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.

As Nicholas Wade now reports, it appears that the case against Professor Hauser is not what it seemed and has encountered difficulties.  My sense of the situation, as an attorney, is there clearly was a rush to judgment and a shocking lack of process that has resulted in a Kafkaesque experience for Professor Hauser.  It obviously has taken a financial and emotional toll on him.  Harvard certainly has done him no favors.

The most disturbing aspect of the story is that Hauser’s defenders contend his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.”  This sort of thing, if true, is completely unacceptable.  You can be opposed to someone’s research program without engaging in vicious attacks or making allegations that can ruin lives and careers.

This leaves me wondering who this critics are and what might be their motivations.  It would be one thing if such critics are opposed to Hauser’s research into morality and his argument that moral behavior is naturally evolved, no religion necessary.  This is of course a hot button issue that can crank up the temperature in any room.

But it is quite another thing if the criticism is aimed at Hauser’s primate cognition research — honestly, the stakes in such studies are not that high, and the findings — no matter which way they come out, are not going to unsettle anyone’s world view.  If Hauser’s critics are “virulently opposed” to this aspect of his research, the motivations are surely personal and petty.

The bottom line at this point is that it appears that none of Hauser’s research into morals has been touched by the investigation.  This is good news.

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.

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.

Those (such as David Sloan Wilson, Nicholas Wade, and Matt Rossano) who assert that religion is an adaptation frequently rely on group-level selection and the role that religion plays in promoting morality-sociality.  Richard Sosis makes similar arguments within the context of ritual behavior and costly signaling which solidifies one’s commitment to a group.

Those (such as Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, and Justin Barrett) who assert that religion is a byproduct of other adaptations point to various aspects of ordinary cognition which give rise to supernatural thinking.  This view accords with Stephen Jay Gould’s contention that religion is an exaptation or “spandrel.”

Although these evolutionary theorists of religion differ significantly in their approaches and conclusions, these differences do not seem to be mutually exclusive.  There appears to be no reason, in other words, why religion cannot be partly explained as an adaptation and partly explained as a byproduct.