Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
cop-operate with other humans. So the suggestion is that our brains are so hard-
wired to produce this type of thinking that we tend to extend it to other objects and
events that affect us. For example, when a rock falls and injures us, many people
tend to assume that this means that there is an active agent making the rock do this -
they believe that the rock moves because of some intentionality. Such people com-
monly think that the agent is invisible because they cannot see an agent. In primitive
societies today, it is believed that many objects in the environment - trees, rocks,
rivers, mountains and so on - are inhabited by invisible spirits that can be influ-
enced by ritual practices. How many among the most rational of us shout at our PCs
when they do not do what we want? It is easy to slip momentarily into responding
as though they were active agents. We all sympathize with Basil Fawlty losing his
temper with his car when it refuses to start in the BBC TV comedy series
Fawlty
To w e rs
. This adoption of the intentional stance is also a common experience among
survivors of life-threatening accidents - they attribute meaning to their survival in
terms of actions by a supernatural agent.
Evidence that this tendency to interpret the world in a supernatural fashion is
partly genetically determined comes from the Minnesota twin studies, in which the
religiosity of identical twins raised apart in different environments was compared
with that of fraternal twins raised apart. The results were interpreted to mean that
about 50% of the tendency to be religious is genetically determined. Further stud-
ies showed that this tendency also becomes more apparent as children approach
adulthood.
Given the universality of interpreting the world in an intentional fashion, it is
perhaps not surprising that some scientists have also fallen into this trap. For exam-
ple, the first version of the Gaia hyothesis of James Lovelock defined Gaia as “a
complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil: the
totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal phys-
ical and chemical environment for life in this planet”. The simpler view, held by
most scientists, is that the biosphere is a comprehensible mixture of air, water, soil
and organisms, whose behaviour is explicable in terms of different steady states pro-
duced by negative feedback effects. There is no sense in which such a system can be
said to seek anything, and Lovelock has since stated that this aspect of his original
proposal was meant only in a metaphorical sense.
Similarly, some physicists suggest from the fact that the Universe has properties
that allow human life to appear, that this means that its properties were designed with
this intention in mind - the so-called strong anthropic principle. It is hard to imagine
a finer example of unconscious arrogance, as well as ignorance of the mechanisms
of evolution, than to assert that humans are the purpose of the Universe, but this
example does illustrate the tendency we all have to adopt the intentional stance.
On this intentional hypothesis, the widespread tendency to explain the world in
supernatural terms is not itself an adaptive feature of evolution, but a byproduct of
parts of the mind that evolved because they aid survival in other ways. It is essen-
tial to realise that a common feature of evolution is that properties which evolved
because they help survival in a particular environment may have important, but quite
unrelated, consequences, later on. For example, the evolution of feathers in some
