‘Religion’ Category

Princeton Project: Evolution and Human Nature

The Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton will convene an interdisciplinary research team of theologians and scientists in residence during 2012-2013 to address questions of nature and nurture raised by the biological evolution of human beings. The project is entitled “Evolution and Human Nature” and will be led by two Senior Research Fellows: Celia Deane-Drummond, University of Notre Dame, and Dominic Johnson, University of Edinburgh. The work of the research team will include international symposia and seminars with leading scholars such as Melvin Konner, Emory University, Sarah Coakley, University of Cambridge, Simon Conway Morris, University of Cambridge, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Princeton Theological Seminary, Niels Gregersen, University of Copenhagen, and Angela Creager, Princeton University.

The Center of Theological Inquiry welcomes proposals to explore how the explosion of new research in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology is challenging and changing our understanding of human nature and development, not least in relation to religion and theological accounts of the human condition. Our field of inquiry encompasses these evolutionary and human sciences, theological anthropology, practical theology, psychology of religion, religious studies, and the history and philosophy of science. Applications will be considered from scholars in relevant disciplines offering fresh thinking on the topic, including the core questions of nature and nurture and the relationship between religion, culture, and human evolution. How have the human capacities for religion and culture evolved? What do theology and the sciences contribute to our understanding of the evolution of human beings over time? How might philosophy and theology engage the assumptions in the science of human evolution?

The Center of Theological Inquiry will award 8 Research Fellowships of up to $70,000 and 2 Postdoctoral Fellowships of $40,000. Applications will be considered for the full year or a semester, with fellowships awarded pro rata. The full Request for Proposals (RFP) and the required application forms will be available for downloading from our website (under PROGRAM / APPLY) from September 1 - November 30, 2011. The closing date for applications and all supporting documents is November 30, 2011. Applications may be submitted by mail to the Center or electronic attachment to apply@ctinquiry.org. Only completed applications received by the November 30, 2011 deadline will be considered.

CTI is also announcing the research topics for Years 2 & 3, as part of its three year Project on New Approaches in Theological Inquiry, 2012 - 2015, under the leadership of Robin Lovin, Southern Methodist University, and Friederike Nüssel, Heidelberg University: 2013-14 - Religious Experience & Moral Identity, and 2014-15 - Law & Religious Freedom (in collaboration with the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University). The Requests for Proposals for these two years at CTI will be announced in the spring of the preceding year. The Center of Theological Inquiry will also award 8 Research Fellowships of up to $70,000 and 2 Postdoctoral Fellowships of $40,000 in each of these two years.

The Research Fellowships for all three years of this project are supported by a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Cold Feet: On Applying Research from the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion

Guest blog by Richard Sosis

I recently attended a fascinating one-day seminar at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center on the implications of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion (CESR) for religious freedom. I had never considered whether my research, or the collective body of work in CESR, had implications for the protection of religious freedom, so I was intrigued by what the event would offer. To attend, I was even willing to take off my sandals, tuck in my shirt, and sport the fashionable, but seldom used, jacket I purchased for my job interviews more than a decade ago. The primary question the seminar sought to explore was: If religion is indeed natural to humanity, as is generally claimed by CESR researchers, should it be afforded special political protections safeguarding its expression?

The seminar was funded by the Templeton Foundation and graciously hosted by Thomas Farr and Timothy Shah, both extraordinary scholars who impressively balance their academic pursuits with active engagement in the Washington D.C. political environment. The seminar consisted of two morning presentations, the first by Justin Barrett of Oxford University, and the second by yours truly, followed in the afternoon by extensive discussion and debate. The hosts invited about a half-dozen discussants from diverse backgrounds in philosophy, biology, psychology, and theology, including our own talented polymath, Jeff Schloss, who remarkably embodies all these backgrounds in one somatic casing.

Justin opened the seminar with an insightful talk on naturalism from the perspective of cognitive science. Drawing on Robert McCauley’s forthcoming book, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, Barrett defined naturalness as “thought processes or behaviors that are characterized by ease, automaticity, and fluency.” McCauley distinguishes between two basic types of naturalness: maturational and practiced naturalness. Maturational naturalness arises as a natural consequence of normal development, such as learning to walk or talk. Practiced naturalness, on the other hand, arises not through the normal course of physical and psychological development, but rather through repeated practice and training, such as learning to play a musical instrument. Justin argued that religion is situated toward the maturational end of the naturalness continuum, whereas in my talk which followed, I argued that religion was more appropriately categorized toward the practiced end of the continuum. I’m not sure there was really much of a difference in opinion, but rather the particular perspectives we took on the issue reflected the distinct vantage points of our individual disciplinary approaches, cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology respectively.

Concerning religious freedom, I argued that regardless of one’s position in such a debate, religion’s naturalness, whether maturational or practiced, was not an adequate foundation for building an argument in support of protecting religious expression. Even if religion lies on the maturational side of the naturalness continuum, as Barrett and McCauley contend, it is not at the far end of the continuum with other basic human rights, such as the right to freedom from torture, the right to water, and so forth. Religious freedom is indeed a human right, but it is not a basic right; for other rights can be enjoyed without it. Nonetheless, I suggested that CESR might be valuable in situations where religious and secular values conflict, such as issues of environmental conservation, homosexuality, veiling, etc. Most religious-secular conflicts emerge as a consequence of misunderstanding and a lack of appreciation of individuals’ commitments to their respective values. CESR may be able to help resolve religious-secular conflicts by offering an understanding for religious adherents of how secular values can become sacred, and providing compelling materialist explanations of religion to secular individuals who otherwise, and understandably, find commitments to religious behaviors and beliefs utterly bizarre.

Speaking of utterly bizarre religious behaviors, during my visit to Georgetown I received a phone call from a National Geographic reporter - unbeknownst to either of us until the end of our conversation, she was only blocks away - who was interested in my thoughts concerning a recent study on firewalking published in PNAS. In this study, the authors showed that heartbeats of firewalkers and spectators who were kin or friends of the firewalkers synchronized during the ritual, whereas those not socially connected to the firewalkers did not synchronize. Although not tested, it is possible that the synchronized heartbeats result in increased levels of bonding and cohesiveness. It is a fascinating result since I suspect most of us had previously assumed that such effects were limited to ritual performers who engage in collective singing, chanting, or movements. The reporter asked me what the implications of such rituals were for our own society, suggesting that in our fragmented society maybe we could use such rituals to create a sense of shared community that is currently lacking. I could feel my feet burning as I considered how to respond. She was indeed correct that the shared rituals in American society - watching fireworks on July 4th, respectful parades on Memorial Day, etc. - are not nearly as evocative or solidarity-building as firewalking rites, yet I wasn’t prepared to endorse coal hopping as a cure for our societal ills. I suggested that different societies require different levels of cohesion, depending on their need to solve problems of cooperation. Our society has stable social, economic, and political institutions that solve many problems of cooperation for us, whereas in societies lacking these strong institutions, religious rites can serve a similar function, binding the community together to solve cooperation problems inherent in social life. Moreover, religious systems are organic and typically do not respond well to attempts at artificial engineering.

It is exciting to live in a time when evolutionary models are seriously considered by the public as well as policy-makers, and I have no doubt that those active in this area, such as David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton Neighborhood Project) and Rafe Sagarin (Natural Security), are making important academic and societal contributions. CESR, however, is a relatively new field of study that is not as developed as other areas in the evolutionary sciences. Therefore, as CESR work moves into applied realms, I think we need to be cautious about the advice we offer. Religion is a complex system that we are only beginning to understand. As with all complex adaptive systems, changing one part of the system is likely to have effects on other parts of the system. Without understanding the feedback mechanisms that enable religious systems to respond adaptively to changing environmental conditions, we are at risk of offering solutions and changes that will likely yield unintended consequences. But just in case my colleagues don’t share my concerns and are offering extensive counsel to policy-makers and the public, I think I’ll keep my sandals on.

Richard Sosis kindly allowed us to post here a more complete manuscript on this topic, written with Jordan Kiper and entitled “Sacred versus Secular Values: Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion and Religious Freedom“, which will appear in a conference volume.

The God Instinct

Jesse Bering’s new book, The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life, has just been published in the UK.

The God Instinct offers Jesse’s surprising and original take on why we believe in God - and how this belief led to our success as a species. Why does even the most committed atheist turn to God when a family member falls seriously ill, or they find themselves in close personal danger? Drawing on his own and others research from a range of scientific disciplines, Jesse explores how people’s everyday thoughts, behaviours and emotions betray an innate tendency to reason as though God were deeply invested in their public lives and secret affairs.
In what is a greatly entertaining and thought-provoking book, he argues that this religious reflex is not an irrational aberration, and that God is not a cultural invention or an existential band-aid, but an intrinsic human trait, developed over millennia, that carries powerful evolutionary benefits.
Breaking new ground, The God Instinct uses science to show that God is not a delusion, but a sophisticated cognitive illusion. Bering reveals the roots of religion in our ability to think beyond our immediate surroundings, and explains why this capacity for belief sets us apart from other animals.
Jesse not only presents serious ideas in an accessible and engaging way, but also takes a more considered, rational approach than the extreme views so often found on either side of the great debate.

The book will published in the USA in February 2011 as The Belief Instinct, by W.W. Norton.

Read a BBC blog on the book, and see new updates at the book’s reviews page

Sosis Launches “Religion, Brain & Behavior”

Richard Sosis (along with Patrick McNamara and Wesley Wildman) have launched a new journal called Religion, Brain & Behavior. The aim of Religion, Brain & Behavior (RBB) is to provide a vehicle for the advancement of current biological approaches to understanding religion at every level from brain to behavior. RBB unites multiple disciplinary perspectives that share these interests. The journal seeks empirical and theoretical studies that reflect rigorous scientific standards and a sophisticated appreciation of the academic study of religion.

RBB welcomes contributions from a wide array of biological and related disciplines, including cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, social neuroscience, neurology, genetics, demography, bioeconomics, neuroeconomics, physiology, developmental psychology, psychology of religion, moral psychology, archaeology, mimetics, behavioral ecology, epidemiology, public health, cultural evolution, and religious studies. In summary, RBB considers high quality papers in any aspect of the brain-behavior nexus related to religion. RBB publishes high quality research articles, target articles with about ten solicited commentaries and an author response, case studies, and occasional review articles. Issues are published three times during 2011, and four times annually from 2012 onwards.

Several of our project team are members of the editorial advisory board for RBB.

The Evolution of Conscience

I recently returned from an amazing conference on the Evolution of Conscience in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The idea that conscience might be an evolved trait was originally proposed by Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871), in which he suggested a conscience gave humans a crucial moral compass to navigate our complex social world (as in H.L. Mencken’s notion that “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking”). If Darwin was right, conscience is just a product of natural selection like eyes and ears. It appears that the gathering in Santa Fe, 140 years on, was the first ever conference to focus on the origins and role of conscience in human evolution.

The meeting was organized by anthropologist Christopher Boehm, biologist Jeffery Schloss and archeological anthropologist Paul Wason (with terrific help from Lilija Oleaga), and attended by a remarkable group of people representing numerous disciplines including theology, philosophy, primatology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and evolution. The gathering was threatened by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano and generously funded by the Templeton Foundation.

The conference showed that conscience is a tricky concept that means rather different things in different disciplines. Evolutionary psychologist Dan Fessler, for example, argued that there is no such thing as “conscience” per se, but rather a collection of evolved traits and emotions that collectively lead to adaptive cognition and behavior (in the right context), but colloquially lumped together as conscience. It also highlighted numerous ways in which conscience could and should be studied, from phylogenetic history (Jonathan Turner), to primatology (Frans de Waal), ethnography (Polly Weissner), experimentals (Dan Fessler), to neuroscience (Kent Kiehl), and mathematical models (Jessica Flack), among several others.

My own interest in conscience is that it appears to offer a rival alternative to the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis. If conscience provides us with a self-judging “inner voice” that steers us through the minefield of our socially transparent world, then why would we need a supernatural actor to keep us on the straight and narrow? I will tackle this problem in an upcoming article, but the crux of my argument is that: (1) an “inner voice” requires theory of mind and language, and may thus merely be another form of “supernatural agent”; and (2) they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—perhaps the evolutionarily ancient cognitive architecture of conscience is the vehicle by which religion gains traction in altering our beliefs and behavior. The interaction of religion and conscience may be the critical problem to explore.

The evolution of conscience conference in Santa Fe was one of those meetings that just worked brilliantly because of its sheer novelty, interdisciplinarity, free-thinking, and small group format. The discussions chewed up our preexisting assumptions about conscience and spat out not a consensus, but some consilience. The conference will lead on to a conference proceedings setting out that state of the art on what we know about how the conscience may have evolved, its evolutionary function, and its foundational importance for human morality and religion.

Santa Barbara Project Meeting

A 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.

Prosocial Debating

A guest blog by Richard Sosis

Although I have studied religion for the past decade, until this past weekend I had never attended an annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. This year the meeting was held in Montreal (November 7-10). The annual AAR meetings are the granddaddy of religious studies meetings with thousands of attendees and presenters so it is no surprise that I’ve avoided them; I tend to limit my conferences to those with total attendance under Dunbar’s number (that is, 150).  While the AAR is dominated by scholars in the humanities, primarily Religious Studies, several years ago a small group interested in the Cognitive Science of Religion emerged.  If I’m not mistaken this is the second year that the Cognitive Science of Religion section has sponsored multiple sessions.  This year there were five sessions, including two research forums that showcased brilliant talks by Joseph Bulbulia (Victoria University) and Jon Lanman (Oxford University), among others. Ted Slingerland (University of British Columbia), a true guiding light in bridging the sciences and humanities, invited me to speak at a session entitled “The Evolution of Religion: Adaptation or Byproduct?” Lee Kirkpatrick (College of William and Mary) and Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia) were invited and agreed to speak. The adaptationists were in need of a staunch defender. How could I refuse?

It turns out that the deck was slightly stacked in favor of the adaptationists as Joseph Bulbulia served as the respondent and moderator. He opened the session dryly: “It’s an adaptation.” Having solved that debate I thought we might all be packing up to put our minds to other weighty matters, but in fact the show went on and Joseph masterfully outlined the major issues in the debate. Before the session, the speakers had agreed that for the AAR audience a detailed discussion of the adaptationist-byproduct debate made little sense. It would be more productive to highlight how the alternative evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior that we each represented - evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and dual inheritance theory – complemented each other and offered a comprehensive evolutionary analysis of religion.  As someone commented, “Rather than a raucous fight, it was now going to be a love fest.”  And so it was. Following Joseph’s introductory remarks, Lee offered a brief but clear overview of evolutionary psychology and how one would examine the underlying psychological mechanisms that produce religious beliefs and behaviors.  Lee then summarized his pioneering work on attachment theory and explained why psychologists tend to view religion as a byproduct of psychological mechanisms that were designed for other purposes. I followed Lee’s engaging talk with an overview of how evolutionary anthropologists – or at least this one – study religion. I emphasized our focus on behavioral phenotypes and environmental context and how we seek to understand what benefits religion offers that could overcome the costs of religious practices. Ara concluded the session with an inspiring synthesis of the psychological and behavioral approaches, focusing on cultural evolutionary models of religion. He discussed his elegant study with Azim Shariff (University of British Columbia), which found that religious primes increased prosociality in a dictator game. The speakers fielded a half hour of diverse questions following the talks, many which were insightful and many which highlighted our ignorance about religion. But hopefully that was the point. For the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to succeed it has to engage religious studies scholars and the exchange of ideas and information must be mutual. Evolutionary scholars are indeed lacking a deep understanding of religion (Bulbulia and Jeffrey Schloss (Westmont College) are two exceptions) but nonetheless we can offer powerful methodological tools and a compelling theoretical lens to study religion. Hopefully this session offered benefits for everyone involved.

Speaking of benefits and prosociality, I must add one of my personal highlights of the conference. On Saturday evening the five of us involved in the session and Jon Lanman spent considerable time debating appropriate tipping practices in Canada. As any healthy evolutionists would do, we considered Robert Frank’s classic tipping dilemma, straining our memories to reconstruct why we should bother tipping in a city none of us planned to return to in the foreseeable future (wonderful though Montreal is, of course). We pondered what the gods thought of our discussion and looked for tipping boxes with eyes but found none.  After the others walked to their hotels, I walked to the Metro station, wondering why I was the only one who searched for a hotel too late to find one in walking distance to the conference. Lacking a grad student who could work the ticket machine for me, I helplessly tossed coins into the money slot hoping that a ticket would magically appear. It did, but not from the thieving machine. A fellow conference attendee, who apparently was also slow in making hotel reservations, handed me a Metro ticket and refused payment for it.  A mysterious angel? Or had listening to talks on religion all day served as a sufficient prime to produce this savior? After receiving such generosity I was just thankful that even without the gaze of supernatural eyes or a sufficient evolutionary rationale, we had left an appropriate tip.

For further information on the adaptationist-byproduct debate, see Richard Sosis’s new article “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program” in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture.

Posted in Adaptation, Meetings, Religion | 1 Comment »

The Error of God?

The study of cooperation in humans and other animals has been hugely influenced by game theory, an analytical approach to strategic behavior that began life at Princeton with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior”, published at the height of World War II in 1944.

On the 50th anniversary of von Neumann’s death in 2008, a symposium sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation was held at Princeton University to examine the state of the field in cooperation research, and especially the role of moral systems and public goods—issues of particular importance in an age of increasing interest in the origins and functions of religion, and the need to achieve collective action to mitigate global climate change.

The products of that symposium have now been published in a new book “Games, Groups, and the Global Good” (Springer 2009), edited by Simon Levin. The book features a foreword by Lord Robert May, and chapters by such figures as Elinor Ostrom, Martin Nowak and Eric Maskin. The authors address the still vexing questions of how groups form, how institutions come into being, when moral norms and practices emerge, and how game theoretic approaches can be used to examine the interactions between individuals and the collectives they form. The concept of cooperation is examined at a higher level than that usually addressed by game theory, especially focusing on the formation of groups and the role of social norms in maintaining their integrity, with positive and negative implications. The authors suggest that conventional analyses need to be broadened to explain how heuristics, like concepts of fairness arise and become formalized into the ethical principles embraced by a society.

Dominic Johnson’s chapter explores the possible role of “Error Management Theory” in the evolution of beliefs in supernatural punishment. Error Management Theory (hereafter EMT) suggests that if the costs of false positive and false negative decision-making errors have been asymmetric over human evolutionary history, then natural selection would favor a bias towards the least costly error over time (in order to avoid whichever was the worse error). So, for example, we have a bias to sometimes think that sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but never that snakes are sticks (which may be deadly).

Applied to religious beliefs and behaviors, he derives the hypothesis from EMT that humans may gain a fitness advantage from a bias in which they tend to assume that their every move (and thought) is being watched, judged, and potentially punished by supernatural agents. Although such a belief would be costly because it constrains freedom of action and self-interested behaviors, it may nevertheless be favored by natural selection if it helps to avoid an error that is even worse: committing selfish actions or violations of social norms when there is a high probability of real-world detection and punishment by victims or other group members. Simply put, supernatural beliefs may have been an effective mindguard against excessively selfish behavior – behavior that became especially risky and costly as our social transgressions became increasingly transparent due to the evolution of language and theory of mind (people could much more easily discover and retaliate against selfishness). If belief in God is an error, it may at least be an adaptive one. The chapter presents some preliminary theoretical and empirical support for the hypothesis.

The Puzzle of Human Cooperation

Dominic Johnson recently took part in the “What it Means to Be Human” panel at the World Science Festival in New York (June 2009). The panel, chaired by Alan Alda of MASH fame, featured Ed Wilson, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Rob Boyd and Xavier Le Pinchon. Alda hosted the PBS documentary “Scientific American Frontiers” for over ten years, and will host a new three-part series in 2009 on human evolution called “The Human Spark“. We discussed the origins, development and current problems in understanding human altruism - a key focus of evolutionary theories of religion but a phenomenon that remains controversial in nearly all disciplines.

Definitions are crucial, so first off let’s clarify that altruism is A helping B at a cost to A (and benefit to B) that will never be returned. Darwin was greatly troubled by apparent altruism in nature - how could bees, for example, evolve to have stings that are fatal for the bee itself? There appears to be no room in the survival of the fittest logic for that. Darwin worried that the problem of altruism might destroy his entire theory of evolution by natural selection. The puzzle of altruism only really began to be solved a century after Darwin. W.D. Hamilton developed the theory of kin-selection (A helps related individuals because they share the same genes), Robert Trivers proposed reciprocal altruism (A helps B if B helps A tomorrow), and later on this was extended to indirect reciprocity (A helps B and, by gaining a reputation for positive interactions, others such as C, D, and E help A in turn). These theories pretty much solved the puzzle of “altruism” in non-human animals (it was only apparent altruism - really it was just cooperation, meaning mutual benefits to both parties).

However, a major problem remains for understanding human cooperation, because humans cooperate even in one-shot interactions with unrelated strangers they will never meet again (i.e., where all these former theories don’t seem to work). Of course, it could be that we cooperate even in these situations because we carry on behaving as if interactions are among kin, repeated, or lead to reputation gains - after all, they nearly always were in our evolutionary past and our brain evolved for that social environment, not modern day New York. We may “know” that they are one-shot anonymous encounters, but nevertheless act in part on evolved mechanisms that we cannot simply switch off whenever we like. This is often called the “Big Mistake” hypothesis. Perhaps its not always such a big mistake - it can be very costly in the wrong setting, but often an initial cooperative disposition can help generate positive interactions (see Burnham and Johnson 2005 for more on this hypothesis).

Others have argued that humans are cooperative as a result of group selection. In competition with other groups, groups containing more altruists willing to sacrifice for the good of the group would do well at the expense of groups with only selfish individuals, and thus the cooperative group’s gene pool will grow even though it contains costly altruistic genes. This way, altruism could spread. Of course, whether selection at this group level overwhelms the reproductive advantages of within-group selfishness remains an empirical question - both processes occur in tandem and their relative importance will rise or fall depending on various contexts (e.g. migration rate between groups). So this area remains under heavy scrutiny.

The big question that we did not have time to get into during the WSF panel is the role of religion in human cooperation. At first glance, you might wonder why religion has anything to do with the evolution of cooperation. On the other hand, religions appear to offer the quintessential example of human cooperativeness, even altruism - groups of unrelated people willing to sacrifice extraordinary amounts time, energy and resources in the pursuit of shared cooperation (e.g. norms, taboos, helping the needy, collective action). They therefore pose one of the biggest puzzles for those interested in the origins of human cooperation.

To my mind, the evolution of cooperation and religion must have been tightly linked in our evolutionary history. Here’s why. One of the key things that distinguishes cooperation in non-human animals from cooperation in humans is our advanced cognitive abilities for complex language and “theory of mind” (the ability to reason about the contents of other minds, e.g. I know that you know X). Language and theory of mind dramatically elevate the potential for cooperation via indirect reciprocity, as reputations can now spread like wildfire. People can seek out cooperators and avoid cheats even when they have never interacted or even met them before. Moreover, theory of mind opened up a whole new world for managing our own reputations. Unlike our ancestors, with the evolution of theory of mind we were now intensely concerned ourselves about others finding out about and reacting to our own actions later on. I worry about what you know about me (e.g. do you know I stole your brother’s meat?), or what you saw me doing, or what you heard others saying I did, and so on. The consequences of my actions now depend on others’ knowledge, not just on being observed. At the same time, the potential consequences of being found out became more costly, as punishment became more likely (with more connected eyes and ears) and more severe (with the greater potential for group retribution). With the evolution of language and theory of mind, selfishness took on significantly elevated costs.

With our theory of mind on high alert for other minds observing, discovering, and judging our actions, it was a small step to the belief that our actions were continually watched and judged not only by other human beings, but also by supernatural agents (be they gods, witches, ghosts, sorcerers, spirits or whatever). It appears to be a universal feature of human societies that supernatural agents are believed to observe and reward or punish our actions, or even intentions. On the face of it, this seems like the kind of belief that evolution should stamp out because it compromises our reproductive fitness - forcing us to forgo opportunities for selfishness by following taboos or avoiding temptation. However, a belief that supernatural agents are watching may on the other hand bring adaptive advantages - decreasing the likelihood that we will be discovered and punished for socially unacceptable behavior in the real world. Since punishment could be severe in our pre-industrial societies - banishment, shunning, injury, or even death - evolution may have favored a belief in supernatural agents as a mindguard against selfish behavior. In short, part of humankind’s great propensity for cooperation may stem from the fear of supernatural punishment (further reading on this “supernatural punishment hypothesis”). Even atheists maintain beliefs about the consequences of our actions that are essentially supernatural: superstitions, folklore, “Just World” beliefs, karma, comeuppance, just desserts, and so on. If such beliefs were adaptive in our evolutionary history, their universality and persistence across places and cultures would be no surprise at all.