Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

People look at the universe around them, and they feel overawed. It's so big, so incomprehensible -yet it seems to dance to a tune. People who grow up in a culture -especially one with a lengthy history and a well-developed set of techniques for making buildings, planting crops, hunting animals, building boats -immediately recognise that they are faced with something that is far greater than they are. Which immediately raises all the big philosophical questions: where did it come from, what's it for, why am I here? And so on.

Imagine how it must have seemed to Abraham, one of the founding fathers of Judaism. He was probably a shepherd, and he probably lived in and around Ur, one of the first true city-states. He was surrounded by the icons of simple-minded religions: gold-plated idols, masks, altars. He was wildly unimpressed by them. They were trivial things, small-minded. They did not begin to measure up to the awesomeness of the natural world, and its stunning power. Additionally, he was aware that 'something' much bigger than him was running that world. It knew when to plant crops and when to reap them, how to tell whether rain was on the way, how to build boats, how to breed sheep (well, he would have known that bit), how to have a prosperous life. Even more: it knew how to pass all this knowledge on to the next generation. Abraham knew that his own tiny intelligence was nothing compared to this majestic something. So he reified it, and gave it a name: Jehovah, which means 'that which is'. So far, so good, but then he made a simple but intellectually fatal error. He fell for the trap of 'ontic dumping'.

Nice phrase. What does it mean? Ontology is the study of knowledge. Not knowledge itself, just its study. One important way to firm up new knowledge is to invent new words. For instance, when you make an arrow, someone has to produce the sharp pointy thing that sits at its business end. They chip it from flint or cast it in bronze; either way, you can't go on forever referring to it as 'the sharp pointy thing on the end of an arrow'. So you cast around for a metaphor, and you remember that the thing that sits at the business end of a person or animal is called its head. So you invent the term 'arrow-head'.

You have now dumped the knowledge of what the flint or bronze gadget is into a name. We say

'dumped', because for most purposes you don't need to recall where the name came from.

Arrowhead (no hyphen) has now become a thing in its own right, not a property possessed in relation to an arrow.

The human mind is a storytelling device, a metaphor machine: ontic dumping comes naturally to creatures like us. It's how our language works, how our minds work. It's a trick we use to simplify things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. It is the linguistic analogue of a political hierarchy as a way for one person to control millions. As a side effect, ontically dumped words wallow in associations. We are seldom conscious of these, except when we occasionally stop and ask something like 'What on Earth does "gossamer" mean?' Then we rush off to the dictionary and discover that it probably (no one ever knows these things for sure) comes from

'goose summer'. What's that got to do with fine threads that float on the breeze? Well, in a summer when geese abound, a good summer, you find a lot of these fine spider-silk threads hanging in the air ...

Subconsciously, though, we are all too aware of the dark associations several layers down in the ontic-dumping hierarchy. So words, which ought to be abstract labels, are smeared all over with their own (often irrelevant) stories.

Abraham, then, was overawed by 'that which is', and he ontically dumped it into a word, Jehovah. Which quickly became a thing, indeed, a person. That's another of our habits, personifying things. So Abraham made the tiny step from 'there is something outside us that is greater than ourselves' to 'there is someone outside us who is greater than ourselves'. He had looked on the burgeoning extelligence of his own culture, and before his eyes it turned into God.

And that made so much sense. It explained so much else. Instead of the world being like it was for reasons he couldn't understand -even though that greater something clearly understood it perfectly well -he now saw that the world was like that because God had made it that way. The rain fell not because some tawdry idol rain-god made it fall; Abraham was too smart to believe that. It fell because that awesome God whose presence could be seen everywhere made it fall.

And he, Abraham, couldn't hope to understand the Mind of God, so of course he couldn't predict when it would rain.

We have used Abraham here as a placeholder. Choose your religion, choose your founder, adapt the story to fit. We're not saying that we know that the birth of Judaism happened the way we've just explained. That was just a story, probably no more true than Winnie-the-Pooh and the honey.

But just as Pooh in the rabbit-hole teaches us about greed, so Abraham's ontic dumping points to a plausible route whereby sane, sensitive people can be led from their own private spiritual feelings to reify a natural process into an unfathomable Being.

This reification has had many positive consequences. People take notice of the wishes of unfathomable, all-powerful Beings. Religious teachings often lay down guidelines (laws, commandments) for acceptable behaviour towards other people. To be sure, there are many disagreements between the different religions, or between sects within a given religion, about points of fine detail. And there are some quite substantial areas of disagreement, such as the recommended treatment of women, or to what extent basic rights should be extended to the infidel. On the whole, however, there is a strong consensus in such teachings, for example an almost universal condemnation of theft and murder. Virtually all religions reinforce a very similar consensus of what constitutes 'good' behaviour, perhaps because it is this consensus that has survived the test of time. In terms of the barbarian/tribal distinction, it is a tribal consensus, reinforced by tribal methods such as ritual, but none the worse for that.

Many people find inspiration in their religion, and it helps instil a sense of belonging. It enhances their feeling of what an awesome place the universe is. It helps them cope with disasters. With exceptions, mainly related to specific circumstances such as war, most religions preach that love is good and hatred is bad. And throughout history, ordinary people have made huge sacrifices, often of their own lives, on that basis.

This kind of behaviour, generally referred to as altruism, has caused evolutionary biologists a great deal of head-scratching. First, we'll summarise how they have thought about the problem and what kinds of conclusion they have reached. Then we'll consider an alternative approach, originally motivated by religious considerations, which looks to us to be far more promising.

At first sight, altruism is not a problem. If two organisms cooperate, by which in this context we here mean that each is willing to risk its life to help the other [53] There doesn't seem to be a good word for 'to be altruistic'. To altru? , then both stand to gain. Natural selection favours such an advantage, and reinforces it. What more explanation is needed?

Quite a lot, unfortunately. A standard reflex in evolutionary biology is to ask whether such a situation is stable -whether it will persist if some organisms adopt other strategies. What happens, for example, if most organisms cooperate, but a few decide to cheat? If the cheats prosper, then it is better to become a cheat than to cooperate, and the strategy of cooperation is unstable and will die out. Using the methods of mid-twentieth-century genetics, the approach pioneered by Ronald Aylmer Fisher, you can do the sums and work out the circumstances in which altruism is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The answer is that it all depends upon whom you cooperate with, whose life you risk your own to save. The closer kin they are to you, the more genes they share with you, so the more worthwhile it is for you to risk your own safety.