Creatures of Love

Love is what humans do best. Some people will tell you that if we’re made of matter, then you can’t explain love. But science explains love as something we mammals evolved long ago. Birds have also evolved love, and maybe some dinosaurs did, but we mammals are better at it than any other animals have ever been. First, mammal mothers evolved love for their children, and vice versa. Mammal mothers care for their young with a devotion and intimacy that you just don’t see everywhere. Eventually we evolved families, some small and some extended. Families are havens of mutual affection and care, in a word—love. You rarely see a loving family among non-mammals, certainly nothing like an elephant herd or an orca pod. As for us humans, we’re the mammals that crank love up to 11. Human fathers love their mates and their children, not always but a lot more often than mammals in general. Lately, we humans have repurposed familial love, and now we have lifelong friendships between unrelated individuals.

Love is Biological

For us humans, love goes back for tens of millions years at least, and it is in our biology. We respond to our lovers, our friends, and our kin not just on a verbal or social level but with our biological bodies. Women evolved subcutaneous fat and gave themselves the enticing curves so adored by men. Chimp females are nothing to look at, not even to a male chimp, but human women are sexy, sometimes even to other women. On the hormonal level, seeing a sexy woman increases a man’s testosterone, but a woman’s tears reduce it. Human semen includes oxytocin, the hormone that helps people fall in love. Tender touch, meanwhile, induces us to release our own oxytocin. If love is blind, maybe that’s because hormones are blind, too. Mothers and children love each other with instincts that go back at least to the first mammals, over 200 million years ago. Thanks to our social structure, human mothers and children can love each other their whole lives rather than parting ways when the child matures. We also love our tribes, especially when we're united by our instincts for song and dance. It might sound strange for love to be an evolved, natural thing, but it’s right there in our flesh and blood.

Love is Cultural

For its part, cultural evolution has been good to love. When we evolved speech (50 to 100 thousand years ago), we created along with it something unprecedented: deliberate culture. You might call that the fall of man, but that’s another story. In some ways we humans have used deliberate culture to weaken family bonds. Ancient Hebrews, for example, were commanded to kill their own sons if those sons worshiped foreign gods. More often, however, we’ve used culture to exalt love and to spread it wider. When we became behaviorally modern in Africa 50 thousand years ago, our love extended only to our own respective tribes. Killing an outsider man was not murder, and abducting an outsider woman was not rape. We have done a lot to promote love since then. First-century Greek Christians went so far as to identify love with the highest good, saying “God is love.” We humans are no fools, and we can all see that reciprocal kindness is going to get us further overall than fighting over everything. That’s what gives Marxism its appeal. Civilizations have succeeded to the extent that they could get tremendous numbers of people cooperating and trading instead of competing and warring. Modern society, by and large, has used its wealth and power to extend dignity, autonomy, and security to more and more people. If biological evolution gave us an exceptionally love-oriented genome, cultural evolution confirms and exaggerates love’s power.

Love is Magical

It’s true that love feels uplifting, transforming, eternal, and spiritual. There’s no denying that. I’m only denying that it’s supernatural. Terence McKenna, who advocated a psychedelic worldview, said that love is one area of life where everyday people are most likely to experience magic. That has been true for me. But experiencing magic doesn’t mean believing it. I experience the earth as still, but I know it’s moving. I experience English as the natural way to phrase one’s thoughts, but I know it isn’t. Love is magical not because it’s supernatural but because we evolved to feel it as magical. After all, love has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Love gets humans with hundreds of millions of years of selfish instincts to pitch in together for the long haul.

Remember

Plato wants you to think that true love is immaterial and that nothing material can be true. Don’t believe him.

2011

Was C. S. Lewis Right?

C. S. Lewis said morality is real.

C. S. Lewis was right. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, you can imagine how it galls me to admit that Lewis was right about anything. After all, it’s Lewis who tried to trick kids into believing in Christ the magic lion. He also waged a losing battle against the historical understanding of Jesus, a topic dear to my heart. He even popularized the falsehood that Jesus couldn’t have been a wise mortal teacher because he claimed to be God. His Narnia books creeped me out a little, but his masterwork, Abolition of Man (1943), made my teenage soul burn with indignation. So how could I ever concede that Lewis was right about anything? Strangely enough, my reading in evolutionary psychology has given me a new appreciation of the argument in Abolition of Man. When Lewis defended morality as based on something real rather than arbitrary, he was onto something, even if he ended up only half right overall.

Lewis championed old-fashioned values, and he opposed the trendy idea that morality, like all culture, is arbitrary. To support his thesis that values were objective, he amassed evidence from around the world that different cultures have similar moral codes. He refers to these universal moral concepts as the “Tao” (meaning “Way”). In arguing that morality is real, Lewis is right. Morality isn’t just something we humans made up, like alphabets or the rules of chess.

But Lewis is only half right. Like the cultural relativists of his time, he attributed morality rather strictly to learning. In Abolition, he wrote that modern education was creating “men without chests.” These disastrously modern people reportedly had an intellect (the head) that was divorced from their animal nature (the guts), with no trunk to unite these two parts of the human being. He wrote that the wrong sort of education was creating people incapable of virtue. Like George Orwell after him, he prophesied a future in which a cadre of clinical experts could control the masses by controlling their education. The rank and file, in this view, could be reduced to living robots. On this point, Lewis is wrong.

After these dire warnings, the rest of the 20th century showed that humans are built of sterner stuff than Lewis imagined. Every new campaign to revolutionize human society fell in the face of primeval human nature. Reformers have improved society dramatically, but the revolutionaries all failed to reprogram human psychology. Even B. F. Skinner’s learned, modern utopian dream proved to be just that—a dream. The mind control experiments of the Cold War failed. Communism failed to create the new man, and now man is creating the new Communism. We humans didn’t get where we are by being easy to control. Sure, we adapt to the lives we’re born to, but we adapt to pursue our own instinctive goals. That’s why totalitarian regimes have always failed to get people to care more about the State than about their friends and their family. We evolved to have friends and family but not to have a State. Cultural relativists say that the social environment defines human personality. Certainly we individual humans do turn out differently in part based on our different social environments. But society shapes the individual along lines that evolution laid out for us long ago. Like Orwell, B. F. Skinner, and Mao, Lewis underestimated the resilience of human nature.

Morality isn't merely inculcated fresh into each new juvenile brain. Evolutionary psychologists have revealed morality to consist of evolved adaptations. Traits such as sympathy, the conscience, concern for the young, a sense of justice, and the urge to punish cheaters turn out to be social instincts built into us by thousands of generations of natural selection. The Tao that Lewis identified is real even if no one teaches it to you. Lewis thought that morality was separate from one’s natural, animal self because his morality was supernatural. Now we can see that morality evolved naturally. The human ape is incredibly social and incredibly intelligent, so moral behavior has long helped our ancestors get their genes into succeeding generations. Since morality is natural instead of magical, maybe Lewis was not even half right, but only a third. That much I can admit with minimum heartburn.

Related post: Reading About Religion, with a good dose of social instincts.

2011

Meet Your Maker: Evolution 

Humans are created beings, literally “creatures.” That means we didn’t just happen. Something must have created us. Planets, crystals, and meteorites are cool, but they aren’t creatures; living things are. As Richard Dawkins explains, all organisms are creatures, engineered by the blind process of evolution. When you understand evolution to be your creator, it naturally helps you to understand yourself. Evolution illuminates your connection to the living world, your separation from it, your discontent in modern society, and your unique position in the world of living things.

Understanding evolution to be your creator means affirming your continuity with the living world. First Plato and then the medieval Church tried to put humans on the other side of a divide, with flesh on the animal side and our true, immaterial selves on the spiritual side. But modern science affirms that our nerves, sensations, feelings, and even thoughts are of the flesh. The love that a momma bear feels for her cubs is something like the love a human mother feels for her children—Plato be damned. We are animals not according to some dry categorization but by the raw fact of flesh-and-blood descent.

Paradoxically, evolution tells us not only that we’re connected to the rest of the living world but also that we are something new under the sun. We humans use symbols, speech, language, thought, deliberation, and logic. We even use our abstract, thinking brains to understand evolution, our very creator. In this way, we are different from anything else that terrestrial evolution has ever created. In particular, we have internal autobiographies, what Daniel Dennett calls narrative centers of gravity. That makes us special, literally different as a “species.”

If evolution is our creator, then it is also the source of our discontent. Spiritual, political, and reforming idealists have generally understood society to be in some sense evil or unnatural. Marxists and Christians disagree on human nature but agree that everyday society doesn’t represent the right way for people to live. Evolution tells us that we are primarily evolved for life in a tribal society, and when there’s a mismatch between our primeval instincts and our modern lifestyles, that spells trouble.

Finally, if evolution is our creator, then our creator evidently respects our freedom. Like Thomas Jefferson’s impersonal God, evolution establishes us with certain qualities, capacities, and predispositions, but it does not control us on a day-to-day basis or even look over our shoulders as we make moral decisions. Evolution doesn’t hang around waiting for you to pray for miracles so it can break the laws of physics on your behalf. Instead, evolution has set things up a certain way, and, to a large extent, we thinking humans have taken it from there. Termites evolved their way to building arches, but we humans figured out arches in a fraction of the time by thinking and planning. We’re different. Evolution may have built our plan-making brains, but humans with plans move too quickly for evolution to control us.

Religion traditionally concerns itself with humanity’s creator, and atheist religion is no different. We can learn more about ourselves and our mortal lives by learning more about that which created us: biological evolution.

Successful Kickstarter: Raising money to self-publish Grandmother Fish, the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. 

Grief and the Human Animal

My wife Tracy passed
away in 2008.

According to Ruth Davis Konigsberg's Valentine's Day article in the New York Times, people recover from grief faster than one would generally expect. I’m not surprised. Our expectations about grief are romantic stories that we tell ourselves, but those stories are no match for biological reality. After a personal tragedy, it seems like we should never be able to laugh again or love again. How could we? But our animal selves have no time for drama or romantic narratives. Our capacity to recover from grief is a primordial instinct grounded far more deeply in who we are than any narrative we can spin with our newfangled forebrains.

A few years ago, my wife died under exceptionally miserable circumstances. Friends would say that they couldn’t imagine what it must be like for me to suffer through my wife’s decline and doom, and I agreed with them. In fact, I would say, even I couldn’t really imagine what I was going through. I was living through it day by day, but the loss was so profound and the details so tragic that it was fairly well beyond comprehension. There was no sensible story I could tell myself about how I was going to recover or about how things were going to be OK. But somehow, as they say, life went on. Without really trying, I did the inconceivable, and I got better.

The process of recovery defies rational explanation. That’s because it’s not rational in the first place. The rational parts of ourselves like to think that our lives should be rational, but rationality is an extremely recent invention, as far as evolution is concerned. The instinct to persevere and to heal oneself goes back to our proto-mammal ancestors or before. Our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning, were all special in at least one way: every single one of them survived long enough and succeeded well enough to generate at least one offspring. Our ancestors were all survivors. Whether we understand our own power or not, we’re each born with the predisposition to recover from the most serious tragedies, if tragedy should ever strike. Our ability to rebuild our lives is fundamentally biological. Recovery from loss is not rational any more than digestion or color vision is rational.

We never evolved the capacity to fully comprehend the enormity of personal tragedy. Why would we have evolved any such capacity? What good would it have done our ancestors to have a clear understanding of monstrous, personal loss? When things get bad enough, comprehension falters. But it’s not our understanding that heals us anyway. It’s not our conscious awareness of loss that gets us past grief. Instead, what takes over is the perseverance that we evolved from an unbroken line of ancestral survivors. Without permission from our conscious selves, and without even full awareness, the more ancient parts of who we are set about the practical business of rebuilding broken lives.


Life, Death and Religion: my wife passing away helped me appreciate being part of a church community.