Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Manufacturing belief, Salon, May 15, 2007

Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he’s an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert’s view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it’s based on a grand illusion….

Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?
Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they’re a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.

Why did they do better?
They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don’t have religious beliefs.

Haven’t studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they’re less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?
Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.

So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it’s totally an illusion.
Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don’t understand where the universe came from….

If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?

I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it’s very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It’s very strong there. I’d be very surprised if it disappeared.

So the project of Richard Dawkins — basically, to try to turn us all into atheists — is just a pipe dream?

I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people’s personal experience, rather than logical arguments.

‘The God Delusion’ - The New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007

By Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr

In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr, in “A Mission to Convert” [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with “religious thought” with its “meticulous reasoning” in any serious way. He notes that the book is “defiantly middlebrow,” and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Breaking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherché versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

H. Allen Orr, A Mission to Convert - The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007

Scientists’ interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, Reply by Richard C. Lewontin, ‘Higher Superstition’: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998

Among the polemical lions of The New York Review, a few are by now (if truth be known) quite gone in the teeth. Richard Lewontin is one of the dentally challenged. Consider, for illustration, his obiter dictum on Higher Superstition, and thereby on us, its authors [NYR, October 22]. It and we are mocked as “naive” and “obtuse” for having dared to suggest that natural science is concerned with, and responsive to, the real world. (Advanced social thinkers, presumably, know better.) “Naive” and “obtuse” are odd charges coming from one who has for so long trodden the tortuous road of orthodox Marxism.

Nevertheless he must be serious in these derogations. Whether there is a real world or not, Lewontin does not doubt his own ability to know how things really are. And he has railed elsewhere against Higher Superstition, particularly in a review, a few years back, for the journal Configurations. He derided us there for choosing easy targets, for dealing with writers so foolish and insignificant as to be not worth refuting. We were also denounced for embracing the unspeakable—sociobiology.

Lewontin must have failed to notice, however, that a number of those simpletons and obscurities not worth refuting were members of the Configurations editorial board, or prominent fellow contributors to its pages. Presumably they didn’t notice, either. Even stranger was his failure to notice that Higher Superstition had nothing to say about sociobiology, favorable or otherwise. The only reference to it was in an endnote, added in proof, remarking that Andrew Ross (later to be a source of innocent merriment in connection with the Sokal hoax) is eager to defame E.O. Wilson in connection with sociobiology, but has nothing at all to say about Wilson’s powerful advocacy in aid of biodiversity and other ecological causes with which Ross likes to associate himself.

Lewontin, Survival of the Nicest? - The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005

In Higher Superstition, a book remarkable both for its influence on the intellectual community and for its obtuse ignorance of the actual state of science, the authors told us that

Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise…. Reality is the overseer at one’s shoulder, ready to rap one’s knuckles or to spring the trap into which one has been led…by a too complacent reliance on mere surmise…. Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle.[1]

Any reader who wants to test this charmingly naive view of science should immerse himself or herself in the literature of evolutionary biology. Indeed, the immersion does not have to be very deep before the currents and countercurrents of ideology can be felt tugging at one’s understanding. Unto Others, a collaboration between Elliott Sober, one of the founders of the modern philosophy of biology, and David Sloan Wilson, one of the most creative theoreticians in evolutionary studies, wades into this turbulent stream at precisely the point where so many other adventurers have been swept away: the problem of the origin of altruistic behavior. Can natural selection have made us genuinely cooperative and unselfish in pursuit of the greater good of the many, or is apparent altruism nothing but an artfully disguised version of every man for himself? Have Professors Sober and Wilson really collaborated in order to spread enlightenment, or are they engaged only in a bit of academic career building, each using the other as a tool of their separate ambitions?

Darwinism, born in ideological struggle, has never escaped from an intimate reciprocal relationship with world views exported from and imported into the science. No one challenges the claim that evolutionary theory has had a wide effect on social theory. It is a cliché of cultural history that the explanation of evolution by natural selection served as an ideological justification for laissez-faire competitive capitalism and the colonial domination of the lesser breeds without the law. Nor are these evidences only of the quaint naiveté of the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism has had a continuous and vigorous life until today. Only three years ago a leading publisher of psychological monographs produced a book by a professor of psychology at a first-rank Canadian university claiming that the evident moral and cognitive superiority of Europeans over Africans was a consequence of natural selection in a cold rather than tropical climate. All the Africans got out of their experience of the survival of the fittest were greater libidos and longer penises.[2] The slightest suggestion, however, that evolutionary biology has imported some of its conclusions from social theory and political prejudice will be greeted by incredulity and indignation on the part of scientists convinced of the intellectual autonomy of the study of nature. Even those who insist that they concentrate on the “internal” history of science agree that Darwin’s notion of the struggle for existence, and the consequent differential survival of those types with greater fitness for the struggle, owed a great deal to the economic and social theorists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Dugald Stewart and the Scottish economists; and they recognize that so-called “Social Darwinism” was a popular ideology long before the composition of the Origin of Species.

Richards and Lewontin, Darwin & Progress - The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005

In his review of Michael Ruse’s Evolution– Creation Struggle and Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone [NYR, October 20], Richard Lewontin offers typically insightful analyses of the conflict that has arisen between creationists and IDers on the one hand and evolutionary biologists on the other. As well, he offers salutary cautions about the application of general models of cultural change based on evolutionary theory. He may be quite right that a deep fear of meaninglessness urges many individuals to fly to higher, governing powers and to reject the Darwinian slough of chance. Though Lewontin seems to agree with Ruse that some scientists mount the pulpit in trying to extend evolutionary considerations into all corners of human life, he yet chides him for locating the nub of the dispute in two different notions of progress, that characterizing Darwinism and that endemic to the old-time religion—the one leading nowhere in particular, the other to the ultimate transformation.

Lewontin supposes that Darwin kept the ideology of progress from sullying his own theory. He offers as an index of Darwin’s freedom from taint the presumed fact that the word “evolution” (which in the embryological domain had been used to describe a predetermined unfolding) is absent from the first edition of the Origin. Well, not exactly. Rather famously the last sentence of the book hits the rhetorical high mark with “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Later editions do not shy from use of the noun form of the word, nor does the Descent of Man.

But more importantly, Darwin’s deeply ingrained sense that his theory explained progress in organisms permeates his text. In the first edition, he does not hesitate to say: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (p. 489). And elsewhere he affirms that “in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancients; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms” (p. 337). The embryo of more advanced creatures, he believed (though couldn’t prove), displayed “a sort of picture, preserved by nature, of the ancient and less modified condition of each animal” (p. 338). In the Descent of Man, he had the task of explaining why the reprobate Irish seemed to be winning in the struggle for life by leaving more offspring than the virtuous Scots and English, certainly more progressive types. After analyzing the problem he concluded that since the profligate suffer greater mortality, perhaps natural selection had not been thrown out of gear. Darwin concluded that while progress was not inevitable or the result of any innate tendency, it was general and the somewhat chancy product of the manifold operations of natural selection. To render Darwin’s theory as bereft or antithetic to the notion of organic and social progress is to make him into a thoroughly modern neo-Darwinian, which he certainly was not.

Richard C. Lewontin, The Wars Over Evolution - The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005

1.The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explanation. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution–Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second.

‘The Prehistory of the Mind’: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1998
By Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Reply by Howard Gardner

In response to Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange (October 9, 1997)

To the Editors:

The exchange between Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker [NYR, October 9, 1997] regarding the nature of evolutionary psychology and more specifically the notion of cognitive spandrels was entertaining and informative. Which aspects, if any, of our mental functioning are spandrels, as opposed to adaptive mechanisms “designed” by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems faced by our ancestors in their struggle to survive and reproduce (quoting Pinker), is an extremely important question that requires serious discussion and debate. But it also involves a study of precisely what those “kinds of problems” may have been, and quite how our ancestors solved them.

In this regard a serious weakness in the current literature of evolutionary psychology is the almost blasé disregard for the archaeological, fossil, and palaeoenvironmental records that provide evidence to address these questions. Reading much of the evolutionary psychology literature as an archaeologist, I find it astonishing that gross generalizations are made about our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer past, with such little reference to the research of archaeologists who endeavor to reconstruct past lifestyles. Pinker did at least acknowledge the existence and value of the archaeological record, when commenting about whether reading may be a spandrel. But whatever its theoretical strengths or shortcomings as debated by Pinker and Gould, evolutionary psychology will not prosper until it takes the hunter-gatherer past as seriously as it claims to do so. The archaeological, fossil, and palaeoenvironmental records provide evidence about past behavior and cognition.

Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997

By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould

In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997)

To the Editors:

Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to understand our mental faculties in light of the evolutionary processes that shaped them. Stephen Jay Gould [NYR, June 12 and June 26] calls its ideas and their proponents “foolish,” “fatuous,” “pathetic,” “egregiously simplistic,” and some twenty-five synonyms for “fanatical.” Such language is not just discourteous; it is misguided, for the ideas of evolutionary psychology are not as stupid as Gould makes them out to be. Indeed, they are nothing like what Gould makes them out to be.

Evolutionary psychology often investigates the adaptive functions of cognitive and emotional systems—how natural selection “engineered” them to solve the kinds of problems faced by our ancestors in their struggle to survive and reproduce. The rationale follows from two premises Gould himself states nicely:

(1) “I…do not deny either the existence and central importance of adaptation, or the production of adaptation by natural selection. Yes, eyes are for seeing and feet are for moving. And, yes again, I know of no scientific mechanism other than natural selection with the proven power to build structures for such eminently workable design.”

(2) “The human brain is the most complicated device for reasoning and calculating…ever evolved on earth.”

Quite so. First, adaptive design must be a product of natural selection. Complex organs like eyes have many precise parts in exacting arrangements, and the odds are astronomically stacked against their having arisen fortuitously from random genetic drift or as a byproduct of something else. Second, the brain, like the eyes and the feet, shows signs of good design. The adaptive problems it solves, such as perceiving depth and color, grasping, walking, reasoning, communicating, avoiding hazards, recognizing people and their mental states, and juggling competing demands in real time are among the most challenging engineering tasks ever stated, far beyond the capacity of foreseeable computers and robots. Put the premises together—complex design comes from natural selection, and the brain shows signs of complex design—and we conclude that much of the brain should be explained by natural selection.

Stephen Jay Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997

With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot. But Charles Darwin must have been the most genial of geniuses. He was kind to a fault, even to the undeserving, and he never uttered a harsh word—or hardly ever, as his countryman Captain Corcoran once said. Darwin’s disciple, George Romanes, expressed surprise at the only sharply critical Darwinian statement he had ever encountered: “In the whole range of Darwin’s writings there cannot be found a passage so strongly worded as this: it presents the only note of bitterness in all the thousands of pages which he has published.” Darwin directed this passage that Romanes found so striking against people who would simplify and caricature his theory as claiming that natural selection, and only natural selection, caused all evolutionary changes. He wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely at the close of the Introduction—the following words: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.” This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection—the powerful idea that he often identified in letters as his dear “child.” But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.

In this light, especially given history’s tendency to recycle great issues, I am amused by an irony that has recently ensnared evolutionary theory. A movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence in a variety of fields, from the English biological heartland of John Maynard Smith to the uncompromising ideology (albeit in graceful prose) of his compatriot Richard Dawkins, to the equally narrow and more ponderous writing of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (who entitled his latest book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).[1] Moreover, a larger group of strict constructionists are now engaged in an almost mordantly self-conscious effort to “revolutionize” the study of human behavior along a Darwinian straight and narrow under the name of “evolutionary psychology.”