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.

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.

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.

It is also a problem in science, which scorns postmodernism and savages it with satire. Science, and those who play in its fields, is chock full of highly intelligent people who adhere to irreconcilable schools of thought. We can only hope that the schoolmasters involved are, as Heller twice notes, thinking truthfully. Those who are not specialists in a particular field and who rely on experts are entitled, at a minimum, to intellectual honesty.

In this regard, it was refreshing to see an evolutionary psychologist recently make a public confession: resurrection apparently does not contradict science because it is beyond natural law. Death, in a special one-off some 2000 years ago, is not really death. This is on good authority of the pope and tradition.

Prior to this confession, I had long been at a loss to understand the stories this evolutionary psychologist has been telling about the “evolution of religion.” Matt Rossano, psychology professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, has been nothing if not prolific on the subject and recently published a book that purports to explain how religion evolved through “supernatural selection.” At least we now know what has been driving Rossano, and that his use of science and anthropology is not disinterested.

Anthropologists are in general agreement that between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, one or several groups of humans living in Africa experienced some kind of breakthrough enabling them to increase their numbers, leave the continent, and colonize the world. Who these humans were and where they lived remains something of a mystery. What sorts of advantages these humans possessed also remains something of a mystery.

There is no shortage of plausible hypotheses. They could have been the first group(s) to possess fully fluent language or the capacity for symbolic thought. They may have been technological innovators, crafting better tools, weapons, shelters, and clothing than their predecessors. Some or all these things would have resulted in larger group sizes, which surely played a primary role in their success.

Or, as Rossano would have us believe, they were the first to get religion. This is of course possible. But is it probable? Is it parsimonious? Does the majority of the evidence point in this direction? The answers are no, no, and no.

The evidence is uncertain and equivocal, though you would never know this by reading Rossano’s work. As he selectively presents the evidence, you would think that science has the answers and it all points to the adaptive or supernatural, which for Rossano seem to be one and the same. Science does not yet have the answers, and the incredible story Rossano tells about the “evolution of religion” appears to be wishful (or Catholic) thinking.

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.

In God & War: An Audit & An Exploration, Greg Austin, Todd Kranock and Thom Oommen explain the goal of their study and conclusions:

One organising feature of this article is what it calls the ‘Religious War Audit’. BBC asked us to see how many wars had been caused by religion. After reviewing historical analyses by a diverse array of specialists, we concluded that there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars from 1948 to now, often painted in the media and other places as wars over religion, or wars arising from religious differences, have in fact been wars of nationalism, liberation of territory or self-defense.

This article concludes that at a philosophical level, the main religious traditions have little truck with war or violence. All advocate peace as the norm and see genuine spirituality as involving a disavowal of violence. It is mainly when organised religious institutions become involved with state institutions or when a political opposition is trying to take power that people begin advocating religious justifications for war.

It is not hard to identify the difficulties which afflict any study of this kind.  Disentangling religion from nationalism is a nearly impossible task.  The rise of organized religions coincides with the rise of city-states; religion has been married to power from the beginning.  The problem with the religious war audit (found on pages 13-14 of the study) is that it does not recognize this marriage, and thus seriously underestimates the role of religion in many of the wars that are listed.

The first war listed in the chart, the First Battle of Megiddo (1469 BCE), was undertaken by an Egyptian pharaoh, who was a self-proclaimed god-king.  The soldiers in his army were not fighting on behalf of a secular Egyptian empire; they were fighting because their god-king commanded it.  Despite this fact, the war audit authors rate this battle as a “zero,” which means that religion played no role in the conflict.  This is absurd.  There are several additional examples.

Take, for instance, the Greek-Persian Wars (499-488 BCE) which are also rated as a zero (i.e., religion supposedly played no role in these conflicts).  These wars actually started much earlier, given that Cyrus the Great conquered Ionia in 547 BCE and successor Persian kings (Darius the Great and Xerxes the Great) — all of whom proclaimed themselves to be deities and were worshiped by their peoples as such — continued fighting the Greeks until 451 BCE.  These were  not simple wars of empire — in each case, the Persians were commanded by god-kings and the Greeks knew that if they were conquered, they would be forced to give up their gods and worship Persian deities.

I could go on with similar examples, but the point is clear: we should treat this religious war audit with considerable skepticism.  Rossano, however, largely accepts the war audit findings:

Brace yourselves, those for whom religion equals war. The majority of all wars (44/73 or 60 percent) had no religious motivation whatsoever — a zero rating. Only three wars — the Arab conquests of 632-732, the much ballyhooed Crusades, and the Reformation Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries – earned a 5, and were thus considered to be truly religious wars. Only seven wars earned a rating of 3 or more — less than 10 percent. Thus, the vast majority of all wars involved either no religious motivation or only a modest one. The authors concluded by noting that “there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars were wars of nationalism and liberation of territory” (p. 16).

There are many Jews and Muslims in the Middle East who surely would be surprised to learn that the Israeli/Arab wars rated a mere 2 on the religiosity scale, and that those wars were driven mostly by nationalism and territory.  I think if someone surveyed the participants, they would say something much different.

Rossano concludes his article with this observation: “Outside of kinship, nature has come up with nothing more effective for creating group cohesion than religion.”  He is right about kinship — for the vast majority of human history, it has served as the primary bond for group cohesion.  Nature did not, however, come up with religion — humans created organized religion to serve specific needs and goals.  One of these goals has been to organize people for war.

In more recent times (i.e., over the last 700 years or so) another factor has played a major (if not dominant) role in group cohesion.  That factor is nationalism, and it has much in common with religion.  In tomorrow’s post, I will detail the many ways in which nationalism is analogous to religion.

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.