|
And then there is the possibility of creating a
social structure and culture that is organized in such a way the the group and
individual benefit automatically from the behaviors of each other.
Maybe we need a further brain development before
this will be taken seriously.
Selma
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 10:53
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Why God?
In view of recent discussion on FW, here's an
interesting article by Prof Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University. I'm not
quite sure what his precise job description is (palaeoanthropologist?) but
he's a leading academic over here.
The following is from a special
Evolution feature in New Scientist this week.
Keith
Hudson
<<<<
WHAT'S GOD GOT TO DO WITH
IT?
Robin Dunbar
Perhaps your sentiments lie with Karl Popper.
Religion, argued the great philosopher
of science, lies in the realms of
metaphysics and is not open to scientific enquiry. That is the line most
biologists take to justify sidestepping the issue. But there is no denying
that religion and gods are a core part of human behaviour. That's why I and a
growing number of biologists think we must offer some insight into the
questions of why religion exists and at what point in human evolution it
began.
Humans exhibit one feature that is very odd by animal standards,
namely our extraordinary willingness to accept the will of the community and
even to die for it. This level of altruism is the key to our success, allowing
us to exploit cooperative solutions to the problems of individual survival and
reproduction. For these to work, however, the individual has to be prepared to
trade immediate personal interests for long-term gains. And high levels of
group conformity expose us to the risk of free riders -- those who take the
benefits of sociality but will not pay the costs.
Of course, we can and
do control free riders with policing and appeals to decency. But in the end,
both strategies carry only so much weight: who cares if you don't like what I
do if I gain enough by doing it. Religion offers a significant advance because
the threat of intervention by forces beyond our control -- whether now or
after death -- offers a level of penalty that far exceeds anything the civil
estate can manage. But it only works if people believe in the existence of a
shared supernatural world.
That's where our species' special talent for
mind reading comes in. This phenomenon is best known in the form of "theory of
mind": the ability to understand that someone else has a mind driven by
belief-states. This might be represented in the sentence: "I believe that you
suppose that there is a supernatural being who understands that you and I want
to aspire to behave decently." It is this kind of thinking that enables us to
go beyond holding personal supernatural beliefs to organising religion as a
shared, social phenomenon.
So, our brains allow us to create gods and
religions. But is this ability simply an accidental product of the evolution
of big brains, or is it an adaptation? My own studies show that in primates,
including humans, the volume of the neocortex -- and especially the frontal
lobe -- is directly correlated with group size and social skills. In other
words, the evolution of brain size has been driven by the need to provide the
computational capacity to support the social skills needed to maintain
stability among large groups. And in the case of humans, these social
adaptations include religion.
By recognising that religion requires a
large amount of mental power, we can also start to ask when it might have
evolved. Plotting theory of mind abilities as a function of brain size in our
fossil lineage suggests that the complexity required to support religion is
likely to have arisen very late in our evolutionary history. It could not have
happened before the appearance of Homo sapiens half a million years
ago, and possibly not until anatomically modern humans appeared 200,000 years
ago. That tallies with evidence for the evolution of language, another
prerequisite for religion.
Of course, religion isn't all stick and no
carrot. While religious sanctions help enforce conformity, religious
experiences make us feel part of the group. Once again, evolution seems to
have furnished us with mental mechanisms that make this possible. In recent
years neuroscience has revealed the so-called God-spot -- part of the brain's
left parietal lobe, responsible for our sense of spatial self -- an area that
shuts down when individuals experience ecstatic states (New Scientist, 21
April 2001, p 24). As well as being linked with a sense of "oneness with the
universe", it also creates the blinding flash of light associated with trances
and religious experiences.
But perhaps the most powerful device for
reinforcing commitment to the group must be endorphins. These brain chemicals
are released when the body is under stress. It's surely no coincidence that
most religions involve practices such as flagellation or long periods spent
singing or dancing, which trigger a flood of endorphins whose opiate-like
effects make us feel relaxed and at peace with those we share the experience
with.
So, gods are created by big brains to prevent free riders
benefiting from cooperative society without paying the costs. But religious
experience can also be seen in a more positive light, as a way to help
reinforce the group's effectiveness as a bulwark against the vagaries of the
natural world.
>>>>
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper
Camden Place, Bath, England
|
