Evolution, ethics and religion

Abstract

Arguments are advanced that ethics provide the building blocks for the cultural evolution of those forms of behaviour that distinguish different human moral communities. To perform this function ethical variants need to be maintained within communities over many generations and this is achieved by religious prescription enshrining the ethical variants. This gives religions their essential function. It also follows that ethics themselves must evolve and be subject to natural selection. Some ethical variants and their possible survival value are discussed. This survival value is clearly distinct from the reasons that the variants were introduced. Finally, the consequences for ethical evolution arising from the change of humans from an endangered to an endangering species are considered.

Keywords:

• evolution
• cultural evolution
• ethics
• religion

Evolution

¹The term evolution describes the processes by which all the different life forms have developed from their earliest common ancestor. This idea certainly goes back to the ancient Greeks (Sedley, 2007) but became prominent again only in the nineteenth century. One problem for believing that all life forms developed from a single common ancestor – which was not known to the ancient Greeks – became apparent with the discovery of micro-organisms of various kinds and the belief that these small forms of life could be generated spontaneously. This idea was only finally disposed of by Pasteur in his classical experiments with swan neck flasks, into which contaminants from the air could not enter, and which, in consequence, remained sterile, unlike flasks open to the atmosphere. We now know that the most ancient creatures yet described were the cyanobacteria and the archaea, whose earliest fossils date from 3.5 billion years bp. They were responsible for creating the first free oxygen in the atmosphere, thereby making the eventual development of animal life possible. That the original atmosphere on earth contained no oxygen is sufficient evidence that not all species can have arisen (or been created) at the same time.

The great insight of Charles Darwin (and also of Alfred Wallace) in the mid-nineteenth century was that evolution occurred by the process of natural selection. This term describes a process whereby variation occurs, with no predefined purpose, within existing species and that those variants that survive better and that leave more progeny, that will themselves reproduce, will be favoured and that in this way new species can arise. Another important feature of Darwinian selection is that it responds only to selective pressures that were present at that time. It does not, and cannot, predict future events, nor does it have a long-term purpose. This is the real difference between Darwin and an earlier version of evolution due to Lamarck. Lamarck believed not only in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (which Darwin did as well) but he believed that evolution had a purpose which was eventually the evolution of human beings.

Social Darwinism

Darwin's ideas on evolution by natural selection were hugely influential and were picked up not only by biologists but also by social scientists and politicians. Herbert Spencer, a social scientist who was roughly contemporary with Darwin, coined the term “the survival of the fittest” to encapsulate the Darwinian idea and this term was widely adopted – even by Darwin. However, it is probably at the core of the deep misunderstanding common to politicians from Marx to Hitler that survival of the fittest must involve conflict between competing groups and that superior groups should therefore regard it appropriate to exterminate their inferior rivals, be they different social classes or different “races”. Competition between species does not necessarily imply conflict at all and competing species may never even come into direct contact. A good example is the competition between grey squirrels and red squirrels which has been shown to be due to the squirrel pox virus which infects both species but kills just the red squirrels. This virus is not transmitted directly from one squirrel to another but probably is caught from contaminated drays (Sainsbury et al., 2008).

Further misunderstanding of evolution by natural selection, which is still current in the present day, is that evolution produces perfection. Dawkins (1982, 2005) quotes Richard Lewontin as saying “that is the one point which I think all evolutionists are agreed upon, that it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in its own environment”. This is an illusion. Only if one looks at evolution over very long periods of time, say at sharks which have existed a relatively unchanged way for over 400 million years, can one see something approaching “perfect” adaptation to their environment; but in general, and particularly now that evolution is studied at the molecular level, it is quite clear that evolution far from producing perfection just “muddles through”. Since Darwin had no knowledge of genetics, and certainly none of modern molecular genetics, he could not have been aware at all of how evolution could work; but the idea that grew up, that evolution occurs on the basis of mutations in existing proteins which confers new functions on them, has lasted much longer than it should. Once a protein has an important function, it cannot simply evolve into something new. Susumo Ohno (1970), in his book Evolution by Gene Duplication, points out that it is necessary to have currently unused genetic material for new functions and structures to evolve and this is largely dependent on gene duplication, sometimes of individual genes and sometimes of much larger stretches of a chromosome and occasionally by duplication of a whole chromosome set. It was further realised in the 1970s that evolution of proteins does not take place at the level of the amino acid but at a limited number of protein “domains” – modules of proteins with a common folding pattern and a retained 3D structure. There are probably only about 1500 of these domains. Evolution at this level is analogous to writing computer software. Modules/domains are recruited from various existing programmes/pseudogenes, hitched together and benchmarked. If the ensuing piece of software/gene functions well it is kept; otherwise it is discarded. This process has the disadvantage of creating massive complexity. This is a side effect of the way evolution (and writing computer software) works and it is perverse to regard it as a sign of design, intelligent or otherwise.

Cultural evolution

It is clear that not all evolutionary change is produced by differences in the genome. Behavioural characteristics can be transmitted both horizontally between individuals and vertically between generations by other means and the term cultural evolution is used to describe this transmission of information by any means other than through the genome. Cultural evolution has been described in animals (Tyler Bonner, 1980) and was originally transmitted entirely by example. David Attenborough in one of his programmes gave the nice example of a troupe of monkeys who learnt to separate salt from grain by dissolving it in water. This knowledge or behaviour was transmitted to other monkeys who watched this occurring and to their descendants. However, in any highly developed form cultural evolution is seen only in humans and is intimately related to the development of language. Oral transmission was supplemented about 200 generations ago by writing and about 2 generations ago by electronic means. Both writing and electronic transmission have hugely increased both the range of cultural evolution and its speed. There is good evidence that cultural evolution also works by natural selection and how this occurs will be discussed in more detail but it is worth pointing out that there is no cultural speciation as there is in genetic inheritance where different species cannot interbreed. There is also no “non-blending” inheritance; cultural characteristics are neither dominant nor recessive. For these reasons alone the idea that there are homologues in cultural evolution to the genes in genetic evolution, the “culturgenes” of Charles Lumsden and Edward Wilson (1981) or the “memes” of Richard Dawkins (1976), should not be taken too seriously. Furthermore, it is abundantly clear that cultural evolution works on groups and not on “selfish memes”. This is now accepted by Edward Wilson (Wilson & Wilson, 2007) but not so far by the advocates of memes.

It will be argued below that the differences in behaviour that distinguish human “moral communities” are culturally evolved. This is unlike differences in behaviour between different species which are clearly genetic; but also between individuals within groups where there is certainly a major genetic component associated with the inheritance of intelligence and various other normally distributed characteristics that occur within any population. The great advantage of using cultural evolution for these purposes is that cultural evolution can occur very much more rapidly than genetic evolution. Genetic evolution occurs only at reproduction and the average human generation gap seen over long periods of time is between three and four generations per century. Modern humans – Cro-Magnon man or Homo sapiens sapiens – originated around 120,000 years ago. This means that there have been only around 3600–4800 generations of modern man. Mice go through 4000 generations in about 300 years and we have no reason to think that they have changed greatly in their behaviour over this period, whereas humans have gone, in just the last 12,000 years or so, from being hunter-gatherers in a Stone Age culture to modern civilisation as we know it now.

Besides being disseminated more rapidly, cultural evolution is disseminated much further. Genetic information passes only to one's direct descendants whereas a cultural evolutionary change as disseminated by language can move horizontally at very great speed. Thirdly, it is quite likely that the range of cultural evolution allows a far wider range of different behaviours and much greater innovation than would be possible by genetic evolution. There might be a problem genetically to evolve the skills required for writing a symphony, flying an airliner, filling in a tax return or giving a paper at a Bioethics conference.

There are, however, some compensating disadvantages. The major one of these is that the “gains” of cultural evolution are much less secure. Genetic evolutionary changes are shared in due course by all the members of the species or at any rate by very large numbers of them. Cultural evolutionary gains, in the past, have often been confined to a small literate elite, which until relatively recent centuries was quite often confined to the priesthood. A good example was what happened to the Mayas in Mexico after the Spanish conquest. The ruling elite were destroyed and the remaining population who survived in more remote areas reverted to an entirely Stone Age culture.

Comparing bees with humans

How can natural selection work in the case of cultural evolution? In order to answer this question it would be instructive first to consider a species other than humans which shares with it some social characteristics, such as that there are communities/colonies that have significant behavioural differences whose inheritance can be studied. One such species is the honeybee. Bees live in communities where cooperation between individuals performing different tasks is essential for survival. The honeybee colony consists of one queen – a fertile female who lays eggs, with or without a sperm, giving rise either to diploid sterile females (the workers) where a sperm is included; or haploid males (drones) if only an egg is laid. The haploid males mate with a virgin queen on her mating flight and possibly have some function in keeping the hives warm but otherwise do little. The workers do everything else. They nurse the larvae, they build the wax cells, they keep the hive clean and they forage for nectar and pollen, and the efficiency with which they do this and some other characteristics, such as their level of aggressiveness, vary from colony to colony. When a beekeeper has a colony whose behaviour seems unfavourable, if the bees are untidy builders and cappers, if they are aggressive, if they are lazy, also if they are prone to swarming, he may choose to change this by introducing a newly mated queen from a better behaved colony into his hive. This is done very frequently and the effect is always the same. The bees that emerge from the eggs laid by the new queen behave entirely in accord with their genetic background. They learn nothing from the bees among whom they grow up. This re-queening experiment shows beyond doubt that the variations in behaviour are genetically determined even if we do not yet understand what genes are concerned. Where analogous experiments have been carried out in humans, moving children in early life from environments say of the New Guinea highlands to the USA, children acquired the behavioural traits of the community that they grew up among, in other words they grew up not as New Guinea highlanders but as American college students. This demonstrates again quite clearly that such differences in behaviour are culturally inherited and not genetically so.

The role of religion in cultural evolution

For natural selection to be able to work in such circumstances, there need to be mechanisms in place that maintain the relevant behavioural differences sufficiently constant over a sufficiently large population and over a sufficiently large number of generations, so that selection can actually act in as much that these communities leave more progeny which themselves can breed. One can therefore ask how such behavioural differences are preserved within different human communities. The answer that seems compelling to me is that they are preserved as religious prescriptions. These prescriptions concern such matters as rules on interpersonal relationships (such as honesty and truthfulness) and also altruism and concern for others. They concern attitudes to work, regulation of diet and health, regulation of reproductive behaviour and also attitudes to death (both of one's own and those of other people) so that suicide, as well as the necessity to protect weaker members of the society such as the women and children, are all covered in these religious prescriptions. They also largely define ethics whose origin plausibly does derive largely from religious prescription. Frequently given definitions of ethics say that they are “the moral principles that govern a person's or group's behaviour”; or “the moral correctness of specified conduct”. In the modern world, ethics is equated with moral philosophy and is concerned with concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. These definitions do fit well with the view that ethics are the building blocks of cultural evolution.

The origin of ethics

There is a long-lasting controversy over the origin of ethics. Most religions that we know about hold that ethics come from God (or gods); and therefore that ethics are unchanging and eternal. In modern parlance this is sometimes called “natural law”. Aquinas is quoted as saying “there must be something which is to all beings the cause of there being goodness and every other perfection and this we call God”. Jonathan Dolhenty (n.d.) gives a modern definition of this “natural law” when he says

natural law is not made by human beings but is based on the structure of reality itself and is the same for all human beings for all times. It is an unchanging rule or pattern which is there for human beings to discover. It is the naturally knowable moral law, it is a means by which human beings can rationally guide themselves to the good.

This explanation I reject. A second explanation is that ethics arise from philosophical contemplation and we know of moral philosophy to explain ethics at least since the time of Socrates but ethics must be much older and we do not know the philosophical contemplations that went on before the invention of writing allowed them to be recorded.

Ethics evolve by natural selection

The view of ethics that is being advanced here is that ethics are not constant over time and have evolved culturally, by natural selection. While there are some features of ethical behaviour that seem to be common to the overwhelming majority of human moral communities of which we have records there are many others which vary quite widely. The first category includes respect for human dignity (or in Kant's words “humanity is an end in itself”) (Kant, 2005); altruism as enshrined in the biblical saying “do as you would be done by”; honesty and truthfulness; and it would seem likely that these precepts have proved, over very long periods of time, to be essential for moral community to flourish. In the second category there are precepts with an extremely varied history. Human sacrifice was common among many ancient communities, even including the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Slavery was accepted as normal in many communities. Suicide was allowed, or even encouraged, in some societies and forbidden in others. Sexual practices were also subject to very variable strictures, with a tendency to prohibit those that cannot give rise to children. Believers in natural law presumably have to believe that earlier civilisations, such as the Mayas and the Aztecs who countenanced human sacrifice and the ancient Greeks who countenanced slavery, were morally defective. On the other hand, those who believe in the evolution of ethics do not believe that. They take the view that ethics have moved on!

It is pertinent to ask how innovation in ethics or in religious prescription arises. It is abundantly clear that this does not occur by prophets going into the desert and speculating on what changes in behaviour will be advantageous for the survival of their moral community over the course of generations. There is certainly no hint of this in the Bible and it seems extraordinarily unlikely that it occurred elsewhere. Furthermore, looking back over many generations, we can see that many of the prescriptions with regard to diet and sexual behaviour are likely to have had a selectively advantageous effect because of their consequences for infectious diseases, detailed knowledge of which was not available until the nineteenth century. It is therefore quite certain that the origin of religious prescriptions lies elsewhere and can be regarded as comparable with random mutation in genetic evolution. To give one or two examples: cannibalism was probably practised by quite a lot of ancient communities but in very few has it survived. We do not know on what grounds cannibalism in the ancient world was prohibited but we can be entirely confident that it was not prohibited in order to prevent the spread of spongiform encephalopathies. A contemporary cannibalistic community, the Fore tribe in New Guinea, were almost wiped out by an epidemic of Kuru in the last century and one can see that communities that indulged in cannibalism are likely to have died out from such diseases quite independent of why the practice was allowed or prohibited.

Another example lies in prohibitions on eating certain foods. The origin of these is quite unclear but it is possible, and indeed likely, that they may have survived by preventing or limiting gut-borne infections. This became particularly important after the Agricultural Revolution when man became much closer to other animals which he had domesticated, where he lived in larger communities and did not frequently move so that they were more likely to contaminate their water supplies with faecal bacteria. The prohibition of molluscs that prefer to live in highly polluted water would be a good example where prohibition would make sense.

A third example would be restrictions on sexual behaviour that could spread sexually transmitted disease. I am not talking here about HIV, which seems to be a recent infection, but a number of much more ancient infections such as gonorrhoea which produced infertility in women and would therefore have limited the ability of communities to survive and thrive.

Another example one might consider is slavery. Slavery is believed to have originated in ancient times as a consequence of warfare. It is plausibly believed that there were two major outcomes to ancient warfare. In one, the winning party killed all the losing party or drove them off and took their lands. In the other, they killed or drove off the men but kept the women as slaves, both for domestic service and for procreation. This second type of warfare is still certainly to be recognised in the Roman story of the “Rape of the Sabine Women”. It is plausible that this second practice was selectively advantageous in that it widened the gene pool of these relatively smaller primitive communities and therefore produced less inbreeding and more fertile offspring and that this allowed these communities to flourish. If this were the original reason why communities employing slavery did well, this justification has of course long been replaced since there are now other mechanisms for breeding outside one's immediate group and it is therefore not surprising that the opposing disadvantages of slavery – that it contradicts universal respect for human dignity and human altruism –have taken its place, and this can be taken as a satisfactory example of the cultural evolution of ethics.

The prohibition of suicide is plausibly a further strategy to maintain population numbers. Diamond (2005) describes possible examples of suicide practised as a way to reduce or control population in some island communities with limited resources.

It is more difficult to account for human sacrifice. There seems to have been a belief in meso-American cultures that human sacrifice was necessary to make the crops grow but this is clearly a fantasy and there are no obvious alternative explanations of any benefits that could derive from it.

Dissent from Thomas Huxley

This view of the relationship of ethics to cultural evolution is deeply at variance with the views of Thomas Huxley who wrote an essay on “Evolution and Ethics” in 1893. He believed that the practice of

that which is ethically best – what we call goodness or virtue – involves a course of conduct which in all respects is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In the place of ruthless self assertion it demands self restraint, in place of thrusting side or treading down all competitors it requires that the individual shall not merely respect but shall help his fellows. Its influence is directed not so much to the survival of the fittest as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. (Huxley, 1893, pp. 46–116)

A further quotation – “let us understand once and for all that the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it”. This was written long before anything was known about mechanisms of inheritance either genetic or cultural but it does seem strange that Huxley should have opted for this particular, rather perverse, view of ethics as a counterpoise to evolution. It is of course totally at variance with the view that ethics are the building blocks of cultural evolution rather than its enemy – which is the premise of this paper.

Implications that follow from the evolution of ethics

There are a number of implications that follow from the hypothesis that ethics are the building blocks of cultural evolution and that the essential function of religion is as an evolutionary adaptation:

1. There has to be a degree of free will. For this model to be possible it is necessary that individuals and/or groups must be able to choose between ethical prescriptions or religions in order that selection can occur. It is clear that, in the past, individuals in general were not free to choose between different religious prescriptions without great personal risk to themselves; and that the origin of new or altered prescriptions was always a matter of both difficulty and uncertainty. Nevertheless, it is clear enough, looking back even at the history of existing religions, that their prescriptions did begin to vary and that people were able, either individually or as groups, to choose between the variants.

2. It follows from consequence (1) that genetic determinism for those forms of behaviour that distinguish different human moral communities needs to be rejected.

3. Religions need to defend their particular ethical prescriptions if they are to fulfil their evolutionary function. This makes it necessary that these prescriptions are held essentially constant over large numbers of individuals and for many generations. The prescriptions therefore need to be enforced. This need explains the great resistance of religions to innovation which is so memorably discussed by the Bishop of Beauvais and the Earl of Warwick in Shaw's Saint Joan. It also explains why most religions preach love, while their history shows clearly enough that they practise hate.

While one can see that religions have to compete, it is unnecessary and highly regrettable that this competition has so frequently led to conflict, and to attempts to annihilate competing religions. It must be extraordinarily surprising to a visitor from another planet that religions that differ so slightly as the various divisions of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant) or of Islam (Sunni and Shia), should have provoked so much bloodshed between different sects of what are essentially single religions. When one bears in mind that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all worship the same God, the God of Abraham, it is even more surprising that their conflicts have been so riven with violence and hate.

The future

It is unwise to extend evolutionary speculations into prophecy. As already stated, evolution does not look ahead; it reacts to selective pressures that are present at the time. Nevertheless, and with due hesitancy, I will venture one or two predictions. These are based on the clearly observable phenomenon that the ethical prescriptions of all current major religions are still those that are suitable for an endangered species. They place great emphasis on the unfettered right and often also the duty to breed and to create the maximum number of progeny. This is quite clearly not a suitable paradigm at the present time and has not been so since the Industrial Revolution. Human beings are now not an endangered species but an endangering species and a moral paradigm that fits the present situation must be one that regards procreation as a privilege and not as a universal and unfettered right. One must surely look to a time when having more than a certain number of children, perhaps more than two, will require some form of community sanction. If this is not the case then the Malthusian prediction that the world will run out of food or of other requirements for human living is virtually inevitable. The second implication of this conclusion is that there will have to be some modification of the working of democracy between groups, if not within groups. To some extent this is already happening. For example, the United Nations does not give greater rights to countries with larger populations over those with smaller populations. Certainly, the situation cannot be allowed to occur or persist where particular sub-groups within a community or within a group of communities decide deliberately to out-breed the others, thereby neutralising population control policies, in order to assume political control.

To some extent the paradigm shift away from endangered to endangering species has also already occurred. Both women's liberation and gay rights are examples of ethical changes which would not have been acceptable at a time when the human species was endangered since both involve practices which would be inimical to the primary need for population growth. These changes, therefore, are to be welcomed as a step in the right direction and as a sign that human communities can adapt to new circumstances, albeit slowly and painfully.

A cautious optimism for our future is therefore probably appropriate.

Notes

1. This paper is largely based on previously published work (Lachmann, 1983, 2010a, 2010b, 2013) and was presented orally to the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics 9th World Conference, “Bioethics, Medical Ethics and Health Law – Towards the 21st Century”, 19–21 November 2013.