02.25.07
Sociobiology and B….
Biology and Bullshit
by David P. Barash
The usual lament by scientists, and here the unrepentant sociobiologist Barash, against religion might prove itself if there were a single intelligent discussion of it by those who ritually denounce it. The sociobiological vein has become a scholarly vice, and sounds almost adolescent in its wilful ignorance and oversimplification.
Books Discussed in this Essay:
Religion Explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought, by Pascal Boyer. (Basic Books, 2002)
The Language of God: a scientist presents evidence for belief, by Francis Collins. (The Free Press, 2006)
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett. (Viking Press, 2006)
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. (Knopf, 2006)
Evolving God: a provocative view of the origins of religion, by Barbara King. (Doubleday, 2007)
Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion, by L. A. Kirkpatrick. Guilford Publications, 2005.
Evolution and Christian Faith: reflections of an evolutionary biologist, by Joan Roughgarden. (Island Press, 2006)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the search for god, by Carl Sagan. (The Penguin Press, 2006)
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson. (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
The Creation: an appeal to save life on earth, by Edward. O. Wilson. (W. W. Norton, 2006)
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of belief, by Lewis Wolpert. (W. W. Norton, 2007)
All books supporting religion are alike. All books attacking it do so in their own way (well, maybe not, but doesn’t this start us off on a nice Tolstoyan note?). In any event, religion’s interface with science - long fraught - seems especially so these days, with a bevy of books criticizing religion as well as defending it.
Why so much attention, just now? Exhibit A: creationist efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution, masquerading as “intelligent design.” Next, the takeover of the US executive branch by right-wing ayatollahs, combined with presidential assertions that his policies are undertaken in furtherance of god’s will, not to mention efforts to break down the Jeffersonian “wall of separation” between church and state. Add to this the so-called war on terror, which is largely a struggle with radical Islam in response to the latter’s faith-based initiative against the United States.
Meanwhile, American stem-cell research continues to be hobbled by the insistence that every fertilized cell has been “ensouled” and is therefore human and holy. And don’t forget the conspicuous rise of the right-wing evangelical movement in the United States – bastion of religiosity in the developed world - featuring such gems as Pat Robertson’s assertion that catastrophes, from natural hurricanes to unnatural terrorism, are brought about by god’s displeasure with the sexually or textually sinful.
In short, it is fair to say that “they” (religious zealots) started it, as they usually do. It was the Catholic Church that burned Bruno and persecuted Galileo, not the other way around. When have atheists claimed that religious devotees will burn in hell, or sought to hurry them along not with words but flaming faggots? Polls consistently show Americans more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is an anencephalic ax murderer (but religious) than the most admirable atheist. In any event, it appears that despite – or, perhaps, because of – being an oppressed minority, some atheists are finally madder than hell (and/or mad at hell) and unwilling to “take it” any more.
In his 2003 book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris pointed out that alone of all human assertions, those qualifying as “religious,” almost by definition, automatically demand and typically receive immense respect, even veneration. Claim that the Earth is flat, or that the Tooth Fairy exists, and you will be deservedly laughed at. But maintain that according to your religion, a 6th century desert tribal leader ascended to heaven on a winged horse, and you are immediately entitled to deference. (By the way, is the similar claim that a predecessor ascended to heaven, roughly 600 years earlier, without aid of a winged horse less ridiculous … or more?) It has long been, let us say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious faith – belief without evidence – should go unchallenged. Much of the recent uproar comes from just such challenging, among which biologists have been prominent.
Like Mark Twain’s celebrated comment about stopping smoking, scholars have found it easy to explain religion: they’ve done it hundreds of times, in psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical, anthropological and economic terms. Biologists, by contrast, have been Johnnies-come-lately, a neglect that has been changing of late, as growing numbers seek to explore the evolutionary factors – the likely “adaptive significance” – of religion. Indeed, given that religion is, in one form or another, a cross-cultural universal, that it has had such powerful effects on human beings (for good and ill), and yet its biological underpinnings remain so elusive, religion is an especially ripe topic for biologists’ scrutiny.
It would seem both a fertile field and a frustrating one. Thus, on the one hand, religious belief of one sort of another seems to qualify as a cross-cultural universal, therefore suggesting that it might well have emerged, somehow, from the cross-cultural universality of human nature, the common evolutionary background shared by all Homo sapiens. But on the other, it often appears that religious practice is fitness-reducing rather than enhancing; if so, then genetically mediated tendencies toward religion should have been selected against. Think of the frequent religious advocacy of sexual restraint (not uncommonly, outright celibacy), of tithing, self-abnegating moral duty and other seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic denial of the “evidence of our senses” in favor of faith in things asserted but not clearly demonstrated. What might be the fitness-enhancing benefits of religion that compensate for these costs? The question itself is novel: social scientists, for example, have long considered religion as a thing sui generis, not as a behavioral predisposition that arose because in some way it contributed to the survival and reproduction of its participants.