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 As a Darwinian, the aspect of religion
that catches my attention is its profligate wastefulness, its
extravagant display of baroque uselessness. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the
pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest waste. If a wild animal habitually performs some
useless activity, natural selection will favor rival individuals who instead
devote time to surviving and reproducing. Nature cannot afford frivolous jeux
desprits. Ruthless utilitarianism
trumps, even if it does not always seem that way. “Anting” is the odd habit of birds such as
jays of “bathing” in an ants’ nest and apparently inciting the ants to invade
their feathers. Nobody knows for sure
what the benefit of anting is: perhaps some kind of hygiene, cleansing the
feathers of parasites. My point is
that uncertainty as to the purpose does not, nor should it, stop Darwinians
from believing, with great confidence, that anting must be good for
something. Religious behavior in
bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of
man-centuries in its building. Sacred
music and devotional paintings largely monopolized medieval and Renaissance
talent. Thousands, perhaps millions,
of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one
religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods,
killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of
celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion. Though the details differ across cultures,
no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming,
hostility-provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion. All this presents a major puzzle to anyone
who thinks in a Darwinian way. We
guessed why jays ant. Isn’t religion a
similar challenge, an a priori affront to Darwinism, demanding
analogous explanation? Why do we pray
and indulge in costly practices that, in many individual cases, more or less
totally consume lives? Of course, the
caveats must now come tumbling in. Religious
behavior is Darwinian business only if it is widespread, not some weird
anomaly. Apparently, it is universal,
and the problem will not go away just because the details differ across cultures.
As with language, the underlying
phenomenon is universal, though it plays out differently in different
regions. Not all individuals are
religious, as most readers of this journal can testify. However, religion is a human universal:
every culture, everywhere in the world, has a style of religion that even non-practitioners
recognize as the norm for that society, just as it has a style of clothing, a
style of courting, and a style of meal serving. What is religion good for?  There
is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from
stress-related diseases. The evidence
is not good, but it would not be at all surprising. A non-negligible part of what a doctor can
provide for a patient is consolation and reassurance. My doctor does not literally practice the
laying on of hands. However, many are
the time I have been instantly cured of some minor ailment by a reassuringly
calm voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is well documented. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity
at all, demonstrably improve health. That
is why drug trials have to use placebos as controls. It is why homeopathic remedies appear to
work, even though they are so diluted that they contain the same amount of
the active ingredient as the placebo control, zero molecules. Is religion a medical placebo, which
prolongs life by reducing stress? Perhaps, although the theory is going to
have to run the gauntlet of skeptics who point out the many circumstances in
which religion increases stress rather than decreases it. In any case, I find
the placebo theory too meager to account for the massive and all-pervasive
phenomenon of religion. I do not think we have religion because our religious
ancestors reduced their stress levels and hence survived longer. I do not think that is a big enough theory
for the job. Other theories miss the
point of Darwinian explanations altogether. I refer to suggestions like, “Religion
satisfies our curiosity about the universe and our place in it.” Or “Religion is consoling. People fear death and are drawn to religions
which promise we’ll survive it.” There
may be some psychological truth here, but it is not in itself a Darwinian
explanation. As Steven Pinker has said
in How the Mind Works (Penguin, 1997):
. . . It
only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in
beliefs it can plainly see are false. A
freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person
face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a
rabbit. (p. 555)
A
Darwinian version of the fear-of-death theory would have to be of the form,
“Belief in survival after death tends to postpone the moment when it is put
to the test.” This could be true or it
could be false, maybe it is another version of the stress and placebo theory,
but I shall not pursue the matter. My
only point is that this is the kind of way in which a Darwinian must rewrite
the question. Psychological statements
to the effect that people find some belief agreeable or disagreeable are
proximate, not ultimate explanations. As
a Darwinian, I am concerned with ultimate questions. Darwinians make much of this distinction
between proximate and ultimate. Proximate
questions lead us into physiology and neuroanatomy. There is nothing wrong with proximate
explanations. They are important, and
they are scientific. However, my
pre-occupation is with Darwinian ultimate explanations. If neuroscientists find a “god center” in
the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center
evolved. Why did those of our ancestors
who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals
who did not? The ultimate Darwinian
question is not a better question, not a more profound question, not a more
scientific question than the proximate neurological question. However, it is the one I happen to be
talking about here. Some alleged
ultimate explanations turn out to be, or even avowedly are, group-selection
theories. Group selection is the
controversial idea that Darwinian selection chooses among groups of
individuals, in the same kind of way as, in accordance with normal Darwinian
theory, it chooses among individuals within groups. The Cambridge anthropologist Colin Renfrew, for example, suggests
that Christianity survived by a form of group-selection because it fostered
the idea of in-group loyalty and brotherly love. The American evolutionist David Sloan Wilson
has made a similar suggestion in Darwin’s Cathedral.
Here is a made-up example, to show another way in which a
group-selection theory of religion might work. A tribe with a stirringly belligerent “god
of battles” wins wars against a tribe whose god urges peace and harmony or a
tribe with no god at all. Warriors who
believe a martyr’s death will send them straight to paradise fight bravely,
and willingly give up their lives. Therefore,
their tribe is more likely to survive in intertribal selection, steal the
conquered tribe’s cattle, and seize their women as concubines. Such successful tribes spawn daughter tribes
that go off and propagate more daughter tribes, all worshipping the same
tribal god. Notice that this is
different from saying that the idea of the warlike religion survives. Of course, it will, but in this case, the
point is that the groups of people who hold the idea survive. There are formidable objections to
group-selection theories. A known
opponent, I must beware of riding off on a hobbyhorse far from this column’s
subject. Mathematical models arguably come up with very special conditions
under which group selection might work. Arguably, religions in human tribes set up
just such special conditions. This is
an interesting line of theory to pursue, but I shall not do so here. Could religion be a recent phenomenon,
sprung up since our genes underwent most of their natural selection? Its
ubiquity argues against any simple version of this idea. Nevertheless, there is a version of it that
I want to advocate. The propensity
that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se. It had some other benefit, and it only
incidentally manifests itself today as religious behavior. We will understand religious behavior only
after we have renamed it. It is
natural for me as a zoologist to use an analogy from nonhuman animals. The “dominance hierarchy” was first
discovered as the “pecking order” in hens. Each hen learns which individuals she can
beat in a fight and which will beat her. In a well-established dominance hierarchy,
little overt fighting is seen. Stable groupings of hens, which have had time
to sort themselves into a pecking order, lay more eggs than coops whose
membership is continually changed. This
might suggest an “advantage” to the phenomenon of the dominance hierarchy. However, that is not good Darwinism, because
the dominance hierarchy is a group-level phenomenon. Farmers may care about group productivity,
but, except under very peculiar conditions that do not apply here, natural
selection does not. For a Darwinian,
the question “What is the survival value of the dominance hierarchy?” is
illegitimate. The proper question is,
“What is the individual survival value of deferring to stronger hens? And of punishing lack of deference from
weaker ones.” Darwinian questions have
to direct attention toward the level at which genetic variations might exist.
Aggressive or deferring tendencies in
individual hens are a proper target because they either do, or easily might,
vary genetically. Group phenomena like
dominance hierarchies do not in themselves vary genetically, because groups do
not have genes. At least, you will
have your work cut out arguing some peculiar sense in which a group
phenomenon could be subject to genetic variation. My point, of course, is that religion may
be like the dominance hierarchy. “What
is the survival value of religion?” may be the wrong question. The right question may have the form, “What
is the survival value of some as yet unspecified individual behavior, or
psychological characteristic that manifests itself, under appropriate
circumstances, as religion?” We have
to rewrite the question before we can sensibly answer it. Darwinians who seek the survival value of
religion are asking the wrong question. Instead, we should focus on something in our
evolving ancestors that we would not then have recognized as religion, but
which is primed to become recognizable as religion in the changed context of
civilized society. I cited the pecking
order in hens, and the point is so central to my thesis that I hope you will
forgive another animal example to ram it home. Moths fly into the candle flame, and it does
not look like an accident. They go out
of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves. We could label it “self-immolation behavior”
and wonder how Darwinian natural selection could possibly favor it. My point, again, is that we need to rewrite
the question before we can even attempt an intelligent answer. It is not suicide. Apparent suicide emerges as an inadvertent side
effect. Artificial light is a recent
arrival on the night scene. Until recently, the only night-lights were the
moon and the stars. Being at optical
infinity, their rays are parallel, which makes them ideal compasses. Insects are known to use celestial objects
to steer accurately in a straight line. The insect nervous system is adept at
setting up a temporary rule of thumb such as, “Steer a course such that the
light rays hit your eye at an angle of 30°.” Since insects have compound eyes, this will
amount to favoring a particular ommatidium (individual optical tube radiating
out from the center of the compound eye).
However, the light compass relies critically on the celestial object
being at optical infinity. If it is
not, the rays are not parallel but diverge like the spokes of a wheel. A nervous system using a 30° rule of thumb
to a candle, as though it were the moon, will steer its moth, in a neat
logarithmic spiral, into the flame. It
is still, on average, a good rule of thumb. We do not notice the hundreds of moths who
are silently and effectively steering by the moon or a bright star or even
the lights of a distant city. We see
only moths hurling themselves at our lights, and we ask the wrong question. Why are all these moths committing suicide? Instead, we should ask why they have nervous
systems that steer by maintaining an automatic fixed angle to light rays, a
tactic that we only notice on the occasions when it goes wrong. When the question is rephrased, the mystery
evaporates. It never was right to call it suicide. Once again, apply the lesson to religious
behavior in humans. We observe large
numbers of people, in many local areas it amounts to 100% who hold beliefs
that flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts, as well as rival
religions. They not only hold these
beliefs but devote time and resources to costly activities that flow from
holding them. They die for them, or
kill for them. We marvel at all this,
just as we marveled at the self-immolation behavior of the moths. Baffled, we ask “Why?” Yet again, the point
I am making is that we may be asking the wrong question. The religious behavior may be a misfiring,
an unfortunate manifestation of an underlying psychological propensity that
in other circumstances was once useful.
What might that psychological propensity have been? What is the equivalent of using the parallel
rays from the moon as a useful compass? I shall offer a suggestion, but I must
stress that it is only an example of the kind of thing I am talking about. I am much more wedded to the general idea
that the question should be properly rephrased than I am to any particular
answer. My specific hypothesis is
about children. More than any other
species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience
not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. However, to say the least, there will be a
selective advantage to child brains with the rule of thumb: Believe whatever
your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents;
obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Obey without question. I have never forgotten a horrifying sermon,
preached in my school chapel when I was little. It was horrifying in retrospect: at the
time, my child brain accepted it as intended by the preacher. He told the story of a squad of soldiers,
drilling beside a railway line. At a
critical moment, the drill sergeant’s attention was distracted, and he failed
to give the order to halt. The
soldiers were so well schooled to obey orders without question that they carried
on marching, right into the path of an oncoming train. Now, of course, I do not believe the story
now, but I did when I was nine. The
point is that the preacher wished us children to regard as a virtue the
soldiers’ slavish and unquestioning obedience to an order, however
preposterous. Moreover, speaking for
myself, I think we did regard it as a virtue. I wondered whether I would have had the
courage to do my duty by marching into the train. Like ideally drilled soldiers, computers do
what they are told. They slavishly
obey whatever instructions are properly delivered in their own programming
language. This is how they do useful things like word processing and
spreadsheet calculations. However, as
an inevitable by-product, they are equally automatic in obeying bad
instructions. They have no way of
telling whether an instruction will have a good effect or a bad. They simply obey, as soldiers are supposed
to. Their unquestioning obedience
makes computers vulnerable to infection by viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says
“Copy me to every name in any address list that you find on this hard disk”
will simply be obeyed and then obeyed again by the other computers to which
it is sent, in exponential expansion. It
is impossible to design a computer that is usefully obedient and at the same
time immune to infection. If I have
done my softening up work well, you will already have completed the argument
about child brains and religion. Natural
selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their
parents and tribal elders tell them. In
addition, this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection
by mind viruses. For excellent
survival reasons, child brains need to trust parents and trust elders whom
their parents tell them to trust. An
automatic consequence is that the “truster” has no way of distinguishing good
advice from bad. The child cannot tell
that “If you swim in the river you’ll be eaten by crocodiles” is good advice
but “If you don’t sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops
will fail” is bad advice. They both
sound the same. Both are advice from a
trusted source, and both are delivered with a solemn earnestness that
commands respect and demands obedience.
The same goes for propositions about the world, the cosmos, morality,
and human nature. Moreover, of course,
when the child grows up and has children of his or her own, she will
naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children, using the same
impressive gravitas of manner. On this
model, we should expect that, in different geographical regions, different
arbitrary beliefs having no factual basis will be handed down, to be believed
with the same conviction as useful pieces of traditional wisdom such as the
belief that manure is good for the crops. We should also expect that these nonfactual
beliefs would evolve over generations, by either random drift or following
some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of
significant divergence from common ancestry. Languages drift apart from a common parent
given sufficient time in geographical separation. The same is true of
traditional beliefs and injunctions, handed down the generations, initially
because of the programmability of the child brain. Darwinian selection sets up childhood
brains with a tendency to believe their elders. It sets up brains with a tendency to
imitate, hence indirectly to spread rumors, spread urban legends, and believe
religions. However, given that genetic
selection has set up brains of this kind, they then provide the equivalent of
a new kind of non-genetic heredity, which might form the basis for a new kind
of epidemiology, and perhaps even a new kind of non-genetic Darwinian
selection. I believe that religion is
one of a group of phenomena explained by this kind of non-genetic
epidemiology, with the possible admixture of non-genetic Darwinian selection.
If I am right, religion has no
survival value for individual human beings, or for the benefit of their
genes. The benefit, if there is any,
is to religion itself.
Richard Dawkins’s most recent book
is A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor of
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
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