"Science itself is an example of a self-transcending learning process and cannot be reduced to the principles of evolutionary psychology.  There is no reason to assume that science is the only human activity exempted from this kind of reductionistic analysis.  Religion is also about self-transcendence."

This essay was significantly revised and is now chapter four in my book

The New Sciences of Religion:
Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

The Evolution of Religion:
Memes, Spandrels, or Adaptation?

How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Religion or Not

Lecture by William Grassie [1]
www.metanexus.net

Presented at the Society for the Integration of  Science and Human Values (SiSHVa)
Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies
The University of Peradeniya, Kandy Sri Lanka

November 1, 2007

Abstract:  This paper presents an overview of new research that seeks to explain religion using the principles of evolutionary psychology, which argues that nothing persists in biology or human culture unless it serves the functions of survival and reproduction.  A review of evolutionary approaches to understanding altruism serves as a bridge to the discussion of religion.  I explore three different evolutionary paradigms used to explain religion  – memes, spandrels, and adaptation.  In the end, I welcome each and argue also for a fourth paradigm, which understands that human culture has partially transcended our biological origins and constraints.  The capacity of human culture to transcend biological causation, of which science itself is an example, means that there can never be a complete, satisfactory reductionistic account of religion and spirituality.  Indeed, the self-transcendence of science is itself indicative of religious notions of transcendence in the universe and in the human mind.  Nevertheless, evolutionary psychology’s approach to understanding the nature, function, and dysfunctions of religion and spirituality offer many interesting new insights and research programs.

Keywords: Religion, science, evolutionary psychology, altruism, memes, spandrels, adaptation, cultural evolution.

Preface

In my last lecture on the Economics of Religion, we asked two questions: 1) how do religions impact economic development in diverse cultural and historical situations, and 2) how can economic models be used to understand the dynamics of religion. 

You will recall that at the outset, I made the distinction between studying religion from the Inside, as a believer and practitioner of a particular tradition, and studying religion from the Outside, as a nonbeliever from a different tradition or in our case as social scientists and philosophers of religion.  Remember that everyone else’s religion can seem quite bizarre from the Outside, though from the Inside it seems obvious, self-evident, and sublime.  I think of my own Christian beliefs and practices, just as an example.  Try explaining to a Muslim or a Buddhist the strange concept of the Trinity or the taking of bread and wine in Communion.  Unless you are an Insider, these ideas and practices seem bizarre.

So I ask you again to step out of your skin for the next hour and look at the world with new and often strange eyes.  Know that at the end of the lecture, I will return you safely to whatever religious commitments that you entered the room with, though hopefully we will all be enriched by the experience with a greater understanding and appreciation of the Buddha-nature in all things, God, by-whatever-name, the Universe, and ourselves.

Other attempts to Explain Religions

As social scientists, coming out of disciplines like anthropology, psychology, and sociology, the question of religion has been with us since the beginning of our disciplines.  Names like Max Müller, J.G. Frazer, E.B. Tylor, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Claude Levi-Strauss, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz immediately come to mind, not only as founders and giants of our disciplines, but also as early theorists of religion. [2]  

The rise of global maritime travel beginning in the 15th century, and with it the European Colonial expansion, marked the beginning of what might be called the third or fourth great migration of humans around the world (the other great migrations occurring before the invention of agriculture).  And with this migration, Europeans and other peoples of the world were confronted with the great variety of languages, cultures, and religious beliefs and practices.  Not only did great civilizations interact, but innumerable smaller populations in isolated areas like Australia, the Amazon, Africa, and the South Pacific Islands, also came into contact with Europeans, and with these contacts the challenge of understanding, translating, and comprehending diverse cultural and religious practices.[3]   Remember that as strange as Christian beliefs and practices seem to an outsider, these other civilizations and primal cultures also seemed strange to the European scientists and explorers, many of whom were also starting to question their own religious tradition.

Why this diversity of religious beliefs and practices?  Indeed, why religion at all?  Remember we are thinking about all religions, not just the one that you are familiar with from the Inside.  Not all gods are the same.  Not all views of the one God even within the same tradition are the same.  The distinction between monotheism and polytheism may be spurious.  Supernatural agents can be very different.  Some spirits are stupid and can be tricked by clever humans.  Some gods die.  Some religions are exclusive; others are inclusive and synchronistic.  The official religion of theologians, pundits, and philosophers is generally not the religion practiced on the streets.  Some religions emphasize orthodoxy; others emphasize orthopraxis, i.e., it is not what you believe that counts, it is what you do that matters.  Indeed, many religions do not even have the concept of “religion”. 

How are we to account for this wild world of different faiths and practices?  There are four traditional responses in the social sciences to explaining religion.  These will be familiar to most of you. 

First, it was thought that religions provide explanations for natural phenomena and existential concerns. Why the seasons of the year?  Why the motions of the sun, moon, and stars?  Why natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and droughts? Why lightening and thunder?  Why is there disease? Death?  Why do the living vividly remember the dead?  Why do we dream at night and how should we understand these dreams?  Why do some people have peak mystical experiences?  Charisma?  Why are some people crazy?  And so forth.  The great minds of diverse civilizations and isolated tribes reflected on these great questions and devised answers in stories of gods, spirits, and cosmologies.  Religion, then, was akin to science in its purposes, but its answers are primitive, fantastic, and wrong.

The second line of thought in explaining religion was based on our psychological need for comfort in the face of existential terror before evil, suffering, death, and uncertainty.  Human self-consciousness meant that our species could anticipate its death and that this creates extreme anxiety.  Furthermore, we witness and fear evil and suffering in the world.  Religion, then, arises as a compensation, a way of relieving these anxieties with a hoped for life-after-death or reincarnation.  Furthermore, this future would provide heavenly compensation for the toil and suffering experienced in this life, as well as just punishment for those who caused evil and suffering to others in this life.  Like Dante’s pilgrimage through the Inferno, we can take some comfort and perverse pleasure in the torment of those who torment us today, and hope for eternal happiness in a hedonistic heaven as repayment for the pain and finitude that we experience in this life.

The third theory of religion proceeds from the needs of societies, not individuals.  In order for small or large-scale social groups to work together, they need some mental-moral “glue” to bind individuals together in moral order and social harmony.  Humans are otherwise thought to be too egotistical and self-centered to live well together.  We have a proclivity to be lazy and lustful, to rape, murder, pillage, and steal.  Though society may have rules, we also tend to bend and break the rules, to receive the benefits, but not pay our dues.  External compulsion to cooperate is extremely limited.  Religions provide a means not only to articulate the rules for a society and a mechanism of enforcement, but also a way to internalize the social norms of society in individuals and families through the repetition of stories and rituals.  Religion is therefore functional, indeed necessary, for social order.  When one religion is removed, it will have to be replaced by a new religion, or social chaos will ensue.

The fourth theory of religion argues that people are naturally superstitious and credulous.  Whether it is wishful thinking or gullible stupidity, it seems you can coax people into believing and doing all kinds of ridiculous things.  When these bizarre beliefs and practices are reinforced from childhood on by families, friends and cultures, they become irresistible and taken for granted.  It is not just in areas like the i-Ching, astrology, Tarot cards, Voodoo dolls, and alien abductions that we witness this credulity among our fellow humans, government-sponsored lotteries in the United States and elsewhere are best understood as a tax-on-stupidity.  Even most educated people do not understand simple principles of probability, let alone scientific causality.  As the apocryphal quote from B.T. Barnum goes “there’s a sucker born every minute.”[4]

Now for many intellectuals, and indeed in popular culture, these four views of religion have become widely accepted and commonplace.  To reiterate, religions 1) provide explanations, 2) provide comfort, 3) provide for social order, and 4) are illusions.  This makes my job as a scholar of comparative religion rather frustrating, because now everyone is an expert in religion with a just-so-story that they can insert whenever it suits them.  With these “scientific” explanations of religion, there is also no longer a need to pay attention to the stuff on the Inside – the scriptures, authorities, histories, interpretations, saints and sages, rituals, etc. – because none of it is true.  In the modern academe, a great ignorance now exists about religion.  So I get neither respect nor authority in my chosen academic field.  One does not get that response when discussing genetic transcription factors, the mass of neutrinos, or the possibilities of quantum computation.  Perhaps I should just end the lecture here and we can adjourn for tea.   Instead, I invite you to go deeper into this religious jungle with all of its diversity, beauty, and dangers.  We will get lost before we find our way back out.

Let us revisit the question “why religion” by first rejecting these four explanations of religion.  While useful as far as they go, these traditional social scientific accounts of religion are simply not satisfactory.[5]   First, religious explanations can be extravagant and complex, not necessarily easy to understand on an intuitive or causal level.  I think, for instance, of Hindu cosmology with its extraordinary complexity and layers of elaborations.  While Hindu cosmology is fantastic in scope and imagination, much simpler and perhaps much more satisfying explanations could be devised, indeed have been scientifically discovered.  Why do humans create these sometimes baroque explanations and why do they persist, for instance in the case of Young Earth Creationism in the United States, even after scientific explanations have been discovered that conclusively prove a long Earth history – ca. 4 billion years – and an even longer Universe history – ca. 13.7 billion years?  At least Hindu cosmology intuitively captures the enormous scale of the universe, if none of the actual scientific details.  Why do we passionately hold on to these antiquated myths in opposition to factually and practically true scientific accounts?

Second, while religions can be seen as a source of comfort, they can also be sources of new dangers and holy terror.  Many feel some anguish in the face of religious demands for their behavior and obligations.  Religious belief does not necessarily bring ease of mind or ignorant bliss; it can also bring many new fears of devils, demons, witches, ghosts, jinns, and angels.  God’s goodness is ambivalent, just ask Job or those who survived the December 2004 Tsunami.  Far from seeking revelation, the prophets of the Hebrew scripture generally resisted God’s call, suggesting that maybe He had called the wrong number and certainly the wrong person.  When we add to this the prospects for an after-life or reincarnations, we now need to be afraid not just about this life, but also about our eternal souls or karma.  Religion need not be a source of comfort, indeed often quite the opposite.  Again, we are compelled to revisit the question, why religions?

Third, while religions can be seen as a functional force promoting social cohesion and moral harmony, they can also be oppressive and divisive forces in society and between societies.  Why would people “buy into” a belief system that can also oppress them and enrich others?  Why would people invest in religious institutions and hierarchies that promote violence against others, including using their resources and their bodies as “canon fodder” in religiously rationalized war.  And why would people give up so much of their hard-earned wealth to support extravagant construction projects and lazy clerics living in relative luxury?  Certainly as much strife as harmony has resulted from religions.  Religions may be functional, but they can also be dysfunctional.  Again, we are compelled to revisit the question, why religions?

Finally, we are told that religions are illusions and that people are rather gullible, full of wishful thinking and credulous beliefs.  It turns out that we are not equally credulous.  There are many religious ideas that we reject out of hand as implausible.  It seems there must be some hidden grammar and syntax to why we believe what we believe and that we are not equal opportunity fools to just any old tall tale.  Indeed, there are many fantastical stories, thinking perhaps of the Harry Potter phenomena, that we enjoy without ever thinking of these as true.  Many cultures have fantastical stories that they tell their children, for instance, Santa Claus, but no one believes its true.  Why do we invest so heavily in religious stories, as opposed to other fantasies we happily entertain, but don’t take seriously?  Why these particular religious beliefs and practices, instead of the set of all possible illusory beliefs and practices?

The Evolutionary Paradigm

Today we are going to put on the hats and filters of evolutionary psychology to try to understand religious and spiritual phenomena.  How might the evolutionary sciences help us understand the origins and persistence of religion?  This is a useful hypothesis.  Indeed, many aspects of human behavior can be understood on the basis of our genetically evolved physiological, mental and social capacities.[6]   In spite of many significant differences with other species, we are nevertheless evolved animals, members of a single mammalian species, capable of interbreeding and sharing remarkable cognitive and social capacities across every ethnic and linguistic group the world round.  Given this universal human biology and the hundreds of universal anthropological characteristics we exhibit[7] , why do we then see such diversity of religious belief and practice?  Indeed, as social scientists, if only for the next hour, we must ask why religion at all.

Let us begin with a brief review of evolutionary theory, before we see how this might apply to humans in general and specifically to understanding the diversity and forms of religion.  Humans and our most immediate hominid ancestors evolved as hunters and gatherers in small tribes and extended families.  Paleoarcheologists date the rise of modern homo sapiens to around 160,000 years ago in Africa.  For now we do not need to concern ourselves with the many immediate precursors of homo sapiens.  We take it for granted that life evolves from life in a process dating back 3.7 billion years ago on this planet.  The transmutation of species is the foundation of modern biology and nothing makes sense in biology without this as our point of departure. There is no serious debate that some version of evolution is the case, though we can entertain lots of debates about how this happens and what it means for human culture.  There is no serious scientific disagreement about what happened when.  The sciences of evolution are based on sound geology, paleontology, radioactive dating, morphological studies, developmental biology, and significantly today also genetic analyses of the diverse species of life.  Indeed, if we go back far enough, not only do all of us share common ancestry with early humans in Africa,[8] we are also all descendants of the so-called primordial slim -- some of my relatives, more so than others.  The point, however, is not to denigrate humans (or even a certain uncle).  The point is to appreciate that the genetics of even simple bacterial forms of life are very much a part of the human genome today.  Life is us, though for our purposes we need only focus today on the last 160,000 years.

Humans existed as small hunter-gather tribes for over 50,000 generations before the advent of agriculture. Our ancestors adapted and lived successfully in diverse climates starting in the savannas of Africa and then traveling to coastal regions, tropical rain forests, high mountains, and cold artic regions.  Our ancestors survived a major global climatic catastrophe some 70,000 years ago with the explosion of Mount Toba in Sumatra.  This super-volcanic eruption, estimated to be three thousand times greater than the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, changed everything overnight.  The volcanic ash released in the atmosphere reduced average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius for seven years and triggered a global ice age.  Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan were covered with 5 meters of volcanic ash.  Humanity was reduced to some 1000 to 10,000 breeding pairs.  And yet we survived, and as the sky cleared and the ice slowly retreated over the millennia, we resumed our expansion, eventually migrating to every continent except Antarctica.

We need to know this story, because from an evolutionary point of view, ninety-nine percent of human history occurred prior to the advent of agriculture, great civilizations, or for that matter, the Internet.  If we want to talk about the biology of religion, we need to understand that we all still possess the genes, physiology, brains, and sociality of hunter-gathers, albeit living in a very different environment today.  To be sure, much has changed dramatically in the last centuries, but we are physiologically and psychologically more or less identical with these early humans.  Conceived in pleasure, born in pain, we have a long period of childhood dependency before we are initiated as adults with the contingencies of survival and reproduction in small groups.  Successful hunting and gathering required enormous skills and cooperation, communal knowledge of flora and fauna, seasons and geography, predators and prey, the making of tools and shelter, methods for maintaining group cohesion and mutual support.  Many of these skills were acquired in specific and diverse ecosystems, so we needed to pass on essential survival skills to the next generation through some form of non-genetic transmission, i.e., education.  It could not have been all in our genes.  Humans are general-purpose adapters, the first large mammal to successfully inhabit all corners on the globe.  This past with all its diversity and flexibility is encoded in our genes and the very structure of our brains.  While we have differentially coevolved with our tools and our domesticated plants and animals in the last 10,000 years,[9] this is largely insignificant in the slow processes of genetic evolution.

The acquisition and development of language is certainly an important part of this story, but hard to know given that all we have are fossil remains and stone tools.  Some 60,000 years ago, paleo-archeologists talk about a “Great Leap Forward” characterized by more sophisticated stone tools.  For instance, the bow and arrow appears somewhere in Africa or Eurasia some 30,000 years ago, but by the dawn of agriculture had spread to every corner of the world except Australia. Perhaps this “Great Leap” was correlated with some advance in human language, perhaps the advent of new grammar and complex conditional thoughts.  In any case, by 25,000 years ago we see the emergence of symbolic culture -- the cave paintings in Lascaux, France and elsewhere, the Venus of Willendorf and other fertility statuary, the ritualized burials of dead humans – all of this suggestive of what we would have to call religious, symbolic culture, though we can only speculate on what they thought and why they did these things.

The Principles of Evolutionary Psychology

We return to our guiding question: how does evolutionary psychology report to explain religion?  And to answer that question, we must briefly review the theory of evolution.  That there is common descent and the transmutation of species over long periods of time is taken for granted in biology today.  The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive.  There is some debate on how this evolution happens, i.e., the process by which evolution occurs.  Charles Darwin’s formulation of the theory of Natural Selection is still the preferred theory and certainly the easiest to understand in its simplicity.  Stated as a series of observations and propositions, the theory of natural selection goes:

1. Offspring of the same parents are similar, but not identical.  There are variations among offspring.
   
   
2. All species are capable of reproducing at an exponential rate of increase.[10]
   
   
3. This reproductive drive to over-populate leads to a universal struggle for survival, as resources are scares and competition extreme.
   
   
4. Those variations among offspring that tend to promote survival and reproduction will tend to be passed on, while those that do not will tend to die out.  This is where the “natural selection” occurs, through disease, starvation, predation, and death, as well as, in sexual competition to reproduce.
   
   
5. The accumulation of all of these natural selections over long periods of time, including variations in ecologies and geographical isolation, leads to the transmutation of species.
   

Let’s review this again, in Darwin’s own words:

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.  The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive.  I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature.  But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.[11] .

That’s all fine and well for plants and animals, but what about humans?  The earlier attempts to apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection to humans were referred to as Social Darwinism.  Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin incorporated into later editions of The Origins.  The term “survival of the fittest” would quickly become the shorthand for natural selection, though the term is misleading.  We might better say “survival of the fitting-in,” i.e., fitting in to some particular ecological niche.  In any case, Social Darwinism quickly became the all-purpose tool to support all kinds of ideological causes, from predatory capitalism to communism, from racism to sexism, from European Colonialism to Nazism, from eugenics to genocide.  The application of Darwinian principles to human societies got a deservedly bad reputation. Historians suggest that the real impetus for the conservative religious reaction against Darwinism arose not from concern about the origins of species, but from the perception that the theory of natural selection as applied to humans was inherently immoral.[12]

The ethical dilemma is that Darwinism understands only variation, survival, and reproduction.  And the survival part only really matters in so far as it serves the purposes of reproduction.  There is no way something can persist in nature, if it does not survival long enough to reproduce.  The meaning and purpose of life, including human life, seems to be reduced to a rather primitive level.

Today there has been a revival in the use of evolutionary principles to understand human thought and behavior.  In the 1970s, it was referred to as sociobiology[13] , but its advocates were criticized and denounced.  Today, the discipline is referred to as evolutionary psychology and its practitioners have been quietly studying human behavior, decoding our species specific human nature that we have been endowed with due to our particular history as all-purpose hunter-gatherers.  The key is always some understanding of adaptations, differentially selected, over hundreds of thousands of years.  If it does not serve the needs of survival and reproduction, it would not have persist and could not exist as a human trait.

Probably most of you are not use to thinking like an evolutionary psychologists, so let me give you some tidbits of insights just as a taste of how problems of behavior and genetics are typically framed:

• Intrasexual competition and the operational sex ratio
• Post-copulatory intrasexual competition
• Sexual dimorphism in humans and other species
• Criteria in Human Mate Choice – male and female, cross-cultural
• Encephalization Quotients in Hominid Evolution and the Female Pelvis Bottleneck
• Gossip replacing grooming as form of maintaining social cohesion
• Testis size in primate species and sperm competition
• The puzzle of concealed ovulation in human females (makes sex inefficient from a biological point of view, but perhaps helps promote male attachment, thus serving the needs of child rearing).[14]

Needless to say, sex, i.e. reproduction, plays a big role in the thinking of evolutionary psychology, but also violence, cooperation, language, and morality.  These latter will serve as a bridge towards thinking about the evolution of religion.

The Puzzle of Altruism

With Darwin’s theory of natural selection as our account of how evolution occurs, it is no longer difficult to explain why there is selfishness and evil in the world.  These we can take for granted.  The problem becomes how to explain the existence of morality, goodness, and other regarding behavior. Darwin himself recognized this.  The existence of other-benefiting traits in nature “would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection”.[15]   Altruism, i.e., benefiting another at you own expense, is “a central theoretical issue” for sociobiology, notes Harvard University’s E.O. Wilson.[16]

Why would a honeybee sacrifice its individual survival for the defense of the hive?  Why would a soldier fight and die for his tribe, king, religion, or nation, when this sacrifice means that his genes will not be passed on to the next generation?  Why, for that matter, would the Good Samaritan stop and help the injured stranger?[17]   Darwin and most of the earlier evolutionists tried to explain altruism by invoking group selection theory, but group selection fell increasingly out of favor with the rise of genetic analyses in biology.  By the 1960s, group selection was out, the age of the individual upon us, indeed soon, biologists would be talking about “selfish genes” propagating themselves with no regard for the well-being of the individual phenotype.[18]   The abandonment of group selection theory made the challenge of explaining other-regarding behavior that much more difficult.

One noteworthy theory was advanced by William Hamilton, who developed the idea of “inclusive fitness.”  It makes perfectly good sense in gene-centric view for a parent to sacrifice for their children, but how about for another closely related individual – a brother or sister, a cousin, a niece or nephew.  Hamilton developed a simple mathematical equation combined with empirical data to show that individuals will sacrifice to propagate closely related genes, i.e., the worker bees in the hive are all sisters of the queen, so their individual sacrifices do serve the purpose of indirectly passing on their own genes.  This type of altruism is referred to as inclusive fitness or kin selection.  Nepotism rules, but this is still not what we think of as compassionate acts of kindness to strangers, as for instance taught by our religious traditions.

Another candidate to explain other-regarding behavior within an evolutionary paradigm is reciprocal altruism.  The idea being that if I do something good for you, you will reciprocate in the future.  This kind of reciprocation requires some way to keep track of individuals and an informal balance sheet of gifts given and received.  Evolutionary psychologists are able to formalize reciprocal altruism in computer games.  One simple example of this is the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Different versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma can be played.  Indeed, the game need not involve prisoners at all.  This is a subset of a new field of research called Game Theory.  In all cases of Game Theory, the dynamic changes dramatically when the game is played in multiple iterations.

In the classic formulation of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, two suspects in a robbery have been arrested by the police, but the police do not have enough evidence, so they put them in separate rooms for interrogation.   If prisoner A betrays his accomplice prisoner B, then A will go free instead of to jail, while B will go to jail for ten years.  Prisoner B is offered the same choice.  Turn in your accomplice A and you walk, while A does hard time.  Here’s the catch though, if neither of them confess, then the State doesn’t have enough evidence to convict them on the serious crime.  Instead, they will each serve six months.  If both confess and “rat” on each other, then each will serve five years.  Each prisoner has only two choices, 1) to co-operate with his accomplice (remaining silent) in hopes for a lighter sentence (6 months or 10 years, depending on what the accomplice chooses), or 2) to defect and betray his accomplice in return for a lighter sentence (0 or 5 years depending on what the accomplice chooses).  Both prisoners assume that their accomplice is rational and self-interested.  The logic of the game suggests that betrayal is the dominant strategy, because one cannot know in advance what the accomplice would do.  Betrayal minimizes risks and maximizes the possible gain.  This is an example of a non-zero sum game.[19]

The dynamic of the game changes dramatically when played over a number of iterations between two “prisoners” who remember the previous games.  A 1959 paper on this scenario won Robert Aumann a Nobel Prize in Economics.  Again, these games can be played with live humans in laboratory settings or modeled on computers. Greedy and self-interested strategies tend to do very poorly over multiple iterations, while more altruistic strategies did better in promoting the self-interest of the participants. The iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma evolves quickly toward a strategy known as “Tit for Tat”.  One assumes that the opponent is a cooperator in the first round.  If the opponent defects, then you retaliate in the second round, returning to cooperation in the next.  Actually, the most successful strategy in playing this game is “Tit for Tat with forgiveness”.  The winning strategies in these computer games, and perhaps also in life, is to start by being nice towards the opponent.  The logic of the game is that your self-interest will best be served by being a cooperator, rather than a defector.  Always cooperate, however, is a bad strategy, which will end up being exploited by others.  One should retaliate when someone defects.  Some element of forgiveness can help put an end to long runs of revenge and counter-revenge iterations.  Finally, the winning strategy is non-envious, that is it does not strive to win more points than the opponent.

Forgetting that the original game scenario was set up as a compact between thieves, game theory suggests that moral principles can actually maximize self-interest in social interactions.  The mathematics of game theory suggests symmetry with moral teachings.  “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is a winning strategy in these games, at least within limits.  The Golden Rule rules! 

Indirect Reciprocity is another variation on this theme.  In this analysis, we introduce the idea of reputation, which people carry with them throughout the game of life.  People act selflessly not because they are really selfless, which our evolutionists understand to be an impossibility, but because they gain reputation.  Good reputation turns out to indirectly benefits players in the game of life.  So people help little old ladies cross the road, give alms to the poor, and fight for their country, because they collected lots of reputational capital, which they can cash in later in life.

What if there is a fake cooperator playing the game?  A person could let on that he was a reliable partner, but when the stakes got really high, he could defect, screwing the others, and laugh all the way to the bank, as it were.  This happens too some times.  This fear of defection leads to all kinds of adaptations in human evolution.  Humans are extremely sensitive to detecting insincerity, for instance in our mostly unconscious ability to “read” micro-facial expressions.[20]   We are vigilant in looking out for hypocrites and fakes, who say and let on to one thing in order to take advantage of us later on.  This results in an evolutionary “arms race” between defectors and defector-detection devices.  Indirect reciprocity theory leads to signaling theory, in which humans develop costly, hard-to-fake, and involuntary displays to assure others in the group that they are reliable cooperators.  The shaved heads and robes of Buddhist monks are just such a costly, hard-to-fake display, but so too is the conservative dress of Muslim women.  Some groups have high costs for membership, but as we will see, it is precisely those groups that offer their members the greatest “benefits”.  Costly signaling becomes a way to minimize freeloaders, who seek the benefits, but don’t want to pay the price of membership.

Anyway, all of this is to say that if every human behavior needs to serve the purposes of survival and reproduction in a competitive environment, then truly altruistic, self-sacrificial behavior is not really a possibility, because it would quickly breed itself out of the gene pool.  At least, this is the conclusion of most evolutionary psychologists.  Michael Ghiselin writes on behalf of the tribe: “No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside.  What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation.”[21]   It seems morality is just a front for nepotism, favoritism, and pretense.  Human ethical behavior is viewed evolutionarily as “the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact; morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function”.[22]

Now we need not buy into this extreme genetic reductionism, in which all human behavior is merely an expression of survival and reproduction of genes.  We can still believe that morality exists somehow outside of our genes and ourselves, woven into the fabric of the universe or decreed on high by God.  There is no necessary contradiction between moral realism and an evolved natural mechanism for morality in humans.  Indeed, if morality is “real”, then we would expect lots of evolved adaptations to moral behavior as part of our human nature.  A moral realist can read evolutionary psychologists’ accounts of morality and find evidence to support their own interpretations without accepting the premise that morality only serves our selfish genes.

“Its good to be good” says Stephen Post, bioethicist at Case Western University.[23]   It is not just game theory and evolutionary psychology that validates this perspective.  Lots of physiological, psychological, and epidemiological studies suggest that other-regarding behavior is a profoundly important component of our human nature, health, and happiness.  We have been naturally selected to be cooperators.  “It is better to give, than receive” is also in our genes.  This notion of natural moral law, independent of revealed moral law, was a common theological position among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Medieval period.  Love can be seen as a fulfillment of our human nature, rather than something imposed against a natural selfishness.[24]

There is, however, a dark-side of these moral dispositions.  This too we can learn more about through game theory.  When someone defects, the offended party tends to exhibit emotional outrage.  We often seek to punish the offender, even if the cost of punishment to us is more than the actual offense.  This irrational need to retaliate can also set up an escalating dynamic (but it makes the threat of punishment for defection more credible). If we think we have been wronged, then wild passions can be let lose.  The dark side of altruism, real, evolved or otherwise, is that our disposition to cooperate is generally within a known group of cooperators – our family, our tribe, our city, our race, our religion, our nation.  This very disposition to cooperation and self-sacrifice can be harnessed to evil purposes by our propensity to demonize outsiders and to fight wars.  For instance, soldiers on both side of the terrible civil war here in Sri Lanka exhibit the same self-sacrificial behavior, giving up their own reproductive fitness in biological terms for the perceived benefit of their group.   We will return to this dark side of altruistic self-sacrifice, the immoral side of morality, which in the future may yet prove to be our evolutionary downfall.

Three Rival Theories

This discussion of morality from an evolutionary perspective gets us close, but no all the way to our subject matter – how does evolutionary psychology explain the origins and function of religion.  Evolution requires some kind of adaptive function, otherwise why would it exist.  If evolutionists have a hard time understanding altruism, they have an even harder time understanding religion.  Daniel Dennett writes for the tribe:

Any phenomenon that apparently exceeds the functional cries out for explanation… What benefits are presumed (rightly or wrongly) to accrue from this excess activity?  From an evolutionary point of view, religion appears to be a ubiquitous penchant for somersaults of the most elaborate sort, and as such it cries out for explanation.[25]

Why indeed divert precious labor and resources to building cathedrals and pyramids, temples and mosques?  These are opportunity costs.  The resources and labor might have been diverted to improving industry and agriculture, strengthening the national defense, improving education, and so forth.  Why divert precious social resources away from the more pressing tasks of survival and reproduction into “somersaults of the most elaborate sort.”

I will explore three rival evolutionary theories of religion – memes, spandrels, or adaptations -- and conclude by offering a fourth option.

1) Religion as “memes”

The term “memes” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, as a mental analogy to genes.  Bits of information can be “copied”, “transmitted” and “replicated” in the mental medium of human minds.[26]   Examples of memes include joke whispered down the fast lane, popular songs that dominate the airwaves, advertisements that you can’t get out of your mind, ideologies that distort your mind, innovations that become ubiquitous, stories that have a life of their own, fashionable fads that create demands that never existed – hula-hoops and pet rocks for instance?  For Dawkins, religions are the quintessential meme, because just like his “selfish genes”, the replication of religious memes occurs at the expense of the welfare of the organism.

The concept of memes means that humans have a “dual inheritance system”.  On the one hand, we are products of our genes; on the other hand, we are products of our memes.  Once evolution creates a human mind with symbolic language and culture, there now exists a parallel form of evolution in the ideational space of brains, minds, and culture.  The mental now transcends the biological, indeed the mental evolution need no longer be biologically adaptive.  “A mind,” writes Susan Blackmore, “is just a meme’s way of replicating itself”.[27]

“If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes”, writes Richard Dawkins. “Selection favours memes which exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage”.[28]   Maybe, maybe not.  It is not clear that the mind is a zero-sum memory bank.  Lots of different ideas can inhabit a human mind, though as I grow older I am increasingly aware of the finitude of my mind.  Once I learned and spoke reasonably well German, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and advanced calculus.  Only the German and my native English remain.  And I am sorry to say that I am not likely to learn much Sinhala or Tamil during my sojourn here in Sri Lanka.  Languages, however, are not really memes, at least not as I understand Dawkins.  Rather, languages are the medium in which memes replicate, and now I am not sure whether memes are real, certainly not like genes are real, or rather just a misleading metaphor.  The idea of memes has itself certainly been a successful meme, even if memes are not real, which leaves me in an interesting cognitive bind.  We will revisit this notion of dual-inheritance below.

Dawkins is infamous for his hostility towards religion.  He writes that “religion is a virus more destructive than smallpox, but more difficult to eradicate… Science is the virus eradication software.”[29]   One can, however, adopt the meme metaphor without adopting Dawkins harsh conclusions.  Indeed, as evolutionary adaptationists, we might argue that religion, by virtue of its memetic successes, is viable and valuable, or it would not persist.  If religion were such a non-adaptive meme, it would tend to kill off its hosts, like the Ebola virus, rather than replicate and grow.

2) Religion as a “spandrel”

Spandrel is a term from architecture that has become part of the terminology of evolutionary biology.  The new usage began with a 1979 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.[30]   In architecture, a spandrel is the space between an arch and a rectangular enclosure.  The arch is a functional innovation in construction, but the arch also creates these spandrel spaces, where now all kinds of artistic elaboration can occur, which serve no function except to decorate.  Spandrels are by-products of something that is functional.  Spandrels, themselves, serve no architectural function.  They are simply a by-product in which now “useless” elaborations can flourish.

So too in evolution, argue Gould and Lewontin, in their critique of the adaptationist program in evolution.  Not everything that exists in nature serves a purpose. Some things in nature are simply elaborations, by-products of functional adaptations, but not necessarily in the service of survival and reproduction.

For anthropologist Pascal Boyer, religion is a spandrel by-product of the human brain-mind.  Evolution gives us the mental tools, which serve real adaptive purposes in our hunter-gatherer past, but then these mental tools are hijacked by religious elaborations that serve no function.  Religion is mental fancies that take a freeride on these functional mental systems.

Boyer notes that the human mind is modular.  Although we do not generally experience it as such, there is a division of labor within our minds.  The mind consists of lots of evolved inference systems that allow us to quickly process data in our environment, determining what is relevant, how it should be classified, what it means, and how we should react to significant data.  All of these mental “inference systems” originated in our hunter-gatherer past.

So we inherit lots of ontological categories and concepts.  Agency detection, for instance, figures prominently in our big brains, even for babies as young as six months.  We have intuitive psychology and intuitive physics.  We have intuitive expectations and when these expectations are violated, for instance by counterintuitive events, this also impacts our mental recall.  The story of Guatama Buddha is an example of a counterintuitive story that is therefore easier to remember.  Most of us work hard and aspire to living the life of a wealthy prince in a palace with his beautiful wife and child.  That the Buddha walks away from all of this immediately grabs our attention.  It is counterintuitive, in the same way that the Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed stories are counterintuitive.  When these stories are attached to other inference systems in our brain, then the alignment can produce the spandrel called religion.

It is important to remember that our mental templates are modular and universal.  For instance, what counts as pollution varies from culture to culture, but the pollution template is very similar in all cultures, i.e., it is a contagion template that activates the emotion of disgust.  For some, the pollution contagion might be an encounter with a Dalit or a blacksmith, for others a cockroach or pork, for others it might be a menstruating woman or a homosexual. 

Religions are not just any old wives tale or superstitious practice, says Boyer, rather religions successfully harness multiple mental components in a powerful matrix.  Boyer writes:

Some concepts happen to connect with inference systems in the brain in a way that makes recall and communication very easy.  Some concepts happen to trigger our emotional programs in particular ways.  Some concepts happen to connect to our social mind.  Some of them are represented in such a way that they soon become plausible and direct behavior.  The ones that do all this are the religious ones we actually observe in human societies.  They are most successful because they combine features relevant to a variety of mental systems.[31]

Boyer’s exploration of the evolved structure of the human mind and its many inference systems opens many new ways to think about religion.  To say that the human mind is conducive to religion is no great insight; to show how the mind incorporates religious ideas and practices is helpful, indeed revelatory.  This insight, in and of itself, however, provides no way of proving conclusively whether any particular religious belief is true or false, or any particular religious practice functional or dysfunction.  God-by-whatever-name may be true, though the particular beliefs and practices of any tradition not necessarily wholly/holy true.  Remember Boyer’s deconstruction of the religious brain is the same evolved human brain that is capable of doing advanced physics, inorganic chemistry, and physical anthropology.  Shall we dismiss these too as mere spandrels, by-products of our mental architecture, that have serve no function and are not true. 

3). Religion as Adaptation

Another evolutionary approach to explaining religion revives group selection theory, or more properly, multi-level selection theory.  Selection works not just at the level of individual genes, but also on networks of genes, individual phenotypes, groups of individuals, and even at the level of groups of species in ecosystems.  What level of analysis applies will be determined by the context.

Humans, like social insects, reproduce in groups, so group selection makes sense.  In this view, religions contribute to group survival and reproduction in diverse environments and in competition with other groups.  In particular, religions provide a way to promote group solidarity and cooperation, while minimizing the problem of freeloaders and defections.

One sees this in the frequent use of the body metaphor to describe the community.  Plato invokes the metaphor of the body politic in The Republic.  The Christian church is referred to as the “Body of Christ”.  Many Buddhist monasteries in China and Japan are built in the shape of a human body.  The Ummah can be thought of as the body of Islam.

David Sloan Wilson, trained in animal ethology, is leading this effort to revive group selection theory, especially in its application to understanding religion.  His book Darwin’s Cathedral (2002) makes the argument, using examples like the Hutterites, John Calvin’s Geneva (1509-1564), the survival of Judaism in the Diaspora, and the Hindu Water Temple system in Bali.  Wilson argues that religions are not true, not in a factual sense, but they work in a practical sense.  He is in awe of the practical power of religion as a group-level adaptation.

One of the insights derived from Wilson’s approach is the dynamics of the strict sect.  The higher the price of admission to a religious group – in terms of the demands of observance, including strict rules and non-conformist dress and practices – the higher the benefits of membership and the greater the cost of defection or freeloading.  Liberal religions, in this competitive market, tend to lose members and have more freeloaders (recalling some of our discussion about the economics of religion in the last lecture).

The dark side of the unifying spirit of religion is that it is often harnessed in violent conflict with outsiders.  This troubles Wilson, as it should trouble all of us contemplating the growing culture wars within and between our great civilizations.  Objectively though, Wilson does not have such high expectations of religions.  He writes that “the failure of religion to achieve universal brotherhood is like the failure of birds to break the sound barrier”.[32]

This distinction between Factual Realism versus Practical Realism creates an interesting set of problems for David Sloan Wilson and for us.  “An atheist historian,” writes Wilson, “who understood the real life of Jesus but whose own life was a mess as a result of his beliefs would be factually attached to and practically detached from reality.”  Wilson continues:

 … much religious belief does not represent a form of mental weakness but rather the healthy functioning of the biologically and culturally well-adapted mind.  Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged.  Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought. (underline added) [33]

This is a remarkable statement on two accounts.  First, it implies that the religious function, if not any particular religion, is necessary for any functional community or individual.  One religion can be abolished, but it better be replaced by another religion or the group will fail.  Second, making rationality subservient to adaptation raises profound philosophical questions about the truth claims of science (or for that matter religion).  Might science be factually true, but practically false.  Wilson suggest that “science might profit by becoming more religious along certain dimensions, as long as it remains nonreligious with respect to its stated goal of increasing factual knowledge.”[34]   Science as a community and institution also needs a unifying spirit.

4) All of the above and…

As promised, I want to present a fourth evolutionary option to help us explain and understand religion.  While the scenarios above are often presented as mutually exclusive, there is no reason why all of the above theories cannot be partially true, applicable in different circumstances, nuanced in different ways. 

Our minds are surely shaped by evolution.  We think and act through many innate and learned mental modules.  Religion, like any human thought including science itself, necessarily harnesses these inference systems.  Much of religion may be spandrel-like elaborations that serve no profound truth about humans or the universe.  Much of religious practices just are, much like the differences between musical genres or human languages.

Religions can also be seen as group adaptations (or for that matter, individual-level adaptations) that help promote successful communities and successful lives.  Our pressing challenge in this context is to figure out how to make religions more functional and more adaptive.  The warring minds of hunter-gatherer may not thrive or survive the 21st century forms of chauvinistic tribalism, the emotional manipulations of modern mass media, and the growing availability of weapons of mass-destruction.

The notion of memes also opens up other options as well, even if we reject the metaphor as a fiction.  To the extent that we do have a dual-inheritance system – genetic and mental – then something altogether new is going on in evolution.  Once evolution gave rise to our symbolic species with language, thought, tools, and culture, then the Darwinian paradigm begins to take back-stage to what we should now call the Lamarckian paradigm.[35]   Human have the capacity to pass on new innovations more or less directly to the next generation.  Indeed, that is the whole purpose of the university, to pass on and improve upon the discoveries, inventions, and the wisdom of the ages.  We do not need to reinvent the wheel or the microprocessor.  We do not need to reinvent the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita.  Once human symbolic evolution takes off, it proceeds rapidly, as we are seeing today.  Humans engage in large-scale environmental engineering at a scale that the Earth has not seen since the advent of photosynthesis some 2 billion years ago.  We are also about to embark upon large scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves.  Selection will continue to operate in the future, but the source of variation will be intentional tinkering of humans, along with many unintended cosequences.  The future evolution of the planet will be increasingly dominated by human desires and values.  Willy-nilly we have stumbled into designer evolution, not that we completely understand what we are doing or can predict what the consequences will be.

The point is that humans increasingly transcend our biological origins.  We are not slaves to our genes, nor need our morality be slaves to mere survival and reproduction.  Humans are a transcendent species.  On one level, we are just another animal; on another level, we are more like a whole new phylum in the epic of evolution. 

Conclusion

In summary, we have explored how evolutionary psychology explains religion, noting the importance of our species long pre-history as hunter-gatherers and how this would affect our genetic, mental, and behavioral dispositions.  Evolutionary theory emphasizes the centrality of survival and reproduction in all life processes.  The application of evolutionary theory to understanding human thought and behavior, thus tries to determine how these contribute to survival and reproduction.  Altruism, in its extreme form as self-sacrificing other-regarding behavior, is thus a puzzle for evolutionary psychology.  A number of theories have been advanced to understand the evolutionary basis of moral beliefs and behaviors – kin selection, inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, iterative game theory, and group selection theory.  We briefly examined as well the evolutionary “arms race” that arises between “defector/freeloaders” and defection-detection/freeloader-prevention systems.  This dynamic leads also to signaling theory and the advent of hard-to-fake, involuntary social cues to convey one’s reliability as a cooperator/members of a group.  This discussion of the nature of morality set the stage for our discussion of the evolution of religion.  We explored three competing theories of how evolution might explain religion: 1) the idea of religions as memes competing for mental space in human minds, 2) the idea of religion as a spandrel or by-product of our mental inference systems, and 3) the idea of religion as a group-level adaptation that solves the complex problems of social cooperation.  In the end, I suggested that these three models are not mutually exclusive.  I advocated the idea that human culture progressively transcends human biology, so attempts to reduce human culture, including religion, to biological causation, will necessarily be limited.  Nothing in these analyses needs to be taken as anti-religious.

Science itself is an example of a self-transcending learning process and cannot be reduced to the principles of evolutionary psychology.  There is no reason to assume that science is the only human activity exempted from this kind of reductionistic analysis.  Religion is also about self-transcendence.  Whatever the future holds in store, religion will play a role for better or worse.  We can strive to make our continued religious transformation more holy and wholesome.  In that respect, science is a helpmate in discovering and inventing more authentic and healthier religions.  The evolution of religion has never stopped.  It continues; it accelerates.  We should expect both change and continuity in the next century and beyond, as well as differential “survival” and “reproduction” based on experimentations and adaptations in an increasingly globalized religious environment.  That is after all how we all got here and how evolution really works.  There is nothing in these evolutionary analyses to suggest that we should suddenly abandon religion, nor blindly follow it.  Instead, we might think of our great religious traditions as millennia of empirical research conducted by humans in diverse situations.  We should expect to find lots of hard won practical wisdom, not necessarily true in the way that science is true, but rather in ways that are also profound and useful for our continued health and well-being.

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