On evolving Gods, prehumans as food, and grammar’s impact on thought

[Joe Carillo]

This week we present three highly provocative readings: on how God has evolved from the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes in prehistoric times into the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; on a theory that the Neanderthals vanished as a species because modern humans butchered them for food; and on a recent scientific study showing that people who speak different languages indeed do think differently.

The first reading is Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom’s review in The New York Times of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, in which the author proposes that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration,” Wright says in his book.

Read Paul Bloom’s review of Robert Wright's The Evolution of God now!

NEW: Read “God, He’s Moody,” Steve Paulson’s interview of Robert Wright in Salon.com THIS WEBPAGE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE

The second reading is The Observer (UK) science editor Robin McKie’s report on a study recently published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about the jawbone of a Neanderthal showing telltale signs that the prehuman species were apparently butchered by modern humans for food—making our prehistoric forebears nothing less than cannibals!

Read Robert McKie’s “How Neanderthals met a grisly fate” in The Observer now!

And the third reading, “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?”, is a report by Lera Borditsky, Stanford University assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems, on the results of her study on these controversial questions: Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Her conclusion from data collected from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia: yes, people who speak different languages indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how they see the world.

Read Prof. Lera Borditsky’s report in “Dispatches on the Future of Science” now!