Copyright © 2017 by Adam Neiblum
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN: 978-1-54-390749-0
Cover Design by: Kendall Lamkin
Original artwork: Galileo Galilei at his Trial at the Inquisition in Rome 1633, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London See [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galileo_Galilei%3B_Galileo_Galilei_at_his_trial_at_the_Inquisi_Wellcome_V0018716.jpg.
To
Li’l Bear
KK
Sugar Plum
&
My Darling Lammy
My most favorite primates of them all
Acknowledgments
Editorial Notes
1 The Omen
2 The Evolution Revolution
3 What is God?
4 Quirks of the Mind
5 Oxygen, Sugar & the Light of Reason
6 The Many Faces of Human Exceptionalism
7 Put Down That Bible Before Somebody Gets Hurt
8 Spiritual Caulk
9 Progress & Evolution
10 Big-C Culture
11 Humans as Animals
12 Value & the Valuer
13 Smashing the Pedestal
14 Certainty, Probability & Belief
15 Justice & Morality as Stuff Animals Do
16 Missing Links & Other Things that Miss the Point
17 Awe
18 Purpose & Meaning Without God
19 Human Progress
20 Knowledge is Power, Nature is not Destiny
21 Conclusion: The Thread
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography & Recommended Readings
I am deeply indebted to the following people, who have each literally changed my life. I thank these people sincerely, with genuine heartfelt gratitude, for helping me to grow and learn and move closer to the truth.
First and foremost, Charles Darwin, author of the greatest revolution ever. And to Richard Dawkins, who made that revolution accessible to us all, and who will, ultimately, be recognized as one of the greatest influences of our time.
To the late Christopher Hitchens, whose work helped me to crystallize my own thoughts on these important issues. And to Sam Harris and Steven Pinker, who each wrote masterpiece works which significantly affected me and my understanding of human nature. I have also been inspired and impacted, in a noteworthy manner, by the works of Michael Shermer, Jesse Bering, Neil Shubin, Jerry Coyne, Greta Cristina, David Silverman, and Frans de Waal.
I would also like to acknowledge the incredible efforts of the world’s greatest friend, my perfect wife, Laura Joy who served as my backbone, both personally and professionally, and her tremendous self-sacrifice in keeping me alive and bringing this book to fruition.
And finally, I’d like to acknowledge, with the utmost gratitude and respect, the two greatest professors I’ve ever been blessed to work with, Ellen Suckiel and John Doris.
I am a feminist. True, I have a penis. But I am a feminist nonetheless. Accordingly, whenever possible, I use gender neutral language. However, I am forced to fall back on the convention of using standard him and he pronouns and their equivalent in this work. I do so in part because such sexism is historically accurate. The theistic traditions I am addressing and critiquing, as well as the historical contexts in which they arose, are highly patriarchal and misogynistic. As such, it in fact goes to point, and to do otherwise would be historically inaccurate and disingenuous.
Secondly, there is the matter of literary convention. It would be literarily awkward to constantly be saying “he, she or it”, and, as such, sticking with one just makes things smoother for the reader. I sincerely apologize for any oppressive over- or under- tones, and I hope that anyone who is bothered by this can accept it as the conventional modality it represents, and nothing more than that. I would have preferred something alternative, but the gender-neutral pronoun I seek has not yet been popularized to my knowledge. Be consoled by the fact that it is all being done in a worthwhile effort.
While I am not going to go out of my way to throw them at you, as if I were on some sort of foul-mouthed crusade, neither am I going to self-censor. I was raised on ‘colorful’ language, and it will arise on occasion. It’s conversational and natural to me, just as it is with most people I know. This includes everyone from ancient emeritus professors of philosophy, to the guy who sells me tamales, or whatever else I may need, down on the corner.
But, for fun, let’s start our journey of critical reflection right away: how odd is it that fuck and shit are bad words, while fornicate and defecate are completely OK? This is because today’s ‘bad’ words are determined largely by class structure and attendant educational opportunities: foul language is merely language associated with the lower, less educated classes by the European and American aristocracy. It’s pure classist malarkey, a means for the upper classes to say “I am superior to those lowlifes. I do not use the language of the gutter. I am better than those who do.”
Education and opportunity should not be used as a means of perpetuating class divisions. Thinking in terms of ‘foul’ language has no justification in a truly democratic society, which, in principle at least, aims at an egalitarian state of affairs. It’s classism: elitism plain and simple. Either that, or else it’s more of America’s unique brand of thinly veiled racism, to the degree that, in America, class and race are deeply intertwined issues. As with sexism, I resist racism and I resist classism. Fuck that bullshit!
It is not my intention to insult individual persons who take their religion seriously. I am not setting out to be critical of religious individuals at all. I go where the evidence takes me. As such, this work will include some critical analysis of religion and belief in god. While not judgmental of religious individuals per se, my argument will pull no punches as far as religious traditions, beliefs and institutions are concerned. Being insulting or offensive to religious believers is not a goal I have, not an intentional stance, although I am afraid that some offense may be inevitable. I genuinely apologize if anyone is offended by this work. However, it is difficult to challenge people’s core beliefs without ruffling a few feathers.
Evolution still floats in the limbo of our unwillingness to face the implications of Darwinism for the cosmic estate of Homo sapiens…All thinking people accept the biological fact of our decent from the animal world. But the second stage, mental accommodation towards pedestal smashing, has scarcely begun…we have managed to retain an interpretation of human importance scarcely different in many crucial respects from the exalted state we occupied as the supposed products of direct creation in god’s image.
Stephen Jay Gould
Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History,19961
The Tree of Life
Gustav Klimt 1
Muddy streaming chocolate. A swelling river of the stuff. Hmm… This should be fun. Chocolate fountains. Chocolate waterfalls. I love chocolate. Wait, no. It’s water. Soil thickened swathes of swirling brown viscous muck. Oh, great. Here we go again. My dream rider always likes to switch horses in midstream. There’s all sorts of crap in the churning waters, too. Chunks of furniture, detritus of all kinds. This is all imagery snatched from internet footage of tsunamis, filling my internal screen. Japan. Chile. Phuket. You Tube on replay.
Anxiety swells. The powerful current is swirling round my waist, a belt of rapidly slithering muscular python. Eddies cascade round the ninety degree angle of a painted white pylon, this tall pallid monolith withstanding the forces at work. Load bearing. Bearing the load. Beginning to strain. Flood waters are rushing towards me, pushing us back. Us. Someone is with me. I’m not alone, but…
The swell is forcing us back, into our home, trapping us. My anxiety swells and rises along with the thickening, viscous tide. Apprehension. Worry. Dread. All threaten to overwhelm me.
I wake up, rip that fucking sleep apnea mask off of my face, sit up quickly, and lean back against the cool wooden bed frame. A thin veneer of perspiration sheens my chest. The dream. Quickly. Have to catch it, catch the swiftly dissipating cerebral wisps. In this moment it is as if a window is quickly sliding closed. Yet for these few seconds, on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness, the window stays open for just a moment, and I can catch a glimpse of what’s going on back there. What was that? What was I dreaming about?
Omen. It’s going to happen. This is an omen of something that’s going to happen. I knew it; I knew all along that we had to move out of this fucking floodplain. I’ve talked with my wife about this so many times. We live in a floodplain. Right at sea level, a quarter mile at best from the immense Pacific. In a river delta. In California. That’s right, California, where it will go bone dry for four or five years running, then El Niño pays a visit, and what was once a gentle, clear running mountain stream swells into a barely contained mudslide pinched between the Army Corps of Engineers’ straining levee walls…
…If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s gonna break…
The chocolate landslide sweeps mighty coastal redwoods under the bridge. The bridge shudders as each collides on their way past, swept off into the Pacific with ease. Veritable twigs.
The media is full of global warming. Calving icebergs. Warming temperatures. Rising sea levels. Stranded polar bears. Island nations disappearing. And the El Niño. That damned El Niño. I knew it. It’s going to kill us. This is an omen. It’s a warning. Sell the house. Get out now.
Wait a minute. I know better than that. Omen? How ridiculous. As the light of conscious wakefulness begins to illuminate the darkened recesses of my mind, I realize that interpreting this as an omen is seriously primitive stuff. Maybe not lizard brain stuff, but damned close. As my wakefulness increases, I can see that this dream is my brain’s way of processing anxiety over the flooding issue. I had a nightmare about flood waters because I am anxious about living in a floodplain during an El Niño winter.
I’ve been through this kind of thing before. Awakening in the middle of the night, frightened by nightmares. Ghosts and the like. Supernatural interpretations of experience happen instinctively. They seem to be a part of our basic default setting, our initial wiring. Welling up from the deeper recesses of the brain, they offer us those instinctive, prehistoric interpretations of experience with which we are all so familiar. Omens. Signs. Ghosts. Demons. Goblins. Premonitions. Communications from the other side.
But then, as wakefulness increases, as the sun rises, as consciousness crests, the supernatural and the mythical are replaced by much more viable, natural interpretations. At least, this is the case for those who have had the good fortune to learn that supernatural explanations do not represent truly satisfactory explanations. If you are never taught option B, however, you are more or less permanently stuck with option A. Forever and ever. Amen.
And that is a microcosmic version of what Unexceptional is all about. My experience illustrates, in a single case, a process which mirrors the more general maturing process which all of humanity is engaged in. We are all in the midst of this shift, this movement upwards, away from the supernatural, towards the natural. That, in a nutshell, is what I will be exploring. I will make the case for this claim, and I will explore some of the revolutionary, and fascinating, implications as well.
Ockham & the Shrinking Magic Bag
I was raised as an atheist. But, contrary to family tradition, I spent twenty-five years associated with religious organizations and studies, learning to interpret experience in the traditional supernatural ways that have become extremely common in American culture and around the world. Coincidences are actually messages, signposts guiding you. Actions have karmic, moral repercussions. Tradition is all important. Obedience. Adherence to scripture. Worldly knowledge is untrustworthy. Everything is being overseen, and there is a grand, but always mysterious, plan. Spirit forces. Omens. God.
Yet I was often suspicious of these interpretations. And deeply curious, always, about what was the truth of the matter. Suffice to say that my relentless, genuine curiosity did not endear me to my religiously inclined fellows. Today I believe what the compiled totality of known data, the sum of all the worldly evidence, suggests in any given situation. For example, rather than omen, it seems vastly more likely that my dream was an expression or manifestation of my anxiety, and nothing more. This is the interpretation which most closely aligns with all of the evidence. As William of Ockham, noted descriptor of ‘Ockham’s Razor’1, also known as the Law of Parsimony, might well say, the best explanation is the one with the least extra parts.
Omens. Psychological transformations. Ebenezer Scrooge.2 Altruism. Disease and addiction. All of them. Shifting from the magical and the inexplicable, to the knowable and the known. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. Floods. Crop failures. Mothers and babies dying in childbirth. Hurricanes. From the supernatural to the natural. History can be depicted as a process wherein each one of these, one by one, has shifted from the magical, supernatural, and the unknowable, over into the realm of the knowable and the known. Stunning that, in our day and age, Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans was interpreted by some religious people as was done back in the dark ages: god punishing us for being gay, or whatever the alleged sin du jour was at the time.
And yet, sadly, not quite so stunning. Not so stunning at all, as suggested by research showing that eighty to ninety percent of Americans believe in god, or at least say they do, the success of ‘spirituality’ themed self-help books, the popularity of 12-step culture, Fundamentalism both Christian and Muslim, the rise of the mega-churches, not to mention medieval interpretations of calamities great and small, and antiquated religious weltanschauungs which are still, unfortunately, frighteningly, very much alive and well.
So, this is where we are at. Absolutely basic facts about reality are shockingly unrecognized by many. Evolution is a fact; we are animals; naturalistic interpretations of reality can explain a great deal more than we generally give them credit for; religious and dualistic interpretations of reality may have run their historic course and, at this point in time, come to do more harm than good. At the very least, these dualistic interpretations of reality serve as a hindrance to the ever fruitful human propensity towards curiosity and inquiry into naturalistic, data-driven and evidence-based interpretations of the cosmos within which we live.
What I have to say in this book is straightforward, true and simple. Unfortunately, many have yet to get the memo. Hell, many of my fellow Homo sapiens would attempt to murder me if they read this, or at the very least stone me or beat the shit out of me. But, for many of us, it is more and more becoming the case that what was once interpreted as spiritual, divine, or religious, is starting to be blasphemously mocked as ‘woo woo’. Three cheers for blasphemous mockery. It’s way, way better than cowed silence!
Our questions are more and more succumbing to empirical rather than dualistic interpretations, to common sense rather than sixth sense, to science rather than faith, to replicable findings rather than personal revelation. As this continues, the bag of supernatural answers will continue to dwindle in size, perhaps until one day nothing is left. Many people foresee this as a potential disaster. I am telling you that this is, on the contrary, entirely good news. Absolutely nothing good will be lost in the process. I promise.
This Is Your Brain on Windex
When I was just a boy, a young philosopher in training, I remember swimming in the crystal clear tropical waters where we lived. My folks were up at the beach bar, gin and tonics, dad smoking his Camels, mom her Kents, passing around a joint with the two local bartenders, one of whom was a regular in our party home every night. I may have only been ten years old, but I already knew his drink of choice was a Cuba Libre. Rum and coke with a slice of lime.
I was rolling in the waves. I liked to pretend I was Muhammad Ali. I would float like a butterfly, slow motion footwork on the sandy ocean floor. Then, when the wave started to crash, bam, sting like a bee: Right jab, left uppercut. I would punch the three and four foot swells as they broke upon me. While I danced, I would think about the world. I was thinking about my five senses: the smell of the ocean, the feel of the sand, the sun, the salt water on my dark golden skin. I was thinking about the ‘me’ who resides at the center of it all, the nexus of all these perceptive apparatuses. How odd and mysterious it was that there was a ‘me’ at the center of it all, experiencing all of this.
It was then that I first thought of my mind as a window onto the world. There was an objectively existing world all around me, and my senses filled my brain with data, with input that told me all about that world. This process, I figured, started at the beginning of life, at which point we were like empty vessels waiting to be filled up. All of this input, my senses like tendrils, reaching out and gathering information about the cosmos as it is, piling up all that data on the blank slate of the brain, which I imagined started out as this pristine, pure, empty vessel, waiting to be filled with the wonders of experience.
Nice try, kid. Turns out I was wrong. I figured this out as the years went by. Turns out that the brain is much less like a window unto the world and, instead, is much more like an interpretive mechanism. Neither our sensory apparatus, nor the brain, are clear windows, perceiving the world exactly as it is. The brain is not a tabula rasa. The whole system is as much an interpretive one as it is an observational one. The brain is already structured so as to interpret experiences in very specific ways. In fact, the system may be more interpretive than observational.
This actually makes sense. Our sensory apparatus and our brains evolved to be as they are for the purpose of assisting our survival and reproduction, and nothing more. Clearly the apparatuses under consideration, the brain and the perceptual mechanisms that feed it data, have been bent and geared towards those functions over the course of their development, through the process of evolution by natural selection.
In other words, our brain is wired to think of things in this weird, often mistaken way. Instead of awakening and thinking “I am anxious about living in this floodplain”, I awoke and thought “Oh, shit! A flood is coming!” This is very familiar. People today, all around the world, respond like this. In fact, they have a whole host of similarly mistaken interpretations all the time. Some are much more familiar to them than the example I have chosen to initiate this dialogue. No doubt you will recognize many as they arise.
Our brains are interpretive devices that acquired their structure and their nature while we lived under very different circumstances from those within which most of us live today. They also acquired them through the process of evolution by natural selection, which it turns out is much more of a jerry rigging, improvisational, take-the-material-at-hand-and-tweak-it-somehow, MacGyver3 type process, than a neat, clean, well planned process.
Turns out, we are not at all that intelligently designed.
The bottom line is that our brains are not designed to get us to the truth. There are some weird tricks it plays on us. This is a huge, monumental truth about us. The human brain has shaped human history and the world we live in today in ways that are too numerous to count. What if a lot of it was based upon falsehoods and misconstruals dictated by cognitive biases or some such cerebral quirks, blind spots, or misconceptions? MacGyver-style patch jobs that were the best evolution could do at the time, under the circumstances, with the material at hand? What if some of the biases or predilections were designed for life two million years ago, but no longer apply so readily to our modern lifestyles? This would be a very important issue, indeed. If we could know about these tricks, that knowledge might enable us to step outside of their influence, and then to make decisions based on what is real instead.
The more we know about the fact that our brain is tricking us, or throwing us off track, the better for us all. Charles Darwin’s4 Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, as it is popularly known, is a huge step forward in addressing this problem. First, it has enabled us to significantly improve our understanding of how we actually are, how the brain really functions, why it does what it does, and of what precisely human nature truly consists. Evolutionary perspectives are enabling us to become more consciously aware of precisely what is going on and why. And such knowledge is power.
Second, Darwin’s work is an exemplar of a major transition in the history of our species, a manifestation of this major turning point in which we shifted from knowing the world through the brain’s twisted interpretive apparatus, to beginning to know that we see the world through specific twisted apparatus’. In other words, it was around that time that we really moved away from the problematic old ways of interpreting our existence, and began to see things instead in the light of evidence, reason and science.
Darwin represents a huge step forward in our ability to know and understand this transition in human development. Knowing our true nature enables what free will we have. There is a nice, free-will type gap between being robustly determined by our nature on the one hand and, on the other hand, becoming knowledgeable enough about that nature to bend determinism just a little, just enough that we might have a little more say in who we are, how we are, what we are, even why we are. If we can know about our hard-wiring, we can step, to some degree, outside of it, perhaps just enough to choose whether or not we want to let it run us, or conversely, can freely choose what to make of ourselves and the world around us.
I woke twice that night. Once from the scary tsunami dream. Then again, when I realized it was not an omen. That was an awakening, too. In that moment I took my own little personal step away from the multiple millennia of superstition which have ruled humanity. In making that tiny little step, we make a gargantuan leap forward, towards human progress and human freedom.
A deceived person cannot make a meaningful choice. They are enslaved by the deception. Say that you marry someone, or that you vote for someone. But then you find out that they withheld very important, vital, relevant information about themselves. The husband was an inveterate philanderer, the politician a corrupt criminal. Your consent was not real, not meaningful therefore, because, had you knowledge of the critical information, you would probably have withheld your consent, you would have chosen otherwise.
Well, think of Darwin as the guy who came along and gave you the information that your husband was a rogue, your senator a crook. With the more accurate knowledge of our nature which evolutionary theory gives us, we can see how many of our thoughts, our interpretations and understandings of the cosmos and our place in it, our fundamental and long held traditional beliefs, are fallacious or misguided in some very important ways. With that knowledge comes the power to choose a new course. We are empowered, freed even, if you will, so that we can make more meaningful, valid decisions about what we believe, what we think, and what we do.
What evolutionary theory did for us was give us the tools to understand our true nature much more accurately than ever before. And the transition has been really hard for humanity as a whole to make. It’s been one hundred and fifty years, yet we still lag significantly. And that, my friends, is also what this book is about. It’s about how we have long been subject to our own fallacious beliefs, and how we are slowly but surely rectifying that. It is about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by natural and sexual selection, and some of the remarkable implications which flow from his literally revolutionary work. And it is about the progress that ensues when recognition and understanding are finally allowed in.
Now, people have written on Darwin and Evolution before. My intention here is not to waste your time regurgitating familiar stuff. I assume the reader has some basic, rudimentary familiarity. Maybe you took a course in college, read one of Richard Dawkins’1 books. Perhaps Neil Shubin’s2 Your Inner Fish was a title that caught your attention. Maybe. Maybe not. Some familiarity would help, but it’s not a necessity. It’s ok either way. No worries.
I take pride in walking the fine line between academia and the real world: I strive to make sure my work is entertaining, accessible, engaging, and academically rigorous all at the same time. On top of that, I also have some authentically new insights to bring to the arena. And I’ll be utilizing a little genuine, yet totally accessible, academic philosophy. Enough to make it interesting and rich, but not enough to make it stupid complicated.
I have difficulty at times summarizing the subject matter of this work, simply because it connects many disparate phenomenon. One way of thinking of it is as a treatise on human nature. Another is that it represents an effort to bring together three common threads in recent popular non-fiction:
These three phenomena are intimately connected. The first two, obviously. They are very popular, and very clearly intertwined. The third topic is both less popular, and its connection with the first two, much more ambiguous indeed. Nonetheless, the three are actually very deeply interconnected. In the process of exploring the relationship between these three, I will also be exploring a new, emerging picture of human nature which differs considerably from that which has historically held sway.
We live in a truly remarkable, wonderful, positive time. Interestingly, perhaps ironically, the fact that most people are not aware of how remarkable and positive a time this is may in fact be a result of precisely those quirks of the human brain that I opened up by talking about. Perhaps we are being fooled by our own brains into thinking that things are going to hell in a hand basket, when, in fact, things are precisely the opposite.
One of my fundamental premises is that we Homo sapiens have yet to fully absorb the implications of the revolution in thought, in our understanding of the nature of things, in our understanding of the cosmos and our place within it, which occurred in and around 1859. For brevity’s sake I will use Darwin’s name to refer to this incredible transformational period in history. Of course any student of history, or of science, or of the history of science, knows full well that Darwin does not deserve all the credit.
Viable arguments can be made that some folk had honed in on some of the basic concepts centuries earlier. Certainly Alfred Russel Wallace deserves his share of credit for figuring things out around the same time as Darwin. And so the standard caveat which any book on this subject matter must make at the outset: Darwin does not get all the credit. Yet his work was by far the most exacting and detailed articulation of the truth of evolution, the fact of evolution. That is the main reason, then, that he gets the lion’s share.
And yet, it is very important to remember that no man or woman is an island. As Newton is famed to have written, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”3 Scientific discoveries and insights tend to take place within a causal or nurturing context. They are largely an effect of the accretion of general knowledge in any given time or place. Like a tide that lifts all boats.
Sure, some people stand out for one reason or another. But we tend to exaggerate the contributions of the individual. We have an inherent need to crown champions, a natural hunger for heroes. Of course, this itself is also probably an example of the kind of thing I am talking about, a quirk of the human mind that we foolishly embrace and enact instinctively. Perhaps a kink of the hominid mind left over from millennia on the savanna wherein, no doubt, it was often advantageous to have a single, unquestioned strong leader in charge.
But as for social, historic, or scientific progress in more recent eras, we can see that breakthroughs, discoveries, and revolutions in thought are not so much about the individuals whom we credit. They are at least equally an effect of rising tides in general understanding, the accretion of overall knowledge in a given socio-historical context. If Copernicus had not figured out that the earth revolves around the sun in the 16th century, someone else very soon would have. The individuals credited are generally less relevant, causal, or definitive than is the social milieu and momentum at the time. The theory of evolution is a perfect example of the rule, as those versed in the historic moment well know, what with Alfred hot on Chuck’s heels and all.
Having offered up this interesting little caveat, I will nonetheless proceed to refer to the historic change by good sir Charles’ name. Part convenience, part convention. But also, no doubt, part respect. The implications of that turning point in our history will be the foundational subject matter for this book. The theory of evolution was a game changer. It was a major historical turning point in human self understanding. It is a scientific discovery with the most profound of implications. But it’s also a manifestation of larger processes at work, and these secular, scientific processes are themselves equally the focus of this work.
So, there are two parts to consider. First, there is the content of Darwin’s work itself, the theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection. This new understanding of how things were was totally revolutionary. Game changing in the extreme. That is why, one hundred fifty years later, it is still taking time to settle into people’s minds. At the same time there are the broader processes and forces of which his theory was just one example, an effect or expression. Taken together, we are talking about truly huge, world transforming phenomenon with some astounding, far reaching consequences for humanity.
Darwin bequeathed us a very profound change in self-definition, a deep transformation in understanding who we are and what we are, in understanding human nature itself. Breaking strongly with eons of traditional thinking to the contrary, his work placed us squarely within the lineage of all evolved living beings. In other words, we are animals. Like all the other animals, we have our own unique qualities, survival strategies and such. But, we are just animals. And this simple fact has significant implications.
Second, his work represents an excellent example of a new way of looking at problems and trying to figure them out. Of course Copernicus, Galileo, and others were onto this, not just Darwin by any means. At its most rudimentary level, we are simply talking about learning from evidence, from data, and from facts about the world, utilizing reason, as opposed to getting our understanding of how things are from tradition, authority, faith, superstition, or belief in the supernatural. In large measure what we are talking about, then, is science, plain and simple.
Acquiring some knowledge of all these concepts is very important, for society, for the future, for the world of living beings in general. But I also think that the subject matter is personally gratifying. Science, in general, and Darwin’s theory of evolution, in particular, has helped me to find satisfactory answers to many of the deep and mystifying questions of the ages. They have helped me to make sense of things in a way which thousands of books on religion, theology and philosophy could not.
I do not mean to be disparaging to the humanities I embraced for so long. My years as a religious seeker, and as a student of philosophy, were wonderful parts of my life, and essential components in my path to the present. I also believe that the tools I acquired as a student of philosophy have enabled me to more effectively grasp the relevant stuff, to weed through the muck and get to the good part, to some truth about human nature and the human condition. But it has been Darwin’s work which, for me, has caused the real revolution. Hopefully you will find the implications of Darwinian thinking to be as interesting and profound as have I.
Have you ever, at one time or another, stopped to think along the following lines? Five hundred or a thousand years from now, all this stuff that seems so new and amazing in my life will be completely outdated and quaint. The stuff of my world will be the stuff of some museum or archeological dig. Well, that is, assuming that museums or archeological digs are still a thing.
Well, the same can be said about our ideas. Our understanding of how things work, the mental framework which we employ as we interpret our daily experiences, our general view of things both large and small, all of that changes over time. Perhaps even within our lifetimes this can happen. But the process is even more pronounced when we think in larger units of time. When we look back at the history of ideas, there is a very clear pattern. Ideas and understandings that start out in nebulous, fuzzy regions of human thought, questions answered by minds steeped in superstition, tend, over time, to find themselves resolved by very matter of fact considerations about the real, tangible, material world.
Earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes were once thought to be expressions of the wrath of the gods. Sperm were imagined to be tiny homunculi, fully formed miniature versions of people, and growing up just consisted of these homunculi getting bigger and bigger. The earth was flat. The earth was the center of the cosmos. Women could not be doctors. Or do math. Nightmares were omens. This is a very short sampling of a fascinating, and a very lengthy, list.
Prior to Darwin, animals all existed as one god or other had made them. No species ever went extinct. The earth was about six-thousand years old. Man was made in god’s image. However, as human history progressed, these ideas all changed in accordance with evidence and facts about the real world, shifting from the speculative column, the column of belief, of faith, over into the columns of the knowable and the known.
It may be hard to conceive at this point, but many ideas which are commonly held today will, one day, be recognized as antiquated, outdated and, quite simply, false. Actually, all of the positions above are views still held by someone somewhere. So, this is the picture which we need to have in our minds going forward. In the world of Homo sapiens many ideas, many ways of thinking, interpretive habits, and predispositions of thought, with which we are very comfortable and familiar, are, at some point, going to make the shift. The superstitious and religious answers will dwindle in number, while those based upon knowledge of the world will continue to increase.
Darwin and the processes he employed to arrive at his theory of evolution represent an approach, and it has been the application of this kind of approach which has enabled us to, one by one, transform false ideas into more accurate ones. Around the time of Darwin, this kind of approach was rapidly gaining favor due to a bevy of consistently positive results. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. We gain a better understanding of how things change, bit by bit, because of a growing body of superstition-free, evidence-based, rational knowledge rooted in facts and data. The answers to our questions make the shift, over into the factual and true category. And, as I will go into in the pages ahead, this is fantastically good news. Because, the more they do so, the more human life continues to get better and better. There is a direct correlation between the accretion of worldly human knowledge and overall human well-being.
Many people think this process has its limits. Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that religion and science concerned areas of “Non-overlapping Magisteria” 4. This was his way of saying that science could not address certain issues, step into certain terrain, by which he meant religious, including the moral and the ethical. The idea is that science and scientific thinking can make us cell phones, feed us better, build us all houses, maybe even help us control our population and stabilize our impact on our world’s environment. But, as for morality, ethics, and similar value-laden issues: no. Science is entirely mute on such matters.
As far as such issues were concerned, Gould’s idea of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” holds that we must continue to rely upon superstitious and religious thinking to guide us in discerning what we should do, what we should value, what is right and what is wrong. But the idea that religion and morality go hand-in-hand, and that science has nothing to contribute to this most intensely important of dialogues, is in fact another example of an idea which, whether it be ten or one hundred years from now, will eventually prove outdated, antiquated, and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain bullshit.
Such humanistic, revolutionary findings are a result of careful, knowledgeable post-Darwinian thinking and, more generally, of the kind of evidence-based, naturalistic approach which his work exemplified. Understanding humanity in this historically altogether different light, rooted anew in this naturalistic, scientific approach, in this case stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection and its logical implications, will ultimately take us a long way towards a better, more accurate understanding of our true nature. For example, what if justice is an evolved strategy within the human animal which enables us to work together as a socially cohesive unit? What can naturalistic interpretations of human nature tell us about morality and ethics?
What if nothing whatsoever supernatural is involved? Maybe we can to learn a whole lot more about our moral nature by pursuing scientific avenues of inquiry than we could ever hope to learn from the Vedas, Testaments (original or rewritten), the Quran, L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction, or from Joseph Smith’s interpretation of the word of the Lord, acquired allegedly by shoving his face in a top hat and reading the seer stones placed therein. Which only he could read.
The goal here is to come to a better understanding of human nature, and of the deeper philosophical and religious issues that might be resolved thereby. This will come about through an explication of the simple, inevitable consequences of Darwinian thinking, both in specific regarding the facts about evolution, but also more generally, by virtue of the overall shift in human thinking which his work embodied, away from tradition and authority-bound thinking, and towards more evidence-based, factual, data-driven, rational, scientific and naturalistic thinking. Simply put: from the supernatural to the natural.
Unfortunately, there will be resistance. To quote the philosopher Schopenhauer, any good and true idea must
endure a hostile reception before [being] accepted…
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.5
Granted, that sounds a little scary. Oh, well. As that other great philosopher, Mary Poppins, famously quipped:
Well begun is half done.6
Darwin’s work, and his systematic emphasis upon data and evidence, seriously undermined the ubiquitous archaic belief in dualism. Dualism had been predominant in human thought forever when Charles Darwin was bundled into his first set of nappies in 1809. Dualism simply refers to a two-part cosmic scheme, a view of everything that includes the natural realm, but also another realm that is distinct from the natural.
This other realm is conceived by differing people in differing manners. It can include such beliefs as god, religion, and the spiritual, which are fairly common variants in modern America. God, gods, magic for good and for ill, a whole lot of witchcraft still to this day, superstition a-plenty, religious belief and practice like crazy, and spirituality as well, are all aspects of this non-natural dimension, all of which have been of central importance to humanity as far back as we know. The divine, the mystic, the paranormal, all in thousands of forms godly, bodily, apparitional, and animistic as well. The main idea in dualism is the belief in something other than the natural realm, a necessary super-natural element, another realm that has some relevant explanatory, animating, or essential value according to the believer or believers.
Nothing in any of Darwin’s work extends beyond the realm of the natural. His evolutionary perspective places us in an incredibly long lineage of living, natural, physical beings of all types and kinds. Not only are we directly related to chimpanzees, we are similarly, if more distantly, related to moths, maggots and moss. This fact alone changes everything, as the rules which apply to all these other living things, and the rules which apply to us, are one and the same. We are animals, like all the other animals. Natural beings entirely, nothing more, nothing less.
In spite of Darwin pointing out that we are animals, just like all the billions of other animals that have lived and died before us, and will live and die after us; that we are made of meat, like venison or mastodon, with blood flowing through us; muscles and sinews and bones; birthing, killing, eating, fucking, dying; just like every cat, canary, cockroach and kookaburra; many people still believe we partake in some special alternative realms, as illustrated in the Great Chain of Being and other similar religious interpretations of the cosmos.
The Great Chain of Being, which will be considered in a bit more detail soon, is an example of one classic worldview in which human beings were considered to be, in part, divine beings, but also part beast along a hierarchic scale. In short, everything about our new status as animals in a long, connected lineage conflicts with traditional dualistic and religious perspectives of humans as special, part divine, in the image of god, possessing souls: the whole religious package deal.
So, the content of Darwin’s work conflicted directly with dualism and religious understandings of human nature. But the form of his work also exemplified an evidence and data-driven approach to acquiring knowledge which clearly worked well. This reinforced the importance of us learning to find viable answers to questions without reverting to the imaginary fill-in components which characterized dualistic and religious thinking.
Prior to Darwin’s time, it was extremely common, when encountering something inexplicable in the natural realm, to call upon an imaginary, super-natural explanation. While this is still very common today, it has become less so. Darwin represents an alternative to this so called ‘god-of-the-gaps’ approach. Scientific inquiry and data gathering encourages us to simply acknowledge the gap and leave it empty, rather than fill it with detritus culled from our imagination. Better to accept the empty gap than to fill it with something which might mislead us, or cause us to think of the problem as solved, the riddle as answered, potentially sending us off in pursuit of wild geese, or bringing an end to further inquiry or, worst of all, squelching that most wonderful human trait of curiosity and the thirst for truth and knowledge.
One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
-Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 20087
Darwin described our true nature, and demonstrated the power of a supremely excellent means for figuring things out in the process. Form and content. Nowhere in his method did he just fill in the blanks with guesses, imaginary entities or pretend processes. Rather than grab a hold of this profoundly informative approach, many chose instead to stick with the old ways, regardless of the fact that this alternative approach strongly suggested that duality was an illusion, a game of make-believe entirely, albeit one with a long, hallowed, highly esteemed history.
The truth of the matter is that we are all animal, all day, every day. 24/7. 365. Top to bottom, bottom to top. Thank you, Mr. Darwin. Justice, morality, and intelligence are merely evolved traits of us as animals. They are not gifts of the gods, divine attributes, spiritual truths or anything of the sort. No duality required. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that these traits existed before animals manifested them, or that they existed or currently exist independent of animals in any regard.
Evolution resulted in us acquiring our specific traits because they were beneficial in our surviving and reproducing as individuals within a tribe8, within mutualistic, highly social, interdependent groupings. Granted, though, we are conflicted animals. We are naturally born with aggressive, competitive, and selfish traits, as any parent of young children will tell you. Yet, we are equally hard-wired for compassion, altruism, charity, and empathy. These characteristics have been demonstrated to arise both cross-culturally, and at extremely young ages.
But this is not because, as was frequently imagined in days gone by, we are part divine and part beast, with all of humanity’s good traits coming from the divine and all of the bad traits coming from the earthly beast. Rather, we are all beast, all the time: and that includes all the good parts, as well as the bad parts. Religion is essentially misanthropic, and tends to perpetuate a notion of humans as evil, corrupted, and in need of repair, of nature itself as bad, as something to be gotten away from. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The sooner we get that, the better off we will all be. Getting to know exactly how our good parts and our nature are connected will be very useful and beneficial knowledge for humanity indeed as we learn to let go of the misanthropy and misogyny of dualistic thinking, and cultivate a better understanding of the more naturalistic foundations for happiness, wellness, self-fulfillment, and what the Greeks called Eudemonia.
Young Homo sapiens experience genuine pleasure in the instinctual act of food sharing. In this series, the author’s daughter finds great delight, giggling her way through feeding Grandma. Grandma appears to be enjoying it a good deal as well.8
Here we are, one hundred fifty years down the road from Darwin’s brilliant and revolutionary insights into the true nature of life. Yet, notions of human nature, our place in the scheme of things, even our values, are still largely derived from antiquated world views which predate Darwin’s all important, transformational moment in human history. The Great Chain of Being still shapes more people’s cosmic vision than does Darwin’s work. But his theory, and the scientific methods he and others employed to such great success, has begun to make a dent in the outdated religious, hierarchic, dualistic worldviews which still, to this day, predominate in the minds of most Homo sapiens.
The hierarchic worldview embodied in the Great Chain of Being, with its dualistic conception of human nature as part evil, natural beast, and part good, supernaturally divine being, and it’s obvious strong religious overtones, strongly affects our lives in terms of how we view our selves, our destiny, our sense of purpose, our place in the cosmos to this very day.