The Questioning Christian

Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

(It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

Related post:

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

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[1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

A gene may make you ‘look on the bright side’ – or not; might that affect one’s faith?

“[A] genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress. The absence of this protection in the other forms of this genotype is linked with heightened susceptibility to anxiety and depression.”

So says University of Essex professor Elaine Fox, lead author of a paper published Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.”  (HT: Scientific American, May 2009, “Half Empty or Half Full,” Briefs, p. 28.)

I wonder whether people having this genetic predisposition toward optimism are any more inclined to trust that in the end, all will be well.

I’m also curious whether people having such trust are more inclined to believe in the existence of a Creator resembling, at least somewhat, the God of the great monotheistic religions.

Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

From Eric Asimov, "Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?" NY Times, May 7, 2008:

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Emotion makes reasoned decisions possible

"Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible."

— David Brooks, How Voters Think, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2008

The evolutionary pros and cons of promiscuity

If you're interested in the biological bases of morality, and in particular how pressures of natural selection have resulted in monogamy being more or less the norm for humans, you'll want to read the discussion in the comments here.

It seems that humans are by nature monogamous, more or less.  This suggests that perhaps the 'laws' of biology and sociology were set up in a way that happens to promote what we now regard as 'morality' — which is consistent with the concept of a Creator.

Monogamy vs. promiscuity: Competing selection pressures

In one respect, natural selection tends to favor promiscuity:

• On average, promiscuous males are likely to have more children than monogamous ones.

• Promiscuous females also have a certain evolutionary advantage:  As commenter Ross TenEyck points out, a female who is mated long-term to one male has the advantage of economic support from him, but she also bears the evolutionary risk that his genes will not be optimal for her own reproductive success. So it can be in her reproductive interest to cheat on her mate by secretly mating with another male to acquire his genes, if she can do that without jeopardizing her economic support.

But that’s not the end of the natural-selection inquiry.

The $64 question: Who is more likely to have grandchildren?

Another, crucial question is: How many of a given male's or female's children will survive to reach reproductive age themselves?  In other words, are promiscuous males or females more or less likely to have grandchildren than monogamous ones?

Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have noted that the children of monogamous males, whose fathers stay with their mothers, tend to have more economic resources devoted to their survival and well-being than the children of promiscuous males.  (We see traces of this even today in the poverty statistics concerning single mothers.)  As a result, on average the offspring of monogamous males have a greater chance of surviving to reproductive age and producing grandchildren.

There's another, related phenomenon:  males of many species tend to object, often violently, to supporting the offspring of other males.  (It's said that a newly-dominant male lion in a pride often will immediately kill all the cubs, which were fathered by his predecessor.)  For a scriptural take on this type of phenomenon, see this comment by a sociobiologist, 'Catholic Mom.'  Even unmated human females often had (and have) fathers and brothers who would kill males who 'dishonored' their daughters or sisters.  So a philanderer has a non-trivial chance of having his genetic contributions wiped out, suggesting that monogamy might be a safer evolutionary bet.

'Social' genetic pressures for monogamy: Group cohesion

Natural selection doesn't operate on a genetic basis alone. Group dynamics also create selection pressures, some of which favor monogamy. 

Any group has a survival interest in preventing internal strife. A group that can keep the peace among its males is more likely to be able to collaborate successfully in, for example, hunting and warfare.  The members of such a group are more likely to successfully raise children who in turn produce grandchildren than a group that is constantly riven by internal strife between competing males.

(I get the impression that in arguing about natural selection, a lot of people completely overlook the effects of kin- and group selection. The above-referenced sociobiologist agrees, but says that group selection is now thought of by most biologists as a type of kin selection; that may be true from a purely-genetic perspective, but it doesn't seem to take into account the fitness implications of cultural practices, or 'memes'.)

Net result: We're naturally monogamous - well, mostly

All these different, and sometimes conflicting, selection pressures, both genetic and cultural, have probably resulted in a real melange of motivations in our poor psyches.

Scientists conjecture that during humanity’s evolutionary lifespan, men who happened — or could be persuaded —  to be monogamous, and females who preferred to mate with monogamous males, were more likely to have grandchildren than others. 

We’re likely always going to have actual- or would-be philanderers. But there seems to be a strong case for thinking that monogamy as the norm — more or less — among humans is strongly influenced by biology.

Where is God here?

The above analysis doesn't mean the Creator had nothing to do with our morality. Quite the contrary: Our biology and sociology appear to follow 'laws' that result in our being more or less monogamous.

That's quite a trick, if you ask me, and another reason for awe at the Creator's handiwork.

Sin: We've Got a Long Way to Go in Understanding It, Let Alone in 'Treating' It

This morning I got into a discussion about sin with a commenter at TitusOneNine.  Here's an edited version of what I said.

As to 'sin,' certainly we're all sinners in that we all make 'bad choices.'  But we understand very little about why and how we make any choices at all, bad or good.  

Traditional Christian models of 'sin' don't offer us much insight here.  And when it comes to the acid test, that of combating sin (let alone all but wiping it out as we have, say, polio), traditionalist sin models have an uneven track record, to put it politely.

Combating sin with prescriptions derived from traditionalist models is analogous to the way doctors used to treat peptic ulcers with diet changes and stress reduction. In the case of peptic ulcers, sometimes the treatment worked, sometimes it didn't.  The trouble was, doctors could never reliably predict which it would be for a given patient.  When the treatment did work, they didn't understand why, because they didn't understand how and why people got peptic ulcers in the first place. 

It's much the same with the traditionalist 'treatment' for sin.  By this I mean the usual prescription of accepting Jesus into your heart, believing that he was God incarnate who died for our sins, and so on.  Sometimes the treatment works, but very often it doesn't.  We can't reliably predict which it will be for a given sinner.  And when the treatment does work, we don't understand why, because we don't understand how and why people make the choices they do.

In the case of peptic ulcers, doctors eventually figured out that most common peptic ulcers are caused by a particular type of bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.  The standard treatment is now an inexpensive course of antibiotics. 

In the analogous case of sin, we've got a lot of work to do to reach that level of understanding.   I would venture that many nonbelievers and doubters instinctively understand this, and for that reason (among others), exclusivist claims about Jesus strike them as foolish nonsense.  This certainly doesn't help our efforts to bring such people to God.

Free Will - Dennis Overbye in NY Times [reading notes]

Reading note to myself:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.   As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place."

From Dennis Overbye, Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t, NY Times, Tues. Jan. 2, 2007

Wired for Altruism - NY Times article

One of my sisters calls my attention to a piece by Daniel Goleman, "The Roots of Compassion" (Dec. 19, 2005).  It's part of a Times year-end series on happiness and "our ties to friends, family and tradition."  Excerpt:

It’s a truism that the sight of one stranger helping another in the out-of-the-blue fashion of Secret Santa can move people to tears. Exactly why that might be so has been the subject of study by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. He uses the term “elevation” for the warm feeling people get when they hear about or witness unexpected acts of human goodness. Haidt studies how people feel while watching, for instance, a film of Mother Theresa helping the poor in Calcutta. His conclusion: We are wired to be inspired.

Acts of compassion, courage or tolerance have a special psychological potency for most people, moving or even thrilling them, Haidt has found. Seeing someone help the sick or poor can trigger elevation, and so can simple thoughtfulness. The Japanese word for being moved in this way is kandou. In a study in Japan, someone reported feeling kandou on witnessing a tough-looking gangster offer his seat to an elderly man on a crowded train.

The fledgling field of social neuroscience is figuring out the brain mechanics that account for elevation – the circuitry that underlies the urge to help others in distress. An article in the journal Development and Psychopathology summarizing the results of years of brain research suggests that empathy – sensitivity to the emotional state of another person – arises through an interaction of the brain’s pain centers with mirror neurons, which match our internal state to that of another person.

Religion, Mysticism, and Brain Chemistry

From the We-Know-So-Little-About-the-Brain-and-Mind department:   A particular hallucinogen has been shown to induce mystical experiences and positive life changes in many volunteers — but also to induce fearfulness and even paranoia in others. 

(This has been sitting in my stack of things to write about for several weeks.)

In a double-blind study at Johns Hopkins University, 36 volunteers took psilocybin (an active ingredient in "magic mushrooms"), while a control group took Ritalin as an active control.   Scientific American reports that 22 of the volunteers in the test group described the psilocybin experience as a mystical one, with 24 ranking it "as among the most meaningful of their lives, comparing it with the birth of a first child or the death of a parent."  

The Scientific American article quotes the study's principal investigator, Roland Griffiths, as saying that in follow-up work, those test subjects who had a positive experience with psilocybin "continue to report positive changes in attitude and behavior" and that "the experience continues to be personally and spiritually meaningful to them."

(Griffiths also warned against recreational use of psilocybin, however, because of its severe negative effects in some test subjects.)

In a Q&A paper posted on the Johns Hopkins Web site, Griffiths said:

Q 2: Do you have any sign that the same brain "machinery" affected by psilocybin is identical to what people experience in spiritual epiphanies that occur without drugs?

That work hasn’t been done yet, though there is good reason to believe that similar mechanisms are at work during profound religious experiences, however they might be occasioned (for example, by fasting, meditation, controlled breathing, sleep deprivation, near death experiences, infectious disease states, or psychoactive substances such as psilocybin).

The neurology of religious experience, newly termed neurotheology, is drawing interest as a new frontier of study.  [Emphasis and paragraphing edited.]

Perhaps hoping to head off attacks from religious people, Griffiths also commented to the effect that his investigation wasn't trying to reduce God to a matter of brain chemistry:

We are attempting neither to validate nor to invalidate the truth of claims that some people have made about metaphysical realities as a consequence of their psilocybin experiences (or as a consequence of their meditation, fasting, or prayer experiences) - that’s beyond our purview as scientists.

It is within the purview of science to study the changes in mood, values, view of self, and behaviors that may follow such experiences.  [Paragraphing edited.]

Griffiths quotes religion scholar Huston Smith as approving of the study as part of an on-going investigation into how to help people to live good lives as part of their communities:

[Quoting Huston Smith]  In most cases, even the most extraordinary experiences provide lasting benefits to those who undergo them and people around them only if they become the basis of ongoing work.

That’s the next research question, it seems to me: What conditions of community and practice best help people to hold on to what comes to them in those moments of revelation, converting it into abiding light in their own lives? [Paragraphing edited.]

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Sources: 

• David Biello, Not Imagining It, Scientific American, Nov. 2006, p. 33. 
• Roxanne Khamsi, Magic mushrooms really cause 'spiritual' experiences, NewScientist.com, Jul. 11, 2006.
• Johns Hopkins University press releases.

A Paradox: Human Altruism May Have Arisen in the Brutal Evolutionary Crucible of War

From the Progress-Comes-In-Strange-Ways department:    A disconcerting report published last week suggests that altruism — the unselfish concern for others lauded by countless religious- and philosophical traditions — may have been forged, like a diamond from coal, in the brutal evolutionary heat and pressure of humanity's war-like tendencies.

Background:  Individual Fitness versus Group Fitness

First, some background:  Some critics of evolutionary theory claim that human altruism simply could not have evolved in a survival-of-the-fittest environment of natural selection.   They point out that an individual who takes altruistic risks on behalf of anyone other than close kin may be putting his (or her) own particular genes at an evolutionary disadvantage. 

The woman who dies rescuing her child from peril (or her sibling or niece or nephew or cousin) is at least preserving a portion of her own genetic heritage for the future.  It's a much different story for the man who sacrifices himself to save a genetically-unrelated stranger; as far as any future offspring are concerned, he's taking his particular genetic contribution completely out of the gene pool.

And so, critics say, any genetic tendency to altruism would have died out long ago.  It hasn't.  Therefore, they say, evolution simply cannot be the way we humans came to be who we are.

This view, however, confuses individual fitness with group fitness.  Darwin himself pointed out that collaboration can give groups a leg up in gathering food and dealing with disease, bad weather, hostile neighbors, etc.  

In his must-read book Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, author Robert Wright recounts how hunter-gatherer groups, organized as families, clans, and villages, frequently collaborate with other groups in hunting and other endeavors.  Presumably, ancestors of these groups' members figured out that collaboration was a better way of ensuring a reliable food supply, dealing with harsh winters, fighting off raiders, etc.  These ancestors passed on both their genes and their cultural practices to their descendants, who ended up being more numerous than those of the noncollaborators.

Altruism as a Signal, Promoting Time-Shifted Collaboration

Wright also describes how hunter-gatherer groups often engage in lavish gift exchanges, sharing their surpluses with other groups.   In part, he says, sharing is simply prudent social insurance against future bad times:  Eskimo whale hunters learned long ago that, after a successful hunt, a fine place to store extra meat and blubber is in the bellies of other hunters who had been less successful on that occasion and who could be expected to reciprocate when the roles were reversed.  (And other research has shown that those who fail to reciprocate are punished.)

Thus, Wright says, hunters who dealt with other hunters "altruistically" in the present had a better chance of surviving future privation, and thus of raising their offspring to reproductive age, than those who didn't practice altruism. 

Consequently, generation by generation, hunter populations became progressively dominated by individuals who were genetically- and culturally predisposed to deal altruistically with others.

Sociologist Rodney Stark, in his book The Rise of Christianity, proposes that the early Christian church had a similar competitive advantage over pagans:  Christians took care of each other.  This not only increased their individual survival fitness, it also made their Christian movement itself more attractive to potential converts, especially from vulnerable groups such as women and the poor.

Altruism thus serves as a signal, a message that the giver might be a person of good character who can be trusted.  (People and animals still use gifts for that purpose even today.)  Humans have a highly-developed ability to recognize and learn from such signals.  Over time, those signals can lead to mutual trust.  That in turn can facilitate collaboration and thus convey an evolutionary advantage.

The Great Rewarder of Collaboration:  War

And the evolutionary advantage of collaboration is almost nowhere more evident than in the life-or-death competition of war.   History offers ample proof that (other things being equal) a coherent military unit whose members work well together, and who would even die for each other if necessary, will defeat a rabble of selfish, every-man-for-himself individualists.

In humanity's earliest days, defeat in war often meant utter extinction for the losers, and thus for their genes and cultural practices.  In the December 8 issue of Science magazine ($), Samuel Bowles offers empirical estimates suggesting that "genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism."  

In particular, Bowles says, "[a] few archaeological sites from the late Pleistocene suggest that exceptionally lethal warfare took place ....  [T]he level of ongoing hostility indicated by these data would produce fitness effects equivalent to the extinction-repopulation scenario modeled above occurring every five to seven generations."  (Emphasis added.) 

Or as a Scientific American review ($) of Bowles's paper puts it, "the proclivity to wipe out subjected populations continued to reinforce our newly developing altruistic ways. ... History isn't just written by the winners, the people reading that history are probably their descendants." 

So:  Has War Been Part of God's Plan for Refining Humanity?

It may well be that we humans have been genetically marching ourselves up a learning curve of altruism:  rewarding those who happen to have been given genes and memes conducive to collaboration, and punishing those who don't.

In hindsight, the benefit for those of us living now is obvious.   We're the descendants of people who did learn to behave altruistically and to teach their offspring to do so, at least enough to survive wars and to reproduce themselves. 

It thus appears as though war might be one of the mechanisms of the continuing creation. 

That's a disconcerting thought.  The suffering of war, and the waste of human and material resources, are no less for those living in war-torn locales today than for those living in prehistoric times. 

It's hard to fathom that a loving God would work in that way.

Unless — as Christians believe — the world we experience in this life, with its abundant suffering and loss, is not the sum total of all we're ever going to experience in the Creation ....