How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (30 page)

So, do apes have language? The first attempts to teach languages to apes in the 1950s were notoriously unsuccessful, but that was because psychologists had tried to teach English to species that lacked the vocal apparatus to produce the sounds of human speech. They were pal-pably more successful when, setting verbal languages aside, they tried to teach them sign languages. So far the American deaf-and-dumb language, ASL, has been taught to several chimps, a gorilla and an orang, while languages that use arbitrary shapes on a computer keyboard to stand for words have been taught to nearly a dozen bonobos and chimpanzees.

By far the most successful of these has been the justifi-ably famous Kanzi, a bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee. Kanzi’s ability to understand spoken English sentences, and reply using his keyboard, is now legendary. To be sure, neither Kanzi nor any of the other apes has language in the sense that you and I have it. In fact, their language
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skills are probably comparable to those of a three- or four-year-old human child, at best.

But, in one important respect, language is really only a clever means to an end. Of itself, it is merely a mechanism for transmitting knowledge from one individual to another. The real issue is surely the mental abilities that underlie language. So we are forced in the end to confront the thorny problem of exploring minds without the benefit of language.

So, what is it, then, that makes us human? The answer we are being driven inexorably towards has to do with the ability to understand the mind of another individual. As we saw earlier, recent work by developmental psychologists has suggested that human children lack this capacity (known as ‘theory of mind’) when they are born, but develop it quite suddenly at around four years of age. Prior to this, children do not realise that other individuals can hold a belief about the world that is different from their own. If they know that someone has eaten the sweets in the tin, then they assume that everyone knows that. But eventually they come to realise that others can hold beliefs which they know to be false.

The importance of having a theory of mind is that it opens the way to almost everything else that is human. It allows us to create literature, to invent religions and do science. It allows us to create propaganda, to be political and to produce advertising, for all these depend on the ability both to understand what is in another’s mind and to manipulate the contents of that mind in order to change another individual’s behaviour.

We now know that this unique ability, the very cornerstone in fact on which language itself depends, is not
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shared by all humans. Autistic people lack theory of mind: indeed, this is the essential defining characteristic of autism. Nonetheless, autistic people can be of normal, sometimes even supernormal, intelligence in other respects – remember the superhuman memory for numbers of Dustin Hoffman’s character in
Rain Man
? What autists universally cannot do is handle social relationships, because they cannot think themselves into someone else’s mind well enough to understand the subtle processes of human social interaction.

The substantive issue at this juncture is whether we humans are unique in respect of this ability. Despite the sometimes clever behaviour, even understanding, exhibited by your cat or dog, there is no evidence to suggest that any other species is able to think itself into another’s mind. The only exception seems to be the great apes, but even they only do about as well as four-year-old children who are in the process of acquiring theory of mind.

But herein lies the quandary. For it seems that we share with great apes (even if only just) the special cognitive abilities like theory of mind that underpin our moral capacity and make us human, yet this is something that we do not share with all humans (infants, autists and the severely mentally handicapped seem to lack these capacities). But on the other hand, the genetics says we share more in common with these humans than with the great apes. So how should we decide who is a moral being and who is not?

No one would doubt the humanness of autistic people, any more than they would doubt the humanness of a one-year-old child. And no one would question either group’s right to be treated to the full panoply of human rights. If
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we accept (as we should) that such individuals are eligible to belong to our community of equals, then we must ask ourselves how we should view those species that share the same set of cognitive properties even though they may not be quite so closely related to us as other humans are.

That said, it is one thing to say that we should feel an obligation to look after the interests of other species, and quite another to infer from this that these species have a human capacity to make moral judgements – although something like this did in fact happen in medieval times. A pig was once tried for murdering its master, whom it had gored to death. Duly condemned, it was executed for its heinous crime. We might find that bizarre now, but it is perhaps just another example of how easily we attribute these human-like capacities to have intentions to other species. The short answer is that there is no substantive evidence to suggest that any species other than humans have a moral sense. In this respect, maybe we are unique. That might be because having a moral sense actually requires more than second-order intentionality, and no species other than humans can aspire to that. It may be no accident that these high orders of intentionality are also required for full-blown religion in the sense in which we are familiar with it in humans, and that moral codes are invariably closely tied into religious beliefs. So let’s finally turn to religion.
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History tells us that not all the Victorians were impressed by Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution. They seemed to strike at the very heart of the biblical story of creation, and, what was perhaps worse, they challenged our exalted view of ourselves relative to the rest of creation. Wisely, Darwin chose to keep his opinions on the subject of religion to himself. And, following his lead, evolutionary biologists have, by and large, studiously continued to ignore God ever since, preferring to leave discussions of this rather contentious topic to sociologists and anthropologists.

But, in the last few years, God has finally come in from the cold and been placed under the evolutionary micro-scope. It is not clear what has triggered this interest, but a significant factor has probably been the growing realisation that religion
is
a real evolutionary puzzle – one that is intimately tied up with humans’ sometimes disconcerting willingness both to behave prosocially (act altruistically towards those they never expect to see again) and, more puzzling still, to submit themselves to the community will, especially where religious belief is concerned. No self-respecting baboon or chimpanzee would ever will-
[Page 279] ingly kow-tow to the good, the bad or the genuinely ugly in quite the way humans seem prepared to do.

Religious belief is a real conundrum. In our everyday lives, most of us make at least some effort to check the truth of claims for ourselves. Yet when it comes to religion, it seems that we are most persuaded by stories that contra-dict the known laws of physics. As the experimental work of anthropologists Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer has convincingly demonstrated, humans seem to find tales of supernatural beings walking on water, raising the dead, passing through walls and foretelling and even influencing the future especially believable. But, at the same time, we expect our gods to have normal human feelings and emotions. We like our miracles, and those who perform them, to have just the right mix of otherworldliness and everyday humanness.

Why are we humans so willing to commit to beliefs we can never hope to verify? You might well think, along with that great paragon of philosophical common sense Karl Popper, that this question falls well outside the realm of scientific investigation. But evolutionary biologists have begun to challenge that convenient assumption. Given that religious behaviour seems to be universal among humans, and is often very costly, then it becomes increasingly difficult to duck the issue and write it off as froth on the evolutionary landscape. On the face of it, religious behaviour seems to be at odds with everything biologists hold dear. The reductionist view sees us as mere vehicles for our selfish genes – yet religions embrace charity to
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strangers, submission to the will of the community, and even martyrdom.

Even so, the biggest stumbling block for evolutionary biologists has been recognising that religion might have a functional advantage. If a biological trait has evolved, we want to know what use it is – and by that we mean how its possession makes an individual better adapted to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation. That’s not always apparent where religion is concerned, especially where Franciscan charity or martyrdom are concerned. This apparent maladaptiveness of religion has prompted some evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists to conclude that religion is simply a functionless by-product of some more useful aspect of our cognition that is directly involved in fitness-maximising behaviour.

While it probably is true that religion parasitises cognitive mechanisms that evolved for some more general purpose, it does not follow that such behaviour is biologically non-functional or maladaptive. For one thing, the claim that something so costly in terms of the time and money spent on it, never mind the costs of martyrdom, is functionless is simply naïve: it is singularly unlikely that anything that costly could evolve even as a by-product of something else. Besides, humans just aren’t that stupid. The problem really arises because most of those who now dabble in this area and promote the religion-is-mal-adaptive view are cognitive scientists and psychologists rather than evolutionary biologists: as a result, their understanding of evolution is, shall we say, at best challenged. They think only in terms of immediate benefits to the individual: I choose a mate, and benefit by siring offspring with them.
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But for social species like primates in general, and humans in particular, this isn’t always so. Multi-level selection processes are especially important for us because many of our solutions to the problems of survival and successful reproduction are social (we co-operate to achieve those ends more successfully), and social solutions require an intermediate step – making sure that the community pulls together. This is not to be confused with group selection – evolutionary biologists’ big bête noire and unacceptable no-go area because it assumes that the benefit to the group is all that matters. Rather, this is to observe that some benefits to the individual come through group-level functions. That’s a very different thing, and its implications have not been widely appreciated until very recently.

In recent years, evolutionary biologists including myself have come to realise that there are some important aspects of religion which do seem to have explicit benefits. In identifying these, we can start to pin down the origins of religion itself, leading us towards answers to two fundamental questions: why is religious belief so common, and when did it begin?

We can identify at least four ways in which religion might be of benefit in terms of evolutionary fitness. The first is to give sufficient explanatory structure to the universe to allow us to control it, perhaps through the inter-cession of a spirit world – religion as a form of primitive, albeit flawed science that allows us to predict and control the future better. The second is to make us feel better about life, or at least more resigned to its vagaries – Marx’s ‘opium of the people’. A third possibility is that religions provide and enforce some kind of moral code,
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so keeping social order. And finally, religion might bring a sense of communality, of group membership.

The first idea – religion as cosmic controller – seems highly plausible, given that many religious practices aim to cure diseases and foretell or influence the future. It was the view favoured by Freud. However, believing I can control the world is not the same thing as actually being able to control the world, and one might expect a species as smart as humans to figure out that it doesn’t always work. So this proposal seems inadequate as an explanation for humans’ apparent willingness to believe religious claims despite the evidence. Rather, I suspect that this benefit came about as a by-product once our ancestors had evolved religion for one of the other reasons – and thus had a big enough brain to figure out some metaphysical theories about the world.

The second hypothesis, Marx’s opium, seems more promising. In fact, it turns out that religion really does make you feel better. Recent sociological studies have demonstrated that, compared to non-religious people, the actively religious are happier, live longer, suffer fewer physical and mental illnesses and recover faster from medical interventions such as surgery. All this, of course, is bad news for those of us who are not religious, but it might at least prompt us to ask why and how religion imparts its feel-good factor. I’ll come back to that later.

The other two options are concerned with individuals benefiting from being part of a cohesive, supportive group. Moral codes play an obvious role in ensuring that group members keep singing from the same hymn sheet. Nevertheless, the sort of formalised moral codes preached and enforced by today’s major religions are unlikely to
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provide much insight into the beginnings of religious belief. They are associated with the rise of the so-called doctri-nal or world religions with their bureaucratic structures and the alliance between Church and State. Most people who study religion believe that the earliest religions were more like the shamanic religions found in traditional small-scale societies. These are quite individualistic, even though some individuals – shamans, medicine men, wise women and the like – are acknowledged as having special powers. Shamanic religions are religions of emotion not intellect, with the emphasis on religious experience rather than the imposition of codes of behaviour.