Born to Run (the sermon)
Reading - from Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
"Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that's always looking for efficiency. We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that's the brain's department. The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others don't is because the brain is a bargain shopper.
For millions of years, we lived in a world without cops, cabs, or Domino's Pizza; we relied on our legs for safety, food, and transportation, and it wasn't as if you could count on one job ending before the next one began... Nor could (our) ancestors ever be sure that they wouldn't become food right after catching some; the antelope they'd chased since dawn could attract fiercer animals, forcing the hunters to drop lunch and run for their lives. The only way to survive was to leave something in the tank - that's where the brain comes in.
The brain is always scheming to reduce costs, get more for less, store energy and have it ready for an emergency... You've got this fancy machine, and it's controlled by a pilot who's thinking, 'Okay, how can I run this baby without using any fuel?' (If you lose the habit of running) the loudest voice in your ear is your ancient survival instinct urging you to relax. And there's the bitter irony: our fantastic endurance gave our brain the food it needed to grow, and now our brain is undermining our endurance.
...because that's what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don't have to?"
[Note: most of this quote is from the interview with Dr. Dennis Bramble in the book.]
Prayer
The greatest living distance runners today are probably the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. The name Tarahumara was donned by Spanish conquistadors who didn’t understand the tribal tongue. Their real name is the Rarรกmuri, the Running People, and I would like to share with you this morning for prayer and meditation, one of their sayings:
When you run on the earth and with the earth, you can run forever.
Sermon: Born to Run
We just have to face the fact that we simply don’t know where we come from and this makes it difficult to know who we are. This morning we will look at some widespread origin myths and their implications, we will then evaluate a new origin story that is emerging out of modern evolutionary research and, finally, we will evaluate this emerging story in light of the religious dichotomy of hubris and humility.
Our genus has been evolving for about 2.5 million years and written language is only about 4,500 years old. So we have direct records from only the last 0.18% of our history, that’s less than one fifth of one percent. Luckily, we are a species that loves to make up stories. Now many of these stories are mythical, they tell of gods and deeds improbable and unprovable, but they serve valuable functions as morality tales that help us make sense of our place in the world… well, sometimes. Some of these stories have aspects that have become pathological in their modern interpretations.
One of my favorites is the idea that we are ‘born broken’. This pervasive western idea has essentially evolved out of the Christian doctrine of original sin. For me, one indicator of how sneakily pervasive this idea is in our culture is to think about how we use the word human in everyday speech. It seems to me that we use it a lot to follow the word ‘only’ as either an excuse or a reason why we are not, or should not expect ourselves to be, good enough. Is that really what we think of ourselves, ‘we’re only human?’ We have come, through modern psychology, to understand what ‘the soft bigotry of lowered expectations’ does. Yet, we continue to expect and to tolerate from ourselves and from our fellows: meanness instead of compassion, selfishness instead of selflessness, greed instead of generosity, laziness instead of industry. Look, I’m not saying we’re not broken. What I am saying is that we were NOT born that way, and we are not stuck there.
Another favorite of mine is the idea that we are not animals but that we are angels or minds or spirits or souls who happen to be bound to these animal bodies. This one comes out of a long history of dualism in religion and in philosophy. In particular, the pervasive modern belief that we are rational creatures comes out of enlightenment thinking. It is a belief that is probably closer to sacred for many Unitarian Universalists than a lot of other demonstrably false myths. Once again, I think our common language use helps us see how pervasive this is. Even in our own recently penned mission statement, there is a reference to ‘spirit’, a conceit to the dualistic conception. We label the most brutish and nastiest of human action with the epithet ‘animal’, as if any other animal besides humans does anything deserving of slander. As for the idea popular with the economist set that we are rational, there is simply nothing but disproof after disproof in the past several decades of psychology research. Yet our market economic system with its reliance upon informed consumers and our democratic political system with its dependence upon an educated electorate both depend theoretically and pragmatically on the myth that we are rational. And we wonder why they fail to work as advertised.
This brings us to the less but not un- mythological origin story that is currently de jour in evolutionary theory and western culture. We are the toolmakers. We are the smartest, most creative genus to ever grace this planet. We are the masters of this place, self-appointed in our dominion over this vast Earth. We have developed agriculture and language and cities, and that was just the warm up. We are now designing living organisms and space travel and computers and artificial intelligence. We are the genus of the big brains.
There are a couple of problems with this story, the least of which is that it isn’t, strictly speaking, true. The big brains and the tools came later. One of the biggest remaining mysteries in the story of human evolution has been the chicken-and-egg problem of the protein supply that enabled us to grow big brains and the big brains that we needed to get reliable access to protein sources. The dominant theory is that the tools that we used for the first 2 million years were too biodegradable to survive and that’s why we only have fossil evidence of tools for the past few hundred thousand years. This version clings to the identity of our genus as the toolmakers, mostly because there hasn’t been a satisfactory alternative theory to describe how we might have gotten access to a reliable source of protein, at least not until the last decade.
In the early 1980’s, at the age of 22, Louis Liebenberg dropped out of school at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where he was studying physics and mathematics. While taking an introductory philosophy of science course during his sophomore year, Louis became convinced that the big boom in the size and capability of the human brain, the leap from simple tools to a capacity for the kinds of abstract thought that enabled theoretical physics and mathematics, must be related to the types of cognitive skills that we had developed during our evolution for animal tracking. So, he decided to go test his theory by living with the last remaining tribe of bushman hunters in the Kalahari. Louis lived with the bushmen for four years, learning tracking and bow hunting before he was initiated into the club of old style hunting. The bushmen set out hiking until they found a herd of kudu, they then began running after the herd, identifying a single kudu and keeping it in a gallop. The herd would attempt to mix and hide, but the experienced bushmen had several techniques for keeping track of the kudu that they had singled out. After two and a half hours the kudu collapsed from overheating. The hunters brought the prey back to their village and over the course of the next year taught Louis how to use persistence hunting to capture a variety of species depending on season and weather conditions. Louis, now Dr. Liebenberg, returned to school after his time with the bushmen to write: The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, a book exploring how the art of projecting one’s mind in the process of hunting forms the foundation for abstract human thought. But it wasn’t until Dr. Liebenberg read an article in Nature magazine in 2004 that he truly appreciated the full scope of his experience with the bushmen.
During the same period Dr.’s David Carrier, Dennis Bramble, and Dan Lieberman had been working on a theory to explain some morphological oddities of the species homo sapiens. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s their team of scientists from Utah and Harvard had identified 26 genetic distance running markers on the human genome. These are mostly morphological features that make sense only in terms of their contributions to distance or endurance running: for example the nuchal ligament which stabilizes the head during running and the Achilles tendon which absorbs and returns impact energy like a spring, but which is absent from animals who are primarily walkers. While they had catalogued tons of data and evidence of homo sapiens’ substantial distance running prowess, they had been unable to substantiate any of the myriad of persistence hunting tales to validate that there was an evolutionary advantage to endurance, since most of the prevailing theories relating to running and evolution focused on speed. After almost twenty years of research and without the hoped for silver bullet of a documented persistence hunt, the team published their endurance running hypothesis in Nature magazine. When Liebenberg read the article and called Bramble, the biggest hole in the theory was closed, and one of biggest mysteries in human evolution finally had a plausible theory.
Before we were city dwellers, before we practiced agriculture, before we developed language or hunting tools, we were runners. For 1.5 to 2 million years, our ancestors were most likely wide-ranging gatherers of roots and berries who supplemented that diet with a reliable stream of protein procured through persistence hunting. It was this capacity for endurance running which was the foundation upon which our growing brains and expanding communities were built. But as this morning’s reading indicates, as our brains have gotten bigger and smarter, they have begun to undermine our endurance. To quote from Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run, “To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.” And the result, “Fatal disease in epidemic proportion.”
According to Dr. Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, “Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history… If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run…
According to McDougall, “The last time a scientist with Dr. Lieberman’s credentials used (the) term (Magic Bullet), he’d just created penicillin. Dr. Lieberman knew it, and meant it.”
Lieberman continues, “If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.”
And why? Because we are not the smart genus, we are the running genus. It was our legs that gave birth to our heads, not the other way around, and now we have lost our way. By not knowing where we came from we have forgotten who we are, so we are constantly perplexed about why we feel so broken. So we make up stories, stories that tell us we are born broken, stories that tell us that we cannot fix ourselves. And we make up theories, theories that we are not these ailing bodies, we are the whisper of conscious thought that lives forever and is only temporarily trapped in these cages of flesh. And we tell ourselves that we are creatures of reason, that reason is our highest calling and our most noble self, because at least that provides an escape.
But these stories are veils of illusion. They separate us from the truth that can set us free. I am still trying to work through the implications of this myself, I have been reading and rereading this book, I have three or four different drafts of this sermon on my laptop, I have started running again after a three year hiatus from anything resembling a cardio workout, and I still don’t know yet how to really integrate this knowledge into my own daily life. But I do know this, I can’t do it all up here (pointing to head).
I promised you all a discussion of humility and hubris this morning, but before I get into that part of the talk and before you make any plans to go out and buy new running shoes, let me give you a little teaser. There are several topics from the book that I have not touched on this morning and I want to share just enough of them with you this morning to whet your appetite:
First, For all humans, men and women, starting at the age of 19, our distance running capabilities improve until we peak at 27. So the question is, how old are we when we are back to running as slow as we were when we were 19? The answer: 64. That’s 8 years to peak and a staggering 37 more years until we taper out, that’s a prime that lasts for an average of 45 years. There are no other areas of human physical performance where grandfathers can compete on an even keel with teenagers.
Second, here is a quote from McDougall: “running shoes may be the most destructive force ever to hit the human foot.” According to a 2008 research paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine “there are no evidence-based studies, not one, that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.” Actually, there are several studies that indicate that the more expensive running shoes, ones with more corrective features, actually increase your chances of injury. In addition, there is also no evidence that running shoes improve distance-running performance. I’ll leave the rest to those interested enough to read the book.
The term hubris means, among other things, to be out of touch with reality. If we pause a moment to reflect on this meaning, we can see that much of our story this morning has been about hubris. About being arrogantly out of touch. We are these minds, we are the masters of this domain, we are the smart ones, we are the toolmakers. We are the proprietors of these myths. We want to believe that we are smarter, better, and more godlike. We want to believe that we are special, that we are exceptional, that our dominance in this place is the result of our clear superiority. Well, I hate to burst our bubble, but our dominance in this place is the result of our hubris, the result of our being arrogantly out of touch with who and what we are. We may not be born broken, but we are at this time and in this place broken nonetheless.
The root of the term humility is the Latin humilitas, one meaning of which is “from the earth.” It is this aspect of humility that I would like to focus on this morning. To have humility is to recognize that we are from the earth, that we are not exceptional, that we are not special, that we are simply fellow living creatures inhabiting this place. We built these big brains so that we could pretend we were other animals, so that we could track them and hunt them more efficiently, but it ends up that we prefer the imagining to the being. So we now make a habit of imagining that we are different creatures, that we are angels descended into human form, that we are rational, even that we are born broken. We are not these brains, we are not these egos, or I should say, we are not only these brains or these egos. We are whole human beings. We are all the running people. And the sooner we remember how to be ourselves, the happier and healthier we will be.
In the words of Dr. Dennis Bramble, “…if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”
Parting Words
As we return to the world this morning, I would like to leave you with a quote from Jonothan Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis: “we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, math, and chess problems better than any human beings can, but none of our robots, no matter how costly, can (run) through the woods as well as the average six - year - old child.”
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