The choreography of everyday life—a missing brick in the general evolution theory

The “choreography of everyday life refers to the existence of rules of daily life, correspondingly to those of dances: the rules impose order upon individual behavior beyond the level of pure improvisation. The fact that acts of everyday life repeat themselves supports the idea that there exist some mechanisms generating order to daily practices. The replicative model of evolution is a candidate to explain this process of routinization. At the beginning of a replicative cycle behavioral patterns might change radically. In the course of time integrative and competitive selective forces start working. Finally some established rules, choreography, determining daily practices will emerge. In this mature phase identical replication takes place.     

Energy,Complexity, and Strategies of Evolution: As Illustrated by Maya Indians of Guatemala

Using free energy rate density (Φ_m) I differentiate two evolutionary strategies common to cosmic, biological, and cultural systems: the horizontal when energy increases proportional to mass, with no increase in complexity; and the vertical when it increases disproportionately to the mass and complexity increases. The vertical process is a continuing increase in complexity such that the system becomes vulnerable to collapse when energy sources fail. This is illustrated by a comparison of four Mayan Indian groups in Guatemala.     

Socio-cultural selection and the sculpting of the human genome: Cultures’ directional forces on evolution and development

This paper argues for culture as a significant determinant of the modern human genome. As progress in the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology have gained greater insights into evolutionary process, aspects of classical proposals explaining how phenotypic responses to environmental experience could make their way into the genotype have returned in new guises. Recent proposals recognize environmental context as a key source of genetic variation by directly altering selection pressures to mask and unmask adaptive value of expressed traits, by reorganizing the combination and expression of genes during ontogeny to provide novel variants for selection, and by influencing developmental trajectories through epigenetic systems acutely sensitive to ontogenetic contexts. The emergence of a robust human socio-cultural niche, shielding humans from more proximate evolutionary pressures that marked our ancestral evolution, has arguably provided the strongest directive force on modern human evolution. Language is discussed as an exemplar of a cultural niche with a powerful self-organizing dynamic and the potential to dramatically alter the human genome.     

Faith,Fact, and Behaviorism

David Hume argued that ought cannot be derived from is. That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet generations of well-meaning scientists (more and more as secular influences grow in the West) seem to have forgotten Hume''s words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods of science, that is, on faith.     

What Counts as Behavior? The Molar Multiscale View

Because the definition of behavior changes as our understanding of behavior changes, giving a final definition is impossible. One can, however, rule out some possibilities and propose some others based on what we currently know. Behavior is not simply movement, but must be defined by its function. Also, our understanding of behavior must agree with evolutionary theory. I suggest 4 basic principles: (a) only whole organisms behave; (b) behavior is purposive; (c) behavior takes time; and (d) behavior is choice. Saying that parts of an organism behave is nonsense, and, moreover, evolutionary theory explains the existence of organisms mainly through their adaptive behavior. Behavior is purposive in that behavior is shaped by its consequences, through an organism''s lifetime or through interactions with the environment across many generations of natural selection. Behavior takes time in that behavior is interaction with the environment that cannot take place at a moment. Moreover, at a moment in time, one cannot definitely identify the function of behavior. Identification of an activity requires a span of time. Behavior is choice in the sense that a suitable span of time always includes time spent in more than 1 activity. Activities include parts that are themselves activities on a smaller time scale and compete for time. Thus, behavior constitutes time allocation. An accounting problem arises whenever any behavior is attributed to multiple consequences. In the molar multiscale view, this raises the question of whether 2 activities can occur at the same time. The question remains open.     

Big Gods and other watcher mechanisms in the formation of large groups

Norenzayan's effort to integrate genetic and cultural evolution is a welcome advance over previous efforts, as is the attention he devotes to different levels of analysis from cognitive mechanisms to large group interactions. The scope of Norenzayan's argument, however, is bound to leave many scholars of religion feeling uneasy. The content of his model, which is most likely over specified, will need further testing in light of historical evidence. Comparison of Big Gods with Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution (2011) highlights some of the choices Norenzayan made in designing his model and suggests ways it could be elaborated. Historians of religion who would like to help test his model could keep an eye out for ‘watcher mechanisms’ that might play more of a role than ‘moralizing Big Gods’ in some traditions and, thus, potentially offer an alternative route to large, anonymous, yet stable groups.     

Is history important for a historical argument in religious studies?

This review article addresses the historical argument of Norenzayan's Big Gods. It questions the claim that there is enough historical evidence to support the thesis that gods, who are observing human behaviour from high, enable societies to grow beyond the stage of face-to-face groups.     

DIVINE PURPOSE AND EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES

When Darwin's theory of natural selection threatened to put Paley's Designer out of a job, one response was to reemploy God as the author of the evolutionary process itself. This idea requires an account of how God might be understood to act in biological history. I approach this question in two stages: first, by considering God's action as creator of the world as a whole, and second, by exploring the idea of particular divine action in the course of evolution. As creator ex nihilo God acts directly in every event as its sustaining ground. Because God structures the world as a lawful order of natural causes, God also acts indirectly by means of creatures. More controversially, God might act directly within the world to affect the course of events; this action need not take the form of a miraculous intervention, if the natural order includes the right sort of indeterministic chance. In each of these ways God's purposes can shape evolutionary processes.     

BIOLOGY AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN

We will consider two Christian responses to the enormous advances in recent years in the connected sciences of genetics, evolutionary biology, and biochemistry, a dualist one by Pope John Paul II and an “emergentist” one by Arthur Peacocke. These two could hardly be more different. It would be impossible within the scope of a brief comment to do justice to these differences. What I hope to do instead is more modest: to draw attention to troublesome ambiguities in some of the key concepts on which discussions of human uniqueness depend, to recall very briefly some of the difficulties philosophers have encountered in their attempts to define the relation of the human powers of mind to the material capacities of body, and finally to ask what the theological significance of all this is.     

A CHRISTIAN NATURALISM: DEVELOPING THE THINKING OF GORDON KAUFMAN

This essay develops a theological naturalism using Gordon Kaufman's nonpersonal idea of God as serendipitous creativity in contrast to the personal metaphorical theology of Sallie McFague. It then develops a Christian theological naturalism by using Kaufman's idea of historical trajectories, specifically Jesus trajectory₁ and Jesus trajectory₂. The first is the trajectory in the early Christian church assuming a personal God in the framework of Greek philosophy that results in the Trinity. The second is the naturalistic‐humanistic trajectory of creativity (God) that evolves from nonpersonal interactions in the universe and life to creativity in persons and is manifested in Jesus as love. This is elaborated further with Dean Keith Simonton's Darwinian understanding of genius and Marcus Borg's analysis of Jesus as Jewish mystic, teacher of alternative wisdom, and nonviolent resister to the domination system of the Roman Empire. What makes Jesus a religious genius is his exemplifying unconditional, universal love—a new mode of creativity (God) that has evolved from nonhuman to a human form.