Why Darwin Matters

by Michael Shermer

  If scientists can believe in God and evolution, can Christians? Using the same empirical standards, evidently so, because approximately 96 million American Christians do: In a 2001 Gallup poll, 37 percent of Americans (107 million people) agreed with the statement “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Since about 90 percent of Americans are Christians, approximately 96 million Christians believe that God used evolution to guide the process of creating advanced forms of life.2

  Even many evangelical Christians—the religious cohort most outspoken against the theory—accept evolution. Consider the statement by former president Jimmy Carter—who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian—in response to a measure passed in Georgia in 2004 that required all public school biology textbooks to include a sticker proclaiming:

  This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

  President Carter was outraged. “As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox’s attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia’s students,” he wrote. “The existing and long-standing use of the word ‘evolution’ in our state’s textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians’ belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe. There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”3 The requirement was subsequently repealed, though not before it served as fodder for other state legislatures as well as for political cartoonists.

  And as seen in the previous chapter, the compatibility of God and Darwin finds evidence in the one billion Catholics who embraced Pope John Paul II’s 1996 Pontifical Academy of Sciences Encyclical. He asserts that evolution happened, that it is okay to accept it as fact, and that it is no threat to religion:

  New knowledge has led to the recognition that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.4

  Christians, Conservatives, and Evolution

  Despite these examples, recent polling data show that we still have a way to go before the theory of evolution achieves total acceptance. According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared to 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics; politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists while only 11 percent accept evolution, compared to 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. Similarly, a 2005 Harris poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry; further, those with a college education, those between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four, and those from the Northeast and West are more likely to accept evolution, whereas those without a college degree, aged fifty-five and older, and from the South are more likely to believe in creationism.5

  What these figures tell us is that the nonscientific, demographic reasons for rejecting evolution, most notably religion and politics, are very strong. Can a Christian be a Darwinian? Can a conservative accept evolution? Yes. Here is how and why.

  Evolution Makes for Good Theology

  As outlined in this book, the theory describing how evolution happened is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Christians and conservatives embrace the value of truth-seeking as much as non-Christians and liberals do, so evolution should be accepted by everyone because it is true. In this sense, evolution is no different from any other scientific theory already fully accepted by both Christians and conservatives, such as heliocentrism, gravity, continental drift and plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, the genetic basis of heredity, and many others.

  Christians believe in a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal. The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of when creation took place. And compared to omniscience and omnipotence, what difference does it make how God created life—via spoken word or via natural forces? The grandeur of life’s complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.

  In contrast, Intelligent Design creationism reduces God to an artificer, a mere watchmaker piecing together life out of available parts in a cosmic warehouse. If God is a being in space and time, it means that He is restrained by the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance, just like all other beings of this world. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such constraints, not subject to nature and chance. God as creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible would need necessarily to be outside such created objects. If He is not, then God is like us, only smarter and more powerful; but not omniscient and omnipotent. Calling God a watchmaker is delimiting.

  But more important, evolution explains family values and social harmony. Humans and other social mammals, including and especially apes, monkeys, dolphins, and whales, share a host of characteristics: attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peace-making, community concern and reputation caring, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. As a social primate species we evolved the capacity for positive moral values because they enhance the survival of both family and community. Evolution created these values in us, and religion identified them as important in order to accentuate them. “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable,” Darwin theorized in The Descent of Man, “namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” The evolution of the moral sense was a stepwise process, “a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense and conscience.”6

  Evolution also explains evil, original sin, and the Christian model of human nature. We may have evolved to be moral angels, but we are also immoral beasts. Whether you call it evil or original sin, humans have a dark side. Individuals in our evolutionary ancestral environment needed to be both cooperative and competitive, for example, depending on the context. Cooperation leads to more successful hunts, food sharing, and group protection from predators and enemies. Competition leads to more resources for oneself and family, and protection from other competitive individuals who are less inclined to cooperate, especially those from other groups. Thus we are by nature both cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes, and a society based on the rule of law, are necessary not just to accentuate the positive, but especially to attenuate the negative side of our evolved nature. Christians would find little to disagree with in the observation of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s chief defender in the nineteenth century: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”7

  Thus, by explaining the origins of our positive a
nd negative behaviors and characteristics, evolution explains the origin of morality and religions designed moral codes based on our evolved natures. For the first ninety thousand years of our existence as fully modern humans, our ancestors lived in small bands of tens to hundreds of individuals. In the last ten thousand years, these bands evolved into tribes of thousands; tribes developed into chiefdoms of tens of thousands; chiefdoms coalesced into states of hundreds of thousands; and states conjoined into empires of millions. How and why did this happen? By ten thousand years ago, our species had spread to nearly every region of the globe and people everywhere lived where they could hunt and gather. This system tended to contain populations, but the invention of agriculture around that time allowed these populations to explode. With those increased populations came new social technologies for governance and conflict resolution: politics—and religion.

  The moral emotions, such as guilt and shame, pride and altruism, evolved in those tiny bands of one hundred to two hundred people as a form of social control and group cohesion. One means of accomplishing this was through reciprocal altruism—“I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” But as Lincoln noted, men are not angels. People defect from informal agreements and social contracts. In the long run, reciprocal altruism works only when you know who will cooperate and who will defect. This information is gathered in various ways, including through stories about other people—more commonly known as gossip. Most gossip is about relatives, close friends, those in our immediate sphere of influence, and members of the community or society who have high social status. It is here we find our favorite subjects of gossip: sex, generosity, cheating, aggression, social status and standings, births and deaths, political and religious commitments, and the various nuances of human relations, particularly friendships and alliances.

  When bands and tribes gave way to chiefdoms and states, religion developed as a principal social institution to accentuate amity and attenuate enmity. It did so by encouraging altruism and selflessness, discouraging excessive greed and selfishness, and especially by revealing the level of commitment to the group through social events and religious rituals. If I see you every week participating in our religion’s activities and following the prescribed rituals, this is an indication that you can be trusted. As organizations with codified moral rules and the power to enforce the rules and punish their transgressors, religion and government responded to a need.

  Consider the biblical command to “love thy neighbor.” In the Paleolithic social environment in which our moral sentiments evolved, one’s neighbors were family, extended family, and community members who were well known to everyone. To help others was to help oneself. In chiefdoms, states, and empires, the decree meant one’s immediate in-group. Out-groups were not included. This explains the seemingly paradoxical nature of Old Testament morality, where on one page high moral principles of peace, justice, and respect for people and property are promulgated, and on the next page raping, killing, and pillaging people who are not one’s “neighbors” are endorsed. Deuteronomy 5:17, for example, admonishes, “Thou shalt not kill,” yet in Deuteronomy 20:10–18, the Israelites are commanded to lay siege to an enemy city, steal the cattle, enslave those men who surrender, and kill those who do not.

  The cultural expression of this in-group morality is not restricted to any one religion, nation, or people. It is a universal human trait common throughout history, from the earliest bands and tribes to modern nations and empires. Christian morality, like that of many other religions, was designed to help us overcome these natural tendencies.

  Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and sexual fidelity, because the violation of these causes a severe breakdown in trust, and once trust is gone there is no foundation on which to build a family or a community. Evolution explains why. We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy is the norm (or, at least, serial monogamy—a sequence of monogamous relationships). Adultery is a violation of a monogamous bond, and there are copious scientific data showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. (In fact, one of the reasons that “serial monogamy” best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new.) This is why most religions are unequivocal on the subject. Consider Deuteronomy 22:22: “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel.”

  Most religions decree adultery to be immoral, but this is because evolution made it immoral. According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, sexual betrayals are primarily a biologically driven phenomenon encoded over eons of Paleolithic cuckolding. Buss argues that there are differences between men and women in this tendency, and that these differences hold across different cultures; thus, they are primarily driven by our genes. In one study by psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, an attractive member of the opposite sex posed one of three questions to fellow single college students:

  1. “Would you go out on a date with me tonight?”

  2. “Would you go back to my apartment with me tonight?”

  3. “Would you sleep with me tonight?”

  The results were revealing. For women, 50 percent agreed to the date, 6 percent agreed to return to the apartment, and not a single one of them agreed to have sex. By contrast, for men, 50 percent agreed to the date, 69 percent agreed to the apartment, and 75 percent agreed to the sex! No wonder most religions have strict codes of sexual restraint against men and repeated warnings to women about the power of the sex drive.8

  As for the act of adultery itself, its evolutionary benefits are obvious. For the male, depositing his genes in more places increases the probability of his genes making it into the next generation. For the female, it is a chance to trade up for better genes, greater resources, and higher social status. The evolutionary hazards of adultery, however, often outweigh the benefits. For the male, revenge by the adulterous woman’s husband can be extremely dangerous, if not fatal—a significant percentage of homicides involve love triangles. And while getting caught by one’s own wife is not likely to result in death, it can result in loss of contact with children, loss of family and security, and risk of sexual retaliation, thus decreasing the odds of one’s mate bearing one’s own offspring. For the female, being discovered by the adulterous man’s wife involves little physical risk, but getting caught by one’s own husband can and often does lead to extreme physical abuse and occasionally even death. So evolutionary theory explains the origins and rationale behind the religious precept against adultery.

  Likewise for truth telling and lying. Truth telling is vital for building trust in human relations, so lying is a sin. Unfortunately, research shows that all of us lie every day, but most of these are so-called “little white lies,” in which we might exaggerate our accomplishments, or lies of omission, in which information is omitted to spare someone’s feelings or save someone’s life—if an abusive husband inquires whether you are harboring his terrified wife, it would be immoral for you to answer truthfully. Such lies are usually considered amoral. Big lies, however, lead to the breakdown of trust in personal and social relationships, and these are considered immoral. Evolution created a system of deception detection because of the importance of trusting social relations to our survival and fecundity. Although we are not perfect lie detectors (and thus you can fool some of the people some of the time), if you spend enough time and have enough interactions with someone, their honesty or dishonesty will be revealed, either through direct observation or by indirect gossip from other observers.9 Thus, it is not enough to fake doing the right thing in order to fool our fellow group members, because although we are good liars, we are also good lie detectors. The best way to convince others that you are a moral person is not to fake being a moral person but actually to be a moral person. Don’t just pretend to
do the right thing, do the right thing. Such moral sentiments evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors living in small communities. Subsequently, religion identified these sentiments, labeled them, and codified rules about them.

  Evolution and the Conservative

  Theory of Free Market Economics

  Political conservatives can also find explanations—and foundations—in the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection is precisely parallel to Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand. Darwin focused on showing how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of individual competition among organisms. Smith focused on showing how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of individual competition among people. The natural economy mirrors the artificial economy. Conservatives embrace free market capitalism, and they are against excessive top-down governmental regulation of the economy; they understand that the most efficient economy emerges from the complex, bottom-up behaviors of individuals pursuing their own self-interest without awareness of the larger consequences of their actions.

  Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy who posited a theory of human nature with competing motives: We are both competitive and cooperative, altruistic and selfish. There are times of need when we can count on the humanity of strangers to help us, but daily trade in a marketplace is founded on the lesser angels of our natures. As Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”10 By allowing individuals to follow their natural inclination to pursue their self-love, the country as a whole will prosper, almost as if the entire system were being directed by . . . yes . . . an invisible hand. It is here that we find the one and only use of the metaphor in The Wealth of Nations: