Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (36 page)

It is overwhelmingly true that people grow up following the religion into which they were born, which is to say, doing as they have been taught. Whatever the original adaptive value of religion, it may have persisted in large part because it is an accidental by-product of a program that is adaptive in most other respects: When young, believe what your elders tell you.
^xiii
And when you grow up, do as they have done.

Parents may ruefully complain about the waywardness of their offspring, but the reality is that children are strongly predisposed to accept parental teaching, since such input is likely to be fitness enhancing (“This is good to eat,” “Don’t pet the saber-tooth,” and so forth). This, in turn, makes children vulnerable to whatever else they are taught (“Respect the Sabbath,” “Cover your hair”) as well as—if we are to believe Freud, in
The Future of an Illusion
—downright needy when it comes to parent-like beings, leading especially to the patriarchal sky-god of the Abrahamic faiths.

Anthropologist Weston La Barre developed a similar argument in his book
Shadow of Childhood
, in which he proposed that prayer
is unique to our species, resulting from our prolonged, neotonous, developmental trajectory:

No other animal when in distress or danger magically commands or prayerfully begs the environment to change its nature for the organism’s specific benefit. Calling upon the ‘supernatural’ to change the natural is an exclusively human reaction. … [O]ne doubts that even herding animals like the many antelope species in Africa have gods they call upon when they fall behind the fleeing herd and are about to be killed by lions, wild dogs, cheetahs or hyenas. Antelope infancy and parenthood do not present such formative extravagancies. And in the circumstances the belief itself would be highly maladaptive.

In his
Autobiography
, Darwin straddled the fence between thinking religion was learned—acquired via experience—and inherited: “Nor must we overlook the probability,” he wrote,

of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

It isn’t clear to a modern biologist how the inculcation of religion could produce “an inherited effect,” but let that pass. (In much of Darwin’s writing—which, after all, preceded any knowledge of genetics—there are assumptions of Lamarckism, the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” since shown to be fallacious.) The key point for our purposes is Darwin’s conviction that religion is something to which human beings are strongly predisposed, and that part of that predisposition is a susceptibility to learning that begins in childhood, and which is itself adaptive—even though its expression with regard to religion might be nonadaptive or even maladaptive. Given the huge payoff that comes with learning, and the fact that nearly all the time, parents have much genuine survival value to pass along to their children, it is likely that the latter would be quite open—one might even say susceptible and vulnerable—to parental teachings with respect to religion, too. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a simple genetic algorithm that would screen out religious indoctrination but permit other parental teaching to be absorbed.

Deference to experts provides a similar situation. Most people aren’t jacks-of-all-trades. At least, they are better at some things than at others. We trust the auto mechanic to be good at fixing cars, the dentist to be good at fixing teeth, and so on. Even in the early history of
Homo sapiens
, some of our ancestors must have been better at hunting, others at making tools, and yet others at being in touch with occult powers (or at least, who claimed to be). Just as a susceptibility to parental teaching may have greased the skids for susceptibility to religious indoctrination, a generally adaptive respect of expertise may have been extended to those who claimed spiritual expertise as well.

Here is yet another adaptive overshoot hypothesis: Maybe religion serves a Grand Inquisitor function. A famous chapter in Dostoyevsky’s novel
The Brothers Karamazov
takes us back to the Spanish Inquisition, during which the Grand Inquisitor explains that “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” He goes on to explain that organized religion—in the form of the Roman Catholic Church—has lifted that burden by mentally enslaving their subjects and telling them what to believe and what to abjure.
^xiv
For our purposes, the hypothesis would be that as a result of our species-wide intelligence, we find ourselves stuck with a specieswide problem: a tendency to think too much, to get so wrapped up in the endless array of possible actions that we are essentially paralyzed, unable to function effectively and altogether miserable.

Enter, then, religious authority, ritual and holy writ, which—like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor—tell the believer what to do, how to do it, and when, thereby relieving him or her of the terrible burden of too damned much freedom and excessive thought. We might call this the anti-dithering hypothesis.

There is, in fact, a growing body of research in social psychology that speaks to the problem of “choice overload,” which shows that too many choices is a troublesome thing.
²²
In a now-famous experiment, psychologist Sheena Iyengar (currently a professor of business at Columbia University) set up a tasting booth outside a busy supermarket in California. On offer: either 6 flavors of jam or
24 flavors, with the options alternating every few hours. The results? More people stopped at the table when 24 flavors were displayed … but fewer people bought any. The difference turned out to be quite dramatic: Whereas only 3% of those at the 24-flavor booth purchased any product, at the 6-flavor booth, the number shot up to 30%.

Consequentially, perhaps, for our purposes, Sheena Iyengar has also shown that fundamentalists are generally more optimistic than those associated with more liberal religious traditions. “Members of more fundamentalist faiths experienced greater hope, were more optimistic when faced with adversity and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts,”
²³
she writes. “Indeed, the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians, especially those who were atheists.” As with her jam-tasting study, Dr. Iyengar interprets this difference as due to differences in the amount of choice available: fundamentalist faiths (which, in her sample, included Jews, Muslims, and Hindus as well as Protestants and Catholics) allow less latitude among their members. Thus, they are closer to the Grand Inquisitor’s ideal.

Yet another variant on the adaptive overshoot model is another version of HADD, discussed earlier, focusing on the human tendency to see—and sometimes imagine—the world as populated by other beings, in this case not so much an inclination to perceive agency as to engage in a kind of basic taxonomy. Thus, people don’t need to be biologists to have recognized that there are many different kinds of living things, of which human beings are just one. Considering that many religions find themselves at odds with evolutionary biology, it is ironic that there is a connection between the universal identification of many kinds of living things and the fact that we are one among many—but not at the top of the heap. Most people likely know, deep in their hearts, that they aren’t omniscient or omnipotent. So, given that that there are many different kinds of creatures, and that people are deeply aware of this diversity, isn’t it possible that some people, at least, “naturally”
imagine that there must be yet another kind, one that in fact possesses those divine qualities that we know that we lack?

Some readers may balk at the notion that to be religious means to perceive God as a “creature,” pointing out that sophisticated theologies generally perceive the divine as beyond material substance or specific form, and not even acting in traditional space or time—something like Paul Tillich’s concept of the divine as the Ground of all Being, or Spinoza’s account of God as immanent in all of nature. The reality, however, is that most people who practice religions, all over the world, do in fact personify God as some sort of creature or organism, typically an anthropomorphic one who (not that) “hears” prayers; “sees” whether we do the right thing or not; can be angered or pacified, implored or cajoled; and in any case “acts” in real time. That is, for the overwhelming majority of people, the great bulk of the time, God is another species! Typically, God is thought to be smarter than us, bigger than us, stronger than us, but not a purely abstract phenomenon, a divine essence independent of time and space; in fact, God typically resembles our own organicity—hence, perhaps, the powerful tendency to multiply the gods, an inclination against which the major monotheistic religions constantly struggle.

But why should human beings need to posit the existence of yet another creature in their universe? (Aren’t there already enough?) Try this: We start life, at least according to many developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts, with the illusion of omnipotence, or if nothing else, the sense that the world revolves around us and our needs. With increasing maturity, however, comes the growing realization that we are not the center of the universe and, moreover, that we are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. It is an important lesson, and one that every healthy adult learns. But our early experience, especially with parents, induced us to think that someone must be in charge; since we learn that this does not include either our parents or ourselves, this leaves a rather large hole in our image of the world and how it works. Enter God.

In the European tradition, there is a long history of recognizing the
Scala Naturae
, or natural ladder of existence, including various worms and bugs, snakes and birds, and mammals and then people, and then—why not?—God. If so, then God evolved out of an initially adaptive tendency to classify and clarify the diversity of life
forms, combined with a developmental awareness of our own limitations as well as the shortcomings of our parents. (Relevant here, as well, is Freud’s celebrated account, in
The Future of an Illusion
, of religion as an “infantile neurosis,” in which people imagine God as a substitute for the parent who falls short.)

Closely allied to these adaptive overshoot hypotheses is another: religion itself as a by-product. It isn’t strictly necessary that all biological traits have been directly selected for. Sometimes, they arise as a side effect of something else that has been favored by natural selection, such that we are mistaken in considering the trait in question to be an adaptation at all. Consider, for example, the redness of blood. It is possible that blood has evolved its particular color because natural selection favored individuals who, when hemorrhaging, are camouflaged against the blood-red sky of a setting sun. But probably not. More likely: It just happens that oxyhemoglobin is bright red, not because the color per se is adaptive, but simply as a nonadaptive consequence of the biochemistry of efficient oxygen transport.

In the case of religion, another variant on the by-product connection seems more plausible. Sometimes, a highly adaptive trait is so closely allied to the development of a particular by-product that the two cannot effectively be separated. The benefit conveyed by the adaptive characteristic may simply outweigh the slight drawback of the other, so that evolution has “created” both, even though it only actually favored one. Nipples, for example, convey no discernible fitness payoff when borne by a man, but are clearly functional as baby-feeding nozzles when at the tip of a woman’s breast. The embryonic process that creates nipples in girls is too intimately tied to its highly adaptive anatomical outcome to have been segregated by evolution into dramatically different male and female versions, even though the result is nonfunctional one-half the time. And so, men have nipples as a nonadaptive consequence of its payoff among women. Maybe the “deep-question answering” component of religion is like a male nipple, a nonadaptive tag-along consequence of something else—intelligence and curiosity—that has been favored by natural selection.

Natural selection has also endowed us with a need for social connection. Babies can’t survive unless connected to one or more adult caregivers, adults require other adults, and so forth.
For anthropologist Barbara King, human beings “evolved god” because of their need for “belongingness.” According to King,

Hominids turned to the sacred realm because they evolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with their social partners, because the resulting mutuality engendered its own creativity and generated increasingly nuanced expressions of belongingness over time, and because the human brain evolved to allow an extension of this belongingness beyond the here and now.
²⁴

Developmental psychologists and evolutionary biologists would doubtless agree about the merits and allure of belonging, insofar as this leads to caring and being cared for, but what is the adaptive significance of cozying up to the ineffable? If, as King suggests, the bedrock payoff of religion comes from “the belief that one may be seen, heard, protected, harmed, loved, frightened, or soothed by interaction with God, gods, or spirits,” then what in the real world has anchored human biology to this bedrock? A feeling of belongingness sounds lovely, as does the contentment that comes from having a full belly, but to be adaptive, one ought to have a genuinely full belly. No matter how exalted, feelings divorced from reality can be misleading delusions … unless the satisfying belongingness conveyed by religion is a by-product, hitchhiking on the highly adaptive feelings evoked by being part of a sustaining social network. In this case, the proximate gratifications provided by caregivers, lovers, family members, and friends can also power a connection to coreligionists as well and—by extension—perhaps connection to a perceived God, too.