The Questioning Christian

Human evolution is speeding up – Stephen Hawking

[Stephen] Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

- From Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution," in The Daily Galaxy.

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?

---

[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.)

The pragmatic value of virtue is a possible indication of divine design - Robert Wright in The Atlantic

"The Hebrew Bible, considered a holy text by all three Abrahamic faiths, sees the pragmatic value of virtue as itself part of divine design. ... [¶] Of course, the fact that ancient scripture sees the link between prudence and virtue as a reflection of divine purpose doesn’t make it so. But if, as a matter of fact, the prudent pursuit of self-interest has over time led humanity closer to a moral truth—namely, that people of all ethnicities and faiths deserve respect—that lends at least some heft to the argument that there is a larger purpose in human affairs."

- Robert Wright in One World, Under God, The Atlantic, April 2009, p. 38, at 53 (bold-faced emphasis added, italics in original).  This article is excerpted from Wright's forthcoming book The Evolution of God. 

Wright is one of my favorite authors. I was powerfully influenced by his earlier book Non-Zero, a sophisticated, entertaining, and readable work about evolution, game theory, and social science. In the book, he sticks to the facts, but concludes that the evolution of the human race is due in no small part to our capacity for love and reciprocal altruism. He conjectures that the increasing orderliness in our corner of the universe (sometimes referred to as "the optimistic arrow of time") may point to the existence of a God and perhaps even a divine plan.

Reading Wright's Non-Zero was a milestone event in my faith journey; I look forward to getting his The Evolution of God.

Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, "were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry." I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong "exploration of human reality."

He envisioned God as "an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy," and human beings as God's "most developed artwork."

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

---

Related post:

• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai

Self-Replicating Chemicals Evolve Into Lifelike Ecosystem

Alexis Madrigal, Wired Science, Jan. 8, 2009

Evolutionary explanations for religious beliefs?

From a Scientific American posting, Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated - A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Jesse Bering of Queens University, Belfast (links are in original):

... [T]he past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature.  ...

Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend: [¶¶]

Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).

Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. ...

Natural selection over time boils down to just this: Better-adapted individuals leave behind more offspring

Author Michael Shermer offers us a pithy definition of natural selection:  "Natural selection simply means that those individuals with variations better suited to their environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted." Michael Shermer, Darwin Misunderstood, Scientific American, Feb. 2009, at 34 (emphasis added).

Related post:

• Evolution - a simple explanation

Evidence of multiple universes? And if so, just what does that say about the existence of God?

It's possible that our universe wasn't specifically designed to support life as we know it, but is merely one of many possible universes, and ours happens to 'work.'  This, according to some atheists, is supposedly a rebuttal to the claim of scientist-theologians that the fine-tuning of our universe suggests the hand of a Designer.

(The atheists generally brush under the rug the question posed by the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne: If in fact there are multiple universes, that's all well and good, but then where did they come from?)

Hacker News points us to Dark flow: Proof of another universe? by Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, Jan. 22, 2009.  Here's an excerpt:

Kashlinsky, a senior staff scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, .... and colleagues have clocked galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kilometres per second - far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. Stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

Kashlinsky and his team claim that their observation represents the first clues to what lies beyond the cosmic horizon. Finding out could tell us how the universe looked immediately after the big bang or if our universe is one of many. Others aren't so sure. One rival interpretation is that it is nothing to do with alien universes but the result of a flaw in one of the cornerstones of cosmology, the idea that the universe should look the same in all directions. That is, if the observations withstand close scrutiny.

(Emphasis added.)

Related posts:

• The Big Story: We're Helping to Build a Universe
• Creation: A Titanic Set of Processes That Continues Today
• Stardust Memories
• Some Reasons to Think There's a Creator
• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai

Evolution in action: In crowded Gaza, the West-subsidized high birth rate helps select for aggression

Today's WSJ (Europe) contains a thought-provoking piece by Gunnar Heinsohn about the ongoing 'youth bulge' in Gaza, fed by a six-babies-per-woman average birth rate that is subsidized by the West. We can conjecture that this results in at least a modest selection bias in favor of aggressive males, who — assuming they survive to sire children — seem likely to sire more children on the whole than passive or timid ones. (This is a questionable assumption, of course; some women may have a stronger preference for men who are likely to be around to help raise the kids than for those who are likely to get themselves killed.)

Excerpt:

In such "youth bulge" countries, young men tend to eliminate each other or get killed in aggressive wars until a balance is reached between their ambitions and the number of acceptable positions available in their society.

The reason for Gaza's endless youth bulge is that a large majority of its population does not have to provide for its offspring. Most babies are fed, clothed, vaccinated and educated by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. ... [@para;]

The Hamas-Fatah truce of June 2007 allowed the Islamists again to direct all their energy on attacking Israel. The West pays for food, schools, medicine and housing, while Muslim nations help out with the military hardware. Unrestrained by such necessities as having to earn a living, the young have plenty of time on their hands for digging tunnels, smuggling, assembling missiles and firing 4,500 of them at Israel since 2006. ... [¶]

... By generously supporting UNRWA's budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries. Much is being said about Iran waging a proxy war against Israel by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. One may argue that by fueling Gaza's untenable population explosion, the West unintentionally finances a war by proxy against the Jews of Israel.

If we seriously want to avoid another generation of war in Gaza, we must have the courage to tell the Gazans that they will have to start looking after their children themselves, without UNRWA's help. This would force Palestinians to focus on building an economy instead of freeing them up to wage war. Of course, every baby lured into the world by our money up to now would still have our assistance.

(Bold-faced emphasis added.)

Heinsohn's diagnosis seems very plausible, but his prescription is more than a bit lacking.  He does not explain how exactly we are suppose to induce Gazans to reduce their birth rate, while simultaneously continuing to provide assistance for "every baby lured into the world by our money up to now[.]" (Tom Evslin has a couple of observations on that score.)

---

Related post:

• Evolution in action: Did Muslim four-wives rule select for aggressive males?

Evolution in action: Did Muslim four-wives rule select for aggressive males?

Yesterday's news prominently featured an Israeli air strike in Gaza that killed leading Hamas militant Nizar Rayan, all four of his wives, and 9 or 10 of his 12 children. I wonder if the Muslim approval of polygyny, allowing men to have up to four wives if necessary for humanitarian reasons, may help explain why Islamic militants seem to be some of the most aggressive on the planet. I would think that, other things being equal:

• The men most prone to seek multiple wives would tend to be the assertive and even aggressive ones. (This premise intuitively makes sense, but that's all the more reason to give it careful scrutiny before making any significant bets on my reasoning here.)

• Every time a polygynist takes an additional wife, his action has a double-whammy effect on the makeup of the next generation's population:  It reduces the number of women available to bear the children of more-passive men, and it increases the number of women who will bear the children of assertive ones.

• Thus, in a society that allowed multiple wives, over time we would expect more descendants of assertive men, and fewer descendants of passive ones, than we would expect in a monogamous culture.

Assuming intuitively that assertiveness is at least partially determined by heredity (another assumption requiring critical scrutiny), this gives us a clue about how a society might eventually look after X generations of polygyny. 

The above analysis is pretty simplistic, of course. It doesn't take into account other factors that doubtless contribute to the hyper-aggressiveness of Islamic militants, such as overcrowding in Palestinian 'refugee camps' and the inability of many Islamic societies to generate the kind of widespread economic progress that is comparatively common in the West.  (The latter may itself be due in part to a population prone to aggressiveness.) Nor does it take into account the increased likelihood that aggressive males might die violently before fathering as many children as they might have in a normal lifespan.

 But I do suspect it there may be something to it.