To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans will have the requisite features in a distribution over its members.
So I will distinguish between three kinds of religion: religious organisation, religious psychology, and the religious faculty, which is a biological property. The latter is something I will get to in more detail in a later post.
Now I want to discuss whether religion is adaptive, because many attempts to explain religion naturalistically, i.e., as a natural phenomenon, argue that it is. We must determine if it is adaptive, and to what it adapts and how.
Sociobiological explanations of religion have been offered since the nineteenth century. Some were based on Herbert Spencer's philosophy of universal evolution, and others based on the developing science of anthropology, still enmired in the cultural prejudices of Eurocentric values and institutions.
More recently, in the 1970s, the field of ethology (animal behaviour) drew analogies with the social behaviours of other species than humans. Ethology at the time was in some ways rather naive, and many of the species that were appealed to were rather distant evolutionarily from humans, such as gazelles, wolves, and so on. More recently, much work on the ethology of chimpanzees, especially by Frans de Waal, has drawn some rather more closely related conclusions about ape behaviour that, as we are apes, applies directly to us, at least as a starting point for thinking in ways that might be more culturally indifferent.
Most evolutionary accounts of religion based on a sociobiological view have assumed that there is a cost to religious behaviour, and as always when such things are noted, this raises the concern about why that cost might be paid. The cost is, of course, the time and effort, and occasionally fitness (as when a child becomes a celibate priest), not to mention accrued resources. Sacrificing an animal from your livestock is a very real advertisement of commitment.
But some evolutionary accounts are not based on the adaptiveness of religion, but of the dispositions that religion makes use of. For example, E. O. Wilson holds that religion is a byproduct of a feeling of awe and connectedness with the world that was itself adaptive in an earlier time. So we need to decide if that is real, and if so, if it is adaptive.
A very real problem lies in our ability to divide these properties or traits into identifiable units, in order to determine their adaptive value and what it is they are adapted to. Despite the introduction of the concept of modularity into evolutionary psychology, it is as yet unclear if there are in fact singular traits under selection for more general aspects of human psychology.
So if we were to ask if the "feeling of oneness", or any other psychological trait identified as mystical or protoreligious, were adaptive, it is almost impossible to tell if the psychological trait is adaptive as we cannot say either what it is that adapted and to what. For example, a feeling of oneness could be a byproduct of what Wilson calls "biophilia", an adaptive affinity to biological complexity, or it could be a byproduct of adaptation to social cohesion, and the natural awe is a spandrel of that adaptation, or it might be a side effect of individuals having a set of neurological traits that are at one extreme of the populational distributions of such things that just happen to generate this feeling; in other words, an accident (and thus not adaptive).
Similar issues apply when we try to determine if the organisations of religious rituals and behaviours, not to mention the actual hierarchies, and so on, are adaptive, but here the tradition of sociology and economics has more experience. We can say, for example, that Protestant beliefs about thrift and hard work are adaptations in some degree to the increasing role of capital investment in European trade and industry, and the success of those attitudes invited other traditions such as the Catholic Church to relax prohibitions against usury in a similar manner.
Even worse problems arise if we take a memetic approach and treat religious memes as adaptive. There is the problem of individuating memes. We are too easily led by the prejudices and categories that we have developed for a particular type of religion into thinking that they are just obvious. Mostly what is obvious are our inherited categories, from centuries of theorising about religion in a western context. Even applying notions derived from one "Abramic" religion, Christianity, to any of the others is fraught. Islam is a whole-society tradition that does not separate political and social from the religious. Judaism has more emphasis placed on ritual adherence than to doctrinal agreement. Even between the different flavours of Christianity there are significant differences of category.
Then, assuming we have a good first cut of the memes, we have to identify what they are adapted to. Is it the social ecology of the tradition? Is it the cultural milieu? Or is it, as the "mind-virus" view of memes has it, adaptation to the dispositions of human cognition and emotion? And so on.
So we must try to find a way in which we can ascertain what aspects of human psychology, social structures, and biology are possibly adaptive. One way that might be achieved is the so-called "reverse engineering" technique - find out what niche or problem the trait serves a function in, and then backwardly identify the units, the memes or the doctrines, or the psychological and cognitive faculties involved. But to do this directly would be entirely circular, and viciously so. So perhaps there's another way. Identify traits and so forth that are adaptive in non-religious contexts, and see if they contribute causally to the religious behaviours and institutions. Once we do that, it becomes possible to answer the question of adaptiveness, and, moreover, to identify the ecology (social or natural) in which they are subject to selection.
We may find that while these traits are adaptive in the "proper" context, like social cohesion, they are maladaptive in the religious context, a view that has been put forward from time to time. This would be a "spandrel" account, and one that identifies religion as maladaptive. Or we may find that religious instances of these traits are in fact adaptive in a different way. There is no a priori argument either way. It is going to have to wait for empirical work to determine.
Even in ordinary biology, there is no principled reason for thinking that a trait must be adaptive - it can be, or it can be negated by selection for other traits. Something may be adaptive on its own but in the overall fitness of the trait bearers be swamped by countervailing selection of related or linked traits. In a later post I will (again) propose what I think might be a story of adaptiveness of religious traits at all three levels.
However, we must not suppose that something once adaptive remains so, or that there is a single cause of adaptation. A trait might be adaptive in different ways in different contexts. For example animist behaviour and beliefs might be very adaptive in a semi-foraging society like those in the Papuan mountains, but be adaptive in quite different ways in an agrarian sedentary semi-urban society.
- Log in to post comments
So I will distinguish between three kinds of religion: religious organisation, religious psychology, and the religious faculty, which is a biological property.
Hear, hear! Too many discussions of religion (I think particularly in unbelieving circles) treat "religion" as a monolith, simplistically attributed to a single (or very few) cause(s).
This is a fascinating series. Thanks for this, John. Looking forward to the next installment.
I must admit that I find Dawkin's ideas in this respect quite convincing. He puts for the idea that many of the aspects religion uses to perpetuate itself are based in legitimate survival traits. He uses obedience as a good example. For their own survival it is necessary that young children obey and defer to the judgment of adults. This is what keeps them from wandering off cliffs or putting their hands into the fire. However this impressionability and desire for authority also push us toward belief in religion and religious leaders.
This is just one example. The idea here, however, is that there is something to be said for looking at the psychological aspects of religion and identifying what the underlying adaptive nature of those aspects are before we try to look at religion as a whole. Religion is a complex phenomena that almost certainly has multiple levels of explanation and adaptation to it.
This is a fascinating series - which I have only just stumbled upon.
A few comments (some of which would have been better placed in the earlier blogs, sorry). I am certain in my own mind that you can't address modern religions (the last 4,000 years or so) without looking at the precursors and what drove them. Asking if there are individual or social benefits to religion is a more practical question. Indeed asking if religion is adaptive is probably silly in itself, as it is simply too soon to tell in evolutionary terms. Were the precursors adaptive?
My suspicion is that religion is one of many 'spandrels' made possible by the human species recent exponential expansion into culturally meaningful and self organising behavious.
In brief, go back 100,000 years or so and our distant ancestors start using 'new' cultural ideas which improve fitness. These cultural ideas become embedded genetically, developmentally, and socially (a mix of all three methods of affecting heredity) through social selection.
What starts out as an increasingly elaborate set of non-conscious rules ('look out for the alpha male', 'follow the leader', 'share with kin', 'ooh look I can see a pattern', 'there may be some agency around that I can't detect') becomes part of the successful (in fitness terms) troop behaviour. Social selection kicks in to accelerate the acquisition of this behaviour and enables 'culture' to become a social environment an individual has to respond to (or leave no descendants). This social environment spreads through it's own bootstrap success into societies larger than hunter-gatherer troops, agricultural societies, and (currently) into urbanisation. All in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
My suspicion is that most of our inherrent instincts and behaviours are only a little different from other apes. Most of our 'higher faculties' (yuck description) are the result of our own self inflicted 'domestication'. As such I believe that religions need no special explanation that wouldn't also apply to symphony orchestras, table manners, systems of commerce, or politics. YMMV.
I read this post by Mr Wilkins and then immediately following the baying of the mob over at Myers' Kindergarten. I find it hard to believe that these two discussions of the same subject are taking place in the same universe.
I have only read of two small groups of present day humans said not to have a religion. Because religion is so widespread among humans, one suspects it has been highly adaptive.
Jim Thomerson wrote:
Or that it's piggy-backing on other behaviors that are.
Whether a trait is adaptive or not obviously depends upon its context, which, in the human case, is largely cultural. Since the way that human beings live has changed drastically over history, not only in course of thousands of years but over the course of hundreds, it's plain impossible to say if religion is or is not currently adaptive. In any case, since human life is very likely to go through another revolutionary change in the next hundred years or so as the species survives or tries to survive a demographic crash, the present adaptiveness of religiosity may not mean very much. Natural selection is probably too slow to take much notice of it before a new set of cultural conditions changes the rules again.
Natural selection is probably too slow to take much notice of it before a new set of cultural conditions changes the rules again.
Interesting idea. In the human population overall, there doesn't seem to be much natural selection going on right now, and the population is increasing. Natural selection would seem to be much more significant at population bottlenecks - like in a world-wide nuclear or environmental holocaust. Who knows what would be selected for then.
Yes natural selection on humans is relaxed in comparison to the past. The evidence being population growth. Populations grow when the average fitness of the population increases, for whatever reason. Take a look at population growth data and see which populations are the most fit at the moment. It is not you and me, dude. Actually I think the most fit are the Hutterites, a religious group, which have had an 8%/year population growth rate and will soon own all of Canada. But take a look at the large populations which have the higher growth rates.
I was reading a moving account by a woman of the death of her husband. He was a test pilot who died of his injuries 36 days after surviving a plane crash. Both husband and wife were atheist and what was moving was how she was able to cope with her bitter loss without a faith to cushion the blow.
Those around her responded in kindly ways that were nonetheless, for her, irritating. There were the usual pious platitudes about her husband having moved on to a better life, about God's love and trusting in his inscrutable purpose and about praying for her. She found a Catholic priest administering the last rites to her husband in the hospital. It was all well-intentioned but it was not what she and her husband believed.
Most of us have known, at some time, the difficulty of knowing what to say or do when trying to comfort someone experiencing a tragic loss. For those of us who are now atheist or agnostic but were raised in a particular faith, it can be quite difficult not to fall back on those comforting and convenient responses.
Humanity has been afflicted with disease, disaster and death throughout its history. Even today, with all our science and technology, our capacity for dealing with these events is often pitifully inadequate. How much worse must it have been for our distant ancestors who neither understood what was happening nor could do much about it.
The sense of being utterly helpless - of being unable to do anything to save yourself or, even worse, those you love - is terrible thing to bear. We want desperately to be able to do something. Prayer may be useless but it is better than nothing.
This may seem trite and to those fluent in the abstractions of science and philosophy - abstractions which themselves serve in part to distance the user from the sometimes painful realities they purport to describe - but it is far from trivial to those who find themselves in the middle of such suffering.
The hard reality is that if all atheism or agnosticism can do is to tell those people to 'suck it up and get on with their lives' then the megachurches are going to be full for a long time to come.
I have heard of some very moving non-religious memorial services which gave some consolation to the bereaved.
Similarly I have often wondered why religious people are not happy for their loved ones 'going on before'.
I rather suspect that early religions adopted existing death rites rather than supplying their own. Arguably the existing big religions show their success (amongst other ways) by how many life events they have adopted and made 'unthinkable' outside a religious framework.
As an afterthought, it suddenly struck me that it might be more useful to regard formal religions as cultural parasites rather than expressions of adaptive behaviour or cultural value.
Perhaps this should be added as another 'reason' under the earlier post "What is Religion?".