Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  64. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, 122.

  65. Ibid., 65-66. It is worth remembering that premodern human warfare, though often costly in lives, was also often moderated by ritualized rules of combat. To give an ancient Chinese example: it would not be fair to attack an invading army while they are crossing a river, as they would be too vulnerable. “Total war” is a modern invention.

  66. Hrdy, Mothers and Others, 67.

  67. De Waal, The Age ofEmpathy, 208.

  68. Ibid., 48.

  69. Ibid., 77.

  70. Ibid., 75. Although Michael Tomasello on the whole argues for the uniqueness of human capacities relative to our primate relatives, in contrast to de Waal, who sees strong similarities (probably each is right from his own perspective), interestingly he shares de Waal’s skepticism about the argument over altruism, talking about “mutualism,” which seems similar to de Waal’s “merging.” He writes: “I will certainly not solve the evolution-of-altruism problem here. But that is okay because I do not believe it is the central process anyway; that is, I do not believe altruism is the process primarily responsible for human cooperation in the larger sense of humans’ tendency and ability to live and operate together in institution-based groups. In this story altruism is only a bit player. The star is mutualism, in which we all benefit from our cooperation, but only if we work together, what we may call collaboration.” Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

  71. De Waal, The Age ofEmpathy, 65.

  72. Ibid., 74. Gordon Burghardt points out that, for example, reptiles, snakes, and iguanas are quite responsive to human behavior and that snake handlers who are confident and not antagonistic seldom get bitten. Personal communication.

  73. “Cold perspective-taking” may be limited, but it is essential for many human activities-science, for instance.

  74. Ibid., 100,

  75. Just a few of Frans de Waal’s books are Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007 [1982]); Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  76. Gordon Burghardt, personal communication.

  77. I learned of this early work of Maslow from Frans de Waal’s Good Natured, 99, 126-127.

  78. Ibid., 113.

  79. Ibid., 123-124.

  80. Ibid., 103.

  81. Ibid., 131. As a background for my discussion of dominance hierarchies, see ibid., chap. 3, “Rank and Order,” 89-132.

  82. Ibid., 91-92.

  83. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950 [1938]).

  84. Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 81. I also found very helpful Robert Fagan’s book Animal Play Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Because Burghardt includes research done since 1981, I have found it best to cite mainly him. I was also happy to learn from his acknowledgments that work on his book went on “over a more than 15-year period” (xvi), which is even longer than mine has taken, but not much longer.

  85. Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, 71. Huizinga says that play is “different from ‘ordinary’ life.” Homo Ludens, 4.

  86. Darwin took the phrase “struggle for existence” from Thomas Malthus and used it as the title of chapter 3 of On the Origin of Species. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and first used it in his Principles of Biology (N.p., 1864), 444. In the fifth edition of Origin (1869), Darwin himself adopted the phrase. When discussing “the struggle for existence,” he wrote, “The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.” For Darwin both phrases pointed to fitness for reproduction, and the struggle could be with the environment as well as other organisms. But Darwin uses such phrases as a species “beating” its competitors or “gaining victory” over them often enough that the popular meaning often seems implied. Biologists today use neither phrase but speak only of natural selection.

  87. Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, 73. Huizinga says, “First and foremost, then, play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play” (Homo Ludens, 7).

  88. Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, 74.

  89. Ibid., 75.

  90. Ibid., 77-78.

  91. Ibid., 84.

  92. Ibid., 87. See 83-89 for his discussion of types of play.

  93. All quotations in the last three paragraphs are from ibid., 119.

  94. Ibid., 129.

  95. Ibid., 172.

  96. Ibid., 151-156, discusses various theories of the relation of energy and play and warns that the relation is complex and multidimensional. My discussion is necessarily simplified.

  97. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 121.

  98. Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimalPlay, 89.

  99. Ibid., 90.

  100. Ibid.

  101. De Waal, Good Natured, 47.

  102. Ibid., 48.

  103. Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, 90-98.

  104. Gregory Bateson, in his essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), writes, “It appears that play is a phenomenon in which the actions of `play’ are related to, or denote, other actions of `not play.’ We therefore meet in play an instance of signals standing for other events, and it appears, therefore, that the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication” (181). On 179 he refers to the exchange of signals meaning “this is play” as “metacommunication.”

  105. For a chart of chimpanzee gestures, several of which are used to initiate play, see Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 24.

  106. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 [1923]). Walter Kaufmann was the translator for this, the second translation of Buber’s Icb and Du; though Kaufmann kept the English title from the original 1937 translation, he consistently translates the German phrase Icb and Du as “I and You.” The first translation, which gave the nowindelible title to the book, uses “Thou” instead of “You” because Du in German is secondperson singular, as is “Thou” in English. But, as Kaufmann points out, Du in German is used to address lovers and intimate friends today, whereas, for centuries now, one would not use “Thou” for such persons in English. “Thou” has an archaic and slightly pious connotation entirely missing in the German usage of `Du,” for which “You” is a more accurate translation.

  107. Darwin himself, when speaking of insects, where the power of instinct seems almost total, wrote, “A little dose, as Pierre Huber expresses it, of judgment or reason, often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature” (Origin, 208).

  108. Annotation by James T. Costa, on p. 488 of Darwin, Origin. It is far from clear when the “earliest appearance” of Homo sapiens really was, in a process of speciation that was gradual.

  109. Derek Bickerton develops the argument for protolanguage among Homo erectus in Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). Richard Wrangham, in his Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009), argues that cooking originated with Homo erectus, with important consequences for human physiology and behavior.

  110. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 126.

  111. Gordon Burghardt points out that there are other species more altricial than humans, “born without hair or feathers, senses undeveloped, especially vision (mice, rats, cats, dogs, bears, etc. cannot see at all).” Personal communication.

  112. Sue Taylor Parker and Michael L. McKinney argue strongly again
st neoteny or juvenilization in their Origins ofAnimal Intelligence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 336-355.

  113. Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 139.

  114. John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence ofMan, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 254-255.

  115. Hrdy, Mothers and Others, 282. Michael Tomasello, in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), argues that what Hrdy calls emotional modernity, the capacity to understand and sympathize with the intentions of others, probably appeared with Homo sapiens in the Pleistocene, 250,000 or so years ago, whereas Hrdy thinks it appeared among earlier members of the genus Homo, even as long as 2 million years ago. The whole question of dating is vexed.

  116. Hrdy, Mothers and Others, 204-206.

  117. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997), 23. Of course, Deacon was pointing to language, which in some simpler form could have been in existence before Homo sapiens.

  118. Kathleen R. Gibson, “Putting It All Together: A Constructionist Approach to the Evolution of Human Mental Capacities,” in Rethinking the Human Revolution, ed. Paul Mellars et al. (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007), 70.

  119. Terrence Deacon, “Relaxed Selection and the Role of Epigenesis in the Evolution of Language,” in Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience, ed. M. Blumberg et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 750.

  120. Ibid., 731.

  121. Deacon tells me that the “relaxed field” that Burghardt takes as one element of the definition of animal play is analogous to what he means by “relaxed selection” but not identical to it. Personal communication.

  122. Such an argument goes back to the nineteenth century but was forcefully argued by Arnold Gehlen in the mid-twentieth century. See his Man: His Nature andPlace in the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 [1950]). While I cannot accept Gehlen’s radical dichotomy between humans and all other animals, I have found much that is valuable in his book. It was Lenny Moss who called my attention to Gehlen’s work. For Moss’s development of some of these ideas, see his “Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human,” in New Visions ofNature, ed. M. Drenthen et al. (New York: Springer, 2009), 103-115.

  123. This argument has been reviewed extensively in many chapters of Mellars, Rethinking the Human Revolution.

  124. See Sally McBrearty, “Down with the Revolution,” in ibid., 133-151, and her exhaustive discussion of the evidence in Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453-563.

  125. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning ofLife (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

  126. Ibid., 14. George Herbert Mead stressed the importance of play in child development in Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

  127. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 15.

  128. Ibid., 19.

  129. Ibid., 71.

  130. Huizinga argues that “play” as a term has a primary force that all the terms for “notplay” lack. “Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.” Homo Ludens, 45.

  131. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 14.

  132. Quoted in Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, xiv. With respect to the question of Freud’s understanding of “reality,” we might ponder the remark he is supposed to have made-“There is only one God, and we don’t believe in him”-a remark with more than a little ambiguity.

  133. Alasdair Maclntyre, in After Virtue (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 175, defines a practice as follows: `By a `practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” He gives football as an example and uses chess to describe what he means, so games are included, but he also includes arts, sciences, and politics in the Aristotelian sense, but not ritual. It would be hard to argue, however, that ritual doesn’t meet the criteria. Maclntyre includes some forms of play as practices, but does not see play as the prime source of such practices, as I do, but then he is not trying to explain the origin of practices.

  134. Michael Tomasello, Cultural Origins, 31-33, 62-66; and Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 20-34, 60-71.

  135. De Waal, Good Natured, 151-152, emphasis in the original; see also 174, 176, and 205. De Waal mentions neither Durkheim nor Victor Turner, though his description may call them to mind. It is interesting, though, that de Waal’s “celebration” would seem to reverse Turner’s ritual sequence, in that the effervescent phase expresses “structure” but is followed by something that looks like “communitas.” See Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).

  136. Shared intention is central to Tomasello’s argument in all the books of his cited above, but he is also concerned with shared attention. He even sees “attention as a kind of intentional perception” (Cultural Origins, 68), as what will be attended to is in part determined by one’s intention. Merlin Donald discusses attention and intention; he focuses particularly on attention in Origins of the Modern Mind, but on both attention and intention in A Mind So Rare (New York: Norton, 2001).

  137. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 17-18.

  138. Ibid., 5.

  139. The idea that we have in our brains a “module for supernatural beings” seems to me one of the most obvious absurdities of one form of evolutionary psychology.

  140. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), writes, “Anthropologist Maurice Bloch notes that among many peoples who worship supposedly supernatural ancestors, attitudes toward such ancestors are not very different from attitudes and behaviors toward living elders: `The motivations, emotions, and understanding of elders and ancestors are assumed to be the same. Ancestors are simply more difficult to communicate with. Thus, when rural Malagasy, in perfectly ordinary contexts, want to be overheard by the dead, they speak more loudly, something they often also do when they want elders to take notice, since these are often deaf … The ancestors are not as close as living parents or grandparents, but they are not all that distant”’ (91-92).

  141. One could add two more parallel examples: what Wittgenstein called “language games,” though these precede language as a cultural form, and what Pierre Bourdieu called “fields.”

  142. Graham Greene, in the last chapter of his Monsignor Quixote (New York: Penguin, 2008), 192-193, reflects on the distinction between fact and fiction, a distinction the Trappist monk, Father Leopoldo, finds hard to make but the American, Professor Pilbeam, does not doubt. The issue comes to a head when Monsignor Quixote performs a Latin mass in a dreamlike state just before his death. Quixote places an invisible wafer in the mouth of his friend Sancho, which Father Leopoldo thinks is “really” there, but which Professor Pilbeam is equally sure really isn’t. Actually the whole novel is about how problematic this distinction is.

  143. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way ofLife (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 [1987]).

  144. The term “scientist” dates to only the early nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, what we call scientists were referred to as “natural philosophers,” and philosophersDescartes and Leibniz, for example-were scientists and mathematicians as well.

  145. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks
ofAges: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).

  146. Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility ofLife, 271-273.

  147. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything, 196.

  148. Ibid., 200. Some Christians say, in blessing the bread that is shared with the homeless: “Christ has now on earth no body but ours; no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the hands by which the whole earth is blessed.” They would not, however, I think, claim to be the mind of God, though in his own way Meister Eckhart came close to that.

  149. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 302-304.

  150. Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books), 2008.

  151. Ibid., 6.

  152. Ibid., 285-286.

  153. Ibid., 288, 273.

  154. I have found particularly unhelpful those who think of the mind as composed of modules and of religion as explained by a module for supernatural beings. Representative works in this genre are Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001)-the reference to thought and not to practice in his title is indicative of the weakness of this approach; and Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). B. H. Smith, in Natural Reflections, though giving an appreciative reading of these books that would have been hard for me, has described at length their tendency toward speculative theorizing and their lack of insight into religion as actually lived. But the reader will note how much I depend on other kinds of evolutionary psychology, as represented by such scholars as Merlin Donald and Michael Tomasello, though their work deals only incidentally, if at all, with religion.

  155. Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (Boston: Little, Brown, 2009); Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolves and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin, 2009); David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).