On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind
thing bad, dangerous, even ominous, without know-
ing just what or why. They might have been prey to
psychosomatic illness while in the very process of
developing psyche! They might engage in unpro-
ductive searches for the cause of their feeling the
physical presence of something bad or dangerous,
the cause of this new kind of fear.
“Evolution has bred into the members of every
animal species a rate of production of fear which
corresponds to the average degree of endangerment
in which the species must live and survive” (Ley-
hausen 1973, p254). With most animals, production
of fear is limited to present dangers: dangers that can
be guarded against. Some animals are faced with in-
cessant danger:
“An animal of this kind can better afford to go
without food or sleep for a whole day or even longer,
or to miss a mating, than to relax its constant alert-
ness for five minutes... As long as the endogenous
production of fear roughly matches actual endanger-
ment and the overall harmony of the instinct system
which has been won in the process of evolution is
maintained, then for the organism concerned this is
only right” (Leyhausen 1973, p254).
Constant alertness could not be “right” for hu-
mans faced with nascent fears of dying, even if its
initial negative effects were minimal. Human sur-
vival was already precariously balanced (Mithen
1996). Natural selection could not provide any state-
of-the-art flight or fight adaptation. Some adapta-
tion quite new in nature was required if the species
was to survive. Indeed, only one species, of those
who might have had nascent awareness of mortality,
perhaps the only one to develop imagination, did
survive.
Of such fear and “subjective emotional experi-
ences” Leyhausen speculates: “the relationship be-
tween the propensities or instincts of fear and the
experience of fear as seen from the view of the ethol-
ogist are unavoidable. in part still hypothetical and
insofar represent an appeal for the development of a
research program designed to test them” (1973,
p255). In regard to genetic differences, from atrophy
to hypertrophy of fear:
“If hypertrophy has affected the production of
fear, we get the whole range from the overfearful to
the serious case of anxiety neurosis, where the min-
imum level of the automatic production of fear has
shifted considerably farther ‘upward’ and thus does
not fall victim to atrophy from disuse even when
there is a complete lack of adequate releasing situa-
tions. The person affected is therefore constantly un-
der pressure from the strongest appetences for fear,
looks for and finds a ‘substitute object’, and since
this is, of course, not the real cause of his fear, in this
instance no habituation to stimulus or decline in
stimulus-specific sensitivity can set in” (Leyhausen
1973, p267).
Over generations, with increasing awareness of
changes and then a glimmering awareness of time
itself, individuals must have struggled with increas-
ing nonspecific fears before grasping the specific (if
yet unthinkable) fear: “Death can happen to me”.
Such nascent feelings and thoughts may have oc-
curred in many forms before taking root in the soil
of mind as a specific fear of death. Earlier, an individ-
ual sense of life would be somewhat diffuse and im-
personal: not strongly felt as a single being (Langer
1982). Gaining self-awareness, the individual would
gain an increasingly specific fear of death of self. Full
awareness of a personal death is still evolving as we
enter the 21st century. In the early stages of its evo-
lution, neurological structures and language to ex-
press such thought, as well as the thoughts them-
selves, most likely would develop in parallel: the
need and the adaptation to serve that need.
There are many aspects of this growing awareness
that must be considered here. For one, human
groups during the periods considered here were
small: some few dozen individuals (perhaps as many
as ten dozen) living together as sub-groups sharing
a common space (Mithen 1996). Bonds of friendship
would tend to be strong; individuals would be men-
tally as well as physically important to each other.
Picture now, as awareness was developing, one of a
myriad of events: the death of one individual after
some period of suffering, with the others trying to
give aid. The dead body likely would be salient for
some time before burial or other disposal. The others
would struggle to come to terms with the event. Two
comrades might share looks, tears, and moans; they
might then, somehow, create a way of remembering
and communicating their sharing the event. In time
there would be a symbolic representation of the
event that would be stored in nascent memory and
retrieved later, around some similar event. I suggest
that, in the iterative process, the development of
imagination and its cultural expression would be ad-
vanced. In considering how you and I differ from our
ancestors in facing death, these two matters should
be considered first. We do not often look on death;
we have language to share, culture and imagination
with which to filter thoughts when we do look.
There are comforting religious beliefs, but even for
those who reject such, there are cultural supports to
lean on.
Evolution and Cognition ∣ 12 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1