Abstract
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2009. 422 pp. $21.00
Hans Schwarz, The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. xiv + 402 pp. $35.00
Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014. xi + 178 pp. $35.00
Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, New York: Liveright (Norton), 2014. 208 pp. $23.95
The literature on human origins has exploded in the past two decades. Paleoanthropologists have recently clarified, revised, and developed new theories about the evolution and uniqueness of our species with the help of DNA analysis and new discoveries in the fossil record. We now know several things with reasonable certainty. All of us, for example, have a common origin in eastern Africa. Up until about 17,000 years ago, three and possibly four hominin species existed simultaneously on the earth, sometimes in competition with one another. All humans with European and Asian ancestry have approximately 2–4% Neanderthal DNA mixed into their genomic structure. There were several waves of Homo sapiens sapiens migrations out of Africa through the Great Rift Valley. Increasingly, contours of our uniqueness as a species in comparison with our closest genetic relatives, the Great Apes, has come into ever more clear focus.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Co-Director Michael Tomasello’s work on the evolution of human cognition makes a significant contribution to understanding our uniqueness as a species. In order to get a clear fix on what distinguishes us from chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas, Tomasello carefully observed their behaviors and compared them with that of human infants and toddlers. He also analyzed the fossil record related to human evolution in considerable detail. As a result, Tomasello has put forward the “shared intentionality hypothesis.” He argues that “human thinking is fundamentally cooperative” (ix) and can be characterized as “individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix” (1). Apparently, we have the ability to coordinate with others of our species and to operate with a complex dialectic between “I” and “we” in ways that our Great Ape cousins simply do not have. While chimps and gorillas do possess some rudimentary analytical and logical abilities that involve cognitive modeling, “if-then” problem solving, and self-monitoring, they lack the ability to work in a thoroughly cooperative or collaborative manner. According to Tomasello, “Great apes are all about cognition for competition. Human beings, in contrast, are all about (or mostly about) cooperation” (31).
Tomasello grounds his theory of human cognitive uniqueness in a well-established chronology of human evolution. Human cognition, he argues, has emerged through three distinct phases: individual intentionality, joint intentionality, and collective intentionality. We and our Great Ape cousins shared the first phase; that is, we are all able to engage in some degree of reflexive action, schematization, and internal self-monitoring. Proto-humans, however, engaged in these behaviors with much greater facility and depth than the other Great Apes.
The second phase of development occurred approximately 400,000 years ago in relation to the emergence of Homo Heidelbergensis. With the advent of “joint intentionality,” our hominin ancestors developed the ability to think with a “sense of we” (33) that made possible genuinely joint goals and attention. Beyond chimpanzee capacities for limited “co-action” (35), our hominin ancestors engaged in genuinely relational thinking around “a single target of joint attention on which we have different perspectives” (44). Tomasello marks this as the first steps into construction of an “intersubjective world” (46) that “laid the foundation for everything that was uniquely human” (48). This development made possible mutual perspective-taking, symbolism and symbolic communication, propositional and social recursive thinking, and self-monitoring in relation to the group. It also paved the way for socially normatized individual thinking or proto-morality (76).
Tomasello argues that a further step was taken that set us apart from other hominins. About 200,000 years ago Homo sapiens sapiens arose as a distinct hominin group whose thought and behavior was characterized by “collective intentionality.” This involves the development of complex social organization and division of labor as well as the transmission of skills and knowledge across generations. In short, we developed culture. This collectivization of human life saw the emergence of generalized “objective” perspectives, social norms, institutions, abstract thought, social and symbolic systems, and cooperative argumentation and decision-making. Genuinely human life, he argues, involved a complex interplay between certain biological capacities and culturally determined realities.
Tomasello concludes that “It is an empirical fact that the social interaction and organization of great apes and humans are hugely different, with human beings much more cooperative in every way” (153). What makes us human, in other words, is our ability to collaborate and to act at least somewhat altruistically.
Professor of Anthropology Emerita at the University of California-Davis Sarah Blaffer Hrdy affirms Tomasello’s earlier work while pushing it forward. She writes, “my goal in writing this book is to understand how other-regarding tendencies could have evolved in creatures as self-serving as apes” (11). More expansively, she writes: I hypothesize that novel rearing conditions among a line of early hominins meant that the youngsters grew up depending on a wider range of care-takers than just their mothers, and this dependence produced selection pressures that formed individuals who were better at decoding the mental states of others, and figuring out who would help and who would hurt. (66)
The reason for the emergence of such uniquely human capacities can be found in the package of facts that humans have such large brains, that those brains require a huge amount of calories to develop and sustain, and that humans take such a long time to mature. Those three interrelated facts necessitate the development of shared parenting by relatives like maternal grandmothers, older siblings, aunts, fathers, and other members of the hunter-gatherer tribal unit. She argues that “a woman, especially an undernourished woman with several children, could not possibly manage [childrearing tasks] without enlisting kin and other villagers to help her care for her infant” (226). She concludes her discussion of the central role of childrearing in the development of genuinely human collaboration by making the claim that such intersubjective engagement did not require language or symbol and is, therefore, prior to and the necessary conditions for the emergence of symbolic and linguistic communication among humans.
Taken together, Tomasello and Hrdy paint a convincing picture of human uniqueness and the specific features of human cognition. They help us to see that human collaboration—particularly around the challenges of childrearing over an extended period of time—underlies the other amazing aspects of human cognition and culture like language, tool use, symbol, art, and institutional life. What they do not do is provide us with any insight into the emergence and role of religion in the 200,000-year history of our specific hominin species.
Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson’s latest work on evolution does attempt to address the role of religion in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens. As part of his reflections on the burgeoning evidence about human origins, he locates our species in the order of things: Humanity, I argue, arose entirely on its own through an accumulated series of events during evolution. We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us. There will be no redemption or second chance vouchsafed to us from above. We have only this one planet to inhabit and this one meaning to unfold. (15–16)
Wilson does, however, acknowledge that a religious instinct seems to go along with distinctively human cognition. He does not provide much of an account of why such an instinct would arise—particularly if, in his view, it would be something of a design flaw. He does, though, offer a diagnosis of the root problem with religion: tribalism. All the ills and destructive aspects of every one of the world’s religions can be traced back to tribalism: “There is no way around the soul-satisfying but cruel discrimination that organized religions by definition must practice among themselves” (151). He also argues that every creation story manufactured by the “thousands of religions” (153) have proven to be simply false and that “most serious writers on religion conflate the transcendent quest for meaning with the tribal defense of creation myths” (156). If only we would choose to free ourselves from “demons and tribal gods” (158), we would know peace and harmony as a species. Wilson takes a very dim view of the role of religion in the history of our species. He believes that it has no redeeming or constructive value whatsoever.
One does wonder how a person so committed to “nothing-but-the-facts” empirical science can come to such certain conclusions about such non-empirical matters as the existence of God, divine providence in relation to creation, or afterlife. Perhaps one sentence in his book provides the clue to making sense out of his vitriolic assessment of religion in human existence: When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the [evangelical] truth. (183)
Hoping for some intelligent, scientifically engaged reflections on the positive role of religion in human existence over the course of the past two hundred millennia that would both go further and engage other sources than Pannenberg’s 1985 magisterial work of theological anthropology, Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Westminster Press), I turned to the recent work of theologian Hans Schwarz from the University of Regensburg in Germany. Schwarz provides the logic of his work when he writes that in this project we are Asking ourselves first who we are, then whether or to what extent we are free in our own actions, and finally focusing on humans as a community of men and women. We listened to the biblical account, followed historical transformations, took insights of the life sciences into account, and finally formulated our own conclusions. (383)
In his treatment of the place of human beings in the order of things, Schwarz begins with some insightful treatment of Old and New Testament accounts of human existence. He then moves into a credible consideration of some relatively recent findings of evolutionary science. He concludes the section with a surprisingly dated treatment of philosophical anthropology as afforded by existentialism, various leftist perspectives, secular humanism, and postmodernity. He provides no account of just why these philosophical views are put into play, nor does he engage many thinkers from the past two or three decades.
One would expect that the section on the character of human freedom would follow the pattern of the first section: principles derived from revelation followed by insights from evolutionary science and rounded out with perspectives from philosophical anthropology. Instead, Schwarz begins with contemporary neuroscience, moves into a dated and unaccounted-for treatment of the depth psychologies of the usual suspects from the early and middle decades of the previous century (Freud, Jung, and Fromm), and ends with a long treatment of views of sin and evil arising from revelation and church history. Inexplicably, nearly one quarter of the book is given over to views of sin and evil in church history in this section—mainly those of Augustine and Luther with a “contemporary discussion” rounded out by theologians like Barth, Tillich, Pannenberg, and sources like liberation theology and feminist theology. Most often, the answer to every question about human freedom, sin, and evil turns out to be Luther’s modifications of Augustine.
The final section of the book similarly lacks a consistent structure and rationale for sources engaged. Schwarz begins with a consideration of the inherently gendered aspects of human existence from biblical perspectives. Without any sustained treatment of the subject of gender from evolutionary science or philosophical anthropology, the discussion then morphs into a treatment of human sexuality and marriage, with a terse dismissal of homosexuality and not so much as a nod to other questions related to the highly complex interplay between sexuality, gender, and sexual orientation. Again inexplicably, the discussion then shifts into a treatment of vocation in which Luther figures prominently. This, in turn, gives way to a puzzling treatment of eschatology. The third section of the book reads like pearls on a string without much evidence of internal coherence.
Schwarz concludes the oddly organized and executed book with a series of claims about human existence. He argues that human beings are unique among animals, that freedom is the key to understanding our uniqueness, that we live in a perpetual tension between self-interest and altruism, and that we are always aware of our finitude. That is it. How these platitudinous conclusions grow out of the arguments offered in the three main parts of the book is anyone’s guess. I really wanted to like this book and began it with very high hopes. In the end, I discovered little that shed compelling light on what it means to be human from a theological point of view.
These four books sit atop a growing pile of books about human origins and human nature that I have been collecting in recent years. I would have to say that the most interesting work is being done by evolutionary scientists, particularly Tomasello on social cognition and as augmented by Hrdy’s arguments for grounding that social cognition in alloparenting. Theologians, with the exception of Wentzel van Huyssteen’s work, lag on the question of rethinking what it means to be human in light of the many new discoveries, new perspectives, and new questions arising from paleoanthropology and evolutionary science. I would like to see several works of theological anthropology in which sustained theological engagement with current scientific research addresses a range of pressing questions. For instance, I would like to see someone take Tomasello’s argument about the inherently relational aspects of uniquely human cognition and extend them into relational engagement with the nonhuman (the natural world) and with the supra-human (God). Similarly, I wonder what christology might look like when biblical perspectives are brought together in critical dialogue with theories like those offered by Tomasello and Hrdy. In other words, the development of a “we” orientation through “I–You” dialogical interplay could be extended into divine–human relationality understood as grounded in interchange with persons both human and divine. I would also like some consideration given to questions of soteriology in light of the 200,000-year-long history of our species. Moreover, why did divine revelation take place so very late in the chronology of human existence? Also, should not contemporary theological anthropologies take into account the specificities of race, class, gender, and orientation when considering the multiple meanings of the imago Dei? To be sure, more work needs to be done on the subject of the true character of human freedom, particularly in relation to biological and neurological determinations that remain largely hidden from consciousness—to say nothing of the vexed question of the relationship between brain and mind. How can we think theologically about human existence today without also taking some serious account of questions pertaining to the bookends of life (origins and endings) as well as our interface with machines? Finally, what are we to make of Schleiermacher’s claims that human beings are in some basic sense hardwired for knowledge of God in light of the surprisingly persistent role of religion in the fossil record and in contemporary life? Perhaps it is time for theologians of various kinds and persuasions to work collaboratively on questions new and old about human nature.