Alice and the White Queen (who reputedly believed in six impossible things every day before breakfast). Illustration for the fifth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1865) by John Tenniel
I freely admit it: It’s possible that my current series of blogs on the evolutionary biology of religion is a waste of time, yours as well as mine. Maybe religion isn’t an evolved human trait after all, but instead, entirely a product of culture, learning, and social tradition. To be sure, the religions of humankind are extraordinarily diverse, and, moreover, they are clearly passed on from person to person, nearly always from parents to children, but via transmission that is cultural, not genetic.
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing about 2,500 years ago, tells the following story. Darius, king of Persia, was intrigued to learn that east of his empire, in India, the Callatians ostensibly cannibalized their dead. He was also told that to the West, the Greeks cremated theirs. Darius sent emissaries to each, asking what it would take for them to switch practices. The Callatians responded indignantly that nothing could ever induce them to do something so barbaric as to bury their dead, while at the same time, the Greeks were equally adamant that they would never eat theirs. Darius concluded ruefully that not he, but custom was king.
We might call it Darius’s Dictum, and indeed, the presumed primacy of custom over biology has long been the reigning ideology of social science, and much of the humanities as well. Doesn’t it apply not merely to funeral practices—which, after all, are closely tied to religion—but to religion itself?
Probably not. (So, you can rest easy: These posts likely aren’t a waste of time after all.)
For one thing, even though there is tremendous worldwide diversity in the precise nature of religious practices, the fact remains that every human society engages in some form of religion; they are an example of what anthropologists call a “cross-cultural universal.” And when something is consistent across all human groups, despite the enormous cultural differences between them, this itself is prima facie evidence for some sort of biological underpinning. Human beings are a vast planet-wide experiment in which one thing – our biological essence as members of Homo sapiens – is held constant, while other things, namely customs, are permitted to vary. When, in a scientific experiment, one thing is held steady while others diverge, after which something else stays unchanged, it is reasonable to think that the persistent outcome is due to whatever has also been held constant. In our case, this is the human genome. When it comes to the precise details of religion, Darius’s Dictum holds: Custom is indeed king. But when it comes to the universality of religions, which, despite their variety, nonetheless qualify by most common-sense definitions of “religion,” it seems worthwhile to look to biology as well.
“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods,” according to Edward O. Wilson. “It did not evolve to believe in biology. … Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms.” I hesitate to disagree with a great biologist (and one who has been a mentor to me), but in this regard, I think Professor Wilson is mistaken. The human mind may or may not have evolved to believe in God or the gods. But it seems evident that we definitely evolved to believe in biology, or at least, to readily accept and respond to biology’s basic truths: the difference between animals and plants, between predators and prey, the significance of genetic relatives – even without necessarily knowing anything about genes or DNA.
We evolved to “believe” in biology in the same way that we evolved to believe in physics: An intuitive understanding of Newtonian mechanics, including force, friction and momentum, acceleration, and, yes, gravity, even if our ancestors knew nothing about gravitrons or differential calculus. They didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics or relativity, any more than they evolved to believe in the Krebs Cycle (the process whereby cells extract energy from food), although they certainly evolved to take advantage of the ATP produced via the Krebs Cycle. Perhaps a belief in the supernatural is somehow privileged because of our biology, but no more so than a belief in biology itself.
At the same time, it seems likely that religious belief is strongly influenced by our own preferences, and not simply by an objective assessment of validity. Francis Bacon, considered by many to be the conceptual founder of science as an organized enterprise, suggested that “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true,” which is not entirely different from other beliefs (e.g., in the honesty of one’s relatives and friends, in our own basic goodness, etc.)
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe things that are impossible. “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” replies the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” It is widely noted that much of religious faith involves believing in the impossible … not in spite of the impossibility, but because of it. This is fine as poetry, but just as natural selection ruthlessly weeds out maladaptive traits (a tendency to approach predators as though they are one’s friends, or to refuse food when hungry), it should deal harshly with any tendency to do things that are wasteful, or adherence to a creed that espouses tenets that are “impossible.” In the world of biological evolution, reality rules.
Of course, religions almost always serve the interests of those who promote them, so there is nothing mysterious in the fact that shamans, ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and rinpoches support religion, often to the detriment of their mainline followers. After all, their devotion often (albeit not always) generates money, prestige, food, physical security, and/or reproductive opportunities … for themselves. Evolutionary biologists are familiar with similar phenomena, in which natural selection generates arms races between potentially competing entities. Prey-catching adaptations on the part of wolves are typically not adaptive for elk. What’s good for the lion is likely bad for the lamb.
But if there is little need to explain the adaptive value of religion from the perspective of its purveyors, its generals and their associated high command. what about the much more numerous followers, the willing soldiers of their respective Lords? Or, another way of putting it: Insofar as there are genes that predispose their bodies to partake of religion, what is in it for those genes?
Next, we’ll start looking at some possibilities.