Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (35 page)

But at least no harm is done in the process. In fact, some benefit can ensue, as for those African Americans prior to the end of the Civil War who made their way north, escaping slavery, by following the “handle” of the Big Dipper, which ended in the Pole Star, pointing north.

There is no question that the natural world has rewarded people who perceive it accurately, and it seems reasonable that in the process, the door has been opened to misperceptions, as well. But assuming that things don’t flow in the other direction—that sacrificial offerings, prayers, ritual observances, and obeisances of various sorts don’t really influence the physical world—why should people continue to put, literally, their faith in them? Wouldn’t it be more adaptive to drop those belief systems that experience shows to be inaccurate or ineffective? It depends on the cost of persevering versus that of backing away. Moreover, the human tendency to stick with beliefs, even those manifestly unsupported by experience, is itself supported by a deep-seated inclination,
namely, an almost desperate search, not only for patterns, but also for causal connections.

Not that religion necessarily induced believers to substitute erroneous, immaterial explanations for accurate, naturalistic ones. The great British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who spent decades studying the Azande of Africa, reported that these people weren’t ignorant of day-to-day cause and effect. By the same token, most people in the modern world—even those who self-identify as devout—have no difficulty accepting the basic laws of physics as governing their daily lives.
^x
Where the Azande used their religion, which graded imperceptibly into magic and witchcraft, was to explain the otherwise inexplicable specificity of events. For example, they knew full well that termites can cause a wooden house to collapse, but the Azande turned to witchcraft to explain why
this particular
house, with
these particular
people in it, happened to collapse at
that particular
time.
²⁰

Inhabitants of the modern Western world are similarly inclined to look for “deeper” explanations for specific events, looking for solace in particular in the aftermath of painful experiences. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why was my innocent daughter killed in a traffic accident? Why did the tornado come down where and when it did? It isn’t simply a matter of narcissism and egocentrism—the notion that the cosmos is orchestrated with each of us specifically in mind (although it may well include that, too)—but also a genuine seeking for meaning in a world that for the most part proceeds without regard to our hopes, fears, or even our very existence.

In a now-classic research report, psychologist B. F. Skinner described “superstitious” behavior in laboratory pigeons.
²¹
These animals were being trained to respond to certain signals, such as a
flashing light, by pecking a target whereupon they received a food pellet. Occasionally, Skinner’s experimental subjects would develop a persistent tendency to do something seemingly irrelevant—at least from the viewpoint of the experimenter—such as fluttering a wing or twisting its head to the left. The birds had performed these actions on their own and then, simply by chance, were provided with food shortly thereafter, so they developed a fixed delusion, or what in human beings might be called a superstition, that the correlated experiences were causative. Such a presumption can certainly be adaptive; things correlated in nature are not uncommonly connected by cause and effect, so it can be a good strategy to assume some sort of “genuine” relationship. And people do it, too—think about the superstitions that sports fans, and even players, frequently develop: wearing a particular red cap while watching a game, doing a special kind of dance to induce rain, etc. One would think that over time it is difficult to maintain the fiction that dances (or prayers) induce rain, but just consider the persistence of water witching in the supposedly advanced Western world (not to mention prayers). Add to this the ubiquity of efforts to apply various quack cures to human diseases, and the resulting mix is revealed to be especially potent, even for those inclined to draw a line between superstition and religion.

How many correlations are needed before two events are liable to be considered meaningfully connected? We don’t know. But again, if the cost of believing in a connection—even if spurious—is low compared to that of being oblivious to those correlations that are genuinely causative and thus subject to being manipulated to human benefit or ignored only at substantial peril, then the required number may well be quite small. Add to this, moreover, the potency of placebo. That is, to a significant extent, prayers directed toward human health actually do work, compared with rain dances directed toward the inhuman skies. The immediate explanation is “placebo,” the puzzling tendency of people to experience positive health benefits from procedures and substances in proportion as they believe that they will be beneficial.
^xi

Placebo works. On average, it has an efficacy rate of about 33%, with added benefits of very low cost, no side effects, and no risk of overdose. The word derives from the Latin “I please” and the reality has evidently been recognized long before the advent of modern medicine. Thus, in
The Charmides
, one of Plato’s early Socratic dialogues, we read about a cure that consists of “a certain leaf, but in addition to the drug there is a certain charm, which if someone chants when he makes use of it, the medicine altogether restores him to health, but without the charm there is no profit from the leaf.” But what’s in the “charm,” which is to say, why does placebo work? No one knows, but one possibility is that it serves as a signal of social caring and support, inducing the body to attempt healing itself.

But if the body has this capacity, why wouldn’t individuals be selected to make such a healing effort even without placebos? (And this leads to yet another possibility, of a different sort: that the placebo effect is so mysterious in its own right that it deserves its own chapter in this book!) For now, however, the point is that the combination of HADD plus animism plus superstitious coincidence marking plus ToM plus placebo—in the case of early “medicine”—might have helped lay the foundations for religion.

This brings us back to an underlying pattern, a kind of evolutionary misfiring in which one or more tendencies are adaptive and have therefore been positively selected for … but the system then goes awry and overshoots its original target, producing outcomes that if not actually maladaptive can be at least nonadaptive. Before we proceed, let’s clear up a likely misconception. There may be a temptation for opponents of religion to embrace the prospect that religion is nonadaptive, thinking this means it is somehow “not good,” and conversely for the devout, who might be disposed to resist this possibility, worrying that if religion is found to be nonadaptive, or worse yet, maladaptive, this would count as a strike against it.

But there is no reason to think that if religion is nonadaptive, it lacks legitimacy or goodness, any more than if it turns out to be adaptive, it is therefore appropriate and laudable. There are numerous traits that were adaptive in our long evolutionary adolescence that are bad, ethically, for example, nepotism, violence, maybe even rape. And there are others that aren’t adaptive but are by most assessments good: care for the sick, injured, elderly—especially if the recipients are unrelated to the aid giver, and even more so, if they are from a different group, and if the aid is provided anonymously. In short: The adaptiveness or nonadaptiveness of religion may help us understand how religion evolved, but it says nothing whatever about whether religion is good or about the existence or nonexistence of a deity.

Here are some additional hypotheses for the appearance and persistence of religion involving a process comparable to the phenomenon of overreach suggested by HADD. Take intelligence. There must have been a substantial fitness payoff to those of our ancestors who were especially clever: Smart proto-people were likely better at choosing friends, outwitting enemies, getting food, making tools, attracting mates, communicating effectively, caring for their offspring, and so forth. And although it is conceivable that there are separate modal “intelligences” for each of these dimensions—plus numerous others—it seems far more likely that at least to some extent, selection favored generalized IQ (with specificity as well). And part of being globally smart is to have an inquiring mind, inclined to ask questions and to interrogate the world with a searching need for explanations.

Darwin speculated that “primitive religion” evolved as a consequence. He wrote:

The belief in unseen or spiritual agencies seems to be almost universal … nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence.

There is a problem here, however. Why should our ancestors have “naturally” speculated on their own existence? More to the point, it is one thing to follow insights that are empirically valid
and thus likely to be fitness enhancing, quite another to pursue purported insights that are incorrect (e.g., dances prevent or produce rain) or, at best, ambiguous. One explanation, consistent with evolutionary science, would be the overshoot hypothesis: Having generated a “naturally” inquiring mind, evolution has had to deal with an equally natural tendency to demand answers to its inquiries and, when verifiable answers haven’t been available, to insist upon others to fill the intellectual void. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising that religions typically provide responses to otherwise unanswerable questions, such as what happens to us after death, what is the purpose of life, or why do bad things happen to good people.

Here’s an analogy. Engaging in sexual behavior is clearly adaptive. Moreover, since sperm are cheap and easily replaced, men in particular have been selected to be readily aroused by sexually relevant stimuli, which, during 99.99% of our evolutionary past, have been emitted exclusively by genuine, real-life women. But given their biological priming, men are also prone to being aroused by pornography, even though pixel images aren’t “real” and cannot contribute to reproductive success. Maybe our species-wide yearning for answers (adaptive in itself, not unlike the especially male yearning for quick-and-easy sexual stimulation) renders human beings—women no less than men—similarly vulnerable to empty but superficially satisfying answer-giving stimuli in the form of religion.

The following is all the more startling and powerful, coming as it does from the “Meditations of Rene Descartes,” one of the great philosophical and mathematical geniuses of all time, the founder of a branch of geometry and much else:

But above all we must impress on our memory the overriding rule that whatever God has revealed to us must be accepted as more certain than anything else. And though the light of reason may, with the utmost clarity and evidence, appear to suggest something different, we must still put our entire faith in divine authority, rather than in our own judgment.

Theologians are understandably uncomfortable with the formulation known as “God of the gaps,” by which God is invoked to explain gaps in scientific understanding, the problem for the
devout being that as science advances, God becomes correspondingly smaller. Descartes’ message can put “God of the gaps” in a different perspective, suggesting a need for many people—even some of the most brilliant and rational—to subordinate themselves to a higher authority. Maybe this relieves an otherwise intolerable pressure, one uniquely felt by a species endowed with the ability to explain many things, to explain
everything
.

Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity—one of humanity’s greatest scientific advances—was resisted by many at the time because, ironically, it seemed to smack of mysticism, operating as it does via “force at a distance.” Newton agreed that the concept seemed absurd but added that he had been unable to figure out how it happened, and “I do not feign hypotheses.”
^xii
Yet that is much of what religion is. On second thought, it is less the
feigning
of hypotheses than the bypassing of them altogether: leaving the matter to God, and in the process, satisfying a widespread need for answers (of a sort).

The distinction between science and religion is generally clear: The former ultimately relies upon logic and empirical falsification or validation, whereas the latter rests upon faith and authority. Nonetheless, much science is itself counterintuitive. We know with scientific certainty that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, that even a demonstrably “solid” object is mostly empty space, that species are mutable, and that in the miniature world of quantum events or the vast one of light-speed, “weird” things happen with space, time, mass, and energy. What is a large-brained creature, with a need to understand, to do with such facts? As anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out, people simply cannot look at the world “in dumb astonishment or blind apathy,” so they struggle for explanations—objectively valid or not—resulting inevitably in beliefs.

There remains another series of possibilities, all variants on the “adaptive overshoot” hypothesis, involving nonadaptive consequences of being so darned intelligent. For example, throughout the animal world, smarter species are those that rely more on learning and less on instinct, since instincts involve built-in, hardwired behavior patterns whereas intelligence involves the capacity to modify one’s actions as a result of learning; indeed, the ability to learn is as good a definition of intelligence as we have. As a species heavily “into” learning,
Homo sapiens
is also predisposed to do much of that learning while young. We’re born with big brains that, compared to most other animals, have relatively little that is built into them. And so, children are veritable learning machines, neural vacuum cleaners prewired to suck up what they can absorb of what they are taught, especially language and how the world works, particularly the complex rules of the social road. What about religion?