Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul (2008)

Deception and religion have been joined at the hip for a very long time, perhaps as long as religion has existed in human culture given that religion has its origins in believing what we can never see or know.  Monkey Girl is Edward Humes' account of the Dover Township, Pennsylvania school board's effort to introduce the subject of intelligent design into the high school science curriculum and the litigation that ensued when parents stepped forward and asked a court to enjoin the school board's effort on the ground that it offended the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  What the 6-week trial in a United States District Court exposed was concerted deceit on the part of groups opposed to the teaching of natural selection  and what Charles Darwin called "descent with modification" in public school curriculum because it offended the biblical stories that lead them to the belief that god (an intelligent designer) created each of the species separately and the view of some that these acts of creation began no more than 10,000 years ago.  Comparable acts of deceit in the commercial world would be called mislabeling or misbranding or fraud.  In court, it is called perjury.

The drive to engage in the acts of deceit documented by Humes begins with the United States Supreme Court's decision in 1987 that the teaching of creationism offended the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and could not be taught in public schools.  If creationism could not be mandated as a subject of instruction in United States public schools these groups began to think about branding creationism as something else, something that sounded like it belonged in the science classroom --- intelligent design.  Their legal strategy, for example, compelled them to abandon the words "god" and "creator" and relabel god an "intelligent designer."  Their legal strategy also compelled them to create a controversy when, at least in the scientific community, no substantial controversy existed:  the existence of an intelligent designer would be deemed a serious scientific question and one that demanded that schools "teach the controversy."  The lingo of creationism and its relationship to the book of Genesis had to be purged if science students had any chance of being taught an alternate explanation of the creation of species alongside natural selection and descent with modification in the classroom.  This was no easy task.  To biblical literalists, it was confusing and did not sit well with the hard core biblical believers who wanted to drive natural selection and "Darwinism" from science class because, in their view, it was atheistic.  But for the advocates of intelligence design, their difficulties extended beyond the religious motivations of the Dover school board.  Not only were the intelligent design advocates ultimately unable to succeed in concealing the religious motivations of the school board, it turns out there was a long and unambiguous record demonstrating that intelligent design had its intellectual seed in creationism.  The very book that the intelligent design advocates wanted the high school students of Dover to have in their classroom, Of Pandas and People, had been drafted prior to the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, and the drafts had used the word creationism.  By the time of publication, after the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Edwards, the word creationism had been deleted everywhere and replaced with the term intelligent design. 

At the heart of the lawsuit, known as Kitzmiller v. Town of Dover, was this question:  was intelligent design science or religion?  For the plaintiffs, intelligent design was on trial; for the defendants and their supporters, traditional science was on trial.  After a six week trial in which the court heard from scientists on both side of the question, the court found that intelligent design was not science; it was religion. 

The scheme to inject intelligent design --- as opposed to creationism --- into the science curriculum begins with a paper developed by a University of California law professor, Phillip Johnson, that came to be known as the "wedge strategy," because it envisioned hammering a "wedge" into the tree of science by criticizing evolutionary theory --- putting science on the defensive and exploiting religious sentiment that was not only skeptical of evolutionary theory, but was essentially ignorant about natural selection and the body of scientific literature that had substantiated Darwin's natural selection model.  The wedge document was developed by Johnson in collaboration with the Discovery Institute, and essentially outlines not a scientific research program, but a public relations strategy to persuade people that a scientific controversy existed and that the public needed to be made aware of the controversy.  The wedge document was never intended to be made public, and it was forthright and honest in expressing the goals behind the wedge strategy, leaving no doubt about its theistic underpinning: 

• "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
• "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God."
• to initially see, within five years, "intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory" and within 20 years to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science" and to see "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life." 
• "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

During the Kitzmiller trial, however, the lawyers for the defendants, like Peter denying Jesus, wanted nothing to do with the wedge document.  They argued that it was a "mere fundraising proposal" of little significance.  The lawyers for the defendants desperately tried to prevent the plaintiffs' witness, Barbara Forrest, who testified not only about the revisions to the Pandas and People book but also about the wedge document, from testifying at all. 

A central part of the Discovery Institute's strategy was to change the ground rules of science so that it not only included the natural, material world, but also the supernatural ethereal world.  The problem with this project is that it is nothing less than the merger of science and religion.  According to the testimony of the plaintiff's expert at the Kitzmiller trial, "Science is the systematic attempt to provide natural explanations for natural phenomena."  The exclusion of the supernatural from science was unavoidable.  A scientific theory is testable, and is capable of being proven false.  The supernatural is not testable.  Judge Jones concluded, "Intelligent design is predicated on supernatural causation. . . . Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.  These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief."

Numerous posts in this blog raise issues that are relevant to the Kitzmiller case:

Teleology v teleonomy.  (June 12, 2011, May 24, 2010  and March 24, 2010 post).

The human propensity for self-deception and deception.  (February 4, 2012, August 28, 2011, and May 22, 2011 and May 12, 2010 post)

Anthropomorphism, anthropotheism,  and anthropodenial.  (March 20, 2012, June 12, 2011 and June 17, 2010 post).

Dualism and materialism.  ( December 17, 2012, February 27, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post)

At its core, the intelligent design movement, as exposed in the wedge document, is about as un-American as any group can be.  The long-run goal is for design theory to permeate not only religious, cultural, and moral life, but also "political life."  This is so contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, one would think the design movement's adherents were really living in modern Iran or some other theocracy.  Yet what Monkey Girl reveals is that the intelligent design movement has so little respect for the First Amendment, because they believe the government has abandoned religion by recognizing the freedom of atheists, skeptics (agnostics), and pantheists who imagine a universe governed by natural laws (see January 31, 2013 post) and they believe the government has abandoned its moorings as a "Christian nation."  In contrast, Humes closes out Monkey Girl with a quotation from the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, signed by founding father President John Adams:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility, against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the Parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."  (Emphasis added).

Nor should one forget the Jefferson Bible, in which founding father Thomas Jefferson, excised the text pertaining to miracles and other supernatural events. 

I have a proposal that will surely bring the intelligent design movement and creationists running back for the protection of the First Amendment.  Congress should pass a law that requires every religious school class to teach the following every Saturday or Sunday:  "The Book of Genesis is a story.  It was written and later edited by men who could not explain their origins or the origins of the physical universe including other life on earth and life and other material beyond the earth.  It's a wonderful story and it even has meaning, but it is just a story.  Our origins really did not happen they way, Adam and Eve were not real people, and the other stories that purport to be written history of the Hebrews are merely stories as well.  There may be some little historical basis in some of these stories, but they have been gilded, edited, redacted, and revised to fit a collective memory long after the events described in Genesis purportedly took place.  And by the way, children, did you not see that Genesis mentions nothing about the dinosaurs and other animals that lived on earth millions of years ago, whose bones we find in the ground today.  Children, do you not wonder why Genesis does not mention dinosaurs and other animals who no longer exist?  The answer is simple.  The men who wrote the stories in Genesis did not know about these animals.  They were not as knowledgeable as you are today."  Once the law is passed, I am sure there will be a lawsuit.  Maybe the ACLU will be the plaintiff.

In Edwards v. Aguillard, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia dissented from the majority's decision that struck down Louisiana's statute that called for the "balanced treatment" of "creation science" and "evolution science" in Louisiana schools.  The 7 member majority of the Court authored by Justice Brennan and the concurring opinions of Justice Powell and Justice White found plenty of evidence that creation science lacked a secular purpose and was religiously inspired.  "This is not a hard case," wrote Justice White.  The case came before the Supreme Court based on the trial court's grant of a motion for summary judgment, which meant the trial court found enough undisputed evidence presented by the plaintiff's challenging the Louisiana statute to warrant granting a judgment without a full evidentiary trial.  Justice Scalia professed to take no position on the merits of "creation science," but he felt that Louisiana deserved a full evidentiary trial before an appellate court such as the US Supreme Court decided whether or not there was a valid secular purpose.  One would think, and hope, that Justice Scalia, informed by the full evidentiary record in Kitzmiller, would have recognized as Justice White did in Edwards that "this is not a hard case" had the Kitzmiller case made its way to the Supreme Court for judicial review, and that he would recognize that intelligent design deserved the same fate that creation science received in Edwards. 

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Even for those of us who are not professional scholars, there is value in reading the original words of someone like David Hume rather than reading only what others have said about him. Part of that value is found simply in the exercise of mentally transporting yourself back in time to better understand the 18th century period in which he lived and how new ideas were being debated at that time. Another part of that value will be retrieved the next time I read about David Hume, and a greater appreciation of the point the author is making. Among Enlightenment philosophers, I chose Hume because he is too frequently cited in the books I read to not pay attention to him.

Hume, I have surmised, is regrettably overlooked by Americans in their surveys of philosophy. Other Enlightenment philosophers --- notably John Locke --- garner more attention because they were sources of inspiration for the development of American political and legal traditions. Locke is associated with the idea of "natural rights" and declared truths "we hold to be self-evident." In the field of epistemology, Locke probably receives more attention than Hume in surveys of philosophy because he was an earlier proponent of empiricism, which emphasizes the role of experience and the senses in our understanding of objects in the world over the view that knowledge is innate. Within the community of contemporary philosophers of the mind as well as psychologists and neuroscientists, Hume has received his credit for his contribution to our understanding of how the mind works --- even more so than Locke --- and that would suggest that survey courses in philosophy might reorient their Enlightenment-era discussions of knowledge and the mind to pay more attention to Hume to better appreciate how our understanding of the mind has evolved since the 18th century.

A Treatise of Human Nature is an 18th century version of How The Mind Works. It advances the concept of associationism, a concept which dominated psychology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in greater detail than anyone had previously discussed. What Hume did not have at his disposal in the 1730s was a body of empirical research from the fields of psychology, biology, and neuroscience to inform his inquiry into human nature. He had the works of philosophers who preceded him, which he had digested prior to embarking on his Treatise, and his own series of what he called "experiments" --- introspective thinking about how his own mind and body worked and thinking about others to assess whether he could generalize from his own experience. For this reason, the Treatise carries the subtitle "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects."

Hume is an example of John Searle's Enlightenment-era philosopher trying "to cope with the problem of skepticism." (See previous January 21, 2011 post). "As to those impressions," Hume writes, "which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object or a produced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from the author of our being." In other words, the representations of things in our mind come from our sense experiences and we can never know with certainty that the object of our mind's attention produces that impression or whether it is a priori in our minds because of the act of a deity ("the author of our being."). The Treatise represents Hume's effort to "cope" with this inability to know anything directly with certainty, and he determines that the mind's ability to associate ideas enables it to make inferences that form the basis of our knowledge about external objects to which our senses are exposed. The three principle qualities that enable the mind to associate or connect various ideas are resemblance, contiguity (in time and space), and cause and effect.

In his book Mind, John Searle writes that "most philosophers will agree [that Hume's account of causation] is one of the most impressive pieces of philosophical prose ever written in the English language." Why does he say this? Because Hume reasoned a way in which we can generalize about reality from specific sense experiences. Hume describes a principle of causation and a principle of causality, which are not the same. The first says every effect has a cause; the second says that like effects have like causes. We experience something through sensation, but the only quality from that single experience is one of contiguity (before and after, or next to), but we do not necessarily make a connection between that that single experience and what caused it without a constant repetition of similar experiences (resemblances). The greater the regularity of those similar experiences produces a "felt determination of the mind" on which a generality is based. Hume notes that probability plays a role here in creating Belief. "Should it be demanded why men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience, I should reply, that in my opinion it proceeds from those very principles, on which all judgments concerning causes and effects depend. Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection [that is before we even seriously think about what we just experienced] and which cannot be prevented by it." It is what Searle calls "Hume's regularity theory of causation" that has been influential in the philosophy of the mind.

One can be critical of Hume, because he does not believe that we actually experience necessary connections between things (causation), or that we actually experience our conscious selves and are forced to rely on frequently repeating, resembling events that strengthen the force of our perceptions before we can form "beliefs" about external objects or our identity, without having to disparage his analysis of how the mind works. Hume's account of human nature integrates sensation, feelings, emotions, and memory --- what today we recognize as the neurobiological network of the human body, including the brain, that constitutes a conscious human agent. "Belief," says Hume, "is more properly an act of the sensitive, than the cogitative part of our natures."

This book is intended to be a treatise on the nature of humans, but Hume consciously ducks discussing human biology: "The examination of our sensations belongs more to the anatomists and natural philosophers [scientists] than to moral; and therefore shall not at present be entered upon." And even if he had not avoided the biology of what makes us human, today's reader would have learned little in light of the fact that Hume did not enjoy what John Searle notes that we enjoy in the 21st century: "a huge accumulation of knowledge [about biological systems, biological evolution, DNA and reproduction, embryology, etc.], which is certain, objective, and universal." (See previous post of January 21, 2011). But the absence of that knowledge from Hume's treatise should not cause one not to marvel at the depth of his introspection on human nature.

It is important to give Hume credit for recognizing the role of feelings and, what he calls "passions" in human nature and human decision-making. Sensations (experience) give rise to passions (reflective impressions). Sensations are either pleasurable (good) or painful (evil,bad), with varying degrees of each known to us. Certain passions are associated with pleasure (e.g., pride, love, benevolence, compassion, hope, joy), other passions are associated with pain (e.g., humility, hate, anger, malice, envy, fear, grief). The different passions vary by degree, which Hume labels "violent" or "calm." Like knowledge, passions are stronger or weaker because of repetition in our experience and the extent to which those experience become embraced by custom [culture]. Reason, says Hume, is not some objective, fully-informed distinct mental state separate from the passions; it is nothing more than a popular term for the "calm" passions, reflecting Hume's view that reason is never isolated from our emotions that are derived from our experience (sensations). Understood in this light, Hume foreshadows the tradition of Williams James that continues today in the works of Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), which recognizes that emotions and feelings are caused by physiological changes attributable to electro-chemical stimuli in the neurobiological system.

The modern reader of the philosophy of mind, psychology, biology, and neuroscience will recognize that Hume identified and seized on human attributes and behavior that are now more completely understood in biological terms. For example, Hume's statement that "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations" reminds one of Damasio's reference to consciousness as a 'movie within a movie.' The difference between Hume and contemporaries such as Damasio is revealed in Hume's statement: "The comparison to the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed." For Damasio and his peers, while we may not have a full account of the mind and brain, we no longer have a "distant notion" of the place where and how images are represented in the brain and we have a very good of the physical attributes of which the brain is composed.

Hume even foreshadows our modern discussion of mirror neurons when he writes that "the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other's emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees," and he connects this observation to human empathy and sympathy for fellow humans. Later, in Book 3, Hume writes, "When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is conveyed to the effects, and it is actuated with a like emotion." In statements like this one senses a primitive Enlightenment precursor to the research of Marco Iacoboni and others as described in Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect. (See September 18, 2009 post).

The Treatise does not end with Hume's conclusion about the nature of the human mind and how sensory perceptions connect to feelings and emotions that become experiences, memories, and ultimately beliefs about the external world and free-will, but the Treatise expands to include the construction of a cultural reality and social institutions for the regulation of human behavior (customs, rules, and law). Hume is not a social contractarian in the tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau (and later, Rawls). Morality and social structure do not evolve from human reason: "morality is more properly felt than judged," indicating that justice is derived from our impressions, not from reason. The passion sympathy [empathy] is the chief source of our moral distinctions, says Hume. Consistent with Hume's "system" of the human understanding that is described in Book 1, our sensory experiences of pleasure and pain give rise to positive and negative passions, which in turns leads to a propensity toward something that is favored (in the case of positive passions) or an aversion from something that is disfavored (in the case of negative passions). In either case, we are talking about self-interest and self-interest includes a recognition that reciprocal relations with other humans (including promise-making behavior) leads to a moral sense of virtue (favored) and vice (disfavored). After awhile, humans develop a general "sense" of common interest. This leads to the development of social rules, laws, and institutions to enforce them. This process is not the outcome of a rational bargain and a signed contract, but it is a process that reflects an evolving tendency toward stasis, much as the human body pits the positive and negative passions that tend toward homeostasis.

We can also recognize in the Treatise a primitive discussion of whether altruistic acts are confined to biological relations (kin) or are capable of being expanded to wider societal relations and nations. Hume writes, "When experience has once given us a competent knowledge of human affairs and has taught us the proportion they bear to human passion, we perceive that the generosity of men is very limited, and that it seldom extends beyond their friends and family, or, at most, beyond their native country." This same sentiment is debated today in Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (see November 4, 2009), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (see October 13, 2010 post), and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy (see November 9, 2010 post).

Hume clearly disputes Bernard Mandeville's view that man is driven by egotistical impulses, seeking self-preservation and advancement. (See January 30, 2010 post). Hume does not deny egotistical impulses and the pursuit of self-preservation, but for every passion that Hume identifies there is a counter-passion: in the case of self-interest, there is sympathy and empathy for others. In Mandeville's view, it is societal institutions that regulate and restrain man's self-seeking drives; in Hume's vision, sympathy, empathy, generosity, and reciprocal behavior are part of human nature. Hume's assessment of human nature has clearly prevailed from the modern view of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. In this regard, Hume is closer to his fellow Scotsman, Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments is at the core of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post).

Nearly four centuries after Hume wrote his Treatise, we recognize that his observations on human nature are not all that far from those which science and experiment confirm for us today. Associationism may no longer hold sway in our view of how the mind works, but the linkage between sensations, feelings, emotions, reflection, and reasoning, which Hume describes in the Treatise, is the same linkage that neuroscientists describe today. The limitation of the treatise, which I think we will appreciate from the next book off The Bookshelf by Antonio Damasio, is that Hume did not fully appreciate how we construct a personal identity for ourselves. Hume says, "The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects." In other words, Hume says that we come to know our self in the same way we come to know external objects. Presumably this means Hume is coping with his skepticism over his own identity just as much he is coping with his skepticism toward the broccoli he ate for dinner. Let's see what Damasio has to say.

Frans DeWaal, The Age of Empathy (2009)

Good book. Poorly chosen title. Whether DeWaal chose the title The Age of Empathy or the publisher thrust it upon him, it was clearly inspired by the euphoria following the November 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as though the election launched a new era of human behavior. He shares a similar hope with Jose Saramago's hope for a kinder, social society as expressed in The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post). Now, two years later, on the heels of the midterm elections in the United States, empathy is hardly a name that I would assign to these times.

Nor does the title align well with one of De Waal's essential points about human duality, which is illustrated in the following passage:

"Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if all of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it's immune to invasions by mutants."

Even De Waal admits that empathy --- the ability to identify with and feel a connectedness to another --- is as much a part of us (and other species) as selfishness, violence, and egocentrism. "I rate humans among the most aggressive primates," he writes, "but also believe that we're masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It's all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naive and detrimental, whereas unconditional greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own weight." So contrary to the opening line of the book, "Greed is out, empathy is in," there will never be an "age" dominated by empathy or any other single other characteristic of our personality.

Our capacity for cooperation, altruism, and other social instincts is certainly biological, and it is a product of evolution. We have much to learn about what makes us human from learning about the behavior of other species from which humans evolved as we do from observing our own behavior. This is De Waal's primary thesis. And this thesis is no stranger to this blog and previous posts, including De Waal's own The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post), Dacher Keltner's Born to Be Good (July 16, 2010 post), Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009), Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Christine Kennealy's The First Word (August 31, 2009 post).

De Waal takes aim at three myths: (1) the myth that our ancestors --- 4 foot bipedal apes --- ruled the savanna in Africa; (2) that human society is a voluntary creation of autonomous men; and (3) that our species has been waging war for as long as it has been around. Our ancestors were likely both prey and predator and survival favored genes that encouraged collaboration and companionship. The idea that humans were autonomous falsely presumes they had no need for anybody else and could voluntarily choose to live apart, uncommitted to anyone else or any place. A warlike initial state of nature that philosophers like Rousseau imagined that was overcome by social compacts is actually the reverse of human evolution: war on a grand scale, like we have known for centuries, came only after social hierarchies were formed and wealth was created. The early human species was probably defined more by social commitments and small scale collaboration that promoted primitive economic exchange and division of labor.

At the biological core of our humanness is the limbic system, which, from an evolutionary perspective, is one of the oldest parts of our neural network in the human brain. It is a part of the brains of other species as well. Antonio Damassio identifies the limbic system as a critical regulator of feelings and emotions in The Feeling of What Happens, and it is central to understanding human consciousness. De Waal says the limbic system allows emotions such as affection and pleasure, and paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. Other parts of our neural network allow us to store memories of these feelings and emotions and allow us to recall the context in which we previously experienced them and then to "understand" them. A key line here is De Waal's statement, "Bodily connections come first --- understanding follows." Mirror neurons, as described in Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), are active in these other parts of the neural network known as the brain that allow us to "read" the minds of others, enabling us to connect with others, and facilitate the the experience we call empathy. "De Waal calls this emotional contagion: seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotions, and then we build "a more advanced understanding of another's situation." Later, he adds, "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need."

True to his dualism, just as De Waal recognizes that emotional contagion probably starts immediately with the mother-child relationship and that early communication fosters a bond, a second phase begins just months later in the course of child development when the child begins to develop a sense of self. And empathy, De Waal believes, "requires both mental mirroring and mental separation." The former occurs when we see another person in a particular emotional state. The latter occurs when we parse our own emotional state from the other, and this allows us to "pinpoint the actual source of our own feelings." De Waal attributes our dualism to the existence of VEN cells in the brain --- Von Economo neurons --- that differ from other neurons and are unique to humans and their recent ancestors. Physically, VEN cells are long and spindle-like and reach deeper into the brain. Research shows that when parts of the human brain that contain these cells are damaged, behavior is marked by a loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, and future orientation. Besides humans and certain apes, these cells are also found in dolphins, whales, and elephants, where behavioral research shows they have the capacity for empathy that is not found in other species.

De Waal frets that the reluctance of some segments of human society to talk about animal emotions has "less to do with science than religion." Eastern religions, which tend to embrace the connectedness between humans and other species, don't show this reluctance, but the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim religions tend to place humans on a pedestal as the only intelligent life on earth and show greater reluctance to connect themselves to other species as opposed to abstract spirits that purportedly have equal or greater intelligence. De Waal believes this is because of their origin in an existence where humans were desert nomads --- where other animal life was sparse compared to other geographic regions on earth.

From our capacity for empathy evolves reciprocal behavior and ultimately altruistic social rules. But given the dualism that reflects both our empathetic self and our self-centered self, we also have competitive behavior and ultimately social rules to regulate that competition. This leads De Waal to identify two types of fairness principles that are at the core of these social rules: fairness that seeks a level playing field (equality) and fairness that links rewards to effort, and both are "essential," De Waal says.

My observation is that the pendulum swings between the two types of fairness --- one which is grounded in empathy and the other which is grounded in the sense of self. One type of fairness does not displace the other entirely. So if this was the Age of Empathy, the Age of Greed and Discord is merely sublimated for a period of time. But De Waal appears to be the optimist in contrast to Jose Saramago, the pessimist, on this point, whom I quoted in The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), concluding, "It is most likely, however, that there is no remedy for any of the above and that civilizations will continue to collide, one against the other."

Rodolphe Kasser et al eds., The Gospel of Judas (2006)

An English translation of and commentary on The Gospel of Judas, a second century gnostic narrative of that fateful week in Jerusalem around 30 C.E., when the Romans nailed Joshua of Nazareth (nee Yeshua, latinized Jesus) to a cross, which turns Christianity on its head. Although retrieved from the Egyptian desert in the 1970s, this gospel was only "discovered" in 2003.

The significance of this document is not whether it is historically true or not --- like the four gospels of the New Testament, it is not; the significance of this document confirms what we know from other sources that early Christianity was not monolithic and was fractured in its understanding of what to make of Joshua of Nazareth, a man who was not personally known to those who later made him out to be deity. The fractured nature of early Christianity is documented in Richard Rubenstein's excellent book, When Jesus Became God, which describes the theological battle between two priests of Alexandria, Egypt and their respective followers about the actual nature of this man. The special twist here, in the gnostic tradition, is that Joshua really was divine --- a divine offspring of a first tier deity among many dieties, and Judas conspired with him to release him from his human encasement by arranging his death at the hands of the Romans.

It is easy to understand why the 3rd century Catholic powers-that-be never seriously considered this gospel for inclusion in the New Testament: resurrection theology is ruled out in this gospel, and it smacks of polytheism in the finest Greek tradition.

I have never seriously believed that Judas was a traitor to his friend Joshua. That part of the New Testament gospels' story makes no sense, and is easily explained as the creative effort of the early Catholic Church to distinguish itself from Judaism by demonizing Jews and laying the foundation for centuries of anti-semitism. If the early Church had not distinguished itself from Judaism, its efforts at proselytizing and seeking new members among the gentiles might have failed. Judas the traitor was nothing more than a public relations and marketing program. There are even passages in the New Testament that support the view that Judas and Joshua were collaborators in Joshua's grand plan to end his life. The Gospel of Judas makes Judas out to be more of a Dr. Kevorkian, faithfully aiding and abetting Joshua in an assisted suicide, with the only difference being that Joshua does not "die" like an ordinary human.

The Gospel of Judas and the other Christian gospels --- in and out of the New Testament --- share a neo-Platonist/dualist view of the world. There are non-corporeal forms and souls and spirits that comprise one reality, and there are physical manifestations of those forms that make up a separate reality. They coexist. I have commented on other problems with dualism in prior posts (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts). Theology and religion are anchored in a dualist world, and when dualism is rejected, theology and religion must logically be abandoned. Descartes and Leibniz could not abandon a dualist view of the world, because it meant severing ties with church-dominated theistic world of 17th century and sacrificing their material if not pecuniary self-interests. Only Spinoza was bold enough and independent enough to firmly reject dualism, and this led him to espouse a type of panetheism, which to the theist, is nothing more than atheism.

Dualism is a problem of the human mind. When we understand better how the mind works to create imaginary stories about spirits that become part of a collective memory and the evolutionary imperative for doing so, we will finally come to understand what theology and religion really is --- and it will not be the theology and religion that theists have experienced for centuries and claim to understand. And it may well be that there is or will be great resistance to even wanting to know more about how the human mind works in order to avoid confronting a new paradigm of religion.