Wade’s jumping-off point was chimpanzees, asking why humanity’s closest living cousins have not evolved much since their species split some five million years ago even as humans have changed dramatically merely in the last 50,000 years. His explanation is culture, which evolutionists have only recently taken seriously. They’ve learned that culture can feed back into the genome, “accounting at least in some part of the vast differences between people and chimpanzees.” Moreover, evolved humans are “vastly preferable—kinder, more prosperous, less warlike, less profligate of the environment and more knowledgeable.” With the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times, war deaths reached 15 percent of the population, compared to war deaths of 1 percent even in a horrible century (the twentieth).
“Such substantial and fairly steady progress cannot have been directed by evolution, a blind and largely random process with not a flicker of interest in human welfare,” writes Wade. “Surely the only possible origin of progress is human choice.” Early humans in small groups needed rules to restrain individual self-interest for group survival to preserve individual survival. These rules “likely” have a genetic root, which accounts for morality at its “core” being “very similar in every society” but their development and significant differences are based on culture. The similarities are rules against murder, theft, and incest and a general belief in “do as you are done by.” Even Charles Darwin found the latter principle “the foundation of morality.”
Hunter-gatherer religion developed to provide more effective restraints than force, since even the strongest leader was easily overwhelmed by several offended men. The fear of gods and spirits effectively restrained attitudes that were hostile to group survival and solidified the in-group against outsiders, who often were not viewed even as human. Religion provided the “primal glue” that unified these groups and prepared them to survive. Roman emperors even took the title pontifex maximus, meaning chief priest as well as emperor, and all bureaucracies probably started in temples. As the late Samuel Huntington reminded us, religion still defines the line between the major civilizations.
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