Barash - Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science

BUDDHIST BIOLOGY

ANCIENT EASTERN WISDOM MEETS MODERN
WESTERN SCIENCE

David P. Barash

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Oxford University Press 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barash, David P.
Buddhist biology : ancient Eastern wisdom meets modern Western science / David P. Barash.
pages cm

ISBN 9780199985562 (alk. paper)

1. BiologyPhilosophy. 2. BiologyReligious aspects. 3. Buddhism and science. 4. Philosophy and
science. I. Title.

QH331.B244 2013

570.1dc23

2013007312

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Noa Bogaisky

If we had a keen vision and feeling for all that is ordinary in life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrels heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot

THERE ARE SO many people (and more than a few animals) who contributed in various ways to this booknot just the writing, but even more, its conceptual foundationsthat Im tempted to thank everyone by thanking no one. Thus, my gratitude is literally unending to a panoply of biologists, Buddhists, philosophers, naturalists, students, and teachers, some long gone and others still flourishing. Special appreciation, however, goes to my agent, Howard Morhaim; to Jeremy Lewis, acquisitions editor at Oxford University Press as well as to eagle-eyed yet light-fingered copy editor, Barbara Norton; and to Tom Kusel, Aditya Ganapathiraju, and James Woelfel, plus a hard-working group of beta-test readers from my Psychology 480 (Ideas of Human Nature) class at the University of Washington. Much of this book was written while on two sabbatical leaves in Costa Rica, for which I thank the Department of Psychology and administration of the University of Washington.

I also wish to note that several different paragraphs, scattered throughout this book, appeared earlier in various essays of mine that were published in The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. I am grateful to The Chronicle for permission to reprint this material. Similarly, selections from a piece titled Only Connect, and posted in aeon magazine (www.aeonmagazine.com) on Nov. 5, 2012, are incorporated into the present book; I appreciate the kindness of aeons editors in permitting its republication.

BUDDHIST BIOLOGY

EARLY IN SHAKESPEARES play The Tempest, a clown named Trinculo takes shelter from the storm in a most unappealing place: under the monster, Caliban, explaining that misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows. This phrase has since morphed into politics makes strange bedfellows. But in fact, there have been many strange bedfellows, not all of them resulting from misery or involving politics.

Prominent among these odd couples is the pairing of religion and science. Which is the clown and which the monster? Maybe both, or neither. Or maybe a bit of each, depending on circumstances. The new atheists (notably Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) have claimed that religion and science are not just separate but downright antagonistic. The late Stephen Jay Gould, by contrast, made a case that science and religion (Trinculo and Caliban) are actually compatible because they constitute what he called NOMANon-Overlapping Magesteria. For Gould, science explains how things are, while religion deals with why; that is, science is largely concerned with the facts of the world, whereas religion deals with issues of ultimate meaning and ethics. Accordingly, the two are and should be of equal but independent status.

This accommodationist position is appealing, especially since it opens the door to peaceful coexistence between these two key human enterprises. (I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past, concludes Trinculo.) But wishing doesnt make things so, nor does it cause storms to cease. In my opinion, science and religion are often in conflict, not so much because science makes claims about meaning or ethics (although that has happened on occasion), but because religion keeps making assertions about the real world that not only overlap those of science, but are frequently contradicted by them. Consider, for example, the Jewish story about Moses parting the Red Sea and speaking with God in the form of a burning bush; the Christian beliefs that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, raised the dead, and was himself resurrected; or the Muslim insistence that Muhammad took dictation from Allah via the angel Gabriel, and that ten years after becoming a prophet, he traveled to the Seventh Heaven on the back of the buraq, a white winged steed with a human face as well as an extra set of wings, and whose every stride extended to the farthest point that it could see.

There is, however, an intriguing exception to what I, at least, see as the conflict between science and religion: Buddhism. Perhaps this is because Buddhism is as much a philosophy as a religion, or maybe because Buddhism is somehow more valid than, say, the big Abrahamic three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In any event, when it comes to Buddhism and scienceespecially the science with which I am most familiar, namely biologywe can replace NOMA with POMA: Productively Overlapping Magisteria. Buddhism is a religionor, rather, a spiritual and philosophical practice traditionwhereas biology is science. Buddhism is mostly Eastern, at least in its origin; biology is comparably Western. And yet, Kipling was wrong: the twain have met. And not only that, but to a large extent, they get along just fine. Strange bedfellows indeed, yet oddly compatibleat least on occasion, and within limits.

Religion may well be advised to steer clear of factual material, and science, similarly, to avoid deriving ought from is, but the painful truth is that the two have often intersected, with each making truth claims that impinge upon the other. And when this has happened, religion has had to retreat reluctantly, to be sure, and in most cases only after having done much harm to our species-wide search for truth (not to mention bodily harm to many of those pursuing this search). But eventually, religion has given way. The two greatest such fallbacks have involved the geocentric universe, replaced in due course (although not without much gnashing of theological teeth and burning of heretics) by heliocentric reality as described by Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton; and the question of special creation as presented in the Judeo-Christian Bible versus evolution, as described by Charles Darwin and supported by decades of modern biological science.