The Evolution of Religion, part two

The following is a continuation of the entry, “religion, evolution of,” from the Revised Edition of my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012.

Memes: The Software of Religion

The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. The above experiences, such as a sense of disembodiment, will create a compulsion to explain them, an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and the result is a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.

Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by altered mental states, induced by natural compounds (such as psilocybin in some mushrooms), sensory deprivation (as in a cave), ritual rhythmicity, or particularly vivid dreams. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made humans eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. Humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences, and religious memes satisfied this desire.

One of the most important religion memes is guilt. Throughout human prehistory and history, religious leaders have parasitized the human capacity for guilt to reinforce their power over the minds of their followers, and religion has been one of the principal means by which they have done so.

The Evolutionary Advantages of Religion

Religion would probably have been a local aberration in early human populations had it not provided some evolutionary advantage. In modern tribal societies, shamans who claim to have exceptional religious experiences have considerable social power, which can translate into greater resources and reproductive opportunities; no doubt this was also the case during the prehistory of Homo sapiens. David Lewis-Williams points out that this would be the same in the Lascaux cave as in modern charismatic Christianity. Religious leaders would gain the within-population fitness advantage that is necessary for natural selection. Once the trait was established or at least common within a tribe, this tribe would have advantages over tribes that did not possess it—for example, social cohesion and identity that allowed them to prevail in conflicts. 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. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would experience a cascade of benefits.

Another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated is the instinct of biophilia. Humans have a natural passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping and roaring inhabitants. 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. Biophilia, and religious expressions of it, is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in, and has probably helped numerous individuals and tribes to persist through unspeakable hardships.
Although all Homo sapiens groups have religion, there was a striking development of religion when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and later when the most recent ice age forced Northern European tribes southward where they encountered disturbingly intelligent people that already lived in Southern Europe. Religion then functioned in tribal identity. Evidence for the tribal identity function is that there were geographical differences in types and styles of artwork—for example, different caves specialized on different animals, reflecting differences in established traditions.

There have been many different attempted explanations of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Some anthropologists say that the paintings were sympathetic magic to promote successful hunting. However, as David Lewis-Williams points out, the set of animals in the paintings is not the same as the animals that the people ate (for example, they did not eat bears and lions), and only 15 percent of the paintings show animals with spears. The paintings resemble animal visions that people might have seen during hallucinations. The animal paintings are often accompanied by geometric symbols that resemble the images seen during migraines. The animal images are not in their natural habitats, and appear to be floating, and sometimes lack hooves.
To the Cro-Magnon, as to many recent tribal peoples, the wall of a cave may have represented an interface between the outer world and the underworld. When the prehistoric people entered a cave, they were literally entering the underworld. In the darkness they would hallucinate from sensory deprivation, and possibly also from the high levels of carbon dioxide. Then when the lamps were lit, they would paint the images they had seen. Sometimes the artists would also paint their hands, leaving either positive or negative images of them, as a mark of direct contact with the underworld. Hand contact with the wall, and the process of spit-painting, were part of the overall religious experience. The visionary quality of the paintings is particularly evident in the deepest recesses of the caves, some as much as a kilometer underground, where quick sketches of many animals overlapped.

In addition to the individual religious experience, there was also a communal aspect. Religious shamans could gain admiration from their followers by taking them deep into the caves to see the evidence of their religious experiences. Meanwhile, the shallower reaches of the cave served as the assembly rooms for the general population, and it is in such places that the large, vivid images are found. The cave paintings may therefore have served to increase the social status and the fitness of religious leaders.

With the advent of civilization, religion was usually dominated by priests and kings and used as a way of controlling people. The power structure that provided an advantage of some people over others in a society could also allow one city-state to dominate another. This role of religion continues to this day. At the same time, there has been a parallel lineage of prophets who criticize social norms. In ancient Israel, for example, practically all the prophets were outcasts who lived in huts and caves and were sorely hated by the priests and kings. Governments still use religion as a tool of domination in some countries. In the United States, there are many large religious organizations that obtain a great deal of monetary and other kinds of support from their adherents, and these organizations have great influence on national and local politics. Religion is at least as much a tool of power and fitness opportunities as it was at the time of the Cro-Magnons.

Even though religion is not a single adaptation, its memes are closely enough tied together that they will probably all be with the human species as long as it exists. With a rush of Enlightenment optimism, Thomas Jefferson said in the early 19th century, “There is no young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian.” Evidently he was wrong.

Evolution of religion, part one.

The following entries are from the Revised Edition of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012. I have taken them from the entry, “religion, evolution of.”

Homo sapiens is a religious species. This is one of the few behavioral universals of the human species. Though there is individual variation in the strength of this trait, no society is without it; those that tried to eliminate it have failed. Religion appears to be ineradicable. There is clearly no biological basis for particular religions, but it is likely that there is a biological basis for the capacity for religion.

Neandertals apparently did not have religion. The contrast between the religious artifacts of Homo sapiens and their absence in Homo neanderthalensis in their regions of overlap could hardly be greater. While Homo sapiens had intricate burials (a burial of two children in Sungir, Russia, contained 10,000 shell beads each of which took from one to three person hours to prepare), Neandertals apparently dug the shallowest possible graves to keep the body from stinking. The Shanidar burial of a Neandertal with flowers, even if it is confirmed, is a rare and isolated instance. Neandertal pendants associated with the Châtelperronian culture have been mostly dismissed as imitative of the Aurignacian culture of the Cro-Magnon, and even if they were not, their connection with religion is unclear. Neandertal caves totally lack the wall art that abundantly and resplendently represents Cro-Magnon religious experience. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams calls Neandertals “congenital atheists.” Yet Neandertals had brains at least as large as those of modern humans. Other groups of H. sapiens, all over the world, had a similar abundance of religious practice.

What is Religion?

Religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. Many scientists have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. Therefore when scientists say that religion is universal among humans, they mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. They cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. Social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others.

The Brain: The Hardware of Religion

Human brains increased in size over evolutionary time for numerous reasons, including the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it the evolution of intelligence. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size, including the parts associated with the following capacities:

• Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can create a feeling of transcendence (ex- means out of, stasis means place).
• Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. The sensation of having a defined body is something that the brain creates. Some kinds of strokes cause their victims to experience reality as a stream of sensations, without an awareness of embodiment. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.
• Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, and one for which religion clearly provides an outlet. One of the principal components of altruism is guilt, which reinforces the likelihood that people will act altruistically.
• The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this may be a vestige of a child’s worship of parents.
• Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that he or she will die, and the possibility that he or she will be preoccupied by it.
• Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them.

Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. Specific areas and functions of the brain have been implicated in the mystical, religious experience. Neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have been particularly active in researching the brain activities associated with religion. They point out, for example, that when humans enter an altered state of consciousness, the orientation association area of the brain (which in the left lobe is associated with the sensation of having a limited body, and in the right lobe with the sense of space that a person occupies) contribute to out-of-body experiences.

Religion is not pathological, but brain pathologies can help scientists to understand its neurological basis. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe by electrodes (or pathological stimulation by epilepsy) produces experiences closely paralleling the near-death experience of passing through a tunnel towards the light. Similar effects are also produced by the drug ketamine.

Announcement: On my other blog I begin an October series about the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. On my YouTube channel, Darwin visits these dinosaur footprints.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Four. How could Near Death Experiences Have Evolved?

As I established in previous blog entries, the Near Death Experience (NDE) is no mere delusion. But neither is it a glimpse into Heaven. It is entirely subjective, occurring within the brain of the person experiencing it. It is a highly structured, detailed, and intense subjective experience. It is something that the brain does in extremis, that is, when imminently threatened with death.

This immediately raises the question of how the capacity for humans to have such a highly structured set of brain experiences could have evolved. Natural selection cannot, after all, favor something that occurs just before death, since the person who experiences them cannot leave offspring.

I wish to suggest that the Near Death Experience evolved because it offered a fitness advantage to people who experienced them and then returned to life. Consider what would have happened back in cave man days. A warrior was killed. Then he came back to life! And he had such things to report! Such visions! Clearly, he had some special contact with the gods. He would be rewarded with high social status and all of the additional mating opportunities that this would afford. Something similar could have happened to any shaman, male or female, who might have gone a little bit too far with the Salvia divinorum or the mushrooms.

Someone who had mere delusions from a brush with death would not be nearly as credible as one who had specific and credible visions such as those associated with the Near Death Experience—credible enough that people still believe them, and books about them are best sellers even in an age of science.

It has been noted that people from many different cultures have similar near death experiences. While it is possible that this is because they have all seen Oprah, it could also be because the brain-based capacity for experiencing a near-death experience had already evolved before the common ancestral populations of all modern races left Africa about 100,000 years ago, before modern races had differentiated.

I have, therefore, offered in this series of blog entries first a medical then an evolutionary explanation for the Near Death Experience. It is neither mere delusion, as skeptics often claim, nor is it a glimpse into heaven.

See my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books.

Religious Software in the Human Brain

The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. This is the major component of evolved human intelligence. If you have brain experiences mentioned above—a sense of disembodiment; a conviction that everything is caused by an agent; sexual euphoria; and visions of the tunnel—you will also have the compulsion to explain them. Here is an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and you have a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.

Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by hallucinogenic drugs, which tapped into the sense of disembodiment. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made us eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. We humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences—what young person has not tried to express the overwhelming sense of being in love?—and religious memes satisfied this desire.

The earliest religions may have been like the theology of Adam and Eve, as depicted in the early chapters of Genesis. They seemed to have no theology except that they knew there was a godlike being who walked around in the garden in the cool of the evening. Deep in the Cro-Magnon caves such as Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet, people seeking religious experiences made lots of marks on the walls, and touched the walls, painting silhouettes of their hands. According to anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, they thought they were making contact with the spirit realm. It may have taken thousands of more years before complex mythologies and systems of theology developed.

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

Religious Hardware of the Human Brain

Human brains increased in size for a number of reasons, such as the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size. Some parts of the brain, even while not themselves conferring advantages, may have gotten dragged along in the general brain size increase. These can be considered to be the mental hardware of religion. Here are some examples.

Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can make you feel that you have transcended out of your place on Earth (ex- means out of, stasis means place). Religions connect religious devotion to sex, for example in the overtly sexual imagery of the Song of Solomon or the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.

Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. Nearly everybody takes the awareness of his or her body for granted. Once in a while, a person experiences a certain kind of stroke in which parts of the left hemisphere are deprived of oxygen and fail to work while the right hemisphere continues to function. Neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor describes a stroke in which she had a feeling that she was not confined to her body, and that she was flowing through a stream of experience. Our brains take nerve impulses from every sensory organ—and these impulses are all the same—and sort them out into sound, color, pain, heat, cold, taste, smell, and orientation. That is, we detect light with our eyes, but we see with our brains; we detect airborne molecules with our noses, but we smell with our brains. Sight and smell are illusions created by the brain. Apparently the sense of being confined within a body is also something that the brain creates. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.

Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, one for which religion clearly provides an outlet.

The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this is a neotenous vestige of a child’s worship of parents. People continue to follow their charismatic religious leaders long after the leaders’ hypocrisies are revealed, and break themselves from this bond of devotion only after a great deal of anguish.

Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability to understand that you will die, and the possibility that you will be preoccupied by it.

Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them. The agent of wind or pain is invisible, but the children believe in the agents anyway.

Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. And in addition, there is the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience, which I discussed in a blog entry early last year (January 10, 2010), and which I will address in more detail later this year.

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

Religion and the Evolved Human Mind

The following essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World (Prometheus Books). I am not sure I agree with everything that I wrote in this passage—my views keep evolving—but I hope you find it interesting anyway.

There is no such thing as religion.

Many writers, as I did in the original edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution, assume that religion is a unified set of evolved behaviors. (I have corrected this mistake in my revised encyclopedia.) It is now clear to me that religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes (pieces of information) that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. We have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. I hereinafter use the term “religion” to refer to this collection of memes.

Therefore when we say that religion is universal among humans, we mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. We cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. And social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others. But we cannot say, as I once said, that religion per se is an ineradicable part of the human mind.

Only humans appear to have religion. Intelligent nonhuman animals appear to live only in the present. They seem unaware that they will die, or take much notice when other members of their species die. The human awareness of death, an awareness we carry with us from adolescence onward, is not necessarily superior to the blessed ignorance of most nonhuman animals.

Exceptions may include elephants, who appear to mourn and to remember the deaths of specific individuals, and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. A vivid example appeared in the November, 2009 National Geographic. The chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon all knew one another. And they all knew an old female, who died in her late forties, which is an advanced age for a chimp. As the human caretakers carried her away on a stretcher, the other chimpanzees lined up along a fence and did things that, to a human observer, appeared to be expressions of grief. Several researchers, including Jane Goodall, have observed chimpanzees appearing to dance as they watched a waterfall, as if they were exulting in its beauty. While even Jane Goodall cannot know what was going on inside of the minds of the chimps, her interpretation—that this was proto-religious awareness on the part of the chimps—is credible.

The main reason that fully-developed religion is unique to humans is that humans have such large brains. The size of the human brain relative to the size of the body, compared to that of other primates, is out of the ball park. Relative brain sizes of primates exceed that of the average mammal, which exceeds that of the average vertebrate. More than any other species, humans seem to have excess brain capacity. One of its outlets is religion.

This would not necessarily be the case in other intelligent species. Science fiction has created a universe full of intelligent but essentially non-religious species. For the inhabitants of Middle Earth, created by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkein, religion is not distinct from everyday life. Intelligence does not require religion, but in our case the increase in brain size over evolutionary time has resulted in the capacity for religion.

Why Religion Evolved: The Big Guns

I believe that there was a definite evolutionary reason why religion evolved in the human species. It is not merely a set of parasitic memes that slipped into the collective human brain, as Richard Dawkins thinks and as I speculated in my new book, Life of Earth. I believe he is correct but that there is more to the story. I believe that religion, at least in a rudimentary form, is hard-wired into our brains. This means that natural selection had to fashion it. What evolutionary advantage did religion confer?

It is a weapon.

Religion allows one person to exert control over another. We all know about parasitic religious leaders who have deluded followers into giving them money and overlooking their unlimited sinfulness. I mean just one individual exerting control over another.

I realized this recently when I ran into a rabid conservative in the supermarket. (Are all conservatives rabid? I am beginning to think that, in Oklahoma, many of them are. And they have guns. Lots of them.) We had just experienced several days of snow, ice, and very cold temperatures. So he decided to make fun of me for accepting the science of global warming. (Note that I did not begin this conversation.) I said that the overall trend of temperatures still shows that global warming is occurring; yes, it is cold in winter, and global warming is not going to change that. It is the long-term average that counts. He did not listen. He started yelling about how Al Gore was a terrible person (I made no attempt to defend Mr. Gore) and that this proves that all of global warming science is a hoax. I started to say that the science does not, in fact, depend on anything Al Gore says or does.

Then he pulled out his big guns. He said that there was no global warming because of Jesus. I didn’t quite see the connection. I think he meant that his opinions were inerrant because of Jesus. Of course, there is no way to win this argument, because if you disagree with him about anything that proves that you are an enemy of Christ.

I have put up with his attacks for years. (He used to mow my lawn. And now I regret that he knows where I live.) I have always remained calm and agreed as much as I could and quietly held my ground on the rest. But this time I finally lost my patience, though not very visibly. The people in the supermarket were already watching him before I had said anything. You see, I brought out the big guns right then: religion! I used a religious argument against him. I said that Jesus was not his little finger puppet to wave in the air to make him win every argument.

When I needed a strong weapon in an argument, I pulled out the sword of religion. Even I, as an agnostic scientist. No scientific argument is as strong and primal as religion. A religious argument has an irresistible, primal, visceral satisfaction to it that, at least, feels genetic to me, though I may be wrong—perhaps the Dawkinsian religion memes have so thoroughly parasitized my brain that I am unable to imagine any other explanation. I marveled as I watched myself do this. It happened without any premeditation on my part. I felt as if the two of us were two prehistoric tribes accusing each other of being the enemies of God. When I realized this, I just ended the conversation—forever.

When I felt the religious zeal grasp my brain, I hardly knew what I was saying. But one of the onlookers had an empathetic look on his face and wished me a nice day as I left the scene. This is my external reality check, by which I know that I had not been blinded by my use of religion as a weapon. How would I know otherwise?

Religion is a weapon. I know because I found that I used it as such, without thinking, against someone who used it as such, by deliberate choice.

I am a fairly inoffensive person, as anyone who knows me will testify. But I have been sought out and attacked in this way by conservatives a number of times. I should just admit what I have seen: many conservatives are out for blood, and religion is the weapon they use, just short of firearms.

It is religious conservatives, like this man, who are the best argument against the existence of God.

I imagine some of you might want to share similar experiences you have had, and I encourage you to do so in the comment box.