Death… It's A Living

Although I was raised Roman Catholic (I no longer consider myself as a member of the church for multiple reasons that I won’t list here), I was never taught to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, especially the Book of Genesis. For me, these early Christian writings contained words of wisdom about living a healthy, sober, and spiritual life; they were not to be taken as natural history texts. So, I don’t recall ever believing that the world was created in 6 days or that humans were actually more important than any of the other animals on the planet (at least to God). This just wasn’t what I was told to believe.

Children younger than 12 are mostly incapable of thinking logically or abstractly. They haven’t yet developed what cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget called “formal operations”. Rather, they think concretely; that is to say, they can think just as clearly as an adult about the things that they can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. An adult can even have a full if boring conversation with a 7-year-old about shared sensory experiences. It is not until the middle school years (typically) that young people can start to reason about concepts that can’t be empirically measured… things like justice, liberty, or freedom.

I developed formal operations in a small, socially conservative (Christian fundamentalist-leaning) farming town in Alaska. Like most teens, I found friends in people who were mostly just like me: children of educated white-collar parents who were more open about ideas that weren’t in lockstep with everyone else. I suppose this made us somewhat of a band of outcasts, though we were saved from the worst kinds of peer victimization by the minimal ability to talk to girls (well, some of us were).

With decades of hindsight gained since high school ended, I realize was pretty lucky to have grown up around so many people who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible and who viewed Natural Selection, not as an elegant explanation of both extant animal behavior and the fossil record, but as a mortal threat.

I wasn’t keenly aware at the time, but I’m now able to at least imagine how fraught it might have occasionally been for my life science teachers. For the most part, you don’t have to teach biology or psychology by announcing that humans and modern apes evolved from the same ancestors (or for that matter, the same ancestors as pigs, whales, mushrooms, and amino acids, depending on your geological timescale). But if you don’t accept that basic fact about the life sciences, not else really makes sense.

Only the most liberal of my friends took Bio and Psych with me. The others, well…. I had a lot of discussions about the “science” of intelligent design. Fortunately for my college acceptance prospects, I was able to figure out pretty quickly that intelligent design was rebranding of creationism for sympathetic conservative judges.

Intelligent design has mostly gone the way of the dodo in the United States educational system: Because it is not in keeping with scientific thought or evidence, it is not legal to teach in public schools. Those who have tried (and have had at least one brave student who’s questioned what they were being taught) have mostly lost their jobs. Private schools are not held to the same curricular standards, so they certainly could teach intelligent design; however, private schools have no need to present creationism as anything other than what it is, so the term “intelligent design” serves no purpose.

The intelligent designer at the heart of that eponymous “theory” is, of course, God. Some sneaky and not nearly-as-clever-as-they-thought creationists assumed that if you took the word “God” out, you can get around the US’s separation of church and state laws. However, the problem with intelligent design is not the word “God”. Although the life sciences absolutely conflict with a literal interpretation of the Torah (which is a holy text for over half of the world’s population), they don’t conflict the concept of God or of spirituality in general. Although many of my colleagues in the life sciences are atheists, atheism itself relies on faith. That is, a certainty that something is true without evidence. Although one of my high school friend’s fathers, a Christian pastor, once told me that my agnosticism was a “cop out”, I don’t not identify as an atheist because I’m chicken. Science is about believing only what we can sense directly and then reason based on those observations. Faith is about believing in spite of one’s senses and without need of the crutch of logic. They are not in conflict. If you were to put a gun to my head and force me to choose between atheism and Christianity (or Islam, or any faith that receives tax-exempt status), then I suppose I’d choose atheism. I hope not to be at the end of a gun anytime soon, however.

The problem with intelligent design is the word “intelligent”. Here, the creationists reveal their deeper fears by orienting their theory around meaning. Life is too complex, and humans are too special for our existence to NOT have meaning, I suppose the thought would go. We are the only animals with self-awareness, and if there is a God, then surely we are the only animals with God-awareness. That must have to mean something, right?

Perhaps unfortunately, no. In fact, not only does self-awareness not require a meaningful existence, it is evidence that there is no intelligent plan for us all. If there really was an “intelligent” design for life, our designer would have never created self-awareness. Why? Because as proponents of Terror Management Theory have argued, self-awareness ultimately leads to conflict, war, and self-destruction.

The Paradox of Self-Awareness as an Advantage

Although it was countless generations after protohumans developed the opposable thumb, the development of self-consciousness was likely the next most important adaptation our species evolved. Unlike the thumb, however, self-awareness brought problems as well as solutions. Let’s start with the good news.

Before self-awareness, humans likely lived in small groups to increase their chances of survival by decreasing the chance of predation. This makes us just like most other mammals. After the appearance of the thumb and the related growth of the frontal cortex, protohumans must have recognized the value of living in stratified groups. This comes from how we were able to find food. If we mostly foraged on plentiful vegetation, then there would be no need for the protohumans within one group to differentiate their roles. The law of the land would be, “Everyone find food and eat”. With thumbs came tool use, tool creation, and hunting. Here, a skill is required: We vary greatly in athletic ability today, and the same would have been true 2 million years ago. Though I’m sure some cavepeople were better at foraging than others, I’m less convinced that the gap between a clan’s best forager and its worst would have been significant. However, the gap between a clan’s best hunter and its worst may have been significant. If one caveperson was unable to find a patch of edible mushrooms in the forest, then they would surely wait until someone else found it and then take from that patch. However, a caveperson who waits for someone else to spot a boar doesn’t guarantee arentee that they would then be able to throw a spear through its heart.

As such, it would have made sense for some members of the clan to be hunters and others to take on different roles. And before you assume that I am referring to the development of gender roles (with males as hunters and females as nest-tenders), there is no convincing evidence of that at all. In fact, there is significantly more evidence that females hunted as often as and alongside males, and they continue to do so in cultures and societies where hunting for subsistence is common. Therefore, the hunters of the clan weren’t necessarily the men, they were just the good hunters.

If humans were like other species, this might have been a problem for the bad hunters. Fortunately for them, the good hunters learned to be sharers. Not because they were kind but because sharing is an act of self-preservation. The larger frontal cortex that enabled the protohumans to make tools and track and hunt game must have also allowed them to reason about food shortages:

I have food now and you don’t. If I share, I will have less, and that is bad for me. One day, however, you may have something I need to survive, and I will need you to share. If you don’t share and give yourself less on that day, I may die. Therefore, I will give you some of my hunt today. I will have less today, but that is good for me tomorrow.

In this way, we created the concept of the individual, of “I”. As more generations passed, the protohumans who were the most likely to survive were those who were best at understanding social situations and reading social cues. That evolution, possibly combined with the ingestion of brain-chemistry-altering compounds (yes, the cavepeople were drug users) increased the development of human consciousness. We became aware of our existence. We became the only animal whose social structure required knowledge of the past (Who has helped me survive?) and awareness of the future (Who owes me a favor?).

This is a remarkable achievement but there was a profound cost. The development of self-awareness was a bad fit with a much older cognitive adaptation, perhaps the first cognitive adaption: the avoidance of noxious stimuli.

Well before self-consciousness, well before thumbs, well before the first legged amphibious creature crawled out of the primordial dial sea, life was limited to simple, often single-celled organisms. Compared with humans—even protohumans—these creatures were incredibly simplistic. However, they would have been able to avoid environments and chemicals that would have ended their existence. All life fights to stay alive. All life avoids danger and toxins. All life has evolved sensory input systems primarily for this purpose: to detect threats and avoid them.

Thus, the first protohumans had problem. Like all living things, they avoided death at all costs. But because of their newfound self-awareness and understanding of the future, they became aware of the implications of the first adaption. That is to say, they became aware of their own future deaths. As I will continue to write, this knowledge has been the primary driver of social behavior ever since.

-The Plague Doctor