1:  Introduction   …………………………………………..  1

2:  The Web of Human Behavior   ……………………     8

3:  The Evolution of Religion   …………………………   22

4:  Evolution and the Course of World Civilization  …   27

5:  Evolution and Child Development   ………………   33

6:  The Evolution of Cultures   ………………………..   36

7:  The Evolution of Political Systems   ………………   42

8:  The Evolution of Economic Systems   ……………   44

9:  Evolution, the Environment, and the
Future of our Species   …………………………….   51

10:  Conclusion   ……………………………………….   66

Appendix A:  Biochemistry  …………………………….  70

Appendix B:  The Evolution of Violence   ……………   74

Appendix B:  The Evolution of Morality   …………….   78

Appendix C:   The Evolution of Gender Differences … 83

Appendix D:  The List of Human Universals  ………… 94

The Planetary Biology Library  ………………………… 98

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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.

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Now for what I call the Web of Human Behavior.  You could also call it the Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior.

If you’re an evolutionary psychologist, this is going to sound like it was written by a cave man.  As I said, I limit my vocabulary to words the general public can understand.

Emotion is a more powerful motivator by far than intellect.  Emotional communication is more powerful by far than intellectual communication.  And theatre turns emotional communication into a fine art.

Humans evolved as one species because the same set of biological laws affected all of our ancestors equally for all of our evolution.  If our ancestors had been affected by different sets of biological laws, we would’ve evolved as multiple species.  By now, that set of biological laws is written into our DNA, because everyone who didn’t feel like following them died out—natural selection.

All animal behavior, and consequently all human behavior, revolves around one thing:  The attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.

People engage in all kinds of activity that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with preserving the survival of their DNA.  I never said that it did.  I said that all human behavior revolves around the individual’s perception of offering him the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA.

All human emotions serve very specific functions in the original conditions of our evolution.  Emotions cause psychological effects in people that give them their perceptions that certain courses of action offer the most effective means to preserve the survival of their DNA.  Emotions also cause physiological effects in people that prepare them physically for that course of action.
For example, when people are faced with some overwhelming threat to their safety, they feel afraid.  That fear causes them to want to run away, which is usually the best way to survive an overwhelming threat.  It also makes them feel cold because it diverts a lot of blood to their legs to help them run.

For another example, things that make people feel disgusted cause them to gag, lose their appetite, and flare their nostrils, because for most of human evolution that was the best way people had to keep from eating rotten food.  We all do it now because everyone who didn’t do it died from food poisoning.  Even if you flare your nostrils, gag, and lose your appetite whenever you think about your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, you feel disgusted and you react the same way because on some level, the thing that your brain is best equipped to compare that person to is rotten food, and that reaction works well enough that natural selection hasn’t adapted a more specialized reaction.

And so on…

Emotions evolved in the original conditions of our evolution, but we don’t live in the original conditions of our evolution.  That’s why people’s perceptions of the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA are so often misled.

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All human emotion is caused by an interaction of five evolutionary traits of humanity.

First are the two evolutionary instincts shared by all animal species:  survival and reproduction.  In effect, those are just two different versions of the same instinct:  The instinct to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you.

The other three are the three basic mental abilities that combine to form human intellect, which enable us to perceive things that other animals can’t.  People have the ability to imagine abstract ideas, to perceive the passage of time, and to communicate abstract ideas among members of the species.  Other animals have these abilities to some degree, but humans have a clear advantage in all of them over all other species.

As Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili explain in their book Why God Won’t Go Away, animals’ instincts can only be triggered by direct stimulation of their senses—the sight of a predator or a potential mate, for example.  Humans’ instincts can be triggered by direct stimulation, but also by things they can imagine, things they can remember, or things they’ve heard about from other humans.  (Technically these things also apply to other animals to a lesser degree, but again humans have a clear advantage over all other animals here.)

Any time you, or anyone else, feel any emotion, you are reacting to something that involves either your survival or reproduction (or both).  You are reacting that way because of direct stimulation to your senses or because you imagine something, you can remember something, or because you’ve learned about something from someone else.  Of course you can be doing any number of those things and any combination of those things all at the same time, and some of them could be conscious while others are only subconscious.  The possible outcomes are virtually infinite, but all of those infinite possible outcomes originate from those five mental characteristics.

For instance, if you were walking through a forest and you knew grizzly bears lived there, you would feel afraid.   You would be alert for grizzly bears and for signs of grizzly bears.  You would be ready to run away if you saw a grizzly bear or any indications of a grizzly bear.

You would feel afraid because you had seen what grizzly bears did to someone else, or because you’d heard what grizzly bears did to someone else, and you could imagine what a grizzly bear would do to you.

If you saw something moving in the bushes, you could imagine it was a grizzly bear and react as if it was a grizzly bear, by dumping lots of adrenaline into your blood and running away.
That would give you a big head start over someone else who waited to see the actual grizzly bear before running away.  It wouldn’t matter if it was only a squirrel in the bushes, because by imagining it was a grizzly bear and running away, you preserved the survival of your DNA just the same.  As the saying goes, better safe than sorry.

A deer walking through the same forest would only have his “natural fear of everything” to protect him.  If he saw something moving in the bushes, he would only perceive it as “something moving in the bushes”; he wouldn’t imagine it was a grizzly bear.  He would stop whatever he was doing, look over, wait to see if anything happened, and if nothing happened, he would go back to whatever he was doing.  The only way he could learn to be more afraid of grizzly bears than he was already would be by surviving an attack by one.

Deer and grizzly bears are able to compete against each other as species because deer can run about as fast as grizzly bears.  Sometimes the deer win, and sometimes the bears win.
Humans can’t run as fast as grizzly bears, so we depend on other abilities to make up the difference.  By imagining that something moving in the bushes could mean a grizzly bear was coming, instead of running faster, we run sooner.

The deer fears the bear.  The human fears the idea of the bear.

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To see the basic ways emotions can affect people, we can look at the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs, which is used in education.  We can also look at the Five Human Motivators, which is a list used in marketing.  By combining the two lists we get one list of seven items, to which I add an eighth.  All human interests fall into these eight categories.  My proof of this is that I live in America in 2007, and if there was anything else that people felt was important in life besides these eight things, you can be sure that advertisers would’ve found it by now!

In descending order of general importance they are:  Survival, safety, reproduction, social, self-gratification, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and fulfillment of self-fulfillment.
Survival refers to anything involving immediate physiological necessities:  food, water, oxygen, body temperature, and rest.

Safety refers to anything involving physical safety and avoiding risks to physical safety.  This is a direct product of the survival instinct.

Reproduction refers to anything involving literal reproduction, romantic relationships, raising children, or recreational sex.

Social refers to membership in groups and interpersonal relations of all kinds.  All species of primates are social animals for the same reasons people are:  because they can survive best by cooperating in groups.

Self gratification refers to anything that makes a person feel good.  Technically, this isn’t an instinct; it is the superficial result of the satisfaction of an instinct.  Good feelings are the physiological reward for satisfying instincts.  Since people have found so many ways to trigger superficial results of the satisfaction of instincts that have nothing to do with the actual satisfaction of their instincts, self-gratification is worth listing separately as a motivator.  One good example is fruit-flavored candy:  Candy tastes good because it tastes like ripe fruit that will keep you alive, even though eating candy won’t keep you alive.

Self-actualization refers to the use of abilities.  As I use the term here, an ability is any personal capacity a person can use to advance his interests.  Some direct examples are the abilities to hunt, to cook, and to work to earn a paycheck.  Less direct examples include the ability to express oneself through dance, the ability to find (superficial) reproductive satisfaction with a member of the same gender, and the ability to search for better situations in which to use your abilities.  Self-actualization applies differently to everyone, but applies in some way to everyone.  For all of human evolution, people have depended on using whatever abilities they’ve had to preserve the survival of their DNA.  If people are prevented from using their abilities to preserve the survival of their DNA in the most effective means perceivable, they will feel unsatisfied with their lives.  That includes people who get stuck working at dead end jobs, dancers who aren’t allowed to dance, and homosexuals who are prevented from pursuing homosexual relationships. You’re probably listening to me talk right now to use your abilities to learn something new that you can put to use in your life somehow.

Self-fulfillment is the fullest use of an ability.  Throughout human evolution, using abilities to their fullest potential was usually the best way for people to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable.  Otherwise, self-fulfillment is an extension of self-actualization.

Fulfillment of self-fulfillment is the use of all of one’s abilities to their fullest extents—or at least, their fullest extents possible, given the situation.  For all of human evolution, the single best way for an individual to preserve the survival of his DNA was to use all of his abilities to their fullest potentials.  Fulfillment of self-fulfillment gives you the sense that your life is complete. I had to add this one to the list myself because fulfillment of self-fulfillment is useless in marketing, because you can’t sell stuff to people who already feel like their lives are complete.

Here’s one example of how an emotional situation can involve multiple interactions of these thirteen items:  If a man hooks up in a romantic relationship with a desirable woman, he satisfies his reproductive instinct by acquiring an attractive mate.

This applies in the short term to his desire to establish such a relationship in the first place, and it can apply in the longer term if he intends to have children with the woman.

If the woman had resources that the man needed to satisfy his survival and/or safety motivations, the relationship could serve those purposes also.

Creating an important relationship with another person serves a social function.

A romantic relationship with a desirable woman could also be a status symbol among his friends, which is another social function.

The relationship can yield self-actualization, self-fulfillment, or fulfillment of self-fulfillment depending on the degree to which he was satisfied with his ability to seek and find a mate.

The relationship can also satisfy those motivations if it offers him further opportunities to use his abilities.

The relationship will yield self-gratification by making the man feel good as a result of satisfying any of those motivations.  Or… the man could be preoccupied with feeling like he’s satisfying his motivations, even though he isn’t.  Basically, he would be doing things that seemed like they should satisfy his motivations and he would be imagining that they were satisfying his motivations, even though they weren’t really.

He would be imagining that their relationship was working out the way he wanted it to, just so he could go on feeling good about it.  Then he would be assuming that the fact that he felt good about the relationship proved that it was working out.  And if the woman felt like it wasn’t working out, she must just be making it all up.  I’m sure we’ve all had relationships like that at some point, right?

You could say that he’s not in love with the woman; he’s just in love with the feeling of being in love.   The woman was just the catalyst he needed to start the process.

So he better not be surprised when the woman kicks him out of her bed because she realizes that as far as he’s concerned, any other woman could serve in her place equally well.

As anticlimactic as I know it sounds for me to break love down into a mathematical equation, when Juliet stood on her balcony and said, “Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?” this is what she was feeling. She remembered Romeo made her feel good in the past, and she imagined he would make her feel good again in the future, so she perceived his presence to offer her the most effective means to preserve the survival of her DNA.

As it turns out, she was wrong, because by the end of the play they were both dead, but at the time, that’s what she perceived.

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I count five factors outside a person’s basic genetic makeup as a member of the Homo sapiens species that affects his decision making process.  These factors could be divided up differently, and you’re welcome to do that for your own use, but I find that dividing them this way makes them the easiest to explain.  They are, in no particular order: abilities, skills, available resources, personal history, and cultural background.  You could add in some other things like liabilities, opportunities, information, or personality if it makes the list easier to use, but I don’t bother because ultimately those additional categories fit into the five basic categories in various ways.   A liability is a negative resource, an opportunity is an abstract type of resource, information is either a skill, an ability, or a resource, and personality is made up of everything in the Web of Human Behavior.

I count everything that makes an individual unique for reasons beyond his own control as an ability.  This includes all genetic traits, all physical abilities regardless of their source, and anything else that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. Sight, for instance, is the ability to see.  Intelligence is the ability to think.  Poor health is an inability to endure harsh environments.  An assertive personality gives a person a great ability to assert himself.  For a personal example, I’m 6’3”, which makes the top of my refrigerator look like a convenient place to put things.

Individual skills are any skills that a person has learned.  The better he is at the skill, the more he will be able to use it to preserve the survival of her DNA.  For example, to a person who can play the guitar, a guitar looks like an instrument she can play.  To someone who can’t play guitar, it doesn’t.

Available resources consist of anything the person has, or doesn’t have, to draw upon beyond his physical self to achieve his objective.  If the person has resources and can use them, they will affect his decision-making.  If the person doesn’t have them and needs them, they will affect his decision making differently.  If the person has them but can’t use them in a situation, they won’t affect his decision-making. This includes physical resources, but also more abstract things, like time, another person’s personality, the laws of physics, and man-made laws.  For instance, a person who has 25 minutes to drive to work will make different decisions based on that time resource depending on whether he needs 20 minutes to drive to work, 25 minutes, or 30 minutes.

Personal history overlaps somewhat with skills, because it includes everything the person has ever learned.  Unlike skills, it includes everything the person has learned that doesn’t directly relate to the situation.  That can include things that relate to the situation indirectly, and things that the person thinks relate to the situation but don’t actually.  For instance, if a woman has been physically abused, if a man raises his voice at her she probably will perceive him as a threat, so she will start trying to escape abuse—even if she doesn’t have specific skills to use in escaping abuse, and even if she was no danger of being abused in this case. If the man who raised his voice didn’t intend to abuse the woman, then the woman’s reactions won’t make sense to him.

A person’s cultural background will teach him values of objectives and approaches—that is, objectives he should or shouldn’t work toward, and ways he should or shouldn’t work toward them.  This overlaps with personal history, but it is a specific source of abstract influences on the person’s decision-making.  It is the most pervasive and least tangible form of learning from life experiences, because the person doesn’t necessarily learn from specific events or even realize he is learning from them.  Instead, cultural values are learned gradually over time by association.  Usually the person takes them for granted as the way the world is supposed to be, without realizing it’s only the way the world is supposed to be according to his own culture.  Everyone who belongs to a minority already knows how that works.

That’s it.  All human behavior revolves around these 18 points.  Any time you feel an emotion, you are being affected by some combination of these.  Any time someone else feels an emotion, they are being affected by some combination of these.  Any time you have a disagreement with someone else, the two of you are being affected differently by these 18 things.  Usually the best way to resolve your disagreement, or at least to begin to understand it, is to identify where it originates.  Basically, every main character in Shakespeare’s plays figured this out the hard way.  Shakespeare was able to write plays about this happening to people because he figured it all out ahead of time.

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All life depends on energy.  That means all life revolves around the efficient expenditure of personal energy.  No one ever undertakes any course of action that they perceive at the time to be a waste of personal energy—because to waste energy would contradict the survival instinct.  (However, a person could waste energy intentionally for the self actualization value of proving that he was capable of wasting energy, in which case he would be expending his energy as efficiently as possible to achieve his goal of proving he could waste energy.  When I say that theatrical directors have turned understanding human behavior into a fine art, I’m not joking!)

Ultimately, people always expend their energy in whatever way they perceive to best preserve the survival of their DNA.  A lot of times people’s perceptions are misguided, but people always act upon that perception.

Take a suicide bomber for example.  A suicide bomber blows himself up because he perceives that to offer him the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA.  If he had children and blew himself up in order to kill some people who were threatening his children, he would be helping to preserve the survival of his DNA.  If he didn’t have children but did have nieces or nephews, he would still be helping to preserve the survival of his DNA, because his nieces and nephews carry some of the DNA he inherited from his parents, even though it’s not as much as his own children would carry.  But what if he doesn’t have any children, nieces, or nephews?

If you can convince someone that acting in a certain way will result in his living forever in eternal paradise, literally you have taught the person to perceive that pursuing that course of action will preserve the survival of his DNA in the most effective way imaginable.  If he also gets to spend the rest of eternity with his family or gets 72 virgins out of the deal, so much the better!  There is no scientific evidence to suggest these perceptions have anything to do with the actual preservation of people’s DNA, but people’s instincts don’t make them aware of the existence of their DNA.  People’s instincts make them feel like surviving and reproducing, and if you can offer them the most perfect forms of survival and reproduction they can imagine, that can go a long way toward convincing them to do anything.

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Any time you communicate with anyone, you are attempting to evoke a favorable response from the person.  You want the person to react in a certain way, so you are communicating to try to get them to feel like reacting in the way you want.  Of course, if the other person is communicating with you too, it means they want something out of the deal, and they’re trying to make you feel like giving it to them.  In general, the best way to make the situation turn out favorably for yourself is to find a way to make it turn out favorably for the other person too.  If it turns out favorably for you but unfavorably for the other person, you might win in the short run, but you can expect the other person to remember it and to start using his imagination to plot his revenge!

Any time you’re communicating with anyone and their communication seems unclear, watch how the person is expending their energy, through their body language, their tone of voice, their facial expressions, and the words they’re using.  The person is trying to do one of two things:  survive or reproduce (or both).  They are using three mental abilities to help them do that, there are eight basic ways they can pursue their goals, and there are five additional factors that can affect them.  They are communicating with you to try to get you to react in a way that will prove favorable to their goals.  They are expending their energy in what they perceive to be the most efficient means to achieve their goals.

So:
How are they
Expending their energy
To try to evoke
A reaction from you
That they perceive
To benefit
Their survival and reproduction,
As efficiently
As possible?

If you can answer that question, you can understand what the person is doing.  Even if you can’t answer that question, by trying to answer it, at least you can move yourself closer to understanding what they’re doing.

I call this the Web of Human Behavior because by establishing 18 points of reference you can deconstruct any emotional situation from romantic relationships to terrorist attacks.  By doing so, you can identify what you are trying to do and what the other person is trying to do.  Depending on the situation, you can then take an active approach to achieving your goals, to maintaining your emotional well being, and (if possible) to resolving conflicts in ways you and the other person will find mutually beneficial.

Now let’s look at how this Web of Human Behavior has brought us to some important landmarks in human evolution…

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Religion and spirituality are universal constants of humanity.  Even though some individual people don’t practice religion or spirituality, in every part of the world there are people who do.
Every religion in the world is exactly the same as every other religion in the world.  Every religion in the world was created to serve the needs of Homo sapiens who are evolutionarily equal and have asked the same questions about life.  Every group of people in the world found answers to those questions that satisfied them, by extrapolating upon what they did understand about the world to try to explain the things they didn’t understand.
Every religion in the world offers its followers the same basic things, which include:  An explanation for what makes the universe work, some way for people to escape their physical mortality, ways for people to build healthy families and strong communities, and ways for people to make themselves feel satisfied with their lives.  Any argument over whose religion is better than whose is impossible to win, because everything about the two religions that has observable evidence to support it is identical, and everything that’s different doesn’t have any observable evidence to support it.

In effect, in the same way that different sects of Christianity are just different versions of the same basic religion, every religion in the world is just a different sect of one universal religion of humanity.

Some religions are practiced in ways that are emotionally or physically harmful to people, and some people even equate global mass suicide with eternal salvation, but the religions are not responsible for that, people are responsible for that.   Religions are universal constants of humanity.  Globally suicidal religions are not universal constants of humanity.

Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili examine the evolutionary origins of religion in their book Why God Won’t Go Away.   The chain of logic they draw goes like this:
The evolution of human intellect made humans the dominant species of the world, because it gave humans an advantage in hunting that no animal species was equipped to defend itself against.  Humans could remember seeing animals in a certain place at a certain time of the year, they could imagine seeing them there again at the same time next year, and they could make plans among themselves to cooperate in hunting the animals.  That made humans the only species in the world that could always change their hunting tactics faster than their prey could evolve defenses against them.

Well those same abilities also made humans the only species capable of perceiving their own mortality at all times.  The abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate also gave them the abilities to remember people dying, to hear about people dying, and to imagine themselves dying.  That made them perceive a permanent and inescapable threat to their survival.  That forced them, essentially, to write an escape clause to life, so they could perceive a way to survive their mortality.  Religion was an evolutionary inevitability, because without it, our entire species would’ve become extinct due to mass clinical depression.

Those other three universal constants of religion followed close behind the first.  Human intellect gave people the ability to wonder how the universe worked and how to make themselves happy, so every group of people figured out ways to answer those questions based on the information they had to work with.  While they were telling stories to answer those questions, it was easy to add in stories about how people had to act to make their communities function—morality, in other words.

(I should add that morality is a universal constant of humanity.  Christian morality isn’t a universal constant of humanity.  Every group of people has discovered that they can teach their children to feel like acting in whatever way people need to act in order to make their communities function.  Christians don’t have a monopoly on morality, and neither does any other group of people.)

Every philosophical ideology that serves in the place of religion also offers its followers these four universal constants.  Take Atheism, for example.

What makes the universe work?

The laws of physics, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t, but we keep searching for more answers.

How can people survive their physical mortality?

There’s a lot of different ways this could be answered, but I think this is the most profound:  Everyone lives forever in the effects that their lives have on the world.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was recognized as a hero in his life, and Adolf Hitler was recognized as a villain in his.  Now, decades after their deaths, one of them is still remembered as a hero, and the effects of his life are still benefiting people.  The other is still remembered as a villain, and people are still trying to erase the effects his life had on the world.

How can people build strong families and healthy communities?

A good place to start is by learning about things like physics, environmental science, child psychology, and human sciences in general.

Then, just act the way people do on Sesame Street.  It’s really not that difficult.  Conflict resolution, cooperation, fairness, responsibility, sharing, turn taking, and pretty much everything else you learn on Sesame Street are universal constants of humanity.

How can people make themselves feel satisfied with their lives?

Well that’s up to you to figure out.  Obeying the laws of physics is always a good idea.  Another good trick is abandoning traditional religious morality that doesn’t serve any purpose anymore.  You can drink and have sex all you want now without undermining society or ruining your life, so long as you do it responsibly and avoid all those big time negative consequences that can come with either of those.

Buddhism throws in a couple of unusual twists that at first glance seem to disprove two of the universal constants of religion, even though they don’t really.

What makes the universe work?

Nothing.  The universe sprang forth out of nothing, and we are all nothing.

How can people escape their physical mortality?

You can’t.  When you die, you cease to exist.

While it is true numerically speaking that “nothing” means “the absence of anything”, once you give that nothing a name, it becomes something, because it becomes an idea that people can think about.

Likewise, the ultimate goal of asking, “How can people escape their physical mortality?” is to find an answer to the question.  Once you answer the question, you give the people something they can prepare themselves for.  They survive their physical mortality by learning to accept it.
Once you accept that the force that powers the universe is called “nothing”, and you accept that when you die you become “nothing”, you’ve accepted that when you die you become one with the force that powers the universe.  Change a couple of words around there and suddenly we’re talking about Christianity.

See what I mean about every religion in the world being a different sect of one universal religion of humanity?

Filed under: h: Turning the Tide on Religious Fundamentalism by Ezra
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