I have said often in these pages that it seems likely that the human propensity for religion is a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, this idea of “group-level selection”, though out of favor among Darwinian theorists for many years, is now becoming repectable again, and is an appropriate place in which to look for adaptive explanations of various sorts of social behavior.
One common objection to naturalistic accounts of human morality — usually made in support of theistic viewpoints — is human altruism, which often seems to go beyond any clear expectation of reciprocity, or benefit to individual fitness. But on a group-selection level it becomes far easier to understand: it makes economic sense for a social organism, living as part of a group, to exhibit behavior that might reduce its relative fitness within the group as long as it increases the fitness of the group as a whole, relative to other groups. This in turn improves the average prospects of all the individual members of the more-altruistic group; the rising tide lifts all the boats more than enough to account for the within-group sacrifices the altruistic mindset requires. Religion provides an excellent framework for this sort of social arrangement.
This is not, of course, to say that there is a Christian genome, a Muslim genome, and so forth. But what it does mean is that the sorts of brains that are better able to learn these social behaviors — the brains that are more easily trained to hold the sort of concepts that aid in the suppression of individual advantage over that of the group, and perhaps to have the kind of “religious experiences” that reinforce belief in, and the cohesive power of, religious traditions — will be favored.
Once you have the right sort of brains in place, a new sort of competition begins: a cultural arms race between various social systems. Those that do the best job of binding the group, and of reinforcing the behaviors that lead to group success, will do better in competition. If my group has a religious system in place that offers me, in exchange for my self-sacrifice, the approval of my entire tribe in this life and an eternal reward in the next, we are likely to prevail in competion against teams less well organized.
Religions themselves will, then, be subject to design pressure; the most successful ones will have an impressive arsenal of cognitive and social features that protect them and help them propagate.
Because religions are ideas, their habitat, their ecosystem, is therefore human minds. “Propagation”, to a religion, means making a copy of itself in another mind, and the religions that do this best are going to enjoy a “fitness” advantage of their own. They might achieve this by containing, in part, ideas that encourage the mind each copy resides in to be aggressive about making more copies in other minds — or to believe that it is necessary to eliminate those minds that contain copies of competing sets of ideas.
On this view of religion, religious idea-sets can be seen as having Darwinian “interests” of their own, and can be looked at as organisms unto themselves; indeed a religion that is especially effective at propagating itself into other minds might do very well independently of the effect it has on the fitness of the host. This might take the form of a religion that causes all its adherents not to breed, or to commit suicide. Examples of such religious cults do indeed exist; the Shakers, for example, were celibate. (You probably don’t know any Shakers, and now you know why.) We can also imagine that a religious idea-set might confer fitness advantages on a group under some circumstances, but not others; we might expect these religions, which could do very well for a while, to die out as the competitive environment changes.
If an organism that requires a host tends to kill its hosts once acquired, it must either be very good at finding new ones quickly, or it will not be around long. But some organisms enter a mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts, which, when it occurs between living organisms, we call symbiosis. We should expect that the most successful religions will be like this: sturdy of design, good at propagating themselves, and tending to increase the fitness of the minds that they occupy. And we should also expect that, given the long symbiosis of human minds and religion, there will be plenty of human brains that are good hosts: that are correctly set up to enter such a relationship.
There has been quite a lot of research, lately, confirming that religious people are in various ways better off than the rest of us. In an article published a few days ago in the New York Times, John Tierney, himself an unbeliever, cites a new study (by Michael McCullough and Brian Willoughby of the University of Miami) showing that religious adherents exhibit better self-control. Tierney writes:
This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school, but Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives. He confesses to not being much of a devotee himself. “When it comes to religion,’ he said, “professionally, I’m a fan, but personally, I don’t get down on the field much.’
His professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.
These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.
“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,’ Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.’
Well, maybe it’s just that people like that tend to gravitate toward religion. No, says Dr. McCullough:
But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence.
“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,’ he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.’
In a study published by the University of Maryland in 2003, students who were subliminally exposed to religious words (like God, prayer or bible) were slower to recognize words associated with temptations (like drugs or premarital sex). Conversely, when they were primed with the temptation words, they were quicker to recognize the religious words.
“It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,’ Dr. McCullough said. “When temptations cross their minds in daily life, they quickly use religion to dispel them from their minds.’
So is it organized religion, with all its cultural trappings, that produces this result, or just a spiritual nature generally?
In one personality study, strongly religious people were compared with people who subscribed to more general spiritual notions, like the idea that their lives were “directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being’ or that they felt “a spiritual connection to other people.’ The religious people scored relatively high in conscientiousness and self-control, whereas the spiritual people tended to score relatively low.
“Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,’ Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.’
Tierney, who is not religious, finds all of this rather dispiriting:
So what’s a heathen to do in 2009? Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals.
Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.
“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,’ he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.’
Of course, it requires some self-control to carry out that exercise ”” and maybe more effort than it takes to go to church.
“Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,’ Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.’
The rational, naturalist infidel does find himself in a bit of a pickle here. The myths, folklore, and superstitions of religion have no pull on him whatsoever. Unsupported by any compelling evidence, and full of Ptolemaic epicycles and special defensive pleading, they seem quite obviously made up, and almost certainly false. (At best, given that they make incompatible assertions, all but one must be false, and to us unbelievers, that one is too.) But swallowing the pill — suppressing one’s intellectual immune-system so as to let the virus enter and take hold — seems to confer real, measurable benefits.
The question, then, is: must it be one or the other? Can we wean ourselves from religion? Can we fly without the magic feather? Can we learn to have the benefits, the solidarity, the “sacredness” of religion without the supernatural beliefs?
Inshallah, I think we can.
You can read McCullough and Willoughby’s paper here.
16 Comments
I think you’d enjoy reading sociologist Peter Berger’s classic, The Sacred Canopy. Despite Canopy‘s having been written decades ago, I hear echoes of Berger in the above.
Kevin
Amen.
Malcolm writes: Religions themselves will, then, be subject to design pressure; the most successful ones will have an impressive arsenal of cognitive and social features that protect them and help them propagate.
Presumably, if for the sake of argument we focus on the Christian religion, you would explain the medieval cathedrals, monasteries, religious works of art, sacred books and music etc., as part of the “impressive arsenal of cognitive and social features” that protect it and help it propagate. I’m not sure whether the resources, time, and energy that such artifacts consumed had a cultural payback which might not be understood in either an “aesthetic” or a “spiritual” sense.
Social fitness often involves extraordinarily costly gestures, for example the sometimes ruinously expensive generosity displays of tribal chieftains of the Pacific Northwest.
What is more costly to the individual — helping to build a cathedral for the greater glory of God, or dying in a holy war? I think such artifacts are the “peacock’s tail” of religion.
Interesting post Malcolm. However, there are a few points which do not seem to have been considered.
Religion, so called, is not a universally unified phenomenon in human history. The kinds of discipline characteristic of much of modern religious practice is not characteristic of religious behavior generally.
The kinds of discipline religious practice characteristic of modern institutionalized religion is not characteristic of probable religious practice prior to the rise of states and chiefdoms, and is almost certainly not a relevant factor in human biological evolution. Any adaptationist account of religion needs to consider the social context in which it might have evolved. Indeed it is more likely that religion (especially modern religion) simply co-opts basic cognitive proclivities as a means of self-reproduction.
It is not religion per se that instills discipline in its practitioners, but certain kinds of practice required by that religion. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for the nurturing the practice of self-control. Military training is an excellent example. Military training shares many properties with religious training: self-discipline, self-sacrifice, altruism, group loyalty, etc. but is clearly not religion.
Following Durkheim, we can view religion as being a society’s imagining itself.
Thanks, Kevin — I’m not familiar with that book, and will take a look.
Hi Jacob, and thanks for joining us.
I am not sure what sort of discipline you are thinking of when you speak of the contrast between modern and ancient religions, but the specifics are not really what is at issue, from an adaptive standpoint. The broader idea is that the group-selection paradigm can provide a valid evolutionary account of the altruistic binding of human in-groups; an evolutionary process that is presumably as old as our species.
Indeed, as you suggest, religion is only one of many imaginable social and cultural artifacts that can make use of this feature of our cognitive design. I would say that the excesses of 20th-century totalitarianism, which took the form of secular “religions”, took advantage of it also — and in addition to your example of the military, the same levers are also pulled by politicians, corporate “team-builders”, sports coaches, and so forth. Religion, however, seems to have by far the most powerful effect, and is certainly the most exquisitely designed and refined of all the systems by which this innate human feature expresses itself. It seems reasonable to me that the effectiveness of religion in this social function led to a “Baldwin Effect” that would have increased selection pressure at the biological level (which would, in turn, have contributed to the further cultural evolution of the religious systems themselves).
The snippet of my post that you quoted was really just a rhetorical flourish; I have said often that I think that human individuals and groups can manage without the need for supernatural beliefs. The author of the study, as quoted in Mr. Tierney’s article, acknowledges this also, when he suggests that unbelievers find something “sacred” they can attach to. I do imagine, though, that so deeply is this phenomenon rooted in the behavioral architecture of socialization that just picking any old thing and calling it “sacred” all by oneself wouldn’t do much; I expect that the benefits cited in this and other studies depend on a shared, communal organizing principle.
The distinction between religion and spirituality is interesting, but I’d like to point out that all of us, religious or not, possess strong instincts toward passionate belief in concepts of artificial and fundamentally unsupportable meaning. This applies most clearly to anyone who loves their family. Obviously the well-being of our immediate family members has absolutely zero significance in the grand order of the cosmos. Yet most of us are fiercely dedicated to (at least some of) our family members, and while we can explain this away as the mere turning of evolutionary gears and sloshing around of chemicals in the lumpy pieces of meat that are our brains, this is clearly an intellectual rationalization that does not describe the way we really think about the matter. On some deep level we know that this is truly important…even though it isn’t.
Other examples are, of course, demonstrable. I find this important because it suggests a deeper and more universal behavior of which religion is just a particularly clear example. Just because one lacks religious custom or even base spirtuality, it doesn’t necessarily mean one is free of the associated mythical tendencies. These things don’t cut so cleanly.
And to muddle things up even further, if we gather up all the major belief systems most universally accepted as “religion”, we’re hard-pressed to identify any core attributes that are a) common to all of them and b) absent in non-religious belief. The assertion of mutual excusivity you mention in your post, for example, is not a universal religious principle.
Point being: I don’t see the clear delineation between religious belief and non-religious behavior that it’s so easy to take for granted.
Hi Greg,
But why choose, as your measure of meaning, “significance in the grand order of the cosmos”? That in itself has a whiff of religiosity about it, or teleology at least.
Looking a little closer to home, it is easy enough to see why we would care fiercely about the well-being of our offspring; certainly it requires no leap of insight to imagine that such an attitude would be strongly favored by selection.
The definition of “religion” has been the subject of intense debate, of course, for ages. Here’s Emil Durkheim’s crack at it:
And this from Rodney Stark:
These are two very different views; I think yours is closer to Durkheim’s. It is important to make the distinction between the functional mechanism — that of binding the group into a mutually obligated moral community — and the particular system of ideas that comes into play. I do think that the fact that most religions have a supernatural agency at their core is no coincidence, and indiucates that such models work best; but you are right that the mechanism is a more general one, and other kinds of belief systems can do the job too.
Hi Malcolm,
I don’t have any substantive disagreement with the empirical results of McCullough and Willoughby’s paper, if its interpretation is limited in scope to apply only to those religions (or similar) for which it has data. However, it seems pretty clear that the authors would like to believe that their conclusions regarding the relationship between religion (as such) and self-regulation hold universally. This is problematic, as I point out below.
I appreciate how the article also abstains from just-so speculation on the evolutionary benefit of religion. However, from this video (http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/11508.php?from=128121) it is abundantly clear that McCullough would like to make such a leap. It is with that interpretation that I take most issue.
McCullough chooses to illustrate the proposed evolutionary benefit of religion (with respect to self-regulation) in the last 100,000 years with the preposterous example of a farmer, preposterous because farming as a mode of production is no older than 10,000-20,000 years, and only then is select corners of the world. This unfortunate example only illustrates the larger problem: McCullough’s study has no historical depth, no broad appreciation for the real diversity of human “religion”. Instead, he and his colleague take religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism as generally representative of Religion when in fact all these religions have in common a grounding in state level social organization, when in fact the vast majority of modern Homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers. This lead one to immediately make their speculations suspect, a mere projection of the present onto the past.
I also take issue with their definition of religion as the “cognition, afect, and behavior that arise from awareness of, or perceived interaction with, supernatural entities that are presumed to play an important role in human life”. Philip Newman writes of the Gururumba of western New Guinea that:
McCullough assert that one way in which religion fosters self-regulation by making people believe that “God is watching.” But in prestate societies, where
Essentially, where classed societies have gods interested in morality, and non-stratified societies don’t.
Indeed reverence for the gods is not even necessary: The Tsimshian of the Pacific Coast “shake their fists at heaven and call their gods ‘slaves’ as a term of reproach.” The Manus of the Bismarck Archipelago kick the ghosts of their ancestors out of their houses if someone gets sick saying, “This man dies and you rest in no house. You will but wander about the edges of the island [used for excretory functions]”.
Allow me to quote my friend John McCreery on religion:
I agree with you that group selection of sort will probably have to account for our species’ extraordinary altruism. A Baldwin like effect may also have been involved. And it is probable that that some of the cognitive mechanisms that account for our attraction to religion (or used by religion) must have evolved at the same time. However, without really getting a hold of what “religion” (if anything) was in the context in which these capacities or mechanisms evolved, talking about religion’s role in the evolution of our species pro-sociality is problematic, to say the least. I’m not saying that it has played no role, or that it is irrelevant. I think that it clearly has (for example in maintaining group boundaries necessary for group selection to work). Just appropriate caution is needed.
Just to briefly add to my previous post, McCullough and Willoughby’s paper relate measures of religiousness with measures of self-control. How would one scale the religiousness and self-control of the Manu who kicks his ancestral spirit out of his house and into the collective latrine?
The points Jacob makes should be carefully pondered. Before embracing purported evolutionary explanations of religion (or anything else for that matter), all the assumptions that grease the gears of selectionist theories need critical scrutiny. Absent that, we have just another just-so story — good for entertainment, but not much of a guide to reality.
Thank you for your excellent comment, Jacob, which directly addresses the title of this post. You remind us of the important point that there is a distinction we must keep in mind between the evolution of a general mechanism for altruistic social organization based on shared cultural tokens, and the specific content of the many forms of religion — some of which hardly seem, in conventional terms, to be what we would call “religions” at all — that have arisen as implementations of this innate, and presumably adaptive, human feature. One might say that the cognitive “hardware” we have evolved for the general purpose of organizing and binding groups can run a tremendous variety of “software”.
There can be little doubt of the role that religions do in fact play as powerful versions of that software, however; assuming your point about the dissimilarity of the world’s principal religions today from their hunter-gatherer predecessors, we might imagine that cultural evolution has refined them into increasingly powerful “fuel” for this innate cognitive machine. The assumption of unseen agents seems to be common to almost all religions, old and new; the major monotheistic religions of recent times have promoted and consolidated these agents into a single, personal, omnipotent and omnisicient Creator who in addition wields absolute moral authority. These religions, rather than organizing the cultural life of a tribe or village, have spread like wildfire through the minds of billions of people, and in doing so often displaced previously installed “software”: a testament to their potency (or virulence, depending upon your point of view).
I will have scant time to join in for the rest of the day, as work presses, but this has already been, I think, a most worthwhile discussion, and one I hope will continue.
Malcolm, you may be interested in this post over at John Hawks paleoanthropology blog.
It looks very interesting indeed, Jacob; I had not looked in on this website in ages. Thanks.