Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the dicey paleopolitics that permeates discussions about human origins
may also go deeper. Furthermore, these gut-level reasons may not be
so different from those that inspire antievolutionary rhetoric in some
religious fundamentalists.
religion, evolution, and (im)mortality
Recall from chapter 3 that the discoverer of
Australopithecus africanus,
Raymond Dart, had been raised as a devout Christian. Perhaps this
explains why Dart pondered the relationship between religion and the
study of human evolution. Both enterprises, he noted, address “the great-
est questions man has ever posed or is ever likely to pose . . . : Whence
has man come? How was he made? How did he come to differ from other
creatures? How is it that he at first learned so little and then came, as it
were in a series of sudden spurts, to know so much about the world and
himself while other living creatures were content simply to live and to
traditionally approached these questions through sacred writings, but
the “writing in the rocks” became a preferable source for answers after
Pithecanthropus
was discovered in the early 1890s and with the advent of
radiometric dating techniques.
The tension between religion and paleoanthropology began even
before that, however, when a Neanderthal skull and bones, which were
the first to be recognized as the possible remains of a prehistoric human,
were unearthed in 1856 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Nevertheless, Dart was
right. Even though religious fundamentalists and paleoanthropologists
were worlds apart in methodological and evidentiary matters, they both
addressed the same profound questions. And still do. Although Dart
framed the above questions to refer to humans in the abstract as “man,”
research published in 1990 by the psychologists Jack Maser and Gordon
Gallup suggests that the evolutionary roots of religion stem from a more
personal sense of self (“me” or “I”) in conjunction with one other impor-
tant ingredient—namely a recognition of one's own mortality.
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