The Questioning Christian

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 ....

What Caused the Amish Shootings?

The unspeakable* Amish-shootings tragedy furnishes still more evidence of how little we know about why people make the choices they do.  Apparently the shooter "remembered" molesting two young relatives when he was a youth, but now there's some doubt whether that ever happened:

In Georgetown, not far from the shooting, no one knew what to say about the man whose inconceivable actions were made only more confusing by his last words. 

Mr. Roberts, who ended his siege by killing himself, wrote in a suicide note that he was tormented by memories of molesting two young relatives 20 years ago.

The police later interviewed the two women they suspected had been his victims, and both said they had never been sexually assaulted.

An Old World Close to a New World Horror - New York Times (extra paragraphing added).

It brings to mind the 1966 shootings from the University of Texas tower:  Charles Whitman left a suicide note saying he did not understand why he had been having "unusual and irrational thoughts" and asking that an autopsy be performed on him.  The autopsy revealed that he had a brain tumor that neurologists speculated might have contributed to his actions.

*Correction:  Nothing is unspeakable; our calling is to face the facts and to do what we can to improve them.

Ghostly Experiences: Neurological Hiccups?

Many people, including your correspondent, have wondered whether apparitions and out-of-body experiences might be evidence of a world beyond the grave.  Skeptics respond that such experiences are likely to be merely neurological hiccups (which is not necessarily inconsistent with the world-beyond-the-grave hypothesis).  Today's New York Times reports on recent work by neuroscientists showing that such experiences can sometimes be artificially induced by electrical stimulation:

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

Sandra Blakeslee, Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is To Blame, New York Times, Oct. 3, 2006 (emphasis added).  I'd previously read that the anesthetic ketamine can cause similar effects.  For example, here's an excerpt from a first-person report by a man who had an out-of-body experience when he almost died in an apartment fire, then soon afterwards had a similar experience after taking ketamine:

This Just In: Most People Will Lie and Cheat

From Cheating Is an Awful Thing for Other People to Do, by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, Monday Aug. 21, 2006, p. A02:

You and I may never get to ride in the Tour de France, but a great many studies show that most human beings are open to -- and extraordinarily adept at -- bending moral rules when it is convenient.

Most people report telling lies on a fairly regular basis and being largely untroubled by them. When pressed, people say their lies are innocuous.

Nor can the world be divided cleanly into cheaters and honest people:  A variety of ingenious experiments show that large majorities of people can be induced to do the wrong thing, depending on the circumstances.

Among the most potent motivators to cheat is the sense that one has lost the limelight, is falling behind and will be judged harshly. 

People are also more likely to cheat if they think other people are cheating.

*  *  *

"We have a whole quiver full of rationalizations," said C. Daniel Batson, a psychologist at the University of Kansas who has closely studied cheating.

Batson does not know what happened in the Tour de France, but he does understand how athletes in general can rationalize a decision to cheat. All they need to do is think of a drug or a steroid as a relatively small offense that is evened out by other factors.

"We're very good at explaining to ourselves why we are doing something," he said. "Maybe I have a cold and I know I am going to underperform. Well, I have trained all this time, and in order to compensate for this misrepresentation in my performance . . ."

It's a worthwhile read.

Indirect Genetic Influences on Bad Experiences?

Genes may play a role in problems previously attributed to bad life experiences, according to some recent research:

When the link between smoking and lung cancer was emerging, smoking apologists asked whether some unknown biological factor (call it X) might have two effects, causing people to smoke and causing them to develop cancer.  In that case, although the higher rate of illness among smokers might seem to implicate smoking, in fact X would be the cause of both smoking and cancer. Smoking would be an innocent bystander.

That turned out to be hogwash, of course.  But the premise isn't crazy. Indeed, it has returned to center stage in studies of how life experiences increase a child's risk for depression, behavior problems and other bad outcomes.

The approach is called genetically informed research.  The idea is to not be fooled into believing that a certain experience leads to a certain outcome but to probe whether a genetic predisposition (the X factor in the smoking analogy) leads to the experience and the outcome.

Take the conventional wisdom that their parents' divorce increases the risk that children will develop depression. "It turns out that the increased risk of depression in these children reflects a common genetic liability in the parents and kids," says Brian D'Onofrio of Indiana University, Bloomington. Since depressed people have more trouble getting and staying married, this genetic risk of depression raises their risk of divorce, he finds in a study submitted for publication. Parents pass that risk of depression to kids through DNA, not failed marriage.

"The same genetic risk that makes the parents more likely to divorce also makes the kids more likely to develop depression," he says.

Sharon Begley, Genes, Not Experience Explains Why The Lives Of Some Take Bad Turn, WSJ.com - Science Journal, June 16, 2006, p. B1 (emphasis added).

The Sin Model's Weakness

The classic "sin" model doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining and predicting human behavior.  It's roughly analogous to the ancient four-humours model of medicine.  The sin model's traditional prescriptions of prayer, study, church attendance, and willpower (for example) can definitely be useful, but not consistently so; they're essentially folk remedies that seem to work — sometimes — but we don't particularly know why.

The sin model's basic weakness is that our understanding of human behavior is pretty primitive.  When people act (or don't act), they're moved by a combination of factors such as biochemistry; physiology; learning; and the phenomenon we call "free will."  We know very, very little about how these various factors interact, about how they combine to produce specific behaviors in specific circumstances.  The apostle Paul alluded to this problem in Romans 7.15, where he mourned that "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do."

In today's New York Times, Amy Harmon surveys recent research about possible genetic bases for behavior, and notes some important questions that arise as a result:  If someone seems genetically predisposed toward certain "bad" behavior, what should we do about it?   Should the fact of the predisposition let them off the hook if they do engage in the bad behavior?  Harmon's piece is a must-read for any thoughtful person of faith.  Excerpt (with emphasis added):

What It's All About

A reader, Scott, suggests that I believe in "the glorious triumph of humanity."  He argues that I've fallen prey to what he called "the Enlightenment project's fatal weakness," namely "a too-optimistic evaluation of humans' ability to perfect themselves and the world (in rough terms)."   In responding just now, I managed to capture some things I've been thinking about for a long time.  It needs a lot of work and elaboration, but I thought I'd throw it out here, slightly edited, to see what reaction it garners.

I make no claim that we humans can perfect either ourselves or the world.  I do claim some other things:

1.  Whether we know it or not, we're all serving as part of a cosmic construction crew, as workers laboring in the continuing creation of the universe we inhabit — a creation that appears to be a project of a Creator.

2.  I surmise that the Creator puts to use, not just our successes, but also our failures.  I say this in part because we have been given the ability to learn, and to pass along lessons learned to others.

3.  We don't really know the purpose(s) of the project.  It's not unreasonable to hope, however, that the Creator won't just dismiss us when our service is over, but instead will let us share in the project's fruits.

Christianity's Elephant in the Room

Some conservative Episcopalians like to trumpet the fact that some traditionalist parishes have high Sunday attendance.  They claim that orthodox preaching and leadership pack 'em in, whereas (they claim) "revisionist" parishes often have trouble even getting people in the door.  Well, here's an interesting data point:  Despite the Roman Catholic church's overwhelmingly-orthodox leadership,[1] and even before the clergy sex-abuse scandals, an Associated Press article reports that the church's major U.S. dioceses have been seeing only about 20% Sunday attendance, at best.  And Europe is probably worse by far.   The attendance percentage at my own, very-orthodox parish hasn't been much better that that of the RCs in the past dozen years.  When I eyeballed the charts published by the national church, it appears the best attendance percentage we had between 1994 and 2004 was right around 28%.  I checked a few other parishes in town, both orthodox and liberal; their numbers tell similar stories.

People go to church for lots of different reasons, but these attendance data remind us that there's an elephant in the room:  Educated people have plenty of reason to be skeptical of the claims that traditionalists insist on making; from a purely-marketing perspective, this damages the church's credibility as a bringer of truth.   Over the centuries, Jesus's good news has become covered with doctrinal mold that needs to be stripped away so that people can be attracted again by the basics that he taught.

There's Ample Reason Not to Take Traditionalist Doctrines Seriously — and That Damages the Church's Credibility

I'm convinced that as the years go by, more and more people just don't take seriously what traditionalists claim are the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and that this damages the church's credibility in other areas.  If these folks don't have some other reason to want to go to church, they see little or no point in going there on Sunday morning, so they feel free to attend the Little Church of St. Starbucks (or St. Mattress) instead.

These folks may pay lip service to the doctrines of orthodoxy.  When they think about these doctrines at all, they may hope they're true. But deep down, I suspect, an awful lot of them metaphorically raise their eyebrows when traditionalist Christians say some of the things that they do, such as:

Neurons Identified That Assign Relative Ratings To Goods - FuturePundit

[QUOTE:] All of economics is just the chattering of neurons.  Scientists at Harvard Medical School have identified the neurons that advertisers want to control.  * * *    If you could change the value your brain assigns to various goods would you do it? Would you want the ability to consciously change what your desires are to make your desires more adaptive for your health or more easy to fulfill or less likely to get you into trouble?

One of the scariest things I see about advances in neuroscience is that ultimately these advances are going to point toward directions for the development of neurotechnologies that will make personality and desires malleable. Inevitably governments, terrorist groups, and other entities will use neurotechnologies to mold minds to give them different values, desires, drives. [END QUOTE]

FuturePundit: Neurons Identified That Assign Relative Ratings To Goods.

Killing a Man: Confessions of an Interrogator - New York Times

[QUOTE] ... Then something happened to me. I started to lose it.  I was in an altered state, where my mental processes broke down.  It was as if the scene had been rehearsed and choreographed. My role was to punch him, and his role was to repeat his line.  This went on for about two minutes, and then he stopped repeating.

Lastours felt his pulse and said, "He's dead. And he didn't talk."…

I was horrified by what I had done. I had killed a defenseless man. I had not intended to kill him, but that didn't make him any less dead. [END QUOTE]

Killing a Man: Confessions of an Interrogator - New York Times.