Did religion or beliefs give early man an evolutionary advantage?

[tantalus]

"To understand the later quote fully you'll need to read the article in full which covers a lot of ground and it would be pointless for me to summarise it."

 

I have read this before. Very interesting and thank you for posting it but (IMO) it doesn't actually address the question here. It doesn't give an answer to how religion may be adaptive. It makes a good case for the nature of religious thought; that God -or gods as he is careful to say- can be characterized as "God of the Moral Gaps" but it doesn't propose any mechanism for how religion may have arisen.

It's difficult for me to evaluate your post as I am not sure what you mean when you refer to religion.

 

It doesnt address it directly, but thinking of religion in terms of the evolution and adaptive uses of morality can be a very productive means of providing useful speculations on potentially adaptive causes of religion.

[mp][/mp]

I am in the process of trying to summarise this very long article for the thread on the issue

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345965/

 

One that attempts to analyse the difficulty in defining the question and the framework, and provide a literature view (further down) of the different possible evolutionary causes of religion that are currently popular in the field, not just the byproduct/spandrel theory.

[MEC1960]

"thinking of religion in terms of the evolution and adaptive uses of morality can be a very productive means of providing useful speculations on potentially adaptive causes of religion."

 

How? How is a "God of the Moral Gaps" adaptive in terms of evolution? I'm trying to keep my thoughts here on evolutionary biology. One can make all sorts of arguments of how a "God of the Moral Gaps" might be adaptive in a sociological sense but they don't propose any evolutionary mechanisms to account for it. They do give a nod to others (Guthrie, Atran, Barrett) who suggest that detecting agents is adaptive. That is almost certainly true, but it is also true that humans are not alone in this ability - most animals are capable of it yet (as far as we know) we are the only animals that have religion. Mistakes in identifying agency doesn't really explain *religion* anyway except as a spandrel. But they claim (rightly, IMO) that mistakes in identifying agents don't entirely explain a belief in God either. They go on to say that God is derived from a theory of mind and that may well be true but it still doesn't suggest an adaptive reason for religion; how does thinking that (in this case) a supernatural agent has a mind like ours provide a selective advantage? They don't say, though I suspect they would attribute it to some kind of group selection. That would open up the debate (now mostly settled) about whether or not group selection actually exists.

[tantalus]

"thinking of religion in terms of the evolution and adaptive uses of morality can be a very productive means of providing useful speculations on potentially adaptive causes of religion."

 

How? How is a "God of the Moral Gaps" adaptive in terms of evolution? I'm trying to keep my thoughts here on evolutionary biology. One can make all sorts of arguments of how a "God of the Moral Gaps" might be adaptive in a sociological sense but they don't propose any evolutionary mechanisms to account for it. They do give a nod to others (Guthrie, Atran, Barrett) who suggest that detecting agents is adaptive. That is almost certainly true, but it is also true that humans are not alone in this ability - most animals are capable of it yet (as far as we know) we are the only animals that have religion. Mistakes in identifying agency doesn't really explain *religion* anyway except as a spandrel. But they claim (rightly, IMO) that mistakes in identifying agents don't entirely explain a belief in God either. They go on to say that God is derived from a theory of mind and that may well be true but it still doesn't suggest an adaptive reason for religion; how does thinking that (in this case) a supernatural agent has a mind like ours provide a selective advantage? They don't say, though I suspect they would attribute it to some kind of group selection. That would open up the debate (now mostly settled) about whether or not group selection actually exists.

You misunderstand me, HADDs may possibly explain why religion is a spandrel, by postulating the adaptive evolution of mental machinery that inadvertently favoured the cultural evolution of religion.

 

God of the moral gaps goes further than that however, tying the idea to God to our clearly adaptive moral tendencies , and discusses the possible evolution of a belief in God with the evolution of our morality as discussed by Gray and Wenger. Some may prefer to separate such a belief from religion. under such a framework as they outline in may be difficult to separate the adaptive evolution of morality from a belief in god.

[mp][/mp]

I want to summarise an excellent article which I consider informative http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345965/

 

Part of the difficulty is defining religion and morality, and separating evolutinary/biological elemets from cultural ones which have developed later in shaping religion and its function.

many current investigations suffer .... a tendency to conceptualize morality or religion as clusters of eithercognitively or culturally evolved features rather than both

This leads people to suggest a simplistic, singular cause, where multiple are required

...approach that fractionates both religion and morality while carefully distinguishing cognition from culture ...

 

 

Separating the evolved underlying mental mechanism that facilitate religious thinking, from cultural effects that have influenced the development of religion as a social phenomenon.

 

First the article attempts to the define the question and how to handle the question, when handling the diversity of religion and separately moral behaviour.

These considerations point to the arbitrariness of the “religion” designator. Tendencies to postulate bodiless agents such as ghosts and gods and to participate in rituals may seem to warrant some overarching label, but in reality their cognitive causes may be quite unrelated. For example, afterlife beliefs and rituals may be explicitly connected by more or less shared systems of meaning, expressed in discourse at social events like funerals and wakes; and they may form part of larger cultural systems that are transmitted across populations and handed down over generations. But the psychological mechanisms that generate and underpin afterlife beliefs may operate quite independently from those inducing us to perform rituals (Boyer, 2001; Whitehouse, 2004). We should not, therefore, expect the different component features of “religion” each to bear the same connection to morality.

 

If true this would be an example of the futility of trying to find a single explantion of the evolution of religion, as opposed to the idea if breaking religion up into separate components of religious behaviour, each potentially having a different cause or combination, evolutionary or culturally, adaptive or by-product...

 

Evolutionary theorists standardly categorize the causal and developmental whys as forms of “proximate” explanation, and the functional and phylogenetic whys as forms of “ultimate” explanation (see Mayr, 1961). In this context, “ultimate” does not mean final or superior, but refers to the evolutionary forces that sustain the psychological or physiological mechanisms in question. Thus, if the pigmentation of butterfly wings in industrial areas becomes darker over successive generations (Haldane, 1927), it is because darker variants have a selective advantage in smoke-stained environments, but that does not dispense with the need to explain the physiological mechanisms by which individual butterfly wings acquire their coloration, darkness, and hue.

 

 

This is important because I think we have seen some discussion on the thread about various possible advantages of religion in terms of group selection and tribal benefits etc. Now there may be merit here evolutionary, and there may not be (I favour the latter), but that's not to deny these functions are not real, and not useful, and not realised consciously by individuals, groups, tribes, religions, it's to say they might not be the adaptive reasons for their emergence, an ultimate explanation.

 

Finally, an evolutionary model should clearly specify the adaptive advantage conferred by the candidate foundation upon individuals who bore it in the ancestral past (as Graham et al., 2013, note, a good evolutionary theory will not invoke biological group selection without adducing a great deal of additional support). Fairness meets this criterion nicely. For example, Baumard, André, and Sperber (2013) have compellingly argued that fairness preferences are adapted to an environment in which individuals competed to be selected and recruited for mutually advantageous cooperative interactions (see also Trivers, 1971).

We should seek to find an adaptive reason that finds its selective pressure lower than that of the group,at the individual, or gene, which may favour group benefits in practice, culturally,

Here we discuss five strong candidates for religious foundationhood: (a) a system specialized for the detection ofagents; (b) a system devoted to representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of intentional agents; © a system geared toward producing teleofunctional explanations of objects and events; (d) a system specialized for affiliating with groups through the imitation of causally opaque action sequences; and (e) a system specialized for the detection of genetic kinship. Like proponents of MFT, we do not claim that this list is exhaustive, and future research may suggest alternative, or additional, candidates (when relevant, we discuss current alternate views). Our commitment, born of doubt that there is any “distilled essence” of religion (Gray et al., 2012), is primarily to a pluralistic approach. Nevertheless, based on an extensive review of the cognitive science of religion literature, the following represent the most plausible candidates for universal religious foundations, on current evidence.

 

Second is Theory of Mind (ToM). I skipped over HADDs as I previously discussed them.

 

Notions of supernatural beings as psychological entities with beliefs, preferences, and intentions—intentionalagents—are also likely to be compelling for humans in light of their expertise in representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of others ...The root of this, Bering argues, is that humans have dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about mental states, which, unlike our capacities for reasoning about the mechanical and biological properties of bodies, cannot conceptualize total system failure.

 

If we embrace the earlier of point of breaking religion up into different elements, the theory of mind has potential with dealing with one element in particular, the afterlife. Given humans ability to process the world, consciousness and reflect on their existence, difficulties potentially emerge for an biological individual that can realise its own death, and such a realisation could prove destruction to that individual for achieving maximum evolutionary fitness. Could certain modules be adaptive in proving religious explanations of an afterlife to provide innate coping mechanisms to such a self-ware biological machine???

 

Third is teleofunctional Explanations

...a broad inclination to view objects and behaviors of all kinds—including features of the natural world—as existing for a purpose....an underlying tendency to construe the world in functional terms is present throughout life (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009). If so, this tendency may render notions of intelligent supernatural designers, who have created the world and everything in it for a purpose, especially compelling (Kelemen, 2004).

Fourth Rituals

 

...yet by meticulously conforming to arbitrary social conventions, human groups bind themselves together into cooperative units facilitating cooperation on a scale that is very rare in nature...One of the many clues that ritualistic behavior is written into our species’ evolved biological makeup is the fact that it emerges early in development (Nielsen, 2006). Even infants show considerable interest in causally opaque behavior and will try to copy it...to help children acquire complex technical skills in the absence of a fuller understanding of their underlying causal structure (Schulz, Hooppell, & Jenkins, 2008). Another possibility is that overimitation is designed to help children learn arbitrary group conventions or “rituals.” Such behavior may be motivated by a desire to belong, rather than to learn anything technically useful...

 

Its important to not evoke group selection, you can have gene and individual level selection that favours group co-operation behaviour.

 

Fifth- Kin selection

 

Inclusive fitness theory predicts that organisms will behave in ways that preferentially benefit kin, with more benefits conferred as the degree of genetic relatedness between the actor and the recipient increases (Hamilton, 1964). ...As Pinker (2012) points out, kin recognition in humans depends on cues (in particular, linguistic cues) that others can manipulate...Cultural manipulations of kinship detection machinery may be rife in ritualistic behavior. As Saroglou (2011) notes, religious rituals serve to bond ritual participants together...

The paper offers a summary in the section :The Religion–Morality Relationship in Biological Evolution which discusses their preferences in regard to different ideas they summarise from the literature. They state

As we have seen, Guthrie’s (1993) proposal is that biased agency-perception mechanisms (assuming they exist) are an adaptation for avoiding predators. If the functioning of such mechanisms led to conclusions about the presence of invisible, supernatural agents, this was (at least initially) merely a by-product—a biological spandrel

 

 

 

Note the choice of the word initially, leaving open the door to the idea that adaptive functions of various religious behaviour may have followed in time...

 

The evolution of these various mechanisms (morality-related -inserted by tantalus) would have occasioned a novel set of selection pressures—in particular, the costs associated with being caught violating foundational moral principles. According to D. D. P. Johnson, Bering, and colleagues, the evolution of linguistic and mentalizing capacities would have ramped up these costs, as moral transgressions could be reported to absent third parties, exacerbating reputational damage for the transgressor. The conjunction of these various mechanisms, therefore, may have increased the premium on mechanisms that inhibit moral transgressions. Intuitions about punitive supernatural observers—a short xcursion through Design Space (Dennett, 1995) for mechanisms that are already generating ideas about invisible supernatural agents as a matter of course—would fit the bill here: “What better way [to avoid the fitness costs associated with the real-world detection of moral transgressions] than to equip the human mind with a sense that their every move—even thought—is being observed, judged, and potentially punished?”

 

 

I would love to know what Dennett thinks of this creative speculation...

 

The paper conitunes on the back of such a speculation to discuss empirical evidence of religiosity and increased “moral” behaviour. (we could call this a sixth avenue of exploration) As an atheist, as an anti-theist, this subject makes for fascinating reading for me.

 

Surveys indicate that people who score higher on indices of religiosity (e.g., frequency of prayer and religious service attendance) reliably report more helping behaviors, such as charitable donations (Brooks, 2006; Putnam & Campbell, 2010). As Norenzayan and Shariff (2008) have persuasively argued, however, this “charity gap” could occur because of an important confound: It may be that religious individuals aresimply more motivated to maintain a moral reputation than nonreligious individuals......

 

Note. They also discuss methodological and bias challenges to some of this research.

 

...those primed with supernatural concepts are more cooperative in experimental economic measures, such as dictator games (Ahmed & Salas, 2011; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007; cf. Benjamin, Choi, & Fisher, 2010), public goods games (Ahmed & Hammarstedt, 2011; Benjamin et al., 2010), common-pool resource games (Xygalatas, 2013), and prisoner’s dilemma games (Ahmed & Salas, 2011).7Moreover, primed participants evince greater intention to help others (Malhotra, 2010; Pichon, Boccato, & Saroglou, 2007; Pichon & Saroglou, 2009), less willingness to cheat (Aveyard, 2014; Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005; Carpenter & Marshall, 2009; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007), and greater self-control (Friese & Wänke, 2014; Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons, 2012; Rounding, Lee, Jacobson, & Li, 2012; Toburen & Meier, 2010; cf. Harrison & McKay, 2013).

 

See article for discussion on limitations of such games such as conflicting moral motivations in game design. They also briefly discuss religiosity with negative moral traits, but morally good or bad, is of course not informative against something being evolutionary adaptive.

Overall, we think that religious priming studies provide at least tentative evidence that activating intuitions about supernatural agents curbs moral norm violations.

 

Although they provide caveats, see article.

...in these small-scale hunter–gatherer societies that explicit doctrines about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are conspicuously absent (Baumard & Boyer, 2013a;Boehm, 2008; Boyer, 2001). For example, the Hadza of northern Tanzania and the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are contemporary hunter–gatherer societies with gods who take little interest in human wrongdoing (Norenzayan, 2013).

 

In our judgment, therefore, it is unlikely that our evolved cognitive systems produce stable intuitions about omnipresent supernatural punishers. What we think more plausible is that we have a genetically endowed sensitivity to situational cues that our behavior is being observed. Experiments demonstrate that people—even young children—are “strategically prosocial,” behaving more generously and cooperatively when they know others can observe their behavior (e.g., Gächter & Fehr, 1999; Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, & Olson, 2012; Wedekind & Milinski, 2000). A burgeoning literature indicates that even very subtle cues of surveillance influence adherence to prevailing moral norms.

 

 

 

The upshot of all this work is that evolved agency-detection mechanisms may serve to deliver intuitions about observing agents and to regulate our behavior in the presence of those agents. We doubt, however, that such mechanisms deliver intuitions about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents—instead, we think that the relevant intuitions are more basic (just concerning the presence of agency per se). Triggered in the absence of any visible intentional agent, however, such intuitions may be reflectively elaborated into conclusions about supernatural watchers (Baumard & Boyer, 2013b). And drawing on intuitions about fairness and the psychological characteristics of intentional agents (ToM), such supernatural watcher concepts may morph into more complex, compelling, and culturally transmissible notions of moralizing gods—notions which, when made salient or activated (as in priming studies), serve to promote adherence to the perceived norms of those gods.

 

Important concluding point

we can often make no principled distinction between religion and morality at the level of culture or cognition....A thoroughgoing science of “religion” and “morality” may ultimately dispense with these terms, exhaustively mapping the relations between evolved cognitive systems and cultural representations without recourse to vague overarching labels.

The next section discusses how the cultural evolution of religion may be informed and directed by already occurred biological evolution...

 

They then discuss a cargo cult (modern religion) under the context of the framework they have outlined.

Scholars in the cognitive science of religion tend to agree that many globally and historically recurrent features of religious thinking and behavior are by-products of cognitive machinery that evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with religion ...What distinguishes the adaptationist perspective on religion, however, is the view that at least some of these religious by-products became useful for the survival of individuals and groups in the course of cultural evolution. Most commonly, this argument has been applied to the growth of large-scale societies

 

We are now dealing more heavily in cultural evolution. Although the discussion of the cultural evolution of religion is interesting, it does drift from the idea of adaptive biological reasons for religion so I will ignore that section of the paper.

 

Effectively they seek to crush the idea that the OP question is a meaningful one, and set about to create a conceptual framework that can stimulate a meaninful discussion on the biological and cultural evolution of religion and moral based behaviour.

 

I favour biological mechanisms that had adaptive functions that gave arise (edit. subsequently) to much religious behaviour, evolutionary speaking the evolutionary origins of various of types of relgiious behaviour may be evolutionary separate. The idea that a belief in god is linked to the evolution of morality and the evolution and successful function of a highly intelligent self-aware being is definitely an interesting idea imo.

Edited January 25, 2016 by tantalus

[iNow]

Such a complex and nuanced topic. There is the obvious social cohesion, group indentity, and tribal protection elements, but so much more of it has to do with our mentation.

 

As Phi notes, we evolved the ability to safely practice in our imaginations interactions with unseen others. We could visualize the fight with the neighboring tribe without actually fighting them. We could visualize the hunt before ever picking up a spear. We could visualize the coming winter before feeling the first hint if cold. In short, our minds allowed us to practice and prepare and it's not a huge leap to begin visualizing unseen others who are not actually there at all.

 

Add to that what Prometheus highlighted. There was huge advantage to learning from those around us. When born, we trusted our parents and kin and tribal elders. We benefited from their experience simply through a narrative. We became more strongly educated without ever having the experience directly ourselves. We learned about hunts and dangers "out there" through story telling and training in the safety of our family and we extrapolated and enhanced those stories into something more as our imaginations became more robust.

 

Our stories and narratives were hugely beneficial to our chances at survival, but they weren't always right. A story about an angry bear in the valley prevented us from getting mauled, or a story about the bush with blue berries prevented us from being poisoned, so we also invented stories about the thunder or earthquake or drought or flood being signs from angry gods... Evidence that we'd done something wrong and must change our behavior. The stories were a form of conditioning that altered how we acted.

 

Further, that innate trust in the parent/tribal elder logical implies that in parallel we'd assume some ultimate parent-figure in the universe exists to guide everything... aka god or gods, the ultimate parent. We also knew those who believed differently from the group or who went against the established teachings were ostracized / cast out and thus lost access to food, protection, and mates. This would further reinforce whatever narratives or belief systems that were in place since their acceptance increased the likelihood of survival for so many reasons and in so many ways.

 

As others have already mentioned, this has little to do with either religion or the religious beliefs themselves, IMO. The far more reasonable and parsimonious explanation has to do with the emergent capabilities that became available with our enlarging minds (ability to practice interactions with unseen others, share experience and knowledge with others through narrative and song, implicitly trust parents and tribal elders, minimize doubt and cynicism of their teachings / more readily assume them to be true, etc.), and all within an environment where group association and social cohesion were the single biggest driver of survival and ability to pass genes to future generations.

 

If you understand the psychology of why we crave the Big Mac, then you understand the psychology of religion and religious belief, themselves just super-stimuli shining light on far more powerful evolutionarily selected underlying neurocortical mechanisms.

[EdEarl]

Read about the Buddha and Buddhism to learn how teachings of a man who does not claim to be a deity can become the foundation for religion; its long history of evolution is documented. Study the life of John Smith and the Mormon church; although, its history is short in comparison. You might look at Scientology, which has a very short. One might compare Hinduism, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups to see the results of religious evolution; IDK how much of its history has been recorded. Of course, Christian history and its evolution have been recorded. Seems to me there are case histories for evolution of religion that are relevant to the discussion.

[Robittybob1]

EdEarl The topic is not the evolution of religion but the evolution of the human that enabled man to become religious. For all tribes had some sort of religion AFAIK.

I was wondering if this was reflected in our genetics. Memes is a word I heard yesterday as a solution. I don't see that concept of memes being used much on the forum.

Edited January 26, 2016 by Robittybob1

[tantalus]

I was wondering if this was reflected in our genetics. Memes is a word I heard yesterday as a solution. I don't see that concept of memes being used much on the forum.

Just look at twin studies on religiosity, they are consistently finding significant genetic effects on the likelihood of being religious, upwards and over 50% of the variance.

 

This speaks to the influence on genes, whatever of the adaptive or non-adaptive history in evolutionary terms.

 

There is also research indicating the increased influence of genes on religiosity into adulthood, probably as people leave their parents homes and their influence dwindles, the most powerful environmental factor.

Edited January 26, 2016 by tantalus

[Anthony Morris]

I've given some thought to this subject ever since I became a nonbeliever. I suspect the most primitive religions are the placeto start. Mostparts of the world had ancestor worship long before they had religion as most people think of it today. Ancestor worship does not entail gods or God. What our ancient ancestors most likely percieved when they were feeling watched or that a predator might be near (HADD) was the presence of a spirit and probably that of a deceased relative or community member. This could even have occurred before language evolved as language is not necessary for abstract thought. As language evolved, this tendency would be reinforced by talking about these feelings and other events such as dreams. It's easy to see this sort of thing today. My family relates stories about our ancestors, some of which a bit fabulous and probably not accurate but that is the nature of story-telling. An example might be reminding a child that his deceased mother would want him to eat his vegetables.

 

We have a tendency to extrapolate from our experiences. The notion of spirit might have taken some time to evolve but once it did it would have stuck for the simplicity of it. The notion would have evolved through speech. Speech transports notions (memes) and discourse winnows the more "fit" memes from the less fit ones. A genetic selection may have occurred as well thereby reinforcing the social bond that was evolving at the time. Those individuals that were able to accept the memes being delivered by the more powerful majority (parents, siblings, neighbors and leaders) were best able to adapt to the social environment in which they found themselves. Differing populations subsequently evolved their own religious memes as their environments changed and some schisms may have led to some populations leaving their neighbors for safety's sake. These differing populations would continue to evolve their religious beliefs and spawn new populations in turn that would slowly change their beliefs as well. At some point ancestors would become heroes and later some of them would become gods. As populations intermingled some of them would share their stories of ancestors, heroes and gods. Some would conflate their stories with each other. Some would go to war against each other. Stories would evolve and rituals as well. All of the cultural paraphernalia would evolve in its own way under individualistic conditions.

 

Ancestor spirits are generally believed to be capable of altering conditions for descendants if they are propitiated properly. It is easy to see some ancestors becoming associated with wind, rain, courage, battle, light, dark and the beasts and plants. These attributes would become the basis for some of the titles of gods. Polytheism would be simple gradation from ancestor worship. Single-god religions would be the winnowing of conflicting, opposing or inconvenient gods from the roster. Judaism is known to be derived from the local polytheistic religions of the Middle-East. Some gods disappear from loss of worshippers because the god or the religious observances were no longer appreciated or because the followers died. Some group of worshippers likely decided to get rid of some of the gods and their temples to consolidate power. After a while, there was only one left. Of course, This one religion began to spawn more sects and still does. Christianity especially develops sects with abandon despite the struggles of each sect to prevent this. Most of the processes involved in the evolution of religion are still going on today.

 

The idea of someone inventing religion is a stretch from a more gradual and hence less obtrusive artificial creation of religion. Granted people do invent religions today but the concept and "need" for religion has been here for a long time already so creating a new one is not a stretch although getting converts can still be difficult as most people will not change their beliefs no matter how "reasonable" or "rational" the new religion may be or seem. Most people grow up in their religion and do not make reasoned decisions about their religious membership. There are some however who do change their religious views. Some out of guilt or fear or depression, individuals who may be susceptible to coercion in some form or other. Some, like me, simply are more resistant to religious needs.

 

I have very little need for religion and am more interested in science and evidence. I simply was not indoctrinated enough. Religion was not a major topic of discussion in my family and I was encouraged to read a lot. Many atheists I have talked with have said similar things about their own upbringings albeit not all. Religion in my opinion evolved as a result of genetics being laid over with memes. I sometimes feel as if I'm being watched. I can usually shrug it off after a bit. It would be nice to let myself think my grandmother and grandfather were watching me. I think that is the root of religion's hold over us. Being "sure" that your loved ones are still there watching out for you is a powerful way of keeping you focused on the lessons they taught you. That can keep you alive longer than being down because they are gone. If you don't think your deceased mother is worrying about you, will you eat your peas? The difference in survival is slight but that is how evolution works. Small benefits are more likely to yield positive results and hence better survival and more surviving progeny.