Darwin’s Valentine
The Rev. Edmund Robinson
 The Unitarian Church of Staten Island
February 10, 2008
Reading: Luke 10: 25-37.

	Tuesday will mark the 199th birthdays of two men who changed the paradigms of their  world: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  The stars must have been aligned in an unusual formation on February 12, 1809 to have produced two men whose ideas were so influential on subsequent history. 
	And then two days after that, we celebrate the birthday of St. Valentine.  Many of us are more familiar with Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin than with St. Valentine, but his story is worth bearing in mind.  It is of course, shrouded in legend and who knows what of it is true, but the story goes, in the Second Century of the Common Era, a cruel Roman Emperor named Claudius was concerned because he was running out of soldiers.  Claudius was making war on almost everyone around, but he couldn’t raise a big enough army.  He realized that the young men of Rome would rather make love than war.  So he decreed that no marriages could take place in this time of emergency.  But Valentine circumvented this decree and went on marrying couples in secret.  For this he was arrested, tried and put to death.  Since his martyrdom, he has become canonized and is the patron saint of lovers.
	Does this strike anyone else as a huge irony?  Today we again have the government, outside of a few enlightened jurisdictions, decreeing that as to a certain class of citizens – those of the same sex -- no marriages shall take place.  We have a small band of ministers in this and a few other denominations willing to perform the ceremonies.  And we have mainline Christian churches, Protestant and Catholic heroically taking the side of - the Emperor!  St. Valentine, if you want to change your canonical affiliation, I’m sure we UUs are ready to welcome you!
	My purpose here, however, is not to praise St. Valentine but to use the occasion to offer some reflections on evolution and love.   Several years ago, I signed an open letter expressing that evolution and religion were not mutually incompatible, and the sponsors of that letter have followed up to ask if we clergy would celebrate Darwin’s birthday, February 12, as Evolution Sunday in our churches.  As of Friday, the website indicates that 803 churches nationwide are celebrating Evolution Sunday today.
	But since Darwin and St. Valentine have such close birthdays, what I want to focus on here is, what does evolution have to tell us about the value central to Christianity and Unitarian Universalism, the force of love?  
	Love is so important and yet so hard to pin down.  So much has been said and written that doesn’t get it, we are tempted not to try again.  But I want to try this morning, and I want to try from a perspective which is firmly rooted in relentless rationality, well knowing that there are inherent limitations on such an approach when the subject is such a heart-filled one.  Daniel Dennett of Tufts has said that the logic of evolution is “a universal acid,” it “eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.1”   Let me give you an instance.
	At a recent alumni reunion for my college, they tried to get the alums to do something besides sitting around a tent drinking all day, so they provided us with lectures.  I went to one on evolutionary medicine.  It was fascinating.  It seems that scientists had studied this group of Mennonites whose records of births, death and marriages go back several generations.  They always tended to marry other Mennonites, so it provided kind of a laboratory in genetics.   There was a genetic trait which was carried by some men and some women, and if both parents had the trait, there was trouble – the women would have trouble getting pregnant and would have many miscarriages.  
	The scientists knew how prevalent this genetic trait was in the population, and thus they could calculate the rate at which it would produce these problem pregnancies if the men and women chose their spouses at random.  Then they looked at the actual rate of problem pregnancies, and found it was less than half of what random chance would predict.  So the conclusion was that somehow the Mennonite men and women could tell which mates were genetically right for them and which mates were genetically wrong.  
	The professor who was telling us all this said he had no idea how people knew what mates were biologically good ones and which were not, but he suspected that it had something to do with saliva or sweat.  That made sense to me.  Evolution may have evolved ways for us to tell whom it is best to love, and the mechanism for this would be whether the partner smells good and tastes good to us.  
	That’s a Darwin valentine.  It’s an evolutionary take on love.  Now it may be a disturbing one to you.  You may not want to think that genetics enters into whom you consider attractive.  And you may not want to think about love in terms of making babies.  But making babies, making them successfully, and rearing them to the point where they can make babies of their own, is what the theory of evolution is all about.
	It is not, of course, only or even mainly what modern love is all about.  In the debates over same-sex marriage we recognize that sex and love and marriage are about companionship and pleasure as much as about producing the next generation biologically.  But we are here in the theory of evolution.
	And evolution is concerned with the components of human nature.  The term human nature is very loaded and has been used to promote an awful lot of nonsense and actual harm over the years, and there is a tendency among liberals to deny that there is any such thing, or, to put it another way, to say that human nature is infinitely plastic.  We are born a blank slate, in liberal theory, and if we could only get the right environment for every child, we would eliminate any disparities in ability and achieve equality in fact.
	Steven Pinker of MIT wrote a book to argue against this point of view, and he is convincing that cognitive scientists, working with evolutionary theory, have begun to show that there is some hard-wiring that we all get, there is such a thing as human nature, and that we ignore that at our peril.  So let’s say there is such a thing as human nature; what does it look like?
	There are many marvels of human nature, but the one I want to focus on here is that we have the capacity to love; our various religious traditions give us a faith that that capacity, while limited in practice, is limitless in principle.   If we were to truly know the holy, we would know unlimited love.   But if human nature is viewed as the product of evolution, we need to ask, how did we come to have that capacity? How is the love instinct evolved? 
	Now my logic breaks this down into four stages: the sex drive, or love between mates; child-rearing, love between parent and child; love between kin; and love within a community. 
	Let’s start with the sex drive.  There are many reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom, and I am not going to say that aphids and caterpillars have a sex drive because I don’t know they do, but I know we do and it seems apparent to me that individuals born without a drive to mate don’t mate and drop out of the evolutionary tree, so that evolution favors those with enough libido to select a mate and mate.
	Now is this love?  It can be, it doesn’t have to be.  And Valentine’s day is all about how much actual love is involved in the dating and mating game.  I like to tell a little story about how my own nesting instinct coincided with an animal’s: Jacqueline and I were married in the open-air dance pavilion at Pinewoods Camp in Plymouth on a muggy summer afternoon in 2000.  As I was walking into the pavilion for the ceremony, I noticed a birds nest on the ground.  I picked it up and gave it to our minister Susan Suchocki Brown, and said, this must be some kind of omen.  She agreed, and set it next to the chalice on the little altar we had set up.  During her homily she got inspired and picked up the birds nest.  She was in the middle of making a point of how our lives were woven together like the straws in the nest, when the mother bird came swooping through the hall above the heads of the guests.  I was struck by how the bird’s nesting instincts coincided with my own.
	So for dating and mating.  The next level is between parent and child.  Evolution gives us powerful urges to protect the child.  The mother has this through oxytocin in the blood, but the father has plenty of it too.  The evolutionary reason for this urge is not hard to see: the human child is born into the world at a very immature stage and needs protection for years before it can fend for itself.  Humans who do not have powerful instincts to protect their offspring are unlikely to have offspring who survive to pass on the genes to succeeding generations.
	Here is the instinctive basis for love between parent and child.  It is of a different quality than the instinct between mates, and it is this quality which lend this relation to some of the deepest metaphorical and mythic uses.  God is conceived in the Bible as the father, not as the boss or the headman.  Jesus is conceived as the son.  Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most shocking stories in the Bible, because cuts so much against the grain of paternal love.  Oedipus shocked Greek audiences by murdering his father.   The parent-child instincts are powerful.
	Now the love in these first two categories you could call selfish, in that the drive to mate and to protect our offspring directly helps each of us perpetuate his own genes.  There is a third type of instinct called kinship altruism, and the idea behind this is we protect those who are kin to us because they are carrying more or less the same genes.  So I would throw myself on the hand grenade to save the life of my brother because I know he will continue the family lineage.  And I might throw myself on the hand grenade to protect my first cousin, but then I might draw the line at my second cousin.
	The strength of the drive in kinship altruism depends on the degree of kin.  As the kin gets more remote, presumably the drive gets less.  But kinship altruism can help explain a herd of baboons as well as a tribe of humans, a group related by kinship who band together for mutual protection.
	This sibling and extended cousin relationship also has mythical and metaphorical expressions: He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.  The sisters of mercy.  The Christian ideal a generation ago was expressed in the hymn Because All Men Are Brothers. Universal brotherhood meant that one would extend to the whole race the feelings and behavior which instinct gives us as to close sibling kin.  I’ll return to this in minute.
	The fourth stage of love, which is somewhat more complicated and controversial among evolutionary theorists, is reciprocal altruism.  The idea here is that we evolve instincts to cooperate with others in a community, and this involves social skills such as language, a symbol system, doing favors for others and having them do favors for us in a reciprocal arrangement.  This creates a community and creating community tends to ensure the protection of the offspring, so those humans who have developed the instincts which allow for social cooperation are 	more likely to pass those instincts on to descendants.  As Pinker says,
“Reciprocal altruism can evolve because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes.  They enjoy the gains of trading their surpluses, pulling ticks out of one another’s hair, saving each other from drowning or starvation, and baby-sitting each other’s children.2”
	Some evolutionists say that religion evolved as a mechanism of reciprocal altruism.  Our churches are, among other things, institutions to ensure our evolutionary success by cooperatively raising our children, passing on traditions, engaging in mutual support of a variety of factors.
	But all of this so far has been prologue to may main point, which is this: altruism has its limits, and the instinctual basis for love has its limits.  Evolution takes us only to a love which extends to our own tribe or our own community.  The Universal love ethic preached by Jesus is in some ways contrary to human nature as it has evolved.  
	Let’s take the story of the Good Samaritan.  Generations of Christian ministers have spun this story as Jesus’ ethic of universal love.  The Samaritans were a people hated by the Jews; they worshiped Jahweh but also local tribal Gods, so they were considered apostates3.  In a passage just before the one I read, the Samaritans reject Jesus and Jesus’ disciples ask him if they should call down the fire of heaven against the Samaritans4.  So they were not a popular lot. Jesus is asked by the lawyer what one must do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus asks him what is written in the law, and the lawyer,  says love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus tells him to do this, but the lawyer, as lawyers are wont to do, had a quibble about the terms of the rule.  Who is my neighbor?
	Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to answer this question.  The poor victim is robbed and left for dead.  Presumably he is Jewish, and thus he is a member of the tribe of Israel.  You would expect the tribal instincts of the Priest and the Levite to impel these people to come to his aid, but they pass by on the other side.  The Priests and the Levites were supposed to be the guardians of the law, but they were not a neighbor to the injured man.  Only the Samaritan, the person who was despised by the Jews, actually acts as a neighbor, actually goes out of his way to help.  
	To love one’s neighbor as oneself is an attitude of altruism.  I have said before that the basis of all religion is the recognition that the other is like me.  In Buber’s terms, we stop seeing the other as an “it,” and see the other as a “thou.”  We see our neighbor as someone like us.  We bridge the chasm between the subjective interior and the objective exterior.
	But the Good Samaritan story goes further than just seeing any old other as like me.  In the Good Samaritan story, the neighbor is my enemy, the other tribe, the group our tribe is sworn to resist.  The logic of tribalism dictates that a large part of the identity of any “we” is formed in distinction from a “they”.  Who are “we,” the Jews? We are people who are not Samaritans.  So Jesus’s demand that we treat the Samaritans as our neighbor waters down the definition of a Jew.  
	The bottom line is that the love ethic of Jesus, which is the basis for the love ethic of Universalism and through that, Unitarian Universalism, is decidedly unnatural.  It’s not that human nature won’t bear it.  It’s that human nature resists it, and if we are to spread this love ethic, if we are to preach it, as I certainly think we should, we need to recognize that evolution has made it a hard sell. We need to evolve further in order to hear it, in order to take it to heart, in order to realize it in our lives.
	I think this is why the early Christian Church decided that they couldn’t sell this loe ethic undiluted.  They thought they had to dress it up i8n all kinds of magic.  They tried to shoehorn Jesus into the old prophecies of a Messiah.  St. Paul tried to make him a new Adam, and with John, put forth the notion that his death was to atone for the sins of the world.  
	But Jesus was put to death because people were not ready to hear a message that salvation lay in loving your enemy.  People are still not ready to hear it, much less practice it.  But we can evolve, we have evolved.  
	Human nature is not stacked in favor of loving your enemy, but it does not forbid it. Lincoln in his First Inaugural, on the brink of the most disastrous war in American history, refers to the “better angels of our nature.”   Would that they had been kept in mind.  We are given some hard wiring by our genetic inheritance, shaped by evolutionary forces.  But we also have the instinct to make meaning of things, and to use words and other symbols, and we know how to wire those symbols down deep into the substrate of instinct which our heritage gives us.  So we use myth and metaphor to say that we are all family, that all people are children of God, and thus all are our brothers and sisters and we owe them the care which instinct says we owe to our blood brothers and sisters.
	What wondrous love is this, O my soul.  Let’s sing it, Number 18.
	Amen.

Luke 10: 25-37
A lawyer's question
25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" 27 He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28 And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
Parable of the Good Samaritan
29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30 Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" 37 He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."