Evolution of the Soul?

A Sacred Chain Story

As we’re closing in on publication date for The Sacred Chain, the PR has been ramping up. I saw today on Facebook that my local independent bookstore, Fables, starting running ads for the author event I’m doing with them in April. The charming town of Goshen does a thing called “First Fridays” when all the downtown shops stay open late each month. For that evening on April 5, I’ll be featured at Fables along with a local weatherman who has published a book of poetry called “The Weather Could Be Verse.” That’s pretty clever. If you’re in the area, stop by from 6-8pm and say hello.

Also, I went to Amazon today and looked up my book (which feels a tad narcissistic) because someone told me there is sample of the audiobook available through Audible. I haven’t heard any of that yet (remember my account of doing the narrating here), and I’m worried I might have sounded like a doofus. I thought that Audible and Amazon were the same thing, because I always see the option for getting an Audible version of books I’m looking for. But I didn’t find any audio clips there. However, I saw that The Sacred Chain is the #1 new release in their category of evolution audiobooks. That sounds pretty impressive! Before you’re too impressed, though, it appears that there are only six books total in the newly released evolution audiobooks category. Sounds like there’s a market ready to be developed!

Screenshot from Amazon today

I think the most interesting book news of the last few days, though, is that my publisher passed along a review than came out in Publisher’s Weekly. The publication is mostly geared for people in the publishing industry, I think. And no one knows who actually writes the reviews (well, I suppose someone knows). But whoever it was, they said some nice things about my book, like:

“Throughout, Stump marshals fine-grained textual analysis to convincingly frame the Bible as a divinely inspired text written by ancient people with very different scientific knowledge than today’s humans have.”

And:

“His logical and nuanced approach stands a good chance of reaching those struggling to find a meeting point between the natural and the supernatural.”

But of course you can’t write a review without finding something to pick at, so this reviewer claims, “He’s less persuasive on how souls evolved in humans, which he links to the development of bipedalism and language.”

Hmm… I thought this is my most persuasive part of the book! Did the reviewer really read the book?! If so, that doesn’t bode well for my own self-awareness. But an awful lot of the reviewer’s claim, and my own belief about my persuasiveness, depends on what you mean by the soul.

Let me back up.

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One of my favorite movies is O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in the Deep South in the middle of the Great Depression. In one scene, the main characters Everett, Pete, and Delmar are driving through the countryside when they stop to pick up a hitchhiker named Tommy who is carrying a guitar case. When they ask what he’s doing out in the middle of nowhere, he says that he had to be at the crossroads last night at midnight to sell his soul to the devil. That intrigued Everett, but horrified Delmar. The conversation ensued:

Everett: What’d the devil give you for your soul, Tommy?

Tommy: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar, real good.

Delmar: Oh, son. For that you traded your everlasting soul!?

Tommy: Well I wasn’t using it!

Besides being pretty funny, Tommy’s response sums up a common attitude toward souls: we might still have them, but we don’t think they do anything.

One of my favorite local musicians, Joe Baughman, has an album called Vestigial Soul. Have our souls become like an appendix or wisdom teeth—relics of a bygone era that have lost their purpose for today?

In the fourth part of the book I’m confronting what I’ve called the challenge of the soul. Part of the problem here is terminology. For lots of people like Delmar, the word soul has a distinctively religious connotation about the afterlife, as though that is its only function. I speculate a bit about an afterlife in the conclusion of the book, but in this section I’m more interested in the soul as “the real me” or “the self ” and how it affects our experience in the here and now.

I have to do a little philosophy here: We humans are not mere objects that are acted on by outside forces. We are also agents or subjects who are capable of acting because of reasons. We have a perspective on the world, we experience things through a distinct center of consciousness, we can think and reflect on our experience, and we can choose how to respond. The word mind is often used to refer to some aspects of this, but soul is a more encompassing term for the transcendent aspect of our existence that makes us more than machines.

So the challenge of the soul I’m addressing is this: how could the soul evolve?

Yes, I claim it comes through bipedalism (our ancestors learning to walk on two legs instead of four) and through language. For the details of that, you’ll need to read the five chapters in the part of the book that develops the argument. For a blogpost, I’ll simply say that standing up on two feet put a lot of things in motion: of course it frees our hands to do other stuff, like make tools; it turns us into long-distance specialists as we lost our fur, learned to sweat, and formed arches in our feet; but most crucially, it led to us cooperating more with other people.

One example of this is childrearing. If you’re a chimpanzee baby, hardly anyone but your mother touches you for the first six months of your life. Your mom moves mostly on four legs, so her back is a platform for you, and you can hang on to her fur. She goes about her life with you along for the ride. But if your mom is standing up and has no fur, you can’t hold on for long. So mom has to use one of her arms to keep you from falling, which drastically reduces her efficiency at things like foraging for food or climbing trees to escape predators.

So what’s a mom to do? She needs to be able to hand you off to someone else for awhile (can I get an amen from the moms?). Cooperative childrearing became a thing and drastically changed our way of life.

Sloan’s interpretation of cooperative childrearing

Language is one of my favorite topics to talk about [rimshot for the joke]. Everything living communicates, but we’re the only creatures that use a full symbolic language. Yes, I’m aware that whales have names for each other, that vervet monkeys have different calls for which predator is approaching, and that chimps can be trained to use some sign language. But there is something very different about language, and our lives are saturated with it.

I tell some stories about feral children who somehow managed to live in spite of being raised by wolves (yes, that really happened in one instance). If you don’t learn language when you’re young, it is very difficult to be ushered into that world later in life. But most telling for my response to the challenge of the soul is the account of Helen Keller, who lost both her sight and hearing at about a year and a half old. She could communicate only through gestures and grunts until she was seven, when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, began teaching her language by finger signing into Helen’s hand.

The story of her coming to realize that these signs meant something is remarkable. She had previously only had Pavlovian responses that formed through habit, but then something clicked. She realized the signs were symbols that stood for things—these things had names! That opened up her mind to the world we take for granted. She said in her autobiography,

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. . . . My inner life, then, was a blank without a past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

That sounds to me like she didn’t have a soul — at least if you mean it the way I’ve defined it. If you’re like the reviewer in Publisher’s Weekly and don’t find this persuasive yet, I ask you to read the book!