Evolutionary psychology of religion

The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of

Scientists generally agree with the idea that a propensity to engage in religious behavior evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation, in which case religion conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage. The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors, such as the concept of a protogod,^[2][3] may have emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits without initially being selected for because of their own benefits.^[4][5][6] A third suggestion is that different aspects of religion require different evolutionary explanations but also that different evolutionary explanations may apply to several aspects of religion.^[7]

Religious behavior often involves significant costs—including economic costs, celibacy, dangerous rituals, or the expending of time that could be used otherwise. This would suggest that natural selection should act against religious behavior unless it or something else causes religious behavior to have significant advantages.^[8]

Religion as an adaptation

Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta have reviewed several of the prominent theories for the adaptive value of religion.^[4] Many are "social solidarity theories", which view religion as having evolved to enhance cooperation and cohesion within groups. Group membership in turn provides benefits which can enhance an individual's chances for survival and reproduction. These benefits range from coordination advantages^[6] to the facilitation of costly behavior rules.^[5]

Sosis also researched 200

Studies that show more direct positive associations between religious practice and health and longevity are more controversial. Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79% showed a positive influence.[19] Such studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR program which covered University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality correlated with a lower viral load and improved immune-cell levels in HIV patients.^[20] Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health."^[21] Debate continues over the validity of these findings, which do not necessarily prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between religion and health. Mark Stibich claims there is a clear correlation but that the reason for it remains unclear.^[22] A criticism of such placebo effects, as well as the advantage of religion giving a sense of meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than religious behavior could achieve such goals.^[8]

Religion as a by-product

Stephen Jay Gould cites religion as an example of an exaptation or spandrel, but he does not himself select a definite trait that he thinks natural selection has actually acted on. He does, however, bring up Freud's suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal with the concept of personal mortality. Religion may have been one solution to this problem.^[23]

Other researchers have proposed specific psychological processes that natural selection may have fostered alongside religion. Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life.^[24]

Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyer suggest that humans evolved a "hazard-precaution system" which allowed them to detect potential threats in the environment and to attempt to respond appropriately.[25] Several features of ritual behaviors, often a major feature of religion, are held to trigger this system. These include the occasion for the ritual (often the prevention or elimination of danger or evil), the harm believed to result from nonperformance of the ritual, and the detailed prescriptions for proper performance of the ritual. Lienard and Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system itself may have provided fitness benefits, and that religion then "associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".

This model holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect" the presence of other humans or predators (for example: momentarily mistaking a vine for a snake). For instance, a man might report that he felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked around.[29]

Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold, passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard ontological categories (person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object) with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses that remember what happened in them, etc.). These stories become even more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated expectations for the ontological category (houses that "remember" activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically attribute thought processes to them).^[30]

One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral guidelines). In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules (person identification and behavior prediction) continue to run decoupled from reality, producing incompatible intuitions that the dead are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human predisposition to see misfortune as a social event (as someone's responsibility rather than the outcome of mechanical processes) it may activate the intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" module of the human theory of minds, compelling the bereaved to try to interact and bargain with supernatural agents (ritual).^[31]

In a large enough group, some individuals will seem better skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As societies grow and encounter other societies, competition will ensue and a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to modify their concepts to provide a more abstract, more widely acceptable version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group or guild with its attendant political goals (religion).^[31]

See also

References