I’ve often referred readers to one of my early essays, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality:, for a very short discussion of Bohr’s insights into the primacy of relationships over stuff—in fact, it’s not clear to me that Bohr fully realized the implications of his stance but that’s true of many a pioneer thinker.
Evolutionary selection isn’t for some sort of freestanding entity which meets some sort of abstract standards of good quality, but rather for entities which can properly fill certain roles in evolving and developing relationships with other members of its own species, with members of other species, with the dirt and rocks and air of the earth. Over time, these capabilities to form these proper relationships are manifested in our genes and our flesh-and-blood. And then, the world changes and most dinosaurs aren’t able to form proper relationships; the smaller feathered dinosaurs along with primitive rat-like mammals and reptiles and others take over.
The above stated view isn’t so much a matter of new knowledge so much as it is a restatement of old knowledge, a restatement which likely will make more sense of the world and allow us to move forward in a better way as we explore and try to understand the entirety of Creation. This is a return to more traditional ways of understanding Creation and also a denial of the autonomous individuality which underlies so much of the political and economic and other thought of the past few centuries or so.
There are a great variety of human relationships; I would even claim that our individual characters don’t have such a great variety and rich personhood is a possibility for human beings only within the context of these various relationships, such as those a farmer can form with his family and neighbors, with his animals and with the soils and trees of his property. A man might love and well serve his wife and children and feel close to the other doctors in his clinic including even the ones he doesn’t like; he might be devoted to his patients, even the most obnoxious. A woman might be devoted to the various personalities and cities and even technology of her major area of study—perhaps the city-state of Florence in the 15th century; she might also love her husband and children though her 14 year-old daughter is in trouble at school at least once a week.
How did the human race develop its tendencies toward certain forms of relationships, such as monogamy? There have been and are human societies which encourage or at least allow polygamous relationships, but they are not, over the long-term, the most successful of societies. Some of those polygamous societies simply adopted legal polygamy as a way of taking care of the needs of widows or of dealing with a surplus of women. The latter problem seems to have occurred in the Near East and Middle East during the Biblical ages and during some ages since then. It’s easy to understand how a surplus of relatively young women could develop during violent ages, even when women had high rates of death during childbirth; it’s also easy to understand the adoption of the only obvious solution but polygamy has remained an option for powerful males in some societies in the Southwestern regions of Asia and in the closely related regions in North Africa.
On the whole, monogamy has been the norm for most of the human race in recent millenia. We can adjust to polygamy when necessary or when it’s to the advantage of powerful males in a rigidly hierarchical society, but monogamy—with cheating—seems so predominant that it’s likely found in our inherited genome and phenome as well as nearly all of our inherited cultural traditions.
How did it become the norm? From Evolution of Monogamy in Humans the Result of Infanticide Risk, New Study Suggests, we learn:
Until now, a number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of monogamy among mammals. These include:
[(1)] Paternal care, when the cost of raising offspring is high
[(2)] Guarding solitary females from rival males
[(3)] Infanticide risk, where males can provide protection against rival males
In that same article we can also read that the third option seems to be the winner, though the first option might reinforce monogamous tendencies:
The threat of infants being killed by unrelated males is the key driver of monogamy in humans and other primates, a new study suggests.
From another recent article, Monogamy Evolved as a Mating Strategy: New Research Indicates That Social Monogamy Evolved as a Result of Competition, we learn that the second option is definitely the explanation for the development of monogamous tendencies found in many mammal species:
Social monogamy, where one breeding female and one breeding male are closely associated with each other over several breeding seasons, appears to have evolved as a mating strategy, new research reveals. It was previously suspected that social monogamy resulted from a need for extra parental care by the father.
What gives?
First of all, we must always be cautious when we read articles that are summarized descriptions of projects complex in both the ways in which information was gathered and also the ways in which that information was analyzed. The article might be too highly summarized or it might be inaccurately summarized. In this case, the problem seems to be partly that different groups of species are being studied. The research summarized in the first article looks at a variety of primate species. The second article looks at mammals where females occupy territories and males move into the territories of one or more of those females.
The issue of infanticide, so important to the study summarized in the first article needs some elaboration. A male who is newly dominant or newly the `owner’ of a group of breeding females will gain some advantage by killing the youngest offspring of the females if those females will then become fertile and receptive. I’ve read this is certainly true of chimpanzees and of lions. Apparently, it tends to be true of primates though how true it is of human beings.
I don’t know enough to generalize to, for example, herbivores which form large herds. So, I won’t generalize though I will say I’ve never read of bison or elks or other herbivores using infanticide to gain a breeding advantages.
My main point is: the world is more a story than a collection of stuff interacting in ways which can be understood piece by piece but don’t form a greater whole. It is a tangle of relationships extending over space and over time—modern insights into the nature of spacetime remain valid but under most conditions, pre-modern forms of analysis remain proper as is true for most realms of physics in which 18th century physics is still assumed and used. So it is likely we will be able to understand much by understanding stuff as if it were freestanding entities entering relationships which don’t change those entities in a fundamental way. Yet we should be very careful about thinking as if stuff is primary over relationships as it is likely that the human race has reached levels of number and complexity of relationships such that new forms of, say, political behavior are coming into view. Moreover, this is likely tied to knowledge of being in its deeper aspects so that we need new ways to understand such complex entities as family-lines which have evolved over the millenia.
In such a world as this seems to be, all the smaller-scale stories take place within a larger series of events which seem to be a coherent narrative, within networks of relationships extending over large regions of space and long durations of time.
Let me make my point by way of analogy to a narrative on a smaller scale. The life of Albert Schweitzer, a very complex and very noble man of great accomplishment in a variety of fields, seems impressive enough as it would typically be presented in a popular biography. Yet, once we start to develop a deeper understanding of reality, we realize there is so much that seems almost arbitrary in such a life. If we move on, we can find that Schweitzer was a true man of Western Civilization, if one born in the twilight of at least a major era of that civilization. He wasn’t just a smart and talented man who chose by way of some autonomous free-will to become an organist specializing in Bach, a Lutheran theologian who struggled toward an intelligent (if I think wrong) understanding of Jesus which differed from the secularist and traditional Christian understandings alike, a physician-missionary to Gabon, and—partly to tie it all together—a philosopher who preached a reverence for life. Though I think he went off-track in some of his thoughts, he was a man who was truly a giant of the West. In order to understand Schweitzer, we have to take the West seriously: Western music as well as the struggle to understand Jesus of Nazareth and the various claims about Him, Western medicine as well as the Western efforts to bring corporeal goods to other regions along with or sometimes apart from the Gospel, the efforts of so many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers to `save’ the moral teachings and cultural accomplishments of Christianity while easing back on or even eliminating what were seen as theological embarrassments, and the tendency of all of this to go bad and even lead to exploitation of the simple Christians in the West as well as native peoples outside of the West.
Even Schweitzer had lost sight of the purpose of the West: to explore God’s Creation, make sense of it, and to bring that sense of it to fruition in one’s own land and also in the lands of others. In other words, Schweitzer’s very life and work, when seen in light of a robust understanding of the Christian civilization of the West, were proof that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God come to offer a share of life with God, though Schweitzer’s life was particularly defective because of his refusal to see that his house was built on the truth of the Gospel or on sand. His house was built on that truth of the Gospel that Schweitzer himself had so much trouble accepting and it was so built because Schweitzer was a man of the West.
The science which grew up in the Christian West has shown too much about the contingency not only of the existence of this universe but also of the contingency of spacetime, of matter, of other fundamental aspects of concrete being as it exists in our universe. We now know that God was a true Creator and not a pagan god working within a given structure or with given stuff. An overall understanding of Creation is necessary to make sense of the various levels of understanding of life on earth, of this expansionary phase of our universe, of the universe seen as a purposeful narrative, of the various levels of abstract being up to the most abstract level which is the manifested truths from which all else is shaped.
In other words, those who tried to de-Christianize the West have succeeded and we are starting to learn that there is no meaning to all this marvelous knowledge we’re gaining of so many parts of this concrete realm of being. The theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963) referred to the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in solving the problems of physics. The more difficult the problem, the more remarkable and more “unreasonable” the effectiveness.
We have no way of speaking of mathematical groups as being and thus we have to consider the remarkable and unreasonable effectiveness of group theory in solving problems in quantum theory. Abstractions such as groups just come from nowhere, ghostly tools to work upon our knowledge of the wood and rock of this world though having nothing inherently in common with that wood and rock. As just one example of the corrosive effects of the post-Enlightenment and willfully non-Christian thought which has seemingly taken over the West, those trying to make most sense of the groundedness of human being, including the human mind, in stuff are forced to pretend there is, after all, a Platonic realm of abstractions which we flesh-and-blood creatures can magically access to acquire particular abstractions that we might use them in understanding the stuff of flesh-and-blood. This is even worse than assuming we can use Anglo-American thought to readily understand all cultures and political systems around the globe.
The most hardheaded of empirical thinkers becomes a dualist of the most unconscious sort and also a dualist who possesses a truth independent of concrete being, a truth which can’t be verified or denied by empirical knowledge.
Against this, I’ll argue that Bohr’s insights into the fundamental importance of relationships, even with subatomic particles, should guide our efforts to understand, for example, relationships between a breeding male and a breeding female, even if they happen to be human beings. Darwinists often give me the impression of being perhaps even more confused than Wigner, who was—we must remember—a great physicist and a man who made a serious and respectable effort to understand why the abstractions of mathematics are so effective in solving problems in this concrete realm. But Wigner could only call that effectiveness “unreasonable” in the end in the same way that evolutionary theorists are so good at finding stories and other forms of explanation, species by species and even at higher or lower groupings but deny there are deeper reasons for the evolution of, say, monogamy. For now, my point isn’t even such a deep reason as the existence of the God of Jesus Christ. Go with Einstein’s somewhat pantheistic faith in reason: it all makes sense because it’s all part of a coherent reality, and then try to figure out how our abstract reasoning processes, including group theory but also various literary theories, are connected to concrete forms of being.
Is my claim perhaps true: created being is created being is created being? Is it true that if we know it, even if includes the `impossible’ imaginary square root of negative one, then it’s manifested in some realm of created being and, if it seems useful in this concrete realm, then perhaps concrete forms of created being are somehow shaped from those imaginary numbers and those principles of group theory and even from the truths which are manifested so obscurely in our greatest novels and poems?