Human Nature – the bad and the good

Every day I read the newspaper and watch the TV news and there are conflicts raging often between different ethnic groups or involving different religions, including this ISIS group who seem to think that chopping people’s heads off is going to persuade the rest of us to convert! Then there are reports of domestic violence – a man kills his female partner and baby after discovering that her baby is not his; then yet another gang-rape! Or another politician’s career is brought to an end because of sexual scandal; and violence breaks out between fans of opposing sports teams.

Then, when I’m about to throw up, there is an uplifting report of someone who spends a lot of her spare time reading to people in an old-folks home; or someone donating a kidney to save a life, or dives into dangerous waters to save someone drowning.  What is it about us humans that we are composed of this troubling mix of violence and sexual aggression, and yet have the capacity for extraordinary levels of love and caring? Can a look at our ancient background give us some pointers? I believe so.

In my last blog (Aug. 10^th) I wrote about our close relationship to apes. This is fairly commonly accepted now.  What similarities and differences to do with these tendencies do we find in our cousins the other apes? Two books amongst several that I’ve found helpful in this regard are: “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris (1967), and “The Story of the Human Body” by Daniel Lieberman (2013). Three things amongst several that obviously separate us from other apes are: our nakedness; our fully upright position and bipedalism; and of course our intelligence, and with that our language abilities, that puts us in a different league to all other creatures so that many still think that therefore we must be a separate and very special creation. 

When changes occur rapidly in evolution they occur because of special evolutionary pressures, or to put it more bluntly –when the death rate is high. What were the evolutionary pressures that have made us so different in a relatively short (seven million years at most) evolutionary period of time. In a word - climate change; not the man-made one we’re beginning to experience now but a natural one that brought ice over much of Europe and led to dramatic changes in the vegetation in East Africa where our ancestors were living, so that the tropical forest collapsed and turned into savannah. We were forced out of the trees and soon found that we needed to walk on our hind legs to get around big distances on the ground looking for food. Constant starvation with a high death rate would have been one of those evolutionary pressures forcing us to find new things to eat compared to our largely fruit-eating ancestors. We had no choice but to become hunters. 

Those that survived learned to hunt in groups. We became killers bonded into groups of mutual trust and communication, developing remarkable skills in making projectiles and accurately throwing them. Language developed probably first as a means for the hunting group to communicate strategy. Our brains grew, doubling in size every 1.5 million years.  Our cousin chimps have brains around 300 cc in volume. We know-it-alls have a brain volume of approximately 1,300 cc.  This in turn led to difficulties in childbirth – the infant head became too big – and so babies had to be born prematurely so that for some months afterwards they were (and are) highly dependent on their mothers. The men hunted, the women stayed near the camp. For some reason not as yet understood, menstruation became heavier. Women tended therefore to become anemic and needed a constant source of iron, and red meat was the best source. Mutually dependent bonds became much more important between males and females. The discovery of fire and then cooking was an important step as well. Cooked food releases more nutrients, especially with meat. Richard Wrangham in “Catching Fire: How cooking made us human” (2009) suggests that marriage or strong pair-bonding, not so clear in other apes, began not exclusively with sex in mind but with the female need for red meat. “Bring me some meat and you can have some sex.” And later, after the discovery of fire: “And I’ll cook it for you too”.  And when early hominins started standing upright it meant that the male sex organ and the female’s breasts were now much more in your face so to speak, and became big factors in sexual attraction. With all these things coming together you have the makings of strong pair-bonding and the creation of the human family unit involving genuine love and care. Beyond the immediate family there would have to be strong ties of loyalty and mutual support within the encampment group. But then fear and aggression if a group of strangers appeared on the horizon. Here were all the makings of early humans as sexy, violent and discriminatory. 

Richard Wrangham points out that we are closer genetically to chimps than chimps are to their other nearest ape relative gorillas. And you guessed it – chimpanzees are the most sexually active of all non-human apes. The lesser ape the Gibbon only has sex about once a year. Chimps – every day. 

But it’s the violence that really worries me. An early acquaintance of mine – David Bygot, working with Jane Goodall in Tanzania, was the first anthropologist to observe a chimpanzee murder another chimpanzee. Chimps also engage in group hunts of monkeys tearing them to pieces once caught to eat the meat. Despite the gorilla’s large size and the dominant male enforcing his dominance, gorillas are not so violent. Nor do they eat meat unless you count the small part of their diet that includes insects and snails. 

What I’m saying therefore is that our violence (including red meat hunting) and our sexual eagerness can be traced to our nearest ape cousins. But then, on top of that, the environmental circumstances in East Africa about six million years ago accentuated those trends, in particular the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Fast forward to our modern world and for me - that innate background explains the newspaper headlines I encounter every day.  

Is the situation hopeless then? Absolutely not! As I described in one of my first blogs, I worked for forty years for an international organization whose declared aim was the ‘changing of human nature’. I always thought that this was a little too simply and definitively declared, but I am still a strong believer that our natures can be and are modified for the better. We wear clothes in public to avoid unnecessary titillation and temptation. We have state laws and religious teachings that make most of us pause when perhaps tempted to strike out in anger at someone. Some of us have temptations towards unhelpful behavior in one direction or another more than others. My wife’s grandfather was one of those in the 1930s involved in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their success rate is around 30%. Sadly low you might say, but think of the millions around the world whose lives have been saved through this program of mutual caring and support under a ‘higher power’.  

When I was younger there was apartheid in South Africa where people of color were treated as less than human; and in America things were not a lot better with segregation and even lynchings. I wept tears of joy when first Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, and again when Barack Obama was elected President of the USA – an inspiration and healing for many.  There is still a long way to go but progress is being made. Yes, we humans have violent and discriminatory tendencies in us, but, it is also true, as the song from ‘South Pacific’ goes, that ‘you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear ….

You've got to be taught
From year to year,….

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

That is – those deep tendencies can either be fed and drawn to the surface, or new and better ways can be encouraged, and loves learned and enjoyed and passed on to others. We do not have to be run by our base natures, or the way some of our forebears behaved.

In “The Better Angels of our Nature” (2011) psychologist Steven Pinker gives evidence of how, despite our modern headlines, violence has steadily decreased over the millennia. It is easy to forget the terrible carnage during the Thirty Years War in Europe from 1618-1648. And studies of skeletal remains from when about 20,000 years ago we were all hunter gatherers shows that approximately 15% of people died a violent death in those days. Pinker says that, despite today’s depressing headlines, humanity is indeed making progress, and the steady integration of modern society is a major contribution. America for all its faults (and I could write another several pages about them) is playing an important role here. Despite the current tragedy of Ferguson, Mo, America is the melting pot of the world. Nearly twenty years ago my kids’ high school hung over seventy national flags in the school gym, representing the origin of the students then at the high school. Maybe that was a factor in my daughter Dr. Rebecca Hamlin publishing her first book last week entitled “Let me be a refugee”, published by Oxford University Press, and available on Amazon :-)

  

Relationships

Allow me take you on a trip into taxonomy. I have spent a lot of time in the last years studying plant taxonomy so that when I come across an unusual plant in the forest I first start by trying to determine its Family status, and then from there to genus and then species. Some plant families are big and some small. In my state of Massachusetts, the daisy and aster family Asteraceae has 120 genera and hundreds of species. The primrose family Primulaceae on the other hand has but three genera with just four species spread amongst them. 

Now let’s switch to families of mammals. The taxonomic system is the same. A very large family – equivalent to the Asteraceae – would be the Muridae (rodents) with 150 genera worldwide containing 710 species of mice and rats and squirrels etc. A more selective family would be ours – the Hominidae or Great Apes – containing just four genera. Three of these genera – gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees – have two species each. Then there is the genus Homo and our own species of Homo sapiens. Up until as recent as 40,000 years ago we were not alone, sharing space in Europe with Homo neanderthalensis with whom we did a bit of interbreeding, and possibly a third species in Asia with again some possible interbreeding –Homo denisova. Species of the same genus can sometimes interbreed, but amongst species of different genera interbreeding is extremely rare and mostly impossible.  

Nevertheless, as one goes back in time, not only do those three genera of Primulaceae merge into a common ancestor, but just the same with the genera of the family Hominidae. An significant merger in that journey back in time for us occurs about 5 million years ago when our genus Homo – or actually its direct forerunner – merges with the chimpanzee genus Pan. We’re all familiar now with the letters DNA representing our genetic material. The amount of difference or similarity in one’s DNA is a direct measurement of how long we’ve been apart from these cousins. So my DNA is 99.88% the same as a Neanderthal, and 98.5% the same as a chimp. But then it’s about 70% similar to those rodents, and 30% with those daisies and primulas. So as I walk through the woods, when I see a squirrel or pass by a large handsome oak tree, they are for me my cousins; and I find that thrilling. I hope you might too.

My previous posting on August 1^st , about an interesting conversation that I listened to in 1969 between Arthur Koestler and Jacques Monod, was my way of coming out in terms of my belief system.  I was therefore fascinated to read in the current Time magazine issue, dated August 4th, an article by Josh Sanburn about ‘atheist churches’.  Yes, I know, it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it would seem that in those parts of America – e.g. Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma – where churchgoing is big, atheists, often led by ex-clergy, feel the need for a mutual support group of this sort. It also may be pointing to an issue that concerns a growing number of atheists, and that is, as church communities dwindle in many parts of the country, how do we keep a sense of community to care for those in need and other issues in our towns and cities including environmental concerns? 

Sanburn’s article also reports on the Clergy Project, an online group of hundreds of ‘doubting preachers’.  Sanburn writes: “Being an atheist may be America’s last closeted identity.” The article also reports that 20% of Americans claim no religious affiliation now(still significantly lower than in Europe) and rising steadily. Mind you, an ABC poll in 2011 found that 77% of Americans believe in angels!  And polls regularly show that the majority of Americans do not accept that life on Earth, including us humans, has evolved over a long period of time from simple single-celled organisms, despite the overwhelming evidence to support that.   

Even today, America is living in the aftermath of the Cold War where Soviet Communists were the atheist baddies, therefore all atheists are evil, and probably communist to boot. This simplistic and dated view is held in particular by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, composed it would appear mostly of older white churchgoers.    

Enough of all this. My blog is entitled ‘A biologist’s perspective’, and so I want to get to writing some fun stuff along those lines.  Stay tuned. 

,

A fascinating conversation

A fascinating conversation

In September 1969, I was fortunate to be an observer at a conference in Stockholm on The Place of Values in a World of Facts. A lot of famous people were present and during one coffee break I witnessed an exchange between two great intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century: the well known British-based writer Arthur Koestler and French Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod. Here is how I remember the conversation.

‘Arthur, is it true what I hear that you are interested in extra-sensory perception and such things? I find this worrying.’ ‘Yes, Jacques, I do find ESP very interesting and worthy of investigation.’ There might have been a bit more discussion about this subject between the two men which clearly disturbed Monod, and then he said: “Arthur, don’t you remember? We were both in the Party!” meaning of course the Communist Party and therefore that they had both previously professed atheism. Koestler gave a somewhat reluctant nod of acknowledgment. Then, Monod blurted out: “If you go on like this Arthur, before long you’ll be talking about [Monod struggled to get the word out]…God!”  Koestler, who had a cigarette in his hand, drew on it with masterful pausing for effect, and then said, “Not necessarily so Jacques.”

I have never forgotten this short but fascinating conversation and the import of it has grown on me in recent years. The two men addressed each other by their first names  suggesting that they had known each other before and had perhaps corresponded. Koestler was at that time 64 and Monod 59. Koestler’s earlier association with communism aided him when he came to write his brilliant exposé of the brutalities of Stalinism in the much acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon (1941). Monod’s membership in the Party would have been during the war when he played an active and courageous role in the French resistance movement. He remained left-wing, causing a stir in 1968 when, as a senior French academic, he came out in support of the student demonstrations that were rocking France and other countries of Europe. Koestler not only left the Party but moved to the right even working for the CIA for a while. He then turned his attention to the history and philosophy of science writing a large trilogy on the subject and showing a great ability to grasp scientific concepts across a broad spectrum, except that is with the complexities of biology. Thus leading to his later dalliance with ESP.

Monod would probably have read The Ghost in the Machine before the two men met in September, 1969, aware that Koestler had grabbed onto biological straws to try and make his case, quoting two well-known evolution skeptics – Sir Alistair Hardy and W. H. Thorpe. By that time, Monod would have been well-along with, if not having completed his own book which was published in French in 1970 and in English as Chance and Necessity in 1971. In it Monod covers some of the same ground as Koestler does in The Ghost in the Machine without Koestler’s literary strength but mercifully less verbose, delivering a devastating critique of animism, vitalism and Marxism as unscientific forms of thinking amongst intellectuals. In this context he criticizes the metaphysicist Henri Bergson and the pantheist priest Tielhard de Chardin, both dead by then, but makes no mention of Koestler and his writings on the subject. Too polite perhaps. Here at the Stockholm  conference Monod had his opportunity to make his point with Koestler in person.

How did this exchange impact me? I had been brought up as a Christian. My sixth form biology teacher was a well-known naturalist who answered nature questions from listeners on the BBC. He also was a person of faith as many naturalists were in the 1950s. Knowing few if any non-believers, I had accepted the view in this Cold War era that Godless people were bad. By the time of the Stockholm conference I was in my late twenties and had recently completed a PhD in biochemistry. I bought a copy of Ghost in the Machine, plus books by Hardy and Thorpe, desperately searching for a spiritual dimension to Darwinism, but despite meeting Monod on two other occasions, the last in 1970 when he urged me to read his book, I did not read Chance and Necessity until 2012!  The reason I think is clear: I knew what it would say. Chance and Necessity was the pioneer book in a genre that would be followed later by Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) and Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), books that after giving convincing evidence of the validity of modern Darwinian theory leave no room for any spiritual dimension. But they lay out the truth about how life came to be and has evolved on this planet. As Dennett’s book suggests, these books are dangerous reading but they do tell scientific truth.

In hindsight my refusal to read these books for so many years was neither honest nor true to my scientific training. Jesus said: “The truth shall make you free.” But I had not sought truth wherever it might lead, but rather had avoided the further truth that might be in those books in exchange for comfort. I am not alone in this and the reasons are understandable. It may seem reasonable at first for the individual to choose not to know all the facts, but when many even in the intellectual community of the early 21^st century seem unwilling to live in full reality and where opinions too often trump scientific truth, we could be building troubles for future generations to deal with. In America where I now live, scientific education is hampered by the powerful Creationist lobby, and denial of climate change prevents effective government action to deal with a serious threat to our future wellbeing.

     

Jacques Monod was perhaps the first notable scientist to put in a detailed biological context the fully materialist nature of life. At the same time he was deeply concerned about man’s humanity and about issues of morality and justice. I got the impression of a decent man of great principle, lacking any cynicism, and who had time for me the inquiring young man. Koestler on the other hand, concerned, as he wrote, that science was eroding moral and spiritual values, was deeply cynical and notorious for his womanizing and alcoholism creating scandals that undercut his expressed global concerns. And yet, I the young Christian chose to read his book and not Monod’s.

Jacques Monod concludes his book with these words: “Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism, if not in the sources of science itself, in the ethic upon which knowledge is founded, and which by free choice makes knowledge the supreme value – the measure and warrant for all other values? An ethic which bases moral responsibility upon the very freedom of that axiomatic choice…[man] could at last live authentically, protected by institutions which, seeing in him the subject of the kingdom and at the same time its creator, could be designed to serve him in his unique and precious essence.”  I am reminded of the song by John Lennon – Imagine.