Tree: Evolutionary Biology & Nontheist Friends

Here's an overview of one possible way of thinking about evolutionary biology and nontheist friends, involving a kind of historicization of biological developments as I see them.

{For one definition, see the Wikipedia entry on nontheist friend. Although partly engaging a contemporary Quaker conversation, I think of this term in a broad sense}.

There are so many tens of thousands of generations that precede us - to the beginning of life 3.5 billion years ago - and a predisposition for people affiliated with even nontheism (atheism) not to engage questions concerning evolution. This is curious to me, perhaps because this seems to represent a significant disjunction between biological legacies and cultural ones, to use language I engage.


So, a quick sketch from my perspective vis-a-vis life and nontheistic (atheistic) friends:

In the Cambrian explosion some 530 million years ago, a little cordate creature developed, through evolution by natural selection, - perhaps something that could have been an ancestor of ours. (See Gould's "Wonderful Life" on the fossil finds in the Burgess Shale from the Cambrian).

65 million years ago, dinosaurs disappeared in the K-T extinction, but frog-size reptiles and squirrel-size mammals survived. (It was warm and there was food, even if it was dark for extended periods of time, is one main hypothesis).

7-5 million years ago homo sapiens emerged, standing upright.

About 60 000 - 100 000 all of our ancestors left Africa. (See anthropologist and geneticist Spencer Wells' research).

Language's emergence is lost in the depths of time and generations (although see Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of the Brain and Language" for an explanation of how the human brain got bigger due to articulation of symbols (his thesis)). 5500 years ago is the first evidence for the beginnings of writing.


There's lots of history to 1660s, when Friends (Quakers) started to sit in silent meeting, and conduct meeting for business, and develop the peace testimony, generating social forms that have continued through to today.

Staying with the biological, I wonder if the centering down that occurred in a) silent meeting and the listening that occurred in b) meetings for business, as well as the orientation to c) peaceableness, were forms of the relaxation response (Benson 1972 - a biological phenomenon, that can be very harmonizing and integrating), leading to calm, group, social networking, and a successful approach to age-old, human, group, conflictual tensions through nonviolence, in an increasingly prosperous, yet industrializingly-chaotic Britain - with long, evolutionary biological antecedents. (Were Quakers somehow more like Bonobo chimps {Pan paniscus}, about whom data so far shows to be peaceful and without war or homicide, than common chimps (Pan troglodytes}, which make war and commit homicide?) In this privileging of biology, early Friends would have troopbonded (Money 1988) around the above practices, as well as early Friends' (Quaker) language, which they found beneficial and socially integrative for the group, but wouldn't even have considered explaining these in biological terms, as this discourse didn't exist 350 years ago.

Nontheistic friendly thinking emerges (see link above), and the 'biological' logically (if not theism, then biology ... ) comes into the conversation, but with thus far a lack of engagement with questions of biology and human evolution by nontheist friends, that I have read.

Originating from anthropological, sociological and information technological interests and knowledge, I think that engaging questions of biology/human evolutionary history & nontheist friends' discourse, exclusive of identity questions (vis-a-vis anthropology), if possible, has merit.

And given the centrality of the Internet (as a new, far-reaching cultural development) to this nontheistically friendly conversation, perhaps giving rise to a new nontheistically friendly {Quaker identity & other}, where are nontheistically friendly kids (biology)?

I think it would be fascinating to engage questions of evolutionary biology to complement the questions nontheist friends have been exploring thus far. Looking forward to further conversation with nontheists and theists.