, which requires the individual to track themselves in two separate reference frames simultaneously. The brain must know where the body is in relationship to the ship at all times, a ship, it should be added, that is constantly pitching and yawing and could easily injure the individual. The brain must also track where the ship is in relation to where it is going (i.e., shore). For almost all of our history this required triangulation with stars, or the sun. There’s no reason why a terrestrial, bipedal animal should have this ability. Yet we do. The process is explained beautifully in Tenbrink and Dylla’s 2017 paper, Sailing; Cognition, action, and communication.[15] The neurophysiological circuitry for language grew out of the navigation circuits in the brain. For example, the foundation of all known human language is process known as recursion, or the process by which idea A, leads to idea D, through ideas B and C, even though idea A and idea D are not directly or obviously connected. Recursive navigation is an ability we see in most large terrestrial carnivores because out of necessity they have quite large territories (herbivores must eat constantly because of the relatively low caloric value of plant material, therefore it could be argued they merely follow the next bite around). Language especially, and also crystalline tool manufacture require a hyper-developed form of this cognitive process. This explains why the U.S. Marine Corps (and all Naval landing forces), all known modern Navies, the merchant marines, and even recreational sailors are so insistent upon their use of maritime terminology, even when on land. The first thing a Marine recruit learns in “boot camp” is that a wall is really a bulkhead, the floor is actually a deck, left and right are really port and starboard, and a whole host of other new words that are learned through a fantastic process known as “muscle memory.”

The boot camp experience is the beginning of an institutionalized Lamarckian process that repurposes underlying circuitry in the brain and harnesses it for incredible and apparently impossible feats. The ability of a fancy monkey that evolved in Africa’s Great Rift Valley to completely populate the globe, including the series of islands in Polynesia that are not within sight of each other, is nothing short of astounding. Anyone doubting the immensity of this undertaking should travel to one of these atolls, stand on the shore and marvel at how there is no other land within view. Polynesians inhabited Rapa Nui (colloquially known as Easter Island), which is 2300 miles from Chile, 2600 miles from Tahiti, and 4400 miles from Hawaii, and they left from one of the greater distanced atolls. It is inconceivable that a land based mammal that evolved on a savannah could possess the cognitive capacity to perform with such navigational prowess, to reference itself via the stars on open ocean for weeks on end. This is the power of Lamarckian forces. Though Tenbrink and Dylla do not make this argument, I posit that the ability to navigate at sea (and the extra recursive capacity that went with it) is a relic from our arboreal ancestors. To live in the trees requires the brain to track the body’s position, as well as that of potential predators (or prey) on both a vertical and horizontal axis. The rapidly growing brains and cognitive structures of our ancestors left an underlying ability for spatial reasoning that was not directly utilized. Through cultural processes, however, homo sapiens would learn how to utilize an underlying structure to further engage in with the real world.

This is why ritual is so vital to religious practice, ritualized behavior to engage with the spirit world is a cultural universal, and ritual has the ability to transmit such heightened states of consciousness.[16] The obverse of this fact explains why there is no positive secular equivalent for Divine Consciousness and religion despite numerous very intelligent people devoting inordinate amounts of time to harnessing the brain’s abilities vis a vie these heightened states whilst they abdicate a realm of the spirit.[17] The brain isn’t making something up, it is engaging with something that is already there. Though hominins have a highly developed neocortex, in the evolutionary environment neocortical expansion would not have been possible without subcortical portions of the brain experiencing greater development. Heightened emotive response is necessary in the face of further cognitive development to form the highly cooperative societies of even the early homo line.[18] It is likely that with incomplete cognitive abilities, affects serve to carry the individual through the apparent needs of the moment. Emotion creates a behavioral inertia that can overcome momentary cognitive inconsistencies. Love, affection, et cetera, prevent the individual from responding from a purely self-centered standpoint. Ritualistic behavior serves to orient the individual toward the Great Reality’s emotional course. There is evidence of ritualistic behavior in our pan kin and other animals, but nothing of the complexity and scale of hominin societies.[19] Hunter-gatherer societies have all sorts of rituals, yet it is no accident that cohort that arguably requires the most co-operation and is least likely to be able to achieve it, modern State militaries, is the cohort most obsessed with continual ritual. Choc full of alpha males and members from all over the social structure, State militaries are somehow able to exist without the individuals all ripping each other apart, even though they live on top of one another and have access to the deadliest weapons ever devised. Nor do they often turn on the societies they serve. Whilst this does happen, the truth is a coup d’état is by far the exception, not the rule. This is a sharp contrast to pre-governmental societies where gatherings of individuals beyond a single village are fraught with constant tension and often end in violence or members having to be physically restrained to prevent violence.[20] Ritual places militaries in contact with a Unity that allows them to cooperate despite their constituent parts not having a natural inclination to do so.

The world’s Great Religions are, in essence, the longest running moral experiments we know of. Just as physical reality has been (partially) decoded through the scientific method, the Great Reality is further understood through the practice of morals. Religions have adjusted them over time, not because they’re hypocritical, but because they are the cognition of a superorganism that is learning. Polygyny has been the norm throughout human history,[21] and it appears to be sanctified by the ancient texts of the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Yet, with exception of much of Islam, polygyny is rejected by most of the adherents of these religions today, often with de jure sanctions against the practice. Whether the ancient texts sanction polygyny or not, polygynous societies are always more violent than monogamous societies.[22] Further review of ancient works and modern practice has directed practitioners to have but one wife, and therefore, to kill each other less. Atheists in the Western world will often claim that the Bible justifies slavery, but the people responsible for Western Civilization’s complete moral taboo on the concept of people owning other people, most notably William Wilberforce, did not think so. They believed that the Bible commanded them to end the practice.[23] Setting the moral question aside, slavery in all its forms (to include feudalism) is a horrible economic system. Slave societies innovate little, if at all, and they are in a constant state of potential cataclysm should the slaves decide they want their freedom or cannot be fed. This causes slavery to be a self-perpetuating form of stagnation. The Latifundia system was likely the prime destabilizing force in the Roman Empire, Feudal Europe accomplished little until the Black Plague broke the back of that system and reintroduced a primitive capitalism, and modern Communist China invents absolutely nothing and is an economic time bomb waiting to go off. The point is superorganisms, through the vehicle of religious observance, are becoming better at understanding what moral truth is and that often this truth is only obvious over time scales that far exceed a human life. At some point it becomes worth asking; if this is not access to the Divine, what else could it be? Perhaps, more importantly, what exactly would we expect access to the Divine to look like?

Homo sapiens are the most remarkable species the world has ever known. From small groups confined solely to portions of Africa 50,000 years ago barely surviving we rose to conquer the planet and then walk on the moon. We have created systems that have ushered in an age of unbridled prosperity and despite our destructive natures, relative peace and tranquility. The guiding force in all of this has been the perception of something far beyond ourselves that has allowed us to create these superorganisms and all their attendant trappings. Understood as the Spirit realm, Religion, God, the Great Observer, it has inspired us. This is not, however, a force that is outside of nature, but rather, nature is a force within It. Through natural processes, primarily, natural selection, hominins developed the capacity to perceive the Great Reality that exists. These processes may not, immediately, seem intuitive, but it has been shown that over time adaptations that occurred for dwelling in the trees were repurposed and then honed to connecting hominins more succinctly to each other, and then to God.

[1] Newberg, A., D’Aquili, E., & Rause, V. (2001). Why god won’t go away brain science and the biology of belief. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

[2] Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Geertz, A. W., & Petersen, A. K. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

[3] Alcorta, C. S., & Sosis, R. (2005). Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols. Human Nature, 16(4), 323-359. doi:10.1007/s12110-005-1014-3

Diamond, J. (2013). The world until yesterday. New York, NY: Penguin.

[4] Cicero, M. T. (1994). De Natura deorum ; ACADEMICA (H. Rackham, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[5] Bohm, D. (2008). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge.

[6] Animal Cognition. (2016, October 29). List of animals that have passed the mirror test. Retrieved May 02, 2020, from http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/

Bekoff, M. (2009, July 06). Do animals know who they are? Retrieved May 02, 2020, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animal-emotions/200907/do-animals-know-who-they-are

[7] Newberg, A., D’Aquili, E., & Rause, V. (2001). Why god won’t go away brain science and the biology of belief. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

[8] Ambrose, S. H. (2001). Paleolithic technology and human evolution. Science, 291(5509), 1748-1753. doi:10.1126/science.1059487

[9] Braun, D. R. (2010). Australopithecine butchers. Nature, 466(7308), 828-828. doi:10.1038/466828a

Bruner, E. (2018). Human Paleoneurology and the evolution of the parietal cortex. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 91(3), 136-147. doi:10.1159/000488889

Caminiti, R., Chafee, M. V., Battaglia-Mayer, A., Averbeck, B. B., Crowe, D. A., & Georgopoulos, A. P. (2010). Understanding the parietal lobe syndrome from a neurophysiological and evolutionary perspective. European Journal of Neuroscience, 31(12), 2320-2340. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07291.x

David, N., Aumann, C., Santos, N. S., Bewernick, B. H., Eickhoff, S. B., Newen, A., . . . Vogeley, K. (2008). Differential involvement of the posterior temporal cortex in mentalizing but not perspective taking. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 3(3), 279-289. doi:10.1093/scan/nsn023

Diamond, J. M. (1993). The third Chimpanzee: The evolution and the future of the human animal. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

[10] Ambrose, S. H. (2001). Paleolithic technology and human evolution. Science, 291(5509), 1748-1753. doi:10.1126/science.1059487

Diamond, J. M. (1993). The third Chimpanzee: The evolution and the future of the human animal. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

[11] Ambrose, S. H. (2001). Paleolithic technology and human evolution. Science, 291(5509), 1748-1753. doi:10.1126/science.1059487

[12] Greene, B. (2014). The fabric of the cosmos space, time, and the texture of reality. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

[13] Pogge, R. W. (2017, March 11). Real-world relativity: The gps navigation system. Retrieved May 03, 2020, from http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

[14] Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Geertz, A. W., & Petersen, A. K. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

[15] Tenbrink, T., & Dylla, F. (2017). Sailing: Cognition, action, communication. Journal of Spatial Information Science, (15). doi:10.5311/josis.2017.15.350

[16] Alcorta, C. S., & Sosis, R. (2005). Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols. Human Nature, 16(4), 323-359. doi:10.1007/s12110-005-1014-3

[17] Blackmore, S. (2016). Memes and the evolution of religion: We need memetics, too. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. doi:10.1017/s0140525x15000357

Hutson, S. (2013). The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures. In P. A. Myers-Moro (Ed.), Magic, witchcraft, and religion a reader in the anthropology of religion (pp. 216-233). Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill Companies. (Original work published 2000) doi:10.31234/osf.io/p6e9c

[18] Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Geertz, A. W., & Petersen, A. K. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

[19] Ibid

[20] Diamond, J. (2013). The world until yesterday. New York, NY: Penguin.

[21] Sayres, M. A., Lohmueller, K. E., & Nielsen, R. (2014). Natural Selection Reduced Diversity on Human Y Chromosomes. PLoS Genetics, 10(1). doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1004064

Zeng, T. C., Aw, A. J., & Feldman, M. W. (2018). Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck. Nature Communications, 9(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04375-6

[22] Miller, A. S., & Kanazawa, S. (2008). Why beautiful people have more daughters: From dating, shopping, and praying to going to war and becoming a billionaire: Two evolutionary psychologists explain why we do what we do. New York, NY: Perigee Book.

[23] Metaxas, E. (2013). Amazing grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to end slavery. Milton Keynes: Authentic Media.

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