Excerpted from the sermon “Rethinking Darwin”, delivered on March 13, 2024, at Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation in White Plains, NY. I wrote this in response to the political discourse in our nation, but it might be useful in our religious communities too.
The title “Rethinking Darwin,” may be a bit misleading. I must affirm that I am a firm believer in evolutionary science, and I believe Charles Darwin was a remarkable scientist.
But when we talk about Darwin, we start with two phrases: natural selection and survival of the fittest. But we’re often getting it wrong… because that’s not the end of the evolutionary story.
Instead, it is cooperation and friendliness. “Cooperation is the key to our survival as a species because it increases our evolutionary fitness. … Arguably no folk theory of human nature has done more harm – or is more mistaken – than ‘the survival of the fittest.’”1
To Darwin and modern biologists, survival of the fittest refers only to the ability to survive and leave behind viable offspring. That’s it. It’s about the biology. Yet it’s been used – often cruelly – to justify the discrimination and dehumanization of others. And it permeates our society – only the fittest and most able bodied and most beautiful survive.
But in actuality, Darwin was constantly impressed with the kindness and cooperation he observed in nature, and he wrote that ‘those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.
In other words, the best way to win at evolution is to maximize friendliness so that cooperation flourishes.
Many species cooperate – from the bacteria and microbes that live in our bodies, to the birds and bees who help pollinate plants, and entire ecosystems that rely on friendliness – the intentional or unintentional cooperation or positive behavior toward others.
Evolutionary anthropologists Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods began to wonder if that kind of cooperation, which seems to be a main trait of homo sapiens – or modern humans – is what gave humans the evolutionary edge.
That edge wasn’t a given – other human species seemed to have fitter advantages – bigger brains, the ability to create tools, speak, adorn themselves, care for each other, bury their dead. Some human species even evolved to adapt to colder climates. Homo sapiens – by those standards – wouldn’t have been the odds-on favorite to survive.
But something happened in the 25,000 years or so between our first appearance as a species and when most other human species died out. We had begun developing projectile weapons, which revolutionized hunting – not just keeping us safer but expanding our diets. We created fishing nets, blades, and snares. We ventured out of Africa and began crossing great bodies of water. And this would have required planning for food, and tools, and, “most remarkably, these sailors had to infer that there was something beyond the horizon. Perhaps they had studied the patterns of migratory birds or seen the smoke of natural bushfires in the distance. Even if this was the case, they would have had to imagine that there was somewhere to go.”
We began living in camps filled with hundreds of people – organized with areas for various tasks – cooking, sleeping, butchering. We used fire. We made clothing. We began to expand our social networks. We started to trade. Our ability to create art moved beyond representation into storytelling. We behaved and looked like modern humans, eclipsing other human species and becoming not just dominant, but the one human species that survived.
Hare and Woods suggest that “what allowed us to thrive while other humans when extinct was a kind of cognitive superpower: a particular type of friendliness called cooperative communication.” This means that we have developed a way to communicate and learn from each other’s behaviors, pass on innovations, work together, inherit and pass on knowledge, and form relationships. And they found that our emotions are key to our sophisticated social understanding and strategies.
Hare and Woods suggest this process is a kind of ‘self-domestication’ – meaning that as we evolved, we saw the benefits of friendliness, and have evolved to coordinate, cooperate, and communicate in increasingly complex ways, allowing us to innovate and share those innovations quickly.
Interestingly, our researchers found that dogs, and our closest cousins, bonobos, also seem to have going through this kind of self-domestication, becoming friendlier and more able to communicate in fairly complex ways. (So yes, in this one… limited way, dogs are…yes, they better than cats.) By studying various other animals, Hare and Woods were able to understand the evolutionary benefits of self-domestication and how might have happened over time.
(There’s a couple hundred pages explaining their experiments and other observations, which began with a dog named Oreo; for a deeper dive, I commend unto you their book, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity.)
So … I can hear you asking…if friendliness is such a key to our being human, why are people so awful to each other?
The short answer is that when we form communities and cooperate within them, we begin to feel protective, and when we feel that our group is being threated by a different group, we are able to separate them from us, which allows us to dehumanize them. Where empathy and compassion would have been, there is nothing. Those we perceive as outsiders are no longer humans – and the rhetoric of dehumanization flourishes – not just calling others animals, but using language to elicit disgust and vilification. Which then sets a norm, drawing hard lines between us and them, removing the ability to even communicate, no less come to any kind of compromises.
We shift from survival of the friendliest back to survival of the fittest – mistaking power and control for progress. Some of this is hormonal – oxytocin and serotonin have a lot of impact on how we perceive safety and threat. Love for our own groups enhances our fear and aggression toward strangers with a different identity. And when we isolate only in our own groups, we become even more fearful and aggressive.
This is why our vision of the beloved community is at once so beautiful and so hard.
We envision a world where those divisions are not things to be afraid of, where the people unlike us are actually people too. We envision a world where our propensity for cooperation and collaboration means everyone has enough and we live in peace.
We can see it – we can dream it. But it’s so hard to make real, when there are so many working so hard to keep us separated from one another. As Hare and Woods point out,
“Across time, culture, and country, the underlying psychology is always the same. To initiate the cycle of dehumanization, extremists may convince their own group that they are being dehumanized by another. As the real of perceived threat level increases, even people in the middle move away from the bull’s-eye and closer to the outer circle of the target and are primed for violence against their enemies. Without a humanizing or galvanizing cause, like a common threat, that can be used to unite the different sides, those in the moderate middle struggle to bring extremists and ideologues back to the negotiating table.”
Yet we know that our fear of the other diminishes when we have contact with those who don’t share our culture and experiences, when we have a chance to connect to the humanity in others. We are less likely to ‘other’ a group of people when we know someone who belongs to that group. Suddenly, we see their eyes, hear their voices, sense their lifeforce. We know them as human, just like us, and that softens that fear reaction and changes attitudes.
And soon, we aren’t just making connections and changing attitudes, we are communicating. We are collaborating. We can begin to see how our fates are tied up with one another, how our work toward liberation helps everyone.
We’re never going to reason each other into the beloved community – we must do it through our evolutionary superpower – friendliness. We must be willing to break down the walls that divide us. Hare and Woods’ self-domestication hypothesis suggests we are designed for contact and that contact produces a positive effect.
We felt some of this during the isolation period of the pandemic – and many of us remember that we felt a little fearful when we left our homes – I was thinking about it yesterday as I went to the grocery store – that there was that really hard time when doing simple errands required letting go of that sense of danger. But when we can make safe contact with others, and when we are in community with a variety others, it is easier to feel friendly and empathetic toward others.
We still need that, even as the pandemic is becoming more of an endemic. I notice that it’s been a little harder to connect to others – we’ve gotten used to meetings online, and ordering our groceries, and streaming our movies. Our friendships have suffered, and the ways we ‘do church’ together has suffered, and I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of us versus them when that’s what the media – social, news, and entertainment – tells us is the way of the world.
But what if we were more intentional about our friendliness and collaboration? What if we didn’t just greet and chat with others in our communities? What if we did a little bit more to let go of our anxieties and prickliness and actually connect to the humanity and the wellbeing of others in our communities?
Maybe if we practice it among each other, we can build more bridges out in the world. Maybe if we experience the power of friendliness amongst each other, we can keep using our evolutionary superpower to help create a world of real compassion and friendliness, true peace, and deep justice – to build the beloved community.
All quotations from Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods (Random House, 2020).
This is beautiful: "We’re never going to reason each other into the beloved community – we must do it through our evolutionary superpower – friendliness."
These are words to live by.
Many people since Darwin and Wallace published their theories of natural selection have tried to use "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" as justification for ruthless non-cooperation among people.
This overlooks the many places where see cooperative behavior in social species because it's more successful than ruthless non-cooperation.
Several years ago at the Skepticon conference, neurobiologist Peggy Mason talked about altruism in humans asking if it was culture or biology.
She used lab rats to explore altruistic behavior and described this as an "innate mammalian drive to be good, to help."
She has some introductory remarks but gets into the biology of altruism around the 20:50 time point in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwVy3zGxe_o