Re: [asa] The Evolution of the God Gene

Hi John,

An interesting piece - although I think the conclusion is a bit optimistic. It's hard to see, after all, how somebody like Dawkins could think of religion as anything other than adaptive, but he hardly sees it as good in the same sense as other adaptive features - like those which enable us to engage in scientific research, for instance.

I do have one misgiving about the article's portrayal of religious development, however. In particular, I'm not sure about this interpretation of our religious history;

> The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living
> hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without
> chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It
> bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs
> ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people
> followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community.
> Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against
> outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed
> over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward
> ritual would eventually have become universal.

On this I'd make the point that living hunter-gatherers with which I'm familiar do not live in "egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen" - sure, they're not quite governed by despotic monarchs of the Ancient Near Eastern variety, but the lack of an apparent authoritarian structure doesn't mean the social hierarchy is entirely absent. I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy at play here? Or, at least, an assumption that if authority is not of a particular type (institutional and forensic) then it doesn't exist. But just try nay-saying an Aboriginal elder and see how far you get!

In any case, if we're assuming an evolutionary history for humanity, then would we not assume something like the sort of social hierarchies evident particularly in our nearest evolutionary cousins, the great apes, or even in other socially ordered species - elephants, dogs, lions, etc.?

Personally, I suspect the author is imposing his own contemporary western view of democratic equality on our purported evolutionary past - driven by a desire to avoid the suggestion that an evolutionary argument might support less amenable forms of human social ordering.

I do recognize, however, that the researchers are working in Mexico - so perhaps the reference to small hunter gatherer groups refers to those of the Central and Southern American variety? As I'm not very familiar with such societies I'd be hesitant to be dogmatic. It does, however, become a question of the extent to which the evolutionary history of one groups religious views can be taken as a normative for other cultures where the model clearly does not fit. I think I'll leave it in the hands of the anthropologists!

Other than that little quibble, an interesting piece.

Blessings,
Murray

John Walley wrote:
>
> This is an interesting thought...
>
> "Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for
> some kind of detente between religion and science? "
> John
>
>
>
>
> *The Wall Street Journal*
>
> *November 15, 2009*
>
> *The Evolution of the God Gene** *
>
> *By NICHOLAS WADE
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/nicholas_wade/index.html?inline=nyt-per>*
>
> IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent
> Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
>
>
>
> During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental
> temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The
> record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal
> religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves
> to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of
> corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the
> sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
>
>
>
> This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion,
> one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in
> societies at every stage of development and in every region of the
> world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that
> it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal
> because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral
> human population dispersed from its African homeland.
>
>
>
> For atheists
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/atheism/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because
> it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their
> successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
>
>
>
> For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been
> shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may
> then seem less likely.
>
>
>
> But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily
> threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior
> was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the
> existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has
> shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is
> to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of
> their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language.
> With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then
> supplies the content of what is learned.
>
>
>
> It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have
> conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their
> rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may
> last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong
> feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals
> also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.
>
>
>
> The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living
> hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without
> chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It
> bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs
> ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people
> followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community.
> Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against
> outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed
> over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward
> ritual would eventually have become universal.
>
>
>
> In natural selection, it is genes that enable their owners to leave more
> surviving progeny that become more common. The idea that natural
> selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals,
> is highly controversial. Though Darwin proposed the idea, the
> traditional view among biologists is that selection on individuals would
> stamp out altruistic behavior (the altruists who spent time helping
> others would leave fewer children of their own) far faster than
> group-level selection could favor it.
>
>
>
> But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the
> biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edward_o_wilson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution
> would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is
> the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes
> everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of
> passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups,
> which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting
> behaviors such as altruism and religion.
>
>
>
> A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly
> implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view,
> that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000
> years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. In the larger,
> hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted
> religion as their source of authority. Roman emperors made themselves
> chief priest or even a living god, though most had the taste to wait
> till after death for deification. “Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!”
> Vespasian joked on his deathbed.
>
>
>
> Religion was also harnessed to vital practical tasks such as
> agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite
> unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces
> of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and
> harvested at the right time. Passover
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/passover/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> once marked the beginning of the barley festival; Easter, linked to the
> date of Passover, is a spring festival.
>
>
>
> Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some
> kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many
> atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if
> they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see
> religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles.
> Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in
> promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple
> function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it
> doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means
> of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put
> that cohesion to good or bad ends.
>
>
>
> /Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times, is the author
> of “The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.”/
>
>

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Received on Mon Nov 16 16:15:53 2009