Religion Under the Microscope

Religion has often viewed evolution — the theory and science thereof — as the enemy.

Now science is asking whether religion itself evolved as a cultural adaptation. Perhaps religion as a cultural system has given its believers survival advantages as a group over competing groups of individuals who harbor no shared religious beliefs.

Perhaps, somewhere in the mists of human prehistory, there was a genetic mutation which made some members of genus Homo capable of living by an unselfish code of mutual aid and assistance. These milder mutants would learn to sacrifice their competitive individual agendas and work together for the common good. Their covenant of mutual aid made their group fitter in an evolutionary sense than any group whose members, lacking the cooperation gene, knew nothing of self-sacrifice.

Maybe, since humans are so good at picking up cues from other humans, the whole idea of mutual aid spread even to groups whose individual members, many or all of them, lacked the cooperation gene.

Could religion have been born as a transmitted social code enshrining self-sacrifice for the common good?

Could we even have religion (or religions, plural) today unless religions are in fact (or at least once were) adaptive in an evolutionary sense: making their possessors fitter to undergo the harsh rigors of survival in an impassive, even hostile environment?

In Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion, biologist David Sloan Wilson says something like this may indeed be so. Though Wilson says he himself is an atheist, he assails The God Delusion, the recent book by fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, for suggesting that human religion evolved more in the way a virus evolves. Even though it harms its host's chances of survival, a virus nonetheless spreads to other hosts, mutates, and thereby ensures its own survival.

To Dawkins, Wilson says, religion is maladaptive to us:

As he sees it, people are attracted to religion the way that moths are attracted to flames. Perhaps religious impulses were adapted to the tiny social groups of our ancestral past, but not the mega-societies of the present. If current religious beliefs are adaptive at all, it is only for the beliefs themselves as cultural parasites on their human hosts, like the demons of old that were thought to possess people. That is why Dawkins calls God a delusion. The least likely possibility for Dawkins is the group-level adaptation hypothesis. Religions are emphatically not elaborate systems of beliefs and practices that define, motivate, coordinate and police groups of people for their own good.

Dawkins, Wilson says, even likens religious enthusiasm today to that old-fashioned experience, demonic possession. A meme, which amounts to the cultural equivalent of a gene, is acting as a virus and infecting our minds, to our detriment.

Wilson supports the alternative hypothesis that religion is a complex cultural adaptation, not for human individuals, but for human groups. He wants to see "hard empirical work" done to determine if his hypothesis, Dawkins' counter-hypothesis, or some other explanation accounts for the evolution of religion in human culture.