A recent poll asked about people’s general belief in (human) evolution, and tallied the results by popular vote, grouped by country. A few media outlets have picked up on this, including

• Slashdot
• Pharyngula
• The New York Times
• Fox News

Naturally the crux of the article was the lay of the United States in next to last place, prompting Slashdot’s title of “Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans”. The author of the second article, Dr. Myers, sites 3 “obstacles” blocking a general American acceptance of evolution.

Here are the three proposed obstacles to a full acceptance of evolution:

1. Belief in evolution is inversely correlated with religious beliefs and prayer habits. And there are many more religious conservatives in the USA than other nations.
2. Since the idea of creationism has become politicized by the republican party, the poll results could be swayed by politicization.
3. Genetic literacy in the US is low. i.e. people have no comprehension of basic genetics or evolution to begin with. So why would they believe in a thusly foreign idea?

This growing split between political parties is also mirrored in terms of the religious versus atheists. In fact I think the main finding from the poll, and the point of Myers’ article, is that many people who believe in God fundamentally believe in an inherent mind-body dualism. Accordingly I would not expect many atheists to believe humans contain immaterial souls, nor the religious to believe reality is the sum of matter and energy.

I am inclined to believe that the apparent “two belief” system of evolution and religion results from a combination of a layman understanding of biology and the depth of thought devoted to religious inclination. I hypothesize that on average, Americans have a poor and in fact flawed understanding of biology and evolution (compared to other countries) and has expended minimal effort reflecting on personal reasons for their religious and/or spiritual devotion. Thus without reflection, people are left to make their decisions based on beliefs that are currently popular.

Unfortunately the religion-evolution and dualist-materialist correlations overlap excessively. This is quite disappointing since I do not believe religion and acceptance of proven biological facts provide necessarily mutually exclusive reality models 1.

I think religious beliefs are entertained for two core reasons: to provide a black-box (i.e. nonpredictive) explanation for the phenomenon of human consciousness; and to supply the “mystery science” or metaphysics of the inherent mind-body dualism connecting every individual human to an immortal, immaterial spiritual consciousness. It follows that one would be inclined to reject the notion of human consciousness as the product of organic evolution if you held a dualistic view of reality. On the other hand since the lay person has such an incomplete concept of biology, then it is a natural and rational decision to adopt the black-box religious explanation for consciousness by default. If biologists wish to educate the religious community about evolution, this latter subset is needy indeed.

The personal beliefs of such people might be influenced more by one or the other of the following two points, depending on whether he/she has a basic proper biological education in the first place.

1. Belief in divinity or an afterlife introduces a conflict between current scientific theory of evolution (read: from the apes) and having a “soul” whereas any other species living on earth does not. Suppose you believe in evolution already. Then if humans really do have a soul and there is no material-spiritual duality in the universe, the soul is a product of organic natural evolution on the planet Earth. I would bet no rational person believes this. So if humans do not really have a soul, all our complexities such as consciousness and advanced civilization are the product of evolution. That’s all, folks. So the problem gets pushed to generalization number (2).
2. People do not like to extrapolate when it comes to biology. By this I mean that in general people are uncomfortable thinking about the fact that biology provides an evolution of emergent phenomena such as complex body plans, genetic and environmental robustness, and consciousness, and that we could simply be a product of this evolutionary emergence on planet Earth.

In the end, the evolution/soul dichotomy observed in the poll putatively came about because either people on average are not yet capable enough to picture themselves as the product of a natural evolutionary process and need a God figure to explain away all the oddities and current unknowns of reality, or the concept of a soul does not fit well with the current model of reality, namely materialism.

But this unfortunately obscures the most interesting part of being a smart, thinking, rational human in the early twenty-first century. Instead of pointlessly and harmfully arguing the former (as most media outlets like to do), I suggest that the latter concept is the relevant object of scrutiny. Why should evolution and varied notions of spirituality be mutually exclusive? Is it absolutely not possible for both concepts to be true? Is it possible that humans and (possibly other species) have evolved consciousness as the result of natural and/or artificial selection?

Here I propose a materialist reality model (actually a few options) for spiritualists that smoothes the wrinkles between religion and evolution. However it assumes the organic life did arise from non-living organic molecules, by natural processes.

I’m sure many of you will think this is pure silliness, but suppose, as some biologists now do, that there is life on other planets in the universe. Some take the next step and claim that life on Earth originated as an event of panspermia, i.e. life previously existed on other planets and some event (asteroid collision or an intelligent alien seeding experiment) thence introduced life on Earth, at which point our concept of “natural evolution” began. Defining natural selection as the process of organic evolution on Earth, then any such panspermic event is an act of artificial selection. This is just by definition, no big idea here. The point is that there are many possible points during the history of life on earth where an artificial selection event have occurred. Hell, we do it all the time now with almost every living species in every ecosystem.

I suggest three possibilities for a real and purely materialistic history of life, under the assumption of a panspermic event.

1. A pseudo-microbial life form landed on Earth a few hundred million years ago. This event began the evolution of life on Earth, which led up to human consciousness and civilization, to present time 2. Most recent panspermic event: dawn of life.
2. An intelligent extraterrestrial agency seeded the Earth with pseudo-microbial life form that was genetically engineered to code for consciousness, hundreds of millions of years in the future. Most recent panspermic event: dawn of life.
3. The Earth teemed with life either by a spontaneous pre-biotic–biotic critical event (i.e. either the RNA-world or metabolic world hypotheses), or by the aforementioned microbial panspermic event. Evolution took its course, leading up to the chimpanzees and other apes. Then, an extraterrestrial conscious agent (with understanding beyond current human limits), deliberately altered or accidentally experimented with the course of ape evolution, either by manipulating their genetic code, or by providing novel challenges for the species in order to stimulate their cognitive development3. One such interference event provided the means for the evolution of all that has become humanity. Most recent panspermic event: 6 million years ago (human-chimp split) or 10 000–20 000 years ago (foundation of civilization).

One first glance I would probably scratch option (2) immediately, due to an apparent lack of parsimony. If some super-intelligent alien wanted to play around with life on Earth and wanted to see consciousness evolve, then why wait a couple eons for the end result? Well, perhaps they are working on implementing a new type of information theory or genetic compression technology. In addition super-intelligence probably has the patience of eons. So on second thought this idea does not seem too outlandish.

In addition to these three variants of the theory of panspermia, we have the obvious theory of spontaneous generation implied by every purely materialistic theory of the origin of life. Life must be able to derive from non-life. Above I mention current popular theories, the so-called X-world hypotheses. The RNA-world hypothesis states that the first living thing was based on RNA molecules. The DNA-world hypothesis (not particularly popular as far as I know) states life has always been DNA-based. The metabolic-world hypothesis states that a critical complexity of organic molecules evolved which created a self-replicating complex, that was the irreducibly complex unit of life.

So here things stand, with in my mind not one but four viable and equally possible theories of the origin of life. These theories presuppose very little except for a focus on organic life. Two of them suppose life did not arise first on Earth, but all suppose life did arise from non-life.

This meme may have ventured unexpectedly from a seemingly-harmless political poll towards the origin of life, so let me summarize the point. Americans are divided on the issue of evolution, despite overwhelming evidence proving its existence and influence of all Earthly life. I propose that this poll (as well as common dialog among people) is deceptive in that evolution and religious belief in are inherently compatible at least in a purely materialistic model of reality.

The aspect of materialism problematic for religious people is the seeming uniqueness of human consciousness. Yes, it is commonly hard to believe that such a trait evolved naturally. One reason people turn to religion is to explain this very phenomenon. We are the only self-aware organisms on Earth, thus someone smarter than us must be responsible for our deliberate creation. It is a pity however that many people, instead of integrating religious beliefs with those of evolution, simply decide to believe in religion over the immense theory of biology (and thus briskly refute biology, often instead clinging to alternative ideas such as intelligent design).

I propose that we all simply consider and weight all possibilities compatible with our current wonder of consciousness. Above I proposed a few such materialist models. Consciousness is a trait of organic life derived down the millennia from organic pre-biotic soup (i.e. consciousness derives from matter). The pre-biotic soup was either on Earth or some other planet. This soup spawned intelligent life that is either us, or some other life that came to Earth and influenced the course of evolution, effectively creating us. Praise be to aliens!?

Now, this meme explicitly prohibits any dualistc tones. Thus I might only satisfy one subset of people who, through religion, celebrate the spirit of humanity and human consciousness. However I have not touched upon the idea that the rest of the religious adhere to, which is the belief that each human possesses an immaterial soul that transcends the physical, material universe. Here the possibilities become endless, since this is a largely unexplored realm of science, which many suggest (or forcibly assert) is inherently non observable and thus nonscientific.