Faith as an adaptation
Nicholas Wade has an article up in The New York Times, The God Gene, which serves as a precis of the central arguments of The Faith Instinct, his new book. The title is catchy, but it should really be “The God Phene.” Depending on how you measure it, religiosity is a heritable trait, with its variance being controlled by variance across many genes. There is as likely to be a “God Gene” as a “Smart Gene” or “Height Gene.” In other words, not too likely.
I have been putting off putting up a review of The Faith Instinct because there’s a lot of ground to cover. The portions which emphasized the role of common belief, “imagistic arousal” and ritual in cementing common bonds among men and allowing for maximal force of collective action were persuasive to me. As someone who has never served in the military I am not personally familiar with the “band of bothers” dynamic, but the role of chanting, posing and synchronous mindfulness & action in sport is obvious. It’s no coincidence that high stakes athletics and religion tend to go hand & hand. Wade’s references to William McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History were very intriguing, and I have to check that book out at some point.
Though it is clear to me that there is utility in tribal gods binding a deme together to engage in collective action, I am more skeptical of the central function which Wade places upon religion as a driver of the cognitive biases which are likely to predict religion. Women are more religious than men. One plausible explanation for this is more men than women are socially retarded, and it is social retards who find supernatural agents less intuitively plausible, and are also liable to admit to this belief and not conform with the modal norms of society. The thesis in The Faith Instinct is that group level selection, on the level of tribal units, selected for those demes where religiosity was more pronounced, as those groups could engage in more effective collective action. Much of the argument is derived from Samuel Bowles from what I can tell. The problem of course is that the sex engaged in the warfare which is the specific manifestation of intergroup competition and subject to natural selection, males, seem to be less predisposed to belief in supernatural agents. Of course sex differences should be slow to evolve, so it suggests that if selection was operative upon religion as a trait it hasn’t swept away all the various cobwebs of evolutionary history in terms of the lower-level traits which come together to form the religious phenotype.
An alternative model for why religion is universal in humans from the adaptationist one is that it is a byproduct of various other cognitive traits which are useful, just as heat is produced during work. More specifically, in books like Religion Explained & In Gods We Trust cognitive anthropologists Pascal Boyer & Scott Atran argue that basic intuitions which naturally lead one to supernatural inferences derive from extremely useful cognitive features; agency detection, theory of mind, and flavors of folk psychology. Supernatural intuitions don’t constitute religion, and Wade et al. are not suggesting that it is simply theism which confers a selective benefit, but rather the entire cultural package of religious belief & practice, the “integrative” as well as the supernatural aspect. The problem that seems to emerge from these overlapping models is that I do not see why group selection dynamics operating upon biological traits are necessary to explain religious instincts as we see them today. Religion just doesn’t seem that tightly integrated of a feature, but a more diffuse phenotype (as evident by the novel fusion of philosophy with religion which occurred during the Axial Age). Rather, it seems a cultural adaptation which hooks into previously extant and ubiquitous psychological intuitions.
But a fuller review at ScienceBlogs soon.
It is useful to distinquish between “religion” in general and a particular religious traditions, such as the Western Hebraic tradition(s), which obviously have a high cultural content, whatever their genetic underpinnings.
I am especially interested in the problem of altruism, not at the family or tribal level — I think that problem has satisfactory genetic explanations in terms of kin selection — but in the case of, for example, internatinal relations and race relations. Certain belief systems may be necessary to establish ethical standards between peoples who are genetically distant from each other. This is a point that countless statesmen in the past keep coming back to: Pragmatic considerations are important when it comes to judging the “truth” of propositions (like the existence of God) that influence human behavior in important ways. Think of the way Grotius used the idea of God to establish the principles of international law, or Martin Luther King to establish civil rights for African-Americans.
Razib: just because religion relies on diverse psychological mechanisms that preceded it does not mean it is not a tightly integrated feature. Religion may be something like an emergent phenomenon at the group level, which is the whole point of invoking group selection. Religion doesn’t make sense on the individual level, because it doesn’t have a selection advantage there (in fact it may be deleterious). It is only at the level of the tribe or higher that the increased cooperation due to religious-type belief (and their correlates) is proposed to have its effect.
Hmm. Do most tribes have ‘tribal gods’? From my limited knowledge of anthropology (mainly from Tylor, Westermarck, Frazer, Malinowski, and Evans-Pritchard), I doubt that most ‘primitive’ peoples believe in ‘gods’ as such. They have a mish-mash of beliefs in the supernatural – magic, spirits, witchcraft, ghosts of the ancestors, etc – but nothing we would recognise as gods in the style of Jahweh and Allah. By the time of the Greeks and Romans religion and mythology are a bit more systematic, but we still don’t find ‘tribal gods’. In the Trojan War (according to Homer) the gods notoriously fought on both sides. The idea that ‘god is on our side’ probably comes in with the Israelites, which is a bit late to be relevant to most of human evolution. Supernatural beliefs in a more general sense might be more relevant, but I would want to see the argument carried through by reference to what we know about the actual beliefs of primitive peoples. E.g. what is the role of religion in the tribal warfare of Australian aborigines or Papuans? (Though after writing this I looked up Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer Religion, and it does seem that the ‘air spirits’ play some role in warfare.)
. Religion doesn’t make sense on the individual level, because it doesn’t have a selection advantage there (in fact it may be deleterious).
perhaps. but there are plenty of selective mechanisms for how it could have emerged on the individual level. e.g., over-active agency detection. false positives of agency detection are of marginal fitness effect, false negatives might be fatal.
but nothing we would recognise as gods in the style of Jahweh and Allah.
well, it’s a long way from a tribal god to allah. the god of genesis though is rather close.
The idea that ‘god is on our side’ probably comes in with the Israelites, which is a bit late to be relevant to most of human evolution.
no, this is not so. the mesopotamians had city-gods. just as athens was the city of athena, ur was the city of nanna. during conquests of a city conquerers might despoil the idols of the city’s native god, and replace it with the god of the conquerors. the association of particular gods with a particular polity goes back to the dawn of history in both mesopotamia and egypt (the early unification of egypt tends to elide the original local associations of the gods, but they are evident).
as for anthropology, i don’t know much about that really. so i’ll have to see.
* the point about the trojan war actually illustrates the god’s partisanship with particular cities. poseidon and zeus has long associations with troy.
> Religion doesn’t make sense on the individual level, because it doesn’t have a selection advantage there (in fact it may be deleterious)
Ever worry bout dyin? Think there might of been a time people worried about it more?
@ Eric: I take your point; there are times where religion does have an individual benefit. But I think the main explanation for the origin of religious organization is at the group level, as in the quote from Descent of Man:
“It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”
Here is evidence of religion as an adaptation. When people are shown pictures of attractive people of their own sex, they are more likely to rate themselves as religious. Apparently, seeing lots of rivals makes people want to enforce rules of monogamy. It has been shown that how people feel about premarital sex, abortion, and gay marriage are better predictors of church attendance than opinions about actual religious matters. Religion is, in part, a mating strategy.
Orion, yes, I definitely dont disagree with that group mechanism you mentioned. Learning about that was one thing that moved me farther away from the religious end of agnosticism.
Last time religion and fitness came up I mentioned supernatural excuses for waging war on your enemies, eg the Yanomamo. The fitness enhancement from this has a group component and an individual component. Everyone benefits, but those most prone to moral guilt and universalism benefit more.
I suppose the same might apply in some non-war situations, such as divine law justifying those who have the office of punishing. Also, witchcraft allegations within societies (mostly seen between enemy societies in Yanomamo) seem to be widespread in humans.
Razib:
I couldn’t help noticing a certain pronounced squishiness of expression used in your post (outstanding examples being basic intuition, supernatural intuition, and psychological intuition), to the extent that, by the time I finished the piece, I had’t any idea what you were writing about, much less what you were saying about whatever that happened to be. Is it me? (I haven’t smoked anything more hallucinogenic than old-fashioned Camels for years and had only two lite beers before falling asleep at half-time during yesterday’s game.) Just tell me you’ve got the same feeling from reading the cited books, etc.–then I’ll know I’m OK. Maybe I should bone up on this whole intuition thing?