Letters to the Editor
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Much ado about very little
Dr. King's position constitutes much ado about very little.
The stuff King says that looks to be true is mostly old news. Did any of us not know that apes, as well as even “lower” animals, understand simple symbols and experience empathy?
Re: her point that apes show signs of proto-religious consciousness—well, she doesn’t make a very good case for it. She starts out badly by idiosyncratically redefining “religion” as something nearly synonymous with “emotional connection” or “compassionate action”. This is such a gross distortion of the generally understood meaning(s) of the word “religion” that I get the impression that she’s so anxious to demonstrate proto-religiosity in apes (and perhaps to validate her own beliefs by trying to see them as fundamental to being human) that she’s willing to stretch the definition of religion waaaay out of shape to make it fit.
Certainly establishing the existence of empathy in “lower” animals puts them on the spectrum of “unitive consciousness” that’s central to my (and others’) “spirituality”, but I see this as having little to do with religion, which I associate with supernatural beliefs like gods and life after death, and King gives no evidence that apes have such beliefs, or even the ability to conceive such ideas.
Re: the consciousness of our forebears of 3 million years ago—King wisely refrains from interpreting the Makapansgat cobble as evidence for religious thinking, but then, why mention it at all? She seems to be saying “Well, that’s symbolic thinking, which is an underpinning of religion.” Okay, but so what? The accretion of planet earth from space crud and the development of unicellular organisms were underpinnings of religion and everything else that came after, too, but so what? And symbolic thinking, which apes have to some limited degree, underpins not only religion but also atheism, politics, art, literature, sports, mathematics, etc. etc. Why is King so hell-bent on drawing this obvious but pointless distant connection between ape behaviors and religion, while arbitrarily leaving all those other things out?
Not until she gets into looking at humans, and relatively recent humans at that (100,000 years ago), does she describe anything that I would necessarily call religious behavior.
I wasn’t surprised to find at the end of the interview that King is one of those who seeks to put religion on a par with science as a way of addressing reality. The distortions she has allowed herself in order to connect religion with her scientific specialty, her specious dismissal of Dennett and her unexplained dismissal of Dawkins, and her phrase “Being spiritual and having evolved go hand in hand” reinforce my notion that she’s stretching real hard to try and connect religion with science in order to dignify religion with unearned legitimacy.
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What is this memes stuff?
That which improves the animals ability to cope with its environment and can be encoded into the genome are what makes for evolutionary success. Ask Mrs King what is proof of evolutionary success. That's why religiousity exists.