Notes

1. . The interdisciplinary character of evolutionary theory has existed from its beginning when several areas of geological and biological sciences in the nineteenth century contributed to the formulation of the evolutionary picture. In the twentieth century, with significant new developments from the chemical, physical, and astrophysical sciences to illuminate the evolutionary picture from the more physical levels of analysis on the earlier side and significant new developments from the psychosocial and humanistic disciplines (especially early were contributions from the study of language) to illuminate human development and cultural evolution in more recent levels of emergence, the modern pictures of the phylogeny and ontogeny of man are truly interdisciplinary. An interesting testimony of this is given by the astronmer Eric J. Chaisson in his “The Scenario of Cosmic Evolution,” first published in Harvard Magazine 80 (November‐December 1977): 20–33 and with minor changes republished as “Cosmic Evolution: A Synthesis of Matter and Life” in Zygon 14 (March 1979): 23–39. Chaisson, after illustrating the range of disciplines involved in understanding human evolution, in his last paragraph provides an excellent summary in which he indicates that the “philosophy that we are the product of cosmic evolution [is] very much an interdisciplinary approach, interweaving knowledge from virtually every approach, interweaving knowledge from virtually every subject a university can offer.” For a different but relevant discussion of systems theory see H. Sodak and A. Iberall, “Homeokinetics: A Physical Science for Complex Systems,” Science 201 (1978): 579–82.
2. . Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). In his glossary, on p. 595, he defines “sociobiology” this way. In chap. 1 he defines the term more fully. I use the terms “altruistic behavior” and” altruism” also to designate the kind of behavior which is defined in Wilson's glossary more operationally or objectively than in Webster's dictionary. Wilson's glossary defines altruism as “self‐destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others.” This avoids specifying just what is the self that is destroyed. As will become clear from this paper, I limit the self‐destruction to the phenotype but exclude the genes, which some writers include (I think mistakenly) in their definition of what is risked in altruistic behavior. I would include more behavior than the above definition by Wilson, namely, all behavior that even risks some probability of self‐destruction.
3. . C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1961), esp. p. 131.
4. . Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969), esp. p. 25: “A man, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself.”
5. . S. L.Washburn, “Human Behavior and the Behavior of Other Animals,” American Psychologist  33 (May 1978): 405–18.
6. . Donald T. Campbell, “On the Conflicts between Biological and Social Evolution and between Psychology and Moral Tradition,” American Psychologist 30 (December 1975): 1103–26 (reprinted in Zygon 11 [September 1976]: 167–208).
7. . Ibid., p. 202.
8. . Wilson (n. 2 above), p. 379.
9. . Ibid., p. 362.
10. . Ibid., pp. 354, 356–58.
11. . George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). This is perhaps the classic American statement of the problem, clearly arguing and documenting with evidence that the currently established model or view of how natural selection works does not allow for selection of groups within an ecological niche. See esp. p. 95 for the pithy statement of the main point: “The natural selection of alternative alleles can foster the production of individuals willing to sacrifice their lives for their offspring, but never for mere friends.”
12. . Wilson (n. 2 above) provides details on various aspects of the genetic problems and potentialities for producing altruism. See p. 120 for “reciprocal altruism.”
13. . Williams (n. 11 above), pp. 246–47, points out that for the symbiotic mutualisms, such as the termite and its intestinal symbionts, “the selection of alternative alleles can simply and adequately explain the origin and maintenance of such relationships.”
14. . Alfred E. Emerson, in “Ecology, Evolution and Society” (American Naturalist 77 [1943]: 117–18), his 1941 presidential address to the Ecological Society of America, gave some pioneering analyses of interspecific cooperative communities, where he found populations from several species operating as an ecosystem so closely adapted and effectively coordinated as to warrant being called a supraorganism. In numerous earlier and later papers (e.g., n. 20 below) he provided a wealth of detailed evidence on the coadaptation of the genes and correlated phenotypic structures and behaviors of several species to constitute such an integrated interspecific living system. My many discussions with him were a prime source of my hypothesis of the sociocultural organism as a truly independently selected species to account for human altruism, after Campbell had led me to take Williams's taboo on group selection seriously. The recent discovery that human beings are themselves symbiotic systems is described in a fascinating, poetic form by Lewis Thomas in his The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking Press, 1974) in the chapter “Organelles as Organisms.” An earlier and more detailed summary of the explanation of such phenomena is given by Lynn Margulis, “Symbiosis and Evolution,” Scientific American 225 (August 1971): 48–57.
15. . Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). This is a lively and readable introduction for nonspecialists into the basic problem of the selfish gene and the big paradox of human altruism for sociobiology. For the term “idene,” the cultural analogue of the genotype's gene, we are indebted to Henry Alexander Murray's quip in a 1959 conference of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on “The Concept of Progress in Terms of Biological and Cultural Evolution.” Hudson Hoagland and Julian Huxley used “idea” deriving from Murray's use. For Huxley's statement see Nature 196 (1962): 203. Dawkins introduces “meme” in his last chapter.
16. . F. S. C. Northrop's “The Methods and Grounds of Religious Knowledge” was published as chap. 23 in his The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947) and was reprinted in Zygon 12 (December 1977): 237–88. The term “way of talking” I owe to Philipp Frank who commonly used this phrase when he sought to calm the antipathies of persons from different disciplines and ideologies when they were affronted by the seeming incredibility of terms used in the alien jargon. Frank's “ways of talking” may be a more simple and useful term than the “paradigms” of Thomas Kuhn, for whom he was a mentor, incidentally. For an insight into how a physicist's way of talking in no way diminishes the importance of subjective knowing or “speaking in the first person” see P. W. Bridgman, The Way Things Are (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), esp. the preface and introduction.
17. . Most of my papers since the early 1950s have been concerned with the role of religion in human cultural evolution and hence with religion's real function in biological and cosmic evolution; I was early educated to understand each successive stage of evolution as riding piggyback on all those prior to it. Most of what I have written have been referred to in three recent papers in Zygon: “The Human Prospect and the ‘Lord of History,” Zygon  10 (September 1975): 299–375;“The Source of Civilization in the Natural Selection of Coadapted Information in Genes and Culture,” ibid.  11 (September 1976): 263–303; and “What Does Determine Human Destiny?–Science Applied to Interpret Religion,” ibid.  12 (December 1977): 336–89.
18. . See n. 11 above.
19. . Dawkins (n. 15 above), esp. the last few pages.
20. . Alfred E.Emerson'sDynamic Homeostasis: A Unifying Principle in Organic, Social and Ethical Evolution” (Zygon  3 [June 1968]: 129–68) contains on p. 141 his reference to his analysis of the concept of “supraorganism” published in 1952. He developed the notion in many papers describing the essential cooperation of members of several species whose interactions were difficult to distinguish from that of an organism and none of which could continue to exist without the contributions of the others. A recent summary of his position appeared in his “Tertiary Fossil Species of Rhinotermitidae…,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History  146 (1971): 245–303.
21. . Williams (n. 11 above) concurs in principle that natural selection of alternative alleles can account for symbiotic cooperation among species, even though it forbids selection of cooperative altruism within a species except for close family kin. But he does not seem to be so impressed as Emerson with the degree of complex organization possible through such coadaptation.
22. . The term “value core” of the culturetype is used here to indicate that certain information in culturetypes as well as in genotypes now is understood clearly to be more critical than other information where variability is more tolerable. In culturetypes the value core is designated properly as the more vital or sacred information, the alteration of which would lead to the breakdown of the sociocultural system; other patterns of the culture can tolerate much more variation. In general the religious information in a culture has this character of sacrality. Whether a cultural brother is a tinker, tailor, cowboy, or sailor is not critical for arousing attitudes of liking or disliking him; but whether he properly manifests the same morals and ideology may make for deep affection or extinction.
23. . Concerning the genetic coadaptation in ape‐men for symbiosis with the central or religious values of culturetypes, Hudson Hoagland long ago suggested that “the brain is first and foremost an organ of survival… by natural selection…. [Man's] unique psychosocial evolution has had a feedback on his biological evolution further to develop his brain…. The ability to form meaningful configurations that encompass large segments of the environment is a property of the more highly developed brains, and a good case can be made for the view that man's concerns with science, philosophy, political ideologies, and theologies are a reflection of a basic property of his nervous system to integrate extensive configurations relating himself to his environment.” The above words come from Hoagland's “The Brain and Crises in Human ValuesZygon  1 [June 1966]: 140–57) given at the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science summer conference on Star Island in 1964. See esp. pp. 153–55: “Some Religious Implications of Biological Knowledge.” A more recent IRAS paper adds to a long succession of papers on the role of genetically programmed characteristics of the brain in religion: Eugene G.D'Aquili'sThe Neurobiological Bases of Myth and Concepts of Deity,” Zygon  13 (December 1978): 257–75.
24. . Emerson (nn. 14 and 20 above) elaborated in many papers the exquisite detail of synthetic operations between two or more species in shaping the viable or adaptive behavior of symbiotic superorganisms.
25. . I think the papers published in Zygon and the work of hundreds associated with the formation and activities of IRAS and the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) demonstrate this possibility.
26. . Wilson(n. 2 above), p. 120.
27. . Noam Chomsky pioneered in showing the coadaptation between human languages and genetically structured brain patterns.
28. . Paul D.MacLean'sThe Brain's Generation Gap: Some Human Implications” (Zygon  ) 8 [June 1973]: 113–17) gives a good picture of the hierarchical and phylogenetic structures of the brain. The role of animal‐level ritual, which MacLean finds programmed in the lower or reptilian brain, was brought first to my attention on reading Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966).
29. . LawrenceKohlberg'sIndoctrination versus Relativity in Value Education” (Zygon  4 [December 1971]: 285–310) is illustrative of his development of the stages in human moral development. The close relation of man and chimpanzee has been demonstrated in a new way by studies in the evolution of macromolecules in the past couple of decades. See, for instance, Mary‐ClaireKing and A. C.Wilson, “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science  188 (April 11, 1975): 107.
30. . It is well known that the environment and the genotype in their interaction constrain the brain to present a more or less successful adaptive response to what under the circumstances is required for life. See Hoagland, for instance, in n. 23 above. Whenever the brain completely fails so to perform, nature's selection weeds it out and leaves on the scene only those brains that have been successful. Psychotherapists are also familiar with the fact that the same forces prohibit a brain that for any length of time produces a self‐awareness that denies the worth or hope for the future of the self. But in the evolutionary emergence of increasingly complex cultural transmissions of information to the brains of ape‐men the genetically programmed brain cannot be prepared to handle all the complex adjustments necessary to function in this way without help from the culture. The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky sensed this and expressed it in our conversations on many occasions and wrote of it in his “An Essay on Religion, Death, and Evolutionary Adaptation,” Zygon  1 (December 1966): 317–31, the publication of a paper given at the same 1964 IRAS conference referred to in n. 23 above. Dobzhansky, along with others, inferred from archaeological findings of human burials around 100,000 B.C. that religions already had begun to be a necessary and significant cultural institution for informing brains how to transcend what otherwise would seem to be man's fragmentariness, to provide some plausible source of meaning and hope as the consciously expanding horizons of man had to adapt to information that the genotype had never “been aware of.”
31. . IRAS conferences and Zygon papers have provided numerous papers by persons in different disciplines all reflecting the function of religious myths to alleviate emotionally destructive fears, none perhaps more graphically and authoritatively than Erwin Goodenough's “A Historian of Religion Tries to Define Religion,” Zygon  2 (March 1967): 7–22, another paper given at the above‐mentioned 1964 IRAS Star Island conference. Following Goodenough one can say that religious myths are the stage “scenery” or the culturally artifacted loci that define the stage setting on which we act out our lives. It is a different scene from what the untutored or unenculturated animal sees, for no genes can be selected to be adaptive for circumstances to which only culturetypes are being selected for adaptedness.
32. . I revert here to my scientific setting for life portrayed physically as a dissipative flow pattern. It comes out of the work particularly of I. Prigogine but was introduced to me by Aharon Katchalsky‐Katzir, whose “Thermodynamics of Flow and Biological Organization” was published in Zygon 6 (June 1971): 99–125. It is a paper closely related to J.Bronowski'sNew Concepts in the Evolution of Complexity: Stratified Stability and Unbounded Plans,” Zygon  5 (March 1969): 18–35. It is fascinating to contemplate that these living patterns in the dissipative flow streams of the cosmos have been made more stable than the biblical mountains which were symbols of eternity. This stability we now know is produced by the stable, continally replicated and selected memory patterns that provide homeostasis, or, as Emerson suggested, “dynamic homeostasis.” Some of these patterns as produced by DNA are hundreds of millions of years old, going back to times when the continents of the earth and their mountain systems were utterly different from today.
33. . Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1932).