This reification has had many positive consequences. People take notice of the wishes of unfathomable, all-powerful Beings. Religious teachings often lay down guidelines (laws, commandments) for acceptable behaviour towards other people. To be sure, there are many disagreements between the different religions, or between sects within a given religion, about points of fine detail. And there are some quite substantial areas of disagreement, such as the recommended treatment of women, or to what extent basic rights should be extended to the infidel. On the whole, however, there is a strong consensus in such teachings, for example an almost universal condemnation of theft and murder. Virtually all religions reinforce a very similar consensus of what constitutes 'good' behaviour, perhaps because it is this consensus that has survived the test of time. In terms of the barbarian/tribal distinction, it is a tribal consensus, reinforced by tribal methods such as ritual, but none the worse for that.
Many people find inspiration in their religion, and it helps instil a sense of belonging. It enhances their feeling of what an awesome place the universe is. It helps them cope with disasters. With exceptions, mainly related to specific circumstances such as war, most religions preach that love is good and hatred is bad. And throughout history, ordinary people have made huge sacrifices, often of their own lives, on that basis.
This kind of behaviour, generally referred to as altruism, has caused evolutionary biologists a great deal of head-scratching. First, we'll summarise how they have thought about the problem and what kinds of conclusion they have reached. Then we'll consider an alternative approach, originally motivated by religious considerations, which looks to us to be far more promising.
At first sight, altruism is not a problem. If two organisms cooperate, by which in this context we here mean that each is willing to risk its life to help the other,53 then both stand to gain. Natural selection favours such an advantage, and reinforces it. What more explanation is needed?
Quite a lot, unfortunately. A standard reflex in evolutionary biology is to ask whether such a situation is stable -whether it will persist if some organisms adopt other strategies. What happens, for example, if most organisms cooperate, but a few decide to cheat? If the cheats prosper, then it is better to become a cheat than to cooperate, and the strategy of cooperation is unstable and will die out. Using the methods of mid-twentieth-century genetics, the approach pioneered by Ronald Aylmer Fisher, you can do the sums and work out the circumstances in which altruism is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The answer is that it all depends upon whom you cooperate with, whose life you risk your own to save. The closer kin they are to you, the more genes they share with you, so the more worthwhile it is for you to risk your own safety.
This analysis leads to conclusions like 'It is worth jumping into a lake to save your sister, but not to save your aunt.' And certainly not to save a stranger.
That's the genetic orthodoxy, and like most orthodoxies, it is believed by the orthodox. On the other hand, though: if someone has fallen into a lake, people do not ask 'Excuse me, sir, but how closely related are you to me? Are you, by any chance, a close relative?' before diving in to rescue them. If they are the sort of people who dive in, they do so whoever has fallen into the lake. If not, they don't. Mostly. A clear exception arises when a child falls in; even if they can't swim its parent is then very likely indeed to plunge in to the rescue, but probably would not do so for someone else's child, and even less so for an adult. So the genetic orthodoxy does have a certain amount going for it.
Not much, though. Fisher's mathematics is rather old-fashioned, and it rests on a big -and very shaky -modelling simplification.54 It represents a species by its gene-pool, where all that matters is the proportion of organisms that possess a given gene. Instead of comparing different strategies that might be adopted by an organism, it works out what strategy is best 'on average'.
And inasmuch as individual organisms are represented within its framework at all, which they are only as contributors to the gene-pool, it views competition between organisms as a direct 'me versus thee' choice. A bird that eats seeds is up against a bird that eats worms in a head-to-head struggle for survival, like two tennis-players ... and may the best bird win.
This is a bean-counting analysis performed with a bean-counting mentality. The bird with the most beans (energy from seeds or worms, say) survives; the other does not.
From a complex system viewpoint, evolution isn't like that at all. Organisms may sometimes compete directly -two birds tugging at the same worm, for instance. Or two baby birds in the nest, where direct competition can be fierce and fatal. But mostly the competition is indirect -so indirect that 'compete' just isn't the right word. Each individual bird either survives, or not, against the background of everything else, including the other birds. Birds A and B do not go head-to-head. They compete against each other only in the sense that we choose to compare how A does with how B does, and declare one of them to be more successful.
It's like two teenagers taking driving tests. Maybe one of them is in the UK and the other is in the USA. If one passes and the other fails, then we can declare the one who has passed to be the
'winner'. But the two teenagers don't even know they are competing, for the very good reason that they're not. The success or failure of one has no effect on the success or failure of the other.
Nevertheless, one gets to drive a car, and the other doesn't.
The driving-test system works that way, and it doesn't matter that the American test is easier to pass than the British one (as we can attest from personal experience). Evolutionary 'competition'
mostly works like the driving test, but with the added complication that just occasionally it really is more like a tennis match.
From this point of view, evolution is a complex system, with organisms as entities. Which organisms survive to reproduce, and which do not, are system-level properties. They depend as much on context (American driving test versus British) as on the internal features of the individuals. The survival of a species is an emergent feature of the whole system, and no simple short-cut computation can predict it. In particular, computations based on the frequencies of genes in the gene-pool can't predict it, and the alleged explanation of altruism by gene- frequencies is unconvincing.
Why, then, does altruism arise? An intriguing answer was given by Randolph Nesse in the magazine Science and Spirit in 1999. In a word, his answer is 'overcommitment'. And it is a refreshing and much-needed alternative to bean-counting.
We have said more than once that humans are time-binders. We run our lives not just on what is happening now, but on what we think will happen in the future. This makes it possible for us to commit ourselves to a future action. 'If you fall sick, I will look after you.' 'If an enemy attacks you, I will come to your aid.' Commitment strategies change the face of 'competition'
completely. An example is the strategy of 'mutual assured destruction' as a deterrent for nuclear war: 'If you attack me with nuclear weapons, I will use mine to destroy your country completely.'
Even if one country has many more nuclear weapons, which on a bean-counting basis means that it will 'win', the commitment strategy means that it can't.
If two people, tribes or nations make a pact, and agree to commit support to each other, then they are both strengthened, and their survival prospects increase. (Provided it's a sensible pact. We leave you to invent scenarios where what we've just said is wrong.) Ah, yes, that's all very well, but can you trust the other to keep to the agreement? We have evolved some quite effective methods for deciding whether or not to trust someone. At the simplest level, we watch what they do and compare it to what they say. We can also try to find out how they have behaved in similar circumstances before. As long as we can get such decisions right most of the time, they offer a substantial survival advantage. They improve how well we do, against the background of everything else. Comparison with others is irrelevant.