The publisher of Matthew Alper’s The God Part of the Brain, sent me a copy to review. The premise of the book is that spiritual consciousness (and therefore belief in God), is an evolved trait. Alper argues that our self-conscious awareness, and with it the awareness of our own eventual death, meant that humans would have lived in a state of constant dread unless there was something that could relieve us of the painful effects of that awareness. He suggests that spirituality – and the belief that we continue to live after death – is the palliative mechanism without which our species might not have survived.
It’s an interesting idea, and one that sounds right to me. Not every atheist would necessarily agree. As I recall, Michael Shermer had a slightly different take – I believe he suggested that religion was a way of “enforcing” acceptable rules of conduct necessary for group living. (I could be wrong – it is a while since I was at that talk.) Also I know that PZ Myers really doubts that religion is an adaptive trait. Still, I like the idea. Which is why I was so disappointed that this book doesn’t really make the case.
I was pretty much turned off the book from chapter 3 – “A Very Brief History of Time – which is a description of how we got here, from the big bang, through the formation of stars and planets, the possible way life may have started, and the subsequent evolution to the life we see today. It was a good idea to lay it all out like this, and it would be a useful read for someone not familiar with all the steps. It was let down by the numerous factual errors it contained.
My first “What?” moment occurred only four paragraphs in (page 26), where Alper explains Einstein’s E=mc2 equation:
What this essentially means is that if mass (matter) is accelerated to a high speed, it will become energy. Inversely, should energy be slowed down, it will settle into matter.
Which is of course nonsense. I can only assume that Alper thinks that since the equation includes the speed of light (“c”), this means matter has to be accelerated to a high speed (presumably close to light speed), to be converted to energy. But that is not what it means at all – “c” is just the ratio of conversion from matter to energy. You convert matter to energy by (for example) splitting an atom, not by speeding it up. (Also, how do you slow energy down? What does that even mean?) That had me shaking my head for a bit.
More serious, considering the premise of the book is to explain spirituality through evolution, was his rather startling errors in describing aspects of evolutionary theory. The explanations of natural selection were pretty good. But he goes off the rails on page 41 when he writes about punctuated equilibria:
Other times, a beneficial mutation emerges that is so dramatically different from its peers that a species can be transformed within a few generations…
He seems to be suggesting Saltation. But Stephen Jay Gould was very clear that he never linked punctuations to microevolutionary saltationism. The idea that massive evolutionary changes could come about in a few generations is clearly absurd, and is contra to just about everything else the theory of evolution tells us about small beneficial random mutations. All punctuated equilibria states is that there can be long periods with no evolution, followed by periods of relatively rapid change. But note “relatively” (perhaps fewer than 100,000 years for significant change) - not “a few generations”.
Then on the next page Alper describes genetic drift. Strangely he seems to think it occurs when members of a species migrate to a new area and are isolated from the rest of the species. While small populations are more prone to it, I’m pretty sure genetic drift occurs in all populations, and isolation from the herd is not necessary. But the major and I mean MAJOR error he makes here is in the example he gives for genetic drift – Darwin’s finches. But Darwin’s finches are an example of natural selection, not genetic drift. I actually read this section about five or six times to be sure this was what he was saying, it was so wrong. The errors in this section are so serious and basic that they really need to be cleaned up in any future editions. More to the point, it caused me to doubt the statements of facts and interpretations of data elsewhere in the book, when he was describing things I was less familiar with.
Most of the rest of the book is given over to numerous detailed logical arguments for why all traits must be evolved traits (all planarians turn to the light, all bees build hexagonal hives, all cats meow, etc). He makes a reasonable case although I found the writing style ponderous and repetitive. Unfortunately, although he makes a perfectly logical case to explain how God-belief could have evolved, he offers no actual evidence to support it. In fact you get to page 130 before he even promises that:
In the remaining chapters, I will provide … the most recent neurophysiological and genetic research that supports [the book’s] hypothesis.
But the rest of the book is mostly more of the same logical (and repetitive) arguments (planarians again, honey bees again), with virtually no actual experimental evidence. The most interesting part of the book, in my view, was the short section from page 136 where he describes the work of scientists (such as VS Ramachandran), that reveal an individual’s behavior can change in specific ways following the alteration of specific parts of the brain. In my view this section should have been longer, and with more references to the actual research. This brief section did actually seem to support the idea that “God” resides in a specific part of the physical brain and is not a product of any outside agency. (Paging Michael Egnor. Michael Egnor to the house phone.) Unfortunately it was too short and didn’t touch on the specific reasons Alper claims for the evolution of God-belief.
I really wanted to like this book, and I do think its main premise – that God belief evolved as a way of coping – may be true. But this book offers zero experimental evidence to support the case. The book might be useful to explain the widespread belief in God without proposing that God actually exists. But the factual errors in describing evolution need to be corrected before I could recommend it.