From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Wed 25 Dec 2002 - 00:54:32 GMT
The Origin of Religions, From a Distinctly Darwinian View
By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/24/science/social/24CONV.html?ei=1&en=84058c6767bfb19f
ex=1041750980&pagewanted=print&position=top
In a world overwhelmed by religious conflict, where no faith seems
secure from the wrath of competing creeds, humanity's religious impulse
can look like a decidedly mixed blessing, a source of violent
intolerance as much as a prescription for upstanding and altruistic
behavior.
How can a force that transforms convicted murderers into placid
samaritans, and that has given the world Handel's "Messiah," the mosaics
of Ravenna and Borobudur Temple also have spawned the Salem witch hunts,
Osama bin Laden and columnists who snarl that America should invade
Muslim countries, "kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"?
What sort of Jekyll-and-Hydra-headed beast is this thing called
religious faith?
In the view of Dr. David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in
upstate New York, a very natural and very powerful beast indeed, and one
that helps explain humanity's rise to global dominance.
Dr. Wilson, a renowned evolutionary biologist, proposes that religion
with all its institutional, emotional and prescriptive trappings ranks
as a kind of mega-adaptation: a trait that evolved because it conferred
advantages on those who bore it.
But whereas evolutionary biologists traditionally view an adaptation as
the outcome of a struggle between unevenly matched individuals say,
between one polar bear with a cleanly cloaking white coat, and another
with a slightly less effective form of camouflage Dr. Wilson sees
religion as the product of group selection at work.
In his new book, "Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature
of Society" (University of Chicago Press), Dr. Wilson argues that the
religious impulse evolved early in hominid history because it helped
make groups of humans comparatively more cohesive, more cooperative and
more fraternal, and thus able to present a formidable front against
bands of less organized or unified adversaries.
By taking an evolutionary perspective on the subject, Dr. Wilson said,
religion's twinned record of transcendent glories and shocking
barbarities becomes comprehensible and even predictable, though not,
perhaps, inevitable for the future.
Dr. Wilson, 53, wears big aviator glasses, talks in an energetic, reedy
voice and is as lean as an El Greco saint. On a recent gray afternoon in
Washington, he discussed his book over lunch at a hotel bar that was
quiet and smoky enough to please a church mouse.
Q. You're trying to explain the evolution of religion. So how do you
define your terms? What is a religion?
A. Religion has a superficial definition, which is a belief in
supernatural agents, but some people regard this definition as shallow
and incomplete. The Buddha, for example, refused to be associated with
any gods. Or you could say that religion is something that handles
concepts of an afterlife, but that definition, too, is limited, and it
excludes a number of faiths. A scholar at a religious conference told me
that what little Judaism has to say about the afterlife is only there
because Christians asked them. I've found that when you go beyond the
superficial definitions of religion, it's very difficult to distinguish
anything fundamental about religion that is not also fundamental to
other social organizations. For example, the concept of sacredness, and
the existence of a symbolic system that distinguishes the sacred from
the profane, extends to many other social organizations.
Q. So what's special about religion that makes it such a powerful force
in human history?
A. I think that religion has been very good at rearranging the
nonreligious furniture of our mind into a coherent whole. It takes
things like faith, which is what allows you to keep going even in the
absence of information, evidence or immediate gratification, and which
everybody needs, and it takes forgiveness, which is what you ask for
when you transgress, and it reworks these modules, to put it crudely,
and tries to set them in a permanent "on" position.
Q. What do you gain by looking at religion from a Darwinian standpoint?
A. Certain ways of thinking and study methods that we routinely use as
evolutionists turn out to be very new from the standpoint of religious
scholarship. If I'm looking at guppies or beehives, the first thing I'll
want to know about a trait is, Is it an adaptation or not? So I ask that
about religion. If it's not an adaptation, maybe it's a spandrel a
byproduct of some other evolutionary process rather than an
adaptation. Maybe back in the Stone Age it was adaptive to be nice to
others because most people around us were relatives who shared our
genes, and then we ended up being nice to nonrelatives, too. Maybe
religion is even a maladaptive spandrel today, the way our sweet tooth
makes us fat. Or maybe religion is like a parasitic disease, which
evolved to transmit itself like the AIDS virus, and isn't good for any
of its hosts but gets passed on anyway. If religion is an adaptation, we
can ask, "Did it evolve because it benefited whole groups, or some
individuals within a group? Was it a sting operation, with some leaders
fleecing rather than leading their flocks?" This is almost certainly
true in some cases, but is it true as a rule? These are hypotheses that
we can frame and address as we would a study of nonhuman organisms. And
the great thing about religion is that descriptive information about it
exists in abundance.
Q. You suggest that religion is an adaptation, an example of group
selectionism at work.
A. Religious believers often compare their groups to an organism, or a
beehive. One of the keys to the success of religion is its emphasis on
the moral equality of those in the community. You might be rich, and I
might be poor, but in some sense you're no better than me. This guarded
egalitarianism may be fundamental to the willingness of people to
cooperate with others, including those who are unrelated to them, and to
become the primate equivalent of a eusocial species like bees or ants.
Q. Give me an example of looking at the natural history of a religion.
A. The coolest example can be seen in what the religious scholar Elaine
Pagels wrote about the evolution of early Christianity. When you compare
the gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament with the many
competing gospels that were rejected, what you find is that those that
made it in were the ones that were best as blueprints for various early
Christian communities. The narrative differences in the four Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the fact that Jesus is shown as
being well received in one but practically thrown off a cliff in
another, were not the result of the passage of time, or of memories
fading. These Gospels were serving the needs of different Christian
communities in different social environments. They're fossils of local
adaptations.
Q. So if the egalitarian impulse is strong within us, can we assume that
institutions like slavery were unnatural blips in human history?
A. Unfortunately not. Religions and other social organizations may
preach kindness and cooperation within the group, but they often say
nothing about those outside the group, and may even promote brutality
toward those beyond the brotherhood of the hive. That has been the dark
side of religion. But it is not an inevitable side of it. I don't want
to come across as naοve, but there's no theoretical reason why the moral
circle can't be expanded to ultimately include everybody. Nor is there
any reason why we can't take a surgical approach to religion, and keep
what is positive about it while eliminating the intolerance.
Q. What about you? Are you religious? Do you believe in God?
A. I consider myself a communitarian, and there are many things I admire
about religion, but no, I don't believe in God. I tell people I'm an
atheist, but a nice atheist.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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