Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  THE VIRAL ROOTS OF IRRATIONAL ACTS

  In fall 2007, angry mobs marched in the streets of Khartoum, Sudan, barely held in check by soldiers wielding machine guns. The mobs weren’t demanding higher wages or an electoral recount, but swift and brutal justice for English school teacher Gillian Gibbons, who was standing trial that day. Her crime? She had allowed her class of seven-year-olds to name the class teddy bear Mohammed. To Western observers, the reaction by the people on the streets and the religious court, which ultimately spared Ms. Gibbons forty lashes but gave her fifteen days in prison, was nothing short of crazy.

  Yet there are plenty of seemingly irrational beliefs held by groups in the Western world as well. Most biology professors at one point in their teaching careers find themselves in the tricky spot of debating a student whose deeply held religious beliefs puts him or her at odds with observable features of the natural world. This is particularly evident in the case of teaching evolution, but it seems to pop up all over the place. My moment came early in my teaching career at California State University at Monterey Bay, a public school that benefits from an incredibly diverse student body—in socioeconomics, cultural background, and even age of the students. With this diversity comes a wide range of educational backgrounds, including students with virtually no practical scientific experience prior to attending college. In a very animated lecture on the scientific method in which I expounded with great vigor the virtues of using careful observations of nature as the verifiable basis of scientific study, a student stopped me dead in my tracks by asking, “Well, what about miracles you can see right before your eyes, like the Eucharist?”

  “The what?” I said.

  “You know, the Eucharist. When the priest turns bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ?” he replied, surprised at my ignorance.

  The idea that a twenty-something college student would still believe every Sunday that he was actually witnessing the blood of Christ being squeezed from bread was so far beyond my naive notions of what college science students thought about, I was momentarily speechless. I muttered a somewhat lame retort to the effect of a scientist needing to question even the most careful observations, but I was treading lightly, trying not to anger or embarrass this student in front of his classmates. Moreover, at that point, I really didn’t have at my disposal a way to reconcile two very different ways of observing the world.

  Scientists and social commentators have struggled with this issue in very public arenas as they debate whether evolution and “intelligent design” should be given equal weight in science classes, or how much a role religion should play in politics. Some have taken a very hard line, systematically deconstructing what they call The God Delusion (evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) and assuring us that “God is not Great” (political commentator Christopher Hitchens).3 Others, like the biologist E. O. Wilson, who grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition, urge a more reconciled view of mutual respect between scientific and religious viewpoints. 4 But debating God away, or recognizing, as I try to do in my biology classes now, that some things are a matter of evidence and hypothesis testing and others are matters of faith, does not get at the clearly observable phenomenon that many people, probably the vast majority of people, hold beliefs that are patently false. More important, human behaviors that seem at first sight to be merely irrational turn out to be at the core of many security problems we face.

  Oddly, a virologist, Dr. Luis Villarreal of the University of California–Irvine, has made some key discoveries about human belief systems. It is through his high-profile Center for Virus Research that Villarreal began to trace how far back in evolutionary time belief systems of some sort can be traced, but it was through his community service that he learned first-hand how strongly humans hold onto even irrational beliefs.

  Villarreal is a product of the lower-income Latino community of East Los Angeles, growing up with no relatives or mentors who attended college. As the only member of his high school class who went to graduate school, and then on to a successful university career, he took it upon himself to mentor other Latinos who overcame similar social and economic hurdles as he did to make it to UC Irvine, one of the nation’s premier medical research universities. As director of the Minority Science Program at Irvine, Villarreal developed a self-styled “science boot camp,” in which the beliefs held both consciously and unconsciously by his students are revealed and tested against the rational construct of science. But through the years he became increasingly frustrated in his attempts to disabuse his charges of their scientifically indefensible beliefs—that the world was created in six days, that lighting a candle for La Virgen can bring prosperity, that every Sunday in church a priest could squeeze the blood of Christ from a loaf of bread. Although Villarreal can claim some success in terms of getting students to understand a scientific process, he found to his surprise that no matter how tough he was on his students, or how clearly he outlined the irrationality of their beliefs, many still held them dearly even as they continued their studies in sciences. The difficulty he observed in disabusing highly intelligent and motivated students (indeed, 96 percent of UC Irvine students graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class5) of even the most patently falsifiable beliefs made him want to dig deeper, to uncover the root causes of these beliefs. His search was motivated by a simple question: “Why do people hold beliefs, even obviously irrational beliefs, so strongly?”

  Having been an outsider to the mostly white world of academic medicine himself, Villarreal suspected on a personal level that his students’ beliefs were a way to define their identity within a group and against another group (the nonbelievers) and that students put into a situation where they were the overwhelming minority would be especially inclined to tightly grip their belief systems.

  But it was Villarreal’s professional viewpoint, working with viruses that are among the oldest organisms on Earth, that gave him the necessary perspective to unearth the deep and tangled roots of human behavior. The evolution and development of viruses, it turns out, is inextricably tied to almost every major evolutionary advance, including the rise of modern humans, in Earth’s history.6 This means that as opposed to, say, anthropologists (who have their own important role in studies of conflict), or animal ecologists (who also contribute a key perspective on how to use information in security situations), Villarreal could deftly skip around the kingdoms of life as well as time-travel through vast spans of Earth history in his search for the origins of belief systems.

  What Villarreal emerged with is a synthesis that traces the origins of human belief systems back to the earliest life forms, such as bacteria.7 The exact forms of these belief systems obviously differ between, say, a bacterium, a salmon, a chimpanzee, and a suicide bomber, but the mechanism is the same. In Villarreal’s theory, belief, as we know it in humans, is a form of addiction. And addiction in its pure form, according to Villarreal, is one of the oldest processes of self-preservation on the Earth, traceable to the earliest invasions of bacteria’s genetic material by viruses.

  Although viruses seem to cause chaos in our daily lives—at the least, they cause sick days and frantic parents rearranging day care schedules, at worst they lead to epidemics that kill millions—the virus itself wants stability more than anything. In this sense, a virus is like a businessman trying to maintain a steady clientele. More particularly, the virus is like a drug dealer trying to develop a clientele of hard-core addicts. It does this by offering protection to its clients, something like a safe place to shoot up, shielded from the police or other junkies. This safe place is created by paired genes—called an addiction module by Villarreal—that the virus inserts in the bacterial genome. One part of this pair (called the toxic gene) is destructive, killing all entering foreign bodies at will. If this gene was left to its own devices, it would destroy everything, including the host bacterium’s genome itself. So it is paired with a counterpart (the antitoxic gene) that confers immunity to the host. This simple opposin
g pair—aggressor and protector—provides a way to distinguish, even in the most basic organisms, self from nonself. If something is “self,” coming from the host’s own body or genome, the antitoxic gene allows it to reproduce. If something is nonself, a foreign invader, the toxic side destroys it. It’s easy to see why the bacterium, or indeed any other organism, would get addicted to this product pushed on it by the viral parasite—without it, any number of invaders, including the virus itself, could destroy the bacterium.

  The story would end there with bacterial addicts if it wasn’t such a good system these viral pushers set up. When biological systems emerge with an idea that works, it gets made again and again. Sometimes the idea is replicated exactly; thus we humans have major components of our genome (especially those vital to survival) that are nearly identical to goats and fiddler crabs and even those earliest viral parasites. But often times, good ideas are merely mimicked, taking on different forms for different organisms in different environments, even as they maintain the same basic function.

  A way to detect self from nonself is one such really good idea in biology. Nearly all organisms benefit from such a system. It allows them to identify who is likely to share their interest in producing common offspring and who is likely to disrupt that chain of genetic descent. It allows them to distinguish who to school with and who to swim from, who to eat and who to eat with. Even below the level of organisms, self–nonself identification is essential. In species where females mate with multiple males, the seminal fluid around the males’ sperm has evolved to protect its own sperm and destroy the sperm of a rival male.8

  As organisms get more complex in their behaviors, they need ways to identify potential mates and potential enemies. They need ways to assess a competitor’s intentions. They need ways to make friends and influence others. Villarreal argues that the same basic addiction system—a system that confers simultaneously both protective and destructive powers—fulfills all these complex needs of biological organisms.

  Take the suicidal salmon. Young salmon cue into the precise chemical cues in their home stream. Then they make their way out to sea, traveling thousands of miles over two years or more, before returning to the precise part of the same stream in which they were born, in order to mate. While they may navigate by ocean currents and stars and magnetism in their open water phase, what gets them back to that precise stream riffle where they were born is the smell. Salmon possess a remarkably effective chemical-sensing organ called a vomeronasal organ (VNO). Villarreal argues that the VNO system is the same type of addiction module as the toxic/antitoxic gene pairs in viral-bacterial interactions. Indeed, a VNO system is another one of those evolutionary success stories that gets replicated in animals as different as salmon, snakes, and shrews.9

  For salmon, a sense of self and a sense of place are inexorably linked. Any particular salmon is literally defined by its home stretch of stream. In the salmon’s VNO system, home-like smells are intensified in the system and honed in upon, and non-home-like smells are rejected and effectively ignored. As a result, the salmon will relentlessly target their home spot, past anglers’ hooks and gaping sea lion jaws and enormous concrete dams with their artificial fish ladders as a small (and only partially effective) concession to the salmons’ unyielding will. What we admire as the incredible determination of the salmon is exactly the nature of self-identity addiction. The high threshold of acceptance into the “self ” category ensures that only the most fit will survive and reproduce. This addictive system, by the time it appeared in its particular form in salmon, already survived billions of years of relentless natural selection. What are some scattered predators or concrete barriers in relation to that track record?

  Like the salmon VNO, our own behaviors have driven us to do remarkable things. Our behaviors allowed us to cooperate in complex ways and form strong groups, bonded for life. In small, clever groups whose members had a deep intimacy and mutual understanding and specialized in different tasks, we pulled through any number of forces—predation, bad weather, changing climates—that could have easily wiped out our weak and nearly naked bodies.

  For salmon, group survival comes in part from a common set of olfactory cues that urge the fish to simultaneously migrate to natal rivers and spawn. But humans don’t have such a great sense of smell. The popularly bandied idea that invisible pheromones control our behavior, not to mention the endless iterations of supposed pheromone products purported to “drive women wild with desire,” appears to have little backing in olfactory science.10 While smell plays a subtle and not completely understood role in human mating,11 smells don’t play the dominant outward role in human identity. That is because higher primates and humans essentially turned our VNO systems off. The genes that form the VNO system are still there, but they don’t get activated. Those genetic changes have obvious outward manifestations. Have you noticed, perhaps while walking your dog, that we humans don’t scent mark or eagerly sniff one another’s nether regions when we run into a friend on the sidewalk?

  But we do mark territory; just look at the graffiti scrawled across the walls in the tough neighborhood where Luis Villarreal grew up. That written marks were substituted for scent marks is a clue to the force behind our current sense of identity. Written symbolic language, which recent reexamination of the earliest cave paintings suggests may date back, not three or four thousand years, but perhaps as long as 30,000 years,12 is a uniquely human attribute and one that codifies our identities—especially our group identities.

  Written language has a key role in codifying religious beliefs. As Villarreal points out, the word literate originally meant “one who can read holy scripts.” Not only are religious beliefs often spelled out in written tomes, but religious myths also contain curious references to written materials. God doesn’t just tell Moses the Ten Commandments; he gives them to Moses in written form on stone tablets. And when Moses grows angry with the Israelites for their idolatry, he smashes the tablets as a symbol of the broken bond between the Israelites and their one true God. The deference to written scripture goes beyond Judeo-Christian religions as well. A well-respected Japanese Shinto group, Oomoto, was codified in the late nineteenth century when Deguchi Nao, a supposedly illiterate housewife, suddenly had a vision that she transmitted into calligraphy that she scrawled across the walls of her cottage.13 This is not to say that nonliterate cultures can’t develop religious beliefs, but rather that written language provides a powerful symbolic shorthand for ideas that defy observable natural phenomena.

  Defiance in the face of observable evidence is something that continually baffles outsiders trying to understand behaviors of individuals in tightly bound human groups—be they scientists trying to debate creationists or CIA agents trying to understand why someone would blow himself up for a cause. The rationalist-evolutionist deftly dismantles the structure of creationist theory with a few pieces of devastatingly incontrovertible evidence, but then can’t understand why the school board (freshly stocked with evangelical Christians) votes to “teach the controversy” in her daughter’s public school. People coming from this rationalist perspective tend to think that the resistance to rational testing of ideas is a weakness of religion—when in fact the opposite is true. Religious beliefs, perhaps more than other human belief systems, function well as a strongly addictive system because they substitute symbolic group identification for any type of rational-based test of group fidelity. The core ideas of religious conviction are universally true to believers and will remain so as long as adherence to religious laws is maintained, regardless of what some egghead scientist or analyst says.

  Indeed, the high bar of irrational thought associated with most religions is a selective force that increases the strength of the belief system through time. Stream reaches that require salmon to make large leaps of gravity to get home and religions that require large leaps of faith for acceptance into the sect both enrich their populations with individuals that are especially capable of making these leaps.
In part, this is an example of “honest” or “costly” signaling as discussed in Chapter 7—there is no bluffing your commitment to the group if you will injure or kill yourself on its behalf.

  Joseph Henrich argues that in humans, the value of such costly signaling is reinforced by language and a complex mind.14 That is, I can use words to trick you into thinking I’m a member of your group, and I can do it without much cost to myself (talk is cheap). But you know I can do this, so if you really need to trust me, you’re going to need something more than words. Actions are much harder to fake, and they require a real cost, which could be time (the pre-teen studying for her bat mitzvah), physical pain (American Indian sun dances where the young initiate is held to a post in the hot sun and subject to ritual piercing), or even ostracism from another part of society (polygamist sects that require women to dress in antiquated costumes and keep their hair in decidedly unfashionable styles).

  An important corollary to the costly signaling hypothesis is that it does more than just confirm the identity of an individual to the group. Rather, individuals that engage in costly behaviors for a group serve as recruitment tools to attract new members. And among existing members, costly behaviors encourage those with only weak commitments to strengthen theirs and become more deeply involved. Both ancient Christians and modern radical Muslims have been recruited to these groups after witnessing acts of martyrdom by avowed group members.15

  HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PUZZLE LIKE RELIGION?

  Just because they are deep-rooted does not mean belief systems are necessarily locked in forever. Certainly, we’re able to trade more primal evolutionary signals for modern ones. That is why a short, nearsighted, balding weakling, who would have been an evolutionary dead end in our hunter-gathering days, may still find a fine mate, especially so if he drives a Ferrari. If a modern human female can calculate that the resource-gathering ability of the Ferrari driver may make up for his obvious physical weaknesses, so too can a modern Israeli or Palestinian realize that coming to the negotiating table with an eye to the future rather than to the insults of the past will lead to a much better future than engaging in escalating acts of violence. A modern jihadist can recognize that continuing his education, learning new skills, and getting a mainstream job will give him a far better chance of propagating his genetic code than committing an act of martyrdom. Still, many do not, and it would help to understand why they do not.