← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · mwdallas
Thread ID: 2057 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2002-08-11
2002-08-11 04:36 | User Profile
I have previously recommended David Sloan Wilson's book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (which was intended to resuscitate the concept of group selection) to those of you who have read MacDonald's trilogy.
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674930479/qid=1029038785/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-0853193-6455360]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067...0853193-6455360[/url]
His discussion of multi-level selection and his account of the evolutionary history in which units at one level of complexity have coalesced into a higher-level unit led me to several crucial insights. I gather he has, in turn, been influenced by MacDonald's work, as well as John Hartung's evolutionary perspective on religion.
Hartung's fascinating essays on Judaism:
"Love Thy Neighbor": [url=http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/toexist/ltnhome.html]http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/toexist/ltnhome.html[/url] "Passover": [url=http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/toexist/Passover.html]http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/toexist/Passover.html[/url]
In a new book, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Wilson apparently moves even closer to the territory covered by MacDonald.
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226901343/qid=1029039453/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-0853193-6455360]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/022...0853193-6455360[/url]
This looks like a must-read.
A review from Natural History Magazine suggests:
"The Whole Mass a Paradice" Is religion an adaptation that enables groups to function as single units?
By Frans B.M. de Waal
While many people have begun to worry about religious fanaticism and the violence it injects into the world, a biologist has decided to probe the evolution of religion. In doing so, David Sloan Wilson (no relation to entomologist Edward O. Wilson) compares organized religion to insect societies: harmonious and cooperative on the inside, intolerant of the outside.
Parallels between human and insect societies are far from new. As early as 1714, Dutch philosopher Bernard de Mandeville achieved widespread fame with his lengthy poem The Fable of the Bees (subtitled Private Vices, Publick Benefits), in which he compared civilization to a beehive wherein all individuals happily gratify one another's pride and vanity:
Thus every Part was full of Vice Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Religions are the purported enemies of vice. The Taliban's religious police force, given the Orwellian title General Department for the Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, meted out floggings to women who allowed their faces or ankles to show. Fundamentalist Christians in the West are similarly intolerant, as illustrated most recently by the Reverend Jerry Falwell's comment that gays and lesbians are partly to blame for the 9/11 attacks. Yet somewhat surprisingly, Wilson does not dwell much on the coercive side of religionââ¬ânot even when he discusses John Calvin's tightly controlled religious enclave in sixteenth-century Geneva. Wilson prefers to emphasize the cooperative and altruistic aspects of religious groups and their benefits for believers. Religion, he says, is a good thing for those who abide by its rules.
The argument is twofold: that organized religions function much like beehives or ant colonies, in which all members contribute to the greater good (sometimes at a cost to themselves but mostly to their benefit); and that the tendency to build such solidarity must have evolved by means of group selection. The first point is interesting and new, whereas the idea that selection can operate on entire groupsââ¬ânot only on individuals or on clans of close kinââ¬âhas been offered many times before by the author (and is still regarded by many biologists as slightly heretical). If one group out-reproduces another and if groups don't mixââ¬âso the reasoning goesââ¬âthe genes enabling the first group to do better will spread.
The book's strength is its convincing argument that religious groups often act like a single organism. We learn about Calvinism (in impressive detail), Judaism, early Christianity, established churches, modern sects, and a system of temples and aqueducts on Bali that are dedicated to the water goddess in the island's crater lake. The emphasis is not on what kind of god(s) people believe in, or on how they worship, but rather on what they get from religion.
French sociologist and philosopher Ãâ°mile Durkheim used the phrase "secular utility" for benefits derived from belonging to a religious community. Quite in contrast to the antireligious obsessions of biologists such as T.H. Huxley and Richard Dawkins, the attitude Durkheim held was that something as pervasive and universal as religion must serve a social purpose; he would have shaken his head at the idea of religion as a maladaptive, parasitic "meme." And even though Wilson sees religions as misrepresenting reality, he agrees with Durkheim that they permit human groups to function as harmonious units: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone."
As a biologist, Wilson emphasizes the effect of religion on survival and reproduction. His views are nicely captured by a contrast he draws between early Christians and the surrounding Roman society, with its "extreme male domination and a form of status-striving that made marriage and families unattractive prospects for males." Preference for sons resulted in skyrocketing rates of female infanticide and, consequently, a disastrous imbalance of males and females within the population (Wilson cites a figure of 140 males for every 100 females). Early Christians, whose religion condemned abortion and infanticide, were expected to marry and to be highly fecund, and they soon outnumbered the Romans, whose population in fact declined. Moreover, when two plagues swept through the empire, killing up to a third of the inhabitants each time, the Christians fared better than the Romansââ¬ânot because the germs (probably smallpox and measles) discriminated between people of different creeds but because the Christians cared for their sick. Heathens, wrote the Christian bishop Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century a.d., "pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease." Even though Christians risked self-contamination, guess which group as a whole most effectively curbed mortality?
Where Wilson uses the effect of religion on population growth to fortify his case for selection at the group level, Darwin's Cathedral shows some gaps. For selection to favor one group over anotherââ¬âand for this to have genetic consequencesââ¬âgroups need to be reproductively isolated from one another. This applies well to ants and bees in massive colonies of great genetic homogeneity. All members serve the same reproductive female and do not breed with outsiders, even when they vanquish another colony. Wilson discusses genetic isolation in relation to the low hybridization rates between Jews and other religious groups, but this may be the exception rather than the rule. Most religions tend to proselytize and to accept or encourage marriages with converts, resulting in quite large, genetically diverse populations. Under such circumstances, gene flow is often high, and it is hard to see how group selection could be at work.
Ironically, given the topic of his book, Wilson's defense of group selection leans toward religious fervor and occasionally lends his writing a preachy tone. I had to laugh out loud, therefore, at one of his claims: "I approach others as a student rather than as a teacher." It is obvious that when the author climbs on his hobbyhorse, we are the ones meant to listen and to witness him (as he modestly calls the process in a chapter subhead) "Lifting the Fog From Multiple Streams of Evidence." But my amusement aside, I found Darwin's Cathedral a refreshing look at religion, bound to generate both heated and serious debate at a time when science and religion are all too often presented as antithetical.
Frans B.M. de Waal is C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior and director of Living Links at Emory University in Atlanta. His latest book is The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (Basic Books, 2001).
2003-01-22 17:52 | User Profile
I have begun the new D.S. Wilson book but have not completed it. I am wrapping up another book that provides further biological insights into our political situation: Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue.
Excellent summary here:
[url=http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/4388/origins.html]http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/438...88/origins.html[/url]