richerson newson - religion adaptive

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62 Chapter 7 Peter J. Richerson and Leslie Newson

Richard Dawkins (2006) argues that religious ideas are maladaptivecultural elements (memes), typically transmitted to children at young ageswhen their minds are impressionable and their decision-making powers not

yet ully unctional. He subscribes to a by-product hypothesis to explainmost i not all o religion. Young minds have to be impressionable so as torapidly and accurately acquire essential inormation rom parents. Parasiticreligious memes take advantage o this impressionability.

Dawkins analysis is too simplistic. Nevertheless, one doesnt have toollow Dawkins in suggesting that all religious ideas, institutions, and orga-nizations are maladaptive to realize that some probably are. Teory tells usthat cultural variants that are transmitted non-parentally can readily evolve

pathological properties. Extreme examples o religious sects espousing mal-adaptive ideas do certainly exist. Te cult led by Jim Jones that committedmass suicide in 1978 is one example.

Lets pick apart the question: Is Religion Adaptive? Are we asking ireligion as a whole is adaptive, or some particular religion? Or do we wantto examine some aspect o religion? Every religion is an amalgam o belies,practices, institutions, and organizations. Tese are webbed up with otherdomains o cultureart, social and political organization, amily lie, practi-

cal knowledge, and so on. And, o course, religions are diverse in a multi-plicity o dimensions. Tere are polytheisms, monotheisms, and a-theisticspiritual, ethical, and mystical systems. Some insist that adherents maintaina proper set o belies, some consider carrying out proper ritual to be all-im-portant, and some emphasize common commitment to ethical ideals. Somerestrict entry to a select ew. Others are evangelical and open to all who wantto join. Some religions are bureaucratic and authoritarian and others are theproduct o egalitarian local groups. We know that some societies are success-ul and some ail and collapse. Religions, given their importance, complexity,and diversity, certainly contribute to both success and ailure.

Dawkins parasitic meme explanation gives us a rst cut at a theoryo religious maladaptations. Now let us turn to how religion might evolveadaptations. Religionor a religionor some aspect o religion mightbe adaptive or an individual human, or it might be adaptive or a group oindividuals, a congregation, a tribe or a nation. In the case o the individual,we use adaptive to mean helping its survival and reproductive success.Religions seem to have individually adaptive benets. For example, Hill and

Pargament (2003) review the literature on the connection between religionand spirituality and physical and mental health. In the case o the group oindividuals, we use adaptive to mean helping the group to continue andgrow by recruiting new members and by helping the long-standing membersto prosper and reproduce. Most adaptive accounts o religion ocus on adap-tations at the group level.


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63Is Religion Adaptive?

Let us see how such an account might be built. Richerson and Boyd(2005) have developed what they call the tribal social instincts hypothesisto explain human cooperation. Te hypothesis argues that the evolution

o culture set in motion a process o group selection on cultural variation.Populations in semi-isolation rapidly evolved cultural dierences. Symbolicboundaries limited the ow o ideas between groups. Individual memberswere inclined to copy the behavior most common within their group andthis decreased the dierences within the groups and increased dierencesbetween the groups. Individuals who ailed to conorm were punished andared badly within the group. Groups with superior culturally transmittedsocial institutions prosper in competition with ones with poorer institutions.

As these processes continued or generation ater generation in theremote past, primitive cooperative institutions arose, orming a social en-vironment that selected or innate social instincts that enabled humans tolive in moral communities. Te humans successul in this environment wererelatively docile, prepared to conorm to social norms and institutions, andprepared to cooperate, especially with members o a symbolically markedin-group. Te societies in which our social nature was shaped were tribescomprising only a ew hundred to a ew thousand people, but in size and

degree o cooperation they ar surpassed the societies o other apes. Teseinstincts dont orce us to cooperate with just anyone, but enable us to learnto cooperate when appropriate. Tus human tribes and their modern suc-cessors came to be adapted units. Religions are candidates to have urnishedsome o the institutions that make tribes, and eventually large social systems,adapted systems.

Note that an adaptation at any one level is oten maladaptive at otherlevels; religions that organize congregations tend to lead to sectarian strieamong congregations. Sonya Salamon (1992) provides a concrete examplerom her comparisons o arming communities in the American state o Il-linois. British ancestry communities in the state typically have a number osmall Protestant churches. Congregations preach incompatible dogmas andcompete or members. Religion is a divisive inuence at the community level.German ancestry communities tend to have a single church in each com-munity, either Catholic or Lutheran, but not both in any one community. Inthese communities the churches oster community-level solidarity.

Common eatures o religions are plausible community level adaptations

(D.S. Wilson, this volume). Most religions teach a moral code that requiresits members to help one another. Tey also provide the means or identiyingtrue members (those who have taken the teachings to heart) rom thosewho are not. Many elements o religion serve to mark the members in goodstanding. Iannaccone (1994) argues that strict aiths can generate higherlevels o cooperation and mutual help than lax ones because the practices o


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strict churches are too costly or cheaters to ake. Te belies o strict church-es are complex and difcult to learn. Te ongoing expenditures o time andresources to conorm to the practices o strict aiths are high. Subscribing

to outlandish belies handicaps members rom reasonably considering theevidence and judging what might really be in their best interest. Belongingto a strict aith is a conspicuous commitment that makes it difcult ormembers to maintain strong ties with members o other belie systems. Feware willing to pay such high costs unless their commitment to the religiouscommunity is genuine. Te group is thereore protected rom invasion byparasitic impostors.

Still, the higher the costs members o a religion must pay, the lower their

net benet in being a member. Te congregation might be so engaged inmaintaining rituals and ritual objects that they can devote no eort let tohelping one another. Furthermore, the levels o practical commitment thatmight sometimes be required o devout aith group members may be detri-mental to their welare. Te net adaptive benets o a religion may all belowzero well short o an extreme case like Jonestown.

When religion promotes welare because it unies a community under acommon set o customs, institutions, and organizations, it is most eective

when most i not all people in the population are members o the religiouscommunity. At the tribe and village scale, such uniormity may arise sponta-neously, but the evolution o state-level societies was typically accompaniedby the ormation o more ormal religious systems. Troughout the historyo civilization, many conquerors and leaders have attempted to uniy a popu-lation by declaring one orm o religion to be ofcial, oten with themselvesas the ofcial leader or even as a living god. As ancient empires like Romegrew, they oten incorporated the gods o newly won communities intothe imperial pantheon. Te teachings in the Quran unied Arab clans andeventually many dierent national groups despite the schisms that soon de-veloped. Many societies, be they historically Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic,were and still are hostile to unofcial ideologies.

Te act that so many civilizations throughout history have had ofcialreligions suggests that religions are oten a net advantage to a large popula-tion. Perhaps religion is most advantageous when everyone subscribes to asingle one. A universal religion can promote cooperation on a wide scaleand coordinate larger groups, bringing important benets to the whole so-

ciety (Wilson 2002). On the other hand, established churches oten becomehidebound, bureaucratic, and corrupt. Sometimes they are the handmaidenso predatory elites. Sociologists o religion Roger Finke and Rodney Stark(Finke & Stark 1992) contrast the eebly established churches o WesternEurope with Americas vibrant religious economy based upon a plethora oentrepreneurial churches and sects.


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65Is Religion Adaptive?

Culture is commonly adaptive in part because human actors shape themto be so. David Wilson (2002) provides a number o examples o religiousideas being adopted because they provided tness benets. Te ormation

and spread o Calvinism is his central example. He describes in some de-tail how the problem o corruption in the Catholic Church led Calvin andhis colleagues to propose, and the people o Geneva eventually to adopt, areligiously inspired code o conduct that eectively ended the disruptiveactionalism in the city. Calvins model inspired much imitation based onits success in Geneva. Karen Armstrong (1991) gives a similar account oMuhammads religiously inspired code aimed at regulating the intertribalanarchy o the Arabs. Stephen Lansing (1993) shows how Balinese Water

emples unction to organize scarce water and coordinate rice planting onBali so as to optimize rice yields.

However, cultural-evolutionary mechanisms may generate specic sortso maladaptive behaviors and, again, religion is as vulnerable as any other parto culture. For example, symbolic culture can evolve maladaptively exaggeratedtraits by a mechanism much like sexual selection (Richerson & Boyd 1989).Exaggerated, costly, religious rituals could be examples. Te Protestant Re-ormations charge that the Roman Catholic Churchs lavish expenditures or

buildings and ornaments were dysunctional is a potential example. Perhapscostly religious behavior sometimes has little or nothing to do with guaran-teeing honest signals and is mostly or entirely costly competitive exaggeration.

Conclusion

In the ace o biological and cultural complexity and diversity, phenom-ena like religion are unlikely to support sweeping generalizations about ad-aptation versus maladaptation. Teory tells us that many things are possibleand the empirical cases seem to agree. Any generalizations will have to bebased upon careul empirical work. Te basic task is to total up the variouskinds o costs and benets that accrue to religious variants at all the relevantlevels o organization. Tis project has barely begun in any domain o culture.

References

Armstrong, K. 1991. Muhammad: A western attempt to understand Islam. Lon-don, UK: Victor Gollancz.

Campbell, D. . 1965. Variation and selective retention in socio-cultural

evolution. In H. R. Barringer, G. I. Blanksten, & R. W. Mack, Eds., Socialchange in developing areas: A reinterpretation of evolutionary theory, pp. 19-49. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company.

Campbell, D. . 1975. On the conicts between biological and social evolu-tion and between psychology and moral tradition. American Psychologist,3012), 1103-1126.


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Cavalli-Sorza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. 1981. Cultural transmission and evolu-tion: A quantitative approach, monographs in population biology, Vol. 16.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dawkins, R. 2006. Te God delusion. London, UK: Bantam.Finke, R., & Stark, R. 1992. Te churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and

losers in our religious economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Gintis, H. 2004. owards the unity o the behavioral sciences. Politics, Philoso-

phy & Economics, 3 (1), 37-57.Hill, P. C., & Pargament, K. I. 2003. Advances in the conceptualization and

measurement o religion and spirituality: Implications or physical andmental health. American Psychologist, 58 (1), 64-74.

Iannaccone, L. R. 1994. Why strict churches are strong. American Journal ofSociology, 99 (5), 1180-1211.

Laland, K. N., & Brown, G. R. 2002. Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspec-tives on human behaviour. Oxord, UK: Oxord University Press.

Lansing, J. S. 1993. Emergent properties o Balinese Water emple networks:Coadaptation on a rugged tness landscape. American Anthropologist, 95(1), 97-114.

Lumsden, C. J., & Wilson, E. O. 1981. Genes, mind, and culture: Te coevolu-

tionary process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. 1989. A Darwinian theory or the evolution osymbolic cultural traits. In M. Freilich Ed.) Te relevance of culture, pp.124-147. Boston, MA: Bergin and Garvey.

Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. 2005. Not by genes alone: How culture transformedhuman evolution. Chicago, IL: University o Chicago Press.

Salamon, S. 1992. Prairie patrimony: Family, farming, and community in themidwest, studies in rural culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University o NorthCarolina Press.

Wilson, D. S. 2002. Darwins cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of soci-ety. Chicago, IL: University o Chicago Press.



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richerson newson - religion adaptive

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