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Edward Jayne
February 21, 1992

If God has played nothing more than the initial role in having launched the existence of the universe, there is no way to prove it one way or another. The notion limiting God's intervention to such a preliminary act of creation--nothing more than an unmoved mover in the words of Aristotle--constitutes what old-fashioned positivists such as myself have argued is a matter of "pseudo-statement" dependent on belief rather than observable fact.1 We may suspect that nature's intricacy and certain miraculous events demonstrate God's existence, but we are unable to prove it, since the only viable manifestation of God's intervention--His act of creation--is now in fact entirely absent except for what has been created, which just might have been produced by an entirely different agent, for example nature itself.

What facts may be adduced to prove God's role in having launched evolution? Try submitting a grant proposal in physics, astronomy, geology, biology, archaeology, or physical anthropology to prove such a beginning, and see how far it gets you. And rightly so. As the astronomer Laplace once argued, God's existence wasn't essential in the universe he was proposing. The grand transition that now seems to be taking place from the Big Bang maybe 15 billion years ago to a "super-crunch among Black Holes maybe 70 billion years from now--essentially a passage from sheer energy to sheer mass involving a grand dialectic between the two at every level of interaction (within stars, on the surface of planets, etc.) seems to be moving along quite well without the perceptible intervention of a presumably superior power with anthropomorphic authority. Nor in fact is the notion of a divine being essential to the theory of biological evolution. Of course God may be construed as a final cause additional to everything else, whereby all except God would need to be confirmed by hard data and God's final authority can be accepted on faith. Contrary to Ockham's razor (or law of parsimony), God himself--a potentially superfluous ingredient--would be added at a new and more inclusive scale to augment the story told. But if everything already told completes the story, God's hypothetical involvement becomes entirely superfluous.

So how could the miracle of life begin in a godless universe? All that seems needed, really, are nitrogen, the right assortment of inorganic carbon compounds, and an abundance of water within a temperature range that more or less lies between freezing and the boiling point. The rest can happen spontaneously as an evolutionary process that occurs over hundreds of thousands of years. The famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiments established that an electric charge such as lightening could have produced in the primordial ooze the simple amino acids that provide probably the most basic building blocks of life. What happened between such an event maybe 3.9 billion years ago and the advent of blue algae nobody can entirely explain, but it took almost two billion years alone for the eukaryotic cell to evolve with a nucleus and its magic ingredient, DNA, and this in turn probably originated in an RNA "world," and, before that, an "iron-sulphur" world as described today by Wächtershäuser and others. The explanation remains highly speculative at this point, but it seems that under sufficient pressure and with sufficient heat levels a "nucleotide soup" a mile or two beneath the earth's surface generated a prebiotic "stuff" that evolved into archaea, a sufficient amount of which clung to magma well enough to be thrust into the ocean through deep hydrothermal vents located for example in the mid-Atlantic rift valley. All of a sudden (in geological time) there was an incipient mode of life at the bottom of the ocean, whereupon Darwinian competition came into play, producing evolution first under water, later on land and in the air.

But this was a very major step. Once the eukaryotic cell had established itself as coded by DNA, all the more advanced forms of life could evolve from it through mutation and genetic drift steered by natural selection. It seems everything biological derives from eukaryotic DNA, and our entire family tree may be "mapped"--such, for example, that grass and fungi may be identified as distant cousins of mammals, of primates, and therefore of humanity inclusive of Newton, Einstein, and most all the rest of us. And some of these species are very close cousins--much closer than we realize. It has been estimated that not more than a 1 or 2% genetic difference as coded by DNA exists between man and the chimpanzee. According to some, there is less than a 1 percent difference; according to Morris Goodman of Wayne State University, it is more likely a 1.6% difference.2 Whatever the exact amount, this difference is smaller than between a chimpanzee and gorilla, and it seems to have resulted from gene flow and evolutionary drift punctuated by relatively few genetic mutations--according to Gribbin & Cherfas as few as six, according to Goodman as few as eight. Incredibly, these half dozen mutations played a major roles in differentiating the 6 billion ATCG DNA segments within the cell's nucleus of a human being from those of a chimpanzee. Between 5 and 10 million years ago (according to the recent theory of Sarich and Wilson, as few as 4.5 million years ago), our ancestors diverged from their primate cousins, but any good recombinant geneticist a couple decades from now will probably be able to patch together our respective DNA identities, producing artificial people with monkey genes and artificial monkeys with human genes. And I'm sure it will be done sooner or later.

So what's so special about the human being? Why do we enjoy such an important status in God's eye--"chosen" creatures more punishable and/or rewardable, for instance, than any of the rest of his animal kingdom? In fact, our role in the universe is very marginal. Try this for arithmetic: if, for the sake of argument, the average size of the human being is less than three cubic feet, the current population of the world, around 5.3 billion people, displaces at most 16 billion cubic feet of dirt (or water, or sky). And if the total human population of the world since the very beginning is not more than double our present population (we are reproducing that fast!), this means that everybody in the world since the celebrated Lucy 3.5 million years ago would displace not more than 33 billion cubic feet of dirt (water, or sky)--seemingly quite a bit. But how much of a cubic mile would this fill? The dimensions of a cubic mile are in the neighborhood of 147 billion cubic feet, more than four times the displacement of our total human population! In other words, if a hole were dug a mile square and 1,200 feet deep, it would be big enough to contain us all, all the way back to Lucy, once packed together like sardines in a can.

Contrast this quarter of a cubic mile with the incredible size of the universe. There are over two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone (our own private galaxy). Countless millions of galaxies like the Milky Way fill up bigger clusters, and, in turn, countless millions of clusters fill up even bigger super-clusters. We can only speculate how many of these superclusters exist, or whether they, too, belong to bigger and even more inclusive groupings within the universe itself. And for all we know, the big bang that spawned this infinitude of constellations exists only as one spark among an infinitude of such sparks (or big bangs), each of them exploding, then cooling as its energy converts to mass in a shower of superclusters, clusters, and galaxies. Of course the big bang we are still trying to understand might have been a one-shot extravaganza (or "singularity"), but I'm betting on a vast field of sparks--a million billion points of light. Whatever one wants to speculate about the universe beyond the range of what has already been disclosed by modern telescopes, it seems absurdly disproportionate to think of a personal sky god having created such a vast firmament primarily to cultivate and pass judgment on one-quarter of a cubic mile! Especially as declared in the Bible, which does not even begin to acknowledge this immensity, to say nothing of the DNA miracle and everything known today in the various scientific disciplines. The anthropomorphic hubris of such a presumption frankly astonishes me. Whose watchmaker god, blind or otherwise, would toss together this much matter that hardly matters to support an infinitesimally tiny speck of organic aspiration (the quarter cubic mile mentioned above) that does? And once having done so, why would such a god would so totally botch its explanation in his effort to communicate exactly how he did it to his unhappy chosen people in the opening chapter of their Bible specifically dedicated to this information?

So how did we come by our unique and precious souls as opposed to the limited cortical activity of the animal kingdom? I would argue that the difference is no less quantifiable than astronomy, since the human brain comprises an electrical circuit of at least 100 billion neurons wired together by axons and dendrites comprising an average of 10,000 synapses per neuron--all of which function to support conscious thought in steering us through life as effectively as possible. We may only guess, for example, how many hundred million brain cells discharged or not in providing the neural matrix expressive of Christ's most relevant question just before he died why God had forsaken him. Perhaps most of his brain cells kicked in, perhaps only a few, but sheer quantity seems to have been essential to the adequacy of Christ's idea formulated as a spoken question with a subject, verb, and direct object. In other words, consciousness is quantifiable with even the most desperately transient utterance. The more neural interaction that occurs, the better and more adequate the idea. In strictly behavioral terms, in other words, quantifiable soul = I.Q., and humanity possesses more of it than the rest of the animal kingdom 3. Why? Bigger brain size seems the answer--more brain cells to fire or not fire in their microscopically intricate circuitry. True, elephant brains exceed human brains in size, but not proportional to their body size. Then again, the brains of humming birds are bigger to absolute body size than human brains, but far too small to be competitive relevant to consciousness on an absolute scale. Combine the two variables--absolute brain size and brain size relative to body size--and the human brain is truly unique, capable of language and mathematical calculations.

Granted, Van Valen and others have found at best a 30% correlation between I.Q. and the total brain mass, but based on lobe surfaces instead (which average more or less 1.5 square meters), the correlation is undoubtedly higher, and based on the all but impenetrable thicket of dendrites that cluster within these surfaces, if and when these may be quantified, the correlation, I am confident, would be most significant indeed 4. And certain portions of this thicket would probably be more important than others, for example in the brain's prefrontal region as compared to other regions elsewhere. In other words, the denser this thicket where it matters, the more profound our souls! It may be conceded that both Einstein and the late Duke of Windsor possessed abnormally small brains, but if their brains could have been microscopically dissected, I am confident that a high positive correlation would have linked their intelligence with superior capacity susceptible to numerical analysis, whether measured by their grey mass, dendrite number, lobe surfaces, or total electrical output (i.e., their cumulative neural action potential frequencies). Or perhaps by all of these in combination. Somehow, somewhere, improved cognitive performance in both people and animals derives from increased magnitude in the size, shape and function of the brain. In comparisons among people this correlation might seem arguable, but in comparisons between people and other primates, or mammals, or less advanced creatures (insects, for example), the correlation is undeniable.

The brain-size differences between men and women provide an exception to prove the rule: (a) brain size alone in absolute terms provides evidence of superior intelligence among men, but (b) brain size proportional to body size provides evidence favorable to women. Each gender predominates in one of the two categories, and the two average out to possess roughly the same level of intelligence. The best exception to prove the rule is provided by porpoises, which seem to have brains roughly as big as ours in both categories, but not in the region of the neo-cortex. So the neo-cortex is apparently where it's at--the soul, I.Q., or whatever you want to call it. Lots of neo-cortex wired by neurons and thicketed by dendrites: lots of soul.

How did the human neo-cortex ever get so big? It seems by accident. When dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, smaller hairy nocturnal species suddenly flourished, including mouse-like tree shrews that evolved into monkeys. As monkeys grew bigger (because increased body size has certain obvious advantages in the survival game, as to be observed in dog fights), they could no longer run along the tops of branches but needed to swing beneath, becoming perhaps 15 million years ago the so-called brachiators with opposable thumbs for grabbing and swinging amongbranches. These species in turn evolved into the even bigger semi-arboreal species, including gorillas, chimpanzees, and our pre-hominid ancestors, all of whom could take advantage of the opposable thumb in holding objects such as food and even sticks. Without four legs they could no longer run as fast, but this was more than compensated for by this ability to grab and not let go. And of these ex-brachiators it was only our ancestors, the pre-hominids, who completely descended from the trees, stood erect, and became bipedal (or "terrestrial"), walking on their hind legs, thus altogether liberating their hands at the cost of fast locomotion.

This unique advance to bipedalism--shared by no other living creature--took place approximately 3.7 million years ago, and for perhaps the next million years our prehistoric ancestors walked on their hind legs without much of a brain (perhaps 500 cc). But then a marvelous thing happened, and it happened very suddenly as compared to the total history of life on earth. In the next couple million years the brain almost tripled its size at what seems to have been almost a cancerous speed--supposedly the fastest evolutionary development in the entire history of life on our planet. No other animal organ is known to have evolved more rapidly than the human brain! Freakishly, our ancestors' brains grew to maybe 1,350 cc., big enough to accommodate the eductive skills we associate with human intelligence as opposed to the brute intelligence of animals.

How could the brain grow so fast? Very probably because of the unique and accidental advantages of bipedalism. Only people and birds walk on their hind legs, but birds (cousins of the dinosaur) developed wings instead of hands very soon in their evolution, so most of their biology has been devoted to flight instead of the benefits of exotic neck-top dendritic circuitry. As a result, we homo sapiens are the only creatures adapted to walking continuously on our hind legs with our heads located directly above our legs, with hands instead of paws or feathers at the end of our forelegs, and with enormous brains to guide the use of these limbs. It is universally accepted today among physical anthropologists that bipedalism preceded the enlargement of the human brain; what I think will eventually be recognized is that bipedalism not only preceded this growth, but played a singularly important role in causing it. Here can be listed some of the potentially important advantages of bipedalism for the development of the brain in our hominid ancestors:

1. Fully liberated by bipedalism, as already suggested, hands benefited those the most who best figured out how to use them. Intelligent hominids with hands possessed an enormous advantage at the expense of their dull-witted cousins that continued to scurry about on all fours. Clothes became possible, and tools and weapons. Also, social cooperation became easier. People could work together--they could push and pull together and pass things back and forth. Hands became a kind of IQ test rewarding superior intelligence that best took advantage of their use.

2. Because of mankind's erect posture, the vocal tract seems to have been modified to produce a bigger variety of sounds beneficial to those who could best organize them in language, thus more easily participating in cooperative endeavors. Again, the use of utterances that could ultimately be combined in words and sentences provided a kind of IQ test rewarding superior intelligence that best took advantage of their use 5.

3. The olfactory centers of the brain atrophied because bipedalism lifted mankind's noses too high off the ground to be of much use, creating more available space in the skull for the development of the neo-cortex. Also, the visual centers of the brain could be emphasized, since increased height and binocular vision gave the eyes a more important role. As with both hands and words, the ability to visualize bestowed an obvious advantage.

4. As a result of walking on two legs instead of four, adjustments could occur in the pelvis of the female, making possible a wider birth canal for the passage of infants with bigger heads, as proposed by Owen Lovejoy. Running became more of a task, but this was more than offset by the capacity to give birth to babies with larger brains.

5. An infant's brain could continue to grow after its birth since its skull did not need to be as thick and strong at birth. Why? Partly because neck muscles could be smaller in supporting a head directly above the body instead of hanging in front of it; also because the jaw bone and its muscles could be smaller, since the hands could serve both to cook and tear food, thus reducing the need for heavy chewing. Perhaps most important of all, the diminished need for leverage in both the neck and jaw muscles attached to the skull permitted an open suture at the top of the skull in new-born infants for a sustained period of time after their birth. Called the fontanel ("soft spot"), this gap makes possible the expansion of the skull bone, ultimately letting the brain expand to four times its size after birth, far more than for any other species. This potential expansion has been essential in the advancement of human intelligence beyond the level otherwise possible because of the size limitations of the birth canal. Because of an enlarged birth canal, the human infant could be born with a larger brain, and because of the fontanel the brain could continue to grow even larger. Both advantages derived in combination from bipedalism.

6. And last but not least, babies could be born at an earlier stage in the growth of their brains, when they continued to be much more helpless, because of the more effective care by parents with both hands and a higher I.Q. A baby horse can walk almost as soon as it is born; a human baby requires at least eight or nine months of growth before it acquires this ability. Loving parental care bridges the gap. 6

Quantitatively, how do all these changes benefit the human brain as compared to those of chimpanzees and gorillas? As compared to a new-born chimp's brain, which must be two-fifths its adult size at the time of birth, the new-born human brain can begin only one quarter its adult size, then grow to approximately 1,350 grams (from 3 to 4 pounds), more or less 1/50 of its body size. In contrast, the adult chimpanzee's brain is limited to 400 grams, 1/150 of its body size, and the adult gorilla's brain is limited to 540 grams, 1/500 of its body size. In other words, the human brain ends up more than three times the size of the chimpanzee brain and more than twice size of the gorilla brain. Proportional to its total body size, it benefits from a brain/body ratio three times as much as for chimpanzees and almost ten times as much as for gorillas.

Needless to say, bipedalism's six potential benefits for brain growth listed above are of variable importance, and some are more clearly demonstrable than others. The use of hands, for example, has been of obvious benefit, while the importance of pelvic changes and the relationship of the fontanel to jaw and neck muscles remains highly speculative. Nevertheless, the overall impact of these six evolutionary benefits, all of which derive from bipedalism, continues to be of major importance. Except for birds, the human being is the only species to exclusively walk on its hind legs, and this is crucial importance in our singular advance in evolution. Birds of course sacrificed this advantage to the ability to fly.

But what about social evolution? Didn't this play a role in the growth of human intelligence? Undoubtedly it did, and its impact should also be taken into account. However, the study of the group behavior of chimpanzees and gorillas indicates that human socialization probably thrived at a primitive level well before both bipedalism and the evolution of the brain, and archaeological evidence indicates that the major advances in socialization we can take for granted today began well after the brain ceased its rapid growth between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, near the beginning of the Würm (or Wisconsin) Ice Age. The supposition might even be entertained that advanced socialization eventually capped the evolutionary growth of the brain through the establishment of dysgenic social institutions that have significantly impeded the dynamics of natural selection that had once benefited individuals with bigger and better brains to a much greater extent.

What I am suggesting here is that bipedalism set the stage for increased brain capacity, that increased brain capacity permitted an augmentation of intelligence, and, at least until the end of the most recent ice age, that intelligence and increased brain capacity have since reinforced each other in human evolution through feedback whereby each of these benefits encouraged the development of the other. Bigger and more intricate brains have accommodated higher intelligence, and higher intelligence has rewarded the possession of bigger and more intricate brains. If the Neanderthal brain (bigger than ours) did not favor the neocortex, its displacement was adequate for the necessary adjustments to occur. And in fact such adjustments did occur. So just by walking on their hind legs, our ancestors have sprouted gigantic and maximally functional brains proportional to their bodies--as might very likely happen for dogs and cats, too, if they could grow hands instead of claws and engage in vertical mobility for at least a couple million years. After which, they would likewise sport high I.Q.'s and all the concomitant moods and uncertainties that add up to soul in more obviously human terms.

Again the possibility is to be conceded that a personal god might have bestowed his special grace on our quarter of a cubic mile of the universe without at all disclosing his identity except through sheer belief among the faithful. No doubt about it--an all-powerful god can, if he pleases, hide his role well enough to elude scientific verification, yet be jealously insistent that we all believe in his presumably magnanimous existence. Such a clever and demanding trickster might in fact reign in our universe, as suggested by Descartes' concept of god as being nothing more than a malicious demon. But I don't know why. Nor can I vest any belief in such a creature. To me such a conception seems preposterous, perhaps mildly (even dangerously) paranoid. If in fact such a god does exist, somebody should try to bring him to his senses.

"But without some kind of a god, sane or insane," the believer asks, "who could have created the universe and launched the evolution of mankind?" To which one replies by asking, "Who, then, first launched such an all powerful god?" And when the believer replies that the god he believes in always existed, one answers that it is even easier to attribute this immortal status to the physical universe itself devoid of any godhead. "But who imposed order on the universe and gave us a purpose in life?" the believer persists, to which one replies with the question, "Who, then, granted your god this special capacity to bestow order and purposefulness?" And when the believer replies that god possessed this capacity in the first place, one replies that such a rational potential may likewise be attributed to the universe itself devoid of godhead since the very beginning. How? No problem at all if creation is traced from the bottom up rather than the top down, and with an emphasis on flux and stasis as opposed to patriarchal edict. As the big bang's eruption of sheer energy converts into mass that ultimately dissolves and voids itself by means of proton decay (something's conversion to nothing), flow congeals into a proliferation of structures with amazing complexity based on relatively simple physical laws and finally into a terminal sheer mass exactly the opposite of sheer energy at the very beginning. Entropy entails the transition from one to the other, and life consists of the struggle of particular modes of existence (mankind for example) to resist this transition through an acceleration of this transition for other modes of existence (fried chicken for example). Nevertheless, the best that may be obtained in this effort is a postponement of entropy through the more rapid submission to this process for others.

Think of how a water drop crystallizes as a snowflake, or, better yet, how an almost frozen-over stretch of rapids during winter becomes a magnificent cascade of emerald pools held by ice dams with stalagmite and stalactite overlaps, funnels and flow surfaces. Such an ice palace can be admired in its entirety for its unique and intricate aesthetic harmony, yet calculated based on just a few principles of slope, velocity, temperature threshold, etc. In much the same fashion sub-atomic "logic" differentially replicates itself at the level of molecules, and this logic in turn differentially replicates itself in molecular superstructures a tiny portion of which evolved into carbon compounds, the eukaryotic cell (with its double-helixed DNA logic) and then into all the eukaryotic-derivative organisms inclusive of humanity as stirred by our dendritic brain-ridden logic, the biggest, craziest and most extravagant of all. From the very first instant in the creation of the universe the entire process has been evolutionary, and the latest stage ironically boils down to the evolution of DNA based on the potential survivability of the individuals its code produces. Just as life depends on its DNA to perpetuate itself, its DNA depends on biology to perpetuate itself, and at every level of accomplishment. It's the DNA that gives us orders, not the other way around. Thus our neural intentionality as a mental equivalent to physical and biological inertia--thus our gods, myths, and fantasies, and thus our absurd sense that we possess a soul that transcends the universe in which we live.

So the argument persists. For in fact all the proofs of god's role are readily answered, as summarized in the eight articles in the monumental Encyclopedia of Philosophy listed under the seemingly affirmative entry, "God, Arguments for the Existence of." Yes, a God might indeed exist as an agent of human destiny, but there is no rational argument to demonstrate His influence. God's role, if he exists (and he might), is entirely elusive--somewhere out there hiding behind a cloud--a very special cloud that I, for one, choose not to believe in. If soul = I.Q., I consider religious belief (soul's effort to assert its unique identity impervious to nature) to consist of tired I.Q., timid I.Q., I.Q. that ought to know better.

All this is blasphemy, I realize. But the oppressively simplistic belief system of organized religion seems no less blasphemous at the expense of human intelligence as exercised by the best thinkers in Western tradition since Thales and his pre-Socratic successors who first risked proposing an explanation of the universe at odds with received orthodoxy. Science and philosophy have brought us a long way--we can do better today than the curious notion of an intrusive personal god.

Footnotes

1. Of course even facts must be accepted on a tentative basis, dependent on what John Dewey has described as their "warranted assertibility." But that any particular fact survives the brunt of intensive empirical investigation justifies granting it this provisional veracity until proven otherwise. In contrast, most religious doctrine today totally eludes verification, protecting it from the fate of all the flat-earth assumptions linked with religion in earlier centuries.

2. John Gribbin & Jeremy Cherfas, The Monkey Puzzle: Reshaping the Evolutionary Tree--A Major Scientific Revision of the Theory of Human Origins and Development (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 15. Morris Goodman is quoted in The Washington Post Weekly of May 15, 1990.

3. More accurately, soul = mental capacity as measured by I.Q. For both emphasis and brevity's sake I shall hereafter be describing this capacity as I.Q.

4. L. Van Valen, "Brain size and intelligence in man," American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 1974, 40, 417-23.

5. Research on how bipedalism influenced human speech is thoroughly summarized in Elaine Jayne's unpublished paper, "On the Speech of Neanderthal Man: A Reconstruction of his Vocal Tract," written under the supervision of Dr. Robert Sundick.

6. See Donald Johanson and Maitland Edy's Lucy: The Beginning of Mankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 325.