Evolutionary origin of religion

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religion 

The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.

Nonhuman religious behavior

Main article: Religious behavior in animals

Humanity's closest living relatives are common chimpanzees and bonobos. These primates share a common ancestor with humans who lived between six and eight million years ago. It is for this reason that chimpanzees and bonobos are viewed as the best available surrogate for this common ancestor. Barbara King argues that while non-human primates are not religious, they do exhibit some traits that would have been necessary for the evolution of religion. These traits include high intelligence, a capacity for symbolic communication, a sense of social norms, and realization of "self" continuity.

Elephants perform rituals for their dead. They demonstrate long periods of silence and mourning at the point of death; later, elephants return to grave sites and caress the remains. Some evidence suggests that many species grieve death and loss.

Relevant prerequisites for human religion

Increased brain size

In this set of theories, the religious mind is one consequence of a brain that is large enough to formulate religious and philosophical ideas. During human evolution, the hominid brain tripled in size, peaking 500,000 years ago. Much of the brain's expansion took place in the neocortex. The cerebral neocortex is presumed to be responsible for the neural computations underlying complex phenomena such as perception, thought, language, attention, episodic memory and voluntary movement. According to Dunbar's theory, the relative neocortex size of any species correlates with the level of social complexity of the particular species. The neocortex size correlates with a number of social variables that include social group size and complexity of mating behaviors. In chimpanzees the neocortex occupies 50% of the brain, whereas in modern humans it occupies 80% of the brain.

Robin Dunbar argues that the critical event in the evolution of the neocortex took place at the speciation of archaic Homo sapiens about 500,000 years ago. His study indicates that only after the speciation event is the neocortex large enough to process complex social phenomena such as language and religion. The study is based on a regression analysis of neocortex size plotted against a number of social behaviors of living and extinct hominids.

Stephen Jay Gould suggests that religion may have grown out of evolutionary changes that favored larger brains as a means of cementing group coherence among savanna hunters, after that larger brain enabled reflection on the inevitability of personal mortality.

Tool use

Lewis Wolpert argues that causal beliefs that emerged from tool use played a major role in the evolution of belief. The manufacture of complex tools requires creating a mental image of an object that does not exist naturally before actually making the artifact. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used, that requires an understanding of causality. Accordingly, the level of sophistication of stone tools is a useful indicator of causal beliefs. Wolpert contends use of tools composed of more than one component, such as hand axes, represents an ability to understand cause and effect. However, recent studies of other primates indicate that causality may not be a uniquely human trait. For example, chimpanzees have been known to escape from pens closed with multiple latches, which was previously thought could only have been figured out by humans who understood causality. Chimpanzees are also known to mourn the dead, and notice things that have only aesthetic value, like sunsets, both of which may be considered to be components of religion or spirituality. The difference between the comprehension of causality by humans and chimpanzees is one of degree. The degree of comprehension in an animal depends upon the size of the prefrontal cortex: the greater the size of the prefrontal cortex the deeper the comprehension.

Development of language

See also: Origin of language and Religion and mythology

Religion requires a system of symbolic communication, such as language, to be transmitted from one individual to another. Philip Lieberman states "human religious thought and moral sense clearly rest on a cognitive-linguistic base". From this premise science writer Nicholas Wade states:

"Like most behaviors that are found in societies throughout the world, religion must have been present in the ancestral human population before the dispersal from Africa 50,000 years ago. Although religious rituals usually involve dance and music, they are also very verbal, since the sacred truths have to be stated. If so, religion, at least in its modern form, cannot pre-date the emergence of language. It has been argued earlier that language attained its modern state shortly before the exodus from Africa. If religion had to await the evolution of modern, articulate language, then it too would have emerged shortly before 50,000 years ago."

Another view distinguishes individual religious belief from collective religious belief. While the former does not require prior development of language, the latter does. The individual human brain has to explain a phenomenon in order to comprehend and relate to it. This activity predates by far the emergence of language and may have caused it. The theory is, belief in the supernatural emerges from hypotheses arbitrarily assumed by individuals to explain natural phenomena that cannot be explained otherwise. The resulting need to share individual hypotheses with others leads eventually to collective religious belief. A socially accepted hypothesis becomes dogmatic backed by social sanction.

Language consists of digital contrasts whose cost is essentially zero. As pure social conventions, signals of this kind cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world—they are a theoretical impossibility. Being intrinsically unreliable, language works only if one can build up a reputation for trustworthiness within a certain kind of society—namely, one where symbolic cultural facts (sometimes called 'institutional facts') can be established and maintained through collective social endorsement. In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ritual.

Transcending the continuity-versus-discontinuity divide, some scholars view the emergence of language as the consequence of some kind of social transformation that, by generating unprecedented levels of public trust, liberated a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that had previously lain dormant. "Ritual/speech coevolution theory" exemplifies this approach. Scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even chimpanzees and bonobos have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild. Objecting to the sudden mutation idea, these authors argue that even if a chance mutation were to install a language organ in an evolving bipedal primate, it would be adaptively useless under all known primate social conditions. A very specific social structure—one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust—must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on "cheap signals" (words) an evolutionarily stable strategy. The animistic nature of early human language could serve as the handicap-like cost that helped to ensure the reliability of communication. The attribution of spiritual essence to everything surrounding early humans served as a built-in mechanism that provided instant verification and ensured the inviolability of one's speech.

Animal vocal signals are, for the most part, intrinsically reliable. When a cat purrs, the signal constitutes direct evidence of the animal's contented state. The signal is trusted, not because the cat is inclined to be honest, but because it just cannot fake that sound. Primate vocal calls may be slightly more manipulable, but they remain reliable for the same reason—because they are hard to fake. Primate social intelligence is "Machiavellian"—self-serving and unconstrained by moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive each other, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves. Paradoxically, it is theorized that primates' resistance to deception is what blocks the evolution of their signalling systems along language-like lines. Language is ruled out because the best way to guard against being deceived is to ignore all signals except those that are instantly verifiable. Words automatically fail this test.

Morality and group living

Main articles: Evolution of morality and Morality § Evolution

Frans de Waal and Barbara King both view human morality as having grown out of primate sociality. Although morality awareness may be a unique human trait, many social animals, such as primates, dolphins and whales, have been known to exhibit pre-moral sentiments. According to Michael Shermer, the following characteristics are shared by humans and other social animals, particularly the great apes:

attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group.

De Waal contends that all social animals have had to restrain or alter their behavior for group living to be worthwhile. Pre-moral sentiments evolved in primate societies as a method of restraining individual selfishness and building more cooperative groups. For any social species, the benefits of being part of an altruistic group should outweigh the benefits of individualism. For example, a lack of group cohesion could make individuals more vulnerable to attack from outsiders. Being part of a group may also improve the chances of finding food. This is evident among animals that hunt in packs to take down large or dangerous prey.

All social animals have hierarchical societies in which each member knows its own place. Social order is maintained by certain rules of expected behavior and dominant group members enforce order through punishment. Additionally, higher order primates also have a sense of fairness.

Chimpanzees live in fission-fusion groups that average 50 individuals. It is likely that early ancestors of humans lived in groups of similar size. Based on the size of extant hunter-gatherer societies, recent Paleolithic hominids lived in bands of a few hundred individuals. As community size increased over the course of human evolution, greater enforcement to achieve group cohesion would have been required. Morality may have evolved in these bands of 100 to 200 people as a means of social control, conflict resolution and group solidarity. According to Dr. de Waal, human morality has two extra levels of sophistication that are not found in primate societies.

Psychologist Matt J. Rossano argues that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever-watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups. The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival. Rossano is referring here to collective religious belief and the social sanction that institutionalized morality. According to Rossano's teaching, individual religious belief is thus initially epistemological, not ethical, in nature.

Evolutionary psychology of religion

Main article: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Cognitive scientists underlined that religions may be explained as a result of the brain architecture that developed early in the genus Homo in the course of the evolutionary history of life. Nonetheless, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold:

• either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage
• or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons. Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life. The emergence of collective religious belief identified such agents as deities that standardized the explanation.

Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial proposal, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.

Another view builds on the concept of the triune brain: the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex, proposed by Paul D. MacLean. Collective religious belief draws upon the emotions of love, fear, and gregariousness and is deeply embedded in the limbic system through socio-biological conditioning and social sanction. Individual religious belief utilizes reason based in the neocortex and often varies from collective religion. The limbic system is much older in evolutionary terms than the neocortex and is, therefore, stronger than it – much in the same way as the reptilian is stronger than both the limbic system and the neocortex.

Yet another view is that the behavior of people who participate in a religion makes them feel better and this improves their biological fitness, so that there is a genetic selection in favor of people who are willing to believe in a religion. Specifically, rituals, beliefs, and the social contact typical of religious groups may serve to calm the mind (for example by reducing ambiguity and the uncertainty due to complexity) and allow it to function better when under stress. This would allow religion to be used as a powerful survival mechanism, particularly in facilitating the evolution of hierarchies of warriors, which if true, may be why many modern religions tend to promote fertility and kinship.

Still another view, proposed by Fred H. Previc, sees human religion as a product of an increase in dopaminergic functions in the human brain and of a general intellectual expansion beginning around 80 thousand years ago (kya). Dopamine promotes an emphasis on distant space and time, which can correlate with religious experience. While the earliest extant shamanic cave-paintings date to around 40 kya, the use of ocher for rock art predates this and there is clear evidence for abstract thinking along the coast of South Africa 80 kya.

Paul Bloom suggests that "certain early emergent cognitive biases ... make it natural to believe in Gods and spirits".

Prehistoric evidence of religion

See also: Paleolithic religion and Prehistoric religion

Although the exact time when humans first became religious remains unknown, research in evolutionary archaeology shows credible evidence of religious/ritualistic behavior from around the Middle Paleolithic era (45–200 thousand years ago).

Paleolithic burials

The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead. Most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their own species. Ritual burial thus represents a significant change in human behavior. Ritual burials represent an awareness of life and death and a possible belief in the afterlife. Philip Lieberman states "burials with grave goods clearly signify religious practices and concern for the dead that transcends daily life."

The earliest evidence for treatment of the dead comes from Atapuerca in Spain. At this location the bones of 30 individuals believed to be Homo heidelbergensis have been found in a pit. Neanderthals are also contenders for the first hominids to intentionally bury the dead. They may have placed corpses into shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones. The presence of these grave goods may indicate an emotional connection with the deceased and possibly a belief in the afterlife. Neanderthal burial sites include Shanidar in Iraq and Krapina in Croatia and Kebara Cave in Israel.

The earliest known burial of modern humans is from a cave in Israel located at Qafzeh. Human remains have been dated to 100,000 years ago. Human skeletons were found stained with red ocher. A variety of grave goods were found at the burial site. The mandible of a wild boar was found placed in the arms of one of the skeletons. Philip Lieberman states:

Burial rituals incorporating grave goods may have been invented by the anatomically modern hominids who emigrated from Africa to the Middle East roughly 100,000 years ago

Matt Rossano suggests that the period between 80,000 and 60,000 years before present, following the retreat of humans from the Levant to Africa, was a crucial period in the evolution of religion.

Use of symbolism

The use of symbolism in religion is a universal established phenomenon. Archeologist Steven Mithen contends that it is common for religious practices to involve the creation of images and symbols to represent supernatural beings and ideas. Because supernatural beings violate the principles of the natural world, there will always be difficulty in communicating and sharing supernatural concepts with others. This problem can be overcome by anchoring these supernatural beings in material form through representational art. When translated into material form, supernatural concepts become easier to communicate and understand. Due to the association of art and religion, evidence of symbolism in the fossil record is indicative of a mind capable of religious thoughts. Art and symbolism demonstrates a capacity for abstract thought and imagination necessary to construct religious ideas. Wentzel van Huyssteen states that the translation of the non-visible through symbolism enabled early human ancestors to hold beliefs in abstract terms.

Some of the earliest evidence of symbolic behavior is associated with Middle Stone Age sites in Africa. From at least 100,000 years ago, there is evidence of the use of pigments such as red ocher. Pigments are of little practical use to hunter gatherers, thus evidence of their use is interpreted as symbolic or for ritual purposes. Among extant hunter gatherer populations around the world, red ocher is still used extensively for ritual purposes. It has been argued that it is universal among human cultures for the color red to represent blood, sex, life and death.

The use of red ocher as a proxy for symbolism is often criticized as being too indirect. Some scientists, such as Richard Klein and Steven Mithen, only recognize unambiguous forms of art as representative of abstract ideas. Upper Paleolithic cave art provides some of the most unambiguous evidence of religious thought from the Paleolithic. Cave paintings at Chauvet depict creatures that are half human and half animal.

Origins and diversification of organized religion

See also: Neolithic religion

Social evolution of humans

Period (years ago)	Society type	Number of individuals
100,000–10,000	Bands	10s–100s
10,000–5,000	Tribes	100s–1,000s
5,000–3,000	Chiefdoms	1,000s–10,000s
3,000–1,000	States	10,000s–100,000s
2,000*–present	Empires	100,000s–1,000,000s

Organized religion traces its roots to the Neolithic Revolution that began 11,000 years ago in the Near East, but may have occurred independently in several other locations around the world. The invention of agriculture transformed many human societies from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. The Neolithic Revolution led to a population explosion and an acceleration in the pace of technological development. The transition from foraging bands to states and empires precipitated more specialized and developed forms of religion that reflected the new social and political environment. While bands and small tribes possess supernatural beliefs, these beliefs do not serve to justify a central authority, justify transfer of wealth or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. Organized religion emerged as a means of providing social and economic stability through the following ways:

• Justifying the central authority, which in turn possessed the right to collect taxes in return for providing social and security services.
• Bands and tribes consist of small number of related individuals. States and nations are composed of many thousands of unrelated individuals. Jared Diamond argues that organized religion served to provide a bond between unrelated individuals who would otherwise be more prone to enmity. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel he argues that the leading cause of death among hunter-gatherer societies is murder.
• Religions that revolved around moralizing gods may have facilitated the rise of large, cooperative groups of unrelated individuals.

The states born out of the Neolithic Revolution, such as those of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, were theocracies with chiefs, kings and emperors playing dual roles of political and spiritual leaders. Anthropologists have found that virtually all state societies and chiefdoms from around the world have been found to justify political power through divine authority. This suggests that political authority co-opts collective religious belief to bolster itself.

Invention of writing

See also: History of writing

Following the Neolithic Revolution, the pace of technological development (cultural evolution) intensified due to the invention of writing 5,000 years ago. Symbols that became words later on made effective communication of ideas possible. Printing, invented only over a thousand years ago, rapidly increased the speed of communication and became the main spring of cultural evolution. Writing is thought to have been first invented in either Sumeria or Ancient Egypt, and was initially used for accounting. Soon after, writing was used to record myth. The first religious texts mark the beginning of religious history. The Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt form one of the oldest known religious texts in the world, dating to between 2400 and 2300 BCE. Writing played a major role in sustaining and spreading organized religion. In pre-literate societies, religious ideas were based on an oral tradition, which was articulated by shamans and remained limited to the collective memories of the society's inhabitants. With the advent of writing, information that was not easy to remember could easily be stored in sacred texts that were maintained by a select group (clergy). Humans could store and process large amounts of information with writing that otherwise would have been forgotten. Writing therefore enabled religions to develop coherent and comprehensive doctrinal systems that remained independent of time and place. Writing also brought a measure of objectivity to human knowledge. Formulation of thoughts in words and the requirement for validation made possible the mutual exchange of ideas and the sifting of generally acceptable from unacceptable ideas. The generally acceptable ideas became objective knowledge reflecting the continuously evolving framework of human awareness of reality that Karl Popper calls 'verisimilitude' – a stage on the human journey to truth.

Ombudsman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman

Sign in Banjul, capital of The Gambia, giving directions to the ombudsman's office

An ombudsman (/ˈɒmbʊdzmən/ OM-buudz-mən, also US: /-bədz-, -bʌdz-/ -⁠bədz-, -⁠budz) is a government official who investigates and tries to resolve complaints, usually through recommendations (binding or not) or mediation. They are usually appointed by the government or by parliament (often with a significant degree of independence).

Ombudsmen also aim to identify systemic issues leading to poor service or breaches of people's rights. At the national level, most ombudsmen have a wide mandate to deal with the entire public sector, and sometimes also elements of the private sector (for example, contracted service providers). In some cases, there is a more restricted mandate to a certain sector of society. More recent developments have included the creation of specialized children's ombudsmen.

In some countries, an inspector general, citizen advocate or other official may have duties similar to those of a national ombudsman and may also be appointed by a legislature. Below the national level, an ombudsman may be appointed by a state, local, or municipal government. Private ombudsmen may be appointed by, or even work for, a corporation such as a utility supplier, newspaper, NGO, or professional regulatory body.

In some jurisdictions, an ombudsman charged with handling concerns about national government is more formally referred to as the "parliamentary commissioner" (e.g. the United Kingdom Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, and the Western Australian state Ombudsman). In many countries where the ombudsman's responsibility includes protecting human rights, the ombudsman is recognized as the national human rights institution. The post of ombudsman had by the end of the 20th century been instituted by most governments and by some intergovernmental organizations such as the European Union. As of 2005, including national and sub-national levels, a total of 129 offices of ombudsman have been established around the world.

Origins and etymology

A prototype of an ombudsman may have flourished in China during the Qin dynasty (221 BC), and later in Korea during the Joseon dynasty. The position of secret royal inspector, or amhaeng-eosa (암행어사, 暗行御史) was unique to the Joseon dynasty, where an undercover official directly appointed by the king was sent to local provinces to monitor government officials and look after the populace while travelling incognito. The Roman tribune had some similar roles, with the power to veto acts that infringed upon the Plebeians. Another precursor to the ombudsman was the Diwān al-Maẓālim (دِيوَانُ الْمَظَالِمِ) which appears to go back to the second caliph, Umar (634–644), and the concept of Qaḍī al-Quḍāt (قَاضِي الْقُضَاةِ). They were also attested in Siam, India, the Liao dynasty, Japan, and China.

An indigenous Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish term, ombudsman, ombodsmann, ombudsmand or ombudsmann is etymologically rooted in the Old Norse word umboðsmaðr, essentially meaning 'representative' (with the word umbud/ombod/ombud meaning 'proxy', 'attorney'; that is, someone who is authorized to act for someone else, a meaning it still has in the Scandinavian languages). From 1552, it is used in the Nordic languages as the Swedish ombudsman (pronounced [ˈɔ̂mːbʉːdsˌman] ^ⓘ), the Danish ombudsmand, the Icelandic and Faroese umboðsmaður and the Norwegian ombudsmann/ombodsmann. The general meaning was and is approximately 'a man representing (someone)' (i.e., a representative) or 'a man with a commission (from someone)' (a commissioner). The Swedish-speaking minority in Finland uses the Swedish terminology. The various forms of the suffix -mand, -maður, et cetera, are just the forms the common Germanic word represented by the English word man have in the various languages. Thus, the modern plural form ombudsmen of the English borrowed word ombudsman is likely.

Use of the term in its modern sense began in Sweden with the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman instituted by the Instrument of Government of 1809, to safeguard the rights of citizens by establishing a supervisory agency independent of the executive branch. The predecessor of the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman was the Office of Supreme Ombudsman (Högste Ombudsmannen), which was established by the Swedish King, Charles XII, in 1713. Charles XII was in exile in Turkey and needed a representative in Sweden to ensure that judges and civil servants acted in accordance with the laws and with their duties. If they did not do so, the Supreme Ombudsman had the right to prosecute them for negligence. In 1719 the Swedish Office of Supreme Ombudsman became the Chancellor of Justice. The Parliamentary Ombudsman was established in 1809 by the Swedish Riksdag, as a parallel institution to the still-present Chancellor of Justice, reflecting the concept of separation of powers as developed by Montesquieu.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman is the institution that the Scandinavian countries subsequently developed into its contemporary form, and which subsequently has been adopted in many other parts of the world. The word ombudsman and its specific meaning have since been adopted in various languages, such as Dutch. The German language uses Ombudsmann, Ombudsfrau and Ombudsleute. Notable exceptions are French, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish, which use translations instead. Modern variations of this term include ombud, ombuds, ombudsperson, or ombudswoman, and the conventional English plural is ombudsmen. In Nigeria, the ombudsman is known as the Public Complaints Commission or the ombudsman.

In politics

In general, an ombudsman is a state official appointed to provide a check on government activity in the interests of the citizen and to oversee the investigation of complaints of improper government activity against the citizen. If the ombudsman finds a complaint to be substantiated, the problem may get rectified, or an ombudsman report is published making recommendations for change. Further redress depends on the laws of the country concerned, but this typically involves financial compensation. Ombudsmen in most countries do not have the power to initiate legal proceedings or prosecution on the grounds of a complaint. This role is sometimes referred to as a "tribunician" role, and has been traditionally fulfilled by elected representatives – the term refers to the ancient Roman "tribunes of the plebeians" (tribuni plebis), whose role was to intercede in the political process on behalf of common citizens.

The significant advantage of an ombudsman is that they examine complaints from outside the offending state institution, thus avoiding the conflicts of interest inherent in self-policing. However, the ombudsman system relies heavily on the selection of an appropriate individual for the office, and on the cooperation of at least some effective official from within the apparatus of the state. However, sociologist Jürgen Beyer has criticised the institution, stating: "Ombudsmen are relics of absolutism, designed to iron out the worst excesses of administrative arbitrariness while keeping the power structures intact."

In organizations

Main article: Organizational ombudsman

Many private companies, universities, non-profit organisations, and government agencies also have an ombudsman (or an ombuds office) to serve internal employees, managers and/or other constituencies. These ombudsman roles are structured to function independently, by reporting to the CEO or board of directors, and, according to the International Ombudsman Association (IOA) Standards of Practice, they do not have any other role in the organisation. Organisational ombudsmen often receive more complaints than alternative procedures such as anonymous hot-lines.

Since the 1960s, the profession has grown in the United States, and Canada, particularly in corporations, universities, and government agencies. The organizational ombudsman works as a designated neutral party, one who is high-ranking in an organization, but who is not part of executive management. Using an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or appropriate dispute resolution approach, an organisational ombudsman can provide options to whistleblowers or employees and managers with ethical concerns; provide coaching, shuttle diplomacy, generic solutions (meaning a solution which protects the identity of one individual by applying to a class of people, rather than just for the one individual) and mediation for conflicts; track problem areas; and make recommendations for changes to policies or procedures in support of orderly systems change.

Darwinian anthropology

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinian_anthropology 

Darwinian anthropology describes an approach to anthropological analysis which employs various theories from Darwinian evolutionary biology. Whilst there are a number of areas of research that can come under this broad description some specific research projects have been closely associated with the label. A prominent example is the project that developed in the mid 1970s with the goal of applying sociobiological perspectives to explain patterns of human social relationships, particularly kinship patterns across human cultures.

This kinship-focused Darwinian anthropology was a significant intellectual forebear of evolutionary psychology, and both draw on biological theories of the evolution of social behavior (in particular inclusive fitness theory) upon which the field of sociobiology was founded.

Overview

In 1974 the biologist Richard D. Alexander published an article The Evolution of Social Behavior which drew upon W. D. Hamilton's work on inclusive fitness and kin selection and noted that:

Although ten years have passed since Hamilton's landmark papers, apparently only a single social scientist (Campbell, 31) has made a distinct effort to incorporate kin selection into theories of human altruism... But so have the biologists, for one reason or another, failed to consider the enormous literature on topics like kinship systems and reciprocity in human behavior.

Amongst other suggestions, Alexander suggested that certain patterns of social cooperation documented by ethnographers, in particular the avunculate ('mother's brother') relationship, could be explained in reference to individuals pursuing a strategy of individual inclusive fitness maximization under conditions of low certainty-of-paternity. This hypothesis was subsequently taken up and elaborated in a series of studies by other Darwinian anthropologists:

The hypothesis follows that matrilineal inheritance is a cultural trait that evolved in response to low probability of paternity. [...] The paternity hypothesis was rescued and made explicit in the context of modern evolutionary theory by Alexander in 1974. Over the next 10 years this provided the impetus leading to numerous theoretical refinements and scholarly and empirical investigations (Flinn 1981; Gaulin & Schlegel 1980; Greene 1978; Hartung 1981b; Kurland 1979).(Hartung 1985,661-663)

Ultimately these analyses were considered unsuccessful, and were specifically criticized by other sociobiologists on a number of grounds. One problem was said to be that interpreting inclusive fitness theory to imply that individuals have evolved the characteristic of pursuing strategies to maximize their own 'inclusive fitness' is erroneous; the theory should instead be interpreted to describe selection pressures on genes:

Alexander's argument... erred through looking at things from the point of view of an individual... I believe this kind of error is all too easy to make when we use the technical term ‘fitness’ [of individuals]. This is why I have avoided using the term in this book. There is really only one entity whose point of view matters in evolution, and that entity is the selfish gene.(Dawkins 1989 (1976), 137 emphasis in original)

A related problem was that, in assuming that individuals simply operate as inclusive fitness maximizing agents, any investigation of the proximate psychological mechanisms that mediate social behaviors was ignored. Symons made this observation in his 1989 Critique of Darwinian Anthropology:

DA's central hypothesis is that “evolved behavioral tendencies” cause human “behavior to assume the form that maximizes inclusive fitness”(Irons 1979b, 33). Turke and Betzig (1985) state this hypothesis as a formal prediction: “Modern Darwinian theory predicts that human behavior will be adaptive, that is, designed to promote maximum reproductive success through available descendant and nondescendant relatives.”(p 79)… [T]he key terms in [this] quotation are used in DA to bypass the question of phenotypic design in characterizations of adaptation.(Symons 1989, 131-132)

Symons, along with Tooby and Cosmides, were amongst the founders of the emerging school of evolutionary psychology, whose aim has been to focus more on these hypothesized proximate psychological mechanisms.

Theoretical background

Darwinian anthropology was critiqued by Symonds for its agnosticism as to the psychological mechanisms governing how social behavior is actually expressed in the human species, and its reliance on interpreting inclusive fitness theory to simply imply that humans have evolved to be inclusive fitness maximizers. This section will review some of the relevant background discussion in inclusive fitness theory to clarify why this position was considered untenable.

Evolutionary versus proximate explanations

See also: Tinbergen's four questions

Inclusive Fitness theory has often been interpreted to mean that social behavior per se is a goal of evolution, and also that genes (or individual organisms) are selected to find ways of actively distinguishing the identity of close genetic relatives ‘in order to’ engage in social behaviors with them.

[M]any misunderstandings persist. In many cases, they result from conflating “coefficient of relatedness” and “proportion of shared genes,” which is a short step from the intuitively appealing—but incorrect—interpretation that “animals tend to be altruistic toward those with whom they share a lot of genes.” These misunderstandings don't just crop up occasionally; they are repeated in many writings, including undergraduate psychology textbooks—most of them in the field of social psychology, within sections describing evolutionary approaches to altruism. (Park 2007, p860)

The apparent rationale for this common mis-interpretation is that organisms would thereby benefit the “Inclusive Fitness of the individuals (and genes) involved”. This approach overlooks the point that evolution is not a teleological process, but a passive, consequential and undirected biological process, where environmental variations and drift effects are present alongside random gene mutations and natural selection.

Inclusive fitness theory takes the form of an ultimate explanation, specifically a criterion (br>c), for the evolution of social behaviors, not a proximate mechanism governing the expression of social behaviors. What forms of social behavior might meet this criterion are cannot be a priori specified by the theory, nor can it shed light on whether the life history of a species provides opportunities for social interactions to occur. Thus, strictly speaking, the interpretation that organisms ‘have evolved to’ direct social behavior towards genetic relatives is not implied by the theory (see also inclusive fitness).

Investigating how inclusive fitness theory might apply to the potential emergence of social traits in any given species must begin with an analysis of the evolutionarily typical ecological niche, demographics, and patterns of interaction of that species. Where significant interaction between individuals is not present in the life history of a species, the theory is necessarily null regarding social behaviors between individuals. As Silk (2001) put it;

The role of kinship in the daily lives of animals depends on the demographic composition of the groups in which they live. Kin selection will only be an important force in the evolution of social behavior if animals find themselves in situations where they have an opportunity to fulfill the predictions of Hamilton's rule. At a minimum, kin must be available. The number, availability, and degree of relatedness among kin will depend on how groups are constructed in nature.” (Silk 2001, 77)

Consideration must thus be given to whether the ecological niche leads to the clustering of individuals in groups or whether individuals are typically solitary. Socioecology research, for example, suggests that fundamental influences on demographic patterns are the distribution/fecundity of primary food sources as well as patterns of predation. When considering social behavior traits of a given species, consideration of these influences is in a sense, logically prior to analyses of inclusive fitness pressures on the species.

Selection pressure on genes or strategy of individuals

Darwinian anthropology, following R. D. Alexander, used the notion of the inclusive fitness of individuals rather than the inclusive fitness of genes. Dawkins (above) pointed to this as an error. The source of the confusion can be traced to discussions in Hamilton's early papers on inclusive fitness. In his 1963 paper Hamilton refers, unambiguously, to selection pressures on genes;

[T]he ultimate criterion which determines whether G [a gene] will spread is not whether the behaviour is to the benefit of the behaver but whether it is to the benefit of the gene G; and this will be the case if the average net result of the behaviour is to add to the gene pool a handful of genes containing G in higher concentration than does the gene pool itself.” (1996 [1963], 7)

However, in his paper published in 1964, actually written before the 1963 paper (Hamilton 1996), Hamilton had included a subsidiary discussion on what the genetic theory might imply for how we look at the fitness of individuals:

Actually, in the preceding mathematical account we were not concerned with the inclusive fitness of individuals as described here but rather with certain averages of them which we call the inclusive fitness of types. But the idea of the inclusive fitness of an individual is nevertheless a useful one. Just as in the sense of classical selection we may consider whether a given character expressed in an individual is adaptive in the sense of being in the interest of his personal fitness or not, so in the present sense of selection we may consider whether the character or trait of behaviour is or is not adaptive in the sense if being in the interest of his inclusive fitness.” (Hamilton 1996 [1964], 38)

It is clear here that the formal treatment is of the selection pressures on types (genes or traits), whilst the notion of individual inclusive fitness may serve as a guide to the adaptiveness of the trait; just as consideration of effects of a trait on an individual's fitness can be instructive when considering classical selection on traits. At the same time, it is understandable that Alexander took the inclusive fitness of individuals as a heuristic device.

Context-based or discrimination-based expression mechanisms

In his 1964 paper, Hamilton 'hazards' “the following unrigorous statement of the main principle that has emerged from the model”;

The Social behaviour of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behaviour-evoking situation the individual will seem to value his neighbours’ fitness against his own according to the coefficients of relationship appropriate to that situation.”(1964 [1996], 49)

He uses the terms 'hazards', 'unrigorous', and 'will seem' deliberately, since his formal analysis makes clear that the model specifies the evolutionary selection pressure, rather than specifying what mechanisms govern the proximate expression of social behaviors. He also clearly points to social behaviors being evoked in distinct situations, and that individuals may encounter potential social recipients of different degree of relationship in different situations. If one ignores the cautious qualifying words however, the passage might readily be interpreted to imply that individuals are indeed expected to make an active assessment of the degree of relatedness of others they interact with in different situations. Later in the paper, Hamilton again discusses the issue of whether the performance (or expression) of social behaviors might be conditional on; (a) discriminating factors which correlate with close relationship with the recipient, or (b) actually discriminating which individuals 'really are' in close relationship with the recipient:

The selective advantage which makes behaviour conditional in the right sense on the discrimination of factors which correlate with the relationship of the individual concerned is therefore obvious. It may be, for instance, that in respect of a certain social action performed towards neighbours indiscriminately, an individual is only just breaking even in terms of inclusive fitness. If he could learn to recognise those of his neighbours who really were close relatives and could devote his beneficial actions to them alone an advantage to inclusive fitness would at once appear. Thus a mutation causing such discriminatory behaviour itself benefits inclusive fitness and would be selected. In fact, the individual may not need to perform any discrimination so sophisticated as we suggest here; a difference in the generosity of his behaviour according to whether the situations evoking it were encountered near to, or far from, his own home might occasion an advantage of a similar kind.” (1996 [1964], 51)

For certain social behaviors, Hamilton suggests there may be selection pressure for more discerning discrimination of genetic relatedness, were the mutation to occur. But 'in fact' the same net result of accurately targeting social behaviors towards genetic relatives could be achieved via a simpler mechanism of being expressed in proximity to the actor's 'home'. Hamilton is thus agnostic as to whether evolved social behaviors might be expressed via straightforward proximate mechanisms such as location-based cues, or whether more specific discriminatory powers might govern their expression. He does suggest that the distinct social contexts within which various social behaviors are expressed are factors to consider. Other theorists have discussed these questions of whether proximity, context or more discriminatory expression may govern behaviors:

Animals cannot, of course, be expected to know, in a cognitive sense, who their relatives are, and in practice the behaviour that is favoured by natural selection will be equivalent to a rough rule of thumb such as ‘share food with anything that moves in the nest in which you are sitting.’ If families happen to go around in groups, this fact provides a useful rule of thumb for kin selection: ‘care for any individual you often see’.” (Dawkins 1979, 187)

If, for example, animals behave with an equal degree of altruism to all their “neighbours”… and if on average animals are related to their neighbours, then I would regard this as an example of kin selection. It is not a necessary feature of kin selection that an animal should distinguish different degrees of relationship among its neighbours, and behave with greater altruism to the more closely related…”(Maynard Smith 1976, 282 emphasis in original)

Dawkins believes social behaviors will in practice be governed by context-based expression. Maynard Smith is, like Hamilton, agnostic, but reiterates the point that context-based cues might well govern their expression and that actively distinguishing relatives is not necessarily expected for the expression of those social traits whose evolution is governed by inclusive fitness criteria. In sum, inclusive fitness theory does imply that; the evolutionary emergence of social behavior can occur where there is statistical association of genes between social actors and recipients; but that the expression of such evolved social behaviors is not necessarily governed by actual genetic relatedness between participants. The evolutionary criterion and the proximate mechanism must thus not be confused: the first does require genetic association (of the form br>c), the second does not.

Darwinian anthropology's central premise that human behavior has evolved to maximize the inclusive fitness of individuals is thus not a logical derivative of the theory. Also, the notion that humans will discriminate social behaviors towards genetic relatives is again not entailed by the theory.

Reception by anthropologists

Before the questions raised within anthropology about the study of ‘kinship’ by Schneider  and others from the 1960s onwards, anthropology itself had paid very little attention to the notion that social bonds were anything other than connected to consanguinal (or genetic) relatedness (or its local cultural conceptions). The social bonding associated with provision of and sharing of food was one important exception, particularly in the work of Richards, but this was largely ignored by descriptions of ‘kinship’ till more recently. Although questioning the means by which ‘kinship bonds’ form, few of these early accounts questioned the fundamental role of ‘procreative ties’ in social bonding (Schneider, 1984). From the 1950s onwards, reports on kinship patterns in the New Guinea Highlands added some momentum to what had until then been only occasional fleeting suggestions that living together (co-residence) might underlie social bonding, and eventually contributed to the general shift away from a genealogical approach. For example, on the basis of his observations, Barnes suggested:

[C]learly, genealogical connexion of some sort is one criterion for membership of many social groups. But it may not be the only criterion; birth, or residence, or a parent's former residence, or utilization of garden land, or participation in exchange and feasting activities or in house-building or raiding, may be other relevant criteria for group membership.”(Barnes 1962,6)

Similarly, Langness' ethnography of the Bena Bena also emphasized a break with the genealogical perspective:

The sheer fact of residence in a Bena Bena group can and does determine kinship. People do not necessarily reside where they do because they are kinsmen: rather they become kinsmen because they reside there.” (Langness 1964, 172 emphasis in original)

By 1972, Schneider had raised deep problems with the notion that human social bonds and 'kinship' was a natural category built upon genealogical ties (for more information, see kinship), and especially in the wake of his 1984 critique this has become broadly accepted by most, if not all, anthropologists.

The darwinian anthropology (and other sociobiological) perspectives, arising in the early 1970s, had not unreasonably assumed that the genealogical conceptions of human kinship, in place since Morgan's early work in the 1870s, were still valid as a universal feature of humans. But they emerged at precisely the time that anthropology, being particularly sensitive about its own apparent 'ethnocentric' generalizations about kinship (from cultural particulars to human universals) was seeking to distance itself from these conceptions. The vehemence of Sahlins' rebuttal of sociobiology's genetic relatedness perspective in his 1976 The use and abuse of Biology, which underlined the non-genealogical nature of human kinship, can be understood as part of this 'distancing' trend.

Alternative approaches

The lack of success of darwinian anthropology created space for alternative approaches to analyzing human social behaviors from a biological perspective. Alexander's initial point (above) that the inclusive fitness framework had been scarcely applied to human kinship and social patterns has remained largely valid. But the move away from genealogical kinship in anthropology has continued to be a major barrier to any potential resolution. This section reviews a range of approaches to synthesizing ideas from evolutionary biology to observations and data about human social behaviour across contemporary human populations. Whilst some of these approaches include the inclusive fitness approach, others may seek to demonstrate fit to other theories from evolutionary biology, or to demonstrate that certain proximate mechanisms of social behaviour are both compatible with the inclusive fitness approach, and also with the broad variety of ethnographic data on human kinship patterns.

Evolutionary psychology

Main article: Evolutionary psychology

Human behavioural ecology

Main article: Human behavioral ecology

Nurture kinship

Main article: Nurture kinship

Criticism

Theories in evolutionary biology relevant to understanding social behavior may not be limited to frameworks such as inclusive fitness theory. The theory of reciprocal altruism may have equal or greater explanatory power for some forms of human social behavior, and perhaps kinship patterns. Other approaches may maintain that human behavior is less amenable to biological analysis due to the prominent influence of social learning and cultural transmission in the human species, and instead advance ideas based on the role of e.g. culture, historical contingencies or economic/environmental conditions. All or any of these may or may not contribute valuable insights to our understanding of social behavior and social patterns in humans.

Right to truth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_truth 

Women of the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared demonstrate in front of La Moneda Palace during the Pinochet military regime, demanding information on loved ones subjected to forced disappearance.

Right to truth is the right, in the case of grave violations of human rights, for the victims and their families or societies to have access to the truth of what happened. The right to truth is closely related to, but distinct from, the state obligation to investigate and prosecute serious state violations of human rights. Right to truth is a form of victims' rights; it is especially relevant to transitional justice in dealing with past abuses of human rights. In 2006, Yasmin Naqvi concluded that the right to truth "stands somewhere on the threshold of a legal norm and a narrative device ... somewhere above a good argument and somewhere below a clear legal rule".

Origins

The idea of a legal right to truth is distinct from the pre-existing understanding of the importance of establishing the truth about what happened in a case of human rights violation. In 1977, Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions enshrined a right for families of people killed in armed conflicts to find out what happened to their relatives. A 1993 conference at the Catholic Institute for International Relations addressed the right to truth. The right to truth has been recognized in international soft law instruments such as the United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity (2005) and UN General Assembly Resolution 60/147, as well as by the 2011 appointment of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of non-Recurrence. In 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Commission determined that there was an "inalienable and autonomous right" to truth. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance also guarantees victims of forced disappearance a right to know the circumstances of the disappearance, but it is not universally ratified.

According to Patricia Naftali, the right to truth remains elusive because it is a concept with different definitions (sometimes contradictory), which is deployed in support of a variety of human rights claims.

Cases

Memorial at Villa Grimaldi with the names of hundreds of people either missing from or killed there by Chilean secret police under the Pinochet dictatorship

As a result of cases before international courts that find states in breach of human rights, states have been required to:

1. Conduct effective investigations and prosecute the responsible individuals
2. Reveal information regarding missing persons
3. Publicly apologize and acknowledge the violation of human rights
4. Publish the court judgement
5. Compensate victims
6. Reimburse court costs of claimants
7. Improve security to allow the return of displaced persons
8. Take steps to avert re-occurrence of the violation
9. Change national laws
10. Institute measures to improve compliance with international human rights instruments
11. Construct memorials to commemorate the human rights violation

United Nations Human Rights Committee

The first case that articulated a right to truth in international human rights jurisprudence was a forced disappearance case, Quinteros v. Uruguay (1983); the UN Human Rights Committee determined that, according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the mother of the victim had "the right to know what has happened to her daughter. In these respects, she too is a victim of the violations of the Covenant suffered by her daughter in particular, of article 7 [ICCPR]". In Saadoun v. Algeria (2003), regarding a man who was forcibly disappeared during the Algerian Civil War, the Committee determined that failure to investigate gave rise to a new violation of the ICCPR. In this case, Algeria had proclaimed an amnesty for crimes committed during the "national tragedy".

Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has tended towards an autonomous right to truth. Because of right to truth, the IACHR has invalidated agreements that grant amnesty to human rights violators, as in Barrios Altos v. Perú [es] (2001). In 1985, six years before Guatemala accepted the jurisdiction of the IACHR, American journalist Nicholas Blake disappeared. In Blake v. Guatemala (1998), the IACHR determined that Guatemalan efforts to obstruct his family's search for the truth constituted inhuman treatment contrary to the American Convention on Human Rights.

The IACHR has often repeated its opinion:

the right to the truth is subsumed in the right of the victim or his next of kin to obtain clarification of the facts relating to the violations and the corresponding responsibilities from the competent State organs, through the investigation and prosecution established in Articles 8 and 25 of the Convention.

European Court of Human Rights

There is also case law of the European Court of Human Rights relevant to right to truth. In Cyprus v. Turkey (2001), the ECtHR ruled against Turkey in the case of Greek Cypriots who had been last seen in the custody of Turkish troops. The anguish of surviving relatives constituted a "continuing violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with respect to the relatives of the Greek-Cypriot missing persons." In El-Masri v. Macedonia (2012), the ECtHR established that North Macedonia had violated the Convention in allowing El-Masri to be taken into US custody during extraordinary rendition. The court noted that Macedonian authorities had "deprived the applicant of being informed of what had happened, including of getting an accurate account of the suffering he had allegedly endured and the role of those responsible for his alleged ordeal" as well as hidden this information from the public at large. According to law professor Arianna Vedaschi, "the decision given in El-Masri showed innovative legal reasoning and a wholly innovative attitude of the judges towards the far-reaching enforcement of the right to the truth". In Janowiec and Others v. Russia (2013), the court found no violation of the convention regarding Russian investigations into the 1940 Katyn massacre, but this ruling was on the principle of non-retroactivity because the massacre happened before the ECHR was drafted.

Legal scholar James A. Sweeney criticized the ECtHR's approach to right-to-truth cases:

the ECtHR’s 'underlying values' test could have led the way in promoting internationally the notion that present-day denial or obstruction of the quest for truth about the gravest pre-ratification human rights abuses may amount, in itself, to a contemporary human rights violation. Such an approach does not apply each human rights treaty retroactively, nor does it convert every historical human rights abuse into a 'continuing violation', but it establishes exceptional circumstances in which denying the right to truth about historical human rights abuses is constitutive of a fresh violation within the temporal jurisdiction of the relevant enforcement body.

National law

Argentine law recognizes the right to truth, with a sui generis legal proceeding called juicio por la verdad (trial for the truth) developed in the aftermath of the National Reorganization Process.

Potential forums

It has been suggested that victims might rely on Article 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights in right-to-truth cases before the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. The International Criminal Court's victim-centered approach may prove conducive to a right to truth.

Other examples

Talaat Pasha, the architect of the Armenian Genocide, was buried in 1943 at the Monument of Liberty, Istanbul as a national hero.

According to legal scholar Agostina Latino, the right to truth related to the Armenian genocide extends beyond Armenian genocide survivors to their descendants as well as Armenians at large. Latino states that, as the successor to the Ottoman government that committed the genocide, the Turkish government's ongoing Armenian genocide denial violates their right to truth. For example, there are monuments and streets named after the perpetrators, but not the victims.

The Inter-American Court and some theorists have suggested that truth-telling may be a form of partial reparations to victims of human rights abuses. Right to truth is related to the fight against impunity as establishing the truth about a past event is the first step in holding perpetrators accountable.

Right to Truth Day

Since 2010, the UN has commemorated International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims, or Right to Truth Day, on 24 March, the anniversary of the murder of El Salvador archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero.