Did God Evolve? An Evolutionist's Speculation about Religion - Professor Steve Jones

thanks to that I should get my apologies in first I have no idea whether God evolved I have no idea whether God exists so so I don't really much mind whether God exists or not but but what I do have some idea about about whether a religion evolved with a religion obviously exists and whether we can explore it scientifically or not and that's what I want to that's what I want to talk about what predisposes some people to being religious is there any science in it religious or any religious experiences open to exploration by physiology let's say or psychology and perhaps most important under what circumstances do religions of different kinds actually emerge and I do think that there is a somewhat of a consensus beginning to appear about this subject which even makes it possible to do that very dangerous thing which is to speculate about the future the future in this case on religion well it's a very old issue of course and this image up on screen now here's a picture of a bronze small brand bronze statue about that big I guess it used to sit on a knee in a niche on the main staircase in the zoology department at the University of Edinburgh I was a student an undergraduate student I did my PhD there and I was on the staff there for a couple of years and I must have walked past this damn thing thousands of times and I never really it's still there I saw a couple of months ago one thing has changed when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s it was just sitting there and now it's screwed down which tells us something about social progress I think ok but if you look at it it's rather a telling image we've got a chimpanzee sitting on a pile of books and looking with a very puzzled expression a human skull more carefully you'll see one of the books has got the word Darwin on the cover and on the open page of another book these are magic three words eret its secret Adeus okay well actually I gave this lecture in Oxford the other night and I said well of course I don't need to I'll translate that for you because course all your lectures are totally given in Latin but they look baffled at me most of them most of them were Japanese anyway more Chinese so but actually the phrase Erica's secret days I speak as a man with all little letting but I have to say I've been tired forgotten it is a quotation from the Vulgate the latin version of the bible and is from the third chapter of genesis and it is said by the serpent as the serpent approaches Eve my latest book by the way is called the Serpent's promise and the Serpent's promise is that editor's secret Deus and scientists bond them at moment if you eat this fruit and the day you eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as God's knowing good and evil and CNT are met knowledge the word science was not in fact it was not in fact invented until the 18th century okay so so Santa met knowledge and many people think that science will tell us about good and evil well I can tell you one thing for sure science will never tell you about good and evil because they're human constructs but it will tell you a lot about the IDF's out about the idea how the ideas of good and evil might emerge and how systems of belief which try to enforce those ideas might also emerge so in some senses science can ask you ask questions about religion and that notion goes back quite a long way in fact Darwin himself incentive man noted almost in passing man has arisen by slow and interrupted steps from a loyal lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge models and religion so Darwin clearly had the view that religion had was part of evolution and I think we now have good evidence that is in fact true and one of the reasons why there was such a fuss about the Origin of Species was that many people thought that that the idea that we were rated to primates and apes and other creatures actually drag us down to their level I don't think it's actually true what you can actually see here is Queen Queen Victoria she's the one on the left and the chimpanzee from London Zoo kids name sorry I'm orangutan London Zoo Victoria noted in her diary that the orangutan is frightfully and painfully and disagreeably was underline that word human although later in life first she actually read aloud the Origin of Species to her children showing that she was a serious individual there's no question but many people are concerned that I should science and religion have nothing to do with each other and that the notion that we are an evolved creature somehow demeans whatever religion you actually adhere to i myself of course don't think that at all and in fact my serpents promise book is an attempt to explain various comments and statements in the Bible in scientific terms some which are very obvious like the Great Flood others of which are perhaps a bit more subtle like the obsession of Leviticus play with leprosy and with cleanliness why was Leviticus so concerned with leprosy because the book was written about three and a half thousand years before Christ at the time when the first cities emerged and in order to get an epidemic what you need is a city and people moving around so the first epidemics appeared at just that time so that is a historical really the book had a rather odd review some of which were I'm glad to say fairly very positive sunny times wasn't once again Jones cranks that Darwinian barrel-organ with the monkey of atheism gibbering on the top that was such a that was such a telling review we put there on the back of the paperback and care but in fact what I want to do is to stand back and look not at particular statements from the Bible but a tract at religion itself and it tell us anything of any interest which we don't know already now many several people many people have tried to ask such questions now there are numerous books on science and religion not all of which are hardly any of which have I read these come of course from the dreadful Amazon website but you could look inside for nothing I hate the idea but I do do it and science and the world's religions big gods the biological evolution of religious mind and behavior there's lots of it out there but a lot of it I have to say other stuff I have read there are flat statements unsupported by evidence and now we really are beginning to get evidence aspects of science of religion and people have tried scientific tests of religious belief for a long time the first person perhaps to do so in the modern world a semi modern world was Francis Galton was as I'm sure you know Charles Darwin's cousin and Gautam was a remarkable man about human genetics read the true genius which founded the eugenics movement mistaken rather unfortunately he's the only man as far as we know to have made a beauty map of the British Isles and at University College London we still working left his fortune to found the genetics department we still have the little brass counting device which used to keep in the palm of his hand as he walked through British cities scoring with other females and a five-point scale from attractive to repulsive the low point was in Aberdeen and I once gave a lecture in Aberdeen where I said that I'd rather foolish she said where it still is and I had to Rhonda I had to make make hi teri to the station right over right away but Gordon did one thing which got him into particular trouble he carried out what he called a statistical test of the efficacy of prayer okay and here's his test what he did was to say okay let me identify people who were frequently prayed for and asked does it do him any good and people who have perhaps most frequently pray for are members of royal families god save the queen and all that kind of stuff and he coolly accumulated information on many members of royal families 97 of them are many clergymen and doctors Gentry officers of the army I was very clear that if you looked at the life expectancy of each of those groups each of which was relatively well-off the sovereign was a literary the shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of affluence the prayer has therefore no efficacy okay the Archbishop of Canterbury did not like that one tiny bit now that's amusing but rather shallow perhaps so there are some more serious scientific fits there's some genetics in religion or do they exam what's called religiosity mr. Nixon everything we shouldn't be surprised about that but you can make a measure of how religious anybody might be by with a with a with a questionnaire is there's a thing called a car and camp questionnaire which you have 97 questions in it you paid you don't need 97 you just need half a dozen do you go do you go to church do you believe in God you believe in the afterlife do you think that there is a greater being than you who is controlling your existence to people who break the laws go to hell all these things are simple questions to each with you can give yes or no answers and you can just infer from the answers how religious somebody is and if you do that to identical twins and identity claims of course share all their genes together you find that the identical twins the monozygotic twins they're called up in the blue there tend to be more similar to each other in religious beliefs for different aspects of it it's called a judge are the they belong to a religious community then are normally entacle twins they only share half their genes in common and you see indeed that there's a big difference between the two and certainly in standard and rather naive genetics and this twin stuff isn't as simple as it's made out that would be a strong suggestion there might be some genetic variation behind the religious variation we see around us now there is one obvious maybe involved one very odd observation is the people with autism and people with autism spectrum disorder and autism of course tell you to interact with the outside world well 10 strongly said muddies of America figures so the incidence of Christianity among among the general population shown in red is quite high if you ask the general people in general about their beliefs about 40% of Americans say that they aren't believing Christians for all people with autism autism spectrum disorder which is a milder form of it only about 15% say so artists are much more likely to be atheists or agnostics and quite often they generate their own religions I quite often indeed because they're very self-centered they're the god okay I'm not sure that l ron Hubbard had autism I think he was just greedy but that's quite a common thing now that's that could be a statement that those people who have the kind of personality who looks very much inwards and wants to otherwise analytic mostly to be analytic about the world are less likely to have this mythic notion of some ungrate unknown which is controlling their lives I mean if you want to see autism spectrum disorder go to any university of mathematics department they've all got it okay and they all want to analyze the universe and indeed they all tend to be rather non-religious but that might sound a bit odd but this one's blindingly obvious genetic aspect of religion which is everywhere worldwide women are more religious on all measures than are men by really quite a lot more affiliated with religion they are absolutely certain belief in a personal God and so on and so forth and of course men are men for genetic reasons so you could say the gene for being a Christian resides on the X rather than the Y chromosome the Y chromosome carries the atheism gene there's no question well all this is somewhat hand-wave and I just it's the kind of thing that people do with some more impressive may be examples of how you can explain particular religious attributes through these experiences of using biology here's a comment from st. Helen Googe st. Hildegard of Bingen named the God of England as you probably know did I think in the 13th that could have been the 12th century and she was a visionary and also a composer composer of extraordinary ability who get who wrote some of the earliest church music which is still to listen to Ringo 3 is still a while still often played on radio 3 and it's very beautiful lady and Hildegard of Bingen was a visionary she's your vision she was also a considerable artist and she drew pictures of her visions that's what they looked like and she described them as a great star most splendid and beautiful and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars suddenly they were not annihilated turned to black coals and cast into the abyss and of course she made some mythical religious interpretation of that observation as she was drawing it up there however many of us myself to certain have had such visions and we don't need to attribute them to some message from the gods it's a minor brainstorm which many people suffer from and it comes from a thing scotoma now me grain as you know there's a kind of brainstorm indeed and it can be very very distressing and most people feel sick they can't stand the sign of light I don't have any of that but I do various often have this characteristic thing that's called a Scotto map and what a Scot oma is very hard to lose anybody's experience one will know exactly what I weight means it looks like a zig zag close circle which often turns and can be brightly colored and it's been interpreted by Hildegard as the walls around the City of God okay visions have battlements though called and sometimes they block out the visual field and you can see a a couple of images of the kind of thing they might look like now many people have had Scott over and from me great often very severely great wall of whom was himself a clergyman and was by no coincidence also a mathematician and he was Alice in Wonderland Louis cowl now actually Lewis Carroll kept diary and he recorded many of his experiences and his he often certifications mentions out he has a strange experience of seeing a bright spot in his vision that is turning and blocks out part of the Otherworld he speaks of seeing a man with his hand held up and maybe a bright spot blocks off his hand and then blocks off his most of his head and in fact many of the experiences referred to as Alice having had in Wonderland of classic statements of the sentiments that people would need great experience many people would mean green feel the different parts of their body are stretching then we have of course Alice in her early experience hmm her body stretches they feel they're falling into a black hole that's of course exactly what happens we're now as follows the rabbit into the rabbit hole sometimes they feel as if they're swimming the whole universe around them they miss Cora is sort of holding them up other times they feel that they're getting bigger and bigger the rooms close in on them and there's closing in and the perhaps the best statement of what's known as Lewis Carroll syndrome that is called lose count syndrome is the Cheshire Cat because what Alice did was to look at the cat and the cat disappeared until only the smile was left and in Lewis Carroll's diary is a statement that he'd seen this man where he is most of his head disappeared behind the scotoma until only the smile was left so in that sense hmm we can make some fairly convincing statements based on science about various aspects of religious experience and I think most people would accept that that's true there's a strong tendency for various visionaries to describe describe their experiences in terms that will be recognized by psychiatrists but that's a rather shallow exploration of what science can tell us I want to go on to now is to talk about the notion that maybe religion emerges through evolution through particular changes and developments in humans in the human condition and indeed in human numbers now you will remember when Adam and Eve commit the first and perhaps the least original of all sins they'd realize they're male and female they are expelled from Eden okay and Eden itself what it was even it was a beautiful place all they had to do to feed themselves was to round her around and pluck fruits from the trees and animals came and immediately lay down to be killed and eaten in fact the life of Eden was the life of Riley which is the life which was which was lived by hunter-gatherers people who hunted and gathered their food and it's worth noting that for 98% of human history more than I gave descent we were hunter-gatherers okay and when Adam and Eve committed the sin of knowing about sex they put on aprons however putting on aprons didn't stop them having children and God was understandably irritated and through the matter v and said to to Adam in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat and read the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground so in fact he had to go and farm okay he went farming that was the origin of farming it's very noticeable that their children one noted the other Cade murdered Abel in an argument about property it's worth remembering and hunter-gatherers don't really have proper individual property they lose small gang small bands of which everything is owned by everybody but farmers do have property Cain killed Abel and what happened to him he was expelled and sent to the land of not East of Eden okay here's the Land of Nod that's a real place follow the arrows and OD for nod okay there's there's Syria and so on and over here we're getting over towards India there's the line of odd and there indeed is eating so an under nod is east of eden okay there's something else I'll come back to in a moment which is the Tower of Babel the Land of Nod is an interesting spot because the Land of Nod just here is in the Fertile Crescent where farming itself began okay so there may well be the evidence is indirect but there may well be some kind of race memory not that I often use a phrase of the origin of farming in the expulsion of Eden story so new instead of being a hunter-gatherer you have become a farmer which is much harder much harder work you have much worse life you have much worse diet in particular you know health people's health or worse and it's I think it's more than a coincidence that that happened just the first farmer proper who was cane was actually expelled to and you can see that first of all christened their the the goats were the first to be domesticated pigs cattle and cheaper but later and plants have been to guess a domesticated earlier now that's where farming began there are other centers of farming in in the new world in South in South America where things like maize tomatoes and so on came from and another central farming in the Yellow River in China which is where rice was domesticated but this is the one we're familiar with okay so that's some that's a perhaps a clearer statement so we do have some fit between a historical event and and some statements in the Bible well so they could well be that evolution that the tradition has in some senses evolved what is the evolution many people think it's a complicated thing there isn't extremely simple its Darwin defined it in three words descent with modification descent information passed from one generation to the next modification the statement that that passage is imperfect that mistakes on mutations are made and these errors build up and there's a second process natural selection which means that evolution is a series of successful mistakes but the fundamental or nature of evolution is just genetics plus time in biological terms or descent with modifications and the first realization that that was true refers to another there because story which is the Tower of Babel here we have the Tower of Babel so on the other side of Eden compared to a nod there's the Tower of Babel for the arrows there it is okay and the Tower of Babel of course was the explanation of the world's languages and it's worth remembering that until really quite recently the universal supposition that explained the great diversity of languages across the world was it creationist one they sprang into being at heavens command when when arrogant man did something very which is to build it's not to build this thing the Tower of Babel okay and they those of you who are familiar as I'm sure you all are with the story of the Tower of Babel well know that it was done in order to reach heaven they hope was it we built it tall enough you could climb up the Tower of Babel and enter in by going in the back door rather than through the pearly gates okay well God it was a bit of a NIMBY not in my backyard thank you very much was infuriated by this so he thought to himself are to put a stop to this process and the way I will do it is that now everybody speaks the same language so they can cooperate to build the Tower of Babel instead I will cast down upon them the Great Plague of different languages so that all the bricklayers were polish or the plumbers the plumbers were Welsh all the all the electrician's were Chinese and of course they couldn't talk to each other so the Tower of Babel never got built okay but there's an irony here because actually language itself was the first scientific statement of the existence of the process of evolution that was due to a chap called William Jones who was schooled by in the 18th century he didn't have the immeasurable advantage of going to Eton which of course makes you a leader but he did go to Harrow church I went to Harrow so he can't be bad he was a leader and I'd hope he learned as all students at both Eton and heroin those days and of course in these days too they all learned to speak fluent Latin Greek and Hebrew which he excelled and he also discovered himself to be while he was very young a quite remarkable linguist he little effectively all the European languages by the time he was in his 20s and he's in his twenty twenties he was sent to India as a merchant and began to learn Indian languages too and he was startled to find that there were some similarities between languages what you can see here similarities we are now to us very obvious but English that in Greek the numbers to to dual and dual Sanskrit is an extinct language of northern India but which is left a considerable literature behind so we do know what he consisted of and well if yours if I call it the most beautiful language he knew language he knew and it was clear that these words are wrong as similar now he William Jones thought to himself this must mean that these words are related what do we mean when we say somebody is related to somebody else we mean obviously that they descend from a Shaykh ancestor and jones-drew the first-ever evolutionary tree which is the evolution tree of words the word father in the romance languages pondering times repair and so on in the modern languages they do all descend from the Latin part air and if you go back 2,000 years or so at the time of Latin was Lily the lingua franca a literary you find the classical Greek at the same time was Petare Sanskrit his Peter Gothic which became German his father and so on okay and so he drew this tree and he went one step further and began to speculate that one day it might be possible to reconstitute the extinct word which came before Latin Greek and Sanskrit which was the word for father in a language which we now call pi for proto-indo-european okay and people have reconstituted that languages that language really in detail you can go to conferences where people speak party to each other overthrowing thai at each other and it's been it's been mapped across their languages have been mapped across the world and suggestion is under suggestion is I think a very convincing one is that pi proto-indo-european was the language of the first farmers and if you draw a map here we have a time line going from about 8,000 years ago to a language where one of the oldest is the language called Anatolian which lives here another one which is pretty old called talk area which is there then we have languages like the like the endure you Iranian languages here language is the bolt or slug it's a European languages over here ending up by the most degenerate language of all which is my own native language which is Welsh the Celtic languages which at the far end of Europe and this suggestion was that as the farmers spread out and there was a point in the sea in a moment there's a population explosion with farming as the farmers spread out they began to move away from the center where they had originated taking their languages with them and they taught their children languages and of course they taught them in accurately and you could hear language changing in once in one's own lifetime when I was first at UCL as I say to my young colleagues who have just joined loosely I said don't worry the first 43 years of the worst and I've been there for 43 years and when I got there in 1972 most others do you who spoke rather like this they spoke a very clear direct English which rather overwhelmed me coming from a fairly peasant peasant ridden background but now am i I just think teaching today and somebody came up to him he said yeah do I have to go this tutorial or was it not compulsory is it online then and that's and they all speak like that and what that shows you is a change quite a striking change in language over a very short time if that were to go on for a hundred two hundred years I very soon would have no idea what the students are talking about to be frank that process has gone quite a long way towards its completion so it's much more than a coincidence that the pattern of relatedness of the languages is the pattern of movement across Europe and across India - in at the origin of forming this one here this one here talk Arian come in it's fascinating this is in in in North in the deserts of northern China and it seems remarkable that China one of the Chinese languages state language that one of the Chinese languages was a European language member the European family and it was discovered manuscripts are discovered about twenty or thirty years ago and they've been discard deciphered by linguists linguists and here we have those words again English for two inter-korean it's Wu and we but that's easy T to W is quite a common shift and then we've got do over for you are inter-korean paid while in Welsh okay five is pan-pan cha in Sanskrit so the evidence is good that even these languages even got in to China so how did they do that well as I said following the origin of farming there is always a population explosion because although what hunter-gatherers do is live not on the edge but they can't support large populations they live in small groups every single every single one of the on your way to this event in fact everybody in this room at the moment is seeing more people than the typical human being I wish I mean a hunter-gatherer well they've seen in his more than would say more people than a typical human being a hunter-gatherer would see in his whole lifetime hunter-gatherer groups were often twenty or thirty strong and that was it you never run into another group okay once you start farming you stop using crops and the crops are much much more nutritious and so the population explodes health goes down because the early farmers basically at the Scottish diet and we all know what Scottish health is like porridge six times a day really they just add grains and if you look at their if you look at their skeletons they lose height their teeth are bad they have deficiency diseases but there are lots of them so as farming moved on and here we have for example we have Scotland say with famine came quite late there's the arrival of farming bang population goes up also late population goes up in the Paris Basin the earlier bang up it goes again and so on in Germany Rhineland has a enormous belief in population this leap in population is pressure to move out and as you move out you take your language with you and you have this you have this evolution of language and the spread across the globe so how does this fit with the origin of religion at least a particular kinds of bridging there's a book by Frazer called the Golden Bough which suggests that indeed there may well be some common attributes among the Mediterranean religion the Frasers books in these eight James Frazer population 90 Golden Bough speculated that the Mediterranean Creed's Christianity being a very late version but the various Greek Roman and North African religions long before that's something in common they began as fertility rites of crops because of course in a Mediterranean climate what you have are the rains come the crops grow and everybody's happy then the summer comes the crops wither and you have to beg the gods to have the rains come again ceremonies marked the death of plants and animals in the dry season and a few months later the return was celebrated as the rain concentrated its marriage with the earth and in ancient times a gold King was sacrificed to each year they had a less supper for him and probably without telling him and then beaten to death or perhaps even crucified him and then he came back he was reborn born again in another human form some time later in the next season that of course has some clear parallels with Christianity with the crucifixion and the resurrection and that kind of stuff and in some case if some sense is James race it was right but he was probably wrong in fact he was certainly wrong about something about some aspect of that because we now have evidence of formal religions appearing far far earlier than the Mediterranean around for maybe four or five thousand years ago and the odd evidence came from a place once again in the in the Fertile Crescent called gobekli tepe this is a which is in Eastern Turkey there it is and that was discovered in the 1970s by a shepherd who was wandering about with his sheep noticed some square blocks of stone told a local museum about this this archaeologist came and started digging and they discovered a quite extraordinary built and quite extraordinary building on this which was clearly a church or a temple of some kind on the the the the excavation isn't complete but even in this incomplete incomplete excavation you can see there are seven of these circular buildings complicated and really quite sophisticated walls look in more detail and you have many many of these decorated stones which are images of animals on them particularly images of a vultures and it may well be that this was a Zoroastrian kind of culture where people practiced sky burial they put out the corpses of the dead who were then eaten by vultures and if you look around the landscape there are the bones of thousands or hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle and the suggestion is this was an early center of the first organized religions I said we should point out that the place is eight and a half thousand years older or eight thousand years older than the Giza pyramid and eight thousand years older than Stonehenge so this is very sophisticated stuff so that the early farmers maybe began to develop these sophisticated religions that could afford to build complicated and expensive structures and many people would come from miles around to worship in these structures and no doubt in order to maintain those structures that would be a priesthood no doubt with many many rituals which would make keep things in order and if you look again in South America that separate origin of Agriculture a little bit later you find exactly the same thing those enormous Azteca nink in cities emerge just the time when agriculture began rather later then in the Middle East so there's something about the origin of Agriculture and the origin of formal formal religion of a particular kind now it's clearly the case and if you look at the other logical writings about hunter-gatherers hunter-gatherers I think everybody has some kind of belief but hunter-gatherers in general tend to believe in a God who makes the rains come or makes the crops grow and not in the kind of God that we're familiar with it keeps a beady eye on everything you do okay and the the religions which we're familiar with things like Islam and Christianity they are based fearsome God and the fearsome God punishes evildoers why does he do that because one of the things that's rapidly emerged in the early days of all religions Christianity included was great social inequality here we have urn of the Col deze which is where Abraham was born and some time later after Abraham Solomon was around the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents he had forty thousand stores and horses for his chariots and the argument is that these punitive religions emerged in orders as marks put it as marks suggested that they emerged in order to keep the lower orders in place region was the opium of the people and the way in which you kept the lower orders in place of one person at 40,000 stalls of horses and other people only had one sounds a bit familiar to me I have to say the modern world was to have these punitive gods okay these powerful gods and boost with modern religions have got that um Hindu and say Yama the god of death can do is impose Yama the god of death Chinese and B have the ten kings of hell Christianity of course as Judgment Day we're sinners those who went to whether the rod the righteous people who went to university always London for example or go to heaven it's tillers those from Imperial College London were burn in hell our students always cheer when I say that and indeed even Buddhism has the wheel of life and if you have bad karma terrible things will happen to you and this might be indeed a punitive mechanism for imposing the social inequality upon society and it's noticeable that the first walled cities the first empires all began that but about of just after this time right now that sounds a bit speculative but in fact they're so evidence from the modern world because that's the truth oh the recent world because you can go out and anthropologists for a long time at Cornell and ask people for different methods of subsistence about jello but jealous gods I the LORD thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the father's upon the children even though to the sixth and seventh generation okay and if you go to foragers who are hunter-gatherers you just wander the countryside picking nuts and berries basically they have guns okay but the great majority of them don't have high gods they have gods that makes the rains come okay that's all they have a few of them have got these I've got these active or moral gods which keep an eye on people and if people sin God knows about it and may well punish but in general that bottle gods do not bother themselves at people even if they exist but they don't bother themselves with some nerd is going around picking up nuts and berries okay if you move a step forward from foraging to pastoralism which was canes pastime here she then you find all of a sudden and Cain owned these flocks of sheep all of a sudden the active or moral gods make up the great majority and the inactive ones fade into obscurity okay so that's a inequality some people would love to see people were not much sheep leads to that to the involvement of powerful and jealous gods the same is true if you move up from horticultural garden a your own little patch of peasant like land again the great majority of those communal societies have got either no high gods or they don't in human doings a few have got powerful gods but if you moved to intensive agriculture with somebody owns a farm and hires laborers once again you've got the powerful God's rattling their cage and causing all kinds of trouble for those who God strike or eat or eat one too many potatoes okay and there's kind of a more general phenomenon that if you go to the size numbers in a particular community you see a striking relationship between those numbers of people and the involvement of powerful and often angry moral gods so what is going on well it's clearly the aether which in fact reflects itself not just in the world of the hunter-gatherers and on to governor's have gone now they're really non left but they were studied in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when there was Sun it reflect itself in the modern world and it see it is indeed in its modern of reflection a statement of the importance of inequality in giving rise to organized religions with hierarchies cases and priesthoods okay there's a thing which I'm sure that all you heard of which is called the Gini index and the Gini index is an objective measure of inequality or equality within a society if the society has a total of wealth a society of a thousand people that say contains within itself a total wealth of a million pounds and one person has got all the money so it's a bit like that it would be then the Gini index would be one okay if everybody had a thousand pounds each then the journey index would be zero so the greater the inequality in any society the higher the changing index and you can see it's the most the highest in this group of developed countries it strips unsurprisingly the United States we have the we are proud to say that we're the second most unequal we are the most unequal in Europe we took over to Portugal a couple years ago so now we're the most unequal country in Europe and with a bit of luck and continuation and good luck at the next election and we're probably over United States but if you go to if you go to places like Sweden the inequality is much less but of course I have to say if you go to places like Brazil and places like Nigeria equality is much more Gini is even higher and there's a completely striking fit across countries across the world between the Gini index and the important of religion so the higher the Gini index in many societies large number of societies here the more important is religion to life a higher proportion of people identify themselves as religious or believe in God and so on so once again we've got inequality fitting and with fitting with religion exactly as perhaps happened at the origin of farming ok so this seems to be a very consistent and firm association you can look at it these figures in a different way United Nations has a measure called successful societies index and this is kind of pleaded obvious but it puts together a number of different attributes life expectancy of men and women education levels crime levels things of this nature in order to define a society as successful or otherwise and in developed countries you get a successful society scale with one famous outlier the United States which has the least successful Society on many different levels health care crime and so on and is overwhelmingly the most religious society in this group of mainly European country European Australian Canadian countries ok so once again evidence that that's actually true so the evidence I think is really quite good now that so what's up to going on it turns on as I've said several times it turns on demography and population numbers and we many of us actually congratulate ourselves perhaps wrongly that religion is in decline in United Kingdom here we have the fortunate people identify themselves as Christian or Church of England at least which is I think scarcely counts but still okay and versus non-believers and you'll see that in 2008 throw lines actually crossed in United States even the number of believers is going down however as we will see in a moment demography means that's not the way things are going to happen so what is demography MOG rafi is the is the is the human numbers and Charles Darwin before he wrote the origin when he was still struggling we're trying to work out what was going on in the living world he writes in his diary I read one day for amusement my god for amusement Thomas Malthus essay on the principle of population I have read it it's not amusing at all and he said at last I have a theory to work with here then at last I had got a theory on which to work the numbers would increase logarithmically to four eight sixteen thirty-two where as resources to what he clearly would be arithmetic two four six eighteen so that there would be always be pressure of numbers some people would survive them some people wouldn't those that were better at surviving would pass on their heritage and then you had a mechanism whereby things would change so that we've seen knowledge in Aboriginal had to do with demography okay there was an explosion of numbers and suddenly particular religions seemed rather to be more successful and they established themselves okay so what you ask his from that what's going to happen in the future there's a generally universal rule both within countries and across the globe that countries which are individuals and countries which are more religious are more fakin they have more children now I haven't been able to find a global one but this is the only one I could find but let's take the number of children to born to mothers in Germany okay this is the red line here people who never go to church have about one minute point four children per mother those who go on holiday and holy days one point four for those ago once a week one point eight and those ago more often 1.98 across the globe and this is a very limited sample there are plenty countries not on this graph and the numbers are higher but the pattern is exactly the same okay so in order it's worth remembering of course that Europe is not maintaining its own numbers the only country in Europe which does maintaining some numbers this whoopi Britain godless though we might be we do just about have enough children to maintain numbers but you can see that in Europe as a whole in order they keep Europe going as in population terms you need to go to church more at least once a week at least once a week more often than once a week so that's interesting so what you can therefore do is make some guesses about what will happen to the future your well there's one thing which is very clear is that populations that we turn oh this is an extreme example of where this is happening these are the anus and the a mish North American group who came across an 18th century from Europe where they're being persecuted Anabaptist 17th century they were anabaptists but he had didn't believe in emotion baptism and as of children and for a long time there weren't many of them but they have lots of children ok and they live this eccentric life you may have seen them in Ohio and North and Pennsylvania where they'd like to live in the 18th century they wear agent MC clothes they have horses of cards rally cars some of the less strict groups that called the black bumper Amos they have cars but they paint the bumpers black which is a bit low so it's not showy right which is a bit like the Church of England I don't think ok but they have got two children and here's the numbers of Amos from 1900 to 2000 in 1900 across all of the u.s. they're probably four or five thousand of them in the year 2000 there were 180,000 and at that rate of increase by the year 2100 there will be as many Amos in the US as there are people in the US today that's not likely to happen but that's an extreme statement of the effect of religion on fertility so in order to know what's going to happen to the future all we have to do is to ask where in the world is population growth the greatest and it's blindingly believed in obvious that it's in sub-saharan Africa okay that's Afghanistan for this exception a sub-saharan Africa and most countries have gone through what's called the demographic transition that's the shift from high numbers of children most of them die to low numbers and children most of whom survived Africa as India did that really remarkably quickly China even quicker and I have to say in China with the one-child policy there was quite a lot of government pressure to do it but it succeeded Africa overwhelmingly has not some countries in Africa the mean number of children per mother is seven or eight in plenty of countries in Africa Sierra Leone for example the main number is five or six and what's interesting is that if you travel in Africa's I have done in the past essentially what's interesting is even middle Africa economically is booming people see Africa as as a basket case it is not a basket case I talk large parts of Africa economy is in very good shape strangely enough even those will be well-off and educated Africans tend to want to have large numbers of children okay now let's have genetic effects if you look globally the incidence of skin of genes for skin color across the world has actually changed after 1492 when Europeans started moving into the Americas let's say the incidence of skin color cheese for white skin shot up because Europeans cover the whole world and the numbers boomed Africans didn't travel very much apartment slaves didn't want to travel and so black skins went down but now that's completely reversed itself because of population growth in Africa in fact world in 1950 there were about twice as many white people as black people in the world nowadays there are about the same number of white people as black people in the world prison turns in twenty 50 there will be twice as many black people as white people for reasons that I've got nothing to do with the properties of black skin it's a purely population-based group based phenomenon so I mean those figures are I think correct I mean that is going to happen you can see it happening so you can predict what's going to happen to the frequency of black skins given this pop this pattern of population growth and you could also predict what's going to happen to the frequency of belief because in the future and the this illustrates quite how dramatic the effect is this see these are the United Nations statements about population growth until 2050 and you can see Europe is kind of sinking numbers most other places go up at roughly the same rate the great exception is Africa which goes rocketing up and it may well be that by 2050 Africans probably represent as much as half the world population so what's that going to do to the future of belief well we're all you have to do is to ask where in the world is belief stronger this is the religiosity index across the world and if you look at Africa the light green is more religious and the only place in the world which is both booming in numbers and highly religious in Africa as many Africans as people many people know very deep believers often in all the fundamentalist kind of Christianity and the only place of the world where we have both the enormous population growth and high belief in religion is Africa so what that tells us simple demographic indeed evolutionary reasons that the future is Christianity the Christianity is going to is is now booming and will continue to boom across the world now for somebody who like myself is a bit of an atheist that perhaps might hope to use religion to science as so many people have tried futile need to do to disprove religion and can't do that at all this may be somewhat or somewhat alarming and perhaps it survives suggests to me that what the university should be treated should be teaching now is not a new generation of scientists and biologists but a new generation of theologians so I'll stop there thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 36,747

Rating: 4.5899773 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, gresham college lectures, gresham lectures, gresham lecture, lecture, religion, religion lecture, history of religion, science of religion, science and religion, religion and science, evolution, evolution and religion, science, genetics, biology, steve jones, ucl, professor steve jones, God (Deity), Professor (Job Title), Darwin

Id: _KzP2tISfe0

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015

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[u/alllie]

From /r/LDQ

Ideas and beliefs evolve as much as do bodies and brains and in some ways the two processes are similar. A survey of world religions, both now and in the past, shows some interesting consistencies, with a clear fit between levels of belief and degrees of social inequality.

From the beginning, particular faiths have been - as Darwin showed for bodies - driven by demographic success, and Christianity at least is safe, since its believers reproduce far more effectively than do we atheists.