The Evolution of Religiosity Is the existence of religion, as a “cross-cultural universal,” the result of something else shared across cultures: the human genome? By David P. Barash
No biologist—indeed, no welleducated and thoughtful person— can be in any doubt that human beings are the product of evolution by natural selection. Nonetheless, close attention to Homo sapiens reveals a number of evolutionary mysteries, aspects of our shared humanity that are almost certainly a result of “nature” (i.e., evolution by natural selection), but whose precise evolutionary causation is currently obscure. Among these mysteries of “human nature,” one of the more perplexing—and fraught—is the question of religion. Of course, it is not guaranteed that human religiosity has evolved at all, in the biological sense. There is considerable variability in religious practices worldwide, which at least opens the possibility that the underlying causation is simply cultural tradition and social learning, which vary from place to place—as does, for example, human language. But even as culture and social learning obviously determine the detail of what particular language is spoken by what particular people, it is also true that all ‘normal’ human beings end up speaking some sort of language; moreover, these languages typically share what linguists designate a “deep structure.” This basic pattern seems likely to apply to religion, too. Thus, the simple fact that religion is what anthropologists call a “cross-cultural universal” could suggest that it derives from another, underlying cross-cultural 4 GeneWatch
universal: shared aspects of the human genome. But what? The most obvious possibility is a “God gene.” Although such a gene was purportedly discovered more than a decade ago, subsequent research has been unable to confirm this claim. Far more likely is a general, genetically influenced tendency to accept authority, to venerate designated leaders, to be positively influenced by ritual (especially when socially shared), and so forth. Nonetheless, the evolutionary mystery in this case goes beyond the need to locate one or more presumed religion-promoting alleles. Even in the unlikely eventuality that one or more such genes could be identified, a deeper and more interesting mystery remains: why would any religionpromoting genetic system have been evolved? As philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out, if we see a large mammal rooting around in the mud, it is reasonable to conclude that it is seeking food; i.e., the adaptive significance of such behavior is easy to imagine. But if the animal regularly interrupts such a clearly adaptive activity to do somersaults, we are legitimately inclined to ask why. Looking, for example, at Muslims interrupting their lives to pray five times each day, at Jews refusing to use electricity or even ride in a car on their Sabbath, at Hindus circumnavigating the 52 km route around holy Mt. Kailash
making full-body prostrations on their knees the entire way, or Christians donating 10% of more of their income to their churches, evolutionists cannot help seeing the biological equivalent of truffle-pigs doing cartwheels. In short, it is not biologically satisfying to conclude that religion exists because of a “religion gene”— even in the unlikely event that such a gene or gene complex exists—because this begs the question of why evolution has favored it. Many different hypotheses can be suggested to explain the evolutionary mystery of religion. Following is an abbreviated list of some of the more intriguing possibilities. These are examined at greater length, along with other, similar mysteries such as the existence of art, consciousness, our large brains, along with a panoply of sexual puzzles, in my book Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (2012, Oxford University Press). A Viral Meme One possibility is that religion exists and has been promoted despite being maladaptive, or at least because its biological payoff is enjoyed not by those people who participate in various religions, but instead by the unit(s) that are the cultural equivalent of genes; namely, memes. Whereas genes are entities of nucleic acid that reside in living bodies, memes are entities of memory and August-October 2013