Ever wondered why so many people are investing lots of hours into social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Blogs, vying for some more "friends", "followers", comments or clicks?
It's long been assumed that the reason is our evolutionary history. Whether we are studying obtaining food, organizing security, labour or - the feature most distinguishing us from other primates - cooperative child care, our species learned to rely on social cooperation for successful survival and reproduction. In fact, Charles Darwin dubbed "Man" as a "Social Animal" - although he was not yet aware i.e. of the importance of cooperative childcare. Now, a new Harvard-study by Coren Apicella et al. explored social networks among the contemporary hunters and gatherers of the African Hadza - and found them to resemble those we are building in "modern" ways, too.
And as a special feature, the colleagues not only featured the results on print, but also with a well-done video-presentation. Enjoy!
Maybe you have been wondering why so many people are freaking out because of another "end of the world" destined for 2012. After all, there have been numerous respective dates in the past, and it never happened.
But we are, simply put, products of evolution. And as a deeply social species, we have evolved to become addicted to experiencing and sharing captivating narratives. And what could be more fascinating than a story about the very topics of survival and reproduction: About great catastrophes wiping out nearly everyone, with the few survivors then going forth to be fruitful and multiply. It's a classic.
From Floods to the Apocalypse
Therefore, we shouldn't be too surprised to find respective narratives abundant among religious mythologies. There's plenty of popular end-of-the-world-myths available, ranging from the biblical, noachidic flood (which is only a late version of many older flood narratives) to the Norse Ragnarök and the genre-naming Christian apocalypse (greek: revelation). Ironically, the Mayan calendar is not among them - december 21st 2012 is just the non-specified end of a cyclus.
But modern "secular" culture is craving for apocalyptic tales as any human culture did before. The image of a punishing God may be replaced by those of a vengeful nature. Instead of demons and angels, aliens and asteroids are descending from the sky. And those lucky or worthy few that survive are destined to sire children and to turn the eternal circle of life...
Thus, whether you are secular or religious, you may want to "enjoy" the subsequent collection of some apocalypses. I'd be glad if you would share some of the ideas and emotions you experienced while watching.
Let us take a look at those five introductory sentences framing Darwin's evolutionary perspective on "Belief in God - Religion".
"There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea.”
In his opening sentences, Darwin is refuting the idea of an "Urmonotheismus", a primordial monotheism. Instead, he asserts that some "savage" traditions have no concept of higher deities (such as mono-, poly- or henotheism), thereby bringing up his central argument: That contemporary beliefs and religions evolved from very simple beginnings, too.
“The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the af-firmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived.”
Proving his sound education in anglican theology (the only university degree Darwin mastered throughout his life), Darwin then explains that evolutionary (that is: empirical) studies of religiosity and religions neither proves nor disproves the existence of (a) God. Instead, these questions are to be discussed in the metaphysical realms of philosophies and theologies. Darwin is adding a curteous nod to (evolutionary) theists, many of whom - i.e. Alfred Russel Wallace - accompanied and supported his scientific mission.
“If, however, we include under the term "religion" the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose.”
If theistic religions evolved from earlier forms, we would need a broad and workable definition. Darwin is offering "the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies" - in contemporary words: supernatural agents (or, even more precisely: superempirical agents). Ancestors, spirits, angels are encompassed by this definition as are sentient mountains and trees, Buddhist bodhisatvas, Jain tirthankaras, Shintoist khami or even Raelian space aliens and, of course, any poly-, heno- or monotheistic deities.
It is an interesting coincidence that, although only a small number of contemporary colleagues are aware of Darwin's own works on the matter, contemporary definitions of supernatural (superempirical) agents became the most successful and prevalent working definitions in interdisciplinary studies of religion.
For that, I am assuming a single reason: Charles Darwin had been right on this topic.
For the last years, the demographic potentials of religiosity have been my primary focus of research. Repeatedly, people asked me whether proselytizing or high fertility would be more important for the success of a religious tradition.
Now, Christopher P. Scheitle, Jennifer B. Kane and Jennifer van Hook jointly addressed this topic in a compelling study, freshly published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Rome in the year 2011. After the beatification of a prominent pope, the Vatican is inviting bloggers from around the world to share thoughts and ideas about future dialogue in the World Wide Web. Sounds silly or fantastic? Well, it actually happened. As I happened to be one of the 150 bloggers invited (although being a scientific blogger and German Protestant), I appreciated the chance to visit Rome, to get to know lots of wonderfull bloggers interested in religiosity and religions and to build some more contacts for scientific dialogue.
These last days, a mathematical study about a purported decline of religious affiliation incited various (online-)debates. It was presented by Daniel Adams, Haley Yaple and Richard Wiener at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas. Although I was asked by a German science-portal to write an article about it and waited some more days, I couldn't find a single English-using writer pointing out the main flaw of their elegant model: Adams, Yaple and Wiener didn't include the well-tested effects of religious demography.
Some years ago, I stumbled upon a lecture by nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 - 1992), which he had held in 1982 at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg. Therein, the great economist, evolutionary theorist and social philosopher had pondered his lifetime quest, the complex implications of rationality and creativity in evolutionary theory. And suddenly, he had turned to the evolution of religiosity and religions. Although his great lecture was not really understood by most of his fellows, Hayek would later finish his respective thoughts in the very last chapter of his last book ("Religion and the Guardians of Tradition" in "The Fatal Conceit", 1992). I had found a scientific treasure.
A happy new year, a happy new step: Today, we may enjoy the first guest blogpost here on the Scilog "Biology of Religion" by Alan Le Fevre. Being an avid reader and commentator of this blog, I asked him to formulate his personal views about the evolution of religions for review and discussion.
Alan aka Skipjack Le Fevre: From Religion, the Blessing of Civilization
Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin by the Moat
(aka St. Basil's Cathedral), Red Square, Moscow
The most basic human communities available for study are hunter-gatherer bands.These are extended-family groups;nomadic, egalitarian (no formal social hierarchy), vary in size up to dozens and presumed to be the most primitive, representing human community back into the Upper Paleolithic, 50 odd thousand years ago.If the hunting and gathering were good, the band would grow and split, leaving two now smaller bands to go their separate ways.[1]
Marriages often saw a young woman join the band from another, or less often, a young man. [2]
As the number of bands grew, areas where seasonal or year-round sustenance could be found began to be ‘claimed’ by settled or semi-settled groups.It quickly became their advantage in these conditions to grow the size of the group to better hold and defend this territory.To grow yet maintain stability, however, required the instituting of social structure.As bands grew into tribes, a chief or big-man hierarchy developed. [1]
A tribe could manage a village of up to one to two hundred individuals under the direction of its chief.As the tribe grew larger, the discord and challenges of resolving disputes drove the group to division and one group would leave with their new chief, forming a new tribe.We see the beginnings of plant and animal domestication among tribal communities.
If tribal splits were adequately amicable, territory to expand into limited, the local environment and food production technology sufficient, tribal federations or chiefdoms were possible.These are now stable villages which tend to develop hereditary hierarchies and could support up to thousands of individuals. Often in chiefdoms there is a foundational village, home to the ‘first family’, and such familiar traditions as formalized ‘tribute’ become established and rudimentary bureaucracy as the chiefs’ relations get embedded in the politics of maintaining the federation.
Larger, as long as order and coordination was maintained, offered obvious advantages in holding and defending hunting and farming territories, but growing the next step to cities and states required considerable consolidation and institutionalizing of power and control.Bureaucracies and nobility became formalized and shaman evolved into priests and formalized beliefs into religion as well.
Religion emerges as the first branching of government as civilization evolves out of tribal communities.The increased complexity of government allows the complex social community, the evolutionary progression of the human community.
This process has happened possibly dozens of times on all major continents:Africa, Asia, Near and Far East, Europe, India and the Americas.Religion has been a required component of every city and state foundation known.A component of every civilization recorded.Jared Diamond reflects on this necessity in this educational and entertaining video:The Evolution of Religions -
Before watching this lecture, understand he is very critical of religion – all the trash talk that has become a standard from the ‘enlightened’ minds these days.My point of including it is that he recognizes and condescendingly accepts its necessity, including:‘Religion exacts a high cost on society, if one could have found a way to do without it, they would have a great advantage, but none have’.The clip also shares some background on the evolution of religion and the traditional functions religion has served in states through history.
Why do we have religion?To remain competitive, human societies had to grow in size to defend themselves and their territory.To remain stable and functional, larger communities required increasingly complex structure.To achieve Civilization, to maintain order with tens of thousands (to billions) of individuals, state level government and religion were essential components of that complex structure.
References
[1] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.
[2] Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization.
Note:In both the text and video clip referenced, Diamond repeatedly brings up that tired old missive of religion causing wars.That is really the primary motive of including Keeley.While he never makes my point that civilization is synonymous with ‘has religion’, he shows with meticulous detail that ‘traditional’ human communities, those lacking religion, have three times the number of wars as found in communities with religion (once per year vs. once every three years average), and over ten times the casualty rate as state societies.Religion causes wars?Keeley shows it stopping two out of three wars, nine out of ten deaths.
Why would such be needed?We joke of ‘herding cats’.Try herding heavily armed, predatory apes!
