The Evolution of Conscience
Posted 02 June 2010 by DominicI recently returned from an amazing conference on the Evolution of Conscience in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The idea that conscience might be an evolved trait was originally proposed by Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871), in which he suggested a conscience gave humans a crucial moral compass to navigate our complex social world (as in H.L. Mencken’s notion that “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking”). If Darwin was right, conscience is just a product of natural selection like eyes and ears. It appears that the gathering in Santa Fe, 140 years on, was the first ever conference to focus on the origins and role of conscience in human evolution.
The meeting was organized by anthropologist Christopher Boehm, biologist Jeffery Schloss and archeological anthropologist Paul Wason (with terrific help from Lilija Oleaga), and attended by a remarkable group of people representing numerous disciplines including theology, philosophy, primatology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and evolution. The gathering was threatened by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano and generously funded by the Templeton Foundation.
The conference showed that conscience is a tricky concept that means rather different things in different disciplines. Evolutionary psychologist Dan Fessler, for example, argued that there is no such thing as “conscience” per se, but rather a collection of evolved traits and emotions that collectively lead to adaptive cognition and behavior (in the right context), but colloquially lumped together as conscience. It also highlighted numerous ways in which conscience could and should be studied, from phylogenetic history (Jonathan Turner), to primatology (Frans de Waal), ethnography (Polly Weissner), experimentals (Dan Fessler), to neuroscience (Kent Kiehl), and mathematical models (Jessica Flack), among several others.
My own interest in conscience is that it appears to offer a rival alternative to the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis. If conscience provides us with a self-judging “inner voice” that steers us through the minefield of our socially transparent world, then why would we need a supernatural actor to keep us on the straight and narrow? I will tackle this problem in an upcoming article, but the crux of my argument is that: (1) an “inner voice” requires theory of mind and language, and may thus merely be another form of “supernatural agent”; and (2) they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—perhaps the evolutionarily ancient cognitive architecture of conscience is the vehicle by which religion gains traction in altering our beliefs and behavior. The interaction of religion and conscience may be the critical problem to explore.
The evolution of conscience conference in Santa Fe was one of those meetings that just worked brilliantly because of its sheer novelty, interdisciplinarity, free-thinking, and small group format. The discussions chewed up our preexisting assumptions about conscience and spat out not a consensus, but some consilience. The conference will lead on to a conference proceedings setting out that state of the art on what we know about how the conscience may have evolved, its evolutionary function, and its foundational importance for human morality and religion.
Posted in Meetings, Religion | No Comments »