The basic idea is simple. For decades, geneticists have been able to chemically separate and analyze genes. This made possible a fruitless search for the magic gene which `causes’ schizophrenia or depression or intelligence or other human qualities or disorders of human being. A lot was learned, perhaps most importantly—there are no such magic genes. Complex qualities and disorders involve complexes of genes. Intuitively, this would seem to emphasize the gradual side of evolution—that is, a build-up of changes of the genotype can result in sudden and dramatic changes of the phenotype.
As a result, complex attributes, such as intelligence or sociability, have developed not from a small number of dramatic mutations in a single gene but rather from a build-up of mutations over a number of genes each of which have only a small effect on the attribute; problems in those attributes might be similar in being caused by problems in a number of those underlying genes. An added complication: “high mutational loads” in these important human qualities will result (always?/often?/sometimes?) in immune system problems—thus under `natural’ conditions of selection—ie, no modern hospitals, someone with high mutational loads in intelligence will die young and not reproduce successfully. This is above and beyond the usual (Darwinian) selection pressures against such organisms as human beings who are asocial in our highly sociable species.
In particular, higher or abstract intelligence in human beings seems to involve better than 1,000 genes and similar statements can be made about tallness and some other human qualities; a single mutation causes problems on the order of 2% or less. Some disorders, such as schizophrenia and severe forms of depression, involve high rates of mutations across a number of genes playing a role in producing healthy versions of human characteristics. It seems to be, and was suggested by evolutionary theorists years ago, that the human inclination to engage in “mass-worship of moral gods” is fundamental to the formation of the particular community oriented human personalities we have and, thus, to the formation of complex communities as we know them.
It’s important to know a little about the background to these ideas. I’ll consider as evolutionary theorists scientists of different sorts: paleontologists, archaeologists, geneticists, linguists, and evolutionary theorists `proper’, along with various technical experts and general thinkers such as philosophers commenting upon the theories and speculations.
These various sorts of evolutionary theorists have been exploring selection pressures coming from cultures as well as from the non-human environment. A certain group of human ancestors learned how to control fire somewhat and there a new form of selection: upon the capabilities of humans to handle and advance technology and also upon human abilities to develop social mechanisms for maintaining and developing that technology and transmitting it to future generations. It appears from some ancient, prehistorical knowledge and is glaringly obvious in the records as humans learned to write that collective worship played a major role in shaping human communities—in politics and in setting us on the road to philosophy and theology and eventually to physics and mathematics. Most readers, at least Americans middle-aged or older, will be most aware of the centrality of religion in forming human cultures and states and civilizations from reading the Bible; skepticism as to details but not disbelief is warranted in reading the Bible. The non-Semitic literature of city-states and empires and expansive religions tell substantially the same story. Even the power of kings seems to have begun in the temples though it might mature by way of spears and disciplined bodies of warriors and by way of large-scale farming or mining and disciplined bodies of civil servants.
Putting it strongly, enfleshed human social and moral natures evolved and developed in well-ordered societies on a foundation of “collective worship of moral gods” as some scientists put it. Healthy human being is tied to religious practice. This is not a proof of God’s existence, let alone a proof of the truths of particular revelations from Christianity or any other religion. It does point to the idea that complex human societies, and the individuals of those societies, will be unstable, disordered in morals and other ways, if those societies don’t provide at least rich religious rituals for collective worship. Or if a large percentage of the individuals of a traditional community of a complex sort turn away from their temples and their gods. In the light of this knowledge coming from empirical science—including the historical analyses which try to make sense of ancient Uruk, the ancient pagan Romans had good reason to think of Christians as something like atheists.
It could be argued a different human race might have evolved but we are what we are.
So, there is something of a `model’ of a human being capable of forming and maintaining and living in a complex society, even a civilization. That model includes such traits as a reasonably high intelligence—a matter which should be considered relative to family lines of those capable of fulfilling roles in complex societies. It should also include the small-effect genes for general personality traits which almost certainly overlap those for general (or global) intelligence traits.
Again, the key idea is that there are no magical genes for complex attributes such as intelligence or the (collective-worship-centered) human social nature—communal human nature as I prefer to call it. There are a number of genes for such attributes, each having a small effect and also having an effect on general health. That is, a `broken’ human being, schizophrenic or not inclined to that collective worship is very likely to have a defective immune system as well their more obvious problems; prior to the industrial age with good sewer systems and fresh water systems and modern hospitals, those `broken’ human beings tended to die young. Now they can live lives of length similar to those of the healthy, more `complete’ human beings, producing more `broken’ human beings.
We now have two major problems in much of the developed West:
- a growing part of the Western-descended population is made up of people not equipped to live in complex societies because of genetic mutations, and
- another growing population coming from heavy migration of people from regions of the world where evolutionary processes didn’t produce high levels of some of these attributes necessary for living in complex societies.
In my writings over the previous 12 years or so, I’ve developed a way of making sense of this in the context of Christian beliefs. Let me sketch this for you:
- All human communities, and the Body of Christ in a complete and perfect way, are true communities and not just voluntary gatherings of freestanding individuals. Thus, we have communal human being which is as real as individual human being.
- The Body of Christ is the true civilization with the Christian Church as the central organ—with my current understanding of that Church being: all sacramental Christian churches with a priesthood having Apostolic descent.
- In my book, The Shape of Reality, I speculated on the possibility of using modern geometry of the sort used in Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to describe human communities with each `point’ representing a human being (point of spacetime) and the entire ball of wax being the Body of Christ (the universe). In practice, this could be complex and, for example, each individual might be a plane which is partly bent to the shape of the overall manifold.
Here are two links to a couple recent, (relatively) accessible discussions of the situation with growing numbers of human beings who have high mutation loads:
- Are Atheists Genetic Mutants-A Product of Recent Evolution? and
- The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load
There is much to be done here. We need deeper and more reliable understandings and from such understandings, we need to revise our behavior to better protect the future of our children in the West without harming, but perhaps by no longer helping others if that help is at the expense of the futures of our children. (And I think there is good reason to believe we’ve hurt a lot of people and peoples great while thinking to be helping them.)
One final qualification: These analyses of genetic mutations don’t seem to directly address the issue of highly intellectual forms of atheism or asociality, but it may encourage those holders of those intellectual ideas to think twice, or more, before trying to take away the faith of those of simpler ways of thought—especially their students.