1: Introduction
Welcome to Turning the Tide on Religious Fundamentalism— Evolutionary Science and its uses in Human Equality, Personal Empowerment, Civil Rights, Environmental Sustainability, and World Peace.
I’m Ezra Niesen; I’m the author of the big reference book to life, 42. If you don’t know who Douglass Adams is, then I call it 42 because that’s what you get when the people of two 21st century civilizations stop fighting amongst themselves and start adding their best qualities together for a change. If you do know who Douglass Adams is, then perhaps you’re aware that he was best friends with Dr. Richard Dawkins, who discovered evolution at the molecular level, the second most important discovery in the history of biology. In that case, I call it 42 because it’s the missing link between speculative philosophy and hard-core science.
A lot of people wonder why I still think it’s necessary to turn the tide on religious fundamentalism. I mean, we just elected Barack Obama for president. So now all our problems are solved, right? Well unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.
The United States Constitution was written in the 18th century. The Theory of Evolution and the Laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until the 19th century. The Founding Fathers understood enough about the world to figure out how to make a society function back in their time. But they took certain things for granted about the world that aren’t scientifically valid. They founded our secular government on principles that defy fundamental laws of physics and biology. The idea that White men are superior to everyone else is just the most obvious of those. And after more than 200 years, we still haven’t fixed that mistake… Although we have come a long way.
Well, when you pit your political system against fundamental laws of the universe, it’s a pretty safe bet that the universe is going to win. Democrats and Republicans can’t win elections by admitting how fundamentally flawed our political system is. So every time you vote for Democrats or Republicans, all you’re voting for is in which of two ways would you like our government officials to continue defying scientific reality.
If the public could learn enough about biology and physics, they could solve the problem. But who else controls our public school system besides Democrats and Republicans?
Our political system can’t survive on its present course, and the public is being prevented from learning why. Well guess which politically powerful group of people here in America does have an easy explanation for why our civilization is getting into so much trouble. And guess which group starts winning elections every time big, evil, mysterious forces seem to threaten our country…
In the summer of 1987, during the height of the Cold War, some scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met secretly in Budapest, to try to figure out why our species had become so self destructive. (The Club of Budapest has a website now, at www. clubofbudapest. org.) They began studying what’s now known as evolutionary psychology— How evolution created our brains, and how our brains make us think. The study of human evolution began as the science of How to Not Have a War with Each Other.
Since then, it’s become the Science of Human Equality. Scientists have made monumental discoveries that could be used to bridge the gaps between every group of people in the world. That includes the origins of cultures, the course of world civilization, origins and effects of emotions, gender differences, child development, and even universal constants of religion.
As members of the same species, we all share a universal body structure. Our brains are part of our bodies, so that means we share a universal brain structure too. These scientists reasoned that our universal brain structure must create universal patterns of thought. Those universal patterns of thought should create universal patterns of behavior.
By now, anthropologists have studied every culture in the world. The list of behavioral traits of humanity that exist in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions is nearly 400 items long.
For example, baby talk, belief in the supernatural, beliefs that are false, beliefs about death, beliefs about disease, beliefs about fortune and misfortune, binary thinking, biological mothers normally raising their own children, words for the color black, and bodily adornment are all universal constants of humanity. And that’s just the B section. (The A section is longer and not quite as interesting.)
When a trait of humanity exists in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions, that makes it a direct product of human evolution, because in every part of the world where human DNA exists, this thing also exists.
The biggest reason we’re caught up in a global war that nobody knows how to win right now is because the public isn’t learning the things they need to know to put an end to it.
If we are ever going to build a peaceful, sustainable global community, we are going to build it on what everyone in the community has in common, and not on the continued misperception that one culture is inherently better than all the others. The one most fundamental thing that everyone on Earth is guaranteed to have in common is human evolution.
One of the biggest problems the human evolutionary scientists are facing is how to explain their discoveries in terms that non-academic people can understand… without leaving anything out. A few scientists have started teaching their discoveries by relating them to well known artistic and philosophical insights. Because after so many thousands of years of trying to fit the pieces of human behavior together, inevitably, some artists and philosophers have found combinations that coincide with the scientists’ discoveries.
That’s where I got involved. I come from a large family of artists and engineers. Evolution is the biggest engineering project in the world. My grandfather was an engineer. My grandmother was an artist. They were married for 67 years. So we basically got a fifty-year head start over all these scientists at relating science to art and philosophy.
I work in theatre and also write fiction, which are two of the oldest studies of human behavior in the world. Over the course of 2,500 years of trial and error, theatre artists have identified a number of universal traits of humanity that scientists have overlooked, that human behavior can’t be replicated realistically without. All that left was for someone to figure out how people’s survival and reproduction have depended on these theatrical universals.
In the 1920s and 30s, Constatin Stanislavski, a Russian director, pioneered a psychological approach to theatre. He wrote all his notes in Russian, and they’ve never been translated into English. But today, Hollywood is founded on his work. That means if you can watch movies, you can learn evolutionary psychology.
The evolutionary origins of human psychology is easily the most controversial topic in the history of the world. Luckily for me, this field of study is so new that it didn’t exist back when I was in college. My eight years of post-secondary education revolved around human behavior and various ways simple parts of systems interact with each other to create wholes that seem to be greater than the sums of their parts. Officially, my education doesn’t add up to anything. So my career doesn’t depend on maintaining a professional image.
Before I get started on the scientists’ discoveries, I need to make a few more disclaimers.
Disclaimer #1: This is not remedial science class.
Science depends on observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability.
If you make a discovery that depends on people not being able to see any evidence, not being able to carry out your experiment on their own, not being allowed to critically examine your work, and ignoring self-contradictions in your work, that’s not called science, that’s called somebody making stuff up.
Religion, by definition, is an ideology that requires some pieces of information to be unobservable—like, the existence of your god. That means that your belief in your god doesn’t prove anything except that you believe in your god.
It’s important to point this out because one reason the field of human evolutionary science is so controversial is because it ventures so far into areas that traditionally have been considered religion—or philosophy. That doesn’t prove that science is a religion or a philosophy, or that religion or philosophy are science. That just proves that once upon a time people couldn’t figure out how to measure something scientifically, but now they have.
Disclaimer #2: Science is politically neutral. But our education system is not politically neutral.
Science is the pursuit of information. The way our education system works, people who are good at classroom science get to learn about science, and everyone else gets left out in the cold. The centralization of information creates a centralization of decision-making power. And that is not political neutrality.
If scientists are going to study a universal brain structure of our species, the only truly politically neutral way to do it is to make their discoveries available to everyone. You can just imagine what a small group of materially wealthy and highly educated people could do if they found out about a universal brain structure of humanity and then kept the information to themselves.
Distributing an understanding of the universal brain structure of humanity universally to humanity necessarily depends on explaining it in terms non-academic people can understand. Hence I make no attempt at academic formality. As every anthropologist knows, there is no culture of people that’s inherently superior to any other. And that includes academic culture.
Disclaimer #3: Here in America, the freedom of religion supposedly gives everyone the right to believe in anything they want. Most people assume that religious beliefs should not be subject to critical scrutiny. I am not one of those people.
For some reason, most Americans assume that the Constitution grants them the right to deny observable evidence if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. Clearly, logic and legality have come into conflict here.
Religious fundamentalism is a mental illness. If I was to lock my daughter in her upstairs bedroom for the rest of her life and never let her cut her hair, because I thought that would make a handsome prince come marry her, just because people have been telling the story of Rapunzel for centuries, I would be labeled mentally ill and locked up. I would be basing my perception of the world on an ancient myth, with no observable evidence to support my beliefs, and I would be acting upon my beliefs in a way that harmed other people.
The only difference between Charles Manson and George W. Bush is that Charles Manson’s followers never constituted a voting majority of Americans. Or even anything close, for that matter…
Well, one other difference springs to mind: Charles Manson’s followers only killed seven people.
Christian fundamentalists equate the battle of Armageddon with the path to eternal salvation. In a globally apocalyptic war, billions of people would die. I’m not opposed to the freedom of religion. I’m opposed to the Constitution being used to justify mass murder just for the sake of avoiding hurting the feelings of a certain group of people— even if they are the most politically powerful group of people in America.