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One of my favorite blogs, GetReligion.org, posted about a very strange story from ABC News , headlined “Religion is a Product of Evolution, Software Suggests.”  James Dow, an anthropologist at Oakland University, claims to have written a software program that explains how religion evolved.  But, as always, the devil is in the details - or, more accurately, the devil is in the presuppositions.  Here’s how ABC News described the set-up of Dow’s software:

To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn’t spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people  those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

“Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them,” Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

 As one of the commenters on the GetReligion post noted, it’s interesting the subtle jump that Dow makes from “unverifiable” to “unreal” information.  Note, too, his clear distinction between “believers” and “non-believers,” when the reality of personal belief is a bit cloudier.  Further, when you consider the communications of actual religious teachers, such as Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Francis of Assissi, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., and not hypothetical prehistoric figures like Dow does, it becomes clear that they are not merely “communicating the unreal.”

It’s an interesting experiment, but methinks that Dow could benefit from some philosophy to clarify his terms and examine his presuppositions a bit more closely.  At least he’s upfront about what he is assuming.

Here’s the link to Dow’s actual published study, Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?, published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 11, no. 2 2. 

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute and one of our featured speakers at Following Christ 2008, announced yesterday that he is resigning in order to “explore writing projects and other professional opportunities.” Here is the official news release. 

Dr. Collins has been one of America’s premier scientists, and he is also a Christian.  His book, The Language of God, is subtitled “A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”  He’s also an incredible speaker, who is very comfortable discussing both his professional work and his personal testimony. 

Back in February, Dr. Collins spoke at Stanford University at an event co-sponsored by the InterVarsity chapter there; you can download audio or video from his talk.  It’s well worth it.  In addition to presenting a clear case for Christianity, his personal testimony is inspiring - from hardcore atheist to devoted Christian, all while being confronted daily with the realities of suffering and death as a practicing physician. Like so many other thoughtful Christians, Collins credits C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as one of the key influences in his journey toward God. 

I will be very interested to see what he does next.  May God bless him in his endeavors. 

The use of abortion to choose the gender of a child has long been a concern of the pro-life movement, especially in countries like China or India where cultural and legal norms make both gender selection and abortion more acceptable.  A new study is suggesting that some ethnic groups - specifically Chinese, Korean, and Indian - in the United States may also be using abortion to choose the gender of their children. William Saletan of Slate.com has a good writeup of the study and some implications. 

However, the conclusion of the article is a bit confusing, 

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to theenvironment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

OK - I’m good with that.  I thought that “technology=progress=unlimited good” went out with the Victorians, but that’s fine if people are just now waking up to reality.  The rest of that paragraph is a bit odd. 

But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn’t a newfangled perversion. It’s a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that’ll be real progress.

Eh?  Perhaps some pro-life conservatives base their position of “patriarchal custom,” but I’m not aware of custom or patriarchy or tradition - much less Chinese, Korean, or Indian tradition - being used as a foundation for pro-life arguments in the United States.  

This recent story - about a Vietnamese man who runs an orphanage for unwanted children next door to an abortion clinic in Vietnam - notes that he receives donations from “Christian and Buddhist organizations.” I have not encountered any Buddhist or Hindu approaches to abortion - either for or against - so I would be very interested in learning more about how non-Western religions regard abortion. 

To move things in a completely different direction, maybe human beings are the “running animal.”  We’re not used to thinking of human beings as physically superior to other animals - e.g. cheetahs are faster, elephants are stronger - but it turns out that human beings are the best long-distance runners in the world. So says Daniel Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis Bramble of Utah. In another article, Lieberman notes that:

Once humans start running, it only takes a bit more energy for us to run faster, Lieberman said. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a lot more energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances.

They also point out that human beings are the only animals in the world that run long distances - like a marathon - voluntarily.  Which reminds me of the scene from Back to the Future 3 in which some cowboys are laughing at Marty McFly’s “running shoes.”  

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Every once in a while, a new definition of “human being” gets floated around, in order to distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom.  I think this effort has taken on a new intensity ever since biology revealed a supposedly unbroken connection between human beings and our suspected primate ancestors.  Unfortunately, these definitions don’t tend to hold up, leading to National Geographic or Discover articles touting the unremarkableness of human beings (for example, see this recent story about a study that compared the relative intelligence of human toddlers with chimpanzees and orangutans). Some proposed definitions have included man as the animal that uses language (debunked by Koko the gorilla and countless parrots), man the toolmaking animal (debunked by chimps that use sticks to hunt food), man the animal who uses tools to make tools (a convoluted definition if there ever was one), etc., etc.

But what about man the worshiping animal?  George Orwell, I think it was, once said that horses would create their god in their own image.  Good quote, one that gets bandied around a lot in late-night college discussions.  Except that, as far as we have ever been able to tell, no animal except man has a concept of God. No animal does anything that could be construed as religious or which does not have an obvious practical purpose. 

Only human beings worship.

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If you happened to read this article in Tuesday’s NY Times, you would have found some pretty shocking statements.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

With all deference, the NY Times quotes Nature as stating, Jews and Christians are ignorant bumpkins.  Why should that trouble my sensibilities?

The article goes on:

Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

Let’s be exactly clear with what V. S. Ramachandran, who is Indian, is saying here. I don’t know what Dr. Ramachandran’s personal religious beliefs are, but he here argues that the Hindu-Buddhist religious concept of “the universal spirit of the cosmos” is scientifically acceptable.  Meanwhile, the Jewish-Christian concept of personal souls is “superstition.”  (Though I’m not aware of any theologians who would consider the soul “occupying” the brain or having evolved.)

If Dr. Ramachandran wishes to believe that, then that’s between him and God (or the universal spirit of the cosmos, as the case may be).  But how, exactly, is this science?  Further, how would Dr. Ramachandran counsel a Christian working as graduate assistant under him?  “Superstition” is a strong word, especially from a professional scientist.

We have heard from scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion can peacefully coexist.  Science, we have been told, discusses the “what” and “how” of the world, while religion examines the “why.” Here is at least one group of scientists who expose that as a false paradigm.  For them, science - understood materialistically, with no room for anything that can’t be measured - determines the whole of truth.