Can Religion Really Evolve? (And What Is It Anyway?

Luther H. Martin

Proposals for employing a Darwinian account of religion as a product of natural

selection are not new. Already in 1882, the Dublin anatomist Alexander Macalister (1882)

gave a lecture on “evolution in church history” in which he explicated ways in which

ritual and organizational “variation” might be explained as adaptations to environment (p.

35). Subsequently, proposals have been made for understanding the evolution of the

“mental capacities” for religious ideas and practice (Harrison, 1909, pp. 497-498); for the

evolution of religious groups themselves (Wilson, 2002) and even for religion itself

(Richerson & Boyd, 2005)—all employing a Darwinian model. The methodological issue

raised by these proposals is whether they are to be understood as isomorphic with or

analogous to Darwinian theory. If isomorphic, the appropriateness of applying a theory

developed to explain the data of one domain, organic speciation, to those of another, the

behavioral and ideational productions of a single species, must be raised. If analogical,

the question remains of whether any “useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of

evolution for history” (Fracchia & Lewontin, 1999, pp. 52, 78)? And whether this

application be understood as isomorphic with or analogous to Darwinian theory, what,

precisely, are the data to be explained?

Does “religion” really evolve?

 Those outside the area of religious studies seem to have little problem discussing

the pros and cons of its evolution. To those within the field of religious studies, however,

discussions about the evolution of religion seem curiously quaint since scholars in that

academic field, over its one-hundred-plus years of existence, have yet to produce

anything resembling a consensual definition of religion or even of religions—apart from

their own, of course (à la Macalister, 1882). This is because, as some historians of

religion now insist, “religion” is a Western academic (and political) category and not a

“natural kind” with any independent existence that might be presumed to have evolved

(Smith 1982, p. xi).

Do religious “groups” evolve?

Some scholars wish to argue more specifically that it is not religions themselves

but religious groups that evolve. However, neither the internal coherence of any social

formation nor the definition of its boundaries would seem to be sufficiently stable over

time to conclude that they could function as adaptive units which might evolve in ways

that are either isomorphic with or analogous to biological species. Joseph Bulbulia

(2006), nevertheless, contends that religious groups are adaptive because they reduce “the

cognitive load of social living” through “co-operative norm-reinforcement” (p. 25).

However, alternative social formations perform the same function. That is to say, “co-

operative norm-reinforcement” is instantiated not only by religious coalitions but, for

example, by adherence to the rules in various sports or by the carefully observed

conventions of swingers’ clubs. But no one has argued that any of these groups represent

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an evolutionary adaptation—especially the latter. That “religions” (if I too may beg the

categorical question) supports group solidarity—at least among their own members—is

an observation that is, in other words, true but trivial since any number of other social

formations may, and do, contribute also to social solidarity. Such considerations

invariably slide, in other words, into an affirmation of the assumed category on the basis

of correlate functions.

Some would extend evolutionary explanations even to the development of large-

scale cooperation among non-kin (Richerson & Boyd, 2005, pp. 203-236). Such

cooperation can, however, be explained more parsimoniously by political history, in

which, for example, one small-scale society may find it expedient to cooperate with

another in competition with a third for, for example, resources insufficient to support all

parties. Typically, these negotiations were concluded by strategies, such as an

intermarriage, that allowed all members of the new alliance to be represented as trusted

kin. Such sociopolitical intrigues were, of course, characteristic of much European feudal

history.

A remarkable theoretical account of an alliance between groups of non-kin is

preserved in Hebrew epic, whatever one concludes about its facticity. According to this

epic, a federation was negotiated by a number of Middle Eastern Bedouin tribes to

compete with neighboring tribes for the “milk and honey”, i.e., the scarce resources, of

their rather barren environment (Ex. 3; 13; 23; 33-34). The basis often given for the

“solidarity” of this alliance is religious, i.e., their collective faith in a single deity. Rather,

the success of this epic endeavor was made possible by their construction of a descent

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myth identifying these disparate groups as being “in fact” descendents of a common

ancestor (Gen. 12-25). It was this ex post facto “discovery” of common kinship that

allowed the gods of the previously autonomous tribes to be re-represented as aspects of a

single deity in the first place rather than any acceptance of a single deity providing a basis

for the federation. Thus, even if we accept the argument that groups, large or small,

evolve by adaptation—a plausible position for which should not simply be dismissed

(Wilson, 2002, pp. 12-25)—these arguments tells us nothing about “religion” itself unless

the claimed adaptations can be shown to be dependent upon at least one of its distinctive

aspects.

Do aspects of “religion” evolve?

Recognizing that there is no such “thing” as religion, many advocates of

evolutionary views of religion now consider religion a multifaceted reality to be

“fractionated” or dissected into its constitutive behaviors, ideas, or traits, each of which

has (or may have) its own evolutionary (or adaptive) history (à la Harrison, 1909)

(Bering, 2005, p. 412; Bulbulia 2005, p. 36). But you can’t carve up a turkey without

having a bird and since religion is not a natural thing to dissect, evolutionary discussions

of its aspects seem rather quickly to digress into those of a presumed category.

One of the traits most commonly associated with religion is, for example,

morality. The relationship of moral behavior to religion is, however, a non-necessary

historical contingency, as the non-theistic legitimization of ethics in ancient Greece and

Rome or in Confucian China exemplify. Rather, views of a symbiosis between morality

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and religion are largely a legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its modern colonial

hegemony. Such ethnocentric biases in the study of religion—well documented by

scholars of comparative religions—present a potential problem for evolutionary

psychologists and cognitive scientists in stipulating the theoretical object for their

evolutionary considerations or in their experimental designs (Brown, 1999, p. 154).

Similarly some experimental psychologists have shown that many of the traits

typically associated with religion—teleological reasoning, for example, or inferences

about an afterlife—are natural expressions of ordinary cognitive capacities that can be

elicited experimentally under laboratory conditions. This areligious incidence of such

traits characterizes, of course, all such evidence adduced experimentally and would seem

to present a confound for those who argue an adaptive story for aspects of “religion”. In

other words, those human traits often taken to be religious are, in fact, ordinary

expressions of human cognitive capacities. Unless a necessary or dedicated relationship

can be established between such capacities and the target category, nothing has been

discovered about the evolution of—or anything else about—“religion”.

So what then is religion?

Rather than “top-down” approaches to the question of the evolution of religion

that assume the category and that, consequently, privilege its various contents, what

would seem to be required is a theoretical stipulation of the necessary characteristic(s) of

what is not to be considered religious and a “bottom-up” study of whether or not such a

differentiating characteristic(s) is indeed an evolved human trait. This is not to propose

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any kind of essentializing definition for religion but simply an attempt to discern what

makes “religion” a distinctive (and predicative) category at all—no matter how “fuzzy”

its boundaries. Daniel Dennett (2006) counseled that the starting point for such a

consideration might initially be based on “common sense and tradition” (p. 8)—though I

might suggest that the insights from the comparative study of religion might better inform

such initial inquiries. Whatever else might differentiate the religious from the non-

religious, claims to the authority of superhuman agency that recruit and legitimate

otherwise ordinary human behaviors and ideas and that motivate their practice and

perseverance would seem to characterize all religions. The question of the “evolution of

religion” would seem, therefore, to turn, at the outset, on that of the adaptive efficacy of

representations of superhuman agents and on the acceptance of at least some of these

representations as authoritative.

As a number of cognitive scientists have argued, the human brain easily and

readily produces representations of superhuman, that is, potentially powerful, non-human

agents (Boyer, 2001)—from fairies, trolls, and leprechauns to the imaginary friends of

young children and even to those of adults, as poignantly portrayed by Jimmy Stewart’s 6

foot, 3½ inch invisible rabbit companion in the 1950 film Harvey. This ready

representation of agency is likely an adaptive response “from the wild” in which survival

would depend upon quick identification, on the basis of ambiguous perceptual input, of

possible agents in the environment as either friend or foe, predator or protein. Such a

response can still be noted, for example, in the common reactive representations of a

stick, semi-concealed in the high grass, as a potentially dangerous serpent, even though

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poisonous snakes may well be known to be absent from the present environment.

Selection for such a survivalistic response has resulted in a cognitive bias towards

identifying agency even where there is none—as in the suggestive formations of clouds,

on the surface features of the moon, or in the lonely shadows of the night.

Although representations of non-human agents by H. sapiens seem to be

“natural”, not all such “naturally” represented agents become re-represented as

superhuman beings that might authorize or motivate shared behaviors and ideas. It would

seem, consequently, as though “religion” might best be understood as exploitations of

such naturally produced representations of agency and their postulation as authoritative in

the service of sociopolitical interests. Because of the universal human bias towards the

representation of agency, such “religious” authority, once postulated, could readily be

accepted, transmitted and developed—along with, of course, the social structures and

values thereby legitimated.

While it is undeniable that human beings have evolved capacities for producing

culture, including those behaviors and representations typically associated by scholars

with religion, it does not follow that religions are themselves adaptive simply because

they exist nor that change in religious traditions over time are evolutionary. Rather, most

cognitive scientists have concluded that religion is “not an evolutionary adaptation per se,

but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that set

cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions” (Atran &

Norenzayan, 2004, p. 713). The persistence into the modern world of the counterintuitive

—even maladaptive—by-products that are characteristic of religious behaviors and ideas

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would seem to provide yet another confound for those who would argue that religion (or

culture) itself is an ongoing adaptive process.

Conclusion

I should like to emphasize that views of religions as evolutionary epiphenomena

in no way minimize the impact they have had—and continue to have—for human

societies. In fact, an understanding of religion as a strategic exploitation of evolved

human capacities and behaviors in service of historically contingent social interests may

offer a better explanation for its benevolent as well as its malevolent uses throughout

human history than do such arguments for religions as manifestations of some sui generis

spiritual trait of Homo religiosus (Eliade, 1969, p. 9). It might be asked, consequently,

what evolutionary theory might contribute to the work of the historian qua historian. As

Richerson and Boyd (2005) rightly concluded, “well-studied models and well-tested

empirical generalizations”, such as those supplied by evolutionary theory, can be of value

for the work of historians, not only because of “the complexity of the problems” (p. 248)

to be solved but also—I might add—because of the fragmented, incomplete, and pre-

interpreted evidence with which the historian is confronted. The problem of historians, in

other words, is less one of complexity than of deficiency, that is, of how best to connect

the insufficient dots of surviving historical materials in order to provide inferential

representations of the past to the best evidence.

The historian John Bury (1909) has argued that while general principles may

embody the necessary conditions for any particular sequence, they do not provide

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sufficient conditions, either in biology or in history (p. 539). And the anthropologist

Donald Brown (1999) has cautioned that an “attention to particulars” is required if the

influence of evolution for human affairs is not simply to become a “vacuous truism” (p.

155). What is required, then, are well-tested theories that might inform and constrain

while not imposing upon historiographical method. Even as the historical sciences

employ constraining theories for dealing with the complexities and incomplete records of

their data—astrophysics in cosmology, for example, or plate tectonics in geology

(Edelman, 2006, pp. 80-88)—evolutionary theory can constrain the proximate as well as

general explanations of historians. But the courses of human history can—and do—

fluctuate widely within these constraints. The multiple variables governing the

complexity of historical developments cannot, in other words, be explained in terms of

biological generalization nor should any one theory—no matter how powerful for its

target domain—be expected to explain, or even provide an analogy for, everything.

Attempts to explain the histories of religion in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory,

whether isomorphically or by analogy, not only create semantic and theoretical

ambiguities but they prove finally to be inadequate.

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