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Chapter 1
Introduction
If you’re reading this you are very probably human, a member of one of the most successful species on the planet earth. Our ancestors evolved gradually over millions of years, much as all other living creatures evolved. In the case of Homo sapiens, however, something extraordinary happened to change this rate of evolution into the explosive rates we see today. Something unique happened to our species and to our species alone. It was as if our genes became supercharged in some remarkable way to let us evolve much more rapidly than had been possible in the past.
Evolution and behaviour are inextricably linked. Human behaviour has fascinated people for thousands of years. Ancient Greek plays show it was as much of an enigma 2500 years ago as it is today. Vast numbers of research papers and books have been published on the subject and yet we still do not have a compelling model of what it is that motivates us and makes us behave the way we do. Surely something that affects every one of the people on the planet can be explained, if only in the most general terms, in a way that you and I can feel resonance with, that helps us understand better how our human society works?
I am an active research astrophysicist in the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge, England. Cambridge is an astonishing place to be an academic – a wonderful, stimulating environment where one can find a world expert on almost any subject within 10 minutes by fast bicycle. As a scientist I know how well the scientific method works. When we do not understand something, we gather together as much of what is known about it as we can find from as broad a range of sources as possible. Then look critically at each piece of work in turn, decide what it really tells you rather than what the authors would like you to believe it tells you. Finally, assemble the pieces of the jigsaw in a way that is as consistent with the data as possible, trying to keep your own prejudices well to one side so that your new synthesis is as un-biased as possible. Very straightforward! So, as a scientist working in Cambridge, I felt that it must be possible to make some progress even with something as complicated a subject as human behaviour and evolution. The worry is that every researcher has an intimate personal experience of the behaviour of friends and colleagues and acquaintances. We scientists like to think that by taking an outsider’s view of a subject, we might discern patterns of human behaviour that others working much closer to the coalface are unable to see. I have been fascinated by the subject for many years and realised that if I did not try to write down what I discovered on this exciting quest then perhaps no one else would for some time.
The purpose of this book is to explore how our species has changed over the last hundred thousand years and how these changes affect our lives today. What I found is that it is the intimate connection between behaviour and evolution that is at the core of what has happened, and that this is important for explaining our progress. Our behaviour is now the engine driving our evolution as a species. Behaviour is something that is widely studied and yet it is surprising how little progress has been made towards a compelling model of what is our motivation, what it is that makes us move forward in our lives. My approach is to ask simple questions about everyday behaviour – the little decisions which are of very little consequence – rather than to worry about life changing decisions made, for example, by stone-age hunters in pursuit of food. I believe we can gain a great deal of insight by trying to understand how this micro-behaviour affects how successful we became both individually and as a species and how our evolution is now a consequence of the success or otherwise of our behavioural strategies in life. Sometimes it is these quite elementary questions that raise important issues about the way we lead our lives.
For example, let us start with what seems to be a very simple question: why are you reading this book? I am not asking how you came by it, whether you bought it because of the extraordinary reviews it has received, whether it was given to you by a favourite aunt who imagines you enjoy reading “this sort of stuff” or whether you found it remaindered on a second-hand bookstall. We know you have it in front of you, but why are you continuing to read? What is it that you expect to get out of reading it? Even if it is just to while away the time, there are thousands of other books you could have chosen, many of which would be an easier read. Reading this book will not make you healthier or slimmer, nor will it make you any more attractive to the opposite sex. But for you to continue with it you must expect in some possibly subconscious way that this book will add to what you are. You must hope it is going to make you a better person in some subtle way. The purpose of this book is to try to understand what it is that our human behaviour is trying to achieve. Understanding how humans behave might explain how we have developed and evolved in the recent past so rapidly and so astonishingly successfully. By understanding what has happened to our species we can develop a model of what it is that drives us forward.
In many ways it is surprising that we really know so little about what it is that motivates us and drives us forward from day-to-day. The population on earth is approximately 6.6 billion people (mid-2007) and increasing at the rate of approximately 2.5 people per second or 75 million people per year. Each of us is equipped with an remarkably powerful brain. We have a great deal of knowledge and understanding of how we developed over millions of years and our relationship with other animal species on the planet. Our human society has evolved greatly in the very recent past so that now we live and work in an extremely complicated society with rules and behaviour patterns that help us work together. The progress we have made has been so rapid and substantial that the engine behind that progress must be very directed. Why have we not been able to work out why we are evolving so rapidly already? I believe there are many reasons for this including the way that we see the world and interpret what is happening around us. There is so much to know that we are losing the capacity to take a broad overview of large areas of human knowledge so we are less able to recognise the connections between apparently quite separate disciplines. In many ways we are being overwhelmed by the deluge of information. The British Library receives around 3 million new items every year requiring about 12 kilometres of additional shelf space, and they receive only a fraction of what is actually published worldwide. In addition there is the Internet. Google currently is believed to index over 40 billion web pages with its search engine. To try to accommodate all this information in any meaningful way is completely unthinkable yet we must find some way to make progress. Something as fundamental as the way that we behave and evolve has to be explained. The answer may well be something that is instinctively understood by all of us. The Lord Buddha said: “Each of us is a God. Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom”. If only it were as simple as that.
Our Insulation from Reality
Humankind is brilliantly defended against reality. Even in the most primitive societies, each of us is assaulted continually by an exceedingly complex world of sounds, smells, sensations and images. Together they constitute an extraordinary amount of information which must be processed and abstracted into a form that our brains can handle. To get some idea of the magnitude of the problem consider that a single good-quality digital photograph might be five megabytes in size. Our eyes and our brains are capable of processing high-quality colour images every second without any apparent effort despite the fact that five megabytes is equivalent to the amount of information contained in the entire Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Imagine coping with the information contained in a substantial dictionary every second we are awake. We are protected from that amount of information by the neural processing networks behind the retina of our eyes, in the neural pathways between the eye and brain and by a significant fraction of the processing power in our own brain. We can demonstrate this quite easily. If you look at a single letter on this page and try to see how many other letters around it you can make out while still staring at that first letter then you will discover that the field of view you actually have is incredibly small. High-resolution information from outside this field of view is being recorded by your eye but is being processed so that you have the comfort of thinking you have a high-resolution, wide field imaging capability while the information actually passed to your brain is much more limited. If you take a picture of the retina of your eye you will see it crossed by a large number of blood vessels which supply the energy to keep your vision system working properly. When you look at this page you do not see any evidence of these blood vessels which do actually block part of your field of view. Your brain has processed them out so that you are not confused by them. In a similar way we have a perception of wide-angle full colour vision. However, if you imagine trying to compare two colours towards the periphery of your field of view then you will quickly appreciate that the quality of colour sensitivity out there is very poor in comparison with the quality you have at the centre of the field of view. Your brain keeps you happy with what you see and does not worry you about subtle things such as colour vision fidelity at the edge of your field of view. However if something moves in that peripheral field even very slightly then your eye and the attached processing system picks it up with extraordinary sensitivity. This demonstrates that you do in fact have high-resolution vision in your periphery but that it is normally blocked by your neural pre-processing systems. This sensitivity to peripheral motion is critical for your survival because that almost imperceptible movement could be a tiger creeping up on you to attack you or steal your food. This is why it is vitally important that you know about anything that is happening out of the ordinary at the very edge of your field of view, no matter how slight. However, it would be quite impractical for you to be made continually conscious of everything happening around you because you would have no brain power left to get on with life. You would be permanently distracted. Your eye/brain neural system takes care of all this for you by only passing to your consciousness information that you really need to be aware of.
We see therefore that what we are being presented with all the time is not reality but an abstraction of reality heavily filtered by a complex image processing system designed to protect you from the complexity of the world you live in. This works in other important ways. When we are searching for something we search for an abstracted pattern of the reality of what we want to find, whether it is a bunch of keys, one’s spectacles or a person in a crowd. If you imagine searching for a friend in a crowd it is simply not practical to look at each and every face to see whether that is your friend. What you do is search for an abstracted, categorised version of your friend. Basic parameters such as male/female, hair colour, height, weight, age, etc., allow you to reduce the number of potential pattern matches by a large factor. You may also know approximately what your friend is wearing and again your search pattern will be refined in order to reduce the number of possible matches to a level that starts to be tractable. Now you only need to look carefully at individuals who are a fairly good match to your friend and quickly pass over any others in the crowd. This can sometimes cause problems. I sometimes find while waiting for my wife that I completely fail to see her walking directly towards me because I had in mind that she was wearing quite different clothes from what she is actually wearing. Looking for someone in a pink blouse and dark trousers almost eliminates the possibility of recognising the same person wearing a long coat. She can walk right up to me before I realise she is there.
Every time we receive any information from the world around us it is being processed and abstracted and categorised in terms that reflect our experience of the world. There can be no such thing as taking an objective view of anything because we do not actually have any reliable access to reality. When we experience something it is interpreted in terms of patterns that we have already experienced. We may be more or less open to new ideas and new experiences and so our brains may be more or less amenable to developing new interpretations of what we see and hear. It is inevitable, however, that each of us is inclined to detect patterns in the world around us with which we are already familiar. A biologist will see many things in biological terms and will be more likely to interpret complex phenomena using biological analogues with which he or she is familiar. A psychologist having the same experiences is much more likely to interpret those in terms of his or her knowledge of the workings of the mind and of society. A historian or an artist will again have a different take on those experiences and interpret them and understand them in yet another way. In addition to our academic background each of us has what amounts to a political philosophy of life that will colour our views of everything that we experience. There are many instances where the conclusions of scientists about things as ill-defined as the subtleties of human behaviour have been distorted by their political backgrounds and their belief systems. When we have very straightforward experiences then most will give a very similar account of the event. More complex events, however, will be reported differently. When we question people who have witnessed the same event, for example at a crime scene, accounts of what occurred are often wildly discrepant. The more complex and difficult it is to understand a subject, the less likely people will agree on interpretations. This is, I think, the essential difficulty we have in developing an understanding of what underlies human behaviour and evolution. This is a terribly complex subject with which each and every one of us has been engaged from the moment our heart beat for the first time. It is a subject with which will continue to engage us until that last heart beat.
The increasing complexity of our world and the increasing data input rate we handle means we are more and more required to reduce, simplify, abstract and categorise all the information coming to us. We do not want a detailed report on a meeting or a review of a film that runs to many pages. What we look for is something short and punchy, something that covers the salient points and goes directly to the conclusions. We are forced to accept the summaries of others increasingly because we simply have not got the mental capacity or the time to go through the full report and to consider whether the conclusions drawn by the author are the ones that we ourselves would have drawn from that meeting report or film review. Our desire for the one line summary, the soundbite or the appealing slogan makes it increasingly easy for information to be distorted and our reactions to it manipulated. This makes us even less likely to be able to take an objective view of something. Take it on trust and move on. It is important to appreciate that this is something that has become much more of an issue in recent years. It is one of the most critical downsides of the information explosion information overload can be very hard to deal with.
There is a further aspect of the way we filter reality that is also important. Static visual clues at the periphery of vision are suppressed. Only if something moves is our consciousness alerted because that is a potential source of danger. This strategy of only responding to changes and differences affects a much wider range of human behaviour than you might imagine. We have an extraordinary capacity to get used to the way things are. We can accommodate chronic pain and much discomfort so that only changes in what we feel are registered. Socially we strive for a change in our present condition rather than the achievement of some more absolute material goal. The descriptions in Rohinton Mistry’s book, A Fine Balance, of life in an unnamed city in India during the State of Internal Emergency of 1975 are extraordinarily moving. Self-improvement in those slums is a change from the most abject poverty to slightly less abject poverty, and within that environment people have the capacity for optimism and a degree of contentment. Partha Dasgupta in An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (1993) describes many aspects of this in his studies of the economics of poverty and its alleviation. The downside is, perhaps, the way that so many people are still dissatisfied, and probably always will be, with their lot in the West, even though by any absolute standard they are healthier and wealthier than they have ever been before. Whatever we have, we get used to and want more. It is only change, often change for change’s sake, that matters to us and indeed that urge may be one of the reasons why, as a species, we are still driven in so many ways. We can get used to anything, and stop appreciating what we have. If we have been doing something long enough it ceases to feel wrong or inappropriate or illegal, whether it is stealing pencils from work, driving a large and polluting vehicle, or working as a hangman.
Perhaps before continuing I should tell you a little about myself, and why these subjects interest me. I was trained as a physicist at Edinburgh University and then studied for a PhD in the Radio Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University, supervised by Professor Sir Martin Ryle, FRS, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974. As an astronomer working with radio sources I became interested in their optical counterparts and found that the instrumentation used by optical astronomers to take pictures and measure the colours of distant galaxies was rather mediaeval. I started developing new kinds of detector systems which are now used widely around the world for this work. In 1985 I was involved in setting up a company (AstroCam Ltd) to manufacture and sell similar cameras for a range of scientific research applications. These cameras have extraordinary sensitivity and give remarkable image quality, dramatically better than anything previously available. Through the company I found myself working with research scientists from a wide range of backgrounds and I found I had to learn something of many different research areas. Our cameras found their way into many different applications. We developed automated DNA sequencers so I learned about the structure and function of DNA. We developed protein electrophoresis systems so I learned about many aspects of protein expression and chemistry. Electron microscopes were used to examine the structure of rocks and fossils, and optical microscopes looked at the structure of cells and organisms in many different ways. Looking at stars and distant galaxies with a telescope may seem the very opposite of looking down a microscope at the smallest living structures yet, surprisingly, in many ways they are similar. I suppose all I was really doing much of the time was looking down the wrong end of the telescope. In each of these areas I was impressed by the extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding the research workers had but I was also surprised by how restricted their thinking was to their own field.. They were also often worryingly ignorant of what was going on in other branches of science, even ones relatively close to their own discipline. I also found that although they had plausible ideas as to how their work fitted into a larger picture, the larger pictures were often quite inconsistent and incompatible between fields. I also had the chance to observe many of these people in different social contexts, presenting their results and negotiating at meetings for funding or other resources. I became fascinated by what motivated them and what common ground there might be in the different areas that might lead to a better understanding of human behaviour. You might also ask what sort of biases I bring with me and what are the patterns with which I am familiar and which I might then impose subconsciously on what I have learned about human behaviour and evolution. One of the reasons I hope that this book might be relatively unbiased is that it is difficult to imagine that any of the knowledge I have about the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies has much to do with the evolution of humans. A detailed knowledge of imaging detector electronics and software should not, I hope, constrain my imagination too greatly nor impose on this book on human behaviour too predictable a pattern. But you can never be too sure about these things. I, like everyone else, have a wide range of inbuilt prejudices and you, dear reader, must remain always on your guard. Thomas Jefferson, the US President, in a letter dated 20 September 1787, said: “The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favour that theory”. I hope not to fall into that trap.
If we are to understand more about our motivation as a species we need to be prepared to look much more carefully at the scientific evidence that we have of our origins, of what is known about the way we have evolved since geological times. We need to understand what is known about our biology that allows us to function as physical beings on this planet and what we know about the ways that we develop as individuals and function within our society. We need to be very clear about what we do know and what we have been led to believe, possibly mistakenly, as a consequence of the oversimplifications that are an inevitable part of life in the 21 st century. It is a big task but it is not insuperable as long as we do not let ourselves get too bogged down in unnecessary detail. However, we do need to question at every stage whether our interpretation is one that would be agreed widely or whether that interpretation could be coloured and therefore biased by our own experiences. There is bias in everything but we can work with it provided we appreciate when those biases exist.
It is also important to be clear about what expectations we might reasonably have when trying to improve our understanding of human evolution and behaviour. We know this is a terribly complicated topic and therefore we should not expect to come up with a theory that can be expressed in a few lines, and subjected to a couple of straightforward experiments to confirm or refute the theory. For every piece of evidence that supports the theory there may well be others that go against it. At present some aspects of evolutionary theory are widely accepted because of the extensive body of scientific evidence that confirms them. Others are much less well founded, sometimes being little more than groupings of plausible stories woven around one another to make what looks like a coherent scientific whole but is, however, built on sand. We will never really know how we got to where we are because there simply is no rewind and replay button for human evolution. Even going back a few thousand years many critical pieces of evidence are simply absent. Scientists infer what might have happened and what might not but the evidence can sometimes be remarkably scant. Patchy and inadequate evidence often becomes a useful breeding ground for a fanciful stories which are attractive but remain fantasies.
I should also make it clear from the outset where I think religion comes into this. Joseph Campbell in The Way of the Myth (1994) said: “What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination?” Many people believe that there is a god that created heaven and earth and all that there is. Such beliefs may make many people feel more comfortable about their place in the universe, and they will find that much of what they see around them affirms that faith. There are many who believe, for a variety of reasons, that evolutionary theory and in particular Darwinian evolution is a myth. Their reasons are many and varied. Those reasons all derive from an unprovable act of faith, and as a consequence those reasons cannot diminish the strength of the evidence for Darwinian evolution. A detailed discussion of the relationship of science and religion is out of place here. Daniel C. Dennett’s book Breaking The Spell (Penguin, 2006) gives an excellent and thoughtful review. Although I will comment critically throughout this book on many aspects of human evolution theory there is far too much evidence about the way that this planet was formed billions of years ago, and how the creatures evolved and how they were selected by their degree of adaption to their environment. If you are reading this book in the hope of finding an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory you will be disappointed. The evidence for the ideas of Darwin is very strong. What I will suggest is that Darwin has only exposed part of the story and that there is more to human evolution than simple biological evolution. There will be no comfort here for those who believe in intelligent design or any of the other myths that are popular today. Nevertheless, whatever your beliefs might be I think that many of the ideas in this book about human behaviour and motivation and what it is that drives us from day-to-day may still be of interest to you and indeed be compatible with your views. It is unlikely you will be offended by the book, at least that is not my intention.
The Core of the Problem
I have already tried to make it clear that we should not expect a theory of human evolution and behaviour that is narrow, precise and instantly testable. This is not Einstein’s Theory of Special or General Relativity. Those theories make extremely accurate predictions that scientific experiment proves to be correct. We may find that future work shows that there are details about Einstein’s theories that need to be refined but the theories are, for practical purposes, broadly accepted. With human behaviour and evolution what we can only hope to develop is a new paradigm or model of how this might work. If it is successful then we should find it much easier to understand many aspects of human behaviour that are otherwise rather baffling. Only by finding that the greater part of human behaviour is more consistent with one particular paradigm than another will it become accepted as being a more useful account of human behaviour and evolution. Even then, there is every expectation that a further paradigm will come along that provides an even more compelling account of these topics, and that will, in its turn, be the principal model that scientists and others work with.
I start from the conviction that the way we behave today should be something that we can understand as being a consequence of the way we are evolving today, and the way we are evolving today is a consequence of the way we behave today. The way we are today is because we have grown and changed and evolved from the way we were yesterday. Essentially evolution is a measure of the way that behaviour is changing. Mathematicians might think of evolution as being the first derivative of behaviour. Theories of either evolution or behaviour in which evolution and behaviour are not fundamentally interlinked must account for the relationship between them in some other way. It is important to remember that behaviour is not just about the way we carry out high level activities such as following a programme of research or the way that we conduct ourselves in public. It must include all the little tiny aspects of behaviour such as why we choose particular clothes to wear or food to eat, why we watch certain television programmes and decorate our homes the way we do. It must be a comprehensive model that is free from qualitative judgments such as the impression given by some anthropological studies that primitive tribes behave in a way that is somehow purer than the way gangs of thugs behave in urban ghettos. Above all it must be a model that appeals to our commonsense and that resonates with our own experience of life, because when we talk about human behaviour we are actually talking about the way that you and I behave, not about some laboratory creature in a strange and artificial environment. A surprising number of scientists think of commonsense as virtually incompatible with good science. Lewis Wolpert, a British biologist, in his book The Unnatural Nature of Science (1992), says “I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science”. There are undoubtedly many branches of science that have ideas and theories that are well accepted which are very far from being commonsense, but they all deal with areas that are far outside everyday experience. We cannot expect to have commonsense about quantum field theory or about loop quantum gravity theories of a multidimensional universe. But to say that a commonsense theory of human evolution and behaviour isn’t science by definition is simply ridiculous.
We understand a great deal about Darwinian evolution – the way that we and all other animals have evolved biologically so that those creatures best adapted to their environment survive and propagate. This is the process popularly known as natural selection. We also know that the rate of Darwinian evolution is very slow, happening on timescales of many millions of years. Human evolution in recent years, however, has been progressing more and more rapidly, on incomparably shorter timescales, and in a much more directed manner than Darwinian evolution. We will never know what triggered this but many scientists believe that the unique feature that distinguishes us from animals is our use of language. There is extensive fossil evidence that the brain size of humans grew rapidly in relatively recent times, and that this may well be associated with the development of the first human social groups. In more recent times there has been an explosion in the size and complexity of our society, with advances happening on progressively shorter timescales. Although there have been multicellular creatures on this planet for about 2 billion years, the apparently near-simultaneous (within a few hundred thousand years) increase in human brain size, the development of language and the development of complex societies where hundreds or thousands of individuals live in one community is too much of a coincidence not to be related in some significant way. However, we must remember that this association is circumstantial.
The view of most mainstream scientists working in evolutionary theory is that human biological evolution today still moves ahead on Darwinian timescales. They point out that there are genetic adaptations that have been made relatively recently by humans to allow them, for example, to digest dairy produce, and that these adaptations are now coded into the biological genes (biogenes) of some of us. However these and a few other recent genetic changes are very much in the margins of our biogenetic inheritance. We are now evolving biologically at a relatively slow rate. Indeed population genetics tells us that as our human population is now so large, genetic evolution must be very slow. Nevertheless the most popular model today of how we evolve, according to Laland & Brown in Sense and Nonsense (2002) is that provided by evolutionary psychologists. The paradigm that evolutionary psychologists use as a model of human evolution and behaviour is that our behaviour patterns were established in the Pleistocene, about 2 million years ago, on the grass plains of Africa. Various aspects of our behaviour that became fixed in those distant times have been incorporated into our genes so that our brains today consists of many hundreds or thousands of functional modules encoded into DNA that make us behave the way we do. Evolutionary psychologists see many of the behaviour patterns in the modern world as being a consequence of the mismatch between behavioural patterns established in this distant past and our present environment. This view of human behaviour has been criticised devastatingly in a recent book by David J Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (2005). Buller makes it clear that not only is there are no evidence for the hypothesis that our behavioural patterns were established all these years ago, but that much of the evidence used to support these ideas falls apart on closer inspection.
There is a further problem with the idea that our complex behaviour patterns are largely coded into our biogenes. This comes from the discovery that the genetic complement of humans is only very slightly different from that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. Scientists were initially surprised that the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, showed that the number of genes in the complete set contained in our chromosomes was rather small at just over 20,000, according to Michele Clamp from Harvard (2007). It has also been discovered that the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees amount to probably only a few hundred genes. It is true that we are learning rapidly that there is a great deal we do not know about the structure and functioning of the DNA from which our genes are constructed, and the way these genes are expressed to make proteins in every cell of our body. However there is no possibility that one could encode in any way the information needed to structure our brain to manage language as well as structure our brain to provide all the behavioural features that make us effective in modern society in only a few hundred genes. The complexity of our brain is extraordinary. There are as many nerve cells in each of our brains as there are stars in the Galaxy, and the processing power of our brains is also quite staggering. Understanding language is difficult and requires a considerable amount of processing power, and the idea that there are even hundreds of individual behavioural models genetically encoded to structure different parts of our brain does not hold water. There simply is not enough information carrying capacity in this number of genes. There must be something else that makes us human.
The conclusion has to be that our evolution is no longer something that depends solely or indeed largely on our biogenes. Yet evolution still goes on. Increasingly humans have developed methods of compensating for the inadequacies of their biogenes. We take drugs and undergo surgery to make us live longer, healthier lives. We take better care of ourselves, knowing what is good for our bodies and what is bad. Over the last century, white American males have increased their life expectancy by over 27 years. Some will say that this is not really evolution, that it is only medical science, but that is not good enough. There is no other species on earth that has ever managed to achieve this, even on timescales of millions of years. It is a remarkable achievement for our species to achieve it in a century and this achievement cannot simply be dismissed as a consequence of better nutrition and the development of medicine. It is another great success for our species and for our civilisation. Traditionally evolutionary scientists have preferred to ignore real human behaviour, with the exception of the behaviour of the most primitive tribes on earth. They have often preferred to learn from animal behaviour and extrapolate those results to our species. On the other hand, social scientists have carefully avoided getting involved in extensive systematic studies of human behaviour, often preferring to study social policy and politics. The net effect is that little attempt has been made to ask humans what they think motivates them and makes them behave the way they do. The scientists who have come closest to understanding what it is that motivates us are the social psychologists, and they do indeed seem to have made some significant progress. They have a great deal of evidence that we are inclined to overestimate the importance of the individual and underestimate the effects of the group membership and social environment on our behaviour.
What we see all around us is a Darwinian-like struggle for survival within our social world. Our biogenes are barely under threat at all from our physical environment. Our survival depends principally on just how well each of us is adapted to our social environment. The better adapted we are socially, the more successful we will be. If you ask people how they measure success, it is a combination of their relationships with others, their status and power and the degree of influence and control that they exercise. If you ask people what they think they want to leave behind them when they die and to pass to future generations, few place the highest importance on propagating their biogenes. Indeed if this was important we would expect to see large numbers of would-be sperm donors, whereas in fact they are in very short supply. What we really want is to pass on a bit of what we have achieved in our own lives and experience. We want to pass on our knowledge of the world. Basically we don’t want to die. We want some kind of immortality. Although this is promised by virtually all religions we know in our hearts it is not enough and may well not be deliverable. We can only achieve a degree of immortality by making a significant mark on the world. Attempts to achieve immortality were central to the civilisation of ancient Egypt as was the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi which included the extraordinary terracotta army. Today American presidents have Presidential Libraries to ensure their legacies. We are much more concerned to propagate what we are over and above what is represented by our biogenes. Certainly we want our children to have some of the influence that we ourselves have and we want our children to build upon that. But in reality we want to propagate our ideas not just to our children but to others of every generation, as widely as possible.
In the battle for survival humans need an evolutionary strategy that is faster and therefore more competitive, but above all it must be strongly directed. By developing language and society we were able to develop and evolve much more rapidly. We express different aspects of our personality in different social circumstances and our success depends on how well these different ways we express ourselves are adapted to the social environment within which we find ourselves at the time. This competitive struggle for advancement and success echoes substantially the way that Darwinian natural selection works on our biogenes. This suggests an analogy between our biogenes contained in the cells of our bodies on one hand and the entire contents of our brain, the sum total of all our experiences, attitudes, feelings, emotions, knowledge, etc. on the other hand. It is this “everything else” that we are over and above what is encoded in our biological genes that I call our Supergenes. Like all analogies it should not be taken too far but there are many similarities in the way supergenes and biogenes work. Together with our biogenes, supergenes have given us an incredible edge in the battle for survival on the planet and are continuing to give us an extraordinary evolutionary advantage in the sense of the speed at which we can adapt and evolve. This is why we have become so special, and this is what is at the very core of being human. There are also disadvantages in this evolutionary strategy that we will look at later.
A much more detailed description of the properties of biogenes and supergenes will be developed in later chapters but I summarise here the similarities and differences that there are between biogenes on one hand and supergenes on the other hand.
The Properties of Supergenes
What Are Our Genes and Where Are They Found?
Biological genes (biogenes) are found in almost every cell in the human body. They consist of sequences of four molecules that provide a set of templates for the proteins and other chemicals in our body. They provide the information for virtually every structure contained in our bodies. Individual genes can be unambiguously identified by modern biochemical methods. Our genes are encoded in about 3 billion molecules and together they make up approximately 20,000 individual genes. Certain aspects of our behaviour may indeed be encoded in biogenes so that there is not a unique and unambiguous separation between physiology and behaviour.
Supergenes are the totality of the complex electrical connections in our brains. It seems most unlikely that they can be identified in any individual sense and it is not even clear that the concept of a single supergene is of any importance. They represent every aspect of what each of us is apart from what is encoded in our biogenes. Our brains are much more complicated than the DNA in our cells. The brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells each of which is connected to approximately 1000 others, making a total of 100 million million connections. Each of these connections effectively act as very low powered computers and it is the information that is stored in the networks of these interconnections that is the essence of our supergene pool. The information storage potential of our brain is immeasurably larger than the information storage potential of the DNA in our cells.
How Are These Genes Expressed?
Biogenes: small groups of biogenes are triggered to express proteins in specific cellular environments. Different groups of biogenes are triggered therefore in muscle cells and in neurons for example. In most cells the great majority of biogenes are inactive.
Supergenes: a subset of our supergene pool, the content of our brain, is expressed in particular social environments. At any one moment most of what is contained in our brains is held at an unconscious level and only a small subset is expressed at any one moment. Different social environments lead to the expression of different subsets of our supergene pool. We behave differently when we are with friends or in a meeting at work, when we are on vacation or when we are in a supermarket. In each environment different subsets of our supergene pool are expressed.
Where Did These Genes Come from?
Biogenes: the genes in our body are established irrevocably at the moment of conception when the egg in a woman’s body is fertilised by the sperm from a male. This genetic makeup is fixed thereafter although there are relatively minor epigenetic influences on the operation of different cells which can moderate the expression of certain proteins throughout the life of the individual.
Supergenes: our supergenes are progressively assembled from our earliest days. In no sense is our supergene pool static. Ideas, attitudes and beliefs may be modified throughout life in response to our experiences including internal reappraisal and re-evaluation – in short by thinking about things in response to internal and external promptings. As a consequence, the way we behave also evolves rapidly as we adapt to our evolving social environment.
How and to Whom Are These Genes Propagated?
Biogenes: these may only be propagated by the creation of children and then only half of our bio-gene pool may be propagated at any one time. It requires a fertile partner of the opposite sex who also contributes half of his or her biogene pool. The child will have an essentially random selection of genes from each parent. The child will therefore inherit certain physiological traits from each parent in a relatively unpredictable manner. In a population of a species as large as that of humans biogenetic evolution is inevitably extremely slow although almost certainly still continuing. This relatively slow rate of evolution confers a high degree of stability on the biological evolutionary process.
Supergenes: we can propagate our supergenes to anyone that we have any contact with and our own supergene pool may be modified in response to supergenes propagated from others to us. Supergenes may be propagated to and from individuals of any age or fertility or sexual orientation. The conditions under which we can propagate our supergenes to others and under which we will be prepared to receive and accept supergenes from others are complicated. Broadly speaking, this depends on the relationship that we have as an individual with others, essentially our position in that social group. It is affected by a number of human characteristics including levels of influence, charisma, power, status, etc. Supergene transmission can be in very small packages but the opportunities for this are infinitely more frequent than they are for biogenes.
What Causes Specific Genetic Traits to Survive?
Biogenes: the new human most likely to survive long enough to be able to reproduce is the one best adapted to the physical environment in which it finds itself. Increasingly humans have been able to insulate themselves from this environment with houses, clothing and most recently medical advances that can suppress or eliminate the significance of their non-adaptive characteristics so that Darwinian natural selection pressures are now greatly diminished in humans.
Supergenes: the subset of the human supergene pool that is expressed in the social context (the behaviour of the individual in the broadest sense in that context) will have the best chance of influencing others if it is optimally adapted to the prevailing social environment. Good adaptation leads to an enhanced status within the group and overall a position of greater influence and power. Behaviour less appropriate to that environment is therefore poorly adapted to it. The degree of inappropriateness of behaviour and its frequency will reduce the influence of the individual and can ultimately lead to his or her exclusion from the group.
What are the Evolutionary Timescales?
Biogenes: significant biological evolution is only possible on timescales of millions of years. There is good evidence of much less significant biological evolution on shorter timescales, but the random nature of biogenetic inheritance and the size of the human population makes serious biological evolution extremely slow indeed.
Supergenes: each and every one of us has the capacity to evolve our supergene pool on very short timescales indeed. At the simplest level, we can change our opinion just by receiving information that corrects some misapprehension we held. A more substantial modification of behavioural patterns may take a much longer time and indeed some that have been established in childhood or that are a consequence of a major traumatic event may be almost impossible to erase completely. Nevertheless we have a remarkable capacity to adapt and make sure that we only express appropriate supergenes in a particular circumstance. For example there are a number of things we would avoid talking about in the presence of someone recently bereaved.
How Stable are these Evolutionary Strategies?
Biogenes: the much longer timescales involved in biogenetic changes ensure that the evolution is gradual and between robust, stable states. Selective pressures on these states will be relatively subtle with plenty of time for less well adapted individuals to be selected against.
Supergenes: as supergenes can be acquired very rapidly it is easy for individuals and groups to acquire behavioural traits that are self-consistent and functional in the context of a particular social environment. However, they may be poorly adapted to the real social world. Examples here are some of the more extreme religious cults, and certain criminal gangs. The social pressures that lead to the selection against those supergenes work on much longer timescales and therefore aberrant behaviour is something that can survive for a significant time before it is suppressed by selective pressures on these supergene pools. The overall effect is that supergene selection is relatively poor at maintaining social balance and stability.
Chapter 2
How Did We Get to Be like This?
The strategy that I took in carrying out this quest was to look in detail at two major areas of central importance to our understanding of the human condition for which at present we have at best rather unsatisfactory accounts. The first major problem area arises from the undeniable fact that human evolution is happening at an ever accelerating rate, a rate that is inconsistent with Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, implying that some other mechanism is at work. The second area of concern is that we really have no serious models of human behaviour and motivation that can account convincingly for the way we behave in everyday life, how our societies work and the attitudes we have to a whole range of issues. This chapter and the next look at what we know or think we know about each of these in turn. The gap between theory and reality is worryingly large in many areas.
Modern ideas of biological evolution work remarkably well for all living creatures including man but in the case of Homo sapiens our evolution has accelerated to an extraordinary degree. This dramatic acceleration appears to be the consequence of Darwinian natural selection pressures acting within the social environment on our supergenes. This is in contrast with the way that, for most other animals, Darwinian natural selection pressures only act, or least act substantially, on individuals in response to their physical environment. However, we need to demonstrate that there really is a problem with attributing recent human evolution to conventional Darwinian biological evolution. This will give us a good understanding of how different modern human evolution is from animal evolution.
Few would disagree that human evolution has been driven and affected by a great variety of external influences. If we are to achieve any understanding of what it is that makes us so special on the planet Earth we need to appreciate how we achieved such remarkable things in such a short time. We are all animals with a finite lifespan so it is easy to think of human history over the past few thousand years as extending into the infinite past. Our religious books describe the beginning of time as being only a few thousand years ago because that was how the concept of the most distant past could be understood at the time those books were written. Now we know with surprising accuracy that our home planet formed 4.6 billion years ago. In reality humans have walked on this planet for a negligible fraction of that 4.6 billion years. Within that negligible fraction an even tinier part has been occupied by the explosive growth in mankind and its extraordinarily complex society. If we scale the 4.6 billion year history of the earth to one year, with the present at midnight on December 31, then the first multicellular creatures appeared on earth in July, the dinosaurs were wiped out on December 26, and the first hominids appeared about 12 hours before midnight. The great expansion in human population on this planet then started about 150 seconds before midnight. The first printed work appeared three seconds before midnight and the average life expectancy in the West is about half a second on this scale. This scale model helps us to appreciate the vastness of the time period over which creatures have been growing and evolving and changing on the planet and how incredibly recently human society has developed. There are many parts of the story of how our planet Earth came into existence and has since been evolving of which we are unsure. There is, however, a great deal of scientific evidence from many different directions that makes it clear just how old the universe is and just how old our planet is. Those who wish to believe otherwise by taking a creationist view of human development and evolution must be prepared to deny of the vast body of research that is accepted by the great majority of scientists from a wide range of intellectual, social and religious backgrounds. The general framework of how we got to where we are is, in the main, extremely well established. The evidence in most cases is very clear to those with eyes to see.
In order for us to appreciate what is so unusual about present-day human evolution we must have a clear understanding of our own origins and how our species evolved biologically along with the other creatures that share our planet. We need to understand what pressures our species was under that made it evolve into the creatures we are now. Understanding how this worked to our benefit will set the framework to help us understand how our more complex and much more rapid evolution as social creatures started to be important and now dominates completely.
The Formation of Life
Astronomers are confident that the earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The oldest rocks on earth have been dated by geologists at about 4 billion years. Remarkably soon after this the first evidence of photosynthesis appeared. However, it was to be 2 billion years later that photosynthetic activity by cyanobacteria enriched our atmosphere with oxygen and allowed the appearance of the first multicellular creatures. We are not sure exactly when the first animals appeared but there are many animal fossils as old as 600 million years. This was followed by an extraordinary explosion in the diversity of the animal kingdom but from about 250 million years ago there was a clear geological evidence of the largest mass extinction in history that wiped out about 90% of all marine animal species. We have little idea of what might have caused this extinction but it was probably either a volcanic explosion or possibly the result of the earth being struck by a giant meteorite. Soon after this disaster the first creatures began to colonise the land.
Readers who wish to learn more of these distant times and how evolution changed the myriad species on Earth will find much to interest them in Simon Conway Morris’s book Life ’s Solution (2003). The first dinosaurs also appeared following this mass extinction and they increased enormously until another substantial extinction event occurred approximately 65 million years ago. The evidence suggests that this was caused by the collision with the earth of an asteroid that was perhaps 10 km in diameter. Many geologists believe that the location of this was where we now see a large crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. With the demise of the dinosaurs, the earth was ready for the age of mammals. About 5 million years ago the last common ancestor of both hominids and apes lived, thereafter evolving independently. The fossil sequence that leads to modern day humans (Homo sapiens) can be traced most conveniently by looking at the brain size of fossils. Over the last 5 or 6 million years it has increased from 350 millilitres to 1350 millilitres, or fourfold.
Homo sapiens first walked upon the earth about 500,000 years ago and modern Homo sapiens first appeared around 120,000 years ago. About 40,000 years ago the tools used by Homo sapiens became substantially more sophisticated and a variety of raw materials such as animal bones used to make tools for engraving increased dramatically. We see today some remarkably sophisticated artwork including cave paintings and simple sculptures. The timescale on which physiological characteristics of animals change are very long so that our ancestors of 40,000 years ago would only have looked slightly different from ourselves.
Darwinian Evolution
For several thousands of years people have wondered how it was that we came to be the way we are now – why we look and behave the way we do. There are many aspects of humans that are recognisably similar to animals, and many of the earliest studies of evolution looked at animals and plants to try to make some sense of the complexity of the natural world. The most important intellectual breakthrough in this area happened in the middle of the 19th-century when Charles Darwin published his book entitled The Origin of Species (1859). We will look in much more detail at various theories of human evolution in the next chapter and only summarise here the essence of Darwin’s ideas that came to be known as the Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin realised that life on Earth for most creatures is a difficult, complex business where survival is far from a foregone conclusion. Each creature has a relationship with almost every other in its environment, whether it is as predator or prey, host or parasite. Darwin could see that in this unforgiving environment survival is quite marginal depending on the availability of food, shelter and many other aspects of life such as the climate and the variability of the weather. He concluded from studies of a great variety of plants and animals and other creatures that the survival of a species – and indeed of the individual members of any species – depended critically on the extent to which it was suited to its environment. Those creatures less well-suited were less likely to survive long enough to reproduce and raise their young. Members of a species that were better suited were more likely to produce viable offspring and raise them to maturity. The fittest members of a species – and indeed the fittest species – survive preferentially and this, Darwin deduced, was the mechanism that drove the biological evolution of all living things.
As an idea it was remarkable and had an electrifying effect on evolutionary thinking then as it does indeed today. In Darwin’s time, however, there was no understanding of what it was within an organism that was actually doing the evolving. There clearly has to be some structure somewhere within each member of every species that allows its principal characteristics to be transmitted from one generation to another with excellent fidelity. We see that the members of one species, whether a plant or insect or a bird, are all remarkably similar, clearly using identical biochemistry within their bodies, relying on identical physiologies and behaving in remarkably similar ways. At about the same time that Darwin was working on his theory of natural selection, Gregor Mendel in Brunn, Austria, was also working on the principles of heredity in plants in which he showed that the male and female contribute equally to the traits in the offspring, something that most people then as now instinctively understood because they could see the inherited similarities between children and their parents. He also demonstrated that acquired traits (traits that were not present in the offspring but were learnt or imposed on the organism) were not subsequently inheritable. Mendel is often portrayed as being an isolated monk working in an amateurish way on his own. The truth is very different. He was an extremely competent research scientist supported by a group of able assistants. His work was properly published and, although circulated widely, was largely ignored by the scientific community which did not know what to make of it. It took the work of Darwin to make sense of it.
By the end of the 19th-century it was realised that the chromosomes visible in every eukaryotic cell were critical to reproduction. Interest in these topics was so widespread that scientists held the First International Congress of Genetics in London in 1899. The first time that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was isolated was from salmon sperm in 1889 by Johann Meischer but the chemical structure of DNA was not understood until much later. What was understood, however, was that the chromosomes were central to inheritance. In the cells in our body, chromosomes occur in homologous pairs with each pair consisting of one copy of the maternal chromosome and a corresponding copy of the paternal chromosome. In 1911, E. B. Wilson showed that the gene for colour blindness was located on the X-chromosome, the first gene to be identified on a chromosome. The big breakthrough in understanding the chemical nature of DNA and its extremely complex geometric structure came from work in the early 1950s by Rosalind Franklin together with Maurice Wilkins at Kings College in London. They used x-ray crystallography to show that DNA exists as two strands wound together in a spiral or helical shape. Watson and Crick in Cambridge (1953) used the x-ray diffraction results of Wilkins and Franklin to allow them to deduce the detailed structure of DNA as being what we now describe as a double helix . For this work Watson and Crick shared a Nobel Prize in 1962.
The Structure of the Human Genome
The human genome is the name given to the complete set of DNA molecules contained in most cells of the human body. Certain kinds of cells in the human body, such as red blood cells, do not have a proper nucleus and therefore do not have any DNA. In virtually every other cell there is a complete copy of the DNA that is specifically characteristic of each and every one of us in each and every one of these cells. The function of DNA is quite complex. At this stage we can think of it as being made up of a series of genes each of which is essentially a recipe for one of the proteins in our body. In practice genes seldom act entirely on their own but are dependent on other genes and also, almost certainly, on their position within the three-dimensional structure of the chromosome in which they are found. The human genome consists of approximately 3.2 billion base-pairs of nucleotides arranged in 46 chromosomes. Within the genome only about 10% of the DNA comprises genes yet even within that 10% there are sections of the nucleotides that do not contain genetic information (non-coding nucleotide sections). Within the human DNA the percentage of actual coding DNA may be as low as 3% with the best guess currently putting it at about 5%. The remaining 95 % of DNA is often described as “junk DNA” but there is increasing evidence that this junk DNA is important in its role in giving the precise three-dimensional structure to a particular DNA molecule thereby moderating the way that individual proteins are expressed by that molecule in whatever cell it happens to exist.
The number of genes in the human genome is not known precisely but estimates currently put it at around 20,000. At first that may seem to be a lot but when we bear in mind that there are vast numbers of different cells and different physiological and biochemical functions in our body as well as a vast number of structures it is surprising that there are as few genes as this. The number of separate parts in a motorcar is closer to 30,000 and, of course, the complexity of the human body is incomparably greater than even the most exotic motorcar. Whatever is encoded within the human genome must be a lot more complex than a simple one-to-one relationship between a gene and a protein or a physiological structure in the body. Proteins in the body are not made directly by DNA but by an intermediate molecule called ribonucleic acid (RNA), a single-stranded nucleic acid made up of nucleotides. The function of RNA is to act as a translator and carrier between the DNA molecules and the cell function. In reality the complexity that surrounds the entire mechanism that starts with DNA and, through a great variety of different RNA type molecules, leads eventually to the manufacture of a specific protein, is quite astonishing.
When thinking about the complexity of the human genome there is another issue which must not be forgotten. Every mechanism, every chemical or biological process within the body, consists of an action plus a corresponding mechanism to control and limit and manage the degree of that action. It is not wise for a cell simply to allow the expression of a protein unless it has a very good mechanism for controlling just how much protein is actually made. Having an electric heater in a room will simply cause it to get hotter and hotter. A thermostat is needed to control the maximum temperature and ensure that electrical power is not wasted. This combination of cause and counter-cause is usually described as a servo system and almost every system in life is designed in this way. What it does mean is that every time our DNA provides the recipe for a protein it must also provide the recipe for the control mechanism. What is clear, however, is that the expression of a protein (the phrase we use to indicate that a protein coded in the DNA is actually synthesised within that cell) is something that must be regulated by other aspects of the physiology of each cell. A cell in the brain or the nervous system is clearly very different from a muscle cell in the wall of the heart or a cell in the kidney. Each cell contains all the necessary information for creating every aspect of the human body. However certain cells develop within specific organs for specific functions. As they do, those cells lose the capacity to express proteins that are irrelevant or inappropriate for that particular cell.
Mammalian Reproduction
In order to understand how species evolve we need to understand what happens to our genes and how they are propagated as a consequence of the process known as reproduction. Chromosomes come in pairs. Each chromosome consists of two strands of DNA joined together in the centre to form an X-shaped structure. Because there are two strands of DNA it means that animals have two copies of every gene, one from their father and one from their mother. When a male creates a sperm and when a female contributes an egg the two strands of DNA must be combined into a single strand. The sperm and the egg from the father and mother respectively each contribute one copy of each chromosome and the combination means that the child has two copies of each gene. The sperm cell that leads to the embryo contains a single strand of DNA formed by taking a copy of one gene or the other randomly in the father. In the same way, the egg cell contains a single copy of one gene or other randomly selected from those of the mother. Because of the random nature of the selection of genes every child gets a different mixture of genes made out of the DNA from the father and the DNA from the mother. This is why children of the same parents can turn out to be so different, in so many ways. A gene is nothing
more than a formula for a single protein needed to allow that protein to be manufactured within a cell. In any animal (or indeed in any plant) there are two templates for every enzyme which may or may not be identical. The way in which one template dominates the other in driving what actually happens in the cell will determine the characteristics, to some extent, of the animal. It will also be clear that the genetic composition of the new individual is set at the point of conception and cannot effectively be changed thereafter. What will also be clear is that there is no way that a single gene or even a group of genes can be selected by this process because it is essentially a random selection of genes from one parent combined with an equally random selection of genes from the other that gives the new child its genetic complement. It should further be clear that, because of the extremely complex manner in which proteins are expressed in a cell, the way in which very slight genetic changes affect either the genome or how that a particular protein is expressed could have a significant effect on the overall properties of the individual. We cannot select for one gene or another and we cannot pass on to future generations one specific gene or another. The expression of a particular protein will require a particular gene, but the way in which that protein is expressed, and the quantity of protein that is expressed, compared with other proteins expressed in the same cell, is affected by many other genes and most likely by the considerable amount of so-called “junk” DNA in the cell. Many of the genes that are individually blamed for particular genetic diseases are present in the DNA of all of us. The problem for the individual who suffers from a genetic disease is that the expression of that particular protein may be anomalously strong or weak because of the complex relationship between the gene and others in the cell. This should make it clear that the language of “scientists have discovered the gene for.....”. shows a considerable ignorance of how genes work and how inheritance of genetically based characteristics actually happens.
Genetic Diversity and Evolution
What we are concerned with in particular in this book is what it is that causes human evolution in the broadest sense to happen, how it happens, when it happens and how fast it happens. The Darwinian view expressed in DNA terms is that a new individual is formed by combining the DNA of the parents, and that individual has to fight for survival in the environment. Within a cohort of individuals of one species, certain combinations of DNA are likely to enable particular individuals to thrive better than others, and, as a result, makes them more likely to be able to survive and mature to the point where they can reproduce and pass on their DNA to a subsequent generation. By ensuring that survival is biased towards those individuals who are best fitted to the environment, we can see that the DNA of the offspring is being progressively selected to improve its overall fitness. This is the essential source of the evolution that we see in all animals including humans. Of course it is never a simple as that. Every time the DNA is copied by cell division or when an egg or sperm cell is produced, it is clearly important that every one of the 3.8 billion base pairs are accurately copied. It turns out that there are many mechanisms to check that the DNA replication is indeed as accurate as it possibly can be, but random mutations can have an effect on the way particular proteins are expressed in a cell. These random mutations are probably quite important in causing, or indeed perhaps accelerating, the rate of evolution. There are many mechanisms for making sure that any random mutation does not get out of hand. Very often a random mutation simply stops that cell from functioning properly and it will die. This is what happens in the vast majority of random mutations. In other cases it may be that a random mutation might cause a cell to start to multiply in a relatively uncontrolled fashion. This is what happens with cancer. The DNA in a cell is damaged, possibly by radiation or some other carcinogenic agent such as the chemicals present in tobacco. This causes the mechanisms that limit cell growth and stop cell duplication proceeding in an uncontrolled fashion to be suppressed. Over time, however, it is possible for the genome of any organism to change slowly in a way that, on average, tends to maximise its fitness for its environment. But what should be clear is that this process of evolution will only proceed on very long timescales of hundreds or thousands of generations. Indeed, if the environment changes then this process will become even slower, since this can change a selective pressure from being helpful into harmful.
Within a particular species there is a natural diversity amongst individuals, and an occurrence of a variety of relatively normal forms account for the natural morphological diversity of that species. Humans are not the same as one other. When viewed from the point of view of a bird or an elephant, we humans may seem very much the same but from our point of view we know that there are subtle yet significant differences between individuals. Genetic differences that are common among organisms of the same species are called genetic polymorphisms, and the genetic differences that accumulate between species are the origin of what we call genetic divergence. It is genetic divergence that is responsible for herring being different from mackerel, and for the rose being different from the sunflower. The most common differences between individuals of a single species are known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These differences in the structure of a particular gene are only one single base long and therefore they are the simplest difference that there can be between two genes. It is these SNPs which constitute the great majority of variations in the human genome. It is the analysis of the location of these SNPs within a sample of DNA that is the basis of DNA fingerprinting. This is because these SNPs are indeed unique to an individual and at least 50% of them are passed on to any offspring. Matching the position of these SNPs between different samples of DNA can, for example, check with great accuracy the DNA from two different samples. It can also be used to determine for example paternity or indeed whether an individual may be related to another individual if only relatively remotely. These SNPs also provide an extremely useful mechanism for looking at the statistics of populations and how populations evolve over time. The incidence of a particular SNP in a population does not change over time unless there is some other influence on it. Such an influence could arise if that SNP makes an individual less or more fit to survive in its environment. Darwinian evolutionary pressures suppress those SNPs that reduce fitness.
One important aspect of the statistical probability of a particular trait evolving is the number of individuals in the genetically isolated group within which the trait exists. If there is a very large population of individuals that mates reproductively, then the probability of any particular trait becoming dominant enough to affect the evolution and characteristics of the whole group is extremely small. By contrast if the group is extremely small (for example a group as geographically isolated as creatures on the Galapagos Islands) then individual traits have a much higher chance of becoming favoured because only a handful of individuals with that trait will be enough to bias the future evolution of the group. We see, therefore, that evolution is something that happens much more rapidly and aggressively when the size of the group is tiny. Conversely, we see that the prospects of the human species evolving significantly now as a biological creature must be very small because we are such a large, heterogeneous group. This is not completely the end of the story, because it may be that certain traits are helpful for any individual, and that this particular trait might occur quite frequently and be selected for positively. An example here might be increased brain size, on the assumption that a bigger brain would make us more intelligent, though a larger head does make the human birth process more difficult – something that might be selected against quite strongly.
We can also turn the statistical methods round and look at the diversity in a population to work out the number of individuals from which we are descended. Because of the way that DNA is intermixed every time reproduction occurs, it is extremely difficult to get any sensible information from this. However, one important source of information arises from the fact that certain kinds of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are only transmitted through the maternal line, and therefore without any blending or mixing of the mtDNA sequence from generation to generation. By looking at the intrinsic variability in mtDNA across a population we can deduce how many different copies of mtDNA that population is descended from. The evidence from both archaeological and genetic sources suggest that the population we have now of modern humans started with a period of very rapid growth in the population around the beginning of the Pleistocene era, about 1.8 million years ago. However the evidence originally found in 1972 by Haigh and Maynard Smith suggested that the total human population of the planet had collapsed to as few as 1000 individuals by around 40,000 years ago. Similar studies looking only at the distribution of chimpanzee and African human mtDNA suggests that both species suffered from a catastrophic collapse in population at around the same time so that human population in Africa might only have been about 72 individuals and around 260 chimpanzees. Although there are other interpretations suggested for these data, the general consensus is that there was a very great drop in the human population on Earth at around that time. We have geological evidence of much earlier mass extinctions and so it is easy to believe that a substantial environmental change such as an ice age, or an event like the Toba supervolcano might have been a trigger for this mass extinction of our ancestors. The Toba supervolcano erupted in Indonesia approximately 74,000 years ago with an energy roughly 10,000 times that of the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. It may have been such an event which triggered the mass extinction. It is also clear that around the time that the population collapsed so dramatically, the first modern humans appeared and started to grow rapidly in number and in achievement. It may well have been that the population being so low at that time could allow it to evolve very rapidly in a way that capitalised on the unique characteristics of a very small number of individuals. If groups were as small as just a few individuals, then evolution would have been extremely rapid, and that may have provided the circumstances needed for humans to set off in a genetic sense on a completely different track towards where we are now. Humans are, in fact, very different from most animal species because of our amazing adaptability. The event that caused the near-extinction of humans may have favoured those that were much more adaptable to rapidly changing conditions since they were the ones more likely to survive. There are very few creatures that can be transferred to a substantially different environment and expect to survive. We have many stories about individuals being stranded on a desert island and managing to make do against incredible odds. Very few animals would be able to survive as well, and in such a wide range of conditions as would humans. All the evidence we have is that Homo sapiens was uniquely adaptable and therefore able to accommodate changes in the availability of food locally, which in turn was often driven by climatic variability. For example, it might be thought that an animal without body hair would be at a disadvantage because shelter and clothing is always essential. In fact the ability to choose where to live and how much to wear meant that it is possible to optimise survival and success in a wide range of environments. Even in a cold climate, an animal with a covering of fur is at a big disadvantage when running and chasing animals for food because it quickly becomes very hot. Clothes can be put on or taken off depending on what is being done and that can be extremely advantageous in terms of survival. More importantly, having a large brain that can use its experience intelligently to help it cope with a rapidly changing environment is a major advantage. Even minor changes from year to year because of the variability of the weather in many parts of the world has to be responded to efficiently if the individual is to survive. It is only in the most recent years that life for most is no longer brutal or short.
The Beginnings of Human Civilisation
We can identify three principal phases in the evolution of humanity, starting with the hunter-gatherer and then progressing into agricultural and technological phases. The way in which human lifestyles have adapted to the environment has inevitably been one of continuous change. Over the period that we are concerned with, beginning with the time of the major population expansion that followed the catastrophic collapse in population of about 40,000 years ago, most of the evolution has been cultural rather than genetic. There have been some changes in the physical appearance of humans over that period but they have been, however, very slight indeed.
During the last ice age (Upper Paleolithic, from 35,000 to 8000 years BC) roaming bands of hunting humans relied on a diet principally of meat, much as did the Inuit until relatively recently. They built huts with interlocking bones from mammoths and other large animals, and covered them with animal skins. Many of these people were forced further south during the glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, a period of intense cold that lasted about 2000 years. At the end of that period the climate warmed markedly and humans started a significant period of technological and cultural evolution. As the population increased so the pressure on the supply of food grew. There is a lot of evidence that many of the largest land animals were extinguished by human activity. There is particularly good evidence for this from studies of the extinction of a miniature woolly mammoth that was unique to Catalina Island off the coast of California. This island was uninhabited and had an extensive population of mammoths that had adapted to the rather harsh conditions on the island by developing a much smaller variant. The extinction of these mammoths appears to be precisely synchronised with the earliest human remains found on the island.
Before we start looking at this next phase of human evolution it is important to be clear about what we are looking for in the evidence that is all around us. The earliest traces of human activity suggest that it took place in groups of modest numbers, typically a few tens of individuals. Humans lived in a social context and must have related to other humans in their group according to some elementary system of social norms. It was at this point that the ability of an individual human to survive started to depend significantly on its relationship with other members of the group. For the first time Darwinian selection of the biologically fitter individual started to be compromised by the growing importance of the social fitness of the individual as a key component in determining survival. Our evolution as a species from now on starts to depend increasingly on the social dimension. Our biogenes, which have provided a stable framework for a labourious and gradual evolution, are being enhanced by everything that makes us a social creature. We are now beginning to develop our supergenes.
The evidence that society was very important in the earliest human groups is compelling. We may think, for example, that a piece of art is the creation of an individual artist but that the art could only have been created with the knowledge and acquiescence of the other members of the social group. Indeed every kind of human activity must have been in a social context as it is today. When considering the achievements of an ancient and possibly primitive society we must be careful to distinguish in what respects those societies were different from the ones in which we live now. What we have is a great deal of evidence that our societies have evolved and achieved more and more but we must be clear that that does not imply that the members of ancient primitive societies were in any way less intelligent than we are. Education allows intelligence to be expressed in many more ways but it is a deep and fundamental mistake to think of the ancients as being in any way stupid. They may have been primitive, lived in the most abject poverty, had no education or experience outside their battle for survival and so had little opportunity to develop their innate skills, but they were not stupid. It is exactly the same in our modern societies. When we look out today on the sprawling slums in parts of Mexico City or Calcutta we must never forget that somewhere down amongst the pollution and the grinding poverty there are children with the intelligence of Einstein. In the same way we must be careful when examining the creations of ancient societies to remember that what one can create is totally constrained by the tools available. Had Michelangelo lived 5000 years earlier he would never have been able to create his statue of David. The technology to quarry and transport stone and to carve it had not been developed. His ability to proportion his work derived from the experiences of his predecessors, experience passed through the generations down to him, and provided an essential grounding for his own artistic efforts. We must never think of apparently primitive societies in the distant past or indeed in our present world as being inferior to our own. Not having television means having more time to appreciate and develop an understanding of the natural world that we can only dream of.
One can learn a great deal about the state and condition of a society by looking at its art. Cave or rock art consists of engraved and painted works on rocks on the floors and walls of caves. Many are found deep inside complex cave systems and are still being discovered today. They were generally created during the Upper Paleolithic between 40,000 and 10,000 BC. Outstanding cave painting was done by people in southern Europe, particularly in southern France in the Dordogne, the Pyrenees and in parts of Spain. The works of art found in these caves have a remarkable unity across many well-separated sites and in some sense constitute the first art system in human history. This artistic period is known as the Magdalenian, named after the Magdalene site near Lascaux in the Dordogne. It is sad that we know so little about the society that produced such remarkable art, even though it lasted for more than two thirds of the total time over which humans have created art. One of the great difficulties is that the paintings are extremely fragile and the ones which are most impressive today are those in caves which became sealed and the oxygen substantially depleted. Once the caves are opened oxygen affects the pigments used for the paintings causing them to deteriorate very rapidly. The paintings that were found in the Pyrenees during the First World War at Bedeilhac disappeared completely within six months of their discovery. Even the best photographs of these paintings cannot convey the astonishing impact of seeing exquisite renderings of vast herds of animals long since extinct . Some of the animals painted are known to have been extinct at the time of their painting, also showing that communication in those days was remarkably sophisticated. Even with the extremely limited range of colours that these ancient painters had available it is clear that the artists showed the greatest ingenuity. In the more recent caves such as those at Lascaux there are many fragments of the bowls used to mix the colours as well as a wide range of mineral samples that shows the effort put into finding the materials, transporting them considerable distances and processing the materials necessary for these paintings. The art found in these caves was not limited to painting. There are some exquisite carvings such as the beautiful piece known as the “Licking Bison” which is approximately 12,000 years old and is now exhibited in the Musee National de Prehistoire at Les Eyzies.
The caves that we have studied in detail were special places, not habitations. Although a few examples of cave art had been found in the open air most are well hidden inside caves. This may have been purely because the artists needed to be sure that the artwork was properly protected from the climate. Some of the paintings could only have been created on fairly substantial scaffolding structures (we can see the holes cut into the walls to support the scaffolding today) in much the same way that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. At one site in the Dordogne pictures of mammoths are painted over seven metres above the floor of the cave and at Lascaux there is one astonishing cave known as the Picture Gallery which is over 30 metres long and 12 metres wide. These cave paintings were probably of incredible importance to the people of that time. Even today, we who are perhaps somewhat jaded by the vast art galleries of the world, cannot but be stunned by the magnificence of the eight interlocking galleries of the great cave at Les Eyzies which unfold, one after another, to convey not just the outline but the extraordinary sense of movement amongst the animals depicted. There are, perhaps curiously, few instances of portraits or depiction of human form and when they are they are often little more than matchstick figures. The impact on a visitor who had never seen a building or never seen a picture before, at the time they were painted, must have been extraordinary. A gallery illuminated by flaming torches and painted brilliantly in pigments must have been one of the great experiences in the life of a Stone Age man or woman. We can only guess at what might have been the purpose of this art. It is utterly different from European art, for example, smothered as that has been for centuries by religious iconography. The cave paintings show no sacrifices, nothing that might be called a ceremony. The most plausible explanation is that they did this because they liked doing it and they enjoyed the outcome. The feeling that these caves induce in modern visitors is one of reverence and of wonder. Given the technical limitations of the time we can understand that the achievement they represent can stand alongside the greatest modern Western art in terms of the appreciation of beauty and the delicacy of feeling which those ancient artists showed. This artwork could only have been created in an environment where there were strong and effective social groups that made this work possible. The artwork represents a substantial investment of energy by the group and could only have happened with their full knowledge and approval. The skill of the work and the time over which it must have been created means that the artists were provided with food and clothing and did not have to look after themselves in those respects. It tells us a lot about the advanced nature of the social structures of the time and what they were able to achieve. There is no doubt that by this time already our supergenes were on the march.
As the population grew, dependence on hunting became less and less adequate as a way of feeding a group. The earliest settlements were in the Middle East, perhaps 11,000 years ago, and the first permanent settlements also appeared in this area around 10,000 years ago. Village life became much more common and much more practical with the first recorded division of labour. It also accompanied the development of hierarchical power structures and some form of leadership. It was a time of revolution in agriculture. It was also a time when the importance of the social group grew rapidly. A strong community provided an environment that allowed a very different approach to survival. For the first time it became practical for humans to feel secure enough to take the long view that it was worthwhile planting a crop and tending it for many months until it could be gathered. It was around this time, less than 10,000 years ago, that we started eating vegetable matter (and in particular carbohydrates) in large quantities. Before then our diet had been dominated by meat. Gradually the settlements grew during the Neolithic period, and led to the emergence of the first cities. It was in these dense settlements such as Catalhoyuk in what is now Turkey that we have the first evidence of large groupings, even by modern standards, of people living in one place. That city was probably home to over 10,000 people in what now appears to be shambolic disorganisation, even to the extent that the dead were buried under the floors of the houses. Soon after that came the first cities where there were substantial numbers of individuals who did not simply devote their time to agriculture, the first evidence for the accumulation of wealth (and its corollary, taxation) and the first evidence of written materials. We see already that something is driving individuals and groups towards the acquisition of power and status. These are not inventions of the modern world but are probably a deep and fundamental driving force in our psyche, a force critical to our evolution.
Civilisation in the Technological Age
The development of civilisation around the world is a fascinating subject but a detailed description of this history would not be appropriate here. What is of more direct influence on our lives today is the way in which science and technology developed over the last 2000 years so dramatically. The important significance of science-based inventions (as distinct from technological developments) is that they require progress to be based on an understanding of the underlying principles rather than pure trial and error. There is a great inclination in modern western society to see science and technology as being in some way less significant as an achievement of our culture than art and literature. In fact, it is only in the last hundred years that this separation has occurred because in reality it is impossible to separate technological development and application from its considerable influence on our social fabric. We also should not think of technology as starting with the first steam engines. Our technological society truly started when some individuals produced specialised items for others to use that allowed them to improve the quality of their lifestyle in some way. The earliest city-states would have been transformed by the use of wheeled carts to help the transport of food and other goods into the city as well as the transport of the waste material in the opposite direction. Tools are critical to even the most basic agriculture, and the development of better tools allows more efficient cultivation. This was almost certainly the limiting factor in the growth of the human population in the earliest times. The technology needed to build basic shelters had allowed humans to control their environment and improve the quality of life and conditions under which children might be raised. There are, in fact, few parts of the world where it is practical for humans to live outside all year round. Shelters are essential from the sun and the heat just as much as they are from the cold and the rain and the wind.
Large-scale developments followed, with road systems and water management and waste disposal systems. The more complex technologies could only be created effectively with the support of basic sciences and mathematics. In Babylon (in modern southeastern Iraq), a large city with a quarter of a million inhabitants by 2200 B C, we know that they established a legal system and had a detailed knowledge of medicine, mathematics and astronomy. They also left behind a small number of written texts. We can also tell from more recent civilisations such as ancient Greece and Rome just how advanced their technologies were because it would have been impossible to create the buildings or the ceramics, for example, without substantial supporting technologies and a substantial number of skilled artisans to carry out the work.
In more recent times significant technological changes have happened increasingly quickly. Some time before 1000 AD in Europe important agricultural developments include the development of the horse-drawn plough and an appreciation of the importance of rotation of crops. Windmills and water wheels became important and by the time of the Norman conquest of England (1066 AD) there were over 6000 water wheels in use in England for purposes such as the sawing of wood and the grinding of corn. The mechanical clock and the watch with a balance wheel and spring drive were also developed during a period known quite unfairly as the Dark Ages. In the beginning of the 15th century one of the most significant developments was the invention of printing using movable type. The first known printed book was the Bible printed by Johan Gutenberg in Germany in 1455 AD. This is really where the information technology revolution started. In parallel Chinese and Korean printing advanced using other methods but the development of printing was critical in allowing fast, efficient and accurate communication of ideas much more widely. It was the beginning of the information explosion which started with the widespread availability of paper and printing, radio, television and most recently the Internet.
Navigation became an established science which allowed the great voyages of discovery of the 15th and 16th centuries AD. Copernicus published his book De Revolutionibus Orbum Coelestium in 1543 showing that the Earth was a planet in orbit around the Sun. His ideas developed those of earlier Arab astronomers and mathematicians mentioned by him in that book. In a few hundred years, we have moved from there through the first documented telescope (built by a Dutch optician, Hans Lippershey in 1608) through the work of Galileo and Newton and on to Edwin Hubble who proved that our Milky Way is the view of our own galaxy seen edge on and that other galaxies we can see in the sky are incomparably more distant. We now have, named after Edwin Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope, a remarkable instrument that has taken the deepest pictures of the most distant parts of the universe. Within four hundred years we have gone from the first telescope to being able to record pictures of galaxies so distant that the light detected by the Hubble Space Telescope was two thirds of its way towards us before the planet Earth was formed. We can design such an instrument and build it with extraordinary precision. If the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope was scaled up to the size of the United States, the irregularities on its surface would be less than one centimetre in height. We can launch this telescope into space and we can repair it when it goes wrong so that it continues to let us look at the very edge of the universe. We can also look at distant gas clouds, gas clouds that are only now collapsing, soon to form a planetary system possibly much like ours on which one day other intelligent creative creatures will eventually evolve. It may take another four or five billion years but it no doubt will happen sometime. It has probably happened already very many times across our galaxy, and indeed in other galaxies across the universe.
We look back with amazement at these ancient civilisations and wonder what it must have been like such a long time ago. But in relative terms it is not that long ago at all. From the earliest days, however, for which we have evidence, it is clear that the basic behaviour of individuals and groups in society has been much as it is today with the emphasis so often on striving for advancement and success. I do not want to be too specific about what counts as success. It includes Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation, essentially the innate need of humans to strive to make the best of their abilities. But for some it will be a very modest level of achievement. For most, however, it is judged principally in terms of the power and influence of individuals and groups. The legendary Spanish conquistador Hernando Nunez de Valvida (La Serpiente Negra) wrote, in his diary entry on April 20, 1521 (the day he allegedly slaughtered 200 Aztecs), “La gloria es un millon ojos asustados”, roughly translated as “glory is a million frightened eyes” (Quoted by Marisha Pessl in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Penguin Books, 2007). Our biological origins will always be important to us but the timescales on which Darwinian evolution can improve our capacity to survive are now hopelessly long. The evolution of our society is progressing much too rapidly for there to be any significant biological input to that. We simply cannot pretend any longer that human evolution is something that is purely biological. That may be basically all there is in the animal kingdom. We humans need to have a much better explanation.
I am convinced that the answers lie not within conventional biological evolutionary studies, but within a better understanding of what it is that underlies human behaviour. Our rapid evolution is a consequence of our species making it happen. It is moving far too rapidly to be a consequence of random, undirected chance. The evolution of our supergenes is something that we are doing to ourselves whereas biological evolution is something that is being done to us. Homo sapiens decided to take control of its own evolution as a species and that control is manifested in the way it behaves. We have taken and developed the biological strategies bodies found worked so well for successful evolution in our physical environment, and applied them in our even more complex social environment. What matters to us more than anything is for part of us to survive our physical death, not by relying on empty promises of priests, but by implanting our ideas in the minds of those who will survive us. We achieve that by striving to gain attention and control to let us increase our influence and power in the world, our opportunities to propagate parts of our supergene pool. But before we can look at the ideas that underpin the supergene hypothesis we have to understand what ideas are already current among scientists working in human behaviour and evolution. Many of these studies have been on animals and their application to the human condition is something which may be much less justified than has hitherto been assumed. In the next chapter we will look at what is known about human behaviour in the broadest context.
Chapter 3
Modern Ideas of Human Evolution and Behaviour
To be plausible our theory of human behaviour and evolution must account for as wide a range of human behaviour as possible and provide a better explanation than any other extant theory. It should also have the potential to predict human behaviour in other circumstances, and the outcomes of experiments yet to be tried. We must avoid being too ambitious when dealing with theories of human behaviour and evolution because these subjects are very complex indeed and a comprehensive theory will be difficult to develop initially. We must nevertheless try to make progress with the expectation that it will be refined and added to in the future. Above all, we need to develop a model that you, the innocent reader, can feel is consistent with your own very considerable experience of human behaviour.
The scientific method is fundamental to human progress. An unexplained phenomenon is examined to try to understand what is going on. An explanation is then produced (the theory) which ties together what is known already about the subject to some degree and, most importantly, makes predictions which can be tested by experiment. A good example of how this works was when a substantial depletion in the ozone layer that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun was discovered in 1985 over the South Pole. Scientists were asked for an explanation. Relatively quickly they discovered that this depletion could be attributed substantially to the leakage of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from refrigerators and air-conditioning units. Scientists predicted that if we reduced the usage of these CFCs the depletion would ultimately be eliminated. This eventually led to a worldwide ban on their use as a refrigerant and there is now early evidence that the thinning of the ozone layer might have been reversed, though it is predicted to take at least 50 years to heal fully. This is an excellent example of how the scientific method can work. In nearly every area of human activity, scientists are engaged in trying to help us understand more clearly what is happening. Even in circumstances where our understanding is not at all advanced there are models and theories which are being tested, with the results of these tests allowing the models and theories to be refined and improved. Even in astronomy where we often have remarkably little information about the most distant objects in the universe, scientists produce models which can be tested in different ways. As they refine their knowledge an understanding of the universe gradually increases. What is surprising is that when it comes to an understanding of human behaviour and evolution there are no models that make any serious attempt to provide an overall explanation of what is going on in an area which is surely central and fundamental to what it is to be human. Virtually all current efforts in this area concentrate on a relatively narrow area of study and avoid making significant linkages with other areas.
This is not to say, however, that there are no models of how humans should and do behave, but we must distinguish between those ideas which have at their core a fundamental yet unprovable act of faith and those which do not. The central teachings of traditional Christianity are that Jesus is the Son of God, one of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that his life on earth, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven are proof of God’s love for humanity and God’s forgiveness of human sins; and that by faith in Jesus one may attain salvation and eternal life. This teaching is embodied in the Bible, specifically in the New Testament, but Christians accept also the Old Testament as sacred and authoritative Scripture. Christianity provides a complete explanation of mankind’s place in the universe, a guide to acceptable behaviour and a promise of an everlasting life in heaven or hell depending on that behaviour. It is a full and self-consistent model for life but it is based on a fundamental act of faith for which there is simply no hard evidence. Sigmund Freud (1933) said that: “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires”. Just because we want to believe such things does not make them fact. Christianity is only one example, one with which I am most familiar having been born and brought up in Britain. There are many other faiths that also provide a complete prescription as to how to conduct one’s life. Each is different from the next, sometimes in relatively minor ways and sometimes in more substantial ones. All religions promise immortality in one form or another at least for the soul if not for the body, and the soul is essentially the more spiritual, more valued part of our supergene pool. Many religions promise eternal punishment as part of that immortality if the wrong choices have been made during life. There is nothing wrong in believing such ideas but they do remain simply a faith. If one is of that faith then almost every experience can be interpreted as confirming it but the fact that the entire edifice is built on something that is quite unprovable makes it hard to convince non-believers that their views should be taken seriously. The differences between faiths are sometimes remarkably subtle, yet the clashes and disagreements they provoke can be incredibly strong. Indeed one can often have the impression that it is the slightest difference that causes the greatest offence. We will come back to this when we try to understand how the struggle for the ascendancy of one’s supergenes has to focus on the differences with others, even if those differences are extraordinarily subtle and slight. If you are from a Christian background then the continuing battles between Sunni and Shia Muslims seems incomprehensible in the same way that someone from an Islamic background must view the troubles in Northern Ireland, a struggle between Protestants and Catholics, with the same degree of bemused disbelief. Indeed, Christians from outside Northern Ireland have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the conflicts there. There is a story told by the American Comedian, Emo Phillips, about the power of religious hatred. ‘I was walking across a bridge one day and I saw a man about to jump. I said, “Stop, don’t do it.” “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “Well, are you Christian?” I asked. He said: “Yes.” I said, “Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Protestant.” “Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?” “Baptist.” “Wow, me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” “Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformation of 1915.” I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off’.
Any scientific theory may only provide a model for part of a problem but it must be founded on hard demonstrable fact and, most importantly, must be able to make predictions that can be tested experimentally so that the model can be verified, improved or discarded. What often happens, however, is that plausible ideas or stories become embellished with detail and take on a life of their own that lets them masquerade as a scientific theory when in reality there is no solid foundation for them. Unfortunately there are now many areas of intellectual activity outside religion where such an approach is commonplace, and ideas become accepted as being sound simply because they have been repeated again and again. This was understood by Lewis Carroll in his brilliant nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits, when he said: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true”. There is no central authority that gives a stamp of approval on any theory. The most ridiculous ideas can propagate and survive and grow in importance with the right kind of publicity. In many cases it is obvious to most people that they are indeed nonsense, with examples such as the belief that the earth is flat (the website of the Flat Earth Society provides an amusing diversion but not a great deal of scientific accuracy). Intelligent Design is another version of creationism that is derived from a disbelief in evolution. The premise here is that there are so many incredibly complex lifeforms on earth that evolution could not possibly account for them. The conclusion is that only God could have created such designs. The scientific community widely sees this as not being a theory, only creationist pseudoscience. There was a time when the motions of stars and planets across the heavens was quite incomprehensible. We now understand these motions so precisely that we can land spacecraft on other planets. There are many aspects of evolutionary theory that we do not understand, and seem today to be a long way from that understanding. But to say that these details are fundamentally not ones we can ever understand is a conclusion far too premature to make. Voltaire (1764) put his finger on it when he wrote: “Superstition sets the whole world on fire; philosophy quenches the flames”. Intelligent Design, along with the Flat Earth Society is rooted firmly in superstition.
An article by E. O. Wilson (New Scientist, November 2005) made one of the best points about why we should not believe in Intelligent Design using an argument that could just as well be applied to the question of the existence of God. He pointed out that there are probably several hundred million scientists in the world today. If anyone was to find incontrovertible proof either of Intelligent Design or the existence of God then that scientist would achieve an eminence much greater than that of Einstein or any winner of the Nobel Prize. It would be an absolutely extraordinary achievement because it would affect the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Such a scientist would quickly becom |
