Sorry, Charlie — Charlie Darwin, that is.
We’ve taken your theories and stretched them to fit our own needs. We’ve extended your ideas to suit new notions. We’ve employed your elegant speculations as explanations for myriad problems in the modern world, such as relations between the sexes and clinical depression, and we did it all without getting your OK.
The latest appropriation of your famous moniker to justify the unlikely things that humans do, say and believe — and not simply the absence of gills in our high school graduation photos — is the recently published book “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society” (University of Chicago Press) by David Sloan Wilson. In it, the evolutionary biologist argues that your theories can help explain why people go to church.
But Wilson, who teaches at New York’s Binghamton University, doesn’t think you’d mind his attempt to “broaden evolution to include cultural evolution,” as he puts it.
“I hope he [Darwin] would approve,” said the soft-spoken but firm and purposeful Wilson on a recent visit to Chicago. “This book is a fulfillment of what he was seeing. The real mystery is why it took us so long.”
Wilson’s book argues that religions, like big brains and opposable thumbs, are products of natural selection in humans. His thesis is radical not only because it swipes Darwin’s ideas about physical characteristics and uses them to serve cultural ends, but also because its topic — religion — often is posited as the opposite of anything Darwinian.
To some religious people, then, Wilson’s book may seem like the literary equivalent of asking Dracula to apply a tourniquet to a severed artery. Can the enemy really be trusted to do the right thing?
Wilson deals with religion “not as a theological explanation of purpose and order,” he writes, “but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units — at least to a degree.”
Here’s how the idea works: Organisms, Wilson reminds us, are the results of natural selection, the culmination of many generations of changes that produce optimal conditions for survival and reproduction.
“What’s happened that is so exciting,” Wilson said, “is the discovery that individual groups are themselves organisms. People used to think that evolution just took place by mutational change. Individuals would become just a little bit different and evolution would happen that way. The new discovery is that a second pathway is for social groups to become so integrated that they become a new, higher level of organism.
Looking at traits
“Do traits evolve that enable a whole group to do well, relative to other groups? When you look at religion that way, it’s astonishing how well it fits.”
In other words, people are religious because being religious — being part of a group of like-minded people — is advantageous to their survival. Yes, they may believe the spiritual tenets of a religion; but tenets or no, being a member of the religious group works. It increases the individual’s chances to prosper. “Religions are designed to establish community, to make human groups into functional units,” Wilson said. “All of the elements that look crazy to non-believers actually turn out to be playing a role in the physiology of the group.”
Before his ideas could get a fair hearing, Wilson said, scientists had to get past a restrictive notion of individualism and the “selfish gene” theories (the phrase was coined by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins) that had dominated the field since the 1960s.
“It got to the place in the social sciences where self-interest was the grand principle to explain all behavior,” Wilson said. “Evolution became very individualistic and group selection was rejected.”
Lately, however, group selection has returned to intellectual legitimacy: “All of the sudden, from being a heresy, the idea of a group as an organism is acceptable again,” said Wilson, whose father, the novelist Sloan Wilson, had views of his own on groups, expressed in his 1950s best-seller “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” an indictment of the conformity of corporate America.
Not on the bandwagon
Not everyone, however, is ready to Darwinize the world, to apply Darwin’s theories — no matter how well they seem to fit — to human culture.
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, said that social and cultural theorists must be cautious about grafting Darwin’s ideas onto their own fields.
“Yes, Darwin was concerned with the evolution of human behavior — but Darwin was always wedded to evidence,” Coyne said from Bellagio, Italy, where he was researching a book. He has not read “Darwin’s Cathedral,” he said, but was familiar with Wilson’s work.
Coyne said misuses of Darwinism come in two forms: metaphorical, in which people toss around terms such as “survival of the fittest” in ways not intended by Darwin; and sociobiological, in which social behavior is explained by referencing Darwinian terms.
Trouble is, Coyne pointed out, “There’s not a single human behavior you can’t make an evolutionary argument for.” If somebody does something, you can make the case that the “reason” is evolution — and who can refute it? One can even imagine adolescents trying to finagle their way out of parental punishment by claiming that breaking curfew is the result of a genetic predisposition to party.
“It’s given everybody license to use Darwin to explain everything,” Coyne said. “It’s so widespread, I can’t think of a single area that’s untouched. It becomes a parlor game instead of a science. You need evidence.” Sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson (no relation to David Sloan Wilson) have made careers out of explaining human behavior in Darwinian terms; some even see such problematic acts as rape and chronic infidelity as genetically induced, thus letting the perpetrators off the hook. Yet “there’s no fossil record of human behavior,” Coyne said. “All you have are plausibility arguments.”
Where’s the proof?
The problem with David Sloan Wilson’s thesis that religious groups evolve the way organisms do, he added, is that old bugaboo: proof. “You have to develop evidence that the tendency to be religious has a genetic basis and not just a cultural basis. It might be right — but it’s not science unless you can find evidence.”
Wilson, though, argues for a different definition of evidence: “An expanded view of evolution,” he writes, “allow us to interpret recorded history as a fossil record of cultural evolution in action.”
Wilson, like Darwin, is not an especially religious person, he said. “I could’ve written a book about political or military or even intellectual communities. What starts it all off is the organism. We need a general theory of groups, of which religion is just one kind.”
Oddly, Coyne pointed out, the impulse to Darwinize everything is similar to the impulse by creationists to reject Darwinism outright. “It’s trying to make sense of the way things are, of giving an ultimate answer to problems at hand.” Which might make people feel better — but shouldn’t be confused, he said, with the rigor of real science.
