The Social Conquest of Earth - By Wilson, Edward O Page 0,2

God, a tribe of Gods, a divine family, the Great Spirit, the Sun, ghosts of the forebears, supreme serpents, hybrids of sundry animals, chimeras of men and beasts, omnipotent sky spiders—anything, everything that could be conjured by the dreams, hallucinogens, and fertile imaginations of the spiritual leaders. They were shaped in part by the environments of those who invented them. In Polynesia, gods pried the sky apart from the ground and sea, and the creation of life and humanity followed. In the desert-dwelling patriarchies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, prophets conceived, not surprisingly, a divine, all-powerful patriarch who speaks to his people through sacred scripture.

The creation stories gave the members of each tribe an explanation for their existence. It made them feel loved and protected above all other tribes. In return, their gods demanded absolute belief and obedience. And rightly so. The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could long survive without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die. In the early history of each tribe, the myth therefore had to be set in stone.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature. The truth of each myth lived in the heart, not in the rational mind. By itself, mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity. But the reverse order is possible. The discovery of the origin and meaning of humanity might explain the origin and meaning of myths, hence the core of organized religion.

Can these two worldviews ever be reconciled? The answer, to put the matter honestly and simply, is no. They cannot be reconciled. Their opposition defines the difference between science and religion, between trust in empiricism and belief in the supernatural.

If the great riddle of the human condition cannot be solved by recourse to the mythic foundations of religion, neither will it be solved by introspection. Unaided rational inquiry has no way to conceive its own process. Most of the activities of the brain are not even perceived by the conscious mind. The brain is a citadel, as Darwin once put it, that cannot be taken by direct assault.

Thinking about thinking is the core process of the creative arts, but it tells us very little about how we think the way we do, and nothing of why the creative arts originated in the first place. Consciousness, having evolved over millions of years of life-and-death struggle, and moreover because of that struggle, was not designed for self-examination. It was designed for survival and reproduction. Conscious thought is driven by emotion; to the purpose of survival and reproduction, it is ultimately and wholly committed. The intricate distortions of the mind may be transmitted by the creative arts in fine detail, but they are constructed as though human nature never had an evolutionary history. Their powerful metaphors have brought us no closer to solving the riddle than did the dramas and literature of ancient Greece.

Scientists, scouting the perimeters of the citadel, search for potential breaches in its walls. Having broken through with technology designed for that purpose, they now read the codes and track the pathways of billions of nerve cells. Within a generation, we likely will have progressed enough to explain the physical basis of consciousness.

But—when the nature of consciousness is solved, will we then know what we are and where we came from? No, we will not. To understand the physical operations of the brain to their foundations brings us close to the grail. To find it, however, we need far more knowledge collected from both science and the humanities. We need to understand how the brain evolved the way it did, and why.

Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence. The query itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon for philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn