The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  A similar idea has been advanced by another anthropologist, Pascal Boyer. “Concepts of gods and ancestors with whom you can interact require a minor but consequential ‘tweaking’ of standard theory of mind,” he says.65 Both he and Atran view religious behavior as an accidental consequence of the way the brain works and hence as nonadaptive.

  How can something be specified by the genes yet not be adaptive? One example is the redness of the blood. Natural selection did not favor individuals with red blood over those with blood of some other color. It favored an efficient method of transporting the respiratory gases between the lungs and tissues. That method employs the hemoglobin family of molecules which, because each contains four atoms of iron, are a vivid red when carrying oxygen. The redness of the blood is accidental, a mere by-product of the trait that was selected for; hence red blood, though genetically specified, is regarded as nonadaptive.

  Now a biologist who argues religious behavior is adaptive must then concede that it confers some significant benefit, in the form of whatever caused it to be favored by natural selection. But from the nonadaptive position, religion can be derided as an evil or useless pursuit, with no redeeming feature.

  Two well-known biologists who advocate the nonadaptive view are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Both, it so happens, are trenchant critics of religion.

  Pinker considers and dismisses three reasons for thinking religious behavior is adaptive and then offers a hypothesis of his own as to why religion is universal. Pinker is a distinguished psychologist and author whose views merit respect, but there is room to differ with his position that religion confers no evolutionary advantage.

  The three dismissible adaptive arguments, in his view, are that 1) religion is a source of intellectual comfort in facing death or uncertainty; 2) religion brings a community together; and 3) religion is a source of moral values.

  Pinker is probably right to dismiss the first argument; it is hard to see how mental comfort could translate into leaving more progeny, the only measure that natural selection cares about. The third argument Pinker derides by stating that the Bible “is a manual for rape and genocide and destruction.” The good book, he says, “contrary to what a majority of Americans apparently believe, is far from a source of higher moral values. Religions have given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombings, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be united in heaven.”66

  But excesses in suppressing the schisms with which established religions are regularly challenged do not alter the fact that religion is nevertheless a source of moral values. Almost all religions encode some form of the golden rule, that of “do as you would be done by,” as well as other moral restraints, and these will be adaptive if they enhance the social fabric.

  In countering the second argument, that religion could be adaptive because it fosters group cohesion, Pinker concedes that “religion certainly does bring a community together,” but says this could be achieved by other means. He asks, “Why, if there is a subgoal in evolution to have people stand together to face off common enemies, would a belief in spirits or a belief that ritual could change the future be necessary to cement a community together? Why not just emotions like trust and loyalty and friendship and solidarity? There’s no a priori reason you would expect that abelief in a soul or a ritual would be a solution to the problem of how you get a bunch of organisms to cooperate.”

  But however strange religious behavior may seem, this is the means that evolution has found effective. For much of history, emotions like trust and loyalty have generally grown out of a shared religion. And belief in punitive gods, as discussed above, is highly effective at getting people to cooperate for the good of society. There is every reason to suppose the cohesion thus attained would be highly adaptive in the struggle for survival against competing societies.

  If religious behavior is not adaptive, as Pinker argues is the case, how did it get to be universal? The explanation he offers is that religion flourishes because it is good for priests, however bad it may be for people. This may be true but stumbles on the fact that religion became universal long before priests existed. Hunter gatherer societies, as noted above, were egalitarian. They had religion but no religious officials, with the possible exception of shamans in certain tribes. Their rituals were communal, with everyone on an equal footing.

  Pinker suggests that a trait or behavior should meet three tests before being considered adaptive. The first is that it should be shown to be innate, for example by being universal in its species and developing reliably across a range of environments. Speaking, for instance, meets this criterion but reading does not, since children learn to read only when taught to do so. Religious behavior too would seem to meet the criterion quite well, given that religion is universal and the propensity to learn it appears reliably in every culture around the age of adolescence. Children may be exposed to religion starting from much younger ages but it is rites around the age of puberty that induce an emotional commitment to supernatural beliefs.

  Pinker’s second criterion is that the trait should have improved survival in the past, such as during hunter gatherer days. Religious behavior meets this criterion too. It strengthened social cohesion, and thereby a society’s moral fabric and military strength. It evidently enhanced survival so efficiently that societies which failed to inherit the behavior all perished, leaving religious behavior a universal trait of all the survivors.

  The third criterion is that the trait should have engineering functionality—it should be something evolution has worked hard to perfect, like the design of the human eye or ear, even if by methods very different from those a human engineer might choose. But religion meets this criterion with flying colors. With nothing but rituals and symbols, it deftly induces members of a community to lay aside their self-interest and make an emotional commitment to the common good, including with the sacrifice of their lives if necessary. By what conceivable means, if not by religion, could such a goal be attained?

  Dawkins is another well-known biologist who argues that religious behavior is nonadaptive. Like Pinker, he agrees with the proposals by Boyer and Atran that belief in supernatural agents is a nonadaptive by-product of other brain modules. He begins by conceding that religion is ubiquitous and acknowledging that “universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.”67

  Dawkins raises one possible explanation, that religious behavior could indeed have been selected for when the societies with religion wiped out those without it. This raises the question, about which biologists have differing opinions, of whether natural selection can operate at the level of groups, rather than on individuals, an issue discussed further below. All that need be noted here is that Dawkins argues group selection could occur, but not to any significant degree. Hence religion could not have become adaptive through intergroup competition, in his view.

  He then notes that people die and kill for their religious beliefs, behavior which he compares to the misfiring of a moth’s navigational system when it flies into a candle flame. Since the moth’s behavior is nonadaptive, so too is religion, Dawkins argues. So what, he asks, “is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires to generate religion?” His hypothesis is that “There will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you.” Religious belief, in his view, spreads like a virus from parents to impressionable children, a cycle that is repeated every generation. Religion, therefore, is the accidental by-product of children’s propensity to believe what their parents tell them.

  This argument seems a little stretched because nonsensical information is not of great help in the struggle for survival and seems unlikely to have been passed on for 2,000 generations in every known human society since the dispersal from Africa. Religion can impose enormous costs, just in the amount of time it takes up, as is evident from the rites
of Australian Aborigines. Had religion no benefit, tribes that devoted most of their time to religious ceremonies would have been at a severe disadvantage against tribes that spent all day on military preparations.

  Dawkins does not seem highly confident in his gullible child theory because he stresses it is “only an example of the kind of thing that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the stars.” But without offering any more plausible explanation he insists that “the general theory of religion as an accidental by-product—a misfiring of something useful—is the one I wish to advocate.”

  Dawkins’s gullible child conjecture, like Pinker’s manipulative priest proposal, seems to be driven less by any particular evidence than by the implicit premise that religion is bad, and therefore must be nonadaptive.

  Religious Behavior and Group Selection

  But if religious behavior is adaptive, how did it evolve? Religion, as has been argued above, is primarily a social behavior, meaning one that exists to benefit the group. But there is a serious general problem in accounting for the evolution of social behaviors. Biologists have not yet resolved the issue, so it cannot be resolved here, but the problem is easy enough to describe. Any individual who behaves so as to benefit his group will put himself at a disadvantage with respect to other individuals who behave selfishly. This altruist, by spending time and resources to benefit others, will leave fewer progeny and his genes for altruistic behavior will soon be eliminated from the population. How therefore could altruism or other forms of self-denying, pro-social behavior ever have evolved or be maintained?

  The answer that occurred to Darwin was that natural selection could take place at the level of a group of people, not just at the individual level. A society full of altruists, say of men ready to sacrifice their lives in battle, would be very likely to prevail over a less well-motivated group. Just as some individuals within a group will be more successful than others and leave more progeny, so it is in the struggle between groups. The more unified societies, those whose members contain a larger proportion of pro-social genes than do their rivals, will prevail over others, and pro-social genes will become more common in the population as a whole.

  Despite Darwin’s authorship of the idea, selection at the level of groups, known as group selection for short, is controversial among evolutionary biologists. It has recently drawn the support of notable champions, such as David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, but they are at present in a minority. Most evolutionary biologists believe that although natural selection could in theory operate at the group level in special circumstances, its principal operation takes place at the level of individuals.

  The argument that follows shows how group selection, if it has occurred in human evolution, could account well for the evolution of religious and other social behaviors in early human groups. Human social behaviors, such as the deeply ingrained moral instincts described earlier, exist and must have evolved somehow. If they did not do so through group selection, then it was through some other evolutionary process, but group selection, despite the uncertainties surrounding it, is the process presented here.

  Here is how Darwin said group selection would work:

  “It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.”68

  This deep insight carries political implications that some biologists and others have found unwelcome. It could be extended to imply that might is right, that victorious nations are more virtuous than those they vanquish, or that the rule of colonial powers is justified. But Darwin neither said nor implied any of the above.

  Whether or not with extraneous political reasons, many evolutionary biologists have looked askance at the idea of group selection. They still embrace the position put forward by George Williams and others that group selection might occur to some small account, but its contribution will always be minor compared with individual selection.

  Biologists developed several more specific reasons for thinking they could do without group selection to explain human social behaviors such as altruism. One was the theory of inclusive fitness, or kin selection, produced by William Hamilton, who argued that altruism could spread among groups of closely related individuals. Even if an individual perished, genes identical to his own would survive, on average, in the children and siblings for whom he laid down his life.

  Hamilton’s theory seemed at first to explain how sociality arose in social insects like ants and bees in whose colonies the workers, by a quirk of insect genetics, are more closely related to their sisters than to any daughters they might have. But recent research has shown that social insects are in some cases not as closely related as thought. And in any case, kinship seems to have limited power in explaining the sociality of human societies.

  Researchers have recently noted several special features of human behavior that might have made group selection significant in people, even though it seems to play little role elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

  The most serious objection to group selection has to do with the balance between the forces favoring people with altruistic genes and the forces opposing them. A hunter gatherer group with many self-sacrificing, altruistic heroes might, as Darwin suggested, destroy a group less fortunately constituted, and genes for altruism in the population as a whole would increase. But within the victorious group, as time went on, the nonaltruists would devote their resources to their own families, raising more children, and the genes for altruism would become less common. Skeptics of group selection say the second process, the within-group selection against altruistic behavior, will always proceed faster than the between-group process favoring it and hence will overwhelm it.

  The proponents of group selection agree that the balance between the two forces is the crux of the issue. “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary,” say David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson in a recent article.69

  There are two significant behaviors that may have made humans far more strongly affected by group selection than are most other species. One was the fierce conformist pressures within hunter gatherer groups that reduce the heavy disadvantages of altruism. The other was intense warfare between groups that accelerated the rate of group selection.

  A major point made by the two Wilsons is that selfishness within groups is likely to have been limited by a crucial event in human evolution—the emergence of egalitarianism in early hunter gatherer societies, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Successful hunters are forced to share their catch with everyone else. They cannot resist sharing, and cannot put on airs, because stinginess and bragging are the two behaviors that incur the most opprobrium in hunter gatherer communities.

  Hunter gatherer egalitarianism was no mere principle; it was rigorously applied. And the conformity that ensued would have greatly reduced the natural variability in human social behavior. The mighty hunters, the power seekers, the philanderers and any who stood out and made themselves a subject of gossip, all found it difficult to thrive. If everyone had to behave alike, within-group variation would have been suppressed and differences between groups would have taken over as the principal driver of evolutionary change, at least in terms of social behavior.

  For a modern e
xample of just how rigorously small communities can secure conformity, consider the case of Toby Greenberg, a young mother in the Orthodox Jewish village of Kiryas Joel in New York state. Because of minor infringements of the dress code approved by her Hasidic sect, the tires of one of her cars were slashed and a message in Yiddish, “Get out, defiled person,” was painted on the window of the other. She and her husband filed a complaint with the police accusing the rabbinically appointed modesty committee of orchestrating the harassment. A member of the committee, David Ekstein, denied it had any involvement but told a reporter that in the case of people who defy social mores, “If we find they have a TV or a married woman won’t wear a wig, we invite them to speak with us and try to convince them it’s unacceptable, or next year we will not accept their children into the school system.”70

  If this is how nonconformity is stamped out in twenty-first-century New York, imagine how efficiently materially primitive people in earlier centuries could have erased any behavioral deviation from some equally arbitrary norm, especially given the almost total lack of privacy in hunter gatherer societies. People who rejected orthodoxy or even expressed strange ideas would have been ejected from the band, which in hunter gatherer days meant death, unless they could find another band that would take them in. Over the generations, cultural suppression of novel behavior could well have retarded genetic novelty, especially in a small group whose members were already highly interrelated.

  Because of egalitarianism, the two Wilsons write, “Suppressing fitness differences within groups made it possible for between-group selection to become a powerful evolutionary force. The psychological traits associated with human moral systems are comparable to the mechanisms that suppress selection within groups for other major transitions [in the history of life]. The human major transition was a rare event, but once accomplished, our ability to function as team players in coordinated groups enabled our species to achieve worldwide dominance, replacing other hominids and many other species along the way.”