Religions, evolution and animals that look like people

The 80/20 Rule seems to apply to many areas of life, including the return for the investment one gets from reading. 80% of the excellent ideas I read seem to result from 20% of the authors I read. The trick, then, is to choose carefully when picking up a book. Make sure that the author is a high-quality thinker/writer, and you'll end up getting a mind expanding education merely by following a few dozen authors. That is my experience, anyway. For me, one of those high-quality authors is primatologist Frans de Waal. I have just finished De Waal's most recent book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009) (here is my earlier post on this same book). De Waal makes so many compelling points in his book that I'm tempted to simply throw up my hands and urge everyone to go read this book. Truly, there is a terrific new idea or two every few pages, most of which have application to the increasingly strained modern human condition. Image by s-dmit at Dreamstime.com (with permission) Starting around page 206, De Waal makes a strong case for the emotional continuity between all animals (and especially other primates) and human animals. Yet, so many people or uncomfortable with the existence of this continuity. They would much rather believe that humans are not animals, and that humans somehow stand outside of nature, whereas all the other animals are part of nature. I have written before about the importance of recognizing that humans don't stand outside of nature, but that we are full-fledged animals. De Waal believes that this reluctance to talk about our animal emotions is caused by certain types of religious, "particularly religions that arose in isolation from animals that look like us." He explains:

With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain forest culture has ever produced a religion that places humans outside of nature. Similarly, in the East--surrounded by native primates in India, China, and Japan--religions don't draw a sharp line between humans and other animals. Reincarnation occurs in many shapes and forms: a man may become a fish and a fish may become God. Monkey gods, such as Hanuman, are common. Only the Judeo-Christian religions place humans on a pedestal, making them the only species with a soul. It's not hard to see how desert nomads might have arrived at this view. Without animals to hold up a mirror to them, the notion that were alone came naturally to them. They saw themselves as created in God's image and as the only intelligent life on earth. Even today we're so convinced of this that we search for other of such life by training powerful telescopes on distant galaxies.
De Waal describes how shocked Westerners were when chimpanzees and monkeys started arriving at Western zoos in the 1830s. He points out that this exposure to other primates occurred relatively recently for many Westerners, "long after Western religion had spread its creed of human exceptionalism to all corners of knowledge." De Waal's idea is as powerful as it is elegant. It makes good sense too. People who are exposed to a variety of animals with various gradations of "humanness" would certainly be more comfortable with the idea of biological continuity, with his Darwinian idea that human animals are cousins with every other living thing on the planet. De Waal clarifies that we Westerners are actually inconsistent with regard to our resistance to this idea that we are continuous with all other life forms. We stack the deck:
When it comes to characteristics that we don't like about ourselves, continuity is rarely an issue. As soon as people kill, abandon, rape, or otherwise mistreat one another, we are quick to blame it on our genes. Warfare and aggression are widely recognized as biological traits, and no one thinks twice about pointing at ants or chimps for parallels. It's only with regard to noble characteristics that continuity is an issue and empathy is a case in point.
De Waal points out that many well-accomplished scientists have worked feverishly to seek "specialness" in humans. They focus their efforts on trying to find something to distinguish humans from the "animals." As De Waal suggests, they are likely to "discover" that these differences are most pronounced in the noble traits. It's time to recognize the one-sidedness of these efforts, however.
My main point, however, is not whether the proposed distinctions are real or imagined, but why all of them need to be in our favor. Aren't humans at least equally special with respect to torture, genocide, deception, exploitation, indoctrination, and environmental destruction? Why does every list of human distinctiveness need to have the flavor of a feel-good note?

Continue ReadingReligions, evolution and animals that look like people

Forbidden love and the Westermarck effect, illustrated

The linked video is an example of a father (John) having a romantic relationship with his own daughter (Jenny) and having children with her. The documentary also introduces viewers to a romantically involved half-brother and half-sister. But doesn't nature rig close relatives so that they are sexually repulsed from each other? Yes, but only if they live in close proximity during a critical early developmental window. This potential desensitization to sexual attraction is referred to as the Westermarck Effect. In the case of John and Jenny, the daughter had essentially no contact with her father for the first three decades of her life. Same situation with the half-siblings. Without the Westermarck effect to pull back on the reins, "genetic sexual attraction" kicks in to supercharge the romance. Notice how the moralistic and legalistic discussion in this documentary runs orthogonally to the biological research. Not once is the Westermarck Effect discussed, even though it sheds substantial light on these situations. It often occurs to me that we'd be better off analyzing social situations in terms of evolution and ecology in addition to legality and morality, but that would deprive us of so many opportunities to engage in angry finger-pointing and judgmental barking. To consider the science would admittedly require some effort, something that many of today's self-assured people are unwilling to do. If people did take the time to think things through more rigorously, however, they would likely see that this "father" and this "daughter" are dramatically unlike prototypical fathers and daughters in dramatic ways that correlate to solid biological and psychological research. If they took the time to understand this situation using (easily available) science rather than simply folk-morality, even the harshest critics of these couples might have the following thought: If I had been in that situation, these same sorts of powerful attractions might have overwhelmed me too. A perspective infused with even a bit of science would have set a different tone for this entire documentary. A bit of scientifically-informed self-critical thinking might even open the door for a more empathetic perspective. It's a new multidisciplinary world out there with regard to "morality," as psychologist Jonathan Haidt eloquently explains at Edge.

Continue ReadingForbidden love and the Westermarck effect, illustrated

Compelling gossip

I was on a two-hour bus ride today, surrounded by people chattering loudly on their cell phones. From the large man with the goatee (in front of me, to my left), I leaned that he had bacon and eggs this morning at a little restaurant and that it was good. It took him five minutes to describe his meal to the person with whom he was conversing (I do wonder whether that person was really listening to the entire thing). The woman in front of me was getting angry at the person to whom she was talking--she insisted that there was a closer Wal-Mart, and that that person ought to turn her car back immediately and go there, not to the Wal-Mart down the road. A man behind me was making a wide variety of calls, reassuring people that he would be visiting someday, and apparently trading much chit-chat. The woman behind me was discussing various movies with her conversant. Again, there were lots of details, and it seemed as though each of these conversations ended because the people got tired of talking, not because they traded any significant information. All of this chattering was irritating to me, because I have a difficult time filtering out one-sided conversations. Every time the person near me stops talking, an internal warning kicks in and I automatically replay my buffer (as best I can) in order to jump in and respond. It's all automated, and it turns out, time after time, that they are not talking with me at all. My little sub-routine, which works rather well in many situations where someone has paused for the purpose to allow me to respond, is merely an annoyance in these situations. Now multiply this gossipy chatter by hundreds of millions, all across America, and you have an enormous amount of time and energy dedicated to gossip. Whenever you see so much energy going into an activity, red flags should go up: it is likely that such a ubiquitous activity is serving some important biological function. But what could possibly be important about gossiping? Based upon much study, Robin Dunbar has proposed the answer that gossip is verbal grooming. I described his position in some detail here. His bottom line is that even though the content of the gossip seems relatively unimportant, the exchange is critically important. Engaging in gossip is social sonar. It is our way of determining the identities of our allies and foes, not simply by determining who is willing to gossip with us, but through many subtle clues dropped in the course of the gossip. We learn the identities of the people who talk about us and our friends, and bits and pieces about their attitudes toward us. We learn who has resources, social and material, and their willingness to share these resources, and with whom. Gossip is a powerful use of language, but it is often not focused on the truth-content of the words used. In modern times, gossip is likely to be seen as a Gouldian spandrel. But just maybe, as Dunbar suggests, gossip is truly verbal grooming and thus arguably the original impetus for the development of all human languages. As I see it, gossip but one of several non-prototypical uses of language. I suspect that we see another such use in most religions, where language can be critically important, even though ambiguous, untrue or even oxymoronic.

Continue ReadingCompelling gossip