Evolutionary Advantages of Religion for the Human Species

Something as apparently dysfunctional as fundamentalist religion would seem to have nothing to contribute to evolutionary success. But clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers, the Stone Age version of Unitarians and Quakers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would likewise benefit.

And there is another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated. The human mind desires the experience of beauty. While religion memes have fed the worst of human feelings and actions, it has also fed the best of them. We have a natural, and probably irresistible, passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping inhabitants. To scientists, this is an evolved human emotion Edward O. Wilson called "biophilia." To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them.

It is easy to be inspired by the beauty of interesting landscapes, mountains and waterfalls and soaring birds and leaping whales and teeming jungles (so long as you are not actually walking through them and swatting the mosquitoes and pulling off leaches that fall on you like rain). But biophilia is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in. Consider these examples.

I taught a class at a field station one summer. One of my students was a young lady who grew up in western Kansas. The entire landscape of western Kansas is utterly flat and is devoted entirely to wheat. Granted, there are beautiful places in Kansas, but this was not one of them. I had just driven through this young woman's hometown to arrive at the field station. She said, regarding western Kansas, that it was the most beautiful place in the world.

I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which was beautiful at one time, before all of its natural wetlands were drained and almost all of its oak forests were cut down in the twentieth century, transforming it into farmland. In my childhood it seemed inexpressibly beautiful. It is a feeling I still get, if only a little, whenever I visit it.

Before we dismiss believing in the beauty of western Kansas or the San Joaquin Valley as delusion, let us briefly consider what humans have had to endure. Much human misery has come from the seeming indifference or even hostility of the environment. Floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts. But the successful humans were those that loved their lands zealously, no matter what nature did to them, and endured. Their religious memes may have told them that there were evil spirits in the storm winds, but the Great Spirit prevails to make the world into a cosmos in which we can continue to live. We love the land in which we grow up. This is biophilia. Biophilia has been one of our adaptations to survival. Enshrined within the memes of some religions, biophilia has helped to keep us going.

This essay is part of my new book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published by Prometheus Books.