Oh look, it’s the “naturalism cannot explain X” mantra so many intellectually indolent mythology fanboys love to trot out, to hide their failure to pay attention in class.
If you think that powerful hormonal motivators for various behaviours aren’t positively selectable by evolution, you need to re-take all your science classes from scratch. Because, wait for it, organisms that perform the requisite behaviours survived better than those that didn’t within their clade, and likewise, produced more offspring and influenced future generations.
Every species, no matter how simple or complex, all the way from nematode worms to humans, require the ability to maintain situational awareness. Because doing so means that you detect food more quickly, are more successful at eating, detect threats more quickly, are more successful at avoiding becoming lunch for something else, detect mating partners better, and are more likely to get laid, and thus bequeath a litter of crotch spawn to the world.
Powerfully motivating hormones, are simply one biological means of ensuring that certain parts of situational awareness are active. All the better to ensure that you don’t miss out on lunch, don’t become lunch for something else, and don’t miss out when that hot mating partner shows up.
Meanwhile, once again, the usual mix of biological ignorance and anthropocentric conceit is at work in the usual tiresome apologetics. Pair bonding and relationship building aren’t unique to humans by any stretch of the imagination. Even an elementary observer will see this at work right across the entire clade of mammals. Everything from the duck billed platypus, through various marsupials such as Koalas, via rodents and Artiodactyl mammals, all the way through to us, exhibit this behaviour, and it has a well-understood chemical basis, via a peptide hormone called Oxytocin.
But, and here’s the fun part, this isn’t even unique to mammals. Just ask anyone who has kept a tropical freshwater or marine aquarium, and watched various species therein breed, and they will tell you that there are entire taxonomic Families of fish that exhibit similar pair bonding and relationship forming, particularly with respect to reproduction.
The classic example is the Family Cichlidae, about which I posted previously here among other places. I listed several species in that post, but there’s a Genus therein (containing, unless taxonomic revision has changed this, three species) that not only exhibit the advanced pair bonding rituals and parental care of other Cichlids, but take this one step further - the parents produce special nutrient slime on the sides of their bodies when rearing offspring, that the fry feed upon until they’re ready to start looking for nice juicy protists to munch upon.
Now, of course, none of these organisms know anything about the weird and wacky mythologies humans have invented, or the cartoon magic entities asserted to exist therein. Instead, they simply conduct their lives in accordance with the imperatives that are delivered by those selectable hormones and other mechanisms of motivating behaviour.
Humans, of course, add to this mix a large cerebral cortex, which provides the data processing substrate enabling both curiosity and a desire for storytelling in a social setting. Indeed, the book accompanying David Attenborough’s Life on Earth TV series, ends with a chapter on humans, and the title of that chapter is, tellingly, The Compulsive Communicators.
As organisms driven by curiosity, a desire to make sense of our surroundings as opposed to merely existing therein, and a desire to share our ideas with others of our species, it’s not surprising that we’ve come up with some, let’s call them interesting ideas in the past. Our mythologies are littered with these, some of them more fantastic than others. But, one feature that our early, mythology based attempts to make sense of our surroundings all share in common, is the projection of our capacity for intent onto our surroundings.
For example, our ability to strike flints and initiate controlled fires, became a natural metaphor for thunderstorms to our early ancestors. Who came up with the idea that said thunderstorms were the product of a big, invisible version of ourselves striking invisible flints and making lightning. It doesn’t require a Ph.D to work this out, just basic human understanding.
But, that large, and sometimes overactive cerebral cortex, started devising all manner of fun stories for the campfire. Lo and behold, that’s how religion was born. Someone in the past concocted some fantastic stories for the campfire, persuaded enough fellow humans to treat those fantastic stories as fact, and the rest follows.
Indeed, our childhood trust in adults and our capacity for gullibility stem from relevant evolutionary imperatives. Children that obeyed their parents and stayed within safe watching distance, were more likely to survive than children that wandered off out of sight, and into the mouth of the nearest large predator. Those that believed their parents when said parents told them that the big striped kitty will eat them, were more likely to make it to adulthood, and pass on the same advice to their own offspring.
The flip side of this, of course, was the tendency to carry this childlike trust in ‘authority figures’ into adulthood with respect to those fantastic campfire stories. It’s taken our species a long time to understand that this is a double edged sword, and that the proper way forward is to exercise care and diligence when presented with assertions. Even now, not everyone recognises this fact, and the duplicitous play upon this.
But, those who did learn this important lesson, even despite their historically unavoidable failings and other human weaknesses, went on to deliver our most treasured gift - science. Which, along with pure mathematics, is a discipline that teaches its practitioners to think carefully about what assertions are likely, or unlikely, to be true.
Diligent work in the realm of science has taught us a great deal about the operation of ourselves and our surroundings, and we ignore that knowledge at our peril. If that knowledge happens to toss cherished mythological assertions into the bin, then tough, into the bin said assertions must go. Failure to follow that maxim, makes you a soft target for every charlatan and fraudster waiting in the wings. It’s not as if we lack evidence for the abundance of such malign figures in the world of mythology based beliefs.
At which point, it’s time to present some facts, facts that are unpleasant for the sort of people who cling to mythology based beliefs to confront.
First, none of the adherents of any of our pre-scientific or hypo-scientific mythologies, have ever once presented even an atom of genuine evidence for their favourite cartoon magic entities. That includes yours. All of you have FAILED DISMALLY to deliver over the past millennia.
Second, your mythologies aren’t “evidence” for your favourite cartoon magic entities. They are, instead, evidence for the propensity of the authors thereof to make shit up.
Taking as an example the Abrahamic mythology so beloved of many who come here, engaging in ideological stormtrooping on its behalf, this contains assertions that are not merely plain, flat, wrong, but farcical and absurd. Such as that nonsense about genetics being controlled by coloured sticks, an assertion that was totally destroyed by a 19th century monk, when he launched modern genetics as a properly constituted scientific discipline. If you experience butthurt when told this fact, then tough.
Third, ex recto apologetic fabrications, that an astute child would point and laugh at, also do not constitute “evidence” for your pet magic entities. They instead, are evidence for the desperation and duplicity of the pedlars thereof.
Fourth, when successful direct experimental tests of relevant postulates falsify the assertions of your favourite mythology, again, it’s tough. Your mythology goes in the bin. This has already happened, and you had better start learning about this.
Now, back to that tiresome and glib mantra that mythology fanboys love to chant or post online, the “naturalism cannot explain X” mantra. Again, you’re going to be reaching for the burn cream. Because scientists have alighted upon vast classes of entities and interactions, that the authors of mythologies were incapable of even fantasising about. Painting fake apologetic bulls’ eyes around scientific discoveries, fools no one who paid attention in class, and this practice is merely a symptom of ideological desperation.
Not only that, but those same scientists have provided testable and verifiable quantitative explanations for vast classes of observables, and performed successful direct experimental tests of those explanations. The gaps into which mythology fanboys can try in desperation to insert their pet magic entities, are becoming vanishingly small. Those gaps will disappear completely. Indeed, reality would have to throw us one colossal curve ball, to reverse the trend of the past 400 years, and there are no signs of that happening, regardless of any wishful thinking mythology fanboys might have on this matter.
“Magic Man did it” might have seemed reasonable to a barely literate 10th century peasant, but it isn’t reasonable to anyone in the 21st century who enjoyed a proper science education. And I am not in the least bit sorry for forcing the more snowflake parts of the mythology fanboy demographic to face that fact.