In 2008, a nine-year-old boy, the son of a paleontologist, discovered the skull of a considerably older nine-year-old boy in Africa. This skull, also of a hominid since named Australopithicus sediba, may provide further links between the australopithecines and us.
Those species, along with our earliest hominid ancestors, coexisted in Africa for about 2 million years, surviving mindbendingly longer than we have so far.
Our group, Homo, shows up in the fossil record about 2 million years ago and includes Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis. Homo erectus made it out of Africa, probably without language, more than a million years ago, migrating as far as the Caucasus Mountains, China, and Indonesia.
It appears that some members of Homo heidelbergensis gave rise to the Neanderthals after migrating to Europe, and recent DNA sequencing data suggests that there was some hybridizing between our Homo sapiens ancestors and Neanderthals. Those Homo heidelbergensis who remained in Africa ultimately gave rise to early, anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
The earliest recognized fossils of Homo sapiens occur back to nearly 200,000 years ago. There is evidence of symbolic abilities, such as pigments potentially used in coloring, and also evidence of long-distance exchanges and trade between groups, which required a sophisticated means of symbolic communication. It seems likely that the oldest known members of our species probably had the most significant species-specific cognitive, social, and behavioral feature—the ability for language.
You and I, modern Homo sapiens with our ability for language, began to leave Africa 60,000 years ago, a blink of the eye in evolutionary time.
Put aside our ethnic, racial, nationalistic, and religious differences. Underneath our skins we are all Africans, the sons and daughters of a small group of hunter-gatherers who arose in Africa, outsurvived all others, and conquered the world.
What is even more amazing is that a severe climate variation between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago apparently reduced our population to perhaps as few as 600 breeding individuals. That is what modern genetics now tells us. That means that every one of the 7 billion people on this planet is a descendant of that small group of hunter-gatherers who lived in Africa and survived the harsh climate change.
Why us? How and why did we survive? Comparing Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and modern human skulls shows a gradual transformation in the area above the eyes. The forehead loses its steep slope and becomes rounded. A brain size of 400 to 500 cubic centimeters inAustralopithecus doubles for Homo erectus and almost triples by the time of modern Homo sapiens. That change is particularly notable in the frontal lobe regions. These are the areas of our brain that contain the complex machinery, the evolved adaptations that enable us to negotiate our social worlds.
So what drove the evolution of these big brains of ours? We did. Or, more specifically, others of our species did, because we needed to work together to survive. Physical survival required social survival; we developed “groupishness.”
If you arbitrarily divide a room full of people into two groups for a game, they will invariably begin to identify with the group to which they’ve been assigned. They will consider those in their group as “in,” and those in the other as “out.” There likely will be strong competition between the two groups, even if the people in them were strangers to each other when the game began. The strangers have become teammates. Hasn’t that ever struck you as odd? Probably not, because it is quite literally natural. You most likely would do the same thing. This “groupishness” is hardwired and helped our ancestors survive the worlds in which they evolved.
The crucible of small, tightly knit bands of kin sculpted us into the people we are today. This is not ancient history. As recently as five hundred years ago, two-thirds of the world’s population still lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, the kind of social environment that shaped us and to which we are adapted. In many ways we are still quite tribal in our psychology. But then we are still very young.
So, you ask, what does this have to do with religion? Everything.
Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. These mechanisms were forged in the not-so-distant world of our African homeland. They are why we survived.
While not an adaptation in its own right, religious belief is a by-product of those psychological mechanisms that allowed us to imagine other people and other social worlds, abilities crucial to human survival. Because religion only slightly alters those adaptations, it can be equally powerful.
Let’s look at the workings of adaptive by-products another way: do you like fast food—say, a big, juicy burger with cheese, a large side of crisp, salted fries, and an icy cola or shake? Most people like some kind of fast food, at times even crave it. If fast food doesn’t tempt you, maybe you occasionally crave a succulent prime rib. Or ice cream. You may avoid them for dietary or health reasons, but odds are that you at least occasionally break down and buy such meals, even against your better judgment.
Why does this matter? If you understand the psychology of craving fast food, a savory slice of prime rib, or a decadent chocolate sundae, you can fully comprehend the psychology of religion.
We evolved in harsh, dangerous environments. We evolved cravings for foods that were rare and crucial to our physical well-being. Nobody craves Brussels sprouts. Certain types of greens and tubers were an available source of food in the ancient world. But we all crave fat, and we all crave sweets.
The original fat was game meat, an invaluable source of concentrated protein and calories. The original sweets were ripe fruit, important sources of calories, nutrients, and vitamin C. Plentiful food was nonexistent. Starvation was always right around the corner.
Craving is an adaptation. It solves the problem of securing crucial but rare life-sustaining foods. When our ancestors experienced cravings, they sought those foods out, and because of that survived and reproduced better than those who did not inherit this particular adaptation, and thus did not crave the foods they needed.
And once they found those foods, whenever they could, our ancestors ate more than they needed at that moment. In the world in which we evolved, they couldn’t expect to find that food again tomorrow. That eat-more-than-you-need appetite and adaptation helped solve the problem of unpredictable food availability.
But today, in most areas of the developed world, food is plentiful and human culture has created new ways of responding to these cravings. Now we have fast food, high in unhealthy fat that plugs our arteries and expands our waistlines, a far cry from the lean game meat our ancestors sought out. Instead of ripe fruits we have sodas and candy bars.
Even knowing the harm eating fat, salt, and sugar can do to us, we still crave them, and unless disciplined, we will choose them over lean meat and ripe fruit. Why?
Because they pack supernormal stimuli. Our brains react to this relatively recent rise of excessive calories on demand as if it’s a good thing, as though we still need to behave as our ancestors did. Our brains reward us. When we eat our favorite food, the pleasure centers in our brain explode with delight. What we experience is not just slight satisfaction, but an intense pleasure released by brain chemicals. Those centers in our brain, mediated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, are called “do-it-again” centers. Not only do they give us a wave of pleasure, they motivate us to repeat the action that brought us such satisfaction.
The pleasure sensation also is an adaptation. It originally helped solve the problem of searching for and securing crucial foods by reinforcing their consumption, rewarding the find, and causing the craving that ensured survival to continue.
So, our illogical craving for these new cultural creations arises from adaptations that helped ensure survival—the cravings that caused our ancestors to seek out fats or sweets, which helped them survive. But these modern foods, packed with more
fat and sugar than anything our ancestors ever found or killed, satisfy the cravings with far more intense emotional reward and consequent stimuli than the original game meat or ripe fruit ever provided.
This is why it is not a joke to say that if you understand the psychology of fast food, you understand the psychology of religion. With the design of fast food, we have unconsciously hijacked ancient adaptations to crave and subsequently secure the essential fats and sweets that kept our ancestors alive and fit to reproduce.
We didn’t evolve to crave fast food, but our brains still accept it as adaptive. These fast-food cravings are a by-product. And now they become dangerous, because, uncontrolled, they can lead to health problems our ancestors likely never faced.
Which brings us to religion—or, more specifically, the adaptations from which belief stems.
Is what we crave always good for us?
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Our Daily Bread
Craving a Caretaker
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities. . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
—Charles Darwin
Running in the background of our minds is a myriad of survival-based mental capacities waiting to be deployed. These help us navigate the world, especially the social world. We barely notice them, and even when we do, we take them for granted, but they are fascinating and were indispensible for our survival as we evolved, and still are. These adaptations are the building blocks of religious beliefs.
The Attachment System
As the song says, we all need someone to lean on.
The attachment system is one of our most powerful adaptations. Our species could not have survived, much less evolved, without it. When most of us are distressed, we seek out or turn to a caretaker. This driving need begins the day we leave the womb—and from a strictly neurochemical point of view, possibly sooner.
First described by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1940s, and later elaborated on and demonstrated by Canadian-American psychologist Mary Ainsworth in a series of controlled experiments with mother and child, the attachment system is the basis of the child-parent bond. It is a legacy of our mammalian heritage that goes back tens of millions of years or more.
Neuroscientists now believe that attachment is such a primal need that networks of neurons in the brain are dedicated to it, and the process of forming lasting bonds is powered in part by oxytocin, a neuropeptide that we’ll discuss more a bit later.
When we are young and helpless, attachment solves the problem of finding and latching onto our principle source of protection and survival. When we are older, the attachment system is used in romantic love. After the glow of romance fades in any sustained partnership, the attachment system remains. It uses the original parent-child bond mechanism to cement the ties between adults.
Attachment also affects other adult relationships. Close friendships take advantage of it; this is why you turn to certain friends and not others when times are tough. As we evolved and formed small groups, attachment to mates and other adults aided our survival as individuals and as a species.
One haunting example of the attachment system in our ancestors comes from paleoanthropologists Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s description of a Homo erectus woman whose fossilized remains were discovered in Africa. The fossils clearly showed that she had died of vitamin A poisoning, probably from eating an animal liver. It’s likely that after the poisoning, she had lived for weeks, or months, with hemorrhaging into the joints and terrible pain.
The woman would not have survived on the savannahs more than a million years ago without a caretaker. Someone must have brought her food and water, and protected her from predators throughout the African nights.
Today, we see the attachment system every day in our lives and in our own relationships with friends, lovers, spouses, and children. In fact, the attachment system as such is commonly if not always consciously accepted. Not only are people attached to family, they are also attached to their pets, their lovers, their close friends. Even Charlie Brown’s friend Linus is attached to his blanket, as any young child might be attached to a favorite stuffed animal. All make us feel secure and safe.
And, of course, religious people are attached to their gods. It is no leap of faith to see how the attachment system works not just in corporeal dealings but also in the human propensity to desire attachment to a religious structure, as well as to an unchanging, loving, and eternal being.
Think of a two-year-old child reaching out to be picked up and cuddled. He extends his hands above his head and beseeches you. Think now of the Pentecostal worshipper who speaks in tongues. He stretches out his hands above his head, beseeching god in the same “pick-me-up-and-hold-me” gesture. We may lose human attachment figures through death, through misunderstandings, through distance, but a god is always there for us.
We see this often in practical psychiatry. A young woman patient who had been physically, emotionally, and verbally abused by her father sought in her Christian religion his opposite: a considerate father who would love her and accept her love. She would ask for guidance from god for life decisions, talk to him as a young adult would to a supportive and knowledgeable parent, and worry about his reaction as a young woman would fret about a father’s reaction.
The fact is that we never lose the longing for a caretaker.
Who will protect you and your loved ones from starvation, illness, disaster, death, and the other misfortunes of life? Your parents? When you were little, before you even knew the concept of deity, they were the definition of gods, able to do anything. Today, if they are still alive, you know them as the ordinary human beings they are, with no more power than you have to protect, to soothe wounds, and to stem the tides of fortune and fate that rush us headlong through life. They may even now depend on you.
An omniscient and omnipotent sky parent might, if beseeched often and with great intensity, not only protect us and our loved ones, but also help us find community in likeminded people, shield us from the fear of death, assure our salvation, and provide an afterlife that more than compensates for all of our human suffering. This is religion’s promise. Our parents cannot take care of us forever, but Yahweh can. There are no atheists in foxholes.
Religions give us supernormal “parents,” magnificent attachment figures the likes of which we never experience in everyday life, and never can. When we are distressed, we turn to a god that hears our prayers, grants our wishes, protects our loved ones, and reassures us of reward no matter how adverse our troubles.
Like those now counterproductive fast-food cravings, religious ideas arise from adaptations, but today’s religions provide supernormal stimuli and excessively intense rewards that can trigger a desperate search for more. Like the fast-food craving, religious ideas arise from adaptations that kept our ancestors alive—but that doesn’t mean those cravings are good for us.
Which do you prefer, tofu or steak? Broccoli or a hot fudge sundae? Which gives you a greater rush of pleasure?
Attachment and Rejection
This need for attachment contributes both to the ease of accepting religion and to the difficulty in rejecting it. Quite simply, we want to believe in something loving and eternal.
We can see it in Charles Darwin’s own life. When he went on his famous voyage of the Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, he was a creationist. When he returned, he gave his Galapagos bird specimens to ornithologist John Gould. Darwin had already considered the possibility that species were not immutable, not fixed in time—not, to be specific, the unchanging creation of a god. When Gould told him the Galapagos birds were species of finch unknown to nature and not previously described, it became clear to him that species changed according to environment and over time.
In the summer of 1837, Darwin opened his famous notebooks and drew out a tree of life, illustrating the idea that species evolved. And he noted that “man in his arrogance thinks himself a great
work, worthy of the interposition of a great deity. More humble, and I believe true, to consider him created from animals.”
Darwin did not yet understand the mechanism by which this change in species over time occurred. In September of 1838, he read T. R. Malthus’s “Essay on the Principles of Population,” which postulated that animals produced far more young than could survive. He came to believe there was a struggle for existence, and those who had what it took to survive and reproduce were those who continued into the future. He had figured it out.
But even Darwin had a hard time rejecting religion. He was, at the time, engaged to his religious first cousin, Emma Wedgewood. Somewhere in the fall of 1838 he must have told her about his ideas. She wrote, in a letter to him that survives, “My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.” They married in January of 1839.
He certainly had his idea of natural selection worked out by then, but it remained unpublished for twenty years, likely at least in part because of the distress he knew publication would cause his wife. But by the 1850s, the difference between them could be seen on Sunday mornings. He would walk with Emma and the children to church. She and the children would go into the church, and Darwin would continue to walk. His beloved daughter Annie had died from tuberculosis; with her died Darwin’s religious belief.
A year before he died in 1881, as he was finishing his autobiography, Darwin reread a letter from Emma written in February of 1839, in which she wrote: “May not the habits in scientific pursuits of believing nothing until it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved.”
Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Page 3