In the Ideas & Trends section of The New York Times of November 15th, Nicholas Wade waded into the murky waters of natural selection and religion (“The Evolution of the God Gene”). The idea is that religion – the potentiality for any and all religions – is hardwired into our brains from our hunter-gatherer days, some 50,000 years ago. Why? Because those egalitarian groups of naked warriors from which we descend were in constant battle with their neighbors, and internal cohesion as generated by ”religious” rituals (initially dancing, later ancestor-worship, later still, the worship of solar deities) had great utility to the group’s survival. And thus, procreation.
The article was illustrated with pictures of Catholic bishops and Buddhist monks doing their respective (but fundamentally identical) things. But the article’s editors could as will have show Michelangelo’s famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel or a bronze Buddha from Thailand at the Walters. Since both would be, no less than the bishops and monks in action, the glittering “residue” of our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ survival rituals.
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.