biolog

Early in Shawn Stover’s article, The Great Divide, published in Skeptic.com, he takes the position that religion is somehow natural and thus serves an evolutionary purpose. According to Stover, “cognitive studies suggest that religion is ‘natural,’ that it consists of by-products of normal functioning, and that these by-products have evolved by natural selection.”

“Adaptationist” arguments, whether they argue that some behavioral trait arose directly or was an accidental consequence of intelligent brains evolving on the savannah, are controversial and very difficult to prove. Besides, one can’t just say something evolves by natural selection independent of a genetic component, unless you’re making the banal point that brains have plasticity and are capable of a variety experiences and delusions. If that’s the case, then Stover could just as easily stick irrationality or gullibility in place of religion and there would be no meaningful difference in his assertion. The burden of proof, in other words, is on the adaptationist. What is Stover’s evidence that religion is “natural” or a result of natural selection?

The only source Stover mentions is from an eight year old article published in the Skeptical Inquirer. And in that article the only relevant research study listed is from a single paper published in the 1994 issue of Cognitive Psychology. It should be telling that the lone data Stover provides is from a twelve year old study based on a questionnaire given to college students about their god belief.

Before I draw your attention to the research, here’s what Pascal Boyer, the author of the Skeptical Inquirer article from which Stover sourced, says:

Is religion ‘in the genes,’ and could it be considered a result of natural selection? Some evolutionary biologists think that is so, because the existence of religious beliefs may provide some advantages for individuals or groups that hold them. The evidence for this is, however, still incomplete. It may seem more prudent and empirically justified to say that religion is a very probable byproduct of various brain systems that are the result of evolution by natural selection.

Put another way: No genes, but plenty of plasticity. Natural selection and “in the genes” aren’t mutually exclusive. What sort of natural selection is independent of genetics? Nonetheless, Boyer does source a paper in a peer-reviewed journal titled Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts.

As it turns out, the research paper not only fails to lend support to Stover’s claim, it doesn’t even address it. Here’s the abstract:

We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students’ concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects’ awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.

In fact, it could easily be argued that the paper makes the opposite of an adaptationsist argument for religiosity, or at least for religiosity outside of the Judeo-Christian concept of God. “The stories were designed to fit with an agent-God who interacts with the natural world and people. People or contexts that do not assume such a basic property may not exhibit the same phenomenon.”

The research only dealt with a group of college students’ capacity to anthropomorphize what the authors call “super-agents” (be it gods or supercomputers). They didn’t study what properties and traits-much less mechanisms like natural selection-are necessary for anthropomorphic representations. According to the authors, “perhaps it is the case that any intentional agent is conceptualized using an agent-concept based on people, thus yielding an anthropomorphic representation. Another possibility is that only vaguely understood agents are treated this way…” Vague indeed.

They go on to speculate rather that god concepts have to fit into innate cognitive constraints, thereby causing a contradiction in the faithful’s mind between a theological unrestrained god and the “real life” or anthropomorphized concept of god. This bit of speculation is the closest I can find to what Stover calls “by-products of normal functioning.” Indeed, there is an abundance of speculation in the discussion section of the paper. I’m a geneticist and not accustomed reading psychology papers, so maybe this is par for the coarse with studies relying solely on subjecting highly restricted populations to questionnaires to generate data.

Back to Stover. I’m not even arguing that the body of knowledge comprising Evolution of Religion lacks predictive power or falsifiability; I’m simply saying that Stover has written and Skeptic.com has published an article making this argument without any evidence.

Stover’s article raises additional credibility issues, such as falsely stating that Dawkins thinks the religious are contemptible people, or the ahistorical assumption that strident atheists such as Dawkins first drew the line in the sand between science and religion. Toward this last point of contention, I’ll end with a quote from an old-school contentious figure, H.L. Mencken.

That conflict was not begun by science. It did not start with an invasion of the proper field of theological speculation by scientific raiders. It started with an invasion of the field of science by theological raiders. Now that it is on, it must be pressed vigorously from the scientific side, and without any flabby tenderness for theological susceptibilities. A defensive war is not enough; there must be a forthright onslaught upon the theological citadel, and every effort must be made to knock it down. For so long as it remains a stronghold, there will be no security for sound sense among us, and little for common decency. So long as it may be used as a recruiting-station and rallying-point for the rabble, science will have to submit to incessant forays, and the same forays will be directed against every sort of rational religion. The latter danger is not unobserved by the more enlightened theologians. They are well aware that, facing the Fundamentalists, they must either destroy or be destroyed. It is to be hoped that men of science will perceive the same plain fact, and so give over their vain effort to stay the enemy with weasel words.

This includes bad science writing.

Why do a limited number of great themes and archetypes pervade the sagas of so many different and apparently unrelated peoples?

1. Stories spread by learning, and telling, from a single source, and cultures are not nearly as independent as we assume.
2. The evolutionary structure of the mind, as shared by all people, encodes archetypes that channel our independently invented stories along similar pathways, no matter what culture invents the tale.
3. Gould, among others, suggests a third possibility. Our stories about sequential stages are such because we know no other way to make such stories go.

We view the stages of our sequences either as increments of progress (simple to complex) or as steps in refinement (ill-formed and inchoate to well-separated and sharply differentiated). The model for the first is simple addition (each step adds new features and becomes more complex); for the second, differentiation (all bits of complexity exist from the start, but only as potential within an initially homogenous mass). The “march” of the amoeba to human (a false description of evolution) falls into the first category of addition; Michelangelo’s assertion that the final statue already exists in the initial block of marble (waiting for liberation by the sculptor) represents the second category of differentiation. These two primal explanations are only different aspects of a single sequence of objects.

Most of the Creation myth in Genesis 1 reads as a tale of addition—first God creates the earth, then plants, fishes, terrestrial beasts, or tetrapods, and finally exalted us. However, a more literal interpretation of the words suggests differentiation as the intended theme. From an initial formless chaos, God makes a series of progressively finer separations: light from darkness, earth from sky, land from sea, coalescence of sun and moon as sources of light, “bringing forth” of living from the earth.

Much of the research I do at the NIH involves developmental biology and embryology, which features both stories as start-points for the great theories that have defined the area of study since its inception. In a famous19^th century debate, Ernst Haeckel’s (a comparative embryologist) recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”)—following the model of addition—viewed the embryo as growing ever more complex by repeating the adult stages of ancestors in an evolutionary series. Von Baer’s contrary reading—following the model of differentiation—interpreted the embryo as expressing its taxonomic status ever more finely through development: first, one can tell the creature will become a vertebrate, then a mammal, then a primate, then a human.

As a side note: Haeckel was famously wrong (as cool as it might be, human embryos do not have gills).

In his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould said he always viewed the primal stories of addition and differentiation as our literary biases imposed upon nature’s greater richness.

American Politics, American Idol: they sure don’t smell dissimilar. Considering, I urge ya’ll to replace your thinking cap with a cowboy hat and imagine how fun and wonderful four years of Tina Fey’s Palin parodies could be. So please vote unless you live in DC, then stay at home and pay those taxes like good little colonists.

The writing style of Haruki Murakami’s can be as tedious, plodding and uneventful as watching an endurance event on TV. In his defense, the often repeated observation that life as a marathoner informs his writing, he is speaking to the act of writing a novel and not to what’s on the printed page. His latest book, a memoir titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a hat tip to the favored Raymond Carver, settles into that soft and fertile ground created by juxtaposition–that of the long-distance runner to the long-distance writer (novelist). As the main conceit of this slim book, it can be perplexing to see so much distressed cliche.

Murakami’s critics commonly shelve him as a writer of pop-culture. When I think of popular culture, Brittney Spears will always come first to mind, then after focusing a bit the Hardy Boys series of my childhood, and later, Dean Koontz and Clive Cussler. What these writers and Britney share is choreography and repetition to the extent of commodification. The Stratemeyer Syndicate, a writer factory contracted to fill in pre-fabricated plot scaffolds designed after the popular adventure and detective novels of the early twentieth century, captured the market and won Frank and Joe Hardy immortality. Koontz peddles in heroines and innocence pitted against improbable abominations and darkest evil. Cussler’s brand is Dirk Pitt, a rugged, cowboy version of James Bond, who has something like a 30-0 record for rescuing the planet from imminent ruin (only the payroll office at Viking House can know the real number). And whatever the double-digit it is identical to the number of chicks Pitt’s laid. Murakami doesn’t belong here. As much as his writing is riddled with heavy-handed metaphor, it’s also meticulous, soft-spoken and thoughtful. For example, Murakami is in his forties, old enough to see signs of wear, and the fear of a mortal body and mind is palpable throughout as it grapples with the irreversible.

In traditional Japanese aestheticism inborn talent means little, often viewed as a pitfall, toward mastering a discipline. Just as attaining the perfect manicured garden, shaped nigiri, or kanji character brush-stroke, writing and running for Murakami require a reverence to daily practice to such an extent that the only finish line that matters is the mortal one. With a nice balance of insight and ambiguity, Murakami avoids the spectre of the triumphal memoir. In other words, he isn’t following the trend.

Bioblog Rating: C+