Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (32 page)

At the same time, it seems likely that religious belief is strongly influenced by our own preferences, and not simply by an objective assessment of validity. Francis Bacon, considered by many to be the conceptual founder of science as an organized enterprise, suggested that “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true,” which is not entirely different from other beliefs (e.g., in the honesty of one’s relatives and friends, in our own basic goodness, etc.). So maybe the issue is preference rather than actual truth—what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” This raises the additional question: Regardless of whether religions are “true” (and whatever true means in this context), why do so many people find them “truthy”? What is there in human nature combined with the nature of religion that makes the latter so appealing to the former? According to Karen Armstrong in her book
A History of God
, religion is “something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity.”
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This appears to be true, but doesn’t explain very much. More specifically, from whence commeth this naturalness?

At the outset, let’s dispense with a seemingly obvious answer that upon inspection turns out to be no answer at all: Religion has evolved because it provides comfort. This merely substitutes “comfort” for a purported explanation. To say that people find religion comforting is the same as saying that it makes them feel good or contributes to their sense of well-being (and perhaps, of
course, to their genuine well-being, too). But it begs the question. Sleep provides comfort when we’re tired, food provides comfort when we’re hungry, and sex provides comfort when we’re erotically needy. The human psyche has evolved to find these experiences, and numerous others, pleasurable and comforting because they contribute ultimately to our biological success. What about religion?

In most cases, when we closely observe an animal—or even a plant, for that matter—we find that its nature, including its behavior no less than its structure, is likely to “make sense.” This means that we can generally determine how a particular behavior or structure contributes to the organism’s success. The fins of a fish help it swim; the feathers of a bird enable it to fly; the eyes of a horse or of a human being allow it to see. In such cases, one needn’t be an expert to intuit what evolutionary scientists call the “adaptive significance” of the characteristic in question. What especially repays further attention are those cases when the practical, success-promoting effects of a structure or behavior isn’t clear. A notable example is altruism, which had long been an evolutionary puzzle since it seems to defy bio-logic for individuals to behave in a way that reduces their own fitness while enhancing that of others. Such altruism—although admirable by ethical standards—should be eliminated by natural selection and replaced by genetic tendencies to maximize, not reduce, the success of any predisposing genes.

In the case of altruism, such a paradox led to the crucial insight that what appears to be altruism at the level of bodies is actually selfishness at the level of the genes themselves, something that is particularly evident when biologists looked for—and found—close correspondence between genetic relatedness and the predisposition toward “altruism.” In most cases, if we see an animal—or a person—expending calories or running risks to get food, or a mate, or defending its offspring, we typically know what’s going on. But if we see said animal—or person—doing something that appears silly, wasteful, or downright hurtful, then the antennae of evolutionary scientists are likely to twitch.

If a physicist from Alpha Centauri were to examine the body shape of fish, especially their fins and tails, he/she/it would be able to deduce a great deal about the nature of water. Similarly, close attention to the structure of feathers and of birds’ wings would
provide huge insight into what constitutes “air.” The list could easily be expanded, the basic point being that because of the way natural selection works, there is a very close correspondence between the nature of living things and the nature of the real world. This poses a fascinating problem for students of religion: Even if we are prepared to agree with Gandhi that “all religions are true,”
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we need to ask why religion is a cross-cultural universal. After all, people need air to live—also food, water, sleep, and so forth. But these truths have not resulted in cross-cultural belief systems that worship air, pray to water, or offer sacrifices to sleep.

Religion poses an interesting evolutionary mystery for yet another reason: It is costly.

Attending church, synagogue, or mosque takes time and energy that could be spent otherwise. Thus, simply showing up for religious observances imposes what economists call an “opportunity cost” (the simple fact that doing anything—so long as it requires time, energy, or resources—occurs at the cost of reduced opportunity to do something else). Religions nearly always levy some sort of explicit tax as well, ranging from voluntary donations to strict tithing. Not uncommonly, the faithful must submit, in addition, to extensive training, sometimes including difficult and painful initiation procedures, or if nothing else, sponsoring and supporting the existence of a special class of what seem to be social parasites known as priests, ministers, monks, deacons, rabbis, shamans, and so forth. Most important, however, is the disconnect between faith—defined as “belief without evidence”—and quotidian life itself, grounded as the latter is in day-to-day evidentiary reality.

“The most common of all foibles,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.”
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There is much to be said for optimism, but the fact remains that many of the beliefs encouraged by religion are not only palpably untrue but also
downright lethal: The Lord’s Resistance Army, for example, a rebel group in Uganda, has convinced many of its juvenile followers that they are impervious to enemy bullets. One would think that such palpably untrue and overtly fitness-diminishing beliefs would not persist for long. As Steven Pinker puts it, “A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.”
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In fact, maybe delusions of these sorts are comforting, or at-ease putting … but if so, not for long. And therein lies the evolutionary mystery. Even when the demands of faith are less than lethal, and even if they are somewhat more defensible—not necessarily provably true but at least not patently absurd and readily disprovable—they nonetheless tend to go directly against the evidence of daily experience as well as common sense: for example, someone is born to a virgin who is eventually killed but later ascends bodily to heaven, or worship of a god with the body of a man and the head of an elephant.

“It is undesirable,” wrote philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, “to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it to be true.”
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There is a big issue here: Insofar as the human brain and mind are fine-tuned to maximize fitness, what’s the payoff for being so downright wrong when it comes to how the world works? As we shall see, maybe such belief is desirable to evolution (which is to say, favored by natural selection), even if unappealing to rationality minded thinkers such as Bertrand Russell.
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Whether its teachings are factually wrong or right, “Religion is a human universal,” notes anthropologist Jonathan Benthall, “and those who think they can eliminate it by scientific argument or ridicule are no more likely to succeed than those who would eliminate sexuality or playfulness or violence.”
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I don’t think I could eliminate religion by scientific argument or ridicule (although frankly, I would do so if I could). What I am seeking to accomplish in this chapter is to try to understand, scientifically, why religion is a human universal, why—as Benthall indicates in the subtitle of his book—“a secular age is haunted by faith.”

In his book
On Human Nature
, Edward O. Wilson
⁷
noted that

Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions. Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.

In Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
, Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe things that are impossible. “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” replies the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” It is widely noted that much of religious faith involves believing in the impossible—not in spite of the impossibility, but because of it. This is fine as poetry, but just as natural selection ruthlessly weeds out maladaptive traits (a tendency to approach predators as though they are one’s friends, or to refuse food when hungry), it should deal harshly with any tendency to do things that are wasteful or with adherence to a creed that espouses tenets that are “impossible.” In the world of biological evolution, reality rules.

In his book
Freedom Evolves
, philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that from an evolutionary perspective, any characteristic of a living thing that appears to go beyond what is functionally necessary or useful cries out for explanation. “We don’t marvel at a creature doggedly grubbing in the earth with its nose, for we figure it is seeking its food; if, however, it regularly interrupts its rooting with somersaults, we want to know why.”
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Looking at Muslims interrupting their lives to pray five times each day, at Jews refusing to use electricity or even ride in a car on their Sabbath, at Hindus circumnavigating the 52-km route around holy Mt. Kailash
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making full-body prostrations on their knees the entire way
, or
Christians donating 10% or more of their income to their churches, evolutionists cannot help seeing the biological equivalent of truffle-pigs doing cartwheels.

Of course, religions almost always serve the interests of those who promote them, so there is nothing mysterious in the fact that shamans, ministers, priests, rabbis, imams, and rinpoches support religion, often to the detriment of the mainline followers. Evolutionary biologists are familiar with a similar phenomenon, in which natural selection generates arms races between potentially competing entities. Prey-catching adaptations on the part of wolves are typically not adaptive for elk. What’s good for the lion is likely bad for the lamb.

But if there is little need to explain the adaptive value of religion from the perspective of its purveyors, its generals, and their associated high command, what about the much more numerous followers, the willing soldiers of the Lord? Or, another way of putting it: Insofar as there are genes that predispose their bodies to partake of religion, what is in it for those genes?

To be clear, there is no “God gene,” despite the wildly exaggerated assertion by geneticist Dean Hamer.
⁹
Rather, there is a particular genetic variant, known as VMAT2, which—along with many others—helps code for the production of proteins that do much of the work in our brains: so-called neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. Different versions of VMAT2 exist in different people (the technical term is that it is polymorphic). And this, in turn, could contribute to why different people respond differently to different stimuli and situations. More specifically, Hamer found a weak but seemingly genuine correlation between the presence of the VMAT2 gene and a tendency to feel connected to the world and a willingness to accept things that cannot be objectively demonstrated. In a review of
The God Gene
in
Scientific American
, Carl Zimmer wrote that a more accurate title would have been “A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.”

There is, however, some evidence pointing to a general genetic underpinning when it comes to religion. A study characterized the
religious inclinations of 31 pairs of fraternal twins who had been reared apart, comparing their pattern of similarity and difference with that found among 53 pairs of identical twins also reared apart. Fraternal twins share, on average, 50% of their genome, whereas identical twins are genetically identical, sharing 100% of their genes. Interestingly, when it came to religious tendencies, the correlation between the identical twins was roughly double that of the fraternals.
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A similar result was found in an Australian study involving more than 4,000 twin pairs from Australia and England.
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In a sense, therefore, we appear to be genetically hard-wired for religion. But what does this mean? Clearly, it isn’t for a particular religion; there are more than 7,000 identified varieties.

Consider this: It has been well demonstrated that a particular human genetic variant, by modifying the way its carriers metabolize the neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin, generate a predisposition toward risk taking. This general inclination manifests itself in specific behaviors, such as a fondness for roller coasters, or for fast sports cars. This does not mean that there is a gene “for” roller coasters, or “against” sedate Volvo sedans. Rather, our genetic makeup often predisposes us in one direction or another, with the specifics determined by what’s on offer. Not only are there no genes for Buddhism as opposed to Hinduism, or for Jewishness as opposed to Christianity, but also there are no genes for religion as opposed to atheism. But there can certainly be genes that make people more or less likely to believe things without empirical evidence, more or less likely to accept the authority of others, more or less likely to enjoy ritualized behaviors such as singing in a chorus, and so forth. Instead of thinking about genes “for” religion, it is more useful to consider genes that result in an openness or susceptibility or inclination for religion.