How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  We can engage this convergence method to understand how and why religion and belief in God evolved in human societies. (This book, in fact, has been doing just that, using the convergence and comparative methods from the various behavioral and social sciences such as neurophysiology, behavior genetics, cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and archaeology.) A survey of the extensive body of literature on religion shows that this is one of the most complex of all human social phenomena, not explicable in terms of an overriding hedgehog theory. We need to take a foxlike approach, yet look for a consilience of evidence to see what these disparate fields of thought might reveal. There is no question that different cultures express religious behavior in many different and unique ways. But is there something underneath these diverse expressions?

  To get at the deeper question of the purpose of religion, I begin with evolutionary theory and the distinction biologists make between how questions and why questions. How questions are concerned with proximate causes—the immediate or nearest cause or purpose of a structure or function—the “how does it work?” type of question. “How is it that fruit taste good?” A physiologist might answer “because it stimulates the sweet receptors on the tongue.” This is a proximate answer. Evolutionary biologists are also concerned with ultimate causes—the final cause or end purpose of a structure or function—the “why does it exist?” type of question. “Why does fruit taste good?” An evolutionary biologist might answer “because there was a natural selection for taste bud receptors and brain modules to produce a pleasurable sensation with certain food substances that are both scarce and healthy.” We can go even deeper and ask what drives the selection process, and postulate that those organisms for whom healthy foods tasted good ate more of them, had less disease, lived longer, and thus left behind more offspring. Since differential reproductive success is the ultimate result of natural selection, and natural selection is the primary driving force behind evolution, we have reached the deepest level of causality in answering our question.

  If questions about anatomy and physiology can be answered at the deeper evolutionary level, what about behavior? In the late 1970s the field of ethology—the study of animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective—came of age. John Alcock’s Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s classic text, Ethology: The Biology of Behavior, demonstrated that behaviors are not just the result of reinforced learning in response to changing environments but also the product of millions of years of evolution. A herring gull chick, for example, pecks at a red dot on its mother’s beak. Its mother then regurgitates her food for the chick to eat. The chick did not “learn” this behavior by trial and error in its own lifetime but inherited it from the evolutionary history of the species. The chick was born “knowing” that when it sees a red dot it should peck at it. The mother, in turn, was born “knowing” that when a chick pecks at its beak, it should regurgitate its food.

  Of course, compared to herring gulls and other simple organisms, human behavior is vastly more complex and influenced by learning and the environment. Nevertheless we are animals, and no less than any other organism on earth we are the product of evolution. In order to fully understand human behavior we must also address our own ultimate “why” questions from an evolutionary perspective. What humans have done in the past 13,000-year history of civilization is nothing short of miraculous, but we must not discount the orders of magnitude of deeper time that preceded the age of civilization, when the human animal was shaped over the course of hundreds of thousands of years as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and over the course of millions of years as primates, and tens of millions of years as mammals.

  In the past decade the field of ethology has been joined by the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Where evolutionary biologists focus on the effects of the physical environment, evolutionary psychologists concentrate on the influence of the social environment. Primates are extremely social mammals, and the human primate is, arguably, the most social of all. In their introduction to the field’s most influential text, anthropologists Jerome Barkow and John Tooby, and psychologist Leda Cosmides explain: “The central premise of The Adapted Mind is that there is a universal human nature, but that this universality exists primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviors. In this view, cultural variability is not a challenge to claims of universality, but rather data that can give one insight into the structure of the psychological mechanisms that helped generate it.”

  The Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has done just this in such works as Sociobiology, On Human Nature, and most recently in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson argues “that the etiology of culture wends its way tortuously from the genes through the brain and senses to learning and social behavior. What we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors.” Wilson says these complex interactions between genes and learning are guided by epigenetic rules, which “comprise the full range of inherited regularities of development in anatomy, physiology, cognition, and behavior. They are the algorithms of growth and differentiation that create a fully functioning organism.”

  A simple example of an epigenetic rule is one-trial learning—taste aversion being the most obvious example. Pairing a food or drink substance with violent nausea, for example, will produce an aversion to that substance for some time to come (red wine once did me in and for over a decade I could not drink even a small amount of it). This is an evolved mechanism for avoiding toxic foods—the learning needs to take place immediately in one trial—there is no margin for error, no time for a gradual learning sequence. Language is a much more complex epigenetic rule in which we all learn the language to which we are exposed as infants, but the basic rules of language were learned over the past hundred thousand years by our ancestors. Moving beyond basic ethological concepts of innate mechanisms, Wilson shows how genes and culture interacted in our evolutionary history in complex ways he calls gene-culture coevolution. Forget the nature-nurture debate with its artificially imposed percentages assigned to each component (for example, 40 percent genes, 60 percent environment). We are well past such facile delineations (a process that itself may be a product of an epigenetic rule that directs us to cleave a continuous nature into bivariate categories in order to simplify our complex world). Humans, says Wilson, are products of both biological and cultural evolution so inextricably interwoven that the two cannot be separated:

  Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked. But the linkage is flexible, to a degree still mostly unmeasured. The linkage is also tortuous: Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself. The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of the existing culture available to it, with selections guided through epigenetic rules inherited by the individual brain.

  The fear of and fascination with snakes, so common in peoples around the world, is produced by an epigenetic rule with obvious survival significance. But how that fear of and fascination with snakes is uniquely expressed depends on the culture in which the individual was raised. Snake stories, myths, and narratives all differ, depending on the culture, but the focus on snakes themselves is hard-wired. Wilson shows how:

  Some individuals inherit epigenetic rules enabling them to survive and reproduce better in the surrounding environment and culture than individuals who lack those rules, or at least possess them in weaker valence. By this means, over many generations, the more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules. As a consequence the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behavior, just as it has in the anatomy and physiology
of the brain.

  This line of reasoning leaves behind the pejorative accusations and false dichotomies of biological and environmental determinism, with extremists on the political left and right accusing each other of employing Darwinian models to justify certain social or political agendas. The epigenetic rules that guide gene-culture coevolution are so complex and interactive that such name-calling tells us as much about the name-caller’s agenda as that of the accused. Culture, says Wilson, evolves “in a track parallel to and usually much faster than genetic evolution.” But, he notes, “Then quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the looser the connection between genes and culture, although the connection is never completely broken.”

  FROM PATTERN-SEEKING TO STORYTELLING

  Humans are pattern-seeking animals who seek and find causal relationships in our physical and social environments. The process is called learning. As we have seen, sometimes we get it right (Type 1 and 2 Hits—not believing a falsehood and believing a truth) and sometimes we get it wrong (Type 1 and 2 Errors—believing a falsehood and rejecting a truth). But we do much more than this. We do not just process environmental data like a computer, spewing out cold, hard facts. We tell stories about it. Humans are storytelling animals.

  In his book How to Argue and Win Every Time, the mediagenic attorney Gerry Spence explains that one of the reasons he is so successful is that he does not speak to the jury like a lawyer, with all the legalese and law-school language spouted by most Ivy League—trained attorneys. Spence talks to them conversationally. He tells them stories. In one case, he began his closing statement with a story about a cocky young man who wanted to show up his wiser elder. His plan was to capture a small bird in his hand, approach the old man and ask him if the bird was alive or dead. If the old man said “dead,” he would let the bird go. If the old man said “alive,” he would crush the life out of the bird. Either way he would show up the old man. So the young man captured a small bird, approached the old man, and asked him if it was alive or dead. “The bird’s life,” replied the old man, “is in your hands.” Spence says he won that case because the jury understood that the story was a metaphor for the life of his client, which they held in their hands. His point was not that telling good stories wins court cases. It was that humans can relate to stories better than they can to pure logic or objective facts. It is simply easier to keep track of a complex argument if it includes people, places, and events rather than propositions, syllogisms, and symbolic logic.

  Psychologists, in search of ultimate why answers to human behavioral questions, have discovered this fact about storytelling as well. Through a series of clever experiments Peter Wason discovered that when students are presented with traditional problems in logic, which they normally have a difficult time in solving, they improve significantly if these same problems are presented in the form of a story, especially a story involving people and relationships in which the students are to detect cheating and rule breaking in social contracts. Cosmides and Tooby review subsequent experiments that corroborate Wason’s findings, demonstrating that “human reasoning is well designed for detecting violations of conditional rules when these can be interpreted as cheating on a social contract.” They conclude that this is the result of an evolved mechanism because “social exchange behavior is both universal and highly elaborated across all human cultures—including hunter-gatherer cultures—as would he expected if it were an ancient and central part of human social life.”

  Anthropologist Misia Landau, in a fascinating study of the evolution of storytelling, believes that “the central claim of narratology is simply that human beings love to tell stories.” But she goes further, arguing that stories are not just about our reality, they help create our realities:

  Narrative, then, is … a defining characteristic of human intelligence and of the human species. Related to this assumption … is the idea that we have certain basic stories, or deep structures, for organizing our experiences. Each deep structure comes in many versions and in several different modes. For example, the Cinderella story is embedded not just in fairy tales but in novels, films, operas, ballets, and television shows. Some narratologists, stressing the central role of narrative in human experience, would further argue that we have not only different versions of stories but different versions of reality which are shaped by these basic stories.

  Origin myths among indigenous peoples, of course, neatly fit this description. Landau, however, goes on to show how scientific theories of human origins are no less susceptible to narrative bias. Was it bipedalism that gave rise to tool use, which generated big brains? Or was it tool use that led to bipedalism and then big brains? Were early hominids primarily hunters—man the killer ape, warlike in nature? Or were they primarily gatherers—man the vegetarian, pacifist in nature? More importantly, does the narrative change in response to empirical evidence, or does the interpretation of the evidence change as a result of the currently popular narrative? This is a serious problem in the philosophy of science: To what extent are observations in science driven by theory? Quite a bit, as it turns out, especially in history and the social sciences. And this fact supports the thesis that humans are primarily storytelling animals. The scientific method of purposefully searching for evidence to falsify our most deeply held beliefs does not come naturally. Telling stories in the service of a scientific theory does.

  FROM STORYTELLING TO MYTHMAKING

  One night in the early 1970s a young couple was parked in a vacant lot high in the Hollywood hills overlooking the lights of Los Angeles. The young man told his date about a recently escaped one-armed convict who was known to be roaming those very foothills, killing parked young couples by slashing them with his arm hook. The girl got scared and insisted her date take her home at once. He did, and when he went to open her car door he discovered a hook dangling from the handle.

  For decades now high school kids have been telling this story, along with another favorite, the vanishing hitchhiker: Driving along a country road you pick up a hitchhiker who gets in the backseat of your car and instructs you where to drop her (sometimes it is a he) off. When you arrive at the house (sometimes it is a graveyard) you discover that the girl has disappeared from your car. You then discover that the girl was killed (sometimes “disappeared”) while hitchhiking on that very stretch of highway that same day the year before.

  As Jan Harold Brunvand noted in his 1981 book about such urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. such stories are appealing because they contain three mythic elements: (1) a strong story; (2) a foundation in actual belief; (3) a meaningful message. (He presents no less than fifteen versions of the vanishing hitchhiker story!) Myths contain a staggering diversity of themes, including stories about life and death, birth and rebirth, adolescence and coming of age, love and marriage, the origin and end of the universe, moral dilemmas, the meaning of life, and all manner of human triumphs and traumas. A myth should not be thought of in terms of its veracity or lack thereof, as when we say that an urban legend is a myth, meaning it is not true. Urban legends, in fact, are a subspecies of myths; they are stories about our fears and anxieties, as in the hook-man and vanishing hitchhiker, or others like alligators living in New York City sewers. All cultures throughout the world, and all peoples throughout history have had myths. Long before there was the written word there was the spoken word, and with language humans told stories—stories about ourselves and our relationships, stories about our origin and our end, and stories about our world and our environment. These stories became myths.

  What are myths, what do they mean, and what methods should we employ to understand them? The Oxford English Dictionary’s history of the word’s usage is enlightening in this regard. A myth is “a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.” In fact, the original Greek meaning of mythos was “word,” in the sense of a final pronouncement, to be contrasted with logos, also
“word,” but one whose veracity may be disputed. The point of a myth is not whether it is true or false, but what it represents. The ancient world was rich in myths, but so too is the modern world. Science fiction, for example, is a genre of modern myth—Star Trek is filled with supernatural persons, actions, and events; it remains one of our most popular myths even in this, the Age of Science. Myths, science-fiction author Thomas Disch might say, are the dreams our stuff is made of. In his 1949 classic statement on the subject, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the diversity of thought on these questions:

  Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God’s revelation to his children (The Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, or how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.