Santa Barbara Project Meeting
Posted 02 March 2010 by DominicA guest blog by Zoey Reeve
Our penultimate project meeting took place from 7-9 January at the Four Seasons Biltmore hotel, Santa Barbara. Nestled between crystal waters, white sands, and breath-taking mountains the workshop was a meeting of minds of the who’s who of some of the most influential scholars of evolution and religion. In attendance were core team members Dominic Johnson, Jesse Bering, Terry Burnham, Jeff Schloss, and Rich Sosis, plus graduate students myself (Zoey Reeve), Paul Swartwout and Lauren Swiney. However, the meeting was made particularly mesmerising by three additional guests to share their perspectives and advise on our project—Joseph Bulbulia, Paul Zak, and “The” David Sloan Wilson. Whilst our merry band (particularly merry in the evening over delicious local seafood and great conversations) was not free of occasional heated debate, this diverse but focused group brought a wealth of fresh insights to the table.
The workshop began with presentations by the three (very lucky) grad students. Discussions ranged from how best to measure feelings of being watched when experimental subjects are given the opportunity to cheat (Lauren)—a key test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis, to paradigms that capture people’s trustworthiness when marked with a religious symbol such as a cross on Ash Wednesday (Swartwout), and those measuring implicit associations of parochialism and protection towards in-groups and out-groups (Reeve).
Jesse Bering, experimental psychologist extraordinaire then offered us a glimpse into his forthcoming book on the psychological origins of meaning. Terry Burham, our resident presented evidence on the role of evolved physiological factors, such as status and testosterone, in people’s cooperation and punishment beahvior (e.g. in the ultimatum game). Dominic Johnson, the project coordinator, is both an evolutionary biologist and political, and he presented possible linkages between these two disciplines in the (little studied) role of elite manipulation in the religious doctrines of reward and punishment. Jeff Schloss once again forced us to switch our brains into high gear and think hard about the meta-philosophical questions surrounding our project. What can we know about beliefs? What do our findings imply about the status of supernatural agents? Rich Sosis is an evolutionary anthropologist with so many projects on the go that our website is constantly out of date. His presentation in Santa Barbara focussed on new experimental evidence that costly religious signals indicate trustworthiness to other group members. Rich and his students use a range of clever experimental paradigms to investigate how subtle religious primes influence performance in well known games such as prisoner dilemmas and trust games.
Our guest speakers then took the floor beginning with Joseph Bulbulia, who despite having flown from New Zealand was awake enough to run every morning as well as scrutinize assumptions about the types of games and payoffs that many evolutionary theories of religion (and cooperation) imply but do not test. The actual games and payoffs relevant in real life have big implications for the supernatural punishment and costly signalling theories of religion. Paul Zak is a neuroeconomist – a founder of the field in fact, and is credited with discovering the role of the hormone oxytocin as a mediator of trust. Oxytocin is the physiological signature for empathy and is readily induced with touch (a fifty minute massage will release oxytocin and influence the amount of money an individual is willing to sacrifice to another individual, even when the other person is not the masseuse!).
David Sloan Wilson is a distinguished evolutionary biologist whose trademark idea is the importance of multi-level or group level selection. His approach is of particular interest to us given that our project takes an individual-level selection position as a starting point. Rather that throw stones from alternative camps, we aimed to invite David to join our discussions precisely to build rather than burn theoretical bridges and develop a common consensus. David’s insights are crucial in ensuring our studies are actually testing individual-level selection. For example, many studies claiming behaviors are individually adaptive only show that a behavior increases fitness. However, for Darwinian selection to work, it must be shown that behavior increases fitness relative to others.
Our project has already amassed a set of diverse theoretical and empirical studies that converge on a common theme—religious beliefs and behaviors have an adaptive logic. The main rival idea—that they are accidental by-products of human cognition—is popular but too easy. First we must explore the benefits of religion as well as its (perhaps more apparent) costs.
There is no substitute for face-to-face meetings, and the Santa Barbara event served to cement our goals for the future. Beyond our individual and joint projects, a major outcome of the meeting was to develop ways to integrate our project with existing projects such as David Sloan Wilson’s Evolutionary Religious Studies project. In proliferating and young field, consensus and coordination will be a critical step in effectively resolving the puzzle of religion.
Posted in Adaptation, Meetings, Religion | No Comments »