From: Alan McGowen <alanm@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.native
Date: 30 Aug 92 03:33 PDT
Subject: The Evolution of Religion
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1308200054:000:19215
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!alanm    Aug 30 03:33:00 1992


At first I thought I would reply to Gary's three pieces in my 
usual eclectic network-style, choosing a few select points to 
rebut or use as a foil, and surrounding the whole with an essay 
aimed in a hopeful direction. But after some meditation, I have 
decided to do it differently.

What follows is very speculative in places. I also draw on many 
ideas, scientific and philosophical, which are presented without 
the many caveats and qualifications they are properly adorned 
with. This is not because the caveats are to be dismissed. It is 
because the medium requires brevity; the post would be twice as 
long if everything were qualified and referenced. 

     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Why is Evolution Relevant?

The ground rules which have been emerging seem to hold that 
evolution is not a relevant topic in this group. This places me 
at a disadvantage. Evolution is the very heart of biology. In the 
past three decades, evolutionary biology, ecology, and population 
biology have merged into a single discipline, a kind of grand 
synthesis in biology. Now molecular biology seems to be joining 
the fold as well. In the July 31 issue of _Science_ there was an 
article describing an experiment in molecular evolution which 
sheds light on a possible transition from early RNA-based life to 
the DNA-based life we have today. To deny evolution is to biology 
what denying heliocentrism would be to astronomy and physics -- 
creationism is the biological equivalent of geocentrism. 

This is especially true in ecology. The living world is not a 
heap of disconnected species, but a deeply interwoven network of 
evolved relationships. Each species has a role, a niche, which is 
shaped not just by the species itself but also by all the species 
and environmental conditions it interacts with. The niches evolve 
with time, not separately, but as a network. Some properties of 
mature ecosystems (such as stability of species composition or 
"invasion resistance") seem to result from this coevolution of 
the entire web of relationships. They could not be understood 
without evolutionary thinking. 
   
Humans also evolved within this web of ecological relationships. 
Like all other species, we depend upon the functioning of that 
entire network, with its power to cycle nutrients and prevent 
them from being lost to the ecosystem. All species have the 
potential to grow exponentially if unconstrained by limits of 
food or environment. These limits to growth define the niche of
each species -- the conditions under which it can grow, or which 
it can tolerate. In a natural ecosystem, niches are limited by a 
variety of factors: availability of food, competition for food 
with other species, predation, disease in dense populations, 
climatic constraints. These limitations are a source of natural 
selection which "tunes" the species to its niche. But the niches 
evolve as a network -- the entire network is "tuned" over time in 
this way, and becomes more stable (in certain respects) as a 
result. In the process, species become more closely entwined with 
each other -- in a sense, more limited by each other, as well as 
more facilitated by each other. This is the world we grew up in.

Human ancestors lived in a world in which they were subject to 
constraints of this sort -- the same sort of limits other species 
are subject to. But as we developed culture and better 
technologies for gathering, hunting, and storing foods, we slowly 
became less limited. The inevitable consequence was that our 
numbers could increase. 
  
This was potentially very dangerous. As human numbers increase 
the environment is used more intensively. Hunted and gathered 
species are brought to lower population levels. A given number of 
humans requires a certain constant amount of food energy and thus 
has a fixed minimum impact on the environment, bringing the 
populations of utilized species down. But all populations 
fluctuate in size from year to year. From time to time, 
populations become extinct as a result of such fluctuation. The 
effect of humans depressing the numbers of other species was to 
make such local extinctions of utilized species more frequent. 
That in turn causes the environment to be less capable of 
supporting humans -- the carrying capacity of the environment for 
humans has been reduced. Human numbers would then reduce as well: 
in effect, humans have the potential to amplify natural 
fluctuations in their own numbers by depressing the numbers of 
other species, increasing the human group's longer-term chances 
of extinction. 

Hunter-gatherers adapted to this threat in many ways. They became 
extremely diversified in their use of food species. They became 
more sophisticated in their seasonal movements. But they also 
seem to have adapted in ways which both limited their populations 
and limited their impact on the environment. There was in this a 
kind of basic self-interest, but it was a self-interest which 
extended over a larger time frame, ensuring the stability of the 
food supply not just for the current generation, but for future 
generations. And it also seems to have become extended, at least 
in some ways, to other species, recognizing a need for a certain 
amount of restraint which eventually became a respect for other 
species, even as they were utilized.

Many human groups appear to have learned management techniques 
which *increased* populations of their prey species. In northern 
New England, Indians burned off the surface growth in forests 
every few years. This did not destroy mature trees, but increased 
the amount of game forage. As a result, the abundance of species 
dependent on forage was increased. This obviously improved the 
food supply for the Indians, but also improved the overall 
diversity of the ecosystem. Contemporary Yanomami Indians 
practice subsistence horticulture in ways which likewise increase 
the biological diversity of their immediate environment. They 
benefit from this, since they utilize many of the species they 
help to increase; but the ecosystem also benefits. To have such a 
power present in the forest which can counteract the effects of 
natural disturbances is an ecological asset. [Humans are not the 
only species capable of such an effect; beavers also increase 
biodiversity as a result of their engineering efforts.]   

From an evolutionary point of view, it is not hard to see how 
adaptations for limitations of birth rate and of intelligent 
utilization of the environment could develop: groups which did 
not develop them had a greater chance of degrading their 
territories and becoming extinct as a result. Moreover, the human 
knack for symbolic culture means that if one group develops such 
successful cultural traits of lower-than-possible reproductive 
rates and lower-than-possible rates of exploiting the 
environment, other groups might pick it up: ideas travel. In time 
the successful ideas -- the ideas that lead to survival -- are 
the ones that remain. The hunter-gatherer groups that liked to 
devour everything in sight and reproduce as fast as possible 
crashed, and their views did not survive. 

So in a sense indigenous hunter-gatherer societies (and many 
indigenous societies which also practice agriculture) are the end 
result of an evolutionary process which favored cultures that 
produced a kind of human equivalent to the old niche -- no longer 
enforced by predators eating us when we became too many, nor by 
starvation or disease, but enforced by culturally encoded 
forbearance. A place in the scheme of things -- a place in 
nature that works, is sustainable, and can be understood. This, I 
believe, is the original core and purpose of religion: religion 
is the symbolic cultural encoding for the human niche.     

But it is more than a static set of symbols. It is a dynamic 
regulatory mechanism, ensuring that the unified system of human 
culture group + ecosystem remains viable. Or at least, that is 
what it was in the past, and still is today in the few 
functioning indigenous cultures that remain in existence. 
Religion clearly does not serve such a function in modern 
industrial states. Nevertheless, that was its original purpose: 
to delimit and enforce a sustainable human niche.

     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Biophilia

Subjective experiences are a puzzle to evolutionary biology. They 
must have an adaptive value. Attempts to find such values are 
both speculative and controversial. Why do we love? Why do we 
like chilies? Why do we have religious experiences? An 
evolutionist is committed to the view that there must be reasons, 
at least distantly derived from the same concerns of increasing 
fitness which we share with all other species. But we don't know 
the reasons [not even for chilies.]

One subjective experience which many people in all cultures have 
is a deep love of nature. The universality of this experience   
suggests that it is not a product of culture alone. A capacity 
for such an affective bonding with nature could have had great 
survival value for early human hunter-gatherers. In any human 
group, it is crucial that the attention of the young be focused 
on learning the survival skills of the group. If the details of 
nature are rivetingly interesting -- the habits of that animal, 
where that plant grows -- the chances of learning (or 
discovering) important survival uses of species are greatly 
improved. Like all mammals, humans have a primary affective 
maternal bond, but in humans, with our neocortical elaboration of 
affect into symbology, there is a possibility for this bond to be 
extended into other adaptive zones not accessible to animals 
without our symbolic competence. It may be that we extended the 
maternal bond to the more general environment, and the mammalian 
edict to learn from the mother to a more general tendency to 
learn from the natural environment. 

Humans may have been preadapted to the development of 
*biophilia*, the love of nature, an affective bond with the 
environment conducive to learning its nature, derived from the 
maternal bond which is the root of social learning. In many 
people who feel this bond strongly, childhood experiences are 
identified as formative. Perhaps this bond, like so many others, 
is a kind of imprinting experience, a capacity which all humans 
possess as a part of our genetic endowment, but which is most 
strongly elicited by certain childhood experiences of nature, 
much as maternal bonding is facilitated by early contacts such as 
breast feeding. 

Biophilia seems to permeate many traditional cultures, and is 
never totally absent even in the most mechanized of industrial 
societies. In western literature it seems to have been present 
from the beginning. From Euripides' _Bacchai_ to T.S. Eliot's 
_Ash Wednesday_ we have felt dew on our neck with the doe leaping 
free from the hunter's snare, and heard the cry of quail and the 
whirling plover, calling to us from whatever building we sat in 
as we read those words. This is also the western heritage. But it 
is a minority heritage, a voice crying in the wilderness, the cry 
of a lone Bacchant tripped on her mountain, hearing the 
bulldozers approach. Biophilia has become the voice of the 
victim, the voice of extinction. The voice of Agamemnon-raped 
Cassandra.

     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Spirituality

If religion is what makes the human niche, the experience of the 
sacred is what harmonizes us to it. Humans seem to need meaning 
as much as we need language. The experiential capacity to receive 
fundamental meaning, not only from human teaching but also from 
nature, is a symbolic extension of biophilia which may have 
developed into shamanism. The shaman is the one who ventures out 
into the unknown aspects of the relation to nature. He or she 
eats the poisonous plant and reports back the effect. Though 
anthropological emphasis always seems to be laid on psychotropic 
plants, I can't help but wonder whether this self-experimentation 
could not also be the primary source of knowledge about more 
commonly-needed drugs for more mundane things like relieving 
menstrual cramps or fever or infection. I suspect that shaman (of 
both sexes) are, within the symbology of their culture, 
functioning very much like research biologists. The main benefit 
to the culture which produced them is probably measurable from a 
purely practical point of view, and rather high from that point 
of view.

The sacred is not opposed to practicality, but emerges from it. 
Its first purpose is to render human life meaningful and pleasant 
at the same time. But it does have a deeper purpose. That deeper 
purpose is to discover the true connections of humanity to the 
mystery of nature. This is the ultimate task of the shaman: to 
seek the truth of who we are, and why we are here, and what the 
world means. This task has not changed in its essentials from the 
shaman to the modern scientist (however much the latter might 
protest at such a comparison). 

Human cultures have developed many symbologies to provide this 
connection. The fundamental human capacity *for* a connection 
with nature, like the human capacity for language, does not 
determine the *semantic details* of the connection, any more than 
it determines the semantic details of language. The details of 
the symbology vary from Tibetan Buddhism to superstring physics. 
But the function is the same: to relate humans to the universe, 
in however derivative a fashion.

Humans have an *experiential capacity* for biophilia - the love 
of nature - and for sacred experience, the harmonization with 
nature through understanding it; and the latter capability is the 
capacity for numinous experiences. In these experiences a human, 
effectively acting as a shaman, undergoes a personal 
transformation of orientation towards the natural world. This is 
subjectively similar to what many scientists experience at 
critical stages of understanding scientific theories -- a 
numinous experience of the order of nature transforms the 
student. These events occur only occasionally in a life; a lucky 
individual has perhaps two or three. Because of the rarity of 
these events, they shape the psychology of scientists usually 
without acknowledgement. Undoubtedly similar experiences occur in 
other areas of human activity.

This capacity to experience the numinous -- the capacity for 
sacred consciousness -- is probably inherent in all humans. Like 
biophilia it has an obvious adaptive value. The ability *to 
receive* the unknown and potentially alien order of nature into 
oneself, into one's own mind, is the primary sacral capacity. The 
symbology of the culture will shape the experience: it may be the 
Divine Will, the harmony of nature, the mathematical thought of 
God, the voice of spirits, the Love that moves the earth and the 
other stars. It can be seen in the motion of a flagellum or of a 
filament of galaxies; in the power of an ecosystem to recover 
from damage or a human mind to model an alternative reality. 
Its adaptive value is that it opens up a whole new level of 
learning, a whole new realm of cultural adaptation. It makes 
symbology more general than than the fitness of one individual: 
it makes it symbolize the Whole. And it makes one see one's place 
in the Whole, the symbolic equivalent of the old biological 
niche.

At least it *can* do that. But that is not what it does today.

     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *
Finale
    
It seems that we found a technical fix for limited numbers of 
humans: settle down, farm the land, have babies every year 
instead of every four years or so, and when the land grows weak, 
conquer your neighbor with your superior numbers and 
superior military technology. That eventually leads to here, to 
the destruction of the ecosystems and indigenous cultures of 
North America, and to watching the same thing happening in South 
America now, at this moment. And our mythology is already 
preparing us for the next conquest, space, which as we know 
trivializes all concerns about the Earth, and what is happening 
today. Have faith in Progress, and all will be well. [Well, not 
for the Yanomami, but they will Develop, and then it won't 
matter.]

I wish that were a joke, but it is not. I've spent much of the 
past year arguing against technocrats in sci.environment who are 
just dying for a chance to begin the next phase of Human Conquest 
-- and who don't give a tinker's damn what else has to die to 
achieve it. Those people are not myths, they are real, and 
ordinary and common. You can find them standing in front of the 
sci-fi section of your favorite bookstore. I'm sorry if that 
sounds  extreme -- but it is what I see.  The mythos of  Progress 
has a sacred literature,  and it is Science Fiction. And its True 
Believers  can't wait to finish the business of replacing  nature 
with artifacts.

As for NatChat and alt.native -- what is its purpose? Insofar as 
it serves native Americans to organize over affairs of their own, 
it is up to them to decide. But Internet, the spine of all this 
talk, is ultimately a public thing, funded by the US govt from 
all our taxes. Everyone has a right to make his or her peculiar 
noise. It seems that many non-Indians are here for spiritual 
guidance. It also seems that they have found what they think is 
spiritual guidance.

I wonder what would happen if Pat Buchanan posted in here? 
Probably he would get short shrift if he posted under his own 
name, no matter how much spiritual guidance he offered. But what 
would happen if he posted under an Indian name?

Then it seems he would receive the kind of exegesis one would 
give to the words of Plato: no matter what he said, it would be 
cleansed and purged of all associations with western movements  
by the moderators, and reposed as Great Spiritual Truth. No 
matter what: anti-choice, creationism, the most illiberal 
hatred of any notions of a common good ("how awful Statism is"), 
and simple racism would all be excused in order to continue 
receiving the Great Spiritual Message, as if Black Elk stood among 
us, mouthing Reaganomics.

No, this is not the word of Black Elk, nor does any White Buffalo 
Woman shimmer on the horizon, holding the Pipe we can pray with 
for everything that lives. You whites have been cheated, and 
the words do not come from the Great Spirit. They come probably 
from Russell Means and the Libertarian Party, and they serve the 
interests of the wealthy, who are smart enough to know how to 
take advantage of a desire for revenge. 

For people who suffer the brunt of white government, I ask you to 
think about this: the desire for revenge is as justified as any 
such desire can be; but it is a thing which will be exploited by 
those who can profit from it. Do not allow anyone, white or red, 
to use your pain for their benefit, at your expense. Think 
through your *real* interests, with as much information as you 
can get, and act only on those. You will not go wrong if you do 
this.

-----------
Alan McGowen