Christianity and Evolution

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Evolutionary Psychology by John Grohol, 3/19/97
  • Clinical Sociobiology: A Rationale by James Brody, 9/7/97
    
    

Christianity is remarkably successful. Psychic comfort, reassurances and alliances are braced. The first 4 Commandments define the hierarchy with Alpha who gives protection in return for loyalty. The final 6 reinforce Tit-for-Tat, the old strategy of reciprocal altruism, eroded over the past millennia by higher population in combination with shifting social ties, and rampant opportunities for Cheater tactics. (1)

However, Christianity itself sometimes loses individual focus just as our physicians do. Pennhurst (2), university medical centers, HMOs, and public schools coexist with Christianity and Christian organizations can have the same bloated structure as formal government organizations. Christians may be Christian, but they are also hominid and contain the same evolved preferences, perhaps based on sensory mechanisms, for the lively, the large, and the novel. Economic and political power can be functions of size; few manic theologians can resist having a larger structure or more enrolled members, even while losing the little children.

K-Selection can apply at the level of physical resources (perhaps its original context) while r-selection operates at the level of social relationships. Salesmen for insurance companies, phone companies, and religious persuasions have a very rich field from which to eat, a field of people. Kids (spin-off subsidiaries) are spawned everywhere and cheating abounds.

Evolved mechanisms, our Psychological Adaptations, make us more comfortable in smaller groups where reciprocity can be maintained. As a result, smaller fundamentalist groups (some of them rotating meetings in members' homes) thrive and smaller private schools nibble at the large public grapefruits just as mammals did in the company of dinosaurs.

I suspect that Christianity, despite the respect voiced to simplification and individuality, has also been suckered by SNS whether in the domains of congregations or leaders. Evolution has the promise to remind us of the virtues of smaller, of continuity in relationships, of mutual loyalty, of reciprocity.

NOTES:

1) Large populations can be maintained under authoritarian structures only if people don't relocate very often. Formal cooperation (rules and contracts) grows as population approaches the limits of environmental capacity; cooperation, however, depends on continuity of relationships.

2) Pennhurst was a residential facility that housed as many as 3000 mentally retarded adults at one point. It was a bloated testament of altruism turned cancer. Erosion in Tit for Tat and changes in the fitness landscape (See Kauffman, S. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford) did to Pennhurst as it does to other large, rigid organizations. That institution, despite its original Christian intent, properly closed in 1986.

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