Humans are Cooperative Breeders! - Evolving Religion? Sarah Hrdy
For a long time, evolutionary studies have been dominated by Western male scientists. Maybe it is not that surprising that their main hypotheses about the specific pathways of our hominid ancestors focussed on competition, hierarchies, warfare, weapon-and-tool-making and hunting. Unfortunately, the most obvious differences between our species and our primate relatives went largely unnoticed: No chimpanzee or orang-utan could entrust her children e.g. to a birthday party or kindergarten in the hands of non-kin others (the biological term being "alloparental care" - childcare beyond mother and father). Their offspring would risk to be attacked and killed. Therefore, other primate mothers tend to carry and shield their offspring for longer stretches of time, which led to extended spans between births wile restricting times of childhood.
Human hominid ancestors evolved by cooperative Childcare!
How did our ancestors manage to shorten birth intervals while expanding the times of childhood (used e.g. for brain development)? They evolved cooperative childcare! A prime among the global universals of hunters and gatherers is the contribution of non-parents to the raising of kids beyond the nuclear family. As the African proverb knows to our day: "It takes a village to raise a child."
With her new book "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding", Sarah Blaffer Hrdy did this (inter-species and inter-cultural) comparison in such a profound way that I would recommend it to anyone seriously interested in the evolution of Homo sapiens. It's an eye-opener!
The Evolutionary Function of Religious Beliefs
What about the relevance in the field of evolutionary studies of religion? It is tremendous! Most of the classic hypotheses (including those of Darwin himself) focussed on religious intra-group cooperation in the fields of hunting and warfare. But Hrdy rightfully observes that religious mythologies is legitimizing distinct family models and organizing cooperative childcare. Not only Mother Church (!) provided assistance and later education to families and children (including the often-quoted "widows and orphans"), as did the Muslim Umma (from arab. umm = mother). Religious personnel is frequently called in the terms of as-if kin, e.g. as Father (Pater), Mother, Brother, Sister, the "Nun" etymological closely related to the "Nanny". Shamans are communicating with the ancestors, emphasizing familial as well as mythological relationships.
If you look at Europe and beyond, religious communities today are increasingly focussing on their central competences - successful religions bestowing massive reproductive advantages upon their adherents in contrast to the less-reproducing seculars. We don't have to speculate about the evolutionary mechanism: We are able to observe it, today and worldwide.
And in the near future, I plan to report (and to admit) how the consequences of these observations and a new and recent experimental study led me to abandon a cherished hypothesis.
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I don't see how taking care of your ingroups children opposes fighting and killing outgroup people. In fact I'd assume that both happen and are important (at leas taken the high killing rates in present hunter-gatherer cultures). It's what Samuel Bowles call "parochial altruism". The important question here is, how do people react to the children of outgroups? Adoption might be important here, as well as female slaves. There's some genetic analyses of male African slaves to America and female African slaves to the Middle East that suggest that the female slaves where mixed into the new population and "integrated without a trace", whereas the male slaves remained a distinct group.
Although the Old Testament is not historically reliable, it's interesting to see the prescriptions for how to handle war enemies after winning battles. Often you should kill men and keep women, sometimes only young women. I don't remember what they say about children though.
Culturally, it would make sense to keep the outgroups small children which are still culturally malleable. Genetically, it would be best to abandon them and make your own (as I believe chimpanzee males do?).
Which one of these (fighting outgroups, helping ingroups) are most important evolutionary, or if other behaviors are more important is an open question.
Of course, denying that ingroup cooperation is important, especially for taking care of small children, isn't very smart.
Thanks for the interesting observations! And I would agree, although I would like to emphasize the point that you are discussing the very point that humans are able to extrend cooperative child care to non-relatives. We tend to do it not in every case, but in many cases. In some cases - as e.g. currently debated in Canada - children have even been taken away by force from their families because others wanted to change their behaviors and to destry their cultural traditions:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...s_and_canada/10338836.stm
Therefore, I wouldn't say that cooperative child care is always "good" or opposed to inter-group competition. But it is a very peculiar behavior, without which no human generation could have survived and procreated. It seems to have shaped our evolutionary path very distinctively - and still does.
Your example: ‘children have even been taken away by force from their families’ has happened on many tribal reservations around the world (a Colonial habit I suppose), but it really involves very few individuals in total so is probably insignificant genetically. Lawrence H. Keeley in ‘War Before Civilization’ recounts ‘bride kidnapping’ as a very common motive for raids in historical aboriginal communities. Among other things, this helps reduce inbreeding. :)