The Sacrifice of One's Own Children: Abraham and Isaac

In my blog post from 1/2/2011, Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict, I described a biological rationale for why, under some circumstances, people are not only willing to sacrifice their own lives for their kin or ethnic group, but to sacrifice the lives of their children as well. How else to understand such diverse phenomena as mothers gladly sending off their sons to war or even to be suicide bombers, female infanticide in China, and so-called honor killings in the Middle East?

The later is especially strange - fathers or brothers kill their own daughters/sisters because they have besmirched the family honor, usually through some sexual transgression - even if involuntary! Women who have been raped can suffer this fate.

The mass appeal of the Jesus story, in which God sacrifices His only son in order to save mankind from the fires of hell, is probably due to this characteristic tendency of human beings. 

In the Old Testament, there is another widely cited story of the willingness of a parent to sacrifice a child. It is the story of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of his faith. He is about to do the deed when God tells him he does not have to.

An interesting sidelight to this story is that in almost all artwork that depicts this incident, Isaac is portrayed as a little boy. This can be seen in the painting at the top of the post. Not so! I was surprised to recently learn that, in fact, most Biblical scholars believe, from other things in the Bible happening around the same time, that Isaac was about 37 years old!

Abraham was supposedly over 100 years old at this time, so Isaac could have undoubtedly overpowered him. What this means is that Isaac must have been just as willing to be sacrificed as his father was willing to sacrifice him. Self sacrifice and the sacrifice of children often go hand-in-hand.

The idea from evolutionary biology that covers this willingness, kin selection, is often criticize by many in that field due to what I believe to be a misinterpretation of the phenomenon. Indeed, it is quite true that many people are not willing to sacrifice themselves or their children at those times when most of the people within their peer group are. The willingness to follow the herd into sacrifice is an inherited biological tendency, not a mandate.

Group pressure to be willing to sacrifice can indeed be very powerful - often leading resistant individuals to an almost overwhelming sense of terror known as existential groundlessness or anomie as described in this post. This does not mean, however, that everyone simply must go along. The thinking parts of the brain can choose to ignore their fears and can override the biological tendency to follow the kin group.

People who resist the herd are often in danger of being attacked or even killed themselves from others from within their group who condemn their independent ways. People may give in to these threats, but they can also stand up to them even at great peril. 

Where does such courage come from? That is an interesting question, and I do not think we know the answer.

Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict

In my new book, I pose the following question: "If people are basically selfish and our biological imperative is to survive in order to pass down our genes to future generations, how do we explain the willingness of so many people to die for their country or their clan in a war? Throughout history, hundreds of thousands of men have marched headlong and almost without flinching into enemy spears, arrows, gunfire, and bombs, all the while watching their friends and comrades killed or maimed right beside them...

Mothers who send their sons off to war are also honored. In the United States, women whose sons die in war are hailed as 'Gold Star Mothers'... The idea that maybe one should not always be willing to do that was rarely questioned on a large scale anywhere in the world until wide-scale opposition developed to the Vietnam War in the United States in the mid-1960’s."

I go on to explore a theory which may explain the paradox of humankind's willingness towards self sacrifice and the sacrifice of their own children (for example, honor killings in the Middle East, and female infanticide in China) through an evolutionary biological concept called kin selection: "Darwin actually addressed this issue. At first the characteristic of altruism, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the seeming good of one’s ethnic or kin group, seemed to him to be at odds with his theory of natural selection.

He then realized that this paradox would disappear if he changed his focus from the individual with a good genetic adaptation to the group to which the individual belonged. A single individual with a genetic mutation that is highly desirable and adaptive may still die before reproducing. If a group such as a family, a herd, or a tribe has many individuals who share the adaptation, then the propagation of that gene becomes far more likely."

This could lead to a situation in which genes that predispose individuals to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the kin group, and which cause the kin group to be willing to sacrifice individuals, would be more likely to survive and be passed down from one generation to the next and therefore selected for.

So a tendency towards self sacrifice for the good of the tribe may be in our genetic loading. A lot of evolutionary biologists do not accept the concept of kin selection primarily because they worry it might be used much like the concept of eugenics was in the last century - as an excuse for killing off the weakest members of society. (Some of today's legislators do not seem to need such an excuse). Nonetheless, the potential misuse of a scientific concept is not proof that the concept is invalid.

Now comes some new data which might lend further creedence to the concept of kin selection: (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html?_r=2&emc=eta1).

Oxytocin is a hormone which does a number of things, such as helping cause the contractions of the uterus which expel a fetus during birth. It is also commonly found in the brain, where it has been found to be central to the process of attachment between a new mother and her new baby. As the New York Times article explains, "This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more."

Oxytocin

Well, not trust everyone, as it turns out: "The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism." In an ingenious series of experiments, Dutch psychologist Dr. Carsten K. W. De Dreu found that Oxytocin may "...create intergroup bias primarily because it motivates in-group favoritism and because it motivates out-group derogation.”

The author of the New York Times article describing the experiments raises another interesting question, and gives Dr. De Dreu’s answer: “Early religions were also involved in establishing group cohesion and penalizing offenders. Could oxytocin be involved in the social aspects of the religious experience?” Dr. De Dreu sees oxytocin’s effects as being very general, and no more likely to be associated with the religious experience than with soccer hooliganism. ‘When people get together with others who share their values, that drives up the level of oxytocin,’ he said.”

Still, I often wonder why so many people are so ready to profess to believe transparently and obviously preposterous religious dogma. Perhaps that is a price they are willing to pay in order to maintain in-group status and group togetherness.