Religion and Evolution

[A Serious Buddhist]

Quirks and Quarks, the best radio science show I know (CBC! It's Canadian! Hooray!), recently featured a couple of interviews with scientists who are studying religion, and who are considering it from the perspective of evolution: both as a product of how our brains work (a tendency to certain kinds of belief seem to be innate in humans) and as a quality that has led to evolutionary success for the species. The podcast is well worth listening to, and you can do so by clicking here (the file will open and start playing in a new window). Or you can find the Quirks and Quarks podcast through iTunes (click here) if you want to put it in your iPod.

My question is this: where does Buddhism fit in here? More specifically, where does YOUR version of Buddhism fit in here?

[Dan]

(Love the icon btw)

[fivebells]

I haven't listened to the podcast, but this is something I've thought about a lot. There's a tendency to shoehorn our understanding of things to fit every aspect of our experience. For the most part, contemporary explanations of human behavior in terms of neuroscience or evolution largely arise from this tendency, rather than convincing evidence. They tend to be highly speculative, because we know almost nothing about human neuroanatomy (relative to its complexity) or evolution.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that human behavior is vastly flexible, and psychological and cultural factors play a huge role in shaping it. Many aspects of human behavior which are popularly explained in terms of speculative neuroanatomy or evolutionary just-so stories can probably be explained in terms of cultural and psychological development.. Religion is a good example of this. (Although I've been embarrassed by Richard Dawkins's anti-religion crusade over the past few years, I find the meme concept to be very useful.)

As for where Buddhism fits, Gotama Buddha taught a path to liberation from the suffering arising from attachment to self-concepts. Most Buddhists are attached to their self-concept as Buddhists. The notion of memetic evolution is related to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination: there is a strong selection pressure for memes which encourage attachment to themselves as a core self-concept, because this attachment is a case of the "becoming" phase of dependent origination. The intent of the practice Gotama recommended was to bring an end to "becoming", so Buddhism as it has usually been practiced throughout history has been a corruption of Gotama's original intent.

Ken discusses the notion of karma as an evolutionary process in our day to day lives in this podcast. He doesn't talk explicitly about dependent origination, but it's there in the background.