[Back-cover note] The front cover is from Ox Herding, a Buddhist narrative-painting by the 15th century Japanese Rinzai Zen

monk Shubun. The series is said to be a copy of a lost original attributed to Kakuan, a 12th century Chinese Zen Master. The 10 paintings are 35-cm circles on a paper scroll kept in the Shokoku-ji temple in Kyoto. As the image shows, the ox has gone missing, in the manner of the deist god. [Temporary note: Shubuns copyright has surely expired by now!]

(Front end paper)

LIFE IS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE, BOTH FOR THE GODS, AND FOR PEOPLE MADE IN THEIR IMAGE. THE GODS ESTABLISH THE LAWS THAT WILL GOVERN THEIR UNIVERSE, SET THE INITIAL CONDITIONS, AND PUSH THE gO BUTTON. THE GOAL IS TO DISCOVER THOSE LAWS AND CONDITIONS, AMONG THE MILLIONS POSSIBLE, THAT WILL PRODUCE A UNIVERSE IN WHICH MORAL JUSTICE PREVAILS. gODS MAY WORK IN TEAMS, BECAUSE THE NUMBER OF GODS IS ONE OF THE EXPERIMENTAL VARIABLES. CHANGING THE LAWS IN MID-EXPERIMENT IS FORBIDDEN,1 BUT ONE IS ALLOWED TO MAKE SUGGESTIONS TO ANY LIFE FORMS WHICH DEVELOP SUFFICIENT RECEPTIVITY.
1

We deduce this from the fact that the same laws work as far back in time as we can look, 13.73 Gyr.

[Facing end paper] PRCIS OF THE LAST 14 BILLION YEARS: ONCE upon a time, there were 3 student goddesses, and a canid. They did the best they could. Their universe developed stars, metals, life, and apes that used tools and re. Nothing much happened for the next 2 million years. Then one day in the Middle Paleolithic, Peira found a receptive tribal shaman and whispered in his ear. What she suggested worked for about 5 millennia. Then Eirene saw an opportunity to work with the tribal great-grandmother, and within 2500 years we had made the Watershed Leap into the Upper Paleolithic. All then went well for 100 centuries, until some of the physical laws combined to return the world to a half myriennium of great cold and isolation. Each group assumed Eirenes panacea was for itself alone. After the cold departed, and groups began to meet once more, we were back to the behavior of the Middle Paleolithic. The Leap gave us toolsand weapons, and when the cold turned to drought, we used them on eachother. Emphante thought it might help if she sent CoyotlTrickster and Shapeshifter though he wasto explain the role of the gods, and although they tried numerous times, it was always a bit like talking to puppies. Not all of the message is understood. What came through, too often, was dysfunctional distraction and abiding confusion, leading to the 5000-year great recurring muddle that we call history. It was only when Emphante and Peira learned to work together that we began to see our way out of this. It turned out that not everything that we could imagine was true, and that there were ways of determining which was which. What we should do with that information is use it to help the students reach their goal. What we will to do with it remains to be seen.

Examples. On the left, the object known in engineering circles as a therblig (perhaps from the

diculty of manufacture) ready for threading; on the right, a tribar (or Escher bracket), invented by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvrd and popularized by Roger Penrose.

Frontispiece. The power of synthetic kinship. This well known picture is Drenched Cat, by South African photographer Jim McLagen. If looks could kill, the person holding this cat would be dead. What preserves him is that the cat has been tricked (by domestication and adoption) into believing that the handler is his mother, and One Does Not Kill Mom. [Temporary note: While this is copyrighted material, I believe this figure falls under fair use, as it does not signicantly impede the right of the copyright holder to sell the copyrighted material, is not being used to generate prot in this context, and presents ideas that cannot otherwise be exhibited. Besides, all attempts to contact McLagen fail.]

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ONCE upon a time, ............................................................................... 3 A-0. Preface: A Scientists Search Note to the Deeply Religious True Believers Synopsis of the Hypothesis Essential Components of Religion Eirenic(after Eirene, goddess of peace) Gaian(after Gaia, goddess of the earth) Qualifications? Authorial Bias Hurt Feelings Acknowledgements 6 6 8 9 12 12 13 14 16 18 21

Frontispiece .............................................................................................. 4 Fig. 0.1 Timeline ..................................................................................... 11 Fig. 0.2 Bias ........................................................................................... 19

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A-0. Preface: A Scientists Search3

Let men decry Pietism as they may, the people who were in earnest with it were honourably distinguished. They possessed the highest that man can possess that calm, that serenity, that inward peace which is not disturbed by any passion. No trouble, no persecution dismayed them; no contest had the power to stir them up to anger or hostility: in a word, even the mere observer was involuntarily compelled to respect them. Immanuel Kant Failing states are an early sign of a failing civilization. Lester Brown The problem is worse than we thought. Nearly any environmental scientist.

Note to the Deeply Religious

As a child, my incessant Why?s found natural answers in the quotidian sciences geology, biology, meteorology, &cfiltered through my parents, and these answers were pure brain candy. Later, it turned out that these were answers to How come? rather than Why?to process, not purposeand that answerable questions must be carefully formulated and sharply constrained. When life, as it often does, destroyed my carefully constructed world view, I looked further afield for deeper answersand did not find them. The consolations of religion were crafted in and for an earlier age; for the limbos, not the cortex.4 Still later, as people once again started enthusiastic killing in the name of god, the question became, How did belief become so important to us? The books title makes 3 arrogant claims: that I know what religion was for, that it needs fixing, and that we can fix it. The first claim is a hypothesis, vulnerable to falsification, explaining why religion was once useful. The second (implicit) claim arises from the development of pseudoreligions: an invention once useful because it stopped us from killing eachother now encourages and purports to sanctify that killing. The third claim requires only that we refocus on the core of religion, which never was self-centered salvation and the afterlife. As shown by 1) the loss of biodiversity and 2) the faltering of progress toward abundance, personal freedom, opportunities, and general happiness in the last third of the 20th century, our ultimate concerns are 1) planetary stewardship and 2) social justice. As to the purpose of religion as a mental image of a world of deeper meaning than meets the eye, one suspects that the need to believe runs so deep in the human psyche that it is part of our genetic makeup. The only way this could have happened was that belief once allowed more
3

The qualifying clause means that I had little idea what I was going to say when I began the book, a decade ago. This was a learning experience.
4

I think this difference is at the root of a disparagement of computational evolutionary psychology in favor of more context-sensitive studies of religion whose approach has the potential for supporting naturalistic appraisals of (allegedly) profound kinds of religious experience {Barr11}. Naturalistic is the key word here: Chapter 4 addresses the human cognitive capabilities and their evolutionary history that underly my interpretation of naturalistic.

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of our children to survive to breed. Religion was originally a good thing. Populations without religion (including all other animals) are stable; only after our species invented religion could it break the iron control of the environment to take over the Earth for a moment. Does the idea of fewer children dying seem good to you? Think carefully about your answer, because if it is Yes you are, by definition, celebrating evolution. This is because mathematical genetics rests on 2 definitions: Viability is the fraction of children who survive to breed; Evolution is an increase in viability. This is not a trick, but a common-sense description. Statistically, barring cometary strikes and habitat destruction by humans, other populations are stable. Despite a generation time as low as 20 minutes, the mean number of bacteria in the world today does not increase, so all bacterial descendants die. A codfish may lay 100 million eggsof which 2 survive to breed. A cat may have 75 kittensof whom 2 breed. Americans in 1920 needed 3 children to maintain a stable population {Knig21: Ch4}. Today it takes 2.2 children per family,5 of whom 2 breed. There would be less unhappiness if we could reduce this number to 2.1. Add to the definitions 2 factsthat children are not identical to parents, and that some children thrive better than othersand we have the crux of the story told by Darwin,6 Wallace, Mendel, Bateson, Galton, Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Morgan, Huxley, Dobzhansky, Mller, Beadle, Watson, Crick, Nierenberg, Margulis, and the hundreds who filled in the details. The result is that more of our children survive. Thats all there is to evolution.

Nevertheless, most people want the human experience to have more purpose than evolution seems to provide. It is not easy to accept that evolution is a meaningless tale told by an idiot, said van der Dennen, acknowledging that explaining a disgusting phenomenon [war] by means of a revolting theory [evolution] may not be particularly appealing to many readers {vdDe95}. It is worse to explain an exalted phenomenon (religion) by a revolting theory. We escape unappealing explanations with myths that imbue us with satisfying significance (see the front end papers). Van der Dennen devoted his first chapter to a discussion of the nuances of biological and cultural evolution (citing 70 papers in one footnote). His chapter is entirely relevant to the evolution of religion, and since it is available on the web, I recommend it to anyone uncomfortable with evolutionary explanations.
For those who fear that science is an attack which will reduce things they hold dear to cold discomforting facts, I suggest Richard Dawkinss Unweaving the Rainbow. This is his answer to Keatss complaint that Newton had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by

reductionism, and an attempt to convey the feeling of awed wonder that science can give us. As it happens, the rainbow has been studied, reduced, deconstructed, and explained by a host of talented scientists. Rainbows have also lived in my sequence of desktop computers for 20 years, where my optics and graphics programs and I have been
5

This decrease is sociomedical, and a demonstration that evolution proceeds at all levels simultaneously. DNA, chromosomes, organelles, cells, organs, individuals, groups, societies, and civilizations all interact, and some thrive better than others. The one which can devote the least effort to reproduction has the most resources for improving its environment and the highest probability of survival.
6

Darwin acknowledged 34 previous writers who believe in the modification of species, or at least disbelieve in separate acts of creation {Darw59: Ch. 1 Historical Note}.

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discovering ever more fascinating things about them. Them because there are more than the 2 rainbows we often see,7 and no 2 rainbows are alike. Any rainbow is a remarkable cooperative project, with layers of mystery and beauty that Keats, limited to his eyes, could not imagine. The more we learn about rainbows, the more ways we have to understand them, the more interesting and marvelous they become. The same is true of religion. Perhaps, as Will and Ariel Durant said of history, we can learn enough [] to bear reality patiently, and to respect one anothers delusions {Dura68: 13}, adding, Only a fool would try to compress 100 centuries [] into hazardous conclusions. We proceed. I propose to compress 350 centuries. Come! Let us explore! Without speculation there is no good & original observation, as Darwin wrote to Wallace.

True Believers
The gods denied mankind many gifts, and attached hard conditions to most of those which they granted. But for all their withholding of certain gifts and their tainting of others, they sought to compensate by giving an extra allowance of credulity. W. J. Ghent, Our Benevolent Feudalism. Initially, I hoped only to understand how the need to believe an implausible story became important.8,a When I constantly italicized need to believe, it became a distinct concept that needed the dignity and convenience of its own name, hence:
pothodoxy, n. (from pothos, craving, yearning + doxasia, opinion, belief; cf. orthodoxy, correct opinion) the apparently genetic need to believe an implausible story, particularly when there is contradictory evidence.

The qualifying phrase about evidence is needed because quantum mechanics is as implausible a story as we have, yet it is our most numerically accurate theory. Thus, pothodoxy describes belief in a 6000-year-old Earth and angels with 70,000 pairs of wings, but not belief in the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is a currently undecidable choice. Pothodoxy is more fully characterized by Nicholas Wade as The Faith Instinct an altogether gentler and more sympathetic book than this one, yet including examples of pothodoxy compelling [people] to override the strongest human emotions, including those of self-preservation and the protection of family {Wade09: 224}. I take Gibbons Gambit as the type example of pothodoxy: So urgent [] is the necessity of believing,

In the laboratory, 17 rainbows have been reported, resulting from 1 to 17 internal reflections. The 3rd and 4th lie behind you as you admire the 1st and 2nd, and are overwhelmed by forward scattering; the 5th lies in Alexanders dark space between the pair ordinarily seen, and is too dim for the daylight adapted naked eye.
8

The life of a solitary individual in the Paleolithic was likely to be short and brutal. Sabertooth cats abounded, and hunting was a cooperative activity, so a solitary individual was in serious trouble. Ostracism was both a death sentence (unless one could find another accepting tribe) and a customary way of dealing with troublemakers among foragers. Anything that encouraged belonging was advantageous and strongly selected for. Today, alleles for belonging are no longer needed to stay alive, so a few of us have lost them? (The a mark indicates an endnote continuing this discussion.)

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that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition. {Gibb88: I, 432}. Herbert Spencer showed that belief is the ultimate fact that we can never transcend, because all logical acts of intellect are themselves assertions that something is; and this is what we call belief {Spen55}. Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out the problem with any fanatical belief (that is, one unsupported by publicly accessible data)whether by Christians, Mohammedans, nationalists, Communists, or Nazis (Neoliberals, Neocons, Technolibertarians, and the Tea Party did not yet exist). Fanaticism is not content to wallow in superstition itself; it needs fiercely to impose superstition on all and sundry. Consequently, its True Believers are infected with
a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; [...] all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. [...T]he fanaticism which [] drives them on to expansion and world dominion [has] a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power {Hoff51: ix} not to mention a desire for instant change without debate or compromise, because the pothodox know that they possess all truth and righteousness. Freud noted that his tentative hypotheses in the course of time [] gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other way. L. Ron Hubbard died believing in his money-making pulp-fictional pseudoreligion and its evil Galactic Emperor. The creation of false memories by repeated exposure to suggestion is well known {Mitc96}, and is a customary aspect of self-delusion {vHip11}.

Pothodoxy implies fanatical belief and misevaluation of probability, and often includes a pathological predilection for supernatural dualism.

Synopsis of the Hypothesis

The definition of religion that emerges departs so strongly from familiar approaches (Appendix 3) that it will require rethinking a number of current axioms about religion, and it will not make sense until its terms are explained in detail, but in 25 words (discounting the parenthesis):

! Religion is the preconscious invention of synthetic kinship that got us out of

the Middle Paleolithic, increased viability

and in the Neolithic, bequeathed us pothodoxy (the genetic need to believe

irrational and implausible stories as proof of kinship). Three corollaries may make this definition more familiar: C1 Nonparticularity: Judging from 3500 anthropological examples, nearly any story will do. C2 Dualism: A preponderance of the stories divide the world into 2 classes, one of which can be kicked (like Samuel Johnsons rock {Bosw91: I, 472}), while the
.
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other cannot. The latter class includes both natural members like ideas, dreams, and night terrors, and supernatural members whose numbers and properties recognize no constraint. C3 Inclusivity: The nonparticularity of the stories means that they attract phenomena that need explanation, which is offered in the storys own terms. Once a pothodox narrative enters a profit-making phase, the salesmans meaning of truth seeps into its dogma: whatever helps the deal go down. Like most human ventures, religion has both useful and obstructive aspects. Simplistic convictionsthose of the Taliban and (to a lesser extent) Richard Dawkins come to mindpolarize the debate without suggesting how to increase the utility and minimize the obstruction. Note also, in Fig. 0.1, what a remote period we must consider. Religion became important 30 millennia ago, when there was both an adequate development of language, and sufficient time for a language-based increase in viability to work its way into our genes.

Fig. 0.1 Timeline. The critical period for the invention of religion40,00025,000 years agolong antedates known religions. We will explain these dates below, but it is important to understand how distant a time we are dealing with. Polls suggest that the shaded area (before Bishop Usshers date for the Creation) does not exist for half of the US population, indicating a major failure of public education.

Traditional aspects of religion are late developments. Theology (concern about the existence and nature of gods) is irrelevant for perhaps the first 20 millennia. Soteriology (concern about personal salvation) is probably not important until the dawn of history. Comparative religion (comparing and contrasting the scriptures and traditions of known religions) provides clues to what religion was all about, but only if one is looking for clues. Paleontology, anthropology and sociology combine to suggest that: Religion is coterminous with culture, with few exceptions, none of which got far out .
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of the Middle Paleolithic.9 One suspects that religion was necessary for culture. On the other hand, there have been 100,000 religions with an amazing variety of beliefs. One suspects that the details of belief are irrelevant, and that the essential was something very simple. Can the exceptions help us here? The New Guinea Highlands were populated by the first people out of Africa, and then isolated. They did not have religion. Mythology and folk tales, yes {Sloa01}: Incoherent, without a trace of organizing principle, many of them seem pointless. There is neither a world view nor a supratribal mythos. Jared Diamond explains the problem, which persisted long after first contact in the 1930s: [I]f a New Guinean encountered an unfamiliar New Guinean [], the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives,10 in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why they should not attempt to kill each other {Diam92: 271}.b This is the social organization of ground apes (hence the Third Chimpanzee of Diamonds title), driven by what we will identify as Instinct I (otherwise, the alpha-male syndrome, machismo, greed).11 Diamond wrote Germs, Guns, and Steel in answer to a Papuan friends question, How did the West get so far ahead of New Guinea? I have no problem with the answers of his title, nor with the efficacy of the Germs, but suggest that Religion was needed to get to the Guns and Steel. My thesis is that in the Eurasian Paleolithic, about 35,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, with the worlds most rapidly expanding brain, had an inspiration. As long as there were Neandertals and H. erectus around, we could kill Them instead of Us.12 Racism among the Cro-Magnons was pseudo-kinship: He looks like me, so we must be related and I dont need to kill him. This is a fundamental improvement over the original urge to kill any hominid on sight. A modern parallelunverifiedholds that the Manchester United football (soccer) club was formed from 2 existing clubs to keep their fans from trying to kill eachother after every match. Tell them that they are all Mancunians, and they go off together to fight other tribes. Pope Urban called the First Crusade in 1095 partly to stop Christian infighting. When we ran out of Paleolithic people who didnt look like us, we found a second substitute for kinship: He believes the same (unlikely) stories that I do. We must be related. All of this happened during the Critical Period of Fig. 0.1. (Kinship surrogates have a long evolutionary history (Ch. 11, Evolution of Kinship Altruism), so there is nothing startling in these developments.) Thereafter, from the Cantabrian littoral to Lake Baikal, little stylized female figurinessome found in situ in household shrinesare icons of what seems to be a common belief system, perhaps centered on the analogy between the basic concerns of human
9

Much has happened since the Paleolithicincluding transmission of religion to societies which neither invented it, nor got out of the Paleolithic by themselves.
10

Exactly like the Irish! said an Irish reader. We will see at least one more related survival of Paleolithic behavior in Irelands Heroic Age.
11

The Instincts have many culturally dependent expressions. See Tables 11.3, 13.3 and 16.4 to understand the difficulty of finding more descriptive names than I and II. Perhaps I should have settled for Freuds Thanatos (hate, destruction / power, manipulation) for Instinct I and Eros (love, creativity / lust) for Instinct II, for these are clearly related, but the collected examples in Table 16.4 do not seem a good fit. Besides, I didnt come across Freuds analysis until the book was nearly finished.
12

H. erectus survived longest where he was hardest to get at, lasting 250,000 years longer in Java than on the Asiatic mainland, and 1 million years longer than in Africa {Swis96}. Neandertal survived for 400,000 years, but vanished 5000 years after we arrived in his territory.

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survival: the fecundity of women and the fecundity of nature. Some see psychological continuity between the figurines, the Great Mother of Old Europe, Isis, the thousands of local goddesses of the Middle East Neolithic, the village goddesses of India, and Mariolatry. A more familiar starting point for the study of religion is prehistoric Greece. Given the wealth of relevant literature from this early flowering of the human spirit, this fascination is understandable. Walter Burkerts magisterial Greek Religion {Burk85}, making no claim to completeness, lists 150 earlier studies. Vedic and Judaic origins attracted comparable attentionand in all 3 cases, things get murky around 6000 BCE, as do Egypt and Mesopotamia. We look nearly 30,000 years earlier, on the basis of slim evidence save for a near consensus among evolutionary psychologists that this is the time scale needed for the formation of pothodoxy, altruism, and similar traits associated with religion. The novel idea is that the details of shared belief are irrelevant to its utility. If the content of belief was not what mattered, all but the most perceptive theology has been barking up the wrong tree, and a great deal of intellectual effort has been misspent.13 I suggest that religion had done all that it could for us by 500300 BCE, at which time the philosophers of the Axial Age began the work of creating myth-free ethical systems. These were a threat to the power of priest-kings, which was met, over the next millennium, by Instinct I co-opting pothodoxy, so that it is no longer socially usefulwith highly respected spokesmen among the unwitting leaders of this reaction. Over the last 150 years, the details of shared belief have steadily decreased in relevance so that religion today is fossil behavior, contributing fewer benefits and more problems with every decade. So much is public knowledge: Polls show that 82% of Britonsliving in the worlds most successful multicultural societyfeel that religion does more harm than good, causing division and tension instead of cohesion. Britains Muslims still maintain that their belief is the most important thing in their lives by an 86% majorityand although Islam was specifically designed to be a supratribal unit in which Islam replaced kinship-based affiliations {Pipe81: 64}Islams scriptures do not supply the essential components of religion. To the extent that these exist, they are supplied by the common sense of individual moderate Muslims, particularly among the Sufis.

Essential Components of Religion

Our planetary ecosystem will not survive the next critical century unless our belief systems match our worlds needs. For far too long, we have accepted as religion anything that its prophet said was religion. This is tantamount to believing a used-car salesman. In particular, religion was not concerned with personal salvation for its first 30,000 years. We will see that religion can be usefully delimited by 2 requirements. It must be:

Eirenic(after Eirene, goddess of peace)14

The Instinct I (alpha-male behavior) of social animals long antedates humans. It gave us ownership of the planetbut alone, it is incompatible with civilization. The quest to discover how we tried to tame Instinct I was begun by the Presocratics. As summarized by Lucretius, they suggested: The first humans [lived] a beast-like life without any arts or technologies, co-operation or society. Then they procure for themselves houses, skins and fire, and begin to live a settled existence with marriage, children, and family
13

Consider the 130-odd confessions that distinguish the major Christian sects established between 1381 and 1909, whose entry in the Encyclopdia of Religion and Ethics takes up 70 pages {Curt10: V3}and most of the other articles in the 10,000-page collection.
14

Note that this usage is distinct from the ideas of Church Father Irenaeus, and from the theological connotation of irenics (the attempt to reconcile differences between Christian denominations).

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life. This leads to a softening, both physical and psychological, that enables them to begin to co-operate with one another and develop the first societies and language. {Camp00: 155} (Emphasis added.) Before discovering that passage, and thinking I had an original insight, I had written During the Pleistocene, I submit that a combination of a weak cooperative tendency, the increasing importance of language, and the ability to learn by language (and thus to believe stories), proved so helpful to our survival that it became Instinct II (cooperation, bonisma, altruism), coded in the genes, and expressed as a need to believe in a group mythos. It was strongly selected for because shared belief was accepted as equivalent to kinship. This allowed us to enlarge the protected kin-group beyond the 150 people of a tribe. Only in larger groups is there an opportunity for the cross-fertilization of ideas that got us out of the Paleolithic. It has taken 2000 years to replace Lucretiuss psychological softening with a specific hypothesis. I will refer to this softening cooperative aspect of religion as Eirenic.

Gaian(after Gaia, goddess of the earth)15

We fiddle while Rome burns. The secondary threats facing us are serious and widely understood: the clash of civilizations, nuclear weapons, the injustice and instability of economic inequality, the modern aberration called fundamentalism. The primary threats are evidently more subtle, because fewer people recognize their culture-breaking potential: Global Heating, Peak Fossil Fuel (Peak Oil was 2006), Peak Food, Peak Water, Economic Meltdown, Failed Statesand overarching all of these is Population Growth, exacerbating all destabilizing threats. Instinct II, which used pothodoxy as a tool to reach its goals, is still with us, which is good.16 Pothodoxy is still with us also, and this is not so good. Wasted effort, opportunity, and energy follow from any extremum of religious belief such as a god will provide, spirit is real, matter is illusion,17 nothing matters because these are the end times, we are doing what some god wants, you must believe what I believe, &c. Our churches tolerate, if not encourage, biodiversity loss, ignorance of thermodynamics, short-term thinking, resource consumption, overpopulation, and other ecocidal practices. Pothodoxy challenges us to reinterpret existing religions in a way which motivates True Believers to survival-oriented action that can minimize the primary threats. There is no dearth of work to be done. Environmental activism (as by Greenpeace, Earth First, Sea Shepherd18 {Wats82}, &c) is not rocking the boat but bailing the
15

For the record, my thinking about Gaia dates from the early 70s, independent of James Lovelocks approach, which I will distinguish as geophysiological Gaia. She is capable of inspiring anyone who will pay attention to her.
16

The pathetic fallacyin which a mental construct or inanimate object is endowed with human passions (evolution wants..., science uses...) is a powerful and efficient figure of speech. Think of it as literary animism, which endows words with nuance and image, as dryads and naiads once granted trees and streams the mana of the sacred. I dont know which thick-headed pedant interpreted one literally and declared it fallacious, but he did us no service.
17

The second clause is literally true: Matter is an evolving probability-wave function. How does knowing this help us?
18

A recent rescue set free 800 mostly immature blue-fin tuna (a highly endangered species), captured after the fishing season and exceeding the allowed quota {GW25.06.10 p3}. Sea Shepherds campaign of harassing the Japanese whaling fleet with red paint, smoke bombs and rancid butter reduced Japans 2010-2011 Antarctic whale killing to 20% of its planned goal {Hosa11}. Japan claims the hunt is scientific, studying mortality rates, whale stock numbers and structure, the role of whales in the Antarctic ecosystem and how environmental changes affect whales. A reasonable definition of science, and economic use of research material, would consume one whale per peer-reviewed paper: Japan

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life-raft. The misplaced enthusiasm that inspires jihad, terrorism, attacks on family-planning centers, attempts to revoke evolution and rewrite history, and the urge to empower corporations to the detriment of people, is crying for redirection into repairing our life-support system and creating a sustainable life style. It follows that to survive we must find something ecologically true and broadly popular, which pothodoxy can fasten onto. For evolutionary reasons, this will be difficult. But the alternative is truly unpleasant and fast becoming inevitable. I will refer to the missing but essential ecological aspect of religion as Gaian. Note that a religion can be Gaian without involving worship of Gaia. This matters out of courtesy to James Lovelock, who explained that his (geophysiological) Gaia is not and should never be the basis of a religion, because religions are faith-based. The word I prefer to faith, says Lovelock, is trust. If we put trust in Gaia then it gives us something that will fulfil the same kinds of needs as religions have. Eirenic and Gaian considerations might seem disparate and separable. Their intimate relation is shown by 2 maps in Jared Diamonds Collapse {Diam05: 497}. One is labelled Political Trouble Spots in the Modern World, and the other, Environmental Trouble Spots in the Modern World. The maps are identical, and in every case, delineate places where one most assuredly would not like to be.

Qualifications?
[I]t has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of [accumulated knowledge]. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of themand at the risk of making fools of ourselves. Quantum mechanic Erwin Schrdinger, What Is Life?

The definitive book on the evolutionary biology of religion should be written by an evolutionary biologist who is also a theologian. I am neither, and this is not that book. The two fields seem mutually exclusive, so the task of making a start has fallen to a high-school dropout. However, I take some comfort in the perceptive and immortal words of Ar-Razi, Persian polymath,19 No man deserves the name of philosopher unless he be a master of theoretical and applied chemistry.20
I once spent 5 years in a California seminary run on Christian-apostolic/Fourier-socialist principles of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need (emerging persuaded that their needs just kept pace with my abilities). California has long had the reputation that if you tipped the country, all the loose nuts would roll down to Los Angeles.21
apparently needs 7000 whales/paper. Nor do Japanese scientists find it necessary to kill Japanese citizens to study their mortality rates or numbers. See {Garl11} for an example of real cetacean science, an 11year study of cultural transmission of social behavior.
19

Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Zakariya Ar-Razi (c. 865923), known in Europe as Rhazes, was the first true chemist, the greatest physician of the Middle Agesand an anti-Muslim free thinker, writing some 200 books on all subjects except mathematics, none of them mentioning the Quran except to comment on its absurd and inconsistent fables.
20 21

How could he have known how neatly this definition would filter out the postmoderns?

Compare, suggested Robert Anton Wilson in 1983, Greece in the 4th century BCE, Rome in the 2st century CE, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, England c. 1600-1900, New York c.

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What is called western esotericism (for lack of a better name) flourished in free-thinking California22 before its Sunbelt conversion to retirement conservatism, and its seminaries catered to this atmosphere. The brand of Christianity they taught might seem bizarre to the mainstream. There was a time when I argued theology with a Baptist minister, until I saw that we both divided Scripture into literal and allegorical passagesand in the time-honored manner, disagreed on which was which. He never saw this, and kept trying to save me. At one point, by dint of night shift as an Engineering Loftsman,23 day shift at San Diego State College (now Cal State San Diego) and sleeping on weekends, I had saved enough money for 1 year at Reed or Harvey Mudd,24 or 2 years at UC Riverside.25 I had 2 years to go. UCR was a young school. 92% of the chemists in my year went on to graduate school, because the faculty was anxious for recognition and sent us forth as missionaries. The choice between Yale and MIT was easy: MIT offered money. I went on to a career in planetary science, including a look at the CO2 problem. The complex kinetic-box models (ocean-atmosphere-biosphere-pedosphere-anthroposphere) of CO2pioneer Charles Keeling were thermodynamically correct, but so abstract that they lost all touch with the real world for me.26 Lesser models suffered from overlooking the subtleties of thalassochemical thermodynamics.27 I thought that a quasi-equilibrium irreversiblethermodynamics approach might avoid such errors and be much simpler than complete kinetic models. I could always complicate it when it failed. It didnt fail. Calibrated against Keelings data, it fit the world in 1860, and it fits it today. About 1980, not liking where it was going, I stopped driving a car (17 years before Kyotos feeble gesture). There is no point in knowing what is going to happen if you fail to do your share to avoid the problems ahead!28
1900-1950, and California today. Note the accumulation of wealth corresponding to the accumulation of heresies, innovations, cults, kooks, pioneers, inventors, &c.
22

As a faculty brat, I may be over-extrapolating from a specialized environment. Pasadena and Berkeley in the 30s and 40s seemed to me to be full of interesting people with unorthodox ideas. There was no John Wayne Airport in those days, and Los Angeles still smelled of orange blossoms when I left.
23

Lofting comes from the days when the only place big and flat enough to lay out the curved ribs of a sailing vessel was the floor of a barn loft. In the 1950s, all of the dimensional information needed to build an airplane was stored graphically on 5x10 sheets of painted steel, with lines drawn with a needle and darkened with copper sulfate. This master was photographed onto a 1x2 glass negative, and reprojected through the same lens (removing any optical distortion), onto sensitized aluminum sheets from which component templates (flat patterns) and shaping instructions (form blocks) were made. Eyeball precision in the trade was 0.003 if you wanted the parts to fit and the plane to fly.
24

Small West Coast bastions of academic excellence, although at the time Mudd was recruiting its junior (3rd-year) class, not having been in existence long enough to produce its own. As the Claremont College (1 of 7) focusing on math and science, it was not going to play second fiddle to any school, Oxbridge or Ivy League.
25

About the same size at the time, and only 4 years old, with no established reputation save the reflected glory of its older brothers, Berkeley and UCLA. A major attraction was its lack of tuition.
26

What, for instance, is the real-world analog of the Lagrange multiplier that creeps in as a key parameter when solving the resulting matrix equations?
27

It takes as long to analyze someone elses model as to create your own. Much of the time is spent deducing implicit background assumptions not specifically mentioned.
28

That sounds noble as all get out, but perhaps I was influenced by Nietzsches possibly tongue-in-cheek, Only thoughts reached by walking have value. A 5-minute jet-fighter flight produces more CO2 than all my efforts save. On the other hand, anyone who intends to pontificate about greenhouse gasses should set a good example.

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After I had written 500,000 words in preliminary drafts of this book, I came across a sentence by John Dewey explaining what I was trying to do. [T]he historic increase in the ethical and ideal content of religions suggests that the process may be carried further {Dewe34: 8}. I am pleased to be able to say that as a result of research for this book, I now have 5 candidates in the short list of religions that meet the Eirenic and Gaian criteria for acceptability: Akhnatons {Devi46}, Zoroasters {Boyc79}, the Uwa of the Colombian rainforest29 {Osbo96}, Zambajis tree-hugging30 Bishois of Rajasthan {Bhat87}, and the tsaar baale hayyim (concern for all life) of medieval rabbis {Cohe76}. The final end paper shows the essentials, epitomized from the Gathas of Zoroaster, as the best traditional statement of what religion is for. The many varieties of Humanismthe antithesis of St. Anselms 12th century formulation called the ontological argument for the existence of God {Sims07}have, since the Renaissance, provided all of the ethical guidance we need: diminishing pain, suffering, and lying [] is at the core of humanistic action.

Authorial Bias
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary simplicity [Thoreau wrote poverty here, {Greg36} not yet having been written]. Thoreau, Walden Anyone who writes on controversial subjects should declare his bias early. As best I can tell, my own religion is as shown in Fig. 0.2. For a quick definition of the axis labels, check the Glossary. I explain them in more detail later.

While Fig. 0.2 places my religion-in-the-concrete among the relatives of known formal systems, it is really the base of a tetrahedron, with a 4th component above the page. A cone joins the peak to the blob, and my religion lies in the cone near the peak. This 4th component comes from my very own religious experience as a child, which fits no known religion. It is compatible with the blob, but accords more importance to our fellow species than even Gautama and Panendy did. With Thomas Paine, I say, My own mind is my own church. Basically, I am a bright, a child of the Enlightenment with a naturalistic world view and a religion of philosophy and of thought.31

29

The 5000 Uwa, having no other recourse, threatened mass suicide unless Occidental and other oil companies stopped polluting their homelands. They also have problems with FARC guerillas who claim jurisdiction over their territory and are limited to Marxist theory which lacks ways of thinking about societies which are neither capitalist, peasant, nor socialist. {Proy99}.
30

Tree-hugger is an honorable term, not to be used lightly or pejoratively! The Bishois were followers of Guru Maharaj Jambaji (b. 1451) who left behind a ban on cutting green trees and killing animals. Ca 1750 the King of Jodhpur sent soldiers after Bishois trees (most others having been cut down). The Bishois villagers, led by the women, hugged the trees to protect them. 363 died before the king came to his senses. The practice has been revived as the modern Chipko Andolan movement, a grass-roots ecodevelopment campaign led by women who have noticed that while their men are willing to sell trees for tobacco money, it is the women who thereafter have to walk miles for firewood, the villages that are vulnerable to floods, and the cattle who have no fodder.
31

Like the division of the world into gays and straights, the division into brights and supers (supernaturalists) is a simplifying convenience which overlooks the complexities of a middle ground.

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Despite the fears of the pious, many agnostics manage a reasonably moral life style, neither drinking, smoking, using drugs, stealing, lying, or cheating on their wives, being and reasonably kind to friends and strangers. To these I will add conscientious objection to killing people my government doesnt like, and the closest I come to profanity are ad hoc expletives like Snarch wurmbl glap!, to which hardly anyone can take exception. Like Mike in Heinleins Stranger in a Strange Land ({Hein61}, but a generation before it was written), there were childhood years when I refused to step on plants because they wouldnt like it. It took a rare California native grass32 by a Sierra Nevada lake to persuade me otherwise. I had just backpacked 12 miles barefoot, and the grass explained that it was adapted to being walked on and quite liked bare feet. It made my feet feel so wonderful that I believed it. And no, I didnt tell this story to Heinlein. His parallel version was independent.

Fig. 0.2 Bias. A theological triangle plot on which admixtures of 3 religions may be shown. The golden blob (at 5% Q1 Yeshuanity, 40% Jatakan Buddhism, and 55% Agnostic Panendeism) is my best guess at my current religion, suggesting that my bias doesnt fit most preconceptions. The inset (a theological trigonal bipyramid of 2 tetrahedra with the triangle as a common base) indicates additional influences. Follow those who seek the truth, said Vaclav Havel, but flee from those who have found it.

Figure 0.2 also suggests the experiences which contribute to locating the blob. Note the persistent effect of early exposure, and the relative influence of limbic (Seminary) and cortical (MIT) education. As for most deist agnostics, the resulting religion is a deeply empowering commitment to an optimistic vision of human possibilities. A naturalistic world view admits that there is vast amount that we do not understand about the universesuch as why there is something rather than nothing, and why, if there is something, it is this something. If (as Victor Stenger maintains{Sten09}) the universe began in total chaos, then the universe has retained no memory of any purpose of the new deist godand, since no one else is going to do this, it is our responsibility to put some meaning and purpose into it. Religion-in-the-abstract is all about deciding what that meaning should be. This is distinct from religion-in-the-concrete, which should be about learning how to live together long enough to answer important questions. As to the nature of god, in the tradition of Pythagoras, Plato {Kenn10}, Giordano Bruno, Edward Fredkin, and Max Tegmark, I suggest god is an equationor resembles an equation
32

Lowland grasses in Californiafoxtail, wild oats, and their ilkcame in the wool of the sheep brought by Catalan missionaries. Only in the high mountains do native grasses survive. The Catalans compensated for the weeds to some extent by bringing Manzanilla olives and the technique of lye curing to remove their tannic acid.

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more closely than anything else we know abouton the grounds that only those things that can be expressed in mathematical terms exist in physical form, and only equations possess the godlike attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. (This idea explains the improbable ability of mathematics to describe the universe.) We know only parts of the equation. At the lowest levels of physics, information is conserved as rigorously as mass-energy, momentum, and angular momentum. This is not obvious in macroscopic continuum physics, or theodicybut it implies that there is a symmetry in nature33 which (by Noethers Law {Noet18}) supports information conservation, and perhaps a mechanism for Buddhist karma. The current description of a flat, ever-expanding, infinite universe apparently filled with mysterious dark matter and dark energy in 10 or 11 or 26 dimensions, should be a humbling reminder of how little we know about our world.34 An equation-god is even less concerned with individuals than Pascals deus absconditus, and leaves us entirely responsible for what we make of that world. As the numerous epigraphs attest, little of this book is novel. I added the epigraphs after the fact, happy to find support from experts. The underlying ideas are part of our cultural heritage, free-floating, available to all who read widely, and needing little but attention and connections to make themselves noticed. This is what lies behind Rupert Sheldrakes concept of morphic resonance {Shel09}, the idea that once something is done by someone, it becomes easier for others to do it,35 and the reason that inventions are often made independently and nearly simultaneously.

Hurt Feelings
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. Karl Popper Daniel Dennett devotes many pages in Breaking the Spell to explaining that the scientific study of religion is not eviloffensive, dangerous, and stupid, but a useful process which will ultimately benefit everyone. The debate of ideas should be as unemotional as reading a journal of mathematics. People become passionate about ideaswhich is no bad thing, except when they want to settle the debate with dogma and violence rather than experiment. Muslims have suggested that I am asking for troublenot that they would knife me, but that this would be the normal response from the mullahs or the Muslim street. There has never been any meeting of minds with Christian fundamentalists.

33 34

Perhaps among the dualities of string theory? {Vene04}.

The current interpretation depends upon galactic redshift representing velocity {Hubb29}. Halton Arp finds high-redshift quasars in front of low-redshift galaxies {ArpH66}, implying an intrinsic redshift. In such anomalies lies the possibility of paradigm shifts.
35

I confess that this interpretation does not explain the appearance of the fractal Brassica oleracea cultivar known as Romanesco broccoli (or space vegetable), shortly after the publication of Benoit Mandelbrots The Fractal Geometry of Nature. See <http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/ mandelbulb.html> 2011-02-14.

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Another concept that I fail to understand is, If our opinion about another religion differs from the opinion and evaluation of the believers, then we are no longer talking about the same religion36 {Krist54: 288}, or No statement about a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religions believers {Smit59: 42}. This is postmodern political correctness, or popoco.37 If you tell me King Lear was written by Shakespeare, and I maintain that it was Roger Bacon, and Joe over there says No, it was Francis!, does this change the play? All we have shown is that I am an ignoramus and Joe is persuaded by logic38and the play stands on its merits. If a believer says that his religion is the revealed word of some god, and I say that it is a product of the prophets unconscious, and Joe says the prophet was a charlatan, does this change the scripture? John Allegro put it better: If some aspects of the Christian ethic still seem worthwhile today, does it add to their authority that they were promulgated two thousand years ago by worshippers of the Amanita muscaria? The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, p205. One reason that questioning a belief might offend someone is because the belief is shakyto which another response is compensatory conviction {McGr01}. Another strange reason is that attacking the core-beliefs and very basis of faith of an individual is a personal attack as well, as one Muslim put it. This is a response which merits study39 (Ch. 5, Religion as identity), but it is basically a problem for the believer and his psychiatrist. The idea that an attack on fuzzy thinking is an attack on the person doing it is a category error arising from a failure of logic. I suspect this happens mostly to people who have no control over what they believe. If one believes as blindly as he falls in lovethat is, emotional acceptance without rational analysisor if failure to believe is a death sentence, it can lead him into the most bizarre behavior. It has become a semi-autonomous meme that, like any other parasite, will use him to protect and propagate itself. The readiness of Muslims to take offense is a political artefact. The reaction to the Danish cartoonswhich were an honest portrayal of Mohammed as described in his official biographywaited 4 months to develop into an internationally orchestrated outburst. As such, it does not merit any response from the West beyond Grow up!.40 Furthermore, offense is inevitably reciprocal: the idea that fundamentalism, illiteracy, innumeracy, ecological ignorance, and blanket rejection of scientific method, survive in an age of space exploration, the internet, and Wikipedia, even in countries that create such advances, is an insult to human potential, shameful to our honor, and harbinger of a failing civilization. We can do better. Once one understands what religion was for, its common employment as a casus belli or inspiration for violence is both offensive and absurd. As Popper noted in the epigraph,
36

Consider a Thugee: His religion tells him it is his duty to strangle Mr Kristensen with a scarf, and he evaluates this as good project. I agree that this is his religious dutybut evaluate it as not good. The scarf is around your neck, Mr Kristensen: Tell me again about your position?
37 38 39

Popoco is a technical term, often conflated with poppycock. See Mark Twains Is Shakespeare Dead? {Twai09}.

Daniel Peacock, who is much more in contact with popular culture than I, understands this response as perceived disrespect and consequent loss of status, by people who derive their entire supply of status from belonging to a dominant group. If the group is defined by belief, disparaging the belief disparages the individual {PeacIP}.
40

In mid-August 2009, Yale University Press removed the cartoons (and other illustrations) from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book, The Cartoons that Shook the World?, prompting the American Association of University Professors to satirize YUPs position as We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.

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there is paradoxical justification for defensive violence in the name of pacifism, but offensive violence is just that and nothing else: offensive.

Editorial details
Finally, a note on typography. Style manuals prefer that small numbers be written out. The late Garrett Hardin was able to persuade his publisher to use numerals wherever possible, by observing that numeracy was a skill whose neglect had sorry repercussions throughout society, so that people should be helped to achieve it. Familiarity with numbers as numbers, rather than as names of numbers, helps. Since of all disciplines, religion is perhaps the most numerically deficient, in a book like this it seems particularly appropriate to take whatever steps one can to correct the situation. Also, the scientist forgets that not everyone enjoys playing with graphs. Visual display of complex data in simple form {Tuft06} is an important component of Descartess scientific method, so that reading graphs is as useful a skill as reading text, and school systems that turn out graphic illiterates are failures. Perhaps it will help if the reader realizes that my computer and I redrew each graph in this book scores of times before we found the most easily interpreted version. So too the tables: Many of them began as 10-page point-by-point analyses. In compact form they may be studied or skimmed. (They are perhaps a hangover from a Buddhist habit of making lists, acquired in previous lifetimes.) Appendix G7 is a reference for those unfamiliar with Systme Internationale units. Briefly: meters are long yards, liters large quarts, kilograms 2 pounds heavy, and euros are big dollars.

Literature references {enclosed in braces} should quickly become invisible to those who are not concerned with tracing controversial ideas. Footnotes abound, but do not be alarmed. They tie up the loose ends of ideas, a function nowadays often performed by marginal boxes and sidebars, unhandy on my word processor. They are mostly there for fun, so if no loose ends occur to you, ignore the footnotes. Occasional end notes respond in detail to challenges raised by early readers. Donald Knuths undergraduate response to an IBM programming manual tells us everything we need to know about him: [T]he manual we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do ... better than that. He also promulgated the use of marginal road signs to warn readers of what was coming and help relocate interesting material. The set we use is: Take-home: Remember this, and act on it. New finding, or if not new, it is at least an uncommon idea. Needed research: Why hasnt this topic been thoroughly studied? Arithmetic or jargon: Some readers will find this useful. Skip if you dont. Scholarly: To show that I have done my homework.
41

. As perfected by Hassan-i-Sabbah ca 1100 CE and lately revived by Barack Obama.

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Theater: Fiction here; enjoy. Soap box: Rant, but in a good cause. Enlightenment: essential ideas from 1750 (epitomized by Thomas Jefferson). Bell-the-cat: Good idea; difficult to implement. Stop this! Write Congress, join quangos, consider pre-emptive assassination,41 whatever! But get this stopped.

Acknowledgements
Daniel Dennett, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, and an anonymous reviewer offered critiques of and encouragement to the parent paper of this book. Too short, said the reviewer, its a good book prospectus, and a book well worth reading. Cut it 40%, countered journal editor Glenn Yocum, and Ill publish it. Comments by Dimitri Kantarelis and participants at a Conference on the Environment improved another ancestral paper. Conversations with Lynn Margulis, Allison Jolly, and the late Garrett Hardin leave ideas which eventually you think were your own. When I stuff my foot in my mouth, it is despite the efforts of experts who answered questions or read chapters: Jim Allen, Tjeerd van Andel, Tanya Atwater, Kelly Beller, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, Wallace Broeker, John Brownie, Noam Chomsky, Sheila Coulson, Tamara Davis, the late Marija Gimbutas, Herbert Gintis, Thomas Greytak, John Hainly, Dean Hamer, James Harrod, Geoff Heard, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Jafarey, Defne Jones, Garret Jones, Richard Klein, Sherri Laizer, Brian McVeigh, Ardeshir Mehta, Branko Milanovic, James OConnell, Cory Panshin, Andrew Pawley, David Pimentel, Peter Richerson, William Ryan, Robert Schick, James Thornton, and Peter L. Ward, among them. Others who offered corrections, URLs of interest, data sources, comments, illustrations, and internet connections include Jim Barty, Vanilla Beer, David Brin, Ellie and John Clemens, Maren Cooke, Hayes Griffith, Bob Harris, Aileen Hennes, Bill Jackson, Georgia Lee, Ole Bendik Mads, Charlotte Mann, Jill Miller, Daniel Peacock, Joan Terrell-Smith, and most notably Dick Miller and Jim Waters. I also provoked the Nisus (Macintosh word processor) user group by trying out arguments on them during lulls in the technical discussions, getting many useful insights in return. Chapter 22 is a direct, if distant, descendant of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship awarded for Philosophical Studies of Man and Nature.

Thanks also to the creators of the internet and search engines. In retirement in the mountains, internet searches saved the day; if the closest library could have found useful material it would have been in French or a local language, and every reference I couldnt find on the web was a $25-$250 expense. I thank everyone who made his

42

. digital library should be regulated as a public utility {Kodi10}. the

Plans to digitize everything in sight need leavening by historian Theodore Koditscheks suggestion that

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research available!42 Viva PLoS, the Public Library of Science, where tax-supported research can be read free, while proprietary journals charge the price of a book for a days access to one paper! What is not in the Web open format, doesnt exist {Maju, Quetzalcoatl anthropology website, 2007.01.08}. A final caution. The hypothesis of religion put forward here is preliminary and based on the decadal research of one outsider starting from scratch, reading no nonEuropean language, and bereft of colleagues and a library, so dont expect a finished theory. Africa and the East, barely touched, are left for specialists. Theres lots of work for everybody!

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ENDNOTES
a

The evolutionary explanation in footnote 7 has been contested, in favor of a linguistic explanation such as Bertrand Russell put forth in On Denoting {Russ05}. Basically, Russell showed that language permits us to create propositions of the sort the present King of France is bald, and then to argue the truth of this and draw conclusions. Since the present King of France is neither bald nor hirsute, Russell observes that Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig. This ability to discuss nonlogical propositions and non-existent entities also means that it is difficult to keep them out of discourse when they offer plausible alternatives, so metaphysics enters our thinking unnoticed. When language was new, all the might-bes of Emphante seemed worth discussing. Weeding Emphantes garden required ideas like the Empty Set, and the Law of the Excluded Middle. The Empty Set is empty, so statements about its contents are neither true nor false, but meaningless.* The Law of the Excluded Middle (x cannot be both A and not-A) is rejected by Hindu philosophy, which remains happy to pontificate about things that are and are-not. However, by the time we had these tools, we had long since accepted much-beloved traditions about supernatural entities whom we did not wish to include in the Empty Set. Belief was expected, and comfortable, and a natural consequence of listening to tales around the hearth. The psychology of belief may be explained by this view of linguistics, but hardly its power, so I stand by my sociogenetic explanation. Were I by birth a Muslim, and sufficiently incautious as to let my views be known, I would (by community preference) be killednot by sabertooth cats, but by pothodox Muslims infuriated by my unwillingness to accept their consensus. When the default option is to kill a stranger on sight, and the only protection from being killed is common belief, alleles permitting scepticism become very scarce in the population. Perhaps an example of the variability of instinct would help. Dogs in Cantabria are primarily kept for hunting sanglier (the wild boar that Obelix eats like corn-on-the-cob), and come large and small, lean and blocky, black and brown, rough coat and smooth, short hair and longin short, a wide variety of alleles. Their individual behavior is similarly varied. The divergence of genetically determined proclivities is illustrated by Aileen Henness report of the behavior of 2 siblings, kept as companions (rather than caged, bored, and lonely in the native manner). Molf, tall, philosophical, and rough-coat gold, is a killer, running beside a deer and bumping it until it stumbles. Yuri, smooth, small, black, and the alpha male of his pack, is a herder. He will collect 5 deer and bring them home; or take 3 of 4 bulls while a farmer is moving them from one pasture to another, and herd them to the camping trailer: People, look! Dinner! Humans have an impoverished allele pool compared to most animal populations, and our human ability to modify behavior by culture may temper the expression of what genetic variability we have, but that doesnt mean that it isnt there. * Nothing in the Empty Set is red, so that The contents are not red is not a false statement. But it implies that there might be contents, and that they might be blue, both of which are not true. Not false AND not true results in meaningless. See how easily language allows one to slip into metaphysics? Including something in the Empty Set is a logical impossibility. Quantum mechanics notoriously defies the Law of the Excluded Middle, which apparently applies only to ideas about objects large enough to see. Mystically inclined physicistsparticularly Indiansare impressed by this, and feel that Indian philosophy anticipated modern physics by 4000 years. Remind him that he is not allowed to kill cats, and he spends a quarter hour puzzling over this inexplicable difference between his instincts and The Rules. It is a recurring problem which he has not satisfactorily resolved.
b

Violence in New Guinea will crop up in subsequent chapters, so it is important to understand how it has changed in recent history. What once might have been an adaptive population control now decimates the countryside. Two vignettes from a paper by anthropologist Polly Wiessner tell the story:
When JL Taylor entered the Lai valley of Enga province in 1939, he wrote:

We were now in the heart of the Lai Valley, one of the most beautiful in New Guinea,

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if not in the world. Everywhere were fine well-laid out garden plots, mostly of sweet potato and groves of casuarinas. Well-cut and graded roads traversed the countryside and small parks [] dotted the landscape, which resembled a huge botanical garden. It may well be called the garden valley of the Lai. {Tayl39: 29}. In 2004, Wiessner wrote in her diary: The Lai Valley is a virtual wastelandas the Enga say, cared for by the birds, snakes, and rats. Houses are burned to ash, sweet potato gardens overgrown with weeds, and trees razed to jagged stumps. In the high forest, warfare rages on, fought by Rambos with shotguns and high-powered weapons taking the lives of many. By the roadside where markets bustled just a few years before, there is an eerie emptiness. In these wars of today, almost everybody loses. {Weis06: 165} Wiessners paper is titled From Spears to M16s. A traditional tribal war would often end with a few spear wounds and no deaths; the same level of antagonism expressed with M16s leaves corpses.

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