Nicholas Wade's Darwinian Liberal Conservatism

In 1975, the left-wing critics of Ed Wilson's Sociobiology accused him of promoting a genetic determinism and a conservative (or even neo-Nazi) politics that denied the possibility and desirability of the social change through cultural learning that could establish a socialist society.  Nicholas Wade, writing for the journal Science, responded by pointing out that Wilson could not be a strict genetic determinist because he recognized that human social behavior was largely shaped by cultural learning.  The evolution of social behavior works through the interaction of genes and culture, so that genetic evolution both enables and constrains cultural evolution.  

Wade also dismissed the charge that Wilson was supporting Nazi-like eugenics as unfairly inflammatory political rhetoric.  After all, Wade noted, Wilson "describes himself as a liberal."  Wilson himself had said that human sociobiology could explain the human resistance to oppressive despotism as an expression of those human rights that are rooted in human biological nature--"rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem."  So it seemed that if Wilson's sociobiology promoted conservatism, it must be a liberal conservatism--conservative in the sense of conserving those genetically evolved behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past, but liberal in the sense of being open to the cultural evolution of the liberal institutions that secure human liberty.

In his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations, Wade elaborates both of these themes--the gene-culture coevolution of human social behavior and the need for both liberal and conservative attitudes to sustain a free, flourishing, and enduring social order.  He also adds a third theme--the evolution of the modern nation-state--that supports an illiberal nationalism that seems to contradict his liberal conservatism.

THE GENE-CULTURE COEVOLUTION OF POLITICS

Many of the leftist critics of sociobiology worried that any conception of a genetic human nature as a constraint on cultural change would deny the possibility of creating a socialist society.  Wade confirms that fear by arguing that the history of socialis utopias--particularly, the socialist kibbutzim in Israel-- shows that any attempt to conquer human nature in establishing socialism must ultimately fail.

The kibbutzim were collective farms established in Israel in the early 20th century.  To achieve complete equality, they abolished the family, abolished the traditional division of labor between men and women, abolished private property, and abolished differential compensation for workers.

The kibbutzim practiced a pure socialism that came as close to absolute equality as any human community has ever achieved.  The members rotated jobs.  They took all of their meals in a common dining hall.  They had no private property.  They did not even own the clothing they wore, which was provided for them by the community.  When children were born, they were sent to a children's house to be cared for and educated by the community.  Children were allowed to visit their parents only a few hours in the afternoon.  This was understood as necessary for the sexual equality of men and women, because women were free from the burden of caring for their children. All decisions about the organization of the community were made by consensus in a general assembly, usually held weekly, where every member participated equally.  The kibbutzniks saw themselves as putting into practice the Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  They also seemed to be following Plato's recommendation in The Republic that the Guardians in the just city should not have private property or private families, because they should care for the common good of the whole community rather than their selfish private interests.

But then, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, young mothers began to complain that they did not have enough time with their children.  They wanted at least to be able to put their children to sleep at night.  As the children matured to adulthood, many of them left the kibbutz because they didn't like the communal childrearing.  Beginning in the 1970s, many of the kibbutzim decided to allow family sleeping rather than collective sleeping.  Socialists complained that allowing children to live with their parents would lead to the privatization of other things and inequality.

The kibbutzniks wanted not only private families but also private property.  Some of them returning from serving in the British army in World War Two came back with teakettles.  Allowing some people to own private teakettles, and to drink tea privately in their homes rather than in the communal dining room, violated socialist equality.  Then some people wanted to own their own clothes and to select their clothing.  They also wanted to own their homes.

The kibbutzim had to abandon job rotation to keep skilled people in their specialized jobs.  The most skilled workers wanted extra pay for their work, and they complained about those people who didn't work hard but received equal pay.  By the end of the 1990s, many kibbutzim were assigning wages according to skill level.

So socialism was successful for the founding generation of the kibbutzniks because of their ideological commitment to the project.  But it ultimately failed because the second and third generations rejected it as frustrating their natural human desires for familial bonding, private property, and earnings according to merit.  The socialist culture of the kibbutzim failed to abolish evolved human nature.

But even if cultural learning cannot abolish human nature, Wade observes, human nature is flexible enough that it can be bent in certain directions by cultural learning.  His two examples of this happening are the rise of monogamy and the fall of tribalism in human history.

Although monogamous pair-bonding is deeply rooted in human evolutionary history, there is also an evolutionary logic for men to compete with one another for sexual access to many women.  Since women can bear only a few children in their lifetimes, but men can father many, a man who mates with many women increases his Darwinian fitness.  But only men with power, status, and wealth can provide multiple women with the resources they need for bearing and rearing children.  So it was only after the development of agriculture, which allowed a few men to accumulate great wealth and power, that high status men were able to have many wives.  For example, Wade notes that the Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail was reputed to have had over 500 concubines and to have fathered over 1,000 children by the time of his death in 1727.  Since the emergence of agriculture, most societies have allowed polygamy.  Actually, this means polygyny (multiple women mated with one man), because polyandry (multiple men mated with one woman) is extremely rare.

But then in ancient Greece and Rome, there arose a cultural rule forbidding anyone from marrying more than one person at a time.  The Christian Church then strictly enforced this cultural rule of monogamy across the Roman Empire and then across the European states.

Rich men are worse off from this cultural rule because it limits their male desire to leave as many (legitimate) offspring as possible.  But it benefits poor men in a way that benefits society at large.

In a polygamous society, the highest status men will have many wives.  Some middle status men will have one wife each.  Consequently, the lowest status men will have little chance of finding a wife.  These young wifeless men will become resentful and violent and thus disruptive to the social order.  

Monogamy evenly distributes the women as mates for the men, and then every man has a stake in the existing order, which strengthens social cohesion.  For that reason, monogamous societies will tend to be more stable and enduring than polygamous societies.

This cultural evolution of monogamy illustrates how a cultural rule can bend but not break a natural human propensity.  In a monogamous society, rich and powerful men (such as politicians) will enjoy sexual access to many women, but these adulterous affairs will not be socially or legally legitimized.

Another example of a cultural curbing of a natural propensity that was necessary for the emergence of modern state societies is the repression of tribalism.  With the appearance of the first horticulturalists about 10,000 years ago--small-scale cultivators of plants--people lived in small villages organized into clans and tribes.  A clan is a social group consisting of families who claim a common ancestor.  The informal leadership of a clan is usually elders or a chief.  A tribe is composed of multiple clans claiming common ancestry and shared culture, language, territory, and traditions.  The tribe is governed by chiefs or councils, but they have nothing like a formal government or bureaucratic state.  John Locke understood the American Indian tribes (particularly, the Huron tribes described by Gabriel Sagard) as living in the state of nature with informal governance but no formal political institutions.

For thousands of years, tribalism was the predominant social organization for most human beings around the world.  History's largest land empire--the Mongol Empire--was tribally organized, and by 1279 AD it stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe.

In Europe, Wade observes, tribalism was undermined by the Catholic Church.  Tribes depend on a network of marriages between people who are closely related to preserve male lineages and inheritance of property in the male line.  Because of the short life spans in premodern times, families often had no male heir.  To keep wealth within the family or tribe, men were required to marry their brother's widow, or a widowed man was required to marry his sister-in-law.  Or a family could resort to adoption.  The Church used its power over marriage rules to forbid these practices under the pretext of preventing incest.  Then, when people on their deathbeds had no male descendants, they could be persuaded by a priest to give their property to the Church as a way of assuring their heavenly salvation.  Consequently, so much of the wealth of the tribes was transferred to the Church that tribal structures were dissolved.

Wade argues that what we see here is the coevolution of genetic instincts and cultural traditions, so that cultural norms can curb genetic instincts like polygamy and tribalism, but those instincts can never be totally extinguished.  Rich and powerful men will always be tempted by the polygamous instinct for extramarital sex.  And people will always have a tribalistic instinct to favor their relatives.

THE EVOLUTION OF LIBERAL CONSERVATISM

The cultural suppression of polygamy and tribalism, allowed for the emergence of the monogamous nuclear family in Europe as the normative institution for organizing marriage and kinship.  The monogamous nuclear family—a couple and their dependent children living together—has historically been linked to the rise of individualism in Western societies. This arises from its role in shaping personal identity, property rights, and social roles.

But people were still under the authoritarian religious and political authority of the ruling elites who controlled the church and the state.  Securing the social, economic, and political freedoms enjoyed by people in a modern liberal democracy, Wade explains, required the cultural evolution of the liberal constitutionalism that first emerged fully in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The Stuart monarchs claimed to rule by divine right, and thus they could not be under the law, since the King was the Law--Rex Lex.  Their opponents in Parliament argued that the king must be subject to the law.  By the late 17th century, there were two political factions in this debate.  The Tories defended the divine right authority of the King.  The Whigs argued for parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law over the King.  This debate was settled when the last of the Stuarts, James II, was forced into exile and replaced in 1689 by William III of the Dutch House of Orange.  This established that the king was subject to the law and Parliament and that governments could rule only with the consent of the people.  Most Tories then accepted constitutional monarchy and gave up the idea of divine-right monarchy.

Wade sees here the cultural evolution of the three components of the modern liberal democratic order.

First, the state was strong enough to defend itself and prevent unrest within its borders.  Second, such conditions allowed the emergence of the rule of law and respect for property rights.  Third, because of the existence and legitimacy of the law, Parliament was able to challenge the king's absolute power and make him subject to the will of elected government (94-95).

For Wade, this allowed for "institutions such as property rights, free markets, and an unbiased legal system . . . open and impersonal institutions, or 'inclusive institutions'" that "stand in contrast to 'extractive institutions' that are designed to sequester a society's resources for the benefit of a small elite" (98-99).  This cultural evolution from "extractive institutions" to "inclusive institutions" corresponds to what Stephen Balch would call the move from a Takers regime to a Makers regime (Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Human Progress [Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026).  The Makers are those who produce wealth.  The Takers are those who expropriate the wealth produced by others.

David Hume saw the conflict between the Tories as the party of authority and obedience to rulers and the Whigs as the party of liberty and resistance to tyranny as a political battle in which the partisans of each faction refused to see the partial truth in each side: good government requires a tense balance between authority and liberty, so that each side moderates the other.  Extreme authoritarianism creates tyranny.  Extreme libertarianism creates anarchy.  Hume thought the task of a philosopher is not to become a partisan for one side over the other but to mediate between the two extremes and promote compromise and accommodation.

Although Wade is not completely clear on this point, he seems to agree with Hume in suggesting that the genetic and cultural evolution of political order requires a balance or accommodation between conservative political attitudes (expressed by the Tories) and liberal political attitudes (expressed by the Whigs), which I have called "liberal conservatism."  

Wade agrees with those political scientists--John Hibbing, Peter Hatemi, and their colleagues--who argue that twin studies have shown that political attitudes are to a significant degree genetically influenced (see John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: The Left, The Right, and the Biology of Political Differences, second edition [New York: Routledge, 2024].  In some studies, questionnaires are given to identical twins, who have 100% of their genome in common, and to fraternal twins, who share on average 50% of their genes.  When the responses from the identical twin pairs are more similar than those from the fraternal twin pairs, a genetic influence can be inferred.  The twins can be asked to answer yes or no to a series of questions about political issues such as the death penalty, gay rights, immigration, and abortion.  In one study, researchers constructed an index of conservatism based on typically conservative answers to the questions and then estimated the heritability of conservatism--the extent to which the variability in the population is influenced by genetics--as 43%.  Studies of identical twins reared apart show that if you know that one of the twins is politically conservative, you can predict that the other twin is likely to be politically conservative.  So it seems that there is some genetic influence on whether one is politically conservative or liberal.

In some previous posts, I have criticized this "genopolitics" research of Hibbing and his colleagues.  One of my main criticisms has been that Hibbing's group gives us an implausibly simplistic model that cannot account for the complex diversity of evolved political ideology.  Isn't it hard to see how the complexity of political thought and behavior could be reduced to two categories at opposite ends of one dimension--the political left or the political right--or perhaps three categories if we include the political center?  At the very least, we need to recognize libertarianism or classical liberalism as a position that is neither purely liberal nor purely conservative, a position that is ignored by Hibbing's group.

The insistence of Hibbing's group that everyone is either liberal or conservative, left or right, requires that everyone be forced to make dichotomous choices about the "bedrock issues of social organization."  They have done this by using a "Society Works Best Instrument" (Kevin Smith et al., "Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology," Political Psychology 32 [2011]: 390-91).  People are given a series of 14 binary choices about how "Society works best when . . ."  Amazingly, they ask about how "society" works best, but they ask nothing about "government" or "the state"; and so they make it impossible to distinguish between the natural and voluntary associations in civil society and the coercive power of government.

Here are some examples.  "Society works best when . . . 1. Those who break the rules are punished. 2. Those who break the rules are forgiven.  1. Every member contributes. 2. More fortunate members sacrifice to help others.  1. People are rewarded according to merit.  2. People are rewarded according to need.  1. People take primary responsibility for their welfare. 2. People join together to help others.  1. People are proud they belong to the best society there is.  2. People realize that no society is better than any other."

Every choice of a 1 was given a score of 1, and every choice of a 2 was given a score of -1.  Those whose total score was close to 14 were extreme conservatives.  Those whose total score was close to -14 were extreme liberals.

I assure you I am not making this up.  This is what Hibbing and his group regard as real social science. 

Wouldn't any reasonable person--any liberal or conservative--object that most of these dichotomous choices are ridiculous, because they are false dichotomies?  Would the conservative say that those who break the rules should always be punished and never forgiven?  Or would the liberal say that they should always be forgiven and never punished?  Would the conservative say that people should always be rewarded according to merit and never according to need?  Or would the liberal say that people should always be rewarded according to need and never according to merit?  Would the conservative say that people should always take primary responsibility for their welfare and never help others?  Or would the liberal say that people should always help others and never take primary responsibility for their own welfare?  Surely, the answer to all these questions is no.

If you insist that political ideology consists of a choice between only two alternatives, these are the kind of silly choices that you have to give to people.

Perhaps we need a somewhat wider range of choices.  Hibbing et al. are silent about the proposal by some political scientists--such as William Maddox and Stuart Lilie (in Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum [Cato Institute, 1984])--for using the two dimensions of freedom--economic freedom and personal freedom--to construct a matrix of four or five political ideologies.  American public opinion survey data shows, they contend, that American citizens are not just divided into liberals and conservatives, but also into libertarians and populists.  Some libertarian theorists (such as David Boaz), as well as the Libertarian Party, have adopted this analysis to construct a matrix of political ideologies based on two dimensions--personal liberty and economic liberty:

You can take a short quiz to see where you belong.  If you score high on personal liberty but low on economic liberty, you're a liberal.  If you score low on personal liberty but high on economic liberty, you're a conservative. If you score low on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a statist (or an authoritarian).  (Maddox and Lilie would call you a populist.)   If you score high on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a libertarian.  If you score towards the middle on both scales, you're a centrist.

Since the libertarian (or classical liberal) agrees with the liberal about the importance of personal liberty and agrees with the conservative about the importance of economic liberty, the libertarian could also be called a liberal conservative.

Wade never explicitly affirms what I am calling "liberal conservatism," but it's implied in much of what he says.  "Evolution has embedded four major structural elements of society in the human genome," Wade claims.  "These are the family, the specialized roles of the two sexes, social institutions [such as religion, commerce, and politics], and the tribe with its successor institution the nation-state" (60, 205).  Wade argues that while conservatives firmly support those evolutionary pillars of social order, liberals--or at least those belonging to the "ultra-left"--undermine those pillars.  But then he insists: "The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics" (211).  On the contrary, "a healthy society needs to maintain in its genetic patrimony the full range of political behavior," combining "its liberal-promoting alleles" and its "conservative alleles," because a healthy society needs to be conservative in preserving its traditional norms but also liberal in making changes in response to a changing environment (158).

Wade seems to be agreeing with Hume that a healthy social order requires a balancing of the Tory party of authority and the Whig party of liberty as expressing two sides of the human nature of social order.  But as I have already suggested, a better position would be to affirm a Darwinian liberal conservatism that recognizes both liberty and authority as grounded in our evolved human nature.

I will say more about this in my next post.

If Humans and Chimps Are 15 Percent Genetically Different, What Difference Does That Make?

Think about how often you've heard it said that the genetic difference between human beings and chimpanzees is only slightly more than 1 percent, and therefore humans are 99 percent similar to chimps.  It is also said that this proves that chimps--and also bonobos--are our closest living evolutionary relatives.  This seems to be confirmed by the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos are more genetically similar to humans than to gorillas.  This 1 percent difference between humans and chimps fits the evolutionary timeline of five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor.

But now an article published last May in Nature (Yoo et al., 2025) reports that a complete sequencing of ape genomes shows that the genetic difference between humans and chimps is a lot greater than 1 percent--more like 15 percent!  And yet perhaps I shouldn't say this article "reports" this because if you read the main article, you won't see this claim of a 15 percent difference.  You have to go to the Nature website and print out the "Supplementary Data" for the article, and even then, you have to work through the technical jargon to find the 15 percent difference.  Casey Luskin has posted a helpful article at the Discovery Institute website that digs deep into the "Supplementary Data" to uncover this remarkable finding.  You would think that such a surprising discovery would be prominently announced in Nature and in press releases: "The Chimp-Human Genetic Difference Is Not 1% But 15%!"  I think Luskin is right to suggest that the editors at Nature must have worked hard to hide this finding because it refutes the popular claim about "only a 1% difference" separating humans and chimps.  

Luskin says this refutes one of the "icons of evolution," as Jonathan Wells called them--that is, widely believed assertions about evolution that the proponents of "intelligent design theory" and "young-Earth creationism" deny.  It's not surprising, therefore, that creationists like Ken Ham have cited Luskin's article as proving that the creationists are right to deny that there is any common evolutionary ancestry linking humans and apes.  Ham explains that Bible teaches us that God created the "ape kind" and the "humankind" separately and created humans as a unique kind made in the image of God.

And yet I don't see that this newly discovered "15% difference" provides any support for the intelligent design theorists or the creationists in their denial of evolutionary science.

But first we need to understand how this new research allows us to calculate genetic difference and similarity.  The title of the article in Nature is "Complete Sequency of Ape Genomes."  The emphasis is on "complete," because the first human and ape genome sequences were incomplete.  They excluded extremely repetitive sequences and large-scale structural differences such as inversions and duplications of genomic sequences.  So the first reports of only 1% differences between human and chimp genomes were based on incomplete drafts of the genomes.  But now the complete sequency in this article allows for a fuller comparison of similarities and differences in the sequences.

The authors found two kinds of differences--"gap divergence" and "single nucleotide variation" (SNV).

Luskin prepared this figure to illustrate the difference between "SNVs" and "Gaps" between two genomes.  Gaps represent nucleotides or segments of nucleotides that don't exist in one of the genomes.  SNVs represent places where the nucleotides are different for the two genomes.  In this illustration, we have 30 nucleotides of the target genome with 3 SNVs and 9 gaps relative to the query genome.  So SNV divergence is 10%, and gap divergence is 30%, which means a total divergence of 40%.

If you go to the Supplemental Data for the Yoo et al. article, you will see that Figure III.12 shows the SNVs in comparing the genomes for humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans--the four "great ape" species who belong to the Hominidae family.  When the human genome is the "target" genome, the "gap divergence" for the gorilla genome is 27.3 percent, for the Sumatran orangutan it's 16.5 percent, for the bonobo it's 14.4 percent, and for the chimpanzee it's 13.3 percent. 

Figure III.11 shows the SNV divergences, which are 2 percent for the gorilla, 3.6 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 1.6 percent for the bonobo, and 1.6 percent for the chimpanzee.

If we add the gap divergences to the SNV differences, we get these total degrees of difference between human and ape genomes: 29.3 percent for the gorilla, 20.1 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 16 percent for the bonobo, and 14.9 percent for the chimpanzee.  That's how we get the estimate of almost 15 percent difference between the chimp and human genomes, which is a lot higher than the purported 1 percent difference.  

It should be noted that these comparisons are for the 44 non-sex chromosomes in the human genome--that is, excluding the X and Y chromosomes.  As compared with chimps, the human X chromosome has a 4.4 percent gap divergence and 1.1 percent SNV divergence, while the human Y chromosome has an amazing 56.6 percent gap divergence and 3.9 percent SNV divergence.

Although this new research shows that the genetic differences between humans and apes are greater than had been previously reported, this does not deny the evolutionary story of the common evolutionary ancestry of humans and apes.  The genetic similarity between humans and apes is still very great--85 percent!  And humans are more genetically similar to chimps and bonobos than they are to orangutans and gorillas, which supports the claim that chimps and bonobos really are our closest living evolutionary relatives.

ALL IN THE GENES?  OR FOUR DIMENSIONS OF EVOLUTION?

There is an obvious problem here, however.  All of us have seen chimpanzees in zoos.  And many of us have seen bonobos if we have gone to zoos in San Diego, Milwaukee, or Cincinnati that have bonobos.  Those zoos often have displays that say something about the 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees.  Now those displays might have to be changed to read 15 percent.  But even so, when we look at those apes and compare them with humans, it's very hard to believe that the difference is only 1 to 15 percent.  It's simply not true that humans and apes are 85 percent the same.  The gap between the mental achievements of human beings and those of the apes is staggering.

Most human beings don't believe that evolutionary genetics can fully explain that gap, and that's why so many people reject the science of evolution, and why so many believe that the superiority of the human mind over the ape mind can only be explained by the supernatural work of an Intelligent Designer or Divine Creator.

They are right to believe that evolutionary genetics cannot fully explain the achievements of the human mind.  But that's because genetics is only a small part of evolutionary science.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are four levels of evolutionary inheritance--genetics, epigenetics, culture, and symbolism (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005).

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. But genetic reductionism and determinism fail to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.  The chemical modification in epimutation is not in the DNA itself but in the chromatin marking. Methylated DNA has a small methyl group attached to some of its bases. The pattern of methylation influences which regions of DNA are expressed. The different kinds of cells in the human body have the same DNA, but the different patterns of methylation regulate the expression of DNA.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. 

To explain why humans are somewhat similar to the great apes and yet radically different from them, we have understand how all four levels of human evolution have shaped human beings to be the unique animals that they are.

COMMON DESCENT OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN?  OR BOTH?

Although Casey Luskin is an advocate of intelligent design theory as the best alternative to evolutionary science, he stresses that he is not pointing to the new estimate of 15 percent difference between humans and chimps as evidence that refutes evolution.  As long as the five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor is enough time for this 15 percent difference to evolve, then the evolutionary story of common ancestry is still defensible.  

But still, Luskin suggests, intelligent design theory has a better explanation for this genetic similarity--85 percent--between chimps and humans:  "Functional genetic similarities between humans and chimps could be explained by common ancestry or by common design.  Common ancestry is not the only way to explain genetic similarities.  Intelligent agents can re-use functional code in different designs.  Common design can explain shared functional genetic similarities just as well as common descent can."

There are two mistakes in Luskin's reasoning, however.  First, he mistakenly assumes a dichotomy between common descent and common design, as if they were mutually exclusive.  As I have noted previously, one of the leading advocates of intelligent design theory--Michael Behe--argues (in The Edge of Evolution) that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is evidence that human beings evolved from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees.  He explains that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life (kingdoms, phyla, classes) but not the lower levels (orders, families, genera, species).  This means that the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian.

Behe is an intelligent-design evolutionist, because he insists: "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain.  What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).  Luskin refuses to recognize Behe's position.

Luskin is also mistaken, however, in assuming the plausibility of the arguments for intelligent design.  He thus ignores my objection that the arguments for intelligent design are fallacious in two respects.  First, intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design can offer no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.  

The second fallacy is the subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of seeing how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of seeing how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

CREATED BY GOD IN HIS IMAGE?  OR EVOLVED IN THE IMAGE OF PRIMATES?  OR BOTH?

Ken Ham (2025) argues, on the contrary, that even if we have not seen with our own eyes God creating everything out of nothing, this has been revealed to us through the Bible; and part of that revelation is that God created all the "kinds" of plants and animals separately, and He created the "chimp kind" to be utterly different from the "humankind," which was created in His image.

But as I have said in my previous posts on Ham and his two museums in Kentucky--the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter--he mistakenly assumes that he is conveying the clear meaning of the Bible and that the Bible's clear teaching is incompatible with Darwinian evolution.

The Bible says nothing about God creating apes and humans as separate "kinds."  The Book of Genesis never mentions apes.  Actually, in the whole Bible, the Hebrew word for "ape" appears only twice (I Kings 10:22, 2 Chronicles 9:21), and never in the context of creation.  And while Genesis speaks of God creating plants and animals "after their kind," it never identifies human beings as a "kind."  Consider Genesis 1:26--"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  The phrase "after our likeness" takes the place of "after their kind," suggesting that in being created in the likeness of God, man is not bound by a "kind."  So there is no Biblical basis for Ham to speak of "humankind."

Moreover, the Hebrew word min that is translated as kind in the King James Bible is ambiguous.  In the Latin translation of the Bible, min is translated as the Latin word species.  Consequently, for almost two thousand years, Biblical believers assumed that God's creating "kinds" meant that God created each "species" separately, and that each species was eternally fixed.  But then after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, in which he argued against the "theory of special creation" that God had created each species separating, some Christians began to believe that the created "kinds" in the Bible referred not to "species" but to some higher level of taxonomy.  Then, in 1941, the Christian biologist Frank Marsh coined the word baramin (combining the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind") as the best term for "created kind."  He argued that a "created kind" was not at the taxonomic level of "species" but at or near the level of "family."  This allowed Biblical believers to accept Darwin's theory of the origin of "species" by natural selection while also believing that God had created the "families" of plants and animals to be fixed and separate.  So, for example, we could say that God originally created the "family" of the finches, but within the limits of that "family," the separate species of finches endemic to the Galapagos Islands evolved by natural selection to be adaptive to those islands.

Notice what this means for the taxonomic classification of human beings.  If the "kind" of human beings refers to their taxonomic "family," then in modern taxonomy, human beings belong to the "family" of Hominidae, which includes chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutan.  Even the young-earth creationist Todd Wood (2010) accepts this Hominidae classification of humans with the great apes, although he identifies the "human holobaramin" as the genus Homo.

This idea of "created kinds" was crucial for Ham in solving an old problem with Noah's Ark.  If the Ark carried all the "kinds" of land-based plants and animals, how could the Ark be big enough to hold all of the land-based species--which could be numbered in the millions?

Ham's creationist researchers have solved this problem by calculating that among these land-dependent vertebrate species, there are fewer than 1,400 known living and extinct kinds (that is, families).  This allows them to estimate that Noah had to have fewer than 6,744 individual animals on the Ark.  Once these animals left the Ark, speciation by natural selection within kinds could create all the living and extinct species that we know today.  The Ham's Ark Encounter is designed to show how as many as 6,744 animals and 8 human beings (Noah and his extended family) could survive on the Ark for almost a year.  But notice that this is a speculative reading of the Bible that never defines "kind" in this way.  This is not the clear meaning of the Bible, as Ham claims.  Indeed, if you go to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you might notice one display that speaks of the need for "Arktistic license" in making up details in the story of the Ark that have no basis in the Bible.

Since the Bible is so obscure in its creation story, and since so much of that story sounds like a figurative folk tale that was not meant to be a literal account of natural history, many Christians (like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Deborah Haarsma) have decided that the Bible could be read as allowing for theistic evolution or evolutionary creation.  According to this conception, God created the universal laws of nature at the beginning of the Universe, but then He allowed all the forms of life to emerge by natural evolution.  God is the "primary cause" of everything.  But the evolutionary process unfolds through the "secondary causes" of nature.  Even Darwin himself accepted this metaphysical conception of "dual causality" that reconciles belief in God as First Cause with acceptance of evolutionary science.  At various points in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, there are displays that acknowledge that many if not most Christians accept some version of this theistic evolution.

But what about the creation of human beings in the image of God?  If the "image of God" refers to the God-like intellect of man, then we might argue that the extraordinary mental capacities of human beings could have evolved through the evolution of the primate brain.  I have argued that the evolution in the size and complexity of the primate brain passed over a critical threshold so that now there are 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and of that total, 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  That emergent evolution of the brain created the uniquely powerful human mind.  We were created in the image of the primate brain.

Even if we are only 15 percent genetically different from chimps, we are different in kind from chimps because we have the mental capacities for language, morality, and symbolic abstraction that they do not have at all.  That's the difference that makes all the difference.

REFERENCES

Behe, Michael. 2007. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the  Limits of Darwinism. New York: The Free Press.

Ham, Ken. 2025. "Study Finds Chimp DNA Is Not '99% Identical' to Ours." Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham Blog. May 27. Online.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Luskin, Casey. 2025. "Fact Check: New 'Complete' Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome." Science and Culture Today, May 21, online.

Wood, Todd Charles. 2010. "Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin." Answers Research Journal 3: 71-90.

Yoo, Dong Ahn, et al. 2025. "Complete Sequencing of Ape Genomes." Nature 641: 401-418.

The Evolution of Religion from Shamanism Supports Religious Liberty

 

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

THE FIRST RELIGION

Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

Animism has been found among all hunter-gatherers.  In animism, there are various kinds of invisible spirits with limited powers that permeate all of nature--plants, animals, and even physical phenomena such as thunderstorms.  These spirits influence human life.  But they do not enforce any moral law for human beings (Peoples, Duda, and Marlowe 2016; Sanderson 2014, 339-53).

In the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin agreed with Edward Tylor in seeing animism--the belief in spiritual beings--as the first religious experience.  As I have indicated in a previous post, C. S. Lewis agreed with Darwin in identifying animism as the first form of religion.  Showing the influence of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, Lewis sketched the evolutionary development of religion through four stages in the Introduction to The Problem of Pain (16-25).  The first stage is what Otto called the experience of the Numinous--the feeling of dread and awe in the experience of the uncanny.  Otto coined the word "numinous" from the Latin word numen for "divinity."  According to Lewis, this arose first among prehistoric human beings.  "Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits" (17).  This dreadful and awful feeling of ghostly invisible spirits was "the seed of religious experience" (God in the Dock, 189).

The first professional practitioners of animism were shamans, who have been found in almost all foraging bands, and who continue to appear in some form in almost every society.  Shamans are believed to have the power to transform themselves through ecstatic trances to communicate with invisible spirits to solve problems--most commonly through healing and divination.  Successful shamans provide the service to their customers of interacting with the invisible forces that control unpredictable important outcomes--such as recovering from illness, success in hunting, communicating with the dead, and protecting people from evil spirits and malevolent magic (Eliade 2004; Singh 2017, 2025a).

Because of its behavioral diversity across societies, shamanism is hard to define.  But Manvir Singh offers a good definition of a shaman: "A shaman is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination" (2025a, 30).  

"Non-ordinary" refers to the altered states of consciousness such as trance or ecstasy that look very different from waking functioning.  They can be drug-induced.  They can be the mental dissociation that comes after many hours of frenzied dancing and singing.

"Engaging with an unseen reality" means interacting with invisible agents that work through invisible means.  Shamans might extract demons from people's bodies or fight with witches.  They might be possessed by dead ancestors.  Or they might go on soul journeys to meet with the gods.

A "service" is some act performed for someone else's benefit.  "Aside from healing and divination, popular shamanic services include changing the weather, improving harvests, boosting business success, and raining down afflictions on one's enemies" (Singh 2025a, 31).

A shaman cannot coerce people into believing in his supernatural engagement with unseen spirits.  But he can put on elaborate performances (wearing strange costumes, shouting, ranting, speaking in incomprehensible language, drumming, dancing) that persuade people of his special abilities, because he must compete with other shamans to provide the most appealing services for his customers.

CHRISTIAN SHAMANISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Similarly, when Jesus and the early Christians claimed to be filled with the unseen Holy Spirit that gave them supernatural powers for healing, prophecy, and even ascending into Heaven, they did not coercively compel people to believe these claims, but rather they relied on the persuasiveness of their shamanic performances to convince people of their special abilities.  So, for example, when Christians spoke in strange tongues--in a foreign language that they had never learned or in an incomprehensible angelic language--this was a persuasive sign that they had been filled with the Holy Spirit and endowed with the same supernatural powers possessed by Jesus (John 14:12; Acts 2-3, 9:3-9, 10:46, 19:6; Romans 15:19; 1 Corinthians 12-13; 2 Corinthians 12:1-4).

Judging the truth of these personal experiences of the Holy Spirit was left up to each individual believer and each church.  Paul advised the churches that they should enforce good order and intelligibility in their worship services.  Those speaking in tongues should use intelligible words, or they should provide interpretation of their words.  And everything should be done in "a fitting and orderly way" (1 Corinthians 14).  

Moreover, Paul warned the churches against false prophets and false apostles who are moved by a different spirit from the Holy Spirit of God--these people should be ostracized and expelled from the church, but the churches could not inflict any violent punishment on these people (1 Corinthians 5:1-5, 12; 2 Corinthians 11:1-15).

As I have noted in previous posts, Locke (in The Letter Concerning Toleration) saw this as evidence that the New Testament churches were "free and voluntary societies"--in contrast to the "absolute theocracy" of the Jewish commonwealth in the Old Testament.  The New Testament Christians recognized religious toleration as "the chief characteristic mark of the true church," because "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every church is orthodox to itself."

This must be so because the Holy Spirit does not speak clearly enough to overcome religious pluralism.  In the Third Letter for Toleration, Locke argued that we cannot count on political rulers to enforce the true religion by coercion because no one can know what the true religion is.  The Christian believer can have faith that his version of the Christian religion is the true religion, "but faith it is still, and not knowledge" (1870, 94-95). 

Against this, the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church is that God has clearly identified the Catholic Church as the only true religion because the divine authority of the Church has been transmitted by the Holy Spirit passing through the apostolic succession of the popes (the bishops of Rome) beginning with Peter, the first Pope (as supposedly taught by Jesus in Matthew 16:18-19).  The picture of Pope Gregory the Great at the head of this blog post conveys this idea:  the Pentecostal Dove of the Holy Spirit whispers in Gregory's ear, Gregory writes out the divine message, and the scribes make copies of his work.  The Pope is the shaman of the Christian church--a religious specialist who, through the supernatural inspiration of the Holy Spirit, engages with divine realities and provides services such as teaching people what God demands of them, which Catholics call the Magisterium--the teaching function of the Papacy.  

According to the tradition of Catholic Integralism, this divine authority of the Pope justifies him in asking political rulers to coercively enforce submission to the Catholic Church and to punish heretics, apostates, and blasphemers who challenge the Church's supremacy.  Locke's argument for toleration and religious liberty was an attack on Protestant Integralism--the claim that a Protestant church like the Church of England could use the coercive power of government to enforce obedience to that church.

Notice that the shamanism of the Catholic Church differs from traditional shamanism in that traditional shamans attract clients through persuasion but not through coercion, because shamans must compete with one another in the free market of shamanism.  The more persuasive shamanic performers win a bigger share of the market, while the less persuasive ones lose customers.

Contrary to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, the New Testament does not say that Peter and his successors as bishops of Rome would have exclusive access to the Holy Spirit.  On the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, all of the apostles "were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them."  There were in Jerusalem Jews "from every nation under heaven," and they were utterly amazed when they heard their own native language being spoken.  Peter explained to the crowd that this was the fulfillment of what the prophet Joel had said about how "in the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.  Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.  Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days" (Acts 2).  Elsewhere in the books of Acts (10:46, 19:6) and First Corinthians (12-14), it is made clear that all the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" (charismata in Greek)--including speaking in tongues, the interpretation of tongues, healing, prophecy, and other miraculous powers--are given to all Christians.  

Amazingly, this suggests that all Christian believers can become shamans.  But if so, that means that each individual must judge the truth of revelation through his personal religious experience.  That's what Locke meant in saying that "everyone is orthodox to himself."  And that supports toleration and religious liberty as everyone is free to pursue his own religious happiness in his own way, as guided by the Holy Spirit, and free to join whatever church he finds to be supportive of his faith.

TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF PENTECOSTAL/CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY

But even if the Christian church of the first century was a charismatic church in which all Christians were filled with the miracle-working gifts of the Holy Spirit, many Christians in later centuries believed that this Pentecostal church had come to an end because God was no longer filling every believer with the Holy Spirit.  

There are at least three reasons for doubting that.  First, the New Testament never says that the Pentecostal church as filled with the Holy Spirit was only a temporary condition, and that within a century, the gifts of the Holy Spirit would no longer be available for all Christians.

Second, there is plenty of evidence that charismatic Christianity persisted throughout the past two thousand years of Christianity (Hyatt 2002).  Certainly, in the first three centuries of Christianity, the Fathers of the Church testified to the ecstatic visions that occurred throughout the Christian community.  For example, Cyprian (A.D. 195-258), the Bishop of Carthage, described some of these visions: "For beside the visions of the night, even in the daytime, the innocent age of boys [innocent children] is among us filled with the Holy Spirit, seeing in an ecstasy with their eyes, and hearing and speaking those things whereby the Lord condescends to warn and instruct us" (Hyatt 2002, 21).  It is true that with the institutionalization of the church in the fourth century, as the church became the established church of the Roman Empire, there was a decline in charismatic experience in the Christian community as the clergy claimed that the gifts of the Holy Spirit belonged only to them and not to the laity.  The freedom of the Holy Spirit moving among all Christians was replaced by ceremonial ritual and ecclesiastical order in which the clergy monopolized the spiritual gifts.

But beginning in the late second century, with the Montanists (the Christian followers of Montanus), there is a long history of charismatic renewal movements in which the qualification for ministry was possession of a spiritual gift from the Holy Spirit rather than appointment to an ecclesiastical office.  The Montanists delivered prophecies in a frenzied state of ecstasy.  Several church councils condemned them as pagan heretics who were demon possessed (Hyatt 2002, 26-30).  There were many more ecstatic mystical movements like this--such as the Cathars (from the 12th to the 14th centuries) who were finally eradicated by the Medieval Inquisition (Hyatt 2002, 63-66).

The third reason for doubting that the Pentecostal church ended in the first century is that there has been a stunning revival of Pentecostalism from the early 1900s into the present.  Pentecostal revivals broke out at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, in 1900, in Zion City, Illinois, in 1901, and at a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906.  These revivals quickly spread across America and to Europe, India, Africa, and South America (Hyatt 2002, 135-159).  Since the 1990s and into the 21st century, Pentecostalism has become the fastest growing religious movement in the world.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

The defining feature of Pentecostal churches is that they follow the example of the first Christian churches as voluntary associations that attract members through their persuasive performances of ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit rather than through the coercive authority of a clerical hierarchy.

CATHOLIC PENTECOSTALISM

The most dramatic manifestation of the popular appeal of Pentecostalism over the past fifty years is the opening of the Catholic Church to Pentecostal revivalism.  This began at the Vatican II Council (1962-1965).  In calling the Council, Pope John XXIII asked Catholics to pray that the Holy Spirit would bring a "new Pentecost" to the Church.  The Belgian Cardinal, Leon Joseph Suenens, one of the most influential people at the Council, led the way in asking for discussions of how "the Charismatic gifts working today" could unite Catholics and non-Catholics in a Charismatic Renewal Movement.

Then, in 1967, a group of Catholic professors and graduate students at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh gathered to study the Book of Acts and pray for a Catholic Pentecost.  They felt the moving of the Holy Spirit through them, and they began shouting praises to God and weeping and speaking in tongues.  This soon spread to Notre Dame University.  And in 1970, a Catholic Charismatic conference attracted over 30,000 Catholic Charismatics.  This has become an ecumenical movement in which Catholics meet in religious services with Charismatic Protestants and Messianic Jews and share in the ecstatic experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit (Hyatt 2002, 174-77).

Since then, all of the popes have endorsed the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement.  In 1992, Pope John Paul II called this "a particular gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church." He said that the Holy Spirit is "the principal agent of the Church's mission in sustaining and guiding her efforts to bring the graces of Pentecost to all people."  He insisted that "there can be no conflict between fidelity to the Spirit and fidelity to the Church and her Magisterium."

And yet, many traditionalist Catholics--like those at Catholic Family News--argue that fidelity to the pre-Vatican II Church and its Magisterium would teach us that Catholics claiming to share with Protestants a personal experience of the Holy Spirit is heretical because since the Catholic Church is the only true religion, non-Catholics cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit.  The traditionalist Catholics can quote from Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864), which says that it is an error to believe that "good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ."  Moreover, Pope Pius IX joined other popes such as Leo XIII in teaching that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the only true religion.  So when the Second Vatican Council issued the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" (Dignitatis Humanae) in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration, this was a heretical denial of the papal teaching prior to 1965.

The most radical of the traditionalist Catholics--the Sedevacantists--go so far as to say that all the popes who have endorsed the heresies of the Second Vatican Council--that is, all the popes since the death of Pius XII in 1958--are not valid popes (Dimond and Dimond 2007).  The Most Holy Family Monastery is one example of a Sedevacantist organization.  The term Sedevacantism comes from the Latin sede vacante--"the chair being vacant."  The Sedevacantists believe that the chair of the pope has been vacant since 1958.

This brings us back to the problem of the Holy Spirit.  As I have argued in previous posts, Catholics must believe that the Holy Spirit selects the pope.  But while the Sedevacantist Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit surely did select popes like Pius IX and Leo XIII, they deny that the popes after 1958 were chosen by the Holy Spirit.  If the Holy Spirit has spoken, its message has not been clear enough to bring all Christians to agreement.  After all, even the 133 cardinals who met in Rome last May to select the new pope were not guided by the Holy Spirit to a unanimous choice.  The choice of Cardinal Robert Prevost was by a two-thirds vote.  And many of the Catholic commentators on this choice, including the traditionalist Catholics, explained this as a prudent political choice of a moderate who was somewhere between the progressives (or liberals) and the traditionalists (or conservatives), which prevented a possible schism in the Church.  The Holy Spirit had nothing to do with it--unless we want to say that the Holy Spirit is good at playing the game of church politics.

THE EVOLUTION OF SHAMANIC RELIGION BY SUBJECTIVE SELECTION IN THE MARKETPLACE OF RELIGION

The belief that there are unseen spiritual agents--like the Holy Spirit--and that some human beings can engage those spiritual agents to exercise extraordinary powers like healing and divination is a human universal.  It has arisen in some form in every human culture throughout history (Singh 2018, 2025a).  

Why?

One answer is that many people believe this because it is true.  They have discovered that there really are spiritual agents who can help human beings solve many of their problems.

Another answer is that regardless of whether it is objectively true, this belief is beneficial.  Human beings have discovered that this belief helps them satisfy some of their natural desires--such as the desires for healing and control over the uncertainties of life.

Since our knowledge of reality is very limited, we cannot deny the reality of supernatural invisible spirits because there might be supernatural dimensions of reality that we have not yet observed.  We can know, however, that so far no one has conclusively demonstrated the reality of such supernatural spirits.  For example, from 1964 to 2015, the skeptic and magician James Randi offered as much as $1 million dollars for anyone who could present proof of paranormal or supernatural powers.  When the challenge was terminated in 2015, no one had ever won.

But even if we can't be sure that the religious belief in the supernatural is true, perhaps it has become a universal belief for most human beings because it somehow benefits them, and therefore it's an adaptive trait that has been favored by cultural evolution.  But many times people can believe that their religious beliefs benefit them even when there are no objective benefits.  For example, people can evaluate religious magical practices to be effective for healing illness or divining the future, even when they have had no causal effect (Hong 2022; Hong and Henrich 2021).

A better explanation of a human cultural universal like religion, Manvir Singh has argued, is to say that a cultural practice like religion evolves through subjective selection and subjective appeal rather than objective benefits (Singh 2020, 2025b).  "Subjective selection" is the production and selective retention of cultural variants that are evaluated by individuals as useful for satisfying their desires or goals.  Individuals will adopt the religious belief in supernatural agents if that belief appears to them to be effective in satisfying goals like healing illness and divining the future.  The subjective appearance is more important than the objective reality.

This explains the healing power of shamanic ceremonies and the therapeutic effects of medical ritual even when the patients don't believe in the causal efficacy of the treatments.  Singh has seen this in many cases of shamanic healing: "You can go to a shaman as a skeptic.  You can come away a skeptic, too.  Nevertheless, if the healing encounter is gripping--if it engulfs you in sound and touch and imagery, and implicitly signals that you are being healed--we should expect it to still be soothing." "Shamanism is about creating a captivating, consuming reality--a conflagration of light, touch, costumes, music, and theater that, in the case of healing, persuades a client they are being treated" (Singh 2025a, 104).

This suggests that you can be healed when your body feels itself being healed.  Some remarkable studies of the placebo effect in healing have confirmed this.  We all know about the studies showing that sick people can become better when they are given a placebo (a sugar pill), but they have been deceived into thinking that the pill contains medication.  The more interesting studies, however, are when researchers get the placebo effect without deceiving the patients.  Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues conducted an experiment with people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome.  Half of them were given no medical treatment.  The other half were given placebo pills, and they were told that these were "placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes."  Amazingly, the group who knowingly took the placebo pills showed significantly greater improvement than the no-treatment group (Kaptchuk et al. 2010).

Singh concludes from this that "in the case of the placebo effect, experience trumps belief" (2025a, 104).  We can be deeply affected by a made-up reality that we know intellectually is fictional.  This is most clearly manifested in our experience of fictional drama.  We read novels, watch movies, and attend theatrical performances.  We know that these stories are not literally true.  But we can be moved to tears by the suffering of a character or to joyful excitement when a character is successful.

Does something similar happen in our response to religious stories?  Even if we know or suspect that these stories are not literally true, they might have a powerful subjective appeal to our natural cognitive propensity to imagine spiritual agents at work in an unseen reality.  Previously, I have written about how religious belief might be naturally appealing to the evolved human mind.

We can then explain the cultural evolution of religion as a psychological marketplace in which religious ideas and practices compete for customers, and those religious traditions that are more subjectively appealing to the human mind win more customers than those that are less appealing, and ultimately the standard of subjective appeal is set by the individual decisions of human beings.

So, for example, we have seen that while the Catholic Church for centuries tried to suppress the freedom of individuals to spontaneously experience the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the popular subjective appeal of the Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition was so persistent that the Church had to open up to that tradition after the Second Vatican Council.

But some Pentecostals would argue that the gifts of the Holy Spirit have not only subjective appeal but objective reality, and their objective reality is proven by the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues.  If people possessed by the Holy Spirit can speak in foreign languages that they have never learned, doesn't that testify to the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit?  I'll take up that question in my next blog post.

REFERENCES

Dimond, Michael, and Peter Dimond. 2007. The Truth About What Really Happened to the Catholic Church After Vatican II.  Fillmore, NY: Most Holy Family Monastery.

Eliade, Mircea. 2004. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hong, Z. 2022. "Ghosts, Divination, and Magic Among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives." Human Nature 33:349-379.

Hong, Z., and J. Henrich. 2024. "Instrumentality, Empiricism, and Rationality in Nuosu Divination." Religion, Brain, and Behavior.

Hyatt, Eddie. 2002. 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity: A 21st Century Look at Church History from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Perspective. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House.

Kaptchuk, Ted, et al. 2010. "Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome." PLoS ONE 5 (12) e15591.

Lewis, C. S. 1940. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan Publishing.

Lewis, C.S. 1970. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Locke, John. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Peoples, H. C., P. Duda, and F. W. Marlowe. 2016. "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion." Human Nature 27: 261-282.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 2014. Human Nature and the Evolution of Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Singh, Manvir. 2018. "The Cultural Evolution of Shamanism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences e66.

Singh, Manvir. 2020. "Subjective Selection and the Evolution of Complex Culture." Evolutionary Anthropology 31: 266-280.

Singh, Manvir. 2025a. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sing, Manvir. 2025b. "Subjective Selection, Super-Attractors, and the Origins of the Cultural Manifold." Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Forthcoming.