Before the Enlightenment, there was no need for such a theory. God served this purpose and everything was explained by the bible or theology. After the Enlightenment, philosophers began searching for the all-encompassing meta-theory. This search culminated in the gargantuan philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel.

Famously opaque, such systems betray a profound uneasiness with the messiness of the world and disorder of experience. Some people are comfortable with ambiguity, unintelligibility, and inexplicability. Others can’t tolerate contradictions, counterfactuals, and incompleteness. The latter, filled with insecurity, construct systems to compensate. It was this fact which caused Nietzsche to comment: “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

While philosophers have largely given up on the idea of unified system, physicists haven’t. They are tying themselves in knots over string theories and imagining new universes whenever the tautology of math demands it. Only Neil deGrasse Tyson seems comfortable with the idea that there is one theory for big things and another for little things. The theories aren’t compatible but each works in its spatial arena. Does it really matter if the twain shall never meet?

Physicists are not, however, alone in this quixotic quest. There are some who believe that everything can be explained as a matter of evolutionary theory. Although evolution sensu stricto is a biological theory, there are some who see it as much more: a unified theory of everything. In a recent post I noted that because cultures are not organisms, extending evolutionary theory to everything is dubious and amounts to “Darwinian monism.” While this monism may satisfy the impulse to a unified system, it doesn’t work (even if the equations which purport to describe it “prove” that it does).

The Wilsons, Edward Osborne and David Sloan (no relation), weren’t the first evolutionists to espouse monism. Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the famous German naturalist, preceded them. In “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion,” Niles Holt describes some familiar sounding aims:

Haeckel presented Monism as a scientific movement which was based on Darwinism and which aimed to free science from the bonds of “dualistic” Christianity, “metaphysics,” and all “irrationality.” Supplementing the antireligious tenor of much of Haeckel’s writings was his assertion that natural science encompassed the totality of valid knowledge, that, as he later phrased it, “scientific research captures gradually the entire province of human intellectual effort.” In Anthropogenie (1874), Haeckel argued that the new theory of evolution was a “most favorable development to the growth of scientific unity.”

Having ushered metaphysics and religion from the scientific room by way of the front door, Haeckel promptly let them in through the back. The inexorable logic of monism or a unified theory demanded it:

Haeckel asserted that the irritability found in all organic matter progressed through evolution into the consciousness and organization of the human nervous system, the brain. This argument was the basis of Haeckel’s “chain of unity of sensation”: evolutionary history had proceeded from the “cell-soul” through “intermediary steps” to the “rational” human soul. The “chain of unity of sensation” were viewed by Haeckel as demonstrating that “natural science and evolutionary theory” were not to be used to degrade nature into a “soulless mechanism” which would “bar all ideals from the real world and destroy poetry.”

Haeckel believed that Monism had established that the soul of man was a “purely mechanical activity.” Yet he wished to avoid, through pantheism, a “depressing materialism which reduced the universe to “dead matter.”

As he aged, Haeckel’s monistic ideas — always centered on the unifying logic of evolution — became increasingly elaborate and obscure. More than a few German intellectuals found the ideas attractive and sought to found a new “religion” on them. Although Haeckel disapproved of these efforts, which often involved ritual adornment and celebration of “unified scientific knowledge,” what had begun as strict monistic materialism grounded in evolution ended as another form of metaphysics or religion.

There is a lesson here for all systematizers.

Reference:

Holt, Niles (1971). Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (2), 265-280 DOI: 10.2307/2708280

I remember thinking the book would appeal primarily to those who were vaguely hostile to religion, but didn’t know why. In Breaking the Spell (“BS”), they would find professional confirmation that their hostility was justified. But they still wouldn’t know why. At least they would be able to say that some really smart guy, a philosophy professor at Tufts, had somehow confirmed their suspicions.

During the ensuing years, I haven’t given the book much thought. I neither recommended it nor loaned my copy. Recently, however, I stumbled across Armin Geertz’s extraordinary review of BS: “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Geertz, professor of religious history and cognition at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, rips Dennett using language not often seen in academic journals:

A recent book by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) is a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious! Dennett seems to be hellishly bent on turning his readers off.

I used to think that philosophers by definition are sophisticated thinkers, gifted in the art of persuasive argument, valiantly exposing hidden assumptions and opaque meanings. But I am wrong. What Dennett has done is a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.

Geertz’s trashing made me wonder: What did others say about BS? They were not kind.

In The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Dennett to task for not distinguishing between the past and present: “And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins?  “Breaking the Spell” is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism.” This is a poignant question, one not contemplated by evolutionary scholars of religion who (mistakenly) believe that the current functions of religion explain past origins.

Dennett’s problem is he believes everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Like David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, Dennett thinks evolution is a unified meta-theory. It isn’t, for one simple reason: cultures are not organisms. While Darwinian monism may be simple and satisfying, it is wrong.

In another harsh review of BS (Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark), Daniel Hart explains why:

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative.

This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the presupposition that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer is of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect.

When evolutionary theory is applied to culture change, we are dealing in metaphors and analogues. Societies do not evolve; they have histories. The sooner we stop talking about memes and “cultural evolution” the better. Time to break the spell.

Reference:

Geertz, A. (2008). How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260232

In a series of foundational papers and books, George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith, William D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and Richard Dawkins explained how altruism and cooperation could have evolved through the combined operations of inclusive fitness and kin selection. The upshot of all this is that what looks like altruistic behavior is actually self interested behavior, when viewed from the perspective of an individual organism and its genes. There is, in other words, no such thing as “pure” altruism.

A small number of scholars have never been able to stomach the notion that what appears to be altruism is rooted in selfishness. Many, I suspect, are metaphysically troubled by the idea and simply cannot accept that “pure goodness” does not exist. In an effort to carve out conceptual space for unadulterated kindness, they have championed the idea of group level selection. They are the Kantians (or perhaps deists) of evolutionary biology. This group includes George R. Price, David Sloan Wilson, Elliot Sober, E.O. Wilson, and Oren Harman.

As some may know, Wilson recently co-authored an already notorious (and as Jerry Coyne explains, certainly dubious) paper in Nature asserting that kin selection is a chimera. Harman, for his part, recently published The Price of Altruism, which is part biography of George Price and part sermon extolling group level selection. Harman’s book was revealing in more ways than one: it exposed the metaphysics that I suspect motivates more than a few group level selectionists. George Price was an ecstatic (and eccentric) Christian.

This longish preface brings me to the point of this post: the “Trickster” figure who is found in the oral traditions of nearly all hunting and gathering peoples. Although this figure has been especially well documented among Native Americans, the trickster appears in nearly all world mythologies in one guise or another (e.g., Prometheus and Loki). After reading Paul Radin’s The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology and Mac Linscott Ricketts’ “The North American Indian Trickster,” I came across this astonishing explanation of the ancient and archetypal Trickster myths:

It is [Franz] Boas’s contention that a sense of altruism is not likely to be very well developed in simpler societies, and so the members of such societies w0uld find it difficult to understand why a culture hero [i.e., the trickster] would want to benefit mankind.

The problem of motivation is solved, however, if the “benefits to mankind” are the accidental by-products of actions which the culture hero [or trickster] undertakes for purely selfish reasons. (Carroll 1984:110-111).

Boas offered this assessment in 1898 — long before anyone had considered the apparent contradiction of altruism in evolutionary terms. If Boas is correct, our ancestors had already considered the issue and resolved it without benefit of arcane equations or recourse to metaphysics: altruism is a byproduct of selfishness.

References:

Ricketts, M. (1966). The North American Indian Trickster. History of Religions, 5 (2) DOI: 10.1086/462529

Carroll, M. (1984). The Trickster as Selfish-Buffoon and Culture Hero. Ethos, 12 (2), 105-131 DOI: 10.1525/eth.1984.12.2.02a00020

While this makes for a plausible story, there are a number of problems. The first is that we have little archaeological evidence of ritual behaviors, especially those that would have been group oriented. While some have argued that evidence of symbolic thinking – in the form of decoration-adornment and markings on material objects – indicates ritual behavior, this linkage is attenuated at best and imaginary at worst. While wearing perforated shell or decorating material objects is suggestive, such displays neither entail nor require ritual-religious behavior.

A simpler explanation is that people were using such items as social markers, to individuate themselves and perhaps signal to others identity or status. There remains a large gap between these artifacts and the kinds of group ritual activities, such as singing and dancing, that some have imagined. While such data do not rule out ritual or proto-religious behaviors, they constitute sparse evidence for ruling them in.

Bigger Groups Win

The second major problem – the one I wish to focus on here, concerns competition between groups. What makes one group more successful than another?  In nearly all cases involving competing groups of social mammals, larger groups out-compete smaller ones.  The reasons are fairly obvious and supported by the evidence: larger groups have lower predation risk and have greater success in agonistic encounters between groups. They have larger ranges or territories, and when resources are depleted or disappear, migration – usually a hazardous undertaking, is more feasible. When a larger group of social mammals encounters a smaller one, the larger nearly always prevails. Larger groups also have a greater store of collective knowledge with respect to nearly everything that matters – water, food, shelter, and predators.

While there are several factors that impact group size, ecological ones being foremost, it is safe to say that ritualistic or proto-religious behaviors are not among them.  Highly social mammals are for the most part bound together by that most powerful of evolutionary bonds: genetic kinship.  Extraneous factors need not be invoked to explain cooperative or even altruistic behavior.  Inclusive fitness is sufficient.

Talking about Tools

Focusing specifically on hominins, there are two factors that would have decisively impacted the size and ultimate success of Paleolithic groups: language and technology. One need not accept the “social grooming” hypothesis to realize that language (or advanced forms of proto-language) is a game changer when it comes to cooperation and cohesion.  In addition to the planning and coordination it would have enabled, language at some point made possible notions of extended and fictive kinship, further strengthening this most powerful form of social glue.

For at least 2.5 million years and probably longer, technology has been a defining characteristic of hominins. Although there are broad progressive technological trends in the lithic record, it is also clear there were long periods of stasis and even reversion. Few things would have had a greater impact on any given group’s odds of success than its technologies. Although apparently slight advances (such as material choice and flaking methods) were undoubtedly advantageous, other technologies were – like language – game changers. The control of fire is obviously one of these. The first groups to develop composite weapons, spear throwers, and bows-arrows would have had immense advantages over other groups, not only in hunting but also in warfare. For groups radiating toward northern latitudes, clothing would have provided similar benefits.

In sum and in rough order of importance to the success of any given hominin group, the factors that would have had the greatest impact intergroup competition are: (1) group size; (2) proto-language or language; and (3) technology. Any group having advantages in one or more of these areas would have been better able to compete against groups deficient in them, but which might have had the kind proto-religion or ritual that enhances group solidarity and commitment.  Such solidarity and commitment is, of course, determined in the first instance by kinship, which is not dependent on proto-religion or ritual for its efficacy.

It seems unlikely that proto-religion or ritual provided any groups with advantages with respect to language or technology. No one has ever suggested that language evolved or technology progressed because either was linked to the supernatural. Given this fact, and the paramount importance of group size to group success in ancestral environments, the critical question facing advocates of group level selection as the functional impetus for the evolution of religion is: Did proto-religion enable Paleolithic hominins to form larger groups? If group ritual oriented around supernatural beliefs somehow resulted in larger groups, then the “religion evolved as a group level adaptation” story may have legs.

Paleolithic Group Size – No Religion Necessary

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that at some point during the middle or upper Paleolithic, certain groups developed proto-religious ideas that promoted ritual activities and resulted in increased cooperation or cohesion. Do we have any reason to think that such ideas or activities also resulted in larger groups, which the single best predictor of success when it comes to group competition? While we can speculate on the ways in which proto-religion might have affected group size, a better method is to look for evidence that hominin group sizes increased during the Paleolithic. If we can identify increases in group size among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, we can then ask whether the larger groups were enabled or caused by proto-religion.

Because we do not have direct evidence of Paleolithic group size, we have to rely on proxies and analogies, however imperfect. As a proxy, we can examine primate group size. For an analogy, we can examine known hunter-gatherer groups. Although primates obviously do not have anything like proto-religion, it is reasonably safe to assume that the factors affecting primate group size are similar to those that would have affected hominin group size. As for known hunter-gatherers, they do have something akin to “religion,” although their loosely organized, non-systematic, and individualized shamanic practices bear few resemblances to the kinds of religions that humans systematically developed in conjunction with agriculture. If we can identify groups that grew over time or were larger than others, we can ask whether the observed size increase was connected to supernatural-religious beliefs, or whether other factors better explain the larger groups.

Because there are over 300 species of extant primates, it should come as no surprise that group size (and composition) varies considerably; the range is from a few family members to a few hundred. While several variables affect group size, the most important are predation risk, resource density, and neocortex size. The latter speaks to the tremendous load that intense sociality places on cognition and memory.

Chimpanzees and baboons are perhaps the most relevant models; the former because they are the most closely related to hominins and the latter because they are largely terrestrial and live in relatively stable multi-male and multi-female groups. Many researchers are of the opinion that this mode and composition most closely resembles the ancestral hominin condition. Chimp group size varies from 15 to 65 and the mean, other factors being equal, is approximately 30. Baboon group size varies from 25 to 250, with a mean near 100.

Remarkably, these numbers are quite similar to those of known hunter-gatherers. The basic foraging unit – which usually includes a few related families – consistently clusters around 30 people. This group typically maintains close ties to neighboring groups that are similarly sized and genetically related. The units occasionally aggregate into a group that averages 150 members, most of whom are related. This fairly tight knit group is primary, and is the one that can be counted immediately counted on in times of need. In most cases, these primary groups of 150 maintain kinship ties with surrounding groups of similar size, with the result being that a kinship group of approximately 500 constitutes the larger regional network that may come together only infrequently. This secondary group is typically the largest and hunter-gatherer groups rarely exceed this number. Beyond the regional network group of 500, relations are attenuated and conflict more likely. This pattern (basic = 30, primary = 150, secondary = 500) is fairly consistent across time and space.

This consistency in forager group size, when coupled with similar group sizes for chimps and baboons, leads to the conclusion that the upper limits of hominin group size remained relatively stable for much of human evolution. These limits and groupings were, of course, substantially altered by the dynamics of domestication; with agriculture and sedentism, human group size increased substantially. It is at this time, when groups become larger than 30-150-500, that kinship glue is no longer able to hold people together, and collective abstractions – such as polity or religion – are required to maintain larger groups. For most humans in the world, this fundamental transition (from foraging to agriculture) occurred no more than 7,500 years ago.

No Group Evolution of “Religion”

Where does this leave us? It means there is no need to invoke religion or ritual to explain group level success. Given the limited group sizes we are talking about for most of human evolution, other factors – such as language and technology – would have had far more profound effects on the success of one group versus another. Kinship, both real and fictive, is more than sufficient to bind such limited-size groups together and make them cohesive, cooperative, and altruistic. This is not to say that proto-religion and ritual would not have had an impact, but it is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which a “religious” 30 member group would prevail over a “non-religious” 150 member group. If group sizes were equal, and one group was proto-religious but the other was not, other factors would have been more decisive in determining the outcome of any conflict between them.

It is only when all primary variables are equal – group size, linguistic ability, and technological prowess – that a proto-religious group may have had some kind of advantage due to increased cohesion or cooperation. This places religion far down on the list of factors that explain group success during the Paleolithic. It also means that “religion” did not evolve because it made some groups more competitive than others.

Sources:

Aiello, Leslie and Dunbar, Robin. 1993. “Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language.” Current Anthropology, 34(2):184-193.

Baer, Darius and McEachron, Donald. 1982. “A Review of Selected Sociobiological Principles: Application to Hominid Evolution — The Development of Group Social Structure.” J. Social Bio. Struct., 5:69-90.

Isbell, Lynne and Young, Truman. 1996. “The evolution of bipedalism in hominids and reduced group size in chimpanzees: alternative responses to decreasing resource availability.” Journal of Human Evolution, 30:389–397

Janson, Charles and Goldsmith, Michele. 1995. “Predicting Group Size in Primates: Foraging Costs and Predation Risks.” Behavioral Ecology, 6(3):: 326-336.

Kosse, Kristinza. 1989. “Group Size and Societal Complexity: Thresholds in Long Term Memory.” J. Anth. Arch., 9:275-303.

Marlowe, Frank. 2005. “Hunter Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology, 14:54 –67.

Wrangham, Richard, et al. 1993. “Constraints on Group Size in Primates and Carnivores: Population Density and Day-Range as Assays of Exploitation Competition.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 32(3)199-209.

Dr. Williams played a leading role in establishing the now-prevailing, though not unanimous, view among evolutionary biologists that natural selection works at the level of the gene and the individual and not for the benefit of the group or species.

Dr. Williams laid out his ideas in 1966 in his book “Adaptation and Natural Selection.” In it, he seized on and clarified an issue at the heart of evolutionary theory: whether natural selection works by favoring the survival of elements as small as a single gene or its components, or by favoring those as large as a whole species.

He did not rule out the possibility that selection could work at many levels. But he concluded that in practice this almost never happens, and that selection should be understood as acting at the level of the individual gene.

Although Williams’ ideas were accepted by most evolutionary theorists, they gained much broader exposure with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ 1976 classic, The Selfish Gene.  Not everyone agreed with the Williams-Dawkins view of gene level selection, the late Stephen Jay Gould and David Sloan Wilson foremost among them.  As Wade notes in his obituary, Williams and Sloan Wilson sparred professionally but were good friends; Sloan Wilson has posted an RIP for Williams over at his blog.

While Wade is a popularizer of the idea that religion evolved through group level selection, Sloan Wilson is the professional proponent of this idea.  In Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society, Sloan Wilson states his theoretical case for group level selection and argues that religion is an adaptation which evolved to promote prosociality and morality.  The primary problem with the stories told by Sloan Wilson, Nicholas Wade, and their imaginative compatriot Matt Rossano is they are anchored in historically known and modern religions.

Why is this a problem?  Because historically known and modern religions — those which arose in tandem with agriculture and larger scale societies over the last 7,000 years –  are fundamentally different from pre-Holocene or pre-Neolithic supernaturalisms.  We cannot simply project the structures, systems, concerns or workings of these religions backwards into the Paleolithic.  As I have noted in several posts, those who do so commit both logical and historical error.

Indeed, I contend it is a mistake to even use the term or category of “religion” to describe supernatural beliefs before the rise of larger scale agricultural societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt.  In this sense, “religion” is a modern construct that does not appear on the historical stage until fairly recently.  It is this fact which previously caused me to ask: Where Are the “Groups” Essential to Group Level Selection and the Origins of Religion?

The short answer is that the groups about which Sloan Wilson and others speak are recent cultural formations that did not come together or become larger because people suddenly became more social or moral around 7,000 years ago.  By this time, the forces creating larger and more cohesive groups have little or nothing to do with biological evolution.

These killings have a purpose, but one that did not emerge until after Ngogo chimps’ patrols had been tracked and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo group has about 150 chimps and is particularly large, about three times the usual size. And its size makes it unusually aggressive. Its males directed most of their patrols against a chimp group that lived in a region to the northeast of their territory. Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent.

The Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, continues with an interesting observation and comparison:

Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes.

Why do chimps incur the risk and time costs of patrolling into enemy territory when the advantage accrues most evidently to the group? Dr. Mitani invokes the idea of group-level selection — the idea that natural selection can work on groups and favor behaviors, like altruism and cooperation, that benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Selection usually depends only on whether an individual, not a group, leaves more surviving children.

Many biologists are skeptical of group-level selection, saying it could be effective only in cases where there is intense warfare between groups, a reduced rate of selection on individuals, and little interchange of genes between groups.

Although Wade is not a biologist, he is not skeptical of group level selection — indeed, he is an ardent advocate.  In his recent book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures, Wade contends that religion was an adaptation specifically targeted by selection because it made groups more cohesive and cooperative.  This, in turn, enabled religious groups to better compete against other groups.  A major aspect of this enhanced ability to compete, so the argument goes, is that religious groups are better able to war against non-religious groups.  Wade is not alone in believing this; the anthropologist David Sloan Wilson and evolutionary psychologist Matt Rossano make similar arguments.

The recent chimp study — “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees” — bears on this hypothesis.  The aggressive Kibale group is exceptionally large because it occupies particularly fertile territory.  This fertile territory sustains larger numbers of chimps, who in turn cooperate and use this numerical advantage to further enlarge their territory.  No one has ever suggested that chimps are spiritual or religious, so these activities — cooperation and warfare — are not being driven by these abstractions.  Kinship is the primary factor holding the males of these groups together, and which causes them to cooperate.

This is quite similar to the ethnohistoric situation on the Great Plains.  From 1680 to 1880, Plains Indian tribes such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa-Apache, Shoshoni, Blackfoot, Cree, Gros Ventre, Flathead, and Sarsi constantly warred against one another for territory, horses, and booty.  These hunting and gathering groups were held together first and foremost by extended kinship ties; shamans neither organized nor lead war parties.  These tribes neither invoked nor relied on religious differences as a justification for war or raiding.  In fact, it would have been impossible to do so given that these tribes had substantially similar types of beliefs and rituals.  The most successful of these tribes — the Lakota — enlarged their numbers and expanded their territory not because they were more spiritual or religious than the other tribes, or had more effective group rituals.  Instead, they had various material, geographic, and economic advantages which enabled them to succeed.

This is not to say that in certain places and at certain times some groups used religion to bind them together and justify war.  It occurred many times and in many places, but this is fairly recent behavior that corresponds to the rise of the first city-states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Near East.  Because this is modern behavior that is the product of rulers and elites marrying religion to power, I cannot see how it has anything to do with the evolutionary origins of religion.

As regular readers of the blog know, I have challenged this argument using several lines of evidence:

• Social primates, such as chimps, appear to understand and practice fairness, reciprocity and altruism, thus indicating that these “moral” behaviors have deep evolutionary roots;
• Children naturally develop a sense of fairness, reciprocity and altruism, thus suggesting that these traits have biological roots;
• Adults across the world and in different cultures tend to share basic and intuitive ideas about what is right and wrong (i.e., moral or immoral), which again indicates some degree of “moral” hard-wiring; and
• In many hunter-gatherer societies, the teaching and maintenance of right or “moral” behavior is completely divorced from ritualistic practices or spiritual beliefs; thus, the supposedly primordial “religion” of shamanism is not linked to morality.

Over the past week, I have been delving into the massive body of work on religion by the sociologist Rodney Stark.  In an article titled “Gods, Rituals, and the Moral Order,” Stark takes direct aim at the historically incorrect idea that religion and morality are necessarily linked:

“Religion functions to sustain the moral order.”  This classic proposition, handed down from the founders, is regarded by many as the closest thing to a “law” that the social scientific study of religion possesses.

The only problem with this “law,” notes Stark, is that “it’s wrong.”  Religion functions to sustain the moral order in certain societies, in certain places, and at certain times — usually within those societies that practice monotheism and whose gods are: (a) anthropomorphic; (b) concerned with morality; and (c) capable of punishing those who transgress morality.  Obviously, not all spiritual traditions or religions — past or present — possess these characteristics.

As Stark notes, many anthropologists have made this observation based on ethnographic reports, and it was well known to Edward Tylor, one of anthropology’s founders, who in 1871 stated:

To some the statement may seem startling, yet the evidence seems to justify it, that the relation of morality to religion is one that only belongs in its rudiments, or not at all, to [premodern societies].  The popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of natural religion simply falls to the ground.  [Shamanism and premodern religions are] almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion.

This does not mean, Tylor comments, that premodern societies lack morals or moral teachings — they simply are not joined with spiritualism or religion:

Not, as I have said, that morality is absent from the life of of [premodern societies].  But these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion, comparatively independent of the animistic beliefs and rites which exist beside them.  [Premodern religion] is not immoral; it is unmoral.

In the remainder of his article — which should be required reading for group level selectionists, evolutionary psychologists, and story-tellers who locate the origins of religion in prosocial and moral behaviors — Stark dismantles the idea that religion functions primarily to sustain the moral order.  While this may be true of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and also Hinduism, it is not true of all other spiritual traditions or religions.

I have read all of Sloan Wilson’s work on religion and my primary objection throughout has been that Sloan Wilson talks about “religion” as if it has always existed in its present form and that it functioned in the past the same ways it functions now.  It is almost as if “religion” miraculously sprang forth, fully formed, at some critical point in the Paleolithic.

Another group level selectionist who views religion this way is the evolutionary psychologist Matt Rossano, whose work I discussed in this post.  In “The Religious Mind and Evolution of Religion,” Rossano makes the following assertions — each of which demonstrates the fallacy of projecting modern religious forms and practices backwards into deep time:

• In the past (as is true today), religion very likely harnessed powerful social emotions to reinforce social unity and ostracize deviants.
• Physically and emotionally engaging group-coordinating activities were the essence of pre-Upper Paleolithic religion.
• Given that the Upper Paleolithic peoples were anatomically modern humans and that religion is a human universal, it seems safe to conclude that religion was present by at least the time of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe.

With respect to the first assertion, it is unwise to assume that what is true today was true in the past.  If history teaches us anything, it is that the present is quite unlike the past.

Regarding the second assertion, we have no evidence that religion existed before the Upper Paleolithic, so we have no way of knowing that pre-UP peoples were engaging in “physically and emotionally engaging group coordinating activities.”  If a group of Pentecostals could travel back in time to missionize groups of archaic Homo sapiens, this claim would have some support.

With respect to the third assertion, we cannot assume that because humans had become anatomically modern 150,000 years ago, they were behaviorally modern.  In fact, there is nothing in the archaeological record which suggests that the first anatomically modern humans were behaving any differently from their predecessors.  This means, of course, that it is not safe to assume “that religion was present by at least the time of the Upper Paleolithic.”

Sloan Wilson and Rossano are telling elaborate tales about the origins of religion.  These stories must be supported by fossils and archaeology.  Using modern forms and understandings of religion to locate its evolutionary origins may make for nice stories but it is bad science.

In response to Taylor’s question in the headline of his article — Are We Born to Believe? — I noted in yesterday’s post that the answer is yes.  In the course of his review, Taylor discusses research involving children which indicates that as their minds develop the attributes I noted yesterday, they become “natural theists.” I will be covering much of that research in future posts.

Taylor’s review also notes that some evolutionists view the supernatural-religious as a byproduct of other adaptations and some view it as a group level adaptation.  I knew of course that David Sloan Wilson espouses the latter view, but did not know Richard Dawkins was a vehement byproduct theorist who — in typical fashion — thinks Sloan Wilson is a dolt:

Among evolutionists, the big debate is between those who argue that religious belief has helped human beings prosper as a species, and those who see faith merely as a by-product of other aspects of our development.

The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson is perhaps the most prominent advocate of the adaptationist view, arguing that religious belief helped make groups of early humans comparatively more cohesive, more co-operative and more fraternal, and thus better able to fight off less organised foes.

Adaptationist accounts are far from universally accepted. Richard Dawkins describes the group selection theory that underlies Sloan Wilson’s account as “sheer, wanton, head-in-bag perversity.”

But whatever is happening at the group level, there is something about the way individual human beings develop that makes us susceptible to religious belief.

The  last sentence is key — there is something about every individual’s brain that predisposes him or her to supernatural thinking and makes it likely that most of us will have religious beliefs.

These kinds of arguments depend on some fairly large assumptions.  While I have no problem with multi-level selection, I find little evidence for the idea that group cohesion is primarily the product of religion.  Prosocial and “moral” behaviors, in other words, do not arise primarily or exclusively because people are religious.

Indeed, I would argue that the kinds of religion we associate with tightly knit groups arose only recently in human history.  They are, in other words, the products of highly organized and modern forms of religion.  These forms of religion are governed mostly by cultural patterns, not biological evolution.

It is difficult to imagine paleolithic hunter-gatherers being bound together primarily by religion.  Kinship probably played a much larger role in maintaining group cohesion and guiding prosocial behavior.  Indeed, one need only look at ethnographically and historically known hunter-gatherers (e.g., the San of Southern Africa or the Lakota of the Plains) to see that their lives — and tribal identities — do not revolve entirely or even primarily around religion.

It is hard to make the case (as Wilson and Wade both do) that religion is the product of biological evolution when the kinds of groups they see as being bound together by religion are so historically recent.  Moreover, they are relatively rare.

Having said this, there are some groups that are bound together primarily by religion.  In the German newsmagazine Spiegel, Ulrike Putz reports on one such group of 550,000 people:

It is the world of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, whose adherents live in tight-knit communities where everything revolves around religion. They radically shield themselves from modern life. Television is frowned upon, as is non-religious music, telephones and the Internet. News that is important to the community is disseminated via notices posted on walls. Boys and girls go to school, but their education is primarily focused on religion.

I’m not sure that indoctrination focused on religion can be called “education.”  It’s a sad story.