Our Species' Fatal Flaw? - Review - book review

The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature. By Reg Morrison. Comstock Publishing, Ithaca, NY and London. 1999. ISBN 0-8014-3651-6. 286 pp. Hardcover, $27.

Some hypotheses are so audacious they nearly take your breath away. Heliocentrism must have sounded that way, five hundred years ago, with Earth spinning recklessly through space. Others include continental drift (while spinning recklessly, shifting beneath our feet), evolution by natural selection, the theory of relativity, and Big Bang cosmology. Reg Morrison's hypotheses may not be as grand as these, but they are just as audacious.

Morrison's book, The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature, will not be a favorite of the clergy. Lynn Margulis praises it in her foreword, and I can imagine Richard Dawkins's wry smile as he reads it.

Morrison uses wide-ranging research and well-composed writing to argue that spirituality is a generically determined trait, molded by natural selection to prevent our species from destroying the world. And not, as you might think, by providing us with the compassion to care and the wisdom to see and solve our problems. On the contrary, Morrison says, our "proud illusion" of being a special species, bearing God and religion's imprimatur, is a fatal flaw that will (pretty soon, actually) result in our own destruction, to the greater good of the world.

Morrison's arguments go like this: According to the Gaia hypothesis (which he buys into), Earth is a self-regulating superorganism. To prevent plague species like achaebacterial algae, rats, locusts, and humans from destroying their environment, evolution has built doomsday flaws into all these species. He describes how early in Earth's history some bacteria evolved the ability to capture the energy of sunlight and use it to put carbon dioxide and water together into glucose: the first photosynthesizing algae. Unfortunately for them (though fortunately for us), oxygen was a byproduct of this reaction. This oxygen was toxic to early life, and clouded the oceans with rust, which acted as a feedback loop to bring the algae populations crashing down.

Likewise, rodents have a series of physiological mechanisms which decrease their birth rates as they get crowded. These are hormonal and behavioral changes which prevent them from completely destroying their habitats. And we humans?

In his first two chapters Morrison describes a litany of human-caused environmental disasters, which with our exploding population mark us as a plague species. And what mole has natural selection planted in our genes, to prevent us from destroying Earth?

First, Morrison discusses growing and good evidence that complex personality traits have a strong genetic component. Is there a spirituality gene? Unlikely, but our tendency to fall back on mysticism, tribalism, and emotional answers to complex questions, like other such personality traits, is likely hidden in a number of places on our DNA. This inborn tendency to delude ourselves, and use ancient emotional responses when clear-thinking is better called for, has actually played a big part in our success. Combined with our intellect and the part cultural evolution plays in insulating us from our environment, this innate emotional tribalism has made us, in Morrison's words, "surely the most dangerous animal ever to walk the earth." And, "being primarily founded on and driven by mystical beliefs of one kind or another, human civilization represents not so much the triumph of the mind over the body as the triumph of the gene over gene-threatening rational thought."

Cults, astrology, mysticism, conspiracy myths all mark us, in Carl Sagan's words, as "significance junkies." These are our responses to an unpredictable and chaotic world. More than that, they are clear evidence of our tendency to delude ourselves. It is this delusion itself which, according to Morrison, in the coming decades will result in our own inevitable catastrophic decline. For while reason might convince us that we must drastically change our ways, to protect ourselves and Earth's ecosystems, our "proud illusion" will likely prevent us from acting reasonably.

While he brings wide-ranging evidence, creative thinking, and a very readable style to fundamental questions of humankind's past and future, Morrison's arguments are not all equally convincing. Still, this anodyne to our present epidemic of "spirituality" is a provocative and audacious book, deserving close reading and ongoing discussion.

Ken Parejko is in the Biology Department at the University of Wisconsin--Stout Menomonie Wisconsin.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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