Evolutionary Psychology and the Fall of Adam and Eve

Labor is a curse, says Genesis.

What does evolutionary psychology have to do with the Bible’s story of the Fall?

Yesterday my neighbor told me that her husband was feeling his age. After a lifetime of physical labor, his knees, back, and shoulders were causing him pain. In evolutionary terms, walking upright is a recent innovation, so knees, backs, and shoulders are still weak spots in our anatomy. In addition, sustained physical labor is an even more recent innovation. Evolutionary psychologists look for mismatches between the tribal life we evolved to live and our current conditions. We evolved our bodies and minds to prosper in the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle of 100 thousand years ago. Sustained physical labor looks like a mismatch to me. A hundred thousand years ago, there were no miners, lumberjacks, farmers, baggage handlers, or construction workers. Today, if you spend your life using your body differently from how it’s designed to be used, you suffer. As the book of Genesis says, a consequence of knowledge is labor, the sweat of one’s brow. This confluence between evolutionary analysis and a three thousand year old creation story is a fine example of how the world’s religious traditions are often at least half right, if you take them figuratively.

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat a magic fruit that makes them self-aware. As a result, they are denied the other magic fruit that would have made them immortal, and Yahweh curses them. Women are cursed with a painful childbirth and domineering husbands. Men are cursed with labor. This all makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. When humans evolved self-awareness and speech, we became aware of our mortality. “On the day you eat of it, you will die,” said Yahweh, and figuratively speaking, that’s true. When we learned to understand our own biographies, we saw ourselves die in our own mind’s eyes. As Mary Oliver conveys in her poem “The Black Snake,” animals that lack foreknowledge live as if they’re immortal. We’re not so lucky. As for the curse of painful childbirth, it’s the result of the oversize brain we recently evolved. In other words, when we evolved sentience, doing so cursed women with the pains of labor. Women also got the short end of the stick in the power struggle between the sexes. Men used their verbal ability to promise, threaten, and punish, allowing them to wield power over women, especially in settled societies. Men’s attitudes toward women have traditionally been proprietary. Finally, men are cursed with physical labor. The capacity to think ahead leads to hard work. For one thing, you see how your own labor can build up wealth for yourself in the future. You work harder than you otherwise would because you can foresee the benefits. For another thing, people with power over you can see how your labor could benefit them, and down through history powerful people have contrived countless ways to force the less powerful to do the heavy lifting. Today, our system is economic, and the wealthy can pay someone like my neighbor to spend his career doing physical labor. Without self-knowledge, our ancestors never worked themselves like we work ourselves or work each other.

In China, the Taoist Zhuangzi said much the same thing in his story of the horses’ hooves. In his story, wild horses are healthy and happy, while domesticated horses are neurotic and sickly. He makes the point that the same is true of people. Before the coming of the sages, we lived simply and happily, but now the sages have brought stress and confusion. Who are these sages? Not coincidentally, “Homo sapiens” means “sage,” literally “wise man.” The wise ones who changed everyone’s lives with their cleverness were humans, specifically those who evolved language. We’ve spread across the globe and invented an endless array of unnatural lifestyles for ourselves.

The cosmological beliefs found in ancient religious texts may be untenable today, but their poetic insights sometimes still ring true.