Evolving God (Electronic book text)

ONE "Apes to Angels" WE HUMANS CRAVE emotional connection with others. This deep desire to connect can be explained by the long evolutionary history we shared with other primates, the monkeys and apes. At the same time, it explains why humans evolved to become the spiritual ape--the ape that grew a large brain, the ape that stood up, the ape that first created art, but, above all, the ape that evolved God. A focus on emotional connection is an exciting way to view human prehistory, but it is not the traditional way. Millions of years of human evolution are most often recounted as a series of changes in the skeletons, artifacts, and big, flashy, attention-grabbing behaviors of our ancestors. Medium-size skulls with forward-jutting jaws morph into skulls with high foreheads, large enough to house a neuron-packed human brain. Bones of the leg lengthen and shape-shift over time, so that a foot with apelike curved toes becomes a foot that imprints the sand just the way yours and mine do as we stroll along the surf. Crudely modified tools made of rough stone develop gradually into objects of antler and bone, delicately fashioned and as much symbolic as utilitarian. Caves, at first refuges for Neandertal hunters seeking shelter from hungry bears and other carnivores, become colorful art galleries when "Homo sapiens" begins to paint the walls with magnificent images of the animals they hunt. Stones, bones, and "big" behaviors like tool-making and cave-painting do change over time as our ancestors evolve, and much of what we can learn about these transformations is enlightening. But the most profound, indeed the most stirring transformations in the evolutionary history of "Homosapiens" involve what does not fossilize and what is only sometimes made tangible: belongingness. Belongingness is mattering to someone who matters to you. It's about getting positive feelings from our relationships. It's what you and I work to maintain (or what we wish for) with family and friends, and perhaps also with colleagues or people in our community; for some of us, it extends to animals as well ("other" animals, for we humans are first and foremost animals). Relating emotionally to others shapes the very quality of our lives. Belongingness, then, is a useful shorthand term for the undeniable reality that humans of all ages, in all societies, thrive in relation to others. That humans crave emotional connection is obvious in some respects. Most of us marry and live in families, configured either as parents (or a single parent) living with children or, more commonly worldwide, as multiple generations living together in extended family groups. We do things, both spiritual and secular, and by choice as well as necessity, in groups of relatives, friends, and associates. We write great literature and make great art based on the deepest emotions for those we love, or pine for, or grieve for. Who can linger over a superbly crafted love poem and doubt the depth of human yearning for belongingness? We "feel," rather than merely read or hear, Emily Dickinson's poem "Compensation": "For each ectatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour Sharp pittances of years, Bitter contested farth