Biology, Strategy, and Religion

 
I work to describe how humans can adapt genetically and strategically to survive and develop long term in the new ecology we have been building since we left the tribal world for the farms and cities of civilization. This is about survival strategy and is part of a larger book.

Civilization is a new ecology that humans have created that does not exist in nature. It is our life support system and gives humanity the potential for long term development to become far more than we are now. Without it, we will basically just remain smart, walking apes, perhaps with feudalism, but disease will prevent more than that. The commonest great danger to civilization is war.

The commonest instinctive survival strategy in nature is for the blind, endless competition that led Alfred Lord Tennyson to call nature "red of tooth and claw". It is a simple strategy of competition for survival resources that operates quite slowly and inefficiently, but it effectively drives evolution over time. In general it is known as dominance behavior, and can be very violent. In mammals. This includes aggressive competition between males for access to females. Humans bring that aggressive competition for reproductive and material resources to another level compared to other species. It is a win-lose type of competition. There is another less common survival strategy though and that is cooperation. It can be a win-win form of interaction.

About the time of Lucy (Australopithecus, about 3 million years ago), when humans "left the trees" and started walking upright to enter the hunter-gatherer-scavenger ecology, they were poorly adapted to their new ecology. The big cats loved eating them. They probably thought we were slow. Those humans were much like us, but small brained without the highly enlarged neo-cortex of later humans. Lucy walked on two feet and had excellent vision as well as very good manual dexterity from tree living, that was also used for mutual grooming. To survive, they needed to develop more social skills including better communication and cooperation. That is shown by the rapid increase in brain size that is shown in the fossil record. It is generally accepted that this brain development was a requirement for the communication, cooperation, and other adaptive skills needed for social behavior. Those behaviors were required for survival in the new, novel ecology that human ancestors were entering. They had to get along and work together in order to survive. Violence had to be avoided because violence in a tribe endangered the whole tribe.

Humans evolutionary development is complicated, branching into different species and sometimes recombining the different branches. Always their tool using and social abilities improved. About 70,000 years ago was something of an evolutionary event. Partly it could be said that the parietal lobe near the middle of the brain (that maps our self and world), evolved, particularly the precuneus. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the brain re-organized. It changed humans so that they were then much more capable, efficient, and dominant in the ecology.

Human art, tools, funerals, social customs and other behaviors changed at this time. We started killing all those pesky cats and everything else. Violence, the most natural evolutionary competitive behavior, again became a useful strategy because we were efficient enough as a individuals that violence no longer endangered us as a tribe. It was far more controlled. No other species could compete with us. We grew and spread around the world very successfully. In the West, this type of violent "competitive behavior" sort of peaked with Rome. The violence was so bad that various philosophies and religions arose to try to deal with it or promote peace, such as Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity.

So here we are now, with instincts for both cooperation and violence. We can see it every day. The future, human survival, will be decided by which of those two primary instincts we choose to follow. Will we revert to blind competition, basically in the role of animals, or will we take advantage of cooperation and the potentials it offers?

Violence is a primary strategy of nature created by evolution that has limited future in the civilization that is our life support system. Civilization does not exist in nature and war can damage or destroy it. To survive, we must cooperate and protect our civilization. At the same time, we cannot lose the ability to fight back or the very effective primary strategy of violence, will naturally re-appear. 
 
Again, we have two primary instincts. (1) The typical blind competition of red in tooth and claw of nature. (2) We also have very cooperative behavior. You can easily see both behaviors in yourself, others,  groups and nations. We orient our moral perceptions around these behaviors. To us, they are value judgements of right and wrong, but they are value judgements that will determine the future of humanity. The first strategy, of blind competition will probably limit us to a feudal society at best. It will not be pleasant and it will leave us vulnerable to worldwide natural catastrophes that have happened before and will happen again. The second strategy, of cooperation, will allow us to develop new genetic and strategic natures to become more than we are now, as well as technologies that should be able to cope with even worldwide disasters and pandemics. It may even allow us to build ecologies we can survive in, beyond the Earth. There are certainly also potentials we cannot imagine now. Again, this book is restricted to the domain of adapting to the next stable ecology after the tribal ecology we came from, where we can survive and develop long term. As this book goes on, it is based around these two survival strategies.

It is not just about the individual. Cultural biases will play into this as well. A critical mass of the culture must understand the significance of cooperation versus competition and what balance there needs to be between them. Right now, the balance is changing from blind competition back to cooperation and has been for some thousands of years. If we do not continue that, we will not retain civilization.

Do you know of Atum? He was the principle God of Egypt through thousands of years of its history. He was quite a God if you look at his accomplishments. He even created himself, yet you do not remember his name. That's how it goes. When the names of Zeus, Jupiter, Yewah and the rest are perhaps forgotten, if civilization persists, the name of the philosopher that told us how to make civilization work, will probably be remembered. Before him, most Gods were selfish and transactional. Many Gods had war as their main power, and philosophy then was very individually oriented. Around perhaps 2800 years ago, Zoroaster taught the principles about the struggle between good and evil that we would find familiar today. His teachings did not spread greatly though and only later did the same ideas get more widely taught, by someone perhaps inspired by his teachings or perhaps not. In any case, it was a Jewish teacher who taught us the essential lessons of civilization, especially how to avoid war and how to create community. Jesus taught "love one another" and taught "forgiveness". Jesus taught other valuable lessons, but those especially, were the software strategies to go with the hardwired cooperative instincts humans have. Those cooperative instincts and strategies are how we can build the new ecology I call civilization, but that is defined by humans controlling their genetic and strategic destiny. Those instincts and strategies give us the potential to avoid the greatest danger to civilization, war. Most of history has been marked by violence. Buddhism and Stoicism were philosophies developed to teach how to contend with warfare, mostly by protecting one's mind from the horrors of it. Christianity taught how to avoid war. Through history people were sick of the endless wars and repeatedly, when offered Christianity, their response was basically "you mean we can stop all this clan warfare". That was attractive. Jesus also taught compassion and an altruistic form of community that is essential for building a civilization.
 
Many people have argued whether Jesus was a God or a man. No one knows with absolute certainty, but that does not really seem important to human survival and development. What we can be absolutely sure of is the value of the messages attributed to him. They were some of the most important elements of philosophy humanity has ever found. If we want to survive and develop long term, we must remember them. With our cooperative instincts, they can create a brilliant future for humanity.
For more details, you could look at Genetics For A New Human Ecology (Transition), though it could use some touch up. That will come after I finish what I am working on now, which is the "Strategy For A New Human Ecology" book that this essay is for.