Re: [asa] David Sloan Wilson

On 4/18/07, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Is anyone on this list familiar with David Sloan Wilson, author of
> "Evolution for Everyone"?
> I have an opportunity to attend a couple of lectures by him this Friday
> and Saturday and wanted a little background.
> Based on a brief search it seems that he tends toward atheism but has
> concluded that religion is of significant value with an evolutionary basis.
> He seems to be one of the researchers on the evolutionary development of
> human behavior and characteristics. Is he on the level? Or out on a limb?
>
> Randy
>

Note the following from the NY Times Magazine Article called Darwin's God,
particularly what I emphasized in bold:

One of the most vocal adaptationists is David Sloan Wilson, an occasional
thorn in the side of both Scott Atran and Richard Dawkins. Wilson, an
evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton,
focuses much of his argument at the group level. ''Organisms are a product
of natural selection,'' he wrote in ''Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution,
Religion, and the Nature of Society,'' which came out in 2002, the same year
as Atran's book, and staked out the adaptationist view. ''Through countless
generations of variation and selection, [organisms] acquire properties that
enable them to survive and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to
see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify
as organismic in this sense.''

Wilson's father was Sloan Wilson, author of ''The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit,'' an emblem of mid-'50s suburban anomie that was turned into a film
starring Gregory Peck. Sloan Wilson became a celebrity, with young women
asking for his autograph, especially after his next novel, ''A Summer
Place,'' became another blockbuster movie. The son grew up wanting to do
something to make his famous father proud.

''I knew I couldn't be a novelist,'' said Wilson, who crackled with
intensity during a telephone interview, ''so I chose something as far as
possible from literature -- I chose science.'' He is disarmingly honest
about what motivated him: ''I was very ambitious, and I wanted to make a
mark.'' He chose to study human evolution, he said, in part because he had
some of his father's literary leanings and the field required a novelist's
attention to human motivations, struggles and alliances -- as well as a
novelist's flair for narrative.

**Wilson eventually chose to study religion not because religion mattered to
him personally -- he was raised in a secular Protestant household and says
he has long been an atheist -- but because it was a lens through which to
look at and revivify a branch of evolution that had fallen into
disrepute.**When Wilson was a graduate student at Michigan State
University in the
1970s, Darwinians were critical of group selection, the idea that human
groups can function as single organisms the way beehives or anthills do. So
he decided to become the man who rescued this discredited idea. ''I thought,
Wow, defending group selection -- now, that would be big,'' he recalled. It
wasn't until the 1990s, he said, that he realized that ''religion offered an
opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.''

Dawkins once called Wilson's defense of group selection ''sheer, wanton,
head-in-bag perversity.'' Atran, too, has been dismissive of this approach,
calling it ''mind blind'' for essentially ignoring the role of the brain's
mental machinery. The adaptationists ''cannot in principle distinguish
Marxism from monotheism, ideology from religious belief,'' Atran wrote.
''They cannot explain why people can be more steadfast in their commitment
to admittedly counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs -- that Mary is
both a mother and a virgin, and God is sentient but bodiless -- than to the
most politically, economically or scientifically persuasive account of the
way things are or should be.''

Still, for all its controversial elements, the narrative Wilson devised
about group selection and the evolution of religion is clear, perhaps a
legacy of his novelist father. Begin, he says, with an imaginary flock of
birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and
calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the
sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time
to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be
spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely
to pass on their genes are the nonsentries. How, then, could the sentry gene
survive for more than a generation or two?

To explain how a self-sacrificing gene can persist, Wilson looks to the
level of the group. If there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the
other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. But the flock with
sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system,
so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. In other
words, if the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual
bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.

There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources
spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain
injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup
struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits
of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.

There is another element here too, unique to humans because it depends on
language. A person's behavior is observed not only by those in his immediate
surroundings but also by anyone who can hear about it. There might be clear
costs to taking on a role analogous to the sentry bird -- a person who
stands up to authority, for instance, risks losing his job, going to jail or
getting beaten by the police -- but in humans, these local costs might be
outweighed by long-distance benefits. If a particular selfless trait
enhances a person's reputation, spread through the written and spoken word,
it might give him an advantage in many of life's challenges, like finding a
mate. One way that reputation is enhanced is by being ostentatiously
religious.

''The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs,'' Wilson wrote
in ''Darwin's Cathedral.'' It might seem disadvantageous, in terms of
foraging for sustenance and safety, for someone to favor religious over
rationalistic explanations that would point to where the food and danger
are. But in some circumstances, he wrote, ''a symbolic belief system that
departs from factual reality fares better.'' For the individual, it might be
more adaptive to have ''highly sophisticated mental modules for acquiring
factual knowledge and for building symbolic belief systems'' than to have
only one or the other, according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that
a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most
adaptive and that ''what seems to be an adversarial relationship'' between
theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive
labor that ''keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.''

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Received on Thu Apr 19 12:40:04 2007