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ABSTRACT
This article has three aims. First, it attempts to identify the exact problem religion poses to those developing an account of the evolution of human social life, and of the cognitive capacities that sustain that life. Having done that, the article aims to specify the criteria that an explanation of the evolution of religion should meet. Second, it presents a critique of one popular account: the idea that religion emerges as a result of cognitive biases that favor agentive thinking, that favor minimally counter-intuitive narratives, amplified and entrenched by some form of cultural evolution. Third, it sketches a positive account in which various forms of communal practice and quasi-religious activity precede the emergence of religious belief. The machinery of the cultural transmission of religion is built before religion transitions into (in part) an ideological system. I call this an ethnographic model of the evolution of religion, because the core ideas are implicit (and sometimes partly explicit) in ethnographically oriented anthropology of religion.
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help I had working up the ideas in this article. Ben Fraser, Carl Brusse, Joseph Bulbulia, Russell Gray, Peter Hiscock, Jess Isserow, and Ron Planer all read and commented on an earlier draft. Ben, Carl, and Ron pressed me, in particular, on the need to give an account of the similarity and stability of religious narrative content across different groups, and Ron suggested that I take more seriously the idea that extraordinary experience might play a role in this explanation. Joseph plugged me into important literature I might otherwise have missed, as did Peter. So too did the reviewers for this journal, whose feedback was constructive in other ways as well. I presented the paper in Wellington, at an empirical philosophy workshop, and in Sydney at an interdisciplinary workshop relating symbolic behavior to the archaeological record, and had helpful feedback at each. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the Australian Research Council, whose generous grants support my work on the evolution of human social life.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 There is a more recent one, dated at about 160 kya, somewhat before the earliest plausible burials (see Clark et al., Citation2003).
2 See Rossano (Citation2015) for a thoughtful and user-friendly review of material symbols in the hominin record, and a careful comparison of their salient role in the sapiens and Neanderthal lineages. He places the onset of religion somewhat earlier than the dates suggested here (at about 150 kya), mostly because he is confident that ocher use is a marker of symbolic, and hence ritual, behavior. There is evidence that ocher was selected for color, and hence it was a technology of visual appearance. But that in itself does not show that ocher was used to make material symbols; both camouflage and signal amplification (think of the value of very intimidating visual displays in stampede hunting). Moreover, Rossano’s analysis of the social role of ritual rests heavily on the idea that rituals were costly signals, and it is one thing to think that material symbol production is a symptom of ritual activity (though material symbols also display individual and collective identity), another to think that they are a symptom of costly rituals. In sum, we are on safer ground when we rely on multiple traces of ritual activity, and these seem mostly to be more recent than 100 kya.
3 More exactly, the form of imaginative thinking of which religion is a special case.
4 See, for example, Atran and Henrich (Citation2010), Baumard and Boyer (Citation2013a, Citation2013b) and Gervais et al. (Citation2011).
5 For many gruesome examples, see chapter 5 of Edgerton (Citation1992).
6 Alcorta and Sosis (Citation2005) and Sosis and Alcorta (Citation2003) also shape this idea into an evolutionary model of religion. But their model is an equilibrium model: if successful, it explains the stability of religion as a system of costly signals, but they do not offer a picture of the incremental transition from a hominin world without religion to one in which religion is ubiquitous and expensive.
7 Somewhat puzzlingly, much of the evolution of religion literature is still framed through the adaptation versus by-product debate, despite the quite wide recognition that religion very likely emerged through some form of coevolutionary dynamics (see, for example, Atran & Henrich, Citation2010). Anton Killin has pointed out that the same is true of the analogous case of music (Killin, Citation2014).
8 There is a near-consensus that there is no such module, even among those who endorse an adaptationist view of the evolution of religion. An exception may be Bering (Citation2006).
9 He seems to be hanging on in Barrett (Citation2008).
10 Guthrie (Citation1980, Citation2014) defends a somewhat similar view. As he sees it, religion is an outgrowth of our pervasive anthropomorphism; pervasive because of the great cost of failing to recognize the presence of an agent who is actually around. But for Guthrie, religious belief in hidden or invisible agents is not counter-intuitive, for he thinks we are intuitive dualists. We do not tacitly or automatically think of minds as embodied in, and as parts of, physical organic systems. I am skeptical of Guthrie’s analysis for the reasons given at the end of section 4: I am very skeptical about the supposed cost asymmetry and its effects.
11 See, for example, Bellah’s (Citation2011) account of Walbiri mythology (pp. 146–159). Stanner’s much longer and more elaborate account of northern Australian ritual practices and beliefs gives a lot more detail, and shows how beliefs and practices can disassociate, but does nothing to make these conceptions of the world seem more intuitive (Stanner, Citation2014). There is a suggestion that this elaborate complexity of these mythological systems is itself a signal (see Mahoney, Citation2008).
12 Notice that the costs of religious practice are real and significant, even if the religious beliefs are true; even if, for example, a healing ritual genuinely cures. Overcoming a child’s neophobia by eating a novel food in front of them is not a cost; it would only be a cost if that novel item had not really been food.
13 See “The Psychoactive Rainforest,” chapter 12 of Watson, Citation2012.
14 And so it is no surprise that very simple primes – a picture of eyes above a coffee dispenser – can provoke enhanced vigilance. But vigilance is one thing; a settled and inelastic belief that the eyes are watching is another.
15 For the distinction and its importance, see Kahneman, Citation2011.
16 Let me emphasize, in my view, this was a change in the center of gravity of the economics of cooperation: almost certainly, some reciprocation was ancient; some immediate return mutualism continued.
17 In Ian Keen’s survey of aboriginal society through the period of contact with settler society, one of the constant themes that comes through the great variation in aboriginal life is the ubiquity of individual connections to neighboring groups. This surely makes sense as a system of risk management in such an unpredictable environment with such striking annual variation (Keen, Citation2004).
18 Whitehouse (Citation2016) distinguishes between naive, imagistic, and doctrinal religion (with his main focus on the last two). In thinking of the first and simplest forms, he buys into the cognitive anthropologist’s picture: “The first is species-typical and more or less invariable, consisting of naturally ‘catchy’ concepts” (p. 43). Bellah’s views on the early evolution of religion are shaped by Merlin Donald’s views on cognitive evolution in general (Donald, Citation2001), and so Bellah distinguishes between mimetic, mythic, and theoretical forms of religion, again thinking of mimetic as an early, proto-religious form. Hayden has a more dichotomized conception, distinguishing between early, small world, traditional experiential religions and latter, large world institutional and doctrinal religions.