From: RFaussette@aol.com
Date: Sun Dec 29 2002 - 00:54:19 EST
Date: Sat Dec 28, 2002 6:28 pm
Subject: Kevin MacDonald on David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
By David Sloan Wilson. University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637, 2002, 268 pp., ISBN 0-226-90134-3, Hardback, $25.00
Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State
University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 [Email: kmacd@csulb.edu].
Forthcoming in the Human Ethology Bulletin.
David Sloan Wilson is something of a quixotic figure in the field of
evolutionary approaches to human affairs. For most of his professional
life he has battled what has become a rigid orthodoxy against seemingly
hopeless odds. The orthodoxy is that natural selection operates more or less
exclusively at the individual level, and that natural selection between
groups is a trivial phenomenon that has not left any important mark on the
architecture of the human mind or on human history. It is a topic that the
vast majority of evolutionists simply relegate to unquestioned dogma-their
eyes glazing over at its mere mention. After all, it was the seeming
resolution of the debate over individual versus group selection that gave
rise to the revolution in evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s. We're
talking basic, bedrock theory here-an area where changes are not to be taken
lightly. And if the past is any indication, the continued life of this
orthodoxy will not change with the publication of Darwin's Cathedral. But, if
so, it won't be because the arguments and
data compiled by Wilson are not compelling. In any case, Wilson is
confident of the future of groups in evolutionary thought: "I believe that
future generations will be amazed at the degree to which groups were made to
disappear as adaptive units of life in the minds of intellectuals during the
second half of the twentieth century" (p. 46). I can only agree
wholeheartedly.
Wilson's basic claim is that religions are organisms designed to attain
evolutionary ends of survival and reproduction. Religious organisms achieve
these aims because of group selection processes in which religious groups are
favored because they are able to successfully promote behavior that is
individually disadvantageous. Particularly important for the viability of
individually disadvantageous behavior in groups are social controls,
conceptualized here as a form of low cost altruism. Group selection has
always had to deal with the albatross that people and other
organisms do not voluntarily engage in self-sacrificing behavior-at least not
readily and not very often. In the absence of social controls, egoistic
behavior is expected to replace altruism, leading to the expectation that
there will be a strong residue of egoism as a holdover from our evolutionary
heritage. However, groups can impose controls that enforce public goods, such
as paying taxes or submitting to authority, and people can develop groups
where even the leaders are thoroughly scrutinized to ensure that group
interests prevail over individual interests. Such controls-termed secondary
public goods-are low cost, and their low cost effectively cuts "the Gordian
knot by partially relaxing the trade-off between group benefit and individual
cost. Social control mechanisms are obviously relevant to religious groups,
which are based on much more than voluntary altruism" (p. 20). Via social
controls effective
groups may be developed with significant degrees of ingroup altruism even in
the absence of high levels of genetic overlap. The result is "a complex
regulatory system that binds members into a functional unit" (p. 25).
Besides social controls, religion is characterized by an ideological
superstructure-the beliefs that often seem exotic but, as Wilson
exhaustively details, often function to motivate group-benefiting
behavior. Rather than depend exclusively on an elaborate set of social
controls maintained by monitoring and punishment, group-benefiting social
behaviors are often voluntarily engaged in because not to do so is to risk
the wrath of God or incur some other spiritual cost. For example, Calvin
developed a belief system that stressed motivated compliance to authority.
As such, it may be regarded as an adaptation-in this case, a way of
creating a cohesive group by lowering the cost of monitoring individual
behavior: "If religious faith plays a role in motivating [behaviors such as
obedience to authority], and if these behaviors cause the group to function
as an adaptive unit, then faith counts as an adaptation" (p. 102). Thus by
developing compelling ideologies that motivate altruistic, group-benefiting
behavior, and by monitoring and enforcing compliance, human groups are able
to overcome the profound tendencies toward egoism that have generally
prevented the evolution of similarly cohesive, altruistic groups among
animals.
Evolutionists who acknowledge the importance of groups as functional units of
selection are also less inclined to adopt that other dogma of
contemporary Darwinism: evolutionary psychology and its commitment to a human
psychology composed more or less exclusively of domain specific mechanisms
designed to solve problems recurrent in our evolutionary past.
Here Wilson points to the incompleteness of such a psychology. Indeed, the
"jukebox theory" of cultural variation promoted by Tooby and Cosmides (1992)
seems little more than a hopeful gesture rather than a serious attempt at
theorizing. It seems utterly incapable of even the most rudimentary
explanation of religion in its many varieties. I agree with Wilson that in
addition to modules designed to solve evolutionarily recurrent problems, the
mind also contains a variety of open-ended mechanisms for solving novel
problems, chief among them general intelligence (MacDonald, 1991; Chiappe &
MacDonald, 2003). As Wilson notes, a prime function of human groups is to
solve novel problems of adaptation in a constantly changing environment:
"Confront a human group with a novel problem, even one that never existed in
so-called ancestral environments, and its members may well come up with a
workable solution.
The solution might be based on trial and error or on rational thought" (p.
31). Interestingly, Wilson explicitly describes Calvin, who designed the
religion that bears his name, as a former scholar and as more intelligent
than his theological adversaries (p. 90). Surely the design of Calvinism as
an adaptive system of beliefs and social controls was the work of a highly
intelligent person; few people would have the intelligence and other talents
required for devising a belief system that resulted in Geneva, a city of
13,000 people, functioning effectively as an organized group. (The same might
be said for the priests who designed the Jewish religion while exiled in
Babylon 2600 years ago, or the 19th-century founders of Mormonism.)
Nevertheless, intelligence is not the whole story. Religious beliefs are
often the height of irrationality-Wilson's example is Calvin's belief in the
imminent coming of Jesus. Besides intelligence, open-ended belief-generating
mechanisms are of critical importance. As Wilson documents, religious
beliefs, combined with methods of monitoring and enforcing social norms, can
have an extraordinary effect on social organization and can result in higher
levels of between-group selection than could possibly exist in other species.
It goes without saying that people need not be conscious of the role of their
beliefs and norm-monitoring in producing successful groups.
An important issue is whether the mechanisms underlying human abilities to
enforce social controls and their proclivity to adopt religious ideologies
evolved as a result of natural selection for altruistic groups. Or were such
mechanisms simply a by-product of natural selection for domain general
mechanisms that evolved for other reasons, such as solving novel problems, as
suggested above. After all, ideologies, including at least some religious
ideologies, often rationalize egoistic behavior, and social controls have
often been used to enforce despotisms. It is the very open-endedness of these
mechanisms that makes them at once so powerful and so dangerous-powerful
because they can rationalize and enforce virtually anything-from the Soviet
Union of the Gulags to the cohesive, peaceful bands of friends and neighbors
that typified early Christianity; and
dangerous because they may lead to behavior that is highly maladaptive at the
individual or at the group level: people may be socialized or constrained to
do things that are massively opposed to their own interests (slavery comes to
mind), and their group may be poorly designed to achieve long term success.
Religions, like all human social organizations where social controls and
ideologies play an important role (i.e., virtually all human social
organizations), are experiments in living. Nevertheless, there is every
reason to suppose that the power of these domain general mechanisms may also
be utilized to rationally construct vehicles of adaptation that would
reliably further individual and ethnic group interests over the long run,
even in the multi-cultural complexity of the modern world.
I do not want to give the impression that the only psychological
mechanisms relevant to religion are the open-ended, domain general
discussed here. Wilson's emphasis is on the sociology of religion draws him
away from the psychology of groups for the most part, but he does review
research on social identity theory as a set of psychological mechanisms that
result in positive perceptions of ingroups and negative perceptions of
outgroups. Other more domain specific psychological mechanisms related to
ethnocentrism and other manifestations of group allegiance are also
undoubtedly important for a complete psychological analysis of religion
(MacDonald, 2003)..
Groups are notoriously prone to the ingroup/outgroup thinking that
motivates self-righteous violence-not surprising if groups evolved as a
result of between-group competition. Here Wilson describes the "dark side" of
groups-their tendency to compete with other groups, to go on wars of conquest
and to even exterminate people from outgroups. Whatever else one might say
about group selection theory, it does not result in portraying humans as
altruists simplicitur. Humans are sometimes altruistic within their own
group, but only with the support of powerful ideologies and social controls
that motivate compliant, group-serving behavior, and always in conflict with
a great deal of backsliding-the creeping egoism that always lurks in the
background.
The balance of the book describes religions as imperfect groups-imperfect in
the sense that they often approach but seldom attain the pure level of
altruistic group functioning that is often idealized in religious thought.
This is because of the pull of egoism: Whatever evolved tendencies human
might have to participate in well-functioning, cohesive and even
altruistic groups, there are also powerful tendencies toward egoism that must
be constantly monitored and controlled.
Calvinism is given a chapter-length treatment as a paradigm of a religion
that functioned to achieve secular utility. Other religions described include
the Water Temple system of Bali, Judaism, and the early Christian Church. In
all of these cases Wilson shows that religion functions to organize groups in
very practical ways to achieve secular ends.
Particularly interesting is the discussion of early Christianity based on the
work of Rodney Stark (1996). Early Christianity emerges as a non-ethnic form
of Judaism that functioned as a way of producing cohesive, effective groups
able to deal with the uncertainties of the ancient world.
The ancient world was a very unpredictable place indeed, characterized by
natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, rioting, epidemics, brutal
military campaigns against civilians, famines, and widespread poverty.
Navigating this world was greatly facilitated by co-religionists ready to
lend a helping hand and to establish economic alliances. Wilson has no
hesitation in supposing that Christian charity in extending aid to fellow
Christians suffering from the plague involved altruism, as indeed it did.
But the result was that more Christians survived these disasters than did
Pagans: Christianity was adaptive at the group level. The adaptiveness of
Christianity also stemmed from its emphasis on several attitudes that were
notably lacking in the Roman Empire: encouragement of large families,
conjugal fidelity, high-investment parenting, and outlawing of abortion,
infanticide, and non-reproductive sexual behavior. The bottom line is that
Christian women did indeed out-reproduce Pagan women. Other obvious examples
of religiously mandated fertility and family-promoting values in
the contemporary world are the Amish and Hutterites, the Mormons, and
Orthodox Jews. All of these religions are characterized by social controls
and religious ideologies that promote adaptive behavior at the group level.
Finally, Wilson has a very enjoyable writing style. The following passage is
a good illustration, and it sums up his view of religions as intricately
adaptive biological entities:
Biologists frequently express a feeling of awe, bordering on religious
reverence, toward the intricacies of nature; the cryptic insect that
exactly resembles a leaf, the fish that glides effortlessly through the
water, and the amazing physiological processes that allow organisms to defy
the forces of entropy. The organismic concept of groups makes possible a
similar sense of awe toward religion, even from a purely evolutionary
perspective. (p. 4)
References
Chiappe, D., & MacDonald, K. B. (2003). The Evolution of Domain-General
Mechanisms in Intelligence and Learning. Psychological Inquiry, 14(4).
MacDonald, K. B. (1991). A perspective on Darwinian psychology: The
importance of domain-general mechanisms, plasticity, and individual
differences. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12, 449-480.
MacDonald, K. B. (2003). An Integrative Evolutionary Perspective on
Ethnicity. Politics and the Life Sciences, in press.
Stark, R. (1996). The rise of Christianity: A sociologist reconsiders
history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture.
In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind:
Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19-136). New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State
University-Long Beach. He completed his doctoral research at the
University of Connecticut in the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences. His
research has focused on evolutionary psychology, especially evolutionary
approaches to human development and personality psychology. He also
studies groups and ethnic relations from an evolutionary perspective.
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