Scientific creation and the evolution of religious behavior

Abstract

The continuing campaign to substitute the myth of ‘Scientific Creationism’ for the teaching of biology in the public schools ( ‘Creationism’, 1982 ; Hailman, 1982 ; Murphy, 1982 ; Wood, 1982 ; Jukes, 1984 ) has focused public attention anew upon the importance of religion in political behavior—and vice versa. The present paper begins with a consideration of some aspects of the judicial politics of scientific evolutionism, and then examines the scenario of human evolution inferred by modern biological evolutionary theory. Particular attention is given to the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals (including humans of themselves: Schubert, 1985a ) approximately 11,000 years ago, and to the cognitive significance, for humans, of the presence of other animals. Earlier creation myths are examined with special emphasis upon the Sumerian-Hebraic-Christian-Moslem versions featured in Genesis, and upon their relationship to biological evolutionary theory. The third major section of the paper discusses several evolutionary models of religious behavior, including representative ones from the respective perspectives of primatological ethology, cultural anthropological neurobiology, and physical anthropological hominid evolutionary theory.