I was born in a relatively large city in the south western Ukraine called Donetsk. Its main industry is coal-mining and accordingly my father was employed by the USSR as an equipment engineer in one of the mines. My mother managed the local equivalent of a neighborhood boiler room, supplying hot water to about a square mile. As the Soviet Union collapsed and the economy was left in ruin, many members of my family began emigrating anywhere they could, mainly to the United States and Israel. Whatever it means to be culturally Jewish, we were it, and so were welcome in these countries and not welcome enough in our own country to permit our departure, while those who were ethnically Ukrainian were forced to stay behind.
At the age of six, I ended up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. After exactly a decade in the public school system, I found myself a sophomore in high school and having to select a major which would partially define my last two years of high school. Presented with the choices I had, I picked the Bio-Medical major because one of my best friends chose it too. This at-the-time seemingly meaningless decision ended up being the beginning of a so far 5-year pursuit of a life of science.
To me, the truly remarkable thing about the sciences is that unlike many other fields, they deal in the realm of facts. Opinions are of interest in the sciences only so far as they inspire experiments. Only tested facts will be applied toward theory, and even so only when they’ve been tested repeatedly by several sources. I find that this philosophy of only accepting that which one can prove has lent itself to every facet of my life. Of course the extent to which one is able to apply such ideals is limited by constraints of time and available knowledge. Nonetheless, I now find myself a staunch skeptic of pretty much everything I haven’t yet proven to myself, with the exception of some likely biases that I have yet to identify.
In any case, this leads me to one phenomenon that I find particularly fascinating and that is the evolution of species by natural selection, as originally explained by Charles Darwin. Although Darwin was originally interested in evolution as it pertained to speciation (the formation of new species), I am interested in it far more so in the way that our own human behavior can be explained within the context of its evolutionary heritage. I take for granted at this point that natural selection (under this umbrella term I include all forms of selection) is the only means by which anything living can ever come about. I mean by this that, logically-speaking, if two species are competing for the same set of resources and one is better at obtaining these resources, then that species will necessarily survive while the other dies off given a long enough time interval. This much, I believe is obvious.
I extend this point to conclude that if one characteristic of human beings secures the survival of those individuals over the survival of individuals lacking this characteristic, then those who possess this characteristic will go on to reproduce and eventually dominate those who don’t. With this in mind, I arrive at the topic of my thesis. I would like to take the concept of human religiosity and place it within the context of our evolutionary history. Why has every culture on earth for the past 100,000 years taken part in some form of religious ritual? This cannot possibly be a coincidence and there must be a scientific explanation for this observance. As noted earlier, by believing that natural selection is the only process by which living phenomena can arise, I necessarily predispose myself to concluding that an evolutionary explanation must exist.
What this explanation is, on the other hand, I have yet to even begin to know. One hypothetical reason was provided by Richard Dawkins, a British Evolutionary Biologist, who claimed that it is a byproduct of the instinctual human tendency to listen and accept as fact the word of their parents (which has many practical applications), combined with the need to dispose of the dead to prevent disease, combined with our enormous capacity for intelligent questions and the one-time-limited supply of answers. In any case, if an explanation exists, or if it can be deduced, then the aim of my paper is to find out what it is. In addition to religion, I may consider other questions including the origin of human morality, which has recently been shown to exist similarly in species of apes.
To get back to myself, however, I am a Biology major and I intend to go on to become a doctor at some point in the near future. In addition to attending Brooklyn College, I am also the effective half-owner of a small Russian souvenir distribution company. Although the economy has of late certainly put a hamper on the demand for Russian souvenirs, it was at one time a large component of my day to day life. The other owner was a professor of Biology introduced to me by my brother for whom this was a part-time job. The reason I mention this is to elucidate further my interest in the Biological sciences. For the past four years or so, I have spent most of my time either learning in school or discussing biology with my business partner, and as such it has become a vital part of who I am and of what I am interested in. In any case, at this point I simply look forward to the thesis-writing process as an experience of revelation and learning.
