TOKENS PODCAST: S5E9
Does evolutionary theory destroy morality? Or might it give us, instead, some clues about the nature of human flourishing. Dr. Justin Barrett contends that evolutionary psychology might help us make sense of some of the challenges we face as humans, as well as provide clues toward fruitful practices of sociability, community, and love.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Justin L. Barrett (PhD Cornell University) is President of Blueprint 1543 and honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. Prior to founding BP1543, he was at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he led the Thrive Center for Human Development and then the Office for Science, Theology, and Religion (STAR). He came to Fuller from the University of Oxford, where he taught and served as senior researcher for Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind. He has also taught at the University of Michigan and Calvin College, and served as co-area director for Young Life in Lawrence, Kansas. His book Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, co-authored with Pamela Ebstyne King, is out now as part of the BioLogos series of books on science and Christianity. Some of his other publications include Psychology of Religion (ed., 2010), Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004), Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds (2011), and Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief (2012).
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Today, an episode on evolutionary psychology. What is evolutionary psychology, you ask? Well, if we define psychology as the scientific study of human thought and behavior…
Justin: Evolutionary psychology then adds this perspective that we evolved from, past selective, conditions. And that helps us understand better why it is. We look like we do today.
Lee: That's Justin Barrett, founder and President of Blueprint 1543, former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, and former senior researcher at Oxford University. Recently he is the author of the book Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing.
Justin: One way of capturing what makes humans really special from an evolutionary perspective is we're the animal that can love.
Lee: Today, an array of helpful insights about the human condition, all from a field some people of faith tend to hold at arm's length.
Justin: Is it possible that God used an evolutionary process to bring us about, to bring about other species? Is that outside of God's power? Surely not outside of God's power. Then let me understand it the best I can and see if it gives me explanatory tools or fresh perspectives that are useful.
Lee: All this, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Justin Barrett did his PhD work at Cornell University, he is currently the founder and President of Blueprint 1543, an adjunct professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary where he was formerly director of the thrive center, and chief project developer for science theology and religion initiatives. Today we're discussing his most recent book Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, which he co-authored with Pamela King. Welcome Justin.
Justin: Thank you, Lee. It's good to be here.
Lee: Good to have you with us. We've been looking forward to this conversation. We, you and I have known each other for a number of years because of working on different projects in this field. And it's, uh, it's great to get to be with you.
Justin: Yeah.
Lee: So, evolutionary psychology, I doubt that there's a lot of people in the street that could give us a definition of evolutionary psychology.
But, uh, it seems to me that your discussion of donuts, seems to be a great place to start and trying to make sense of what evolutionary psychology is.
Justin: And even if it isn't, donuts, right?
Lee: Yeah. It's a great place to start on.
Justin: It’s a great place to start anyway.
Lee: That’s right. Yeah.
Justin: Yeah. It's one of these kinds of textbook examples of how an evolutionary perspective can give us a new angle on how to think about our motivations, our psychology, how we behave, and donuts, right? Uh, why are we so drawn to these sugary fatty things that they're just delicious?
And if we eat too many of them it'll kill us and yet we're drawn to them. What's that about?
Lee: Indeed, indeed.
Justin: And, uh, you know, the sort of textbook story is that we have mechanisms, psychological sort of tendencies to be attracted to sweet and fatty things, because in our past, our species past, those would have been hard to come by, but it very important for our nutrition. Sweet things would indicate, berries, fruits of that sort that are hard to come by.
They're hard to keep, they go bad quickly. Lots of vitamins in that. And so, you want to be attracted to those. And fats, well, that would have been animal fats for the most part, which took a lot of work to sort of kill and prepare the animal, cook it in a way that made it safety and so forth. But we get a whole lot of nutrients and a lot of energy from, from fats.
So, there's something good to be attracted to fats and sugars in those conditions where they're hard to come by. Well, now they're not hard to come by.
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: So, we can get ourselves into trouble. That's right. So, it's an illustration of this sort of mismatch between what you might call our nature and then our current environment, or, you know, the survival demands on us now are very different.
Our niche is very different than it was.
Lee: So, instead of the, instead of the devil made me do it, it's the, uh, my ancestors evolutionary history made me do it.
Justin: Those darn ancestors. Yeah.
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: We can always blame our parents, right? And now we blame our parents’ parents.
Lee: Yes, that's right. That's right. So, so evolutionary psychology then you're, you're presuming the basics of evolutionary theory with regard to modification, and adaptation. And propagation of the species and so forth, natural selection.
And then you're asking, why do we do some of the things we do? How do we make sense of the way we are? Is that, is that a fair enough way to summarize that?
Justin: That's right. As psychology is the scientific study of human thought and behavior, evolutionary psychology then adds this perspective that we are evolved from, you know, under past selective, uh, conditions. And that helps us understand better why it is we look like we do today, and sometimes why we seem like we're a mismatch for the world we live in.
Lee: So, you say they're in, uh, I guess it's midway through the book that we're, we're in effect working with stone-age minds in our given context, and you can make sense of why we do some of the things we do. If you look back and say, well, this was the way our minds, our bodies evolved to deal with the circumstances in which we found ourselves as a species, and then explain them from there.
Justin: That's right. That's right. You can almost think of it as sort of residual kinds of features of us that are left over from a bygone era. you know, really that bygone era is only a couple of hundred years ago for most of the world. We sometimes forget that. But up until, you know, a couple of hundred years ago, the majority of people in the world were still living in pretty close to stone age kinds of conditions.
And it's easy for us to forget in this sort of hyper industrialized urbanized West.
Lee: Yeah, yeah. So, you mentioned the word niche just a moment ago. So, the nature niche gap is a key construct throughout your book. So could you kind of explain to us what you mean?
Justin: Sure. Yeah. By nature, I mean, the, the set of traits, capacities, propensities, features, whatever you like that we typically are going to have just by virtue of being human beings. Growing up in ordinary human environments don't need special tools or education or cultural conditions, just sort of what it means to sort of grow up to be a human.
That's our nature. And then our, our niche is it's a slightly sort of technical, concept, uh, that's related to our environment, but it's not quite identical to our environment. It's kind of the, I try to think of it as the functional environment. It's the environment, how the environment impinges upon what we need to do in order to make it, to, to survive, to reproduce to whatever, you know, those fitness demands are. That's our niche.
Sometimes ecologists compare this to your occupation. Uh, it's not your address, but your occupation, but of course, where you live influences what it is you do. So, if you live on a farm, you're probably a farmer. Uh, and so your occupation is farmer. Your environment is farm. Your niche is farmer.
Your environment is the farm.
Lee: So, I guess the analogy that's coming to mind for me is it, it's kind of like to use an analogy from birds. It's, it's the, it's your current nest plus your environment, something like that?
Justin: Yeah. And what, and what you need to do to interact with that environment. It's the demands, the environment is placing upon you, to survive and sort of reproduce, raise kids and all that other good stuff.
Lee: Which of course, I guess that's, that's huge inevitably in the development evolutionary theory. Right? So, Darwin is looking at different niches, if you will. And then he's seeing the different species that are in those different places. And then that kind of helps spur his thinking of, well, maybe these different environments or demands of the environment contributed to the development of different species at different places.
Justin: Yeah, that's right. And one of the helpful nuances when we come to humans is that word environment, as you indicated with birds’ nests, right? It includes all of the stuff we make and surround ourselves with, too. That's part of how we are active participants in creating or constructing our niche. So, it's not quite the same as usually when people talk about the environment, they think, oh, that's birds and trees and rocks and rivers.
It is all of that can be part of our niche, but so are our clothes and the cars we drive and the, the school systems that, you know, our kids are in, right? They're all part of that developmental environment or niche.
Lee: And even, things like rivers and animals, those are not fixed static realities those have been very much impinged upon by humans’ engagement with those realities, right?
Justin: That's right. In fact, to a degree that I think a lot of, urban folks have sort of lost track of. You know, most of the things we eat are, when they, they look very different than they did, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, we've domesticated so many of these plants that now we eat. So, they don't look the same as they did.
We've changed them. Likewise with the animals we've selectively bred them.
And so, we have constructed even the nature, part of our niche, those plants and animals. We actually done a whole lot of manipulation of them and change their character. Likewise, that process has changed us. That's the niche we live in now. We're dependent on these things that then we've kind of played a hand in creating.
Lee: Yeah. It's fascinating because I think early in the book you say that these sorts of considerations that we're talking about right now, point to the fact that the, the sharp dichotomy between nature and nurture really doesn't hold up under scrutiny. That there's, there's a way in which you can see that there's a, there's an overlap perhaps, between nature and nurture because we have so been involved in the cultivation of the change of the shape of our so-called, niche that nature and nurture kind of overlap in certain ways.
Did I understand you correctly, there?
Justin: That and more, uh, so yeah, absolutely. So, we often use nature to mean our biological endowment and nurture to mean everything else, all the environmental stuff. But you know, as soon as, well, I mean, from the word go, you know? In the womb as we're developing that cell, the single cell that we start with, right, is being influenced by the chemicals around it, that are being produced by the mother who's being influenced by what's going on in the world, around her. There's just no way of extracting out in any kind of clean and consistent way, what the environment is contributing.
Add to that our social environment.
We're such fundamentally social animals. They're part of our environment as well. So, nurturing is part of our nature. It's our nature to be nurtured and it is our nature to nurture. And, so, teasing these apart and making them dichotomy, I just don't find helpful at all.
Lee: So, going back then to this so-called nature niche gap, well, let me back up there just a second. With regard to what you call fitness, that is our capacity to propagate the species, to have children and to keep the species alive. There are certain, alignment that has to occur between nature and niche so that we can have kids, you got to survive in order to have kids, right?
And yet, because of the trait of our human nature, we're able to develop a niche that increasingly is difficult for us to live in. And, so, you say near the end of the book that our human traits or our nature become both source and solution to our problem with the gap between our nature and our niche.
So, could you kind of unpack that for us and kind of describe a bit more about both the opportunity and the problem that exists there?
Justin: Yeah, and this one is, this is a tricky thing, uh, to describe quickly. I'll pick on one little trait to begin with. We're an immensely social animal in the book. I even use the term hyper social in the sense that, unlike a lot of species that just have babies and maybe they raise their babies to a certain age and then they walk away and then do their own thing.
We don't do it that way. We raise our kids. We invest in our kids' kids. We invest in our siblings, kids. They invest in ours. Heck, we invest in kids that aren't even related to us. We're just sort of these immensely social animals. Uh, we have big groups that we live in and have for as far as we can tell an awful long time, compared to lots of other mammals. And we individuate them, we're not just a herd or a school of fish where it doesn't matter who the individuals are.
You know, we, we keep track of particular individuals that we know, what their relationships are to us, to each other, whether we can trust them for this kind of information or that and so forth. So, we've invested a whole lot in our sociality, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have limits. We seem to have sort of natural capacities, with limitations.
I get looks like we can really have about 150 genuine personal relationships. That's what we can maintain plus or minus about 50. And partly that's a, constraint of just how much memory capacity we have uh, so memory constraints, but also time and interaction constraints, because the depth of these relationships, to keep them intimate and personal, we need to, the jargon is socially groom them. Usually that's through like giving hugs and handshakes and high fives and fist bumps, whatever it is right now.
But physical touch is actually really important. It releases endorphins, oxytocin and so forth, that helps us feel bonded to and trust other people. There are other mechanisms we have for that. Synchronized movement, like we get in dance, actually, music, doing music together is actually a really a nice way to do that.
Especially unison singing, it turns out. I was hoping it was going to be harmonic singing, but its unison singing seems to have it a little extra push.
Lee: Unfortunately, Bonhoeffer was right again about that unison singing stuff.
Justin: But these are and laughing together. These are all mechanisms for building trust and sort of, you know, building good, trusting social communities. And we've got a limit on that. It seems to be around 150. So, what then happens when we find ourselves that's our natural kind of, ideal group size.
So, what happens when we move into urban settings? And there are lots of good reasons for building bigger societies. So, to solve problems like, uh, the neighboring band, uh, keeps raiding us and, you know, taking our livestock or even killing some of us, we're like, okay, if we band up with this other group to be a bigger group, then we have more protection from attackers.
That's one example. Or if four villages work together, we can actually build an irrigation system or whatever it is. So, scaling up has some real benefits. And so probably for fitness reasons, we built up bigger societies, but there are some costs to, is they start straining our natural social psychology.
And so now we don't know everybody intimately in the same way. We can't socially groom everyone. We can't keep track of everybody. And that starts creating new kinds of problems that then we have to solve and we solve those and it creates new problems and creates new problems. But what it hasn't changed as far as we can tell, is this stone aged optimal group size of about 150 relationships.
I think, it’s a reasonable working hypothesis that I hope other scientists start looking more seriously at. I think this is a reasonable explanation for why it is that high density living is associated with all kinds of stress, anxiety, psychological disorders, violent behavior, because we almost have to start dehumanizing each other.
We have to start ignoring each other, if we're interacting with so many strangers all the time. I find that tragic. I think it's, in some ways it's soul tearing that we've learned to ignore each other when we live in cities. But we built these cities to solve other problems.
So, that's the kind of dynamic that we try to get at in the book with lots of examples of where we humans use these cool capacities that we have, and it looks like other species don't have to solve problems and we create new problems for ourselves that then we have to solve.
And that seems to be an ongoing struggle with trying to solve this problem of what does it mean to live a flourishing life and how do we bring it about?
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. So, you've pointed there, you, throughout the book, you have three traits or complex of traits that you point to as making us particularly human or that are, that are specific to, and or distinctive about the human species. And the first one you just pointed to, our hyper sociability.
Before we go to the next two, let me ask a little bit more about this. You talk about the social brain hypothesis and that in some evolutionary circles, a hypothesis is that the development of our large brain developed in conjunction with the rise of sociability? Is that correct?
Justin: That's right. Uh, in particular the, what we call the prefrontal cortex, it's kind of our, our big foreheads, the stuff above our eyes and in front of our ears. Because it's that big old, massive brain that, uh, kind of distinguishes us from pretty much all other mammals that if you look at other skulls, there are a lot flatter in the front then, contemporary humans. And it's thought that that sort of massive growth in, brain size. But there's lots of evidence suggesting it correlates with larger and larger group sizes.
Lee: Hm.
Justin: And so, one hypothesis for why invest in this really huge brain, way outsized compared to other species, at least one of the leading hypotheses is it's so that we can be social animals. It's so we can, navigate all of these relationships and learn from each other and teach each other.
And those aren't trivial abilities. Those are, take some special kind of, processing power.
Lee: I was fascinated with your discussion in this chapter of the ways in which there's a lot of stuff going on that I've just never thought about until I have this sort of evolutionary psychology perspective on it. So, for example, the whites of the eyes. Talk about how significant that is perhaps for our species.
Justin: Yeah. That one's pretty crazy. Uh, and once you hear it, then you start seeing it in different places. Uh, so, uh, we are unusual, uh, and unique among primates and unusual among mammals in how big the whites of our eyes are, relative to the colored part of our eyes. And you might think that's just an accidental kind of property, but what it does is enables us to see what direction each other are looking.
And that turns out to be a really important thing to do, because then we have a clue toward what somebody is paying attention to. And, we do it so automatically, we don't even think about it. But, but from infancy, babies are already tracking. All right. What's mom looking at? Okay, when mom makes a sound and she's looking at a particular thing, maybe that sound is associated with that particular thing.
Babies will still in infancy in their first year. They'll start checking that they are looking at the same thing mom is looking at and how do they do that? Partly it's the direction of the face, but partly it's also the, the eye gaze direction. And you can tell eye gaze much easier with these big old whites of the eyes.
But once you're doing that, once you have the whites of the eyes, you have so much more information about mental states and that of course ratchets up sociality.
So that one's really important. And, uh, Hollywood hasn't escaped this hasn't escaped their attention. If you want to make somebody look possessed, like they aren't, uh, acting on their own. They get rid of the whites of the eyes. Suddenly they're a vampire or a demon or a zombie or something. You get rid of the whites of the eyes, it dehumanizes instantly.
It’s a fascinating kind of theatrical technique.
Lee: And then that, that sort of, uh, whites of the eyes is a part of the capacity to do so-called mind reading. Right? So that we're, we're beginning to have the capacity to try to hypothesize or speculate about what somebody else is thinking. And that becomes key as well to our sociability hyper sociability traits?
Justin: That's right. If I can track the direction you're looking, I can make inferences about what you're paying attention to, and what you see. And then I can start thinking about, well, what are your mental states behind that? Okay. You, you saw this, you were paying attention to it. So that maybe leads to you forming such and such a belief.
Like, you know, I hid the donuts, uh, you know, behind that rock over there. So, we've got to tie it back to the donuts.
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: If your eyes didn't go toward the donuts, I might infer that you don't know where the donuts are and I'm going to have them all to myself later. So, suddenly eye gaze direction is a cue to what's going on in minds.
And that's something special. There are very few animals that we have solid evidence that they make mental state attributions, they think about minds. And we're the only species, we have good reason to think, have thoughts about thoughts of other people. Maybe even thoughts about our own thoughts, what we call meta representation.
Lee: So, we’re thinking about aunt Susan's thoughts about my cousins baking, making donuts, and whether she likes my cousin making donuts?
Justin: Yeah, we can do that easily. Or, you know, you, and I can think about whether we are sharing the same thoughts, and that's important for teaching and for that then expertise, acquisition, and so forth. So, for, for you to teach me something, you need to have a good reason to think that I'm thinking along the same lines you want me to be thinking along.
And it's really helpful if I think I'm thinking along the same lines you think, you know, you want me to be thinking along, but we're having to sort of get inside each other's heads quite a bit there. And as far as we can tell other species, just do not do this to the degree that humans do at least, and most just don't do it at all.
They just pay attention to behaviors.
Lee: Well, and that, that just makes me consider more explicitly things that I'm aware of in the process of teaching, but I don't know, I guess I've really thought about it, right? Because I'm always paying careful attention to my students' faces, where they're looking, when I'm lecturing, how they're looking, whether they're looking up in a particular way or looking off in a distracted way. Yeah. That's just fascinating. So that, that then leads us to the second sort of a characteristic human trait that you work with at some length about the capacity to process huge amounts of information and develop specialization. So, talk to us a little bit about that particular trait.
Justin: Yeah, because of the sociality and because we're born kind of immature, okay? Not kind of, a lot immature, uh, and that's not a slam on us as a species. It's just a fact, we've got a long life span and then we take a long time to get to reproductive age and, we're born kind of feeble. We can't walk, we can't fight for ourselves.
We can't feed ourselves. You know, we're not like the horse that drops out of mom and is walking around, um, you know, pretty much instantly. We can't do that. And that means we've got lots of time to learn, to start packing information into these giant heads of ours. But mostly we're learning that from each other, right?
We're social learners. And part of that, you know, that ability to read each other's minds, pay attention to what each other think, and facilitates this intensive teaching. Uh, we may be the only species that deliberately and intentionally teaches others. And almost surely the only one that teaches others who are not related to us.
Lee: Hm.
Justin: It's sometimes called alloparenting. Uh, it's the sort of jargon for it. It was, we, you know, cause if, if a kid walks up to you and says, hey, Mr. what's that thing called? You go, oh, it's, it's called this. You don't go get away from me you stupid kid. I don't know you. We just do. There's just something, something about it.
So, what, and why is that a good thing? Well, we can learn from the community, what they've acquired in terms of the particulars of how to navigate this space, how to live in this niche, how to exploit it, how to use it properly, how to survive and thrive. And that's important for species like us that has moved all over the place.
Right? Most animals that have moved well. Okay. Most animals stay put, all right, wherever they grew up, that's where they stay. Because their nature then gives them the tools to fit into that niche and solve the problems there. Humans have colonized pretty much every niche on earth.
And there are very other few other species that have done that. And when they have, they do it by changing their genetic code to adapt to those environments, we don't. We do it by learning, by acquiring lots of specific information for that particular location, that particular job, mostly from, from others or jointly with others, all this joint problem solving.
So, we acquire expertise. And then that also that ability allows us to diversify what we all do.
We don't all have to know the same things. And that then feeds back in a sort of positive feedback loop on sociality. We become dependent on each other. Some people are better hunters, others are better gatherers, others are better house builders, others are better, you know, childrearer’s, and we all need each other then. That's, you know, sort of in ancient times. Contemporary times, of course, the diversity of tasks that we do in our dependence, interdependence, on each other is much, much greater now. You know, your typical urban dweller wouldn't last a week probably.
And without everybody else around them.
Lee: So, that, then relates to habits like conformity. You talk about the importance of conformity in growth, in specialization, or learning education. How does that kind of stuff play out in both the sociability and the specialization?
Justin: Right. So, the acquisition of information is so important to us to learn those, you know, survival skills that are pertinent to our location that we've got, what looked to be. We sometimes call them learning biases, but body sees sort of sounds negative. You might just think some, uh, proclivities.
Lee: The way we're inclined or disposed?
Justin: Yeah, that's right. We're disposed because if we try to imitate everybody, we're going to have poor quality sort of information because we're surrounded by so many people. So, you need kind of strategies for picking out who am I going to learn from? These are sometimes called social learning biases or tendencies proclivities.
One of the really handy ones that we've got is this conformity bias. Well, what's, what's most everybody else doing? That's what I'm going to go for. That's sort of my default is I'm just, especially everybody else who's a lot like me. That's called the similarity bias where we're inclined to imitate, conform to the behaviors, the thinking patterns, the ways of speaking dressing and so forth, the people who we perceive to be like us.
Lee: So even, even accents, then, you point to even accents being significant in the way we kind of default to who we're paying attention to?
Justin: That's right. Uh, from infancy, it looks like babies prefer to, pay attention to, and to learn from somebody who speaks like they do, or especially like their mom does if they can't speak yet. So, they've already in the womb, it seems, they're already adjusting to mom's vocal patterns.
Lee: Yeah. I mean, this gives me a very helpful way to think about the ways in which New Englanders very stereotypically looked down their nose at Southern accents, is that they're just operating out of their stone-age mind when they do that.
Justin: I think that's right. That's the stone age. Stone age. Yeah. Yeah. One way or the other. Well, I mean, you're joking, but, uh, sort of, but accents are for this reason, accents are really great ingroup, outgroup markers.
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: They're hard to fake, really convincingly and well, but they're acquired so early in life that they are really good kind of indicator of, well, who's like me?
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: I'm going to automatically give the benefit of the doubt to people who I perceive to be like me. Oh. And I should have noted earlier. And the research shows kids are more sensitive to accent than they are things like skin color. So, you know, the, sort of the racially constructed kind of categories is that Americans are sort of all really excited about are actually kind of a weird artificial overlay. The true sort of ingroup outgroup markers are things like, how do we dress?
How do we eat? Our accent. Because those are the ones that are more ancient markers of who's, ingroup outgroup.
Lee: Who's in the group. Right.
Justin: And they're reasonably good.
But I expect then southerners, mistrust New Englanders as well for similar reasons.
Lee: That's right. If they don't say y'all we know that there's at least some investigation to do, to find out if they're trustworthy or not.
Justin: And what's with those missing r’s on car and things like, instead of a car, I mean, what, what is that?
Lee: It makes no sense whatsoever. Yes. Yeah.
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This is our interview with Justin Barrett. Coming up, we'll hear more helpful ideas from evolutionary psychology, as well as Justin's thoughts on the supposed conflict between Christian faith and evolutionary theory.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Justin Barrett.
You talked about, the gap between nature and niche with sociability and the developments, for example, of urban cityscapes. What's the gap that makes it hard for us to thrive with regard to specialization and the capacity to acquire a great deal of information?
Justin: Yeah, here, we seem to be constantly chasing, chasing the carrot in front of us at the same way, you know, uh, in that we've got this great capacity to learn new stuff, to develop new tools, a new expertise, then that is beneficial. So, we keep driving that. But once again, as with sociality, it, we're not infinitely flexible learners.
Right? So, I talked about social learning biases. So, one way in which you can think there can be a gap is in living in really cosmopolitan spaces. Suddenly we're surrounded by people who do sound different than we do, do send off the signals that they're not part of my group and yet I'm expected to learn from them.
So, there's an extra obstacle there. That one is I think, serious in some respects, but a funnier one is a, one of these cues for social learning is, prestige or skill. These are also biases that have a pretty good documentation in the, uh, the scientific research now. Um, so if we perceive somebody to be particularly prestigious, then we are more likely to imitate them, to learn from them and so forth.
But with mass media, people can be famous and have all of the indicators of prestige for really stupid reasons or at least reasons that are completely unrelated to the domain. So, you know, the example I think I give in the book because it's always stuck with me is, why in the world do I know what underwear Michael Jordan wears?
You know, I mean, we all know Haynes, right? Haynes is his brand. Well, why should I care? Great ballplayer, but how does that translate into expertise with regard to what underwear I should wear?
Lee: Right. Yeah.
Justin: I mean, it's completely irrelevant, but there it is. And so, you get these, and that's why advertising works. They keep trotting out these sort of famous prestigious people and we go, yes, yes. Oh, I'm going to pay attention to this. I'm like, but why are their views on politics any better than the guy at the end of the street?
Lee: Right. Yeah. So, you have this pretty, pretty pointed line where you say in times past it would have been hard for the village idiot to gain a following. And yet now, because of our own human traits, we've made that quite possible, right?
Justin: We've made it possible. Not only can they gain a following, they could even get an office if they, you know, in politics, if they need to, you know, and yeah. Uh, we used to be a little bit closer to the ground where you could really see, does the person have the goods or not. That's one example. There are other examples about expertise in this gap, this nature, niche gap.
And, you know, we've developed these really cool science and math fields, the stem subjects, right? These take a lot of cultural investment and a lot of deliberate education and training and so forth. And they do lots of cool things. But all of that work is indicative of how unnatural they are to our minds.
Our minds have natural sort of sweet spots for learning.
They have paths of least resistance proclivities that make some learning easier than others. And, uh, we're going to have to work an awful lot harder with some of those other things, like some of the stem subjects and not at no cost. So, we can really crush the spirit of some kids who this just doesn't come to them very easily.
Their brain goes in a different direction, but if we treat all kids as if they’re the same, and really, they’re just kind of a piece of wood that we can work anyway we want, I think we do harm to those kids.
Lee: Let's talk about the third kind of human trait.
You talk about that of self-control. Give us a description of how this becomes key to being human from an evolutionary psychology perspective.
Justin: Right. So, we, there's that old chestnut that when you, you know, you get scared, your fight or flight mechanism kicks in. Sometimes it's fight, flight or freeze, we've got that. We all know we've got that, get really scared. That's the impulse.
What's kind of interesting about humans. And again, seems to be distinctive is we can shut it down. We can go, you know what, instead of fighting, running away or freezing, I'm going to talk my way out of this. What to talk your way out of it. I'm going to emotionally regulate. I'm gonna say now is not the time for fear.
I'm, uh, think about this another way. Or am I really angry at that person? Or am I just frustrated and disappointed? Or you know, less fancifully maybe in some ways. I get to evaluate whether I want to go to a, you know, whether today I'm going to go to Chick-fil-A or not. Um, I can make a decision. I can sort of spell it out.
Well, if I go over to Chick-fil-A, I'm going to be tempted by their seasonal shake and that's a delicious, but I can't really manage those calories on top of everything else. So, I better steer clear of there. I am using this massive brain I've got to override my impulses, to think through different possibilities, to speculate about possible futures and then make decisions based on that.
That's a pretty cool trick for an animal to do. We try to train our dogs to do this, but eventually, you know, you're balancing that, that bacon on your dog's nose. It is gonna take that bacon way, um, especially if nobody's looking. But humans have this weird ability to actually get in their own heads and exercise self-control, even when no one is looking.
Lee: And that’s located, I think, in the prefrontal cortex as well, right?
Justin: That prefrontal cortex also plays a really important role in that, uh, for sure. I mean, that's, what's fascinating is all three of these categories of capacities that hyper sociality, the expertise acquisition, and self-control are all importantly facilitated by this big old prefrontal cortex.
Lee: Hmm. Yeah. I find this fascinating. I've been reading a bit on this from a number of folks in the last couple of years about the insights that we're getting about willpower, perhaps best understood metaphorically as a muscle. So, describe that to us.
Justin: Yeah, it has been a really helpful metaphor. So, we know with muscles, you can get them stronger by working them out. But we also know that immediately after a strenuous workout, they just don't do much, right? You can, you can work them to exhaustion and then you can't do anything. And at least a lot of the time it looks like self-control is a bit like that.
So that is to say, we can, we can make this muscle stronger. We can get more self-controlled if we give it steady doses of exercise, if we practice restraining ourselves, we practice motivating ourselves to do things we don't want to do. That's good for us. It seems like it builds up that self-control, but immediately after a whole big dose of temptation.
We're probably vulnerable to make a really bad decision. And not just, you know, uh, that kind of, uh, exhaustion, but it could be honest to goodness, physical exhaustion when we're really tired. We just don't have the same kind of resources to override. Or if we've been drinking too much, right?
That's when people often make bad decisions. And that's cause that, that self-control muscle is impaired and it just can't do the job right now.
Lee: You know the way it's helped me a great deal is to think if each day I have kind of a limited amount of self-control, to be wise about what I, invest that in.
And for me, it's been learning to try to invest that at least some daily in habits, helpful habits, which can then minimize how much I have to negotiate with myself in future days. And then I can use my self-control in other areas down the road. I can't change all my habits today, but I can work on one today or maybe two or three at most today.
And then down the road, I can start working on some others because I've invested my willpower carefully today and then have greater capacity to do other stuff later.
Justin: Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Lee. That's, that's the prudent thing to do. If you've got a finite resource, invest it strategically so that you don't have to use as much of it and habits help us not use as much of it.
Lee: So, let's move then to the notion of thriving. How, how are you thinking about evolutionary psychology and how, what that can teach us or help us construe the notion of thriving or human flourishing?
Justin: Yeah, one thing I want to be very clear about is I don't think that evolutionary psychology can deliver the goods on telling us what a thriving life is. Some of its champions, sure talk like it can, but they're smuggling in a lot of assumptions and values that the science itself doesn't give you. In some ways the book project was an exploration in it in how far can it help us and where are its limitations?
And so, you know, we end up concluding, hey, this is a really helpful tool, but it can't get us all the way to the idea of a full flourishing, thriving life. You know, how we ought to live. Sciences are not good with that ought thing. Uh, and, and evolutionary psychology is no exception to that. But where it is helpful, I think, in some ways it helps us zoom out a little bit from the particulars of our situation or our cultural situation and think, okay. Broader scale. What seems to have worked out pretty well for humans? What are we pretty good at? What are the consequences of some of the decisions we've made? And let's let those answers to those questions start informing the, okay.
And now what can we do about it? Especially if we approach evolutionary psychology through a Christian lens where we're accepting for the sake of argument, that this is the way that God created us and he knew what he was doing. So, if God intended fully to create us as we are through this evolutionary process, he was kind of using that to build into us certain kinds of proclivities, certain kinds of limitations, certain kinds of passions, and expecting that, then we would do what we ought to with those things.
And that they're enough for us to then have this flourishing, kind of, uh, life that he called us to well enough, you know, by his grace and whatever other resources he wants to give us. So, that's kind of how we're trying to think through bringing evolutionary psychology to this idea of thriving or flourishing, because by itself, evolution just talks about fitness.
Are you up to the task of staying alive long enough to make babies and then maybe investing in them long enough that they make babies so your genes keep going on? That's fitness. Well, that's not thriving. That's not the same thing. Right? You could make lots of babies and have a miserable life and we would think that's probably not right.
Or you could make no babies and have a really great full rich life. That most of us would say, no, that's probably a thriving life. Uh, you know, when you think of Mother Teresa or someone like that. You'd go, oh, that's a pretty good, well lived life, but she didn't, you know, have kids or Jesus.
A pretty great life, but as far as we know his genes, didn't pass on.
Lee: Yeah. So, the evolutionary psychology then does a good job of description and description of possibilities, descriptions of limits, capacities. And then you need some other sort of authority discipline field of study from merely a human perspective to fill in some of the questions or the normative questions.
The first is good at description, and then we need something for prescription. And then that's, that's, that's your theological term where you're saying there's, there's lots of overlap. Uh, it's not it's not complete overlap, but there's a lot of overlap between the discipline of evolutionary psychology and Christian theology.
Uh, but the Christian theology supplements what the evolutionary psychology can't accomplish for us?
Justin: That's right. Well said. One of the fun surprises to me in, the process of, you know, doing the research for, and trying to put this book together was, was seeing that, wow, there's by no means a perfect overlap between what we're learning from evolutionary psychology about what's good for fitness, or at least has been in our past and what we ought to do from a Christian perspective.
But there are enough points of connection to be interesting and fruitful. And one of those was, you know, Christian theology emphasizes that a life well lived is characterized by love. You know, that gee we're supposed to, we're called to love God and love each other really well. And in a selfless kind of way.
And then, well, but what are the capacities needed to do that? Well, we need to be drawn to other people. That's part of loving, well, that's that hyper sociality. We need to know enough about their particular situation so that we can care for them as an individual, not as part of some anonymous project, or we're not just as I would be lift, well that requires expertise, acquisition. And I need to be able to love them in a way that isn't just to benefit me.
I have to shut me down to be able to love them. Well, well, that's self-control. So, it turns out these three clusters of traits are also really important for loving other people. Well, especially people that you know are outside of our family or a little bit more unfamiliar to us that we can't just be habit.
So, in a real sense, from an evolutionary perspective, it starts looking like what one way of capturing what makes humans really special is we're the animal that can love and love well. That doesn't mean we do all the time, of course, but at least we've got the tool kit for it. And that's, and that's kind of a fun discovery to make, I think.
Lee: I was fascinated by the way. I don't remember if this was seventh or eighth chapter where a couple of times you use language of saying, well, we might even rightfully call such and so sin, but we can supplement our understanding of that by looking at evolutionary psychology. I don't remember what the examples were in particular.
I think maybe one of them was about love that you just mentioned. But could you describe that a little bit more for what are you trying to do there in kind of supplementing what we might traditionally call sin with evolutionary psychology insights?
Justin: Well, I mean, we were talking about donuts. We can come back to donuts as an example, right? We've got a natural propensity you might say toward being overly attracted to donuts. And that could lead to us into sin of gluttony.
For instance, well, from an evolutionary perspective, at least we have a better understanding of why is there this strong, natural predisposition, some of us feel for more than others and what are the tools we have then to combat that? We don't want to immediately, because something seems to be congruent with our nature to say, oh, well, that makes it okay.
Lee: Yeah, right.
Justin: Well, no, just cause it's the it's easy for us doesn't make it good. Right? We don't want to fall into that trap or the, or the converse. We don't want to say just because it's natural, it's bad. Um, either way, the understanding that we get by studying our nature helps us better appreciate just what the challenge is that we're facing there.
Instead of merely saying it's sin, we can say, okay, it's sin, but let's understand that a little better. Another example, it comes from our sort of groupishness. We are an extremely groupish animal. That's part of this hyper sociality and part of those learning biases and so forth is we are drawn to certain, well, people that we perceive to be like us in the relevant kinds of ways, to invest in some people much more than other people, to care for them a whole lot more than other people and so forth.
We form groups. That's what we do. And it's easy to see that in some contexts that leads to really bad behavior.
Lee: Hm.
Justin: You know, we start mistreating out-group members, but we want to be careful, I think with simply labeling the tendency to invest in our in-group as sin. Right? It is part of our nature. There's an open theological question, whether that's fallen nature or just the way we are.
If it's just the way we are then can we leverage that tendency in more positive ways is the question we should be asking? Not, can we eradicate it? And I think some theorists have thought, oh no, the solution to all this groupishness, which includes racism and other kinds of xenophobia and so forth is to eradicate all group membership.
Well, that's impossible. You're not going to do it. Let me just assure you that that is impossible. And some of these philosophical…
Lee: You're not, you're not. So just to be clear to people who are listening, you're not saying it's impossible to eradicate racism as such. Or…
Justin: That's right.
Lee: But instead of saying it's impossible for us to have any sort of functional notion of being human apart from some sort of group identities or group participation.
Justin: Correct, correct. That's right. So, what we want to do is change our groupishness in more productive and positive directions. Um, so, you know, Jesus calls us to love our enemies and to love our neighbor, but he doesn't, as far as I can tell, call us to pretend that our neighbor is, are, is one of our children.
They're still a neighbor and not a family member. And that's okay. As long as we are loving our neighbor. The church is the body of Christ and there are people who are not part of the church and there are distinctions from a Christian perspective between who's, who's the church and who isn't. And it's okay to make those distinctions.
As long as the church, then, isn't characterized by mistreating those who are not the church, instead by loving well those who are outside the church. There should be an inclusive community that's characterized by that inclusiveness and that service to people who are outside the community. But it doesn't mean that you don't have an ingroup and outgroup. Salvation Army, I think is a good example of this, their identity is around taking care of other people.
And so, there are positive ways, I think, to leverage our groupishness instead of just saying, oh no, somehow, we've got to put a, I dunno, a chip in our brains that tell us everybody's the same. Now we're going to mess up our humanity at that point.
Lee: Right. Yeah. I mean, two things in particular percolate up for me. One is that in moral philosophy, when you look especially at virtue traditions, those conversations around desires. So-called natural desires. Typically, we'll say desire, is not the problem.
It's a, it's a disordered attachment to a desire or a disordered employment of a desire. So, the question,instead is how does one rightfully order safe, for example, a sexual desire or the desire for the donut or the desire for sociability and security, that those things are not bad in of and in themselves.
And even I would say from a Christian perspective, Jewish perspective, you know, the Genesis story is about the goodness of all of creation, including sex, music, food, friendship, and so forth. So, these things are good, but the question is whether or not they are ordered, rightfully, uh, according to that particular limited end.
And then the second thing that percolates up for me, is that just in a very practical way, you know, your conversation about love. I think some years ago, I realized, and this is a very mundane sort of example, but I just realized, look, I can't get to everybody's funeral that I would like to get to, becauseyou know, in a, in a city where you know, not just 150 people, but thousands of people, you know, you can't get to everywhere, you would like to get to.
And, and, um, so then accepting, it doesn't mean I don't love someone who's I don't get to their father's funeral.
It's instead the reality of the limited nature of social capacity. But I don't know any thoughts orcomments about that? I'm feeling uncomfortable even using that as an example, but I think it's a really highly practical implication of something that you're pointing to there.
Justin: Let me assure you that, that sounds just right. And you don't have to feel bad about that. Um, exactly. Uh, what our experience tells us. And now increasingly what the science tells us is we just can't, we can't love, you know, everybody the same way. And that's okay. I don't think we should put that burden on ourselves because it can lead to a couple of ills.
Right? One of those is we actually destroy our capacity to love anybody well, because we're so anxious and worried and worked up about trying to love everyone well.
The other is we end up changing love into something very thin, thin enough that we can cover everybody. And so, then we start anonymizing people and treating them as projects or, you know, big groups that somehow we have to care for.
Oh, I, oh, I'm very, you know, invested in loving the X community and like, well, how about the people in that community? Do you love any of them or do you just love that abstract notion of, I don't know, Africa or, you know what it is? Well, what about the people?
So, I think there, there are a couple of dangers with trying to put the burden on us too greatly that somehow, we've got to love everybody the same.
And everybody the same way. We just can't do it. So, it's okay. Don't do it.
Lee: Yeah.
Justin: But love those that you can well, do it well.
Lee: This is all very fascinating. I think in just the last couple of minutes, what I want to do is maybe get to one question that I think some people listening would expect me to ask. Uh, that some people might expect would have been asked at the very top of the interview, but I'm leaving it at the very end for a reason.
And that is, for those who find a sort of sense of immediate threat between engaging evolutionary theory from a Christian perspective, from a faith perspective, um, you clearly don't have, you don't feel threatened by that. So, what would you say to those who have stuck this long to hear what they said, but they still have this kind of discomfort with evolutionary theory, generally?
Justin: I guess, uh, to those folks, I'd say, I understand, I have felt that threat too, and there are moments when I still feel that threat. But, in the world that we live in, in order to at least understand what these science type people are doing, and the science and technology areas are major culture shapers.
So, we need people of faith in those spaces in a full-bodied kind of way. Um, not as outside critics, just throwing rocks, but they need to be participants and they need to bring their faith tradition into those science and technology spaces. We're missing too many great minds and good, valuable perspectives from, uh, the Christian faith in particular in this country because we've excluded ourselves from the halls of science. And I think we've got a, um, an obligation to be in that space and to do it well. But to do that, we need to understand it. And, uh, like it or not, the sciences are the best interpretation that, uh, of why we have the species of animals we have.
Maybe even why humans have some of the proclivities that they have is an evolutionary perspective. And so, one of the things that I've done is asked myself, well, is it possible that God used an evolutionary process to bring us about, to bring about other species? Is that outside of God's power?
Surely not outside of God's power. Is it outside of God's character? I can't tell that it is, um, there's some interesting arguments philosophers will have about that, but I think oftentimes they're based on misunderstandings about evolutionary theory, like, it being purposeless. Well that's no, it's, that's not an assumption that's built into the science, uh, from a Christian perspective, we can say, no, God has purposes through evolution, among other things.
So, is it possible that God used it? Yeah, I think it is. Okay, then. Let me understand it the best I can and see if it, gives me explanatory tools or fresh perspectives that are useful in fitting in, with, uh, what I know from, my Christian commitments and, and see how it goes. And if at the end of this exploration, I've, I've decided I just can't make them go together.
That's all right. It's not the most important thing. Intelligent people can just, you know, and you know, God-fearing, people can disagree about these things and we can still get along. But give it a fair shot and see if, uh, you learn something useful. And even if you don't think it's true about the real world at the end of it, at least you've learned something about your brothers and sisters who, who do think there's something valuable here.
Lee: Yeah. I've been talking to Justin Barrett, founder and President of Blueprint 1543, and author most recently of the book entitled Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing.
Thanks so much, Justin, for the great conversation. Appreciate your time.
Justin: Thanks Lee. It's been fun to talk.
Lee: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
If you would like to hear more about how faith and psychology might work together, then we have two previous episodes that might be to your liking: first, a season 2 interview with Dr. Mark McMinn entitled "What Hath Christianity to do with Psychology; and second, a season 3 interview with Dr. Curt Thompson on his book "The Soul of Shame."
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Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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