Evolutionary Psychology and Spiritual Experience Part 1: Lewontin and the Evolution of Cognition

A look at whether we will ever be able to explain the evolution of cognition, from biologist Richard Lewontin

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with some friends and an academic who was visiting our college to give a public address. This particular person has been studying spiritual experience for a long time, and so most of our conversation was about spiritual experience and its connections to things like literature and music. We also ranged beyond that stuff to other things, and at one point the visiting speaker started talking about the evolutionary purpose of spiritual experiences.

You might not have thought about that before, but if our nervous systems are products of evolutionary processes, and our cognitive or thinking abilities are grounded in our nervous systems, then asking about the evolutionary purpose of spiritual experiences seems important. From a biological point of view, what function do spiritual experiences serve? How did they make human beings more likely to survive in the past, such that those humans who were having spiritual experiences were more likely to leave offspring than those who weren’t?

After bringing it up, the visiting speaker then offered a pretty standard explanation of the evolutionary purpose of spiritual experience, and this standard explanation usually says two things. The first is that, in the past, spiritual experiences could have served to increase kinship bonds between individuals and thus make their community more likely to survive. Shared spiritual experiences or feelings would supposedly unite people together against common enemies and help them protect each other. The second is that spiritual experiences and the resulting beliefs about God, morality, and other issues may help create useful taboos against harmful behaviors. Over the long term, for example, incest may have harmful evolutionary consequences, and so a divine commandment against incest, rooted in spiritual experience, might be beneficial.

This very interesting dinner conversation got me thinking about spiritual experience and evolution, and evolutionary psychology in particular. Evolutionary psychology is the field of science which attempts to apply evolutionary biology to human psychology, or human cognition—it’s the attempt to explain, using evolutionary events and processes, how human beings came to think and experience in the ways they do. The visiting speaker’s explanation of where spiritual experiences came from is an example of evolutionary psychology: you take a particular feature of our thought or experience, and then speculate about what benefits it could have offered to our ancestors, and then conclude that the feature stuck around and spread to other humans because it offered those benefits.

After thinking about these things for a while, and as part of my ongoing effort to distract myself and prolong our essay sequence on the first principle of revelation until 2029, I decided to write a few things about evolutionary psychology and spiritual experience. My plan is to have three essays about the topic, and they’ll serve as a companion to the ones I wrote last year about neuroscience and spiritual experience. Once these are complete, we’ll get back to the first principle of revelation and won’t stop until that sequence is done.

This first essay will discuss the problem of evolutionary explanations as applied to cognition, and will draw from a paper by a biologist named Richard Lewontin. The second will be about how certain problems in the study of cognition itself make its evolutionary history very difficult to discern. The third will then connect evolutionary psychology to the engineering perspective on the gospel and the principles of revelation.

If you’re read the previous ones I wrote about neuroscience and spiritual experience, you might be guessing that I won’t have very hopeful things to say about evolutionary psychology. And your guess would be correct.

Swooping

Let me begin by discussing a phenomenon that I call “swooping.” Swooping is when someone goes to one field of study and pulls out an interesting point from it, then goes and uses whatever they pull out in some other field of study—but in doing so, they divorce that point both from its original context and from any relevant methodological problems in the home field. By “methodological problem,” I mean any of the unresolved issues involved in the discovery or justification of that point, such as whether a particular technology is being used and interpreted correctly in giving evidence in favor of the point.

Put more simply, swooping is grabbing an interesting finding from somewhere and then using it for your own purposes.