Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion

Another good article from The Global Spiral (Metanexus Institute).

This long article looks at the role of religion in biocultural evolution -- the idea that "human evolution bypasses genetics and allows for intentional culturally-acquired adaptations and their cultural transmission between generations in a Lamarckian evolutionary pattern."

The notion of heritability of acquired characteristics -- or "soft inheritance" -- was out of favor for many years, but recent research into the ways that culture and environment can shape and modulate gene expression (which then can be passed on to offspring) have brought the idea back into vogue.

Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion

By William Grassie

In a world which has become conscious of its own self
And provides its own motive force,
What is most vitally necessary to the thinking earth is a faith—
And a great faith-- and ever more faith.
To know that we are not prisoners.
To know that there is a way out,
That there is air, and light, and love,
Somewhere, beyond the reach of all death.
To know this, to know that it is neither an illusion nor a fairy story. –
That, if we are not to perish smothered in the very stuff of our being,
That is what we must at all costs secure.
And it is there that we find what I may well be so bold as to call the evolutionary role of religions.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit paleontologist, (1881-1955) (Chardin 1970, 9).

Introduction

We live at an extraordinary moment in the natural history of the planet and the cultural evolution of our species. From a geological or paleontological perspective, humanity’s brief sojourn on this planet is as dramatic and significant as the invention of photosynthesis some two billion years ago. This is because human evolution bypasses genetics and allows for intentional culturally-acquired adaptations and their cultural transmission between generations in a Lamarckian evolutionary pattern. As humans are about to embark upon large-scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves, even as we have already engaged in large-scale environmental engineering, our biocultural evolution becomes literal and directed Lamarckism. This new pattern of evolution now dominates all life on Earth and places the values and intentions of humans as the driving force in the future evolution of the planet. Thus religion, broadly conceived of as the DNA of cultural replication, will take center stage in biocultural evolution in the 21st century.

My outline introduces the concept of biocultural evolution, particularly with reference to the Twentieth Century and the prospects for the Twenty-First Century. I then explore the concept of complex distributed systems to characterize all highly creative processes in both culture and nature. Subsequently, I turn to the problem of complexity horizons and the challenge that these present for traditional moral reflections. Humans are then characterized as a Lamarckian wild card in epic of evolution. I close by discussing the evolutionary role of religion.

Biocultural Evolution

Humans exist and evolve in a dynamic relationship with the rest of nature. In spite of our impressive cognitive and technological abilities, we remain after all fundamentally biological creatures. As evolved mammals, we are dependent on biological processes to sustain our individual and collective lives. To some extent all species both adapt into an environment as well as change that environment by their very presence, but with humans the capacity to change the environment increases dramatically. We see this certainly in the history of agriculture over the last 10,000 years, which has re-sculpted ecologies and supported a growing human population. Indeed, physical anthropologists discover, agriculture also changes our genetic make-up. There is a dynamic relationship between our biology and our culture, encoded in our genetic and neural evolution, but increasingly also projected outwards onto the environment, which we harness and transform to our perceived benefit.

In the twentieth century, there was a dramatic intensification of human editing of natural environments, which we see also in the realms of mining, construction, energy consumption, forestry, trade, travel, communications, and agriculture. J.R. McNeill provides a non-polemical overview of these changes in his book, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, bringing together diverse data-sources to tell the history of the lithosphere, the pedosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere, all increasing and profoundly transformed by the spheres of human activity on the planet (McNeill 2000).

It is worth reviewing some of these statistics, though they will be known to many already. Most dramatically, human population has increased four fold between 1890 and 1990. The total urban population of the world increased thirteen fold in the same time period. Today, there are over six billion humans on the planet and while birth rates are declining in most regions, we can still expect growth over the next few decades (McNeill 2000, 360-361).

Sustenance for this growth in human population required increased food production and energy consumption, as well as new systems for distributing clean water, sanitation, and the containment and cure of diseases. McNeill calculates that the world economy grew fourteen-fold in the period of 1890 to 1990, while industrial output grew forty-fold, all of this fueled by a sixteen-fold increase in energy use and a nine-fold increase in water consumption. The domestic cattle population grew four-fold in this period. The domestic pig population grew nine-fold. Land under cultivation doubled in this time frame, while forest area decreased by twenty percent. Marine fish catch increased thirty-five-fold in the last century and is now in radical decline save for a dramatic increase in “fish farming” (McNeill 2000, 360-361).

Demographers cited by McNeill estimate that about 80 billion hominids have lived in the past 4 million years for a total of 2.16 trillion years of human life lived on the planet. So while the twentieth century represents only 100 out of the 4 million years, it has hosted 20 percent of all human-years lived. Certainly this was a prodigious century by any measure.(McNeill 2000, 9)

[I often tell my students that given some kind of time machine, Pharaoh or Caesar would gladly change places with them to enjoy the opportunities for education, health care, travel, entertainment, consumption, construction, business, and “empire-building” that they have today. Of course, implied is also a plea to stop whining and try to leverage your good fortune through hard work.]

Many consider these dramatic changes with utopic hopes, others with apocalyptic fears. I will return to these considerations later, but it seems more productive initially to reflect more philosophically upon the nature of these highly creative processes. In order to do so I now introduce the concept of complex distributed systems.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century, The Evolutionary Role of Religion, biology, culture, Religion, evolution, William Grassie, The Global Spiral, Metanexus Institute, Lamarckian evolutionary pattern, soft evolution