Letters to the Editor
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tool of control
I don't believe religion is a tool to contemplate the divine so much as it's useful for establishing a power and control pecking order. It is particularly useful in convincing males that God gave them permission to dominate and sexually abuse women. Afterall, didn't Mohammed take a nine year old as a wife? That means that all good muslims can boink nine year olds and it isn't abuse, it is God's will. And women are put on earth to be slaves to men, according to Judaism. And submissive to men, according to Christianity. I extremely attended a Christian church were female inferiority was relentlessly insisted on. Every sermon.
I'd rephrase this to mean that all animals, ape or human, want to instill a pecking order. Humans are just cunning in that they use God to justify kicking down half of the population. Clever and devious and typical of animals.
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Go ahead, believe in God.
Believe in the tooth fairy if you want to, but it's only going to retard your thought process, and whatever you do, don't foist your damn deity's commandments on me.
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We did evolve 'from apes'. In fact, we are apes!
Barbara said:
'That's right. I'm not suggesting that we evolved from the apes. We didn't. We have a common ancestor with the apes.'
That's a really awkward way of putting things, and it does not reflect our current biological knowledge -- I wonder if this is a misquote by Salon?
Modern biology shows clearly that we ARE great apes, as well as being human. We can't deny our apeish family roots!
In fact, we know our close relatives family tree with reasonable certainty. Humans and chimps (more accurately, chimps plus bonobos) are each others' closest living relatives. Gorillas and more distantly related to our shared human-chimp line, and next the orangs, and so on...
http://tolweb.org/Hominidae/16299
As Richard Dawkins poetically puts it, our mother's mother's [mother's....] mother, and a modern chimp's mother's mother's [mother's...] mother, were one and the SAME great- [great-...] grandmother.
There's a clear trail of ancestry connecting us to chimps, and the connection point, our most recent common ancestor, didn't live so long ago, in the big scheme of things!
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The Third Way
What a pleasure it was to read this interview with Barbara J. King. It's refreshing to hear a voice of moderation, discernment, open-mindedness, and respectful disagreement.
I'm a molecular biologist who also takes the 'Third Way', in that I don't see a conflict between evolutionary science and the practice of spirituality/religion. Like Einstein said, "religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame." Unfortunately, the word "religion' today has taken on so many negative connotations of bigotry, obscurantism, rigid dogma, exclusivity, misogyny, homophobia, irrationality, childish literalism, etc., that many thoughtful people prefer the term 'spirituality' instead. I grew up Muslim, but I incorporate many practices and ideas from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Baha'i, and other faiths into my life, and feel no cognitive conflict with my scientific practice or theories.
Yes, we human beings most likely evolved from the Big Bang, the stars, the Earth’s primordial soup, into reproducing, animate, and ultimately sentient meaning-seeking beings. Hooray for us! Understanding this is no way diminishes meaning-seeking in our lives. Why deny an inherent impulse? Wouldn't that lead to psychological pain? Of course, the challenge is to be as fair, compassionate, and open-minded in our practice of meaning-seeking. We have often failed miserably in that regard (whether though harsh oppressive religion or harsh oppressive secular/materialist/marxist/capitalist ideologies).
For those who can only see their lives and the world from the fortified camps of either science or religion, I am reminded of the tale of the blind men confronting an elephant for the first time. One touches the trunk and says it's a snake. Another touches the ear and says it's a large fan. A third touches the leg and says it's a tree. Who's wrong? Who's right?
If there is such a thing as the "Truth" or "Reality", then we as fragile Homo sapiens with our limited capacities should surely be more humble about venturing to speak for It.
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"The third way" is no way at all
By refusing to answering simple, direct questions about her own religious beliefs with content-free platitudes, King neatly sidesteps the fact that for the vast majority of believers, "religion" is not a set of fuzzy spiritual sayings; it is a straightforward belief in supernatural powers that affect our lives. Making masks or looking in awe at a waterfall may be profound activities with deep roots in our past that tell us a lot about what it means to be human (or primate) but they are not religion. Like most scientists who attempt to defend religion as a concept, King knows too much to defend religion as it is actually practiced, and ends up dodging the hard truth that blind faith is incompatible with our ever-growing body of knowledge about the world.
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Religion is an ingrained, evolved human behavior
I believe it is related to our ability to - and our preference for - identifying patterns from sensory stimuli. This talent is one of the many traits that makes us successful predators - in fact, the most successful predators on the planet. Our need to tell stories and have them passed down through the generations might also be a useful mechanism for transmitting vital information that helps our species persist.
It is an undeniable urge - just like hunger, thirst, sex drive, etc... ya gotta believe in something (even if it's atheism!).
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Here we go again
And so it begins as it does with all these Atoms & Eden interviews: the strident atheists and religion haters will spew their venom, the theists will pontificate, and the few moderate, open minds who care to comment will say intelligent, ecumenical things about the fact that we don't have all the answers in our crazy world.
In other words, we'll proceed as we always do: with 90% of us sure that OUR way is the ONLY right way, while everyone else is deluded. And reasoned dialogue dies slowly.
Sigh.
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Faults with ape research
I admit that I'm not an expert in primatology, but from my limited, outsider POV, there seems to be two main pitfalls that researchers get into:
1) Personifying their subjects. Projecting human emotions and intentions onto animal behavior when there is no direct evidence of such.
2) Mistaking higher-level intelligence for Pavlovian behavior. I recently watched a documentary (can't remember the name) where a researcher was giving a gorilla a specific number of treats and teaching it to touch the corresponding number on a key pad. You might think that the gorilla was learning how to count. But the gorilla could see the researcher, and it may have been simply responding to the researcher's positive and negative expressions--directing it like a parent saying "hot or cold" directs a child to an Easter egg.
Similarly, the gorilla in the article may have simply associated "bad" with a negative reaction from the humans, rather than making some profound conclusion about its own behavior.