How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (31 page)

In my view, the real benefits of religion – and, as it happens, the explanation as to why religion makes you feel happier and healthier – have more to do with the fourth hypothesis. The idea that religion acts as a kind of glue that holds society together was in fact originally suggested by Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, though he could say little about how or why this might be. A century later, we know a little more about how this works. Religions bond societies because they exploit a whole suite of rituals that are extremely good at triggering the release of endorphins in the brain. Endorphins come into their own when pain is modest but persistent – then they flood the brain, creating a mild ‘high’.

This may be why religious rituals so often involve activities that are mildly stressful for the body – singing, dancing, repetitive swaying or bobbing movements, awkward postures like kneeling or the lotus position, counting beads – and occasionally even seriously painful activities like self-flagellation. Of course, religion is not the only way
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to get an endorphin fix. But perhaps that is why genuinely religious people often seem so happy: in a very real sense, they are getting their weekly fix. What’s more, and here’s the rub, endorphins also ‘tune up’ the immune system, and that probably explains why religious people are healthier.

Of course, you don’t have to get your fix from religion. You can also get your high from jogging, pumping iron or many other forms of physical exercise. But religion seems to offer something more. When you experience an endorphin rush as part of a group, its effect seems to be ratcheted up massively. In particular, it makes you feel very positive towards other group members. Quite literally, it creates a sense of brotherhood and communality that doesn’t seem to happen when you do the same thing on your own.

While this may explain the immediate advantage of religion, it does raise the question as to why we need it at all. The answer, I believe, goes back to the very nature of primate sociality and so takes us back to Dunbar’s Number. Monkeys and apes live in an intensely social world in which group-level benefits are achieved through co-operation. In effect, primate social groups, unlike those of almost all other species, are implicit social contracts: individuals are obliged to accept that they must forgo some of their more immediate personal demands in the interests of keeping the group together. If you push your personal demands too far, you end up driving everyone else away, and so lose the benefits that the group provides
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in terms of protection against predators, defence of resources and so on.

The real problem that all such social contract systems face is the ‘free rider’ – those who take the benefits of sociality without paying their share of the costs. Primates need a powerful mechanism to counteract the natural tendency for individuals to free-ride whenever they are given the chance. Monkeys and apes do this through social grooming, an activity that creates trust, which in turn provides the basis for coalitions. Exactly how this works is far from clear, but, as we saw earlier, what we do know is that endorphins are a vital ingredient. Grooming and being groomed lead to the release of endorphins. Endorphins make individuals feel good, providing an immediate motivation to engage in the activity that ultimately bonds the group.

The trouble with grooming, however, is that it is a one-on-one activity, so it’s very time-consuming. At some stage in our evolutionary past, our ancestors began to need to live in groups that were too large for social grooming to provide an effective glue. Such large groups would have been especially prone to exploitation by free riders. Our ancestors needed to come up with an alternative method of group bonding. In the past, I have suggested that gossip played this role, allowing individuals to perform an activity that provides a similar function to grooming but in small groups rather than one to one. But conversation lacks the physical contact of grooming that triggers the release of endorphins.

So what might have bridged the endorphin gap needed to bond these larger groups? Although laughter and music would have filled that gap, religion seems to have played
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a crucially important role in the later stages of human evolution. Religion seems to have been the third leg in the trilogy of mechanisms that supplemented grooming to make the later stages of human social evolution possible.

It is important to emphasise, however, that, if this account of the origins of religion is right, then religion began very much as a small-scale phenomenon. Perhaps early religious practices included something like the trance dances found in shamanistic-type religions today. The !Kung San of southern Africa, for example, seek to heal rifts in personal relationships within the community by using music and repetitive dance movement to trigger trance states. Many religions have practices such as chanting and fasting that invoke similar mental states: blinding light bursts within the head, the soul seems to become united with God and the mind has the experience of leaving the body and entering another (spirit) world. Doing this as a group seems to create an explosion of goodwill and love that welds the group together. It is easy to see how this sort of activity could have been extremely beneficial to our ancestors, uniting the group, discouraging free riders, and so increasing the chances that individuals would survive and reproduce more successfully.

Religion is not just about ritual, it also has an important cognitive component – its theology. My suggestion is that the reason why religion has both ritual and theology is that the endorphin-based group-bonding effects of the rituals only work if everyone does them together. And this is where the theology comes in: it provides the stick-and-
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carrot that makes us all turn up regularly. But to be able to think about the nature of a divine being and its relationship with us, our ancestors needed to evolve sophisticated cognitive abilities that far exceed those found in any other animal species. And it is this aspect of the cognitive underpinnings of religion that provide us with an insight into the other question that has long remained unanswered: when did religion first evolve?

Our ancestors did not always have religion, yet many religious practices seem to have very ancient origins. So, when did religion first evolve? Archaeologists have long been fascinated by this question. But how do you recognise religion and religious practices when all you have is a few old bits of pottery? Being cautious folk (and having had their wrists slapped for idle speculation all too often in the past), archaeologists have perhaps inevitably defined the appearance of religion by uncontroversial evidence such as grave goods in burials: these at least unequivocally imply belief in an afterlife.

Although it has been claimed that the very earliest evidence of deliberate burials dates back as much as two hundred thousand years to the Neanderthals, the motivation for the kind of caching of bodies we find in this case is ambiguous. If we take grave goods as the only uncontroversial evidence for deliberate burials, then burials do not occur much before twenty-five thousand years ago.

The oldest yet found is a child burial in what is now Portugal; the best known is an elaborate double burial of two children at Sungir outside Vladimir on the Russian steppes that dates to around twenty-two thousand years ago. Burials imply a sophisticated theology, so we can safely assume that these were preceded by a long phase
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of less sophisticated religious belief. But without evidence on the ground, can we realistically see any further back into the past than this?

Well, maybe there is another way to gain insight into the question. It comes from asking what kind of mind is required to hold religious beliefs. Take the statement: ‘I believe that God wants... ’ To grasp this, an individual needs theory of mind. But we need more than this to build a religion.

Third-order intentionality allows me to state: ‘I believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent.’ At this level, we have personal religion. But if I am to persuade you to join me in this view, I have to add your mind state: I want
you
to believe that God wants us to act righteously. That’s fourth-order intentionality, and it gives us social religion. Even now, you can accept the truth of my statement (that I truthfully believe this to be the case), but it doesn’t commit you to anything. But add a fifth level (I want you to know that we both believe that God wants us to act righteously) and now, if you accept the validity of my claim, you also implicitly accept that you believe it too. Now we have what I call communal religion: together, we can invoke a spiritual force that obliges, perhaps even forces, us to behave in a certain way.

So, communal religion requires fifth-order intentionality, and this also happens to be the limit of most people’s capacity. I think this is again no coincidence. The majority of human activities, from making tools to surviving the minefields of our complex social world, can probably be dealt with by the capacity for second- or third-order intentionality, yet the two extra layers beyond this undoubtedly come at some considerable neural expense.
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Since evolution is frugal, there must be some good reason why we have them. The only plausible answer, so far as I can see, is religion. And that’s where this line of reasoning can throw light on the origins of religious belief.

As we saw earlier, the level of intentionality a species can achieve seems to scale linearly with the volume of its frontal lobes. Perhaps we can use this relationship to work out the level of intentionality our extinct ancestors were capable of – provided you have a fossil skull from which you can measure the overall volume of the brain.

Plotting these values onto a graph, the evidence suggests that as early as two million years ago,
Homo erectus
would have aspired to third-order intentionality, perhaps allowing them to have personal beliefs about the world. Fourth-order intentionality – equating to social religion – appeared with archaic humans around five hundred thousand years ago. But the fifth order probably didn’t appear much before the evolution of anatomically modern humans around two hundred thousand years ago – early enough to ensure that all living humans share this trait, but late enough to suggest that it was probably a unique adaptation. Interestingly, if we apply the social brain relationship to fossil hominids, it suggests that these same two key dates – five hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago – correspond to major up-surges in social group size, with the second of these corresponding to a fairly rapid shift from groups of around 120 to around 150 individuals that we find in modern humans.

Let me add one final caveat. All this does not justify the truth of religion as such. It simply offers an explanation as to why religion evolved in the human lineage –and only in the human lineage. Strictly speaking, I sup-
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pose that leaves open the possibility that the claims of religion, at least in some form, might be true: God might have chosen to reveal himself to humans at some particular moment in time, as some have argued. But I wouldn’t find that a terribly convincing argument myself. Why then, and not earlier or later? And why only to our species, and not to any others? If there really is something transcen-dentally special about religion, it would seem to me an odd coincidence that it should appear just at the point both where the cognitive capacities to support it first evolve and where we find the glass ceiling in group size that needs both of these phenomena to break through. That said, true or false, religion does seem to work, at least on the intimate social scale. It does have benefits for the individual. But its real benefits seem to be in creating closely knit communities. It is only when religion is taken over by the state and becomes large-scale that problems arise. It seems that the psychological forces it can call on are so powerful as to be able to turn perfectly rational individuals into bigoted mobs. It is these psychological mechanisms that have been exploited down the ages by political elites in various attempts to subjugate the rest of the community.

Marx, it seems, was right after all. In his famous phrase, religion really is the opium of the people – in a much more literal sense than he probably ever imagined. But, equally, Durkheim seems to have been right in suggesting that religion played a key role in bonding small-scale societies. It evolved to make us toe the communal line, and it uses rituals to exploit the brain’s own opiates to do that. The endorphin rush we get from all that singing and praying helps us to overcome the fractiousness of everyday human
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interactions and so gives us the crucial sense of belonging that welds together all traditional small-scale communities. But it seems that religion does its work best if it has a cognitive dimension to it – a reason for believing in what we do in the rituals. And here, in the magical bringing together of deep thought with what seems like no more than a base chemical trick, lies the impenetrable mystery of human relationships. In this respect, religion is just one of many archetypal examples of the way evolution has exploited and honed simple processes to create the extraordinary complexity of cognition and behaviour that makes us what we are. Evolution is truly a marvel, and it was Darwin’s genius to recognise the processes that underpin it.
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academic: communities, 27; performance, 208–12

acquaintanceship, 32–4

Adoyo, Bishop Boniface, 117

advertising: for a mate, 228–32, 236–41; men’s conversations, 75–6

Africa: forests, 144–5; fossils, 132–3; great apes, 4, 122, 127, 134–5, 145, 275; Horn of, 89, 147, 148; human ancestry, 3, 122, 127, 134–5, 138–9, 161; migration from, 85, 127, 129–30, 139–41, 151; Pygmy peoples, 131, 267; San Bushmen, 33, 90, 182, 287; sickle cell anaemia, 101; skin colours, 90–1; Swahili language, 52