Allen MacNeill has started a new blog called Evolutionary Psychology. Allen teaches introductory biology and evolution at Cornell University (New York, USA). This could be a good addition to the blogosphere since he intends to defend the field. (Good luck!)The first posting on the new blog is The Capacity for Religious Experience is an Evolutionary Adaptation for Warfare. It starts out well with ...
Recent work on the evolutionary dynamics of religion have converged on a "standard model" in which religions and the supernatural entities which populate them are treated as epiphenomena of human cognitive processes dealing with the detection of and reaction to agents under conditions of stress, anxiety, and perceived threat.I agree with this. There has been selection in the primate lineages for intelligence and one of the reasons for the fitness advantage may well be the ability to cope with external threats. I think that religion, and many other human behaviors, are epiphenomena that are indirect consequences of intelligent brains.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be what MacNeill really means. He goes on to describe behaviors such as religion and warfare as though they were individually selected. He seems to be implying that there are genes for religious behavior and for engaging in warfare. This isn't the same as the "standard" model—unless my interpretation is completely wrong.Here's how religion evolved, according to MacNeill ...
Wilson (2002) has proposed that the capacity for religion has evolved among humans as the result of selection at the level of groups, rather than individuals. Specifically, he argues that benefits that accrue to groups as the result of individual sacrifices can result in increased group fitness, and this can explain what is otherwise difficult to explain: religiously motivated behaviors (such as celibacy and self-sacrifice) that apparently lower individual fitness as they benefit the group.
At first glance, Wilson's argument seems compelling. Consider the most horrific manifestation of religious warfare: the suicide bomber. A person who blows him or herself up in order to kill his or her opponents has lowered his or her individual fitness. Doesn't this mean that such behavior must be explainable only at the level of group selection? Not at all: the solution to this conundrum is implicit in the basic principles of population genetics. Recall that one of Darwin's requirements for evolution by natural selection was the existence of variation between the individuals in a population. (Darwin, 1859, pp. 7 - 59) Variation within populations is a universal characteristic of life, an inevitable outcome of the imperfect mechanism of genetic replication. Therefore, it follows that if the capacity for religious experience is an evolutionary adaptation, then there will be variation between individuals in the degree to which they express such a capacity.
Furthermore, it is not necessarily true that when an individual sacrifices his or her life in the context of a struggle, the underlying genotype that induced that sacrifice will be eliminated by that act. Hamilton's principle of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) has already been mentioned as one mechanism, acting at the level of individuals (or, more precisely, at the level of genotypes), by which individual self-sacrifice can result in the increase in frequency of the genotype that facilitated such sacrifice. Trivers (1971) has proposed a mechanism by which apparently altruistic acts on the part of genetically unrelated individuals may evolve by means of reciprocal altruism.
Given these two mechanisms, all that is necessary for the capacity for religious behavior, including extreme forms of self-sacrifice, to evolve is that as the result of such behaviors, the tendency (and ability) to perform them would be propagated throughout a population. The removal of some individuals as the result of suicide would merely lower the frequency of such tendencies and abilities in the population, not eliminate them altogether. If by making the ultimate sacrifice, an individual who shares his or her genotype with those who benefit by that sacrifice will, at the level of his or her genes, become more common over time. (Wilson, 1975, p. 4)
I take issue with this description. When an evolutionary psychologist says that "all that is necessary" for the evolution of a behavior is that it confers some advantage, your adaptationist bullshit detector should hit the red line. That's not all that is necessary. Another, very important, requirement is that there be a genetic component to the behavior. In other words, we need to show that suicide bombers (for example) have different alleles in their genomes than atheists. I don't believe there's any evidence that such alleles exist.
The idea that there's a specific genetic propensity for religion is difficult to reconcile with our history. If religion alleles have been selected for thousand of years then how come European countries have been becoming secular in the past century? Are Europeans just learning to override the dictates of thei genes?
Or, is religion just an epiphenomenon—one of many cultural ways that a society can encourage cohesiveness? As a way of creating unity—and identifying strangers—religion is no different than patriotism or irrational devotion to a charismatic political leader (Obama as a religion?
). As a matter of fact, it's probably no different than the cliques formed by adolescent girls or the street gangs of teenage boys. They all serve the same purpose, albeit on different scales. They are all learned behaviors. In my opinion, religion is a product of nurture, not nature.
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