I read Evolution for Everyone, and I was struck by how much David S. Wilson discussed religion. First, he seems to praise The Templeton Foundation quite a bit, in part because of their generous funding of his research. This isn’t to say that he has any illusions about the nature of their interests, but he isn’t an idealist about taking money to explore the questions which interest him. Wilson has to know that this is going to be come in for some scrutiny and no doubt some will denounce him for cavorting with the religious. That being said, Wilson is definitely not a Richard Dawkins style atheist. He promotes a functionalist theory about the nature of religion, that is, he believes that religion serve a useful evolutionary ends (e.g., a “social glue”). Wilson reports without any apology data he has collected which suggests that anti-social people are less religious than the highly social. He also reprises his work from Darwin’s Cathedral, giving some space to alternative viewpoints about the nature of religion. In particular he focuses on the the “byproduct theories,” the economically oriented “rational choice” model of Rodney Stark & William Bainbridge, and the cognitive anthropological hypotheses of Pascal Boyer & Scott Atran.
Though he gives some nod to the byproduct hypotheses as being orthogonal, or subsidiary, to his functional theory, I was struck by Wilson’s tendency to implicitly posit a zero-sum game where his functionalism was competing for space on the same ground as the other models. In Unto Others Wilson chides many thinkers for not viewing group selection as a just one way to look at a particular dynamic process, but he doesn’t seem to want to take his own advice in regards to religion. For example, he asks why ancient conceptions of the afterlife were not glorious if there has always been a tendency posit a life after death. Wilson offers that he has a nice functionalist argument for why there was evolution in regards to this idea over time, so that today most major religions posit a happy and rewarding afterlife for righteous believers. The problem is that those who work in cognitive anthropology never stipulated that the nature of the afterlife has to be good. Rather, they contend that humans have an innate tendency to believe that mind and body are separate and that the mind will persist after the body dies. This does not entail a heaven or anything so felicitous, and in fact it is close to the model that many ancient and tribal peoples have of a “shade” being an echo or shadow of one’s “real self,” which consisted of the integrated whole of the mind & body. It seems that a study of cultural history (which Wilson has no doubt done) will show that there has been selection and evolution on top of these basic evoked motifs to arrive at the modal cultural expressions which we see around us. Cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber would say that Boyer & Atran are dealing in the evoked aspects of culture, while Wilson is focusing on the epidemiological ones. Similarly, the “rational choice” model posited by Stark & Bainbridge also implies cultural evolution over time. I would not be surprised if David S. Wilson agreed with all of this, but the nature of a 350 page general book written for the public did not allow for this exposition. So be it, to the lay reader there will remain the impression that the various schools in regards to the origin of religion exist as alternatives instead of natural complements.
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