Why we believe, p.1
Why We Believe, page 1
FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS IN SCIENCE
At its deepest level, science becomes nearly indistinguishable from philosophy. The most fundamental scientific questions address the ultimate nature of the world. Foundational Questions in Science, jointly published by Templeton Press and Yale University Press, invites prominent scientists to ask these questions, describe our current best approaches to the answers, and tell us where such answers may lead: the new realities they point to and the further questions they compel us to ask. Intended for interested lay readers, students, and young scientists, these short volumes show how science approaches the mysteries of the world around us and offer readers a chance to explore the implications at the profoundest and most exciting levels.
Why We Believe
Evolution and the Human Way of Being
Agustín Fuentes
Copyright © 2019 by Agustín Fuentes
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To Humanity,
we who are neither accident nor miracle
Contents
Preface: Why We Believe
PART 1: Who Are We and How Did We Come to Believe?
1.Belief, Evolution, and Our Place in the World
2.What Makes Us Human?
3.Constructing the Human Niche
4.Animals, Plants, Buildings, and Pottery
PART 2: How Do We Believe?
5.What Is Culture?
6.How Culture Works
PART 3: Religion, Economies, Love, and Our Future
7.Why We Believe versus What We Believe
8.Religion
9.Economies
10.Love
11.Does Belief Matter?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
BELIEF is the most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity that humanity has evolved.
Belief is the ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now and develop mental representations in order to see and feel and know something— an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth—that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that “something” so that it becomes one’s reality.
Beliefs and belief systems permeate human neurobiologies, bodies, and ecologies, acting as dynamic agents in evolutionary processes. The human capacity for belief, the specifics of belief, and our diverse belief systems structure and shape our daily lives, our societies, and the world around us. We are human, therefore we believe.
SHERRINGTON’S CHALLENGE
Eighty years ago, when giving his famous Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the Nobel Prize–winning neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington mused1 that the development of the human, in body and mind, was neither “accident nor miracle,” that “organisms must be the sum of their parts and more,” and that the mind “makes an effective contribution to life.” What continued to elude the science of his time, he went on, was an explanation for how all of that could be true. While a complete and final answer to “the human” still eludes us (and maybe always will), we are far better able than Sherrington was in 1937 to offer insights about how humans evolved and how we develop in body and in mind.
In this book I take up Sherrington’s challenge and update his questions:
▶How do we understand humanity as neither the result of random processes nor the product of divine intervention?
▶How can we be made up entirely of biological parts and organic processes and still dream, hope, and believe?
▶How can our minds and our beliefs shape ourselves, other life around us, and even the planet itself?
If we can answer these questions, not just of human development, but of human becoming, of human believing, then we can step closer to the goals Sherrington sought.
Today we have a much better scientific understanding of the processes of human development and evolution than Sherrington did. Developmental biology, genomics, and evolutionary science have made enormous leaps in the past century and especially in the past few decades. The same is true for the study of the human past. Paleoanthropology, archaeology, anthropology, and neurobiology have given us a radically new landscape of understanding, of knowing, and of forecasting about ourselves, other life, and the whole planet.
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century we’ve redefined the very foundations of our evolutionary history, how our biology functions, and what it means to ask how we become who we are. Humans are neither accident nor miracle, and the explanation of who and why we are is an amazingly complex, dynamic, enticing, and unfinished story. It is a story in which belief is central, as both an outcome and a cause.
My own background is as an anthropologist, meaning I am trained in the biological and behavioral study of humans and our closest relatives. I have spent the past thirty years in deep engagement with the bodies, actions, and ecologies of humans past and present, of primates across the globe, and as an active participant in the debates about, and modeling of, evolutionary processes. I have long been enmeshed in enriching, enlightening, and maddening collaborations with a diverse array of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and other scholars. It is this type of transdisciplinary engagement, the cross-fertilization of ideas, methods, and theoretical grounds that I bring to bear on the data from human bodies and behavior past and present.
As an evolutionary scientist I try to uncover the specific origins, functions, and processes that undergird our capacity for belief. As a social scientist I seek to understand these findings in the context of the human experience: our social structures, belief systems, and daily lives. My goal in pursuing both of these pathways is to develop a better understanding of what it means to be human—past, present, and future.
In this book I share with you a story of our evolution rooted in the scientific endeavor, in the facts of our bodies, genes, ecologies, histories, and behaviors, but one that tries not to lose sight of the equally relevant philosophical narratives that run alongside and through the science. Unlike most evolutionary narratives, the one I present ties the explanation of humanity to our distinctive capacity for belief.
A LITTLE CLARIFICATION OF TERMINOLOGY AND CONTENT
In this book I use the term “belief” to mean more than its basic definition of “trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.”2 Belief is also a richer concept than the slightly antagonistic Wikipedia definition: “the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.”3 It is not about being fooled.
The literary theorist Terry Eagleton, drawing on the philosopher Kierkegaard, tells us that the act of Believing is an act of being wholly and completely in love with a concept, an experience, a knowledge.4 But believing is also an avenue to imagining and becoming, in ways that need not be rooted in the daily material reality but that can be infused with hope. Believing can be fearing an unknown but wholly felt entity or perception, or it can be a certainty of something that cannot be seen, grasped, or measured. Believing is completely real but often without material substance. And most critically, undergirding and infusing belief is the human capacity to imagine, to be creative, to hope and dream, and to infuse the world with meaning.
Belief, for better and worse, is a deeply and distinctly human process.
When hearing the word “belief,” most assume it refers to some form of religion. Let me be absolutely clear: the human capacity for belief is not only about religion, spirituality, ritual, or some notion of the supernatural. It is not only our ability to have faith in something or someone, or our capacity for self-deception (even though these are important parts of the human experience). Throughout this book, I separate the having of faith—the specific content of belief—from the capacity to have faith, which arises from our core ability to believe. This is a critical distinction, especially when it comes to the belief systems that most would call “religion.”
That said, religious belief is a major element in the human story and directly related to our capacity to believe, and thus one of the arenas on which we focus here. Yet I do not seek to explain or provide evidence for the emergence of any given set of faith practices. This is not something a scientist can honestly or effectively do, and anyway it is not what this book is about. I touch on specific beliefs, but only in passing, because the particulars of any given faith are best elab
FOUR KEY QUESTIONS
Humans can see the world around them, imagine how it might be different, and translate those imaginings into reality . . . or at least try to. Meaning, imagination, and hope, which constitute our capacity for belief, are as central to the human story as bones, genes, and ecologies. As a species, we are distinguished by our extraordinary capacity for creative cooperation, our ability to dream big and make those dreams materialize, and our powerful aptitudes for compassion and cruelty—all of which are constructive of, and mediated by, our capacity for and practices of belief.
I propose that we can best understand why we believe by answering four key questions:
1.How do humans relate to the rest of the work biologically and ecologically?
2.What key evolutionary events and processes make us human?
3.How did the changes we made in the world enable the infrastructure for contemporary belief?
4.How do we believe? (What are the processes by which we believe?)
Adding these four together, we can offer an evolutionary answer to the question “Why do we believe?” As you will see, the answer allows us to examine specific categories of belief such as religion, economies, and love, and leads us to a final consideration: today in the twenty-first century, does belief still matter?
PART 1
Who Are We and How Did We Come to Believe?
CHAPTER 1
Belief, Evolution, and Our Place in the World
HERE ARE THREE facts about who we are biologically:
1.Humans represent an infinitesimally small percentage of all the life on this planet.
2.Humans are deeply and substantially linked to all other life.
3.Despite being a tiny part of the great diversity of living things, humans are among the most significant forces affecting all other life.
How we became so significant is one of the most important questions facing humanity. Our capacity for belief is a major part of the answer.
First, a little context.
Scientists have catalogued more than 2 million species of life, and they estimate that this is only about 25 percent of the species out there (most iving things are really quite small). While life is amazingly diverse, not all lineages are equally represented in the panoply of organisms. For example, the 400,000 or so species of beetles represent close to 20 percent of all named species. When the renowned evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude about the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, he is said to have answered, “He had an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
The theological significance of beetles notwithstanding, we can unequivocally state that we humans are not very prominent in the overall picture of the diversity of life—at least on the face of things. Among the lineages of all living organisms, we don’t really stand out. We are one of many, many lines of backboned organisms (a group called “chordata”), lumped in with monkeys, dogs, platypuses, iguanas, salmon, and chickens. Nevertheless, despite our anonymity in the panoply of life, we can learn from our lineage quite a bit about who we are, and how our ancestry lays a baseline for our capacity to believe.
The first time I looked at a cell through a microscope I was amazed. I remember thinking, This is what we are made of. Each of these contains the secret of who we are. Buried deep in the nucleus is the DNA, the blueprint for life. But my thought was far too simplistic. Like most people, I had a fantastical view of DNA, thinking it contains the code for who we are, or the instructions for making an organism. The truth is it has neither of these things. DNA is part of an amazing, intricate system of interrelated proteins, enzymes, and other molecules and chemical relationships that interact to enable core aspects of the development of organisms and their patterns of life.1 DNA cannot do anything alone, and it does not contain either the secret of life or a blueprint. It does offer us a great deal of information about life and its relationships.
As one of the oldest shared elements of most life on earth, DNA acts as a partial record of our ancestries and our ties to one another. It contains patterns that are passed from generation to generation, recording in their alterations and preservations the histories of fusions and fissions that have characterized life from its first humble appearances as much as 4 billion years ago. By comparing different organisms’ DNA sequences, we can reconstruct minute details of their lineages on the great map of life. In short, the structure of DNA and the way this structure is passed from generation to generation enable us to use it, alongside the fossil record, to create a map of the relationships and histories of all living things.
Figure 1. The grand panoply of life, in which humans are but a teeny twig. Source: C. E. Hinchliff, S. A. Smith, J. F. Allman, et al. 2015. “Synthesis of Phylogeny and Taxonomy into a Comprehensive Tree of Life.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 41 (2015): 12764–69.
Looking at humans as part of the cluster of backboned animals, we see that we share something like 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, slightly less with monkeys, around 80 percent with dogs, and about 60 percent with chickens. It turns out that the first part of the answer to who we are is that, biologically, humans are squarely in the midst of the order of mammals we call “primates.” Even a superficial look at all the primates (including us) reveals the family resemblance. What then does being a primate have to do with the capacity for belief?
HUMANS AS PRIMATES
If you stand in the middle of a large group of macaque monkeys early in the morning, the first thing you notice is the activity: feeding, grooming, playing, fighting, resting against one another, exploring, watching each other. To your left you might see a “matrifocal cluster”: an older female, her sister, her daughter, her daughter’s daughter, and their one- and two-year-old offspring playing around them, leaning into them, grabbing bits of food from their hands. The three generations of adult females groom one another, running their hands though each other’s fur, calmly sharing the physical space and creating a social bridge across generations. A few meters away, an old male watches the cluster groom and keeps his eye on two young adult males who have newly begun to challenge him in their quest for social position. He sighs, rises, and saunters over to the females, lying down in front of them to signal an invitation. The oldest turns away from her daughter and begins to groom the old male. This activity, the primate way of being in the world, is social through and through. The deep roots of primate sociality are a key source of the human capacity to believe.
As animal behaviors go, primate sociality is particularly complex2 and different from other forms of gregariousness. Several bird species flock together. Wildebeest congregate in herds that travel hundreds of miles. Fish of all sorts school, swimming and feeding as if they were a single composite organism. But primate groups, distinctively, feature collections of individuals with a range of personalities, competing interests and shared histories of cooperation, conflict, trust, and manipulation. To be social as a primate requires a particular intensity of dynamic relationships. The infrastructure of primate sociality sets the stage for the cognitive and social resources necessary for belief capacities to emerge.
Some species of mammals and a few birds have independently evolved complex social lives similar to the primates. We see these patterns in whales and dolphins, in wolves and dogs, and also in the viverids (especially the meerkats) and their cousins the hyenas.3 But in primates, especially in monkeys and apes, sociality is more than the sum of its parts. The combination of a very extended and intense mother-infant bond, long life spans, substantial cognitive capacities, and the emergence of strong and diverse personalities with an anatomy that includes agile grasping hands, an upper body that frees the arms and hands when sitting down, color vision, and a lack of highly specialized morphology for combat (such as claws or spikes) facilitates the emergence of primate sociality. The primates’ assemblage of physical traits and cognitive and social capacities gives rise to certain possibilities for seeing the world, for complex behavior, for an intense inquisitiveness, and an ability to manipulate objects and other group members in fascinating ways. The world would undoubtedly be very different if orcas (killer whales)4 had thumbs and legs for terrestrial movement. But they don’t. We do.
