Jim says:

I enjoyed Before the Dawn immensely, and have been intrigued to find a book called Them and Us: how Neanderthal predation created modern humans by Danny Vendramini, a successful screenwriter turned independent scholar. It’s only for sale by publisher, not on Amazon, but seems well done. What do you think of the idea that humans and Neanderthals co-existed and that these interactions helped shape our genes?

I can’t find much assessment of the book, pro or con.
http://www.themandus.org

The Other Comments thread was closed, so I post here.

Paul Streitz says:

My numbers are off, 3 of my fifteen member OCS platoor were killed. or 20percent.
my mistake.
pfs

Walton McMillan says:

Here it is again, but without the password requirement:
requhttps://www3.ibackup.com/qmanager/servlet/share?key=aepuy86941

James A George says:

I recently read The Faith Instinct and immediately purchased Before The Dawn which I have almost completed. There is an article in this week’s The Economist magazine (3-25-10) about a newly disclosed humoid from Siberia that Svante Paabo’s team from the Max Planc Institute are publishing in Nature magazine this week. I really follow the logic of your two books, and this recent discovery with obviously more to follow will only provide further credence. Are you planning a third book on this topic?

dan martin says:

Nicholas:
below is an email dialogue regarding Faith Instinct that you may find interesting. My correspondent is a retired professor of Chinese (UW Seattle).

Once again, thanks for your comments. Another idea popped into my head. It is that ideas discussed in Wade’s book are important because in their form, they can be handled within intellectual circles in our mostly secular society. If they can help define why we still talk about the longing of Augustine, it may help temper the areligous trends in civil law and government. Clear expression of these ideas may also allow parallels to be identified early in extreme civic and political movements which will threaten to cause great damage and chaos, essentially defining them as new-hatched religious movements. People in extreme modern new movements tend not to accrue power using supernatural explanations, when in fact there is usually some supernatural/religous core. This is true of communism, nationalism/fascism, and Zionism. They got their power on the secular side. and harnessed common senses of morals and group loyalty (the hidden religion side). Real-time enunciation of what is going on could be stabilizing.

I have been influenced by Edmund Burke’s writings on the French Revolution. He emphasized that a stable society must always build on prior structures. Burke preferred living in a remodeled house, rather than a new one, Wade posited much the same with religion.

You did not comment on his speculation at the end, on “choice”. I had the feeling that it was a newly hatched idea, the thing that developed as he wrote the book. Sometiing like this was implied somewhere in comments written by Wade.

Schnatter, schnatter, Ententeich! (a lot of talk!)

Dan

On Feb 3, 2010, at 9:54 AM, Frederick B. wrote:

Thanks, Dan, for your email and comments on my response to Wade’s book. I note your red comments and agree with them (including the suggestion that Communism in China could be regarded as a form of civic religion). In reading over my email to you I find that I made one mistake. For some reason I wrote “docetism” when I really meant “gnosticism.” Docetism was one aspect of gnosticism, but what I was really referring to was the gnostic idea that entrance into Christianity came by acquiring some kind of special knowledge (greek “gnosis”). If you send my comments on to anyone else please make the change(change was made)

Fred

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Daniel ‪wrote:
Fred, Marie:

I will read your comments again carefully. Thank you for your reply. Note my red comments. I am tempted to send yours off to Wade.

A few years ago someone bought me a book by Dawkins, The God Myth. It was polemic by a scientist railing against the idea of the bearded guy in the sky. That book was so bad it was boring. This one is more interesting, even if it only looks at religious ideas with mass effect.

Love, Dan

On Feb 2, 2010, at 2:10 PM, Frederick wrote:

Dear Dan,

We have had a great deal going on here with all the activities at Skyline and at the Cathedral and then we have had to spend quite a bit of time at Christa House interviewing new renters and helping them move in. Only yesterday did I finally finish reading Nicholas Wade’s “The Faith Instinct.” Let me first thank you again for gifting us with this book. It was very kind of you to buy it for us and as I said I will make it available to others here at Skyline.

As for my reactions to the book, let me first begin with some positive comments. Wade is a very competent journalist and he writes extremely well. The book is a joy to read. He writes in what editors call an “open” rather than a “closed” style which means that his ideas are readily understood, are presented in logical and coherent order, and involve the use of little or no academic jargon. One reviewer said that when you pick the book up you can’t put it down. The book is also obviously intended to be provocative and this is good. As another reviewer put it: Wade is a “1000 percent red-blooded contrarian. You can tell he loves to rile up his readers – perhaps in order to make them think – and in my case he certainly succeeded.” I am sure that many will read this book and it will make them think about things they have never thought about before. This is certainly good.

I believe the book is particularly strong in showing how important religion has been for human evolution in the areas of morality, trust, trade, warfare and nation building. Incidentally, I don’t think that “faith” is the right word in the title! I I agree with that too, I wondered if Religion” would not have been more appropriate.Wade is writing about group religion, and certainly not about personal faith which is a big part of faith. He makes this clear at the beginning. He relies heavily on the work of a handful of social scientists (sociologists, anthropologists, and historians). Most of the book consists of summaries of the work and views of these scientists with numerous strings of quotations to support his genetic, evolutionary instinct hypothesis. Does he prove this hypothesis? I don’t think so. He provides almost no evidence to support this hypothesis from the most important ones in the field: from geneticists and their work. Nor is the hypothesis of group evolution proven or universally accepted. I think he is trying to scoop the hypothesis in the lay press, hoping a stronger scientific foundation builds with time.

As a practicing Christian I do believe that humans were made for God (hard-wired for God, so to speak) and that as Augustine said “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” But I cannot prove this, at least not from the work of social scientists. I have the highest respect for social science and its methodology. The first book I published was a joint study of the religion of Hakka villagers in Hong Kong and I had an anthropologist and a sociologist working with me on that project. Later in my PhD program at Stanford one of my four fields was done with Arthur Wolfe in Chinese anthropology. Social science can be used very effectively in the study of religion but its value lies primarily in the area of description. My thesis is that wisdom averages over the millennia, reaching conclusions that will be quite analogous to what science will support. Scriptures are unintended metaphors of biology.

When social science tries to take on a prescriptive mode it falters. Herein I see a weakness in Wade’s book. It suffers from a bad case of reductionism. There are the severe limitations of social science itself. Religion is much, much more than just an object of study for social science. Religion has to do with the really big issues of life, death, truth and meaning. Social science by definition (as indeed all of science by definition) deals with what can be objectively observed, quantified and reproduced. Religion primarily has to do with realms that transcend Wade’s science. And truth in these realms is hard to come by. For much religion today truth lies in relationship where often the subject – object distinction is blurred or even obliterated. Actually some science is starting to talk like this too. Think of the inter-connectedness of all reality and of the belief that an observer changes the object observed simply by the act of observation. As I used to tell my students religious truth often involves a spectrum of truth with two opposite poles. Both poles here are part of the truth. Often the poles are in a paradoxical (apparently contradictory) relationship with each other and the truth lies in the tension between the two poles. Examples of such poles would be: Divine – Human, Spirit – Flesh, Numenal – Phenomenal, Mystical – Rational, Freedom – Determinism, Self – Society, Individual – Group, etc. The two poles may be understood to be in a dialectical relationship (Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and new thesis) which is common in Western thinking. Or they may be seen to be in a bipolar complementary relationship (yin-yang or “tai-ji, often written tai-chi). The Western spectrum moves in a lineal fashion whereas the Asian spectrum is conceived of as in a circle. This linear – circular difference incidentally forms one more polarity. Here too we see science beginning to talk in these terms. Think of the problem of light. It is both wave and particle.

Wade’s book suffers from another kind of reductionism and this comes from his choice of a definition for religion. On p. 15 he gives his definition of religion: “Religion is a system of emotionally binding beliefs and practices in which a society implicitly negotiates through prayer and sacrifice with supernatural agents, securing from them commands that compel members, through fear of divine punishment, to subordinate their interests to the common good.” This definition of course suits his needs in this book. Wade sees religion as a means to achieve cohesion within a group so that the group can deal with both internal and external threats. But this is a severely reduced definition of religion. Religion is much more than a system of beliefs and practices by which society keeps its members in line. I don’t deny that religion at times functions as Wade suggests, but religion is much, much more than Wade’s definition allows. But you are a bit of a religious gourmet. Most people just eat donuts. It may be that the donut eaters are the ones that keep society going.

Wade’s book has some huge gaps in it. Wade begins by describing early human religious practices in places like Africa, Australia, etc. but then when he comes to the chapters on transformation in settled societies and the tree of religion he shifts almost exclusively to the three Abrahamic religions and their history and practice. What about the great Asian religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism? I suspect that he was more prepared to address these three. Remember, he is a journalist, and probably has deadlines. Think of it as a work in progress.

In the sections on the history and development of the three Abrahamic religions, Wade’s fondness for provocation is at its best. Here he dips into both lower criticism (textual) and higher criticism (literary and historical) and challenges the validity of traditional beliefs about the texts and history of these religions. You mention that some of this is new for you. I don’t doubt that. The material is certainly not new for anyone who has studied in a decent seminary or school of religion in the last 50-100 years. My 12 volume Interpreters Bible was published in 1952 and contains much of this material. But then Wade’s book is mainly intended for the popular reader and to answer your final question, I think it is the readiness of society rather than the availability of the material that makes the book attractive. In any case such textual and critical issues would hardly be a problem for anyone in tune with current theology. As a Catholic Christian the door into my religion is not an intellectual door. It is an empirical door. It is not what you know that counts (that is the heresy of gnosticism). It is what you have experienced that counts.

Finally, I find the end of the book rather disappointing. Wade discusses religion and nation building but seems to have a hard time fitting China (which has had no group religion for some time, if ever) into his scheme ?Communism as religion, or other forms of civic religion.?. He tries to argue (unconvincingly) that the Han as an ethnic group function like a group religion. He also raises the question of the future of religion and after showing how religion is in decline tries to make a case for its importance nevertheless. I find his proposal that we could have a religion with no gods a bit uninformed and naïve. I embrace the word “God” as essential in religious talk with my children; it is quick and easy, and much more efficient than “mystical ultimate mystery”. He seems not to know about the “Death of God” movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Nowhere does he even mention John Robinson or Harvey Cox and his seminal book “The Secular City.” I think that the gods of Wade’s last chapter have been dead for a long time at least among educated, intelligent, theologically oriented people, but Wade does not seem to know this. Of course, this all depends, as you point out in your email, on our definition of God. Certainly no serious follower of religion is going to think of God anymore as a punitive, bearded, white-haired, old man in the sky. I have joined the RCIA program (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) here at the Cathedral and in talking about God the first thing that is stressed is that God is Ultimate Mystery (beyond any adequate definitions) and that our relationship with God is a mystical, empirical one. Considering the staggering complexity and uniqueness of each individuals brain, to that individual, God will remain an ultimate mystery, as it will for other thoughtful people. It would be interesting to compare religious experiences among identical twins. I have wondered if God could refer to that unique religious experience each one of us can have with our environment.

Marie joins me in sending you and your family much love.

Cousin Fred

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Daniel wrote:
Dear Fred:

I am curious to know if you have any comments on Faith Instinct? I am not expecting some utterances as though you are an oracle. But you have pretty much engaged the whole spectacle in your lifetime, So I imagine that you at least would interpret some of his sources differently, or think that he is reaching a bit far in his conclusions. The whole thing is based on the validity of group evolution.

For me, new info on the origins of the three Abrahamic religions is basically new. I found the part on the warfare and ecology of religion a bit on the speculative side, extrapolating and generalizing a bit far from the anthropologic examples. I think that speculation should be so labeled. I thought that the parts on religion and nation and economics did not reach as far into the speculative realm, and was more compelling. For example, I think that it is an empiric fact that Western Europe introduced the modern period of world history, and this happened under the tree of a Christian society, even without defining a causal relationship. Maybe the validity of a religion is defined by the economic, demographic, and military power that its adherents accrue.

The conclusion is one that I had sort of vaguely arrived at myself, but it is very interesting to see someone else formulate it . I think that Wade would find futile the efforts of well meaning religious scholars to go back to original manuscripts, to learn what Jesus himself really wanted us to do. This may prove to be particularly futile for muslims. Wade would assert that the current needs of society define a different religion than that one. Maybe the religious free-market in USA provides about the only viable venue for that doctrinal evolution to occur. But the rate of change around us almost precludes a sufficiently rapid iterative evolution of doctrine within large traditional institutions.

His brief review of taking religion out of US public schools was very interesting. as were his quotations of Washington and Eisenhower.

I was curious that Wade did not try to draw a line defining where “God” ends, and religion/behavior codes/morals/belief systems/fate begins. I think he should have at least touched on this issue. I sense that he defined God as an omnicient spirit with supernatural interventive powers, sort of a classical definition. In my discussions with friends, the God word tends to be very disruptive, even though almost no one chooses to define the word they are using. Maybe he thought such a discussion would have served only to polarize the reaction to his book,

Maybe he wanted to be the first one to put his arms around the whole topic in a book for wide readership, so he published in a hurry and left some loose ends.

Amazing how current this discussion is. Is it the availability of the knowledge or the readienss of our society that makes it happen?

Dan

Sylvia F. Duncan says:

Of all the thousands of books that I have read, this is the first time that I have sent a note off to the author thanking him for writting his book. In this case, The Faith Instinct, may also be the most meaningful (and timely) explanation of the science behind what we are experiencing today as a Western culture. In the final chapter Nicholas Wade left just enough wiggle room to accommodate God or The Universe or Whomever seems to be guiding our evolution.

Ananta says:

I am interested to read your book “Before the dawn”. How would I get a copy?

Kurtis Fechtmeyer says:

It seems to me that groupthink and conformity (if that is as core to religion as you seem to indicate) might have as many mal-adaptive traits as pro-adaptive ones — witness leaders driving entire conformist societies toward extinction. In reading your book, Michael Polanyi came to mind. Could the instinct to imagine the unknowable be more adaptive as an individual knowledge system than as a group cohesion technique? Would other group cohesion techniques be more adaptive than religion? Edwin Friedman also comes to mind in his review of evolutionary basis of successful leadership. In other words, is the cohesion of the group the adaptive trait or the quality of the leadership of that group? I’m not so sure the tension between alpha and egalitarian has been put neatly to bed.

In any event, would appreciate your impressions on my foray in to reputation theory: blog.cleangovernmentnow.org (2nd posting down)

Don LIston says:

I didn’t realize that this was for comments on “The Faith Instinct” which I have not read.
I wanted to ask you about the time line in “Before the Dawn” and whether or not you established the possibility of affects of the receding glaciers that allowed the humans to move progressivly north from the “Near East?”
The time between 50,000 years, more or less when the foxP2forkhead mutation occurred and the 5,000 year marker seems to have been a time when we added written language in the form of ice cave drawings all over the world. The ones that depicted animals found in the caves in France and Spain suggest that we gained this ability fairly early on. If homo sapiens was moving toward the greener pastures opened up from melting of glaciers it would seem that the Spanish caves would have older drawings than the French caves.
Was the geological aspects considered in the traking of language development through this period?

Guy Dauncey says:

Dear Nicholas,
I’ve just finished Before the Dawn, and you have done a truly masterful job. This should be the first book read in every history course!

It opened my eyes to a number of new perceptions, and caused me to ditch some ideas I had been holding.

In particular, your insights on warfare are really important, since they challenge the widespread belief that modern humans are far more warlike than early humans. If you were to take this theme, and explore it in more detail, I think it would create quite a stir. As things stand, it is lost in among so many other important themes that your book raises.

This insight gives us good reason for being hopeful that humans could eliminate all warfare, and channel the alpha male dawn-raiding instinct into sport, as we are doing so well.

I co-authored the book “Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Terror, War and Violence”, and I know how much effort there is going into the work to end warfare.

… in case you were wondering what to write next!!

With much appreciation,
Guy Dauncey,
Victoria, Canada.