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.

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.

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.

]]> http://evolution-of-religion.com/2009/11/10/prosocial-debating/feed/ http://evolution-of-religion.com/2009/10/31/the-evolution-of-leadership/ http://evolution-of-religion.com/2009/10/31/the-evolution-of-leadership/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:10:01 +0000 Dominic http://evolution-of-religion.com/?p=1109 We often think of “leadership” as a uniquely human trait, conjuring up images of historical giants such as Gandhi or Churchill, as well as infamous ones like Hitler or Stalin. Current events also anchor discussions of leadership to human affairs from the war in Iraq, the election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the banks, to our everyday experience of great or bad bosses or the trials and tribulations of leading others in our workplace. Whether it is done well or badly, political, military, religious and economic leadership dramatically impacts all of our lives.

However, have you ever wondered where our propensities for leadership (and followership) came from? If we step back from our own world of human affairs, we quickly notice leadership and followership in action throughout the animal kingdom. Over the summer months, you may have seen bees following leads to productive flowers, trails of ants forming organized highways from your picnic table into the bushes, and now flocks of birds wheeling across the October skies in their seasonal migration. These are not random or chance movements and gatherings. Each is an example of adaptations for leadership and followership that are crucial to survival.

In a new paper with biologist Andrew King and psychologist Mark Van Vugt (“The Origins and Evolution of Leadership”, Current Biology, October 2009), Dominic Johnson examined aspects of leadership and followership that we share in common with other animals. Even humans, it turns out, are subject to some of the same underlying phenomena of mass movement that apply to fish and birds. But our cross-species approach also allowed us to distinguish what is unique about human leadership and followership-big brains change the game-but this difference is where an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful.

Our modern social and physical environment is of course very different to that in which we evolved. But if we understand both the “ultimate” functions of leadership and followership behavior (what is it for? who benefits? who pays the costs?), and the “proximate” psychological mechanisms that cause them, then we can identify areas of “mismatch” where our evolved mechanisms are likely to clash with evolutionarily novel stimuli (the modern world). For example, positions of leadership today are still correlated with age, sex, height, and weight—over and above differences in competence and effectiveness. Are big old male bosses really better than average? Or could this be some sort of hangover from our evolutionary past?

An evolutionary approach to leadership offers a scientific framework that offers new ways to understand, predict and improve leadership and followership—human traits that did not emerge out of thin air, but which we share with countless other species and have been shaped by natural selection for hundreds of millions of years.

The origins of leadership are importantly for our religion project, because evolutionary theorists of religion (as opposed to earlier social theorists such as by Marx) have often ignored the role of leadership (one exception is Lee Cronk’s 1994 article in Skeptic). This is, however, a critical question for understanding the Darwinian fitness benefits of religious beliefs and behaviors. What are the differences, if any, in the causes, consequences, and payoffs in religious beliefs and behaviors between followers (“the masses”) and leaders (”the elites”)? This new paper provides a useful interdisciplinary basis from which to investigate these questions from an evolutionary perspective.

See Current Biology webpage

Conference on evolutionary approaches to leadership at London Business School, 14 January 2010

Dominic Johnson’s other work on leadership: Book chapter “The Mismatch Hypothesis”, with Mark Van Vugt, Robert Kaiser and Rick O’Gorman; and his book “Overconfidence and War” (Harvard University Press, 2004)

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.

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.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the idea that religion may be a product of evolution. Many prominent authors, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, argue that religion is an evolutionary accident—a by-product of big human brains.

We suggest exactly the opposite hypothesis. If religious beliefs and behaviors promoted survival and reproduction in our ancestral past, then they may have been favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. This would mean that religious beliefs and behaviors are “adaptive”, and that religion evolved as a natural product of Darwinian processes. Religion may thus not be an accident of evolution, but rather an example of evolution.

The “Evolution of Religion” project is dedicated to exploring this hypothesis using scientific methods from anthropology, psychology and evolutionary biology (see our aims). The main adaptive advantages of religion appear to revolve around promoting cooperation. The power of religion to promote solidarity and trust offers a remarkably effective way of solving the thorny problem of  ”collective action”—how to trump individual self-interests and promote collective benefits instead. The dark side of religion’s power to promote cooperation is that, although cooperation works wonders within groups, it can exacerbate differences and conflicts between groups.

An evolutionary approach to religion does not exclude the possibility that supernatural agents are genuine (gods and evolution might coexist). However, it does suggest an alternative scientific hypothesis for the origin and persistence of religion. Evolutionary theories of religion are important because if belief in supernatural agents and related phenomena were subject to natural selection, then religious beliefs and behaviors are likely to be deeply ingrained features of human cognition, difficult to alter and unlikely to disappear from human culture anytime soon. Although it appears that many cultures around the globe are becoming more secular, the proportion of believers is growing, and even atheists are not immune from common perceptions of supernatural causation in everyday life—as E.O. Wilson wrote, “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology” (Consilience, p.292). Our ability to understand, predict, and intervene in religious conflicts around the world will be incomplete without a solid scientific understanding of religion’s evolutionary origins, adaptive functions, and cognitive mechanisms.

Edinburgh is a fitting base for our project, where Charles Darwin spent two formative years at Edinburgh University Medical School from 1825-1827. Given the times in which Darwin arrived in Edinburgh, it is likely that his creative ideas were fueled by the Scottish Enlightenment. As described by the Head of Collections at Edinburgh University: “We have one of the greatest intellectual fireworks displays that ever happened in Europe. And then one of the greatest minds which the UK ever produces happens to settle on it. You would expect something very important to happen” (How Edinburgh Inspired Darwin’s Origin of Species, The Times, February 2009).

The timing is also fitting—2009 is the anniversary of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. It is striking that it has taken a century and a half for scientists to seriously think about whether religious beliefs and behaviors, like other beliefs and behaviors, may be subject to the evolutionary processes that Darwin first revealed.

Edinburgh University is celebrating Darwin’s birthday with a variety of seminars, exhibitions, and tours throughout 2009. We are celebrating by launching a project to address perhaps the greatest challenge yet for Darwinism and evolutionary biology: does its power extend to explaining even the phenomenon that was long thought to lie beyond the realm of science?