Back to the Future Evolution of the Human Species

One way to view the teachings of Jesus is with an ‘evolutionary’ lens. And a popular reason for rejecting (or misreading) Jesus is that his teachings fail to promote ‘normal’ human evolution, understood in basic terms like 1) survival, 2) competition, 3) fitness, and 4) reproductive success.

For example, the idea of “suicidal empathy”. The claim is that, in an evolutionary context built on survival and competition, empathy toward others (especially those outside one’s own ‘group’) is disadvantageous to one’s own survival (or of one’s own group). There are lots of problems with this view, but I’m trying to maintain a narrow focus on Jesus for now. Some Christians who hold this view reject (or reinterpret) certain things Jesus says because Jesus seems to advocate for the very kind of empathy that might qualify as “suicidal” from the ‘normal’ evolutionary perspective. So we end up with a kind of brute utilitarian calculus: survival (of ‘our’ people) is good; (too much) empathy (toward ‘other’ people) might jeopardize survival; therefore (too much) empathy (toward ‘other’ people) might not be good and might even be bad.

Jesus never really says, “Don’t survive.” But he says a lot of things about aligning our lives with God’s love without fear of the consequences to our own survival. “Love your enemies.” “Turn the other cheek.” “Do not resist an evil person.” “Bless those who persecute you.” “Pray for those who hate you.” And of course Jesus’ own example of renouncing violent resistance against his own unjust arrest, false imprisonment, corrupt prosecution, and violent execution. With regard to our own personal bodily survival, Jesus teaches and models the dictum of Socrates that “What matters is not life but the good life.”

The early church history of (and, to some extent, celebration of) martyrdom confirms that this is the lesson that those historically closest to the life and teachings of Jesus took away from his example. Peter says “Suffer for doing what is right,” even to the point of shedding blood, which tradition says he in fact literally did. We might also point to widely accepted practices like refusal to serve in the military, or to adopt coercive legal procedures (backed by the threat of state violence) as legitimate avenues to God’s justice.

So, if I grant that following Jesus qualifies as “suicidal empathy” does that entail that following Jesus is anti-evolutionary? Perhaps it does, in the sense of ‘normal’ evolution. But what if Jesus represents a paradigm shift in human evolution, away from ‘normal’ evolution and into something more evolutionary adaptable? From the perspective of ‘normal’ evolution, a radical revolution in our understanding of human evolution would appear to us ‘normies’ as alien, insane, other-worldly – a revelation of a reality we could not have anticipated or foreseen. How could it not?

And this is what Jesus represents – such a decisive break from everything that had previously been assumed to be true of what it meant to be human that humanity’s ‘natural’ reaction is to oppose, vilify, and silence the messenger by whatever means necessary, especially public rejection by both religious and political authorities, leading to shame, dishonor, ostracism and execution.

But how does the way of Jesus fit the evolutionary model of adaptability for fitness to survive, especially in light of the fact that he neither survived nor reproduced? C.S. Lewis argues that Jesus radically transforms the evolutionary notions of human survival and reproduction from ‘natural’ or biological to spiritual. The evolutionary way of Jesus is an adaptation of greater fitness for the survival of the human soul, not the body. And one advantage of this adaptation is that it is no longer dependent on genetic inheritance via sexual-biological reproduction.

In some ways, if we can think beyond the limits of ‘normal’ evolution, this is what we might logically expect as the next level of human evolution – not mere adaptation to survive as a biological species on an exclusively mono-planetary scale, but adaptation to survive as a spiritual species on a trans-planetary or cosmic space-time scale.

This is a view often expressed by early Christians in different ways. I like this version from Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215): “the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.”

But not all Christians, and certainly not all non-believers, are on-board with such a radical revolutionary development of human evolution. So I think it can also be helpful to ‘re-incarnate’ the way of Jesus back into the context of ‘normal’ evolution. If possible to do so, then even those seemingly most unlikely to acknowledge the moral or spiritual authority of Jesus can still become ‘disciples’ of Jesus to some extent, even in an exclusively non-religious and explicitly evolutionary way. It’s not the whole picture of Jesus or evolution, but it is probably better than nothing.

As an aside, my motives for making this argument to my non-believing fellow humans is not purely altruistic. I’m somewhat selfishly motivated by the desire to receive their empathy. If someone is convinced that evolution requires that they deny me empathy, then it behooves me, as someone in need of their empathy, to convince them otherwise – if only to promote my own survival. If I can convince them that, to the contrary, evolution requires that they lavish empathy on all humans equally, then a by-product is that I will also be a beneficiary of their empathy.

So, how do the teachings of Jesus function as pro-evolutionary adaptations, even in the context of ‘normal’ evolution?

Stay tuned for next time.