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

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.

Jaynes begins the essay by reminding us that motion, our understanding of which today is taken for granted, formerly was a problem:

Motion is now so much the domain of physics that it is difficult for us to appreciate that this was not always so. Before the seventeenth century, motion was a far more awesome mystery. Shared by all objects, stars, ships, animals, and men, and since Copernicus, the very earth itself, it seemed to hide the answer to everything. The Aristotelian writings had made motion or activity the distinctive property of living things, an idea that occurs naturally to children and primitive peoples of all centuries.

Motion, in other words, was conceived as animation. Everything that moved did so through the agency of unseen forces or spirits.

Early theorists of religion, such as Edward Tylor, called this understanding “animism” and asserted it was the earliest or original form of religion. Modern theorists of religion, such as Scott Atran, call this understanding “folk physics” and argue that religion arises from the over attribution and imputation of agency.

Although Jaynes wasn’t thinking in these terms, this early essay on motion presages his later interest in religion. Motion and religion may not seem to be related, but they are and have been perhaps since the beginning. Jaynes seems to have understood this.

While recounting the intellectual history of motion, Jaynes comments on Fabricus ab Aquapendente (1537-1619), an Italian Renaissance thinker and rival of Galileo. In 1618, Fabricus published a book containing this remarkable statement:

In truth, nature fulfills her aim by so bestowing behavioral movements and functions among animals that they preserve themselves through them; this consists in a preservation of the ablest in obtaining food, in continuing the species, and in avoiding injury.

It looks like Fabricus was thinking along evolutionary lines several hundred years before Darwin.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian (1970). The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (2), 219-234 DOI: 10.2307/2708546

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.

While this may sound calamitous, it isn’t. There are good evolutionary reasons for lying to ourselves and being cheerful about it.

In “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception,” psychologist William von Hippel and anthropologist Robert Trivers turn conventional “know thyself” wisdom on its proverbial head by arguing that self-deception evolved so that we can effortlessly tell lies without getting caught. Although they don’t come right out and say it, their premise is that (a) everyone lies and (b) lying can be beneficial. Lying, in other words, should not categorically be condemned a priori as bad, sinful, or unwarranted. It’s not hard to imagine circumstances in which lying is beneficial and indeed right or moral. Any such thought exercise should begin with the righteous lies told to Nazis looking for Jews.

While lying to someone else without being caught is of obvious utility when the price of detection is death, von Hippel and Trivers are more interested in the lies we tell ourselves:

There are many ways to deceive other people. An obvious choice is to tell an outright lie, but it is also possible to deceive others by avoiding the truth, obfuscating the truth, exaggerating the truth, or casting doubt on the truth. Just as these processes are useful in deceiving others, they can also be useful in deceiving the self. For example, if I can deceive you by avoiding a critical piece of information, then it stands to reason that I can deceive myself in the same manner.

Just as telling an outright lie is more difficult than fudging the truth or withholding information, it is also difficult to tell ourselves outright lies. For the lies we tell ourselves to be effective, we must believe what our homunculi are telling us. How do we manage? By biasing our information search strategies, offering fanciful interpretations, and selectively recalling memories. If we are really good at this, we believe. If we aren’t so good, we rationalize.

Regardless of which deceptive strategy we use or the result it entails, von Hipple and Trivers find one constant: “What marks all of these varieties of self-deception is that people favor welcome over unwelcome information in a manner that reflects their goals or motivations.” If such goals and motivations are fitness enhancing, that is they enable survival and reproduction, then it is easy to see how believing or rationalizing our self-told and self-made lies is beneficial or adaptive. It may also explain Nietzsche’s observation that false judgments and untruths are necessary conditions of life.

Our homunculi are not just good liars; they are also cheerful optimists. Puzzled by the fact that most people are optimistic and remain so even in the face of bad news or contrary evidence, Tali Sharot and colleagues recently studied how the brain manages this tricky business.Their conclusion: the part of our brain that codes for errors or contradictions doesn’t work so well when the update information is negative and the consequence would be lowered expectations or pessimism. Incredibly, this difference applies only to those who were classified as having “high optimism” before the testing and not to those who had “low optimism.” Both high and low optimists track and code desirable information equally well.

Congenital optimists, in other words, have homunculi that wear rose colored glasses. These glasses filter out negative information or contradictory evidence and distort probabilities. Realistic Bayesians these homunculi are not. As the study authors note, this may be a good thing:

Underestimating susceptibility to negative events can serve an adaptive function by enhancing explorative behavior and reducing stress and anxiety associated with negative expectations. This is consistent with the observation that mild depression is related to unbiased estimation of future outcomes and severe depression to pessimistic expectations. However, any advantage arising out of unrealistic optimism is likely to come at a cost.

As an example of such a cost, the authors cite the unrealistic assessment of financial risk leading to the 2008 economic collapse. There is another cost and it is the ultimate casualty: truth. But perhaps this is just my bias.

What both these studies show is that we are very good at deceiving ourselves and once we have arrived at a conclusion, no matter how unwarranted, changing our minds can be difficult. While this may be depressing for some, for the self deluded and unrealistic optimists it won’t matter.

References:

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34 (01), 1-16 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X10001354

Sharot, T., Korn, C., & Dolan, R. (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality Nature Neuroscience, 14 (11), 1475-1479 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2949

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.

Anyone who has perused Fluff-Po’s Religion section knows it is filled scientific sounding metaphysics and countless articles by progressive religionists telling us that their non-progressive counterparts have gotten it all wrong. The non-progressives (i.e., the majority) apparently just need to be better (i.e., more liberal and ecumenical) readers.

Because non-progressive religionists don’t read Fluff-Po, the progressives are talking mostly to each other about what the texts “really say” and how the traditions should be “properly understood.” It’s all about love and understanding and tolerance, you know. It is nice to see the Rodney Kings (or Karen Armstrongs) of religions all trying to get along.

This is all fine and good but when an evolutionary psychologist tells us (on good authority of the pope) that resurrection does not contradict nature or science and death is not really death, FluffPo Religion makes my Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I may have to lift the ban for Graziano (though I do wish he would post in a more serious and substantive forum).

Graziano is a neuroscientist at Princeton with an impressive list of publications, dealing primarily with the motor system, perception, and consciousness. His writing is not, however, limited to neuroscience; Graziano is also a novelist and has written several popular books, including God, Soul, Mind, Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World. I haven’t read it yet but will report back after I do.

As for Graziano’s recent article, I have questions about the following assertions, which are pivotal to his argument:

Awe, for example, is at its root a social emotion. Its utility lies in shaping our behavior toward others, especially others that we perceive to be wiser or more powerful than us. It is one ingredient in hierarchical social structure.

Awe of a beautiful landscape, awe of music (another spiritual experience I’ve written about before), awe of the spread of stars as you look up at night, all of these instances of awe are traditionally connected in a hazy way in people’s thoughts and feelings with awe of a larger, deistic presence.

Religious awe may belong to a category of biological trait along with male nipples and the gill slits in human fetuses. It has an understandable evolutionary past.

Whatever else it may be, “awe” is not a straightforward or basic evolutionary emotion. Fear, on the other hand, is. When a social animal recognizes another as more powerful, the resulting ranking or hierarchy owes as much or more to fear than “awe.”

“Awe” certainly is an important aspect of supernaturalism and religion, but it is more properly categorized as a “feeling.” I think Antonio Damasio is right when he says that feelings such as awe are the complex result of basic emotion combined with complex cognition. Feelings such as awe are in no way like physical features such as male nipples or gill slits.

Religious awe arises from intense cultural patterning, which is made possible by a neurobiology that is primed for supernaturalism. Graziano’s “social intelligence theory of spirituality” is but one piece of a much larger puzzle. Supernaturalism and religion are complex phenomena that require multi-causal explanations.

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