This new perspective owes much to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been at the forefront of research into moral decision-making, which is grounded in evolutionary theory. Because people have been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, it really isn’t surprising that prosocial or “moral” behaviors are often the result of intuition or snap judgments that are later explained by recourse to reason. Humans are the most prosocial of primates and it would be surprising if this ability were not highly developed.

In recent years Haidt has extended these basic insights to politics and other domains (such as religion), where the terrain is much more uneven and confounded by modern culture. The ideas, in other words, have been extended and applied in ways that are questionable. In this recent article on Haidt from The Chronicle, the overextension is apparent.

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Todd Schorr's "Hunter Gatherer"

I’ve spent several years immersed in the ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record and can’t recall much or any concern with liberty-oppression. This is the kind of concern that arises when you have centralized authority and government, which were absent for most of human history. Nor can I recall much concern for authority-subversion. Again, these kinds of concerns are related to centralized authority and government which didn’t exist in our hunting-gathering past. While hunting-gathering societies are concerned with ritual purity, translating this as sanctity-degradation has a distinctly Axial feel to it. Degradation, in particular, smacks of the Christian fall from grace.

Haidt’s “foundational morals” aren’t innate or universal. The list is provincial, limited in both time and space. Had Haidt tested his list against history or made cross-cultural comparisons, this would have been evident.

To tell stories about a world in which all the organic parts are at an adaptive optimum is typical of attempts to domesticate Darwinism’s randomized, liminal world in motion and render it less fearsome. In fact, adaptive optimization covertly restores the pre-evolutionary argument from design, whose affective motive was to make the world (and its Creator) familiar and tame by founding it upon those analogies to the self, reason and human will, that assure the existence of control over Nature’s power and domestication of Nature’s otherness.

This is a slightly revised excerpt from Eric White’s essay “The End of Metanarratives in Evolutionary Biology,” in which he cites Davydd Greenwood’s Taming of Evolution: The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans.

Nowhere are such views or metaphysical narratives more prevalent than among theist scholars who (often with generous funding from the Templeton Foundation) churn out articles ostensibly demonstrating that religion was targeted by natural selection because it is the Greatest Designed Adaptation, ever.

Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.

It may seem gratuitous to point out that rats don’t have religion and I do so only because evolutionary theists often argue that religion evolved because it makes people cooperative and altruistic. Religion, in their view, is an evolutionary adaptation targeted by natural selection because it creates or enhances empathy and pro-sociality.

Those who make this argument usually ignore the fact that empathy, cooperation, and altruism are widespread in nature. Non-human primates are intensely social and quite cooperative, as are elephants and dolphins. Now we can add rats to the list. Religion isn’t necessary to explain these behaviors.

When confronted with these facts, evolutionary theists usually resort to one of two arguments. The first is that religion makes people more empathetic and pro-social than they would otherwise be without religion. While this may true of post-Neolithic religions which first linked supernatural beliefs to “moral” behaviors, this relatively recent development says nothing about the evolutionary origins of religion.

The second argument is that religion would have made human groups more cohesive and given them a competitive advantage over other groups. While it may be true that post-Neolithic religions functioned as ideological glue for larger groups (group size being the most important predictor of group level success), there is no evidence that human group sizes increased until after the domestication of plants-animals approximately 12,000 years ago. Again, this relatively recent development says nothing about the evolutionary origins of religion.

Speaking of group size, if you are considering rats as pets — something I recommend — remember they are social and you will need to get at least 2 and preferably 3 or  more, all of the same sex (unless you want lots of babies, which I don’t recommend). For reasons that weren’t clear to me until yesterday, I’ve always had females. The study found that females are slightly more empathetic and pro-social than males.

Reference:

Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats Science, 334 (6061), 1427-1430 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210789

I first became aware of “theological anthropology” while browsing the Evolution of Religion website, which is a Templeton funded project devoted to finding God’s plan in evolution. Here is the announcement for several nicely funded fellowships at Princeton in which scholars are to devote themselves to the discovery of God’s design in evolution:

The Center of Theological Inquiry welcomes proposals to explore how the explosion of new research in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology is challenging and changing our understanding of human nature and development, not least in relation to religion and theological accounts of the human condition. Our field of inquiry encompasses these evolutionary and human sciences, theological anthropology, practical theology, psychology of religion, religious studies, and the history and philosophy of science.

There’s more than a bit of mumbo jumbo here but the project boils down to this: now that the Creation account of human evolution has been disproven and Intelligent Design been exposed as fraud, it is our job to interpret evolution through a theological lens; to wit, because God designed evolution and foresaw everything, there are no accidents and everything is adaptive.

Sounds like a horrible way to do science and search for the truth.

The second chapter, which examines the origins of the Iroquois League, highlights the role of religion in group formation and cohesion. Although I have serious reservations about group level selection (and doubt that it exists), the Iroquois may be the closest thing to an historical example.

During the 1400s, the five tribes (Mohawk, Seneca, Onondoga, Oneida, and Cayugas) that eventually formed the Iroquois League were constantly at war with one another and their neighbors.

Map of Iroquois and Neighboring Tribes

Aside from all its other unpleasantness, the constant cycle of retributive war had devastating demographic effects on the tribes.

Though it is difficult to separate fact from subsequent hagiographic fiction, legend has it that Hiawatha lost several children in the warfare and wandered into the forest, grieving and inconsolable. Literally losing his mind, Hiawatha encountered a supernatural being named Deganawidah, The Great Peacemaker. Hiawatha was given rituals and a message that he carried to the five tribes, which heeded the words and formed “The Great League of Peace and Power.” Although this is often abbreviated to “Iroquois League,” the shortened form obscures the purpose of the confederation: peace between the five tribes and power or war against non-member outsiders.

While the Longhouse and wampum rituals are the most famous of those allegedly given to Hiawatha, perhaps the most important were the mourning and condolence rituals which surrounded warfare and slave-taking. Richter explains:

The connection between war and mourning rested on beliefs about the spiritual power that animated all things. Because an individual’s death diminished the collective power of a lineage, clan, and village, Iroquois families conducted “Requickening” ceremonies in which the deceased’s name, and with it the social role and duties it represented, was transferred to a successor.

Such rites filled vacant positions in lineages and villages both literally and symbolically: they assured survivors that the social function and spiritual potency embodied in the departed’s name had not disappeared and that the community would endure. In Requickenings, people of high status were usually replaced from within the lineage, clan, or village, but at some point lower in the social scale an external source of surrogates inevitably became necessary.

The “external source of surrogates” were nearly always war captives. Such captives were inspected, tested, and either adopted into the tribe or ritualistically killed and actually eaten. In the case of adoption, the physical power of the prisoner was appropriated. In the case of eating, the spiritual power was appropriated (giving “food for spiritual thought” an unsettling meaning).

By all accounts, the Iroquois League was powerful and feared. Although it changed considerably over the centuries through its interactions with European powers and colonizers, the League’s success and durability says something important about the power of shared beliefs.

It would be unwise, however, simply to conclude this is an example of group level selection. As is apparent from the taking and adopting of captives, the Iroquois were neither homogenous nor insular. Under group level selection theory, groups must be distinct and there can be only minimal or no immigration.

Even if we assume this is an example of group level selection, it says nothing about the selective origins and evolution of religion. Group level selectionists (most of whom are evolutionary theists) like to argue that religion is adaptive and was targeted by selection because it makes humans more cooperative, prosocial, and “moral.” Of course it has to be this way because God designed the whole thing.

These theorists simply ignore the several lines of evidence which suggest that humans, as the most social of primates who can actually talk about cooperating, were already this way and didn’t need “religion” for small group success. It is only after the advent of agriculture, when group sizes increase exponentially, that something like religiously driven group level selection might come into play.

The Iroquois were sedentary horticulturalists, not Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Numbering around 25,000 people, they were in need of an ideology or religion which could bind the group. Hunter-gatherers, whose group size ranged from 30-150 for the immediate group and 300-500 for the extended group, had no such need.

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

This is Evolutionary Theism. Evolutionary Theists bring several assumptions to their scholarly work and interpret data through the following lens: (1) evolution is not random but is designed, (2) because it is designed, evolution is progressive, (3) evolutionary progress occurs through adaptive change, and (4) this adaptive change is directed toward the evolution of humans. With the evolution of humans, we finally have creatures capable of perceiving and worshiping the God who made it all happen.

As this story goes God designed things so that early humans would apprehend the supernatural and their supernatural beliefs would make them cooperative, moral, and fertile. This God knew that humans would wander in the supernatural wilderness for many tens of thousands of years before they arrived at the (Christian) Truth. The Truth, as imagined by Evolutionary Theists, is that God is author of all.

This is not simple or crude Creationism, whether of the young or old earth variety. Nor is it Intelligent Design, which posits an interventionist entity whose many finely-tuned creations give the false impression there has been evolution. Evolutionary Theism accepts deep time, cosmic change, earth history, and evolutionary processes. But it does so with the understanding that none of this is random: it was designed to unfold in a particular way with a particular goal. Everything has been foreseen and foreordained.

None of this presents a problem so long as it is acknowledged. The problem arises when scholars of this persuasion present their work as if disinterested contemplation of data has led to their conclusions.

While it is not possible to approach data with nothing at all in mind, it is possible to approach data without any a priori commitments to the existence or non-existence of an entity or force called God. Scholars who have such commitments are bound to interpret their data in a particular way. For Evolutionary Theists this interpretation nearly always entails a designed and directed evolutionary progression, with one adaptation after another leading ineluctably to humans who can contemplate the majesty of God.

In paleontology, Simon Conway Morris does this. In evolutionary biology, Michael Blume does it. In evolutionary psychology, Matt Rossano does it. In archaeology, Klaus Schmidt seems to be doing it.

While working on the five-part Göbekli Tepe series for this blog, I came across several articles which noted that the excavator Schmidt is Catholic. There is of course nothing wrong with this but it may explain Schmidt’s premature and probably erroneous interpretation of Göbekli Tepe as the place where shamanistic hunter-gatherers saw the light, sensed the presence of gods (or God), built monuments for worship, and discovered how to domesticate plants-animals. As this story goes, a new “religion” magically or supernaturally appeared and paved the way for subsequent civilization.

If one is an Evolutionary Theist, this extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable progression makes complete sense: history is teleological and the ground was being prepared not only for plants but also for Christianity. If one is not an Evolutionary Theist, the alleged progression is questionable and inexplicable.

It is disingenuous for scientists and scholars who are Evolutionary Theists to present their work as if it were disinterested or compelled by facts and data. At a minimum, they should fully disclose their a priori commitments so we can evaluate their work accordingly.

It is one thing for a theologian such as John Haught to read his faith into evolutionary science and present it as such. It is quite a different thing for scientists and other scholars to read their faith into their science-scholarship without fully disclosing that they have pre-judged the primary issues and their findings flow from this prejudgment.

These mistakes are the result of methodological ignorance or carelessness. In an ideal world, anyone who writes on the evolution of religion would be required to read Michael Ghiselin’s The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969). Many errors could thus be avoided.

“Good scientific investigations employ critical tests of hypotheses by serious attempts to refute them. They do not involve simply amassing data consistent with a particular interpretation, oblivious to whether or not the facts are equally consistent another hypothesis.” (239)

“It is easy to see how a psychologist, attempting to give evolutionary meaning to his data, would tend to use habits of thought quite different from those employed by Darwin. The natural inclination would be to impose an oversimplified evolutionary rationalization upon the observations. The evolutionary theorist, on the other hand, would look at the facts in order to confirm or refute the predictions of his hypothesis.” (210)

Those who do not follow this method (hypothesize, predict, confirm-refute) “completely miss the point of Darwin’s argument: behavioral properties may be mixtures of adaptations and historical accidents.” (211)

“Darwin thought that many behavioral phenomena have resulted through accidents of history comparable to the pleiotropic effects which he discoursed upon at such great length. He did not believe, as many have believed, that all behavior patterns have some adaptive significance, say, as directly serviceable or communicative.” (205)

“It is perfectly true that if a group of organisms had some property, the survival of that group would be favored once the property had been evolved; but this does not explain how that property might have originated.” (57)

The failure to take these ideas seriously has led to a great deal of unrestrained and imaginative storytelling about the “evolution of religion,” unencumbered by more compelling and parsimonious hypotheses that have non-speculative support in the historical record.

I was reminded of Horace’s enduring wisdom by two recent studies; the first on cooperation and second on punishment. Both are major contributions to our understanding of human altruism and collective action. Neither invokes the magic of gods.

In the “Evolution of Direct Reciprocity,” Andrew Delton and colleagues demonstrate that humans are naturally generous even to strangers and that such generosity is evolutionarily advantageous. A co-author of the July 25 PNAS study, Leda Cosmides, explains why humans can afford to be generous (i.e., incur costs) even when interaction might be a one-time affair:

There are two errors a cooperating animal can make, and one is more costly than the other. Believing that you will never meet this individual again, you might choose to benefit yourself at his expense –– only to find out later that the relationship could have been open-ended. If you make this error, you lose out on all the benefits you might have had from a long-term, perhaps life-long, cooperative relationship. This is an extraordinarily costly error to make.

The other error is to mistakenly assume that you will have additional interactions with the other individual and therefore cooperate with him, only to find out later that it wasn’t necessary. Although you were “unnecessarily” nice in that one interaction, the cost of this error is relatively small. Without knowing why, the mind is skewed to be generous to make sure we find and cement all those valuable, long-term relationships.

This is the restrained and mathematical kind of evolutionary psychology we can believe in.

In “Punishment Sustains Large-Scale Cooperation in Prestate Warfare,” Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd find that profane punishment solves the free-rider problem that so exorcizes some evolutionary theorists of religion:

Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa.

Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur, and are punished by community-imposed sanctions, including collective corporal punishment and fines. Furthermore, Turkana norms governing warfare benefit the ethnolinguistic group, a population of a half-million people, at the expense of smaller social groupings.

These results challenge current views that punishment is unimportant in small-scale societies and that human cooperation evolved in small groups of kin and familiar individuals. Instead, these results suggest that cooperation at the larger scale of ethnolinguistic units enforced by third-party sanctions could have a deep evolutionary history in the human species.

Large-scale cooperation, in other words, can revolve around something other than systematic religion or supernatural punishment. Shared language and ethnicity — along with earthly rewards (and beatings) — seem to work just fine.

We don’t need a group level or adaptive deus ex machina to explain the extraordinary success of ordinary humans. Parsimony to the rescue.

References:

Delton AW, Krasnow MM, Cosmides L, & Tooby J (2011). Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21788489

Mathew S, & Boyd R (2011). Punishment sustains large-scale cooperation in prestate warfare. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (28), 11375-80 PMID: 21670285

Supernatural punishment theory is anchored in two sources: lab research and game theory. Although it frequently references ancestral environments, these environments are rarely if ever specified. When and where did humans begin believing in moralizing and punishing supernatural agents?

There are some hints. In their comment to Schloss and Murray’s target article, Aguair and Cronk observe that judgmental gods or policing spirits are historically recent: “Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, smallscale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies.” Azim Shariff similarly comments: “If beliefs in omniscient and punitive gods were genetic adaptations rooted in our Pleistocene past, we would expect these beliefs to be psychological universals, or, at the very least, more prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies. Neither is true.”

In several of its guises, supernatural punishment theory is genealogical. It attempts, in other words, to explain what is known today as “religion” and account for it in evolutionary terms. While this is a perfectly reasonable endeavor, methodological care must be taken: “a purpose or point now found to be characteristic of morality and its institutions must not be uncritically read back into history as providing the key to understanding its origin” (Brandhorst 2010:24).

Friedrich Nietzsche, a genealogist of considerable skill, was sharply critical of ahistorical functionalism and utilitarian essentialism:

How have the moral genealogists reacted so far in this matter? Naïvely, as is their wont: they highlight some “purpose” in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innocently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and have finished.

[T]he origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite) you have not thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,—for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. — Genealogy of Morals (II:12)

We cannot simply assume that because supernatural watchers-punishers exist and have utility in post-Neolithic or complex societies, the same was true during the Paleolithic. Although the ethnographic and ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record is an imperfect guide, it strongly suggests that supernatural watching-punishing is a recent invention.

References:

Schloss, Jeffrey P., & Murray, Michael J. (2011). Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1 (1), 46-99 : 10.1080/2153599X.2011.558707

Brandhorst, Mario (2010). Naturalism and the Genealogy of Moral Institutions. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 40, 5-28