Believers in the idea that America was established as a Christian state scored a hit last year when the Texas school board, a politicised body in which evangelicals control crucial votes, ordered up textbooks laying out this view. Given the size of the Texan market, school-book publishers across the country often follow its lead. The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s.

Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned. Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential candidate, held a day of prayer for the nation in August, Mr Barton was an acknowledged endorser. One of Mr Barton’s admirers is Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who argues that American history has been distorted by secular historians to play down the role of faith. “I never listen to David Barton without learning a whole lot of new things,” Mr Gingrich has said.

It is easy to see why politicians are attracted by the assertion that America was founded as a Christian land, and is hence called to be a place of exceptional virtue. It elegantly fuses two beliefs: Christianity itself, and belief in American history as another sacred narrative, one that sees the founders as people of near-infallible wisdom and virtue waging a noble war against the forces of darkness.

It is an unfortunate fact that the people who most need to read this Economist article in its entirety won’t and those who do will instinctively or reflexively reject it. Don’t mess with evangelical Texas or Republican myths.

The seller suggests that quality is beside the transcendent point: “Normal toasters are tamed and subdued by unfortunate limitations; but great toasters rise above them and become Jesus & Virgin Mary Toasters.” The Jesus toast looks disturbingly like Che Guevara with horns.

Pinker’s previous books, from The Language Instinct to How the Mind Works to The Blank Slate, have firmly established him as one of the most important thinkers of our time. Though some find Pinker’s message — evolution has shaped human nature and biology plays an important role in our lives — distasteful, denial isn’t an option (except for the unwashed few). Human biology and culture have long been locked together in an evolutionary love embrace.

But what about the hate, which is the subject of Pinker’s new book? Better Angels will come as something of a surprise to those who condemn Pinker as a sociobiologist in sheep’s clothing. In a superb review, Peter Singer explains:

The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century. Pinker assumes that many of his readers will be skeptical of this claim, so he spends six substantial chapters documenting it.

The surprise here is that Pinker attributes this progressive decline in violence to the advance of culture and reason. So much for his biological determinism.

But what about Pinker’s central claim and why is it hard for me to accept? Anthropologists have long known (or at least suspected) that when violence is expressed as a percentage, non-state societies are on average more violent than state societies. Pinker confirms this with an avalanche of evidence showing that the percentage of people dying a violent death in non-states societies is around 15%, whereas this percentage is much lower, around 3%, in state societies.

While the death of 5 people in a single clash may not sound like much to modern ears, if those 5 were members of a 40 person group, the percentage loss is catastrophic: close to 13%. This would be like the United States losing 37 million people in a single conflict. The fact that the percentage has gone down is good news right? I suppose it should make me happy but it doesn’t.

My unease arises from the math. Expressing violent deaths as a percentage of population is all well and good, but I think it misses something important. This something is the total number of deaths caused by violence: when considering the value of each and every human life, we lose something by not considering (or denigrating) absolute numbers.

It just doesn’t feel right to say that while 75 million people died as a result of World Wars I and II, this isn’t all bad because when expressed as a percentage of population, it’s “only” about 3%. Never has “only” felt so empty.

This may be progress but it feels horrific. It reminds me of the opening to Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which he fleshes out Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” by noting that if during a tribal skirmish in a forgotten time and place one person dies, that death has little weight or is “light” because it only occurs once. But if that death recurs forever, what was a single forgotten death acquires weight or becomes “heavy.”

This is how I feel when we celebrate the fact that 75 million deaths last century is somehow better than 5 deaths long ago. Heavy.

CONAN: In particular, I was fascinated to read that some genetic evidence, DNA, was investigated by some of these Christian scholars and say, wait a minute, there’s no way you can have the diversity of human beings we have on the planet if you start with two people.

HAGERTY: Yeah, that’s right. They say now that we’ve mapped the human genome, it is clear that modern humans emerged from other primates way before the timeframe of Genesis, you know, like 100,000 years ago. And they say given the genetic variation, we can’t possibly get the original population to below about 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

While it is nice to know that some Christian scholars are finally acknowledging the genetic evidence which makes the Adam and Eve origins story impossible, the relatively recent mapping of the human genome did not demonstrate that modern humans “emerged from other primates way before the timeframe of Genesis…like 100,000 years ago.”

Human are primates with a long evolutionary history; our lineage separated from our closest relative primate lineage some 5-6 million years ago. The genus Homo is approximately 2 million years old. We have known these things for quite a long time. Fossils are amazing that way.

This quibble aside, Christian literalists and progressives have been arguing about Genesis and evolution for well over a hundred years. If the testy exchanges between Harlow and Mohler are any indication, they aren’t any closer to resolution. For those who are required by their Christian faith to make a decision, I can see the difficulties.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

There is something weirdly compelling about Mohler’s argument that if Christians jettison a literal Genesis because science compels it, then a bunch of other important biblical stuff — like the resurrection and miracles — have to go too. The slope can get slippery in a hurry once you start deciding that some supernatural things happened but others didn’t. But then Harlow’s rejoinder, which is ably stated in his article “After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science,” is compelling too.

Fortunately, I don’t have to make these kinds of decisions.

One might think that after decades of well-deserved criticism, overly enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists had learned some restraint. While most have, some stalwarts persist. Super-freak Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, recently caused an uproar by claiming that “black” women are less attractive than other women. He posted this drivel over at Psychology Today, which removed the offending article and belatedly terminated Kanazawa’s blog.

Fearing that Kanazawa was further sullying evolutionary psychology’s (EP) already dim reputation, 68 researchers who use evolutionary approaches to human behavior published an open letter criticizing Kanazawa. The letter, which astutely states that Kanazawa’s “work demonstrates a poor understanding of evolutionary theory, a disregard for data quality, and inappropriate interpretation of statistical techniques,” is posted over at Evolutionary Psychology (a peer reviewed journal) and it says this about peer review:

The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa’s poor quality work. Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals.

This is an interesting statement signed by editors of the journal that on May 10, 2011, published Jared Reser’s article “Conceptualizing the Autism Spectrum in Terms of Natural Selection and Behavioral Ecology: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis.” Reser hypothesizes that the “genes contributing to autism were selected and maintained because they facilitated solitary subsistence.” What follows is so bizarre and flawed it is hard to know where to begin.

Although Reser pays brief homage to parsimony and observes that autism “may appear” to be maladaptive, he never addresses the parsimonious possibility that autism is in fact maladaptive. Reser apparently is unfamiliar with antagonistic pleiotropy, a basic concept in evolutionary biology whereby selection on a single gene influences multiple phenotypic traits, some beneficial and others harmful. Autism, like senescence and cancer, seems like a good candidate for such an effect.

But EP’s a priori commitment to the Panglossian Paradigm — “If It Exists It Must Be Adaptive” — prevents Reser from considering pleiotropy or, horror of horrors, spandrels. Instead he rushes in to consider far more outlandish scenarios, all based in an imaginary and non-existent ancestral past. You know the one: “At some time and some place during the last 6 million years of hominin evolution, there must have been selection pressure for [insert modern trait].” Followed by the ineluctable just-so story: “This explains [insert modern trait].”

The imaginary past Reser postulates for this particular story is the one where difficult conditions during the Plio-Pleistocene forced social hominins to split up, living and foraging all by their lonesomes. Because they are asocial, Reser imagines that autistics would have been better adapted for this kind of solitary existence. Or as Reser puts it:

Individuals on the autism spectrum are described here as having had the potential to be self-sufficient and capable foragers in scenarios marked by diminished social contact. In other words, these individuals, unlike neurotypical humans, would not have been obligately social and may have been predisposed toward taking up a relatively solitary lifestyle.

Here, we have to suspend disbelief and ignore several inconvenient facts. There is no physiological, archaeological, or ethnographic evidence suggesting that human ancestors or humans have ever lived and foraged independently. Indeed, precisely the opposite is true and hominin evolutionary success is usually attributed to extraordinary sociality. Although Reser’s vision of solitary foraging is essentially Hobbesian, at least Hobbes understood the unfit consequences: “no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Reser will have none of this and imagines the “natural” past as being superior to the “artificial” present, at least for autistics:

In a natural environment though, it is likely that hunger would have motivated [autistics] to redirect their obsessive tendencies toward food procurement. Today, their hunger for food does not drive them to refine food procurement techniques because their parents feed them every time they are hungry….Because the compelling and coercing natural instinct of hunger does not actuate or motivate modern individuals with autism, their efforts and skills are misplaced onto irrelevant stimuli….Perhaps, when children with autism ignore their parent’s examples of social behavior today, it is because these examples seem uninteresting and meaningless, whereas in the ancestral past they would have been inspired by their parent’s hunting and gathering activities.

Oh, how we long for the ancestral past when hunger pangs and the food quest made everything so stimulating and relevant! Warming to his theme, Reser suggests that autistic children in modern society are placed in “unnatural or confining environments” and thus behave like caged animals. The shocking conclusion Reser draws from this is one for the ages:

This may indicate that the living conditions that many young individuals with autism experience are artificial, and possibly inhumane, as they are not as stimulating or motivating as the wild environment that they are born expecting.

Read that again; I am not making it up. First, Reser insults parents of autistic children and suggests their living conditions are stultifying and “inhumane.” Second, he claims that unborn autistic children expect to be delivered into a “wild environment” and are bewildered when they find themselves plopped into “artificial” modern environments.

I wish I could report that Reser’s article gets better but it doesn’t. He suggests that autistics are like orangutans in their penchant for being alone (supposedly evidence of a similar “adaptation”), claims that social skills are maladaptive in solitary settings, and speculates that “higher testosterone levels in autistic males may have increased their sexual aggressiveness as well as their sexual attractiveness.” This is just the tip of the iceberg and it only gets worse (never mind the grammar and spelling errors such as “moray” instead of “more” for social conventions). The strings of unsupported conjecture and disconnected speculation are truly jaw dropping.

Presumably, Reser’s therapeutic recommendation for parents of children with autism would be to send the kids to foraging camp, making sure they are hungry upon arrival. There, they can direct their energies and attention toward productive and stimulating things, like food, water, and shelter. They might even get lucky.

In the end, Reser’s article provides another example of everything that is wrong with certain kinds of evolutionary psychology. It is almost as if he deliberately decided to ignore all critiques of EP and write something outrageous. If so, he succeeded. So much for peer review.

Reference:

Reser, Jared E. (2011). Conceptualizing the Autism Spectrum in Terms of Natural Selection and Behavioral Ecology: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (2), 207-238.

She is one of Jesse Bering’s former students, having earned a master’s degree in Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast, and is now working with Jesse Preston in the Psychology of Religion, Agency and Morality Lab. As you can see from the lab’s publications page, they are doing some really interesting research. We look forward to Erika’s coverage on these and other topics.

To welcome Erika to the blogging world and introduce her to my readers, I invited her to guest post here. She graciously assented, so I encourage you to read her post “Foreign Ideas & Moral Indigestion.”

As reported by Spiegel, the teachers invited a local farmer to provide instruction on killing and butchery. In years past, the farmer used chickens and no one complained. This year he unwisely chose a bunny and allowed the children to bid it farewell by saying “bye bye little rabbit.”

About half the class decided not to witness what followed:

Before he began, the farmer told the children that what they were about to see wasn’t disgusting nor was it monstrous — and that they would agree once it was over. Then the farmer hit the rabbit with the hammer. One child fainted, others burst into tears. Next, he slit the animal’s throat with a knife, gutted the body, skinned it and hung it up to drain. The next day, the rabbit was grilled in the school yard and eaten — in Stone Age style, naturally, on a hot stone.

Needless to say, some kids were traumatized and parents — who were not told about this aspect of the Stone Age curriculum — were upset. One parent commented it was a good idea to teach that meat does not come from freezers, but this was a bit much: “I find using a sledgehammer for that twisted. For 10 year olds, that is a shock that will stay with them for life. They still keep their stuffed animals in their beds.”

Lesson learned: obtain parental consent before ritualistically bludgeoning the Easter Bunny.

It is an uncontroversial truism that learning affects perception and experience. This is, after all, the entire purpose of teaching children and what we call culture. Our perceptions of the world do not come to us directly — we filter everything through a brain that has been heavily conditioned by prior experience and learning.

If those experiences include instruction in religion and exposure to religion, it is reasonable to assume this will affect perception. Although I never had much doubt about these effects, it is good to know they have been experimentally verified. You can find the study here, and it demonstrates the obvious: religionists attend to the world differently than do non-religionists. Call it the power of education or indoctrination, whatever your preference.

If those experiences include massive cultural exposure to alleged paranormal phenomena (which it certainly will in America, one of the most credulous nations on earth), it is reasonable to assume this too will affect perception. You will not be surprised to learn this is indeed the case. People who profess prior belief in psi, ESP, spiritualism, and precognition are much more likely to experience “oceanic” or “transcendental” consciousness during shamanic sweat lodge ceremonies than their non-believing counterparts. The latter may lose a lot of water and feel relaxed, but they are not transported to inner or other worlds.

So there we have it: empirical and statistical proof that learning and experience condition our expectations and perceptions. I am glad these issues are now settled.

In a dual review, Malise Ruthven covers Fred Donner’s Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam and Bernard Lewis’ Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East. Though not entirely believable, Donner’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in early Islamic history. Lewis has written better books but if you have not read any of his work, this is a lite introduction.

Next we have Neil Strauss’ humorous piece, God at the Grammys, in which he observes that a good many musical superstars (and other famous people) seem convinced that their fabulous success is part of a divine plan. There is not a hint of irony in the story even though it appears in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Some stars, however, see Satan in success. Billy Ray Cyrus’ heart is feeling all achy-breaky over Miley’s backsliding behavior. Not prone to introspection, Billy blames Satan for ruining his family.

This one belongs in the realm of the bizarre: someone has written a book on Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law. What?! This is what happens when British colonialism collides with 2,600 years of Theravada tradition. The mashup is not pretty, unless you happen to be an attorney who thinks law and religion play well together.

Last but certainly not least is Christopher Beam’s Slate story on South Park’s treatment of religions. Although the occasion for the piece is South Park’s upcoming Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon,” Beam examines South Park’s treatment of religions in general. While South Park is merciless in exposing religious hypocrisy and stupidity, it does not seem to be anti-religious.

My favorite is the episode in which “a team of religious figures known as the ‘Super Best Friends’—Jesus, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Krishna, Lao-Tzu, Moses, Mohammad, and a superhero called ‘Sea Man’—join forces to defeat the all-powerful magician David Blaine”: