The Evolution of Religion

Religion as an Adaption

• Group Cohesion

• Direct Fitness Benefits

Group Cohesion

Sosis, R.; Alcorta, C. (2003). "Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious behavior". Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (6): 264–274.

Direct Fitness Benefits

McGregor, I., Inzlicht, M., Hirsh, J., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural Markers of Religious Conviction. Psychological Science, 20(3).

Religion as a By-product

Attachment Theory

Decoupled Cognition

Theory of Mind

Intensionality

Transference HADD

Inferential Reasoning

Attachment Theory

Granqvist, P., & Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2008). Attachment and religious representations and behavior. In J. Cassidy, P. R. Shaver, J. Cassidy, P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.) (pp. 906-933). New York, NY US: Guilford

Press.

Hyperactive Agency Detection Device

Gray, Kurt; Daniel Wegner (Feb 2010). "Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind". Personality and Social Psychology Review (Sage) 14 (1): 9–10.

Decoupled Cognition and Theory of Mind

Grafman, J. (2009). ‘Theory of Mind’ could help explain belief in God. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

21(9).

Explaining Moral Religions

Nicolas Baumard & Pascal Boyer

Moralising Religions• Religion is associated with

moral teachings, particularly in the Western world.

• Moralising religions have only appeared recently.

• Most of our evolutionary history we lived in small societies of foragers and horticulturalists.

• No unified doctrine about spirits or gods and no established religious organisation or personnel.

Introduction• Organised religion with

ceremonies, doctrines and hierarchies first appeared around 6000 years ago.

• However, these gods lacked a moral conscience and uninterested in human morality.

• Classical Antiquity; Sumerians, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks.

• The gods only cared about sacrifices and obedience.

Introduction• Moralising religions emerged during

the 1 millenium BCE.

• These new movements connected the belief in supernatural agents with specific moral prescriptions e.g. Buddhism, Jainsim, Christianity.

• Emphasised the proportionality between deeds and supernatural rewards. And between sins and penance.

• Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that morality based on proportionality is highly intuitive to human beings.

Universal Similarities• Moralising religions share similar ideas

based on the principal of proportionality.

• The Golden Rule.

• Supernatural Justice; the universe is intrinsically fair. Good deeds are rewarded and misdeeds are punished either through reincarnation or in the afterlife. e.g. different realms of rebirth in Buddhism.

• Sainthood and heroism; good deeds beyond what is required have a special status in moral religions. e.g. good karma in Buddhism.

• These similarities have not been properly explained. Evolutionary dispositions for cooperation may provide the answers.

The Golden Rule in Different Religions

Judaism1200 B.C.E

‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation’, Talmud, m.

Shabbat 31a

Buddhism600 B.C.E

‘Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful’, Udanavarga 5:18

Confucianism500 B.C.E

Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself’, Analects XV:24

Taoism200 B.C.E

Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss’, Tai Shang Ying Pian,

Chapter 4

Christianity1st century C.E.

Therefore all things whatsoever would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’, Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31

Islam600 C.E.

As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them’,

Kitab al-Kafi, Vol. 2, p. 146

Evolutionary Basis for Cooperation, Distribution and Fairness.

• For a long time, the situation used to model cooperation was similar to the prisoner’s dilemma, where one cannot choose one’s partner and must select strategies to reduce the likelihood of defection.

• Ignores the fact that foragers would have been able to choose their partners. A better model is a form of biological market in which individuals use signalling and reputation to convey that they are valuable cooperators.

• Agents have to avoid excessive generosity to avoid being exploited but also have to avoid excessive selfishness to avoid being abandoned.

• This also allows for proportionality; if A does more work than B then A should get more of the reward, if not then A will look for another partner, so it would be in B’s interest to concede more of the reward to A.

• Formal models show that when agents can select partners, evolutionary dynamics converge towards mutually advantageous distributions.

The Evolution of Fairness by Partner Choice

Cultural Transmission of Religious Morality

• This correspondence between universal intuitions and culturally successful representations is an instance of biased cultural transmission.

• Our understanding of human cultures takes as a starting point the fact that genetic evolution produced an array of psychological dispositions typical of humans.

• This genetic predisposition makes certain kinds of information easier to acquire than others, leading to their recurrence in many different places at different times.

• Evolved moral intuitions provide a background against which certain types of information e.g. religious and moral doctrines) are more easily communicated than others.

How is religious morality connected to human evolution?• Moral intuitions are the same in religious and non-religious people because they

occur automatically and precede conscious moral reasoning.

• Adherence to a particular belief system does not significantly affect prosocial behaviour.

• However, at various historical times, moralising movements have emerged in which people followed prescriptions towards a more intense adherence to intuitive moral norms.

• Interestingly, many of these movements appeared in several places across the world at roughly the same time (the second half of the 1 millenium BCE).

• Around this period there was a sharp increase in energy capture (how much energy is extracted from the environment) which occurred at the same time in 3 places - the Yellow-Yangzi Rivers, the Ganga Valley and the Eastern part of the Mediterranean.

• These regions reached a production level of 25,000 kcal per capita per day, surpassing that of previous societies.

Why did moral religions emerge at the same time?

• These 3 regions are precisely the places where moral religions emerged. e.g. Stoicism in the Greek city states, Christianity in the Middle East, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China.

• This suggests that increase in the standard of living is followed by the spread of moral religions.

• Material prosperity allows people to detach themselves from material desire and there is an evolutionary reformulation of the pyramid of needs.

• People downplay the value of higher wealth and status when these needs are met and turn their attention to other domains of evolved preferences like maximising personal wellbeing and enjoying friendships.

• Consistent with this, moralising religions recruited their first adepts among the affluent upper classes e.g. Chinese Buddhism and Roman Christianity. They are both associated with asceticism and self control techniques.

• This new emphasis on explicit morality led to the emergence of new groups such as Christianity and to changes in pre-existing groups like Judaism to become more ethically focused.

• Evidence suggests that religious systems are more congruent with our evolved intuitions because they describe morality in terms of the judgements of supernatural agents who know everything and who reason in ways consistent with our own intuitive psychology.

• By contrast, non-religious movements (e.g. Stoicism) lack this connection to intuition. They engage in analytical thinking which has been found to diminish people’s religious commitment in experimental settings.

Conclusion

Despite their differences, religious and non-religious movements owe their cultural success to the fact that these explicit accounts of moral prescriptions are congruent with universal, and much older, evolved intuitions.