Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Theories in this family raise some interesting possibilities. Both sugar and saccharine trigger our sweet-tooth system. Are there religion substitutes to be found or concocted by clever psychoengineers? Or—even more interesting—are religions themselves a kind of saccharine for the brain, less filling or debilitating or intoxicating than the original and potentially harmful target? Is religion itself a subspecies of folk medicine, in which we self-medicate for relief, using therapies honed by thousands of years of trial-and-error development? Is there genetic variation in religious sensitivity, like the huge genetic variation recently discovered among human beings in taste and olfaction? Those of us who can’t stand cilantro have a gene for an olfactory receptor that cilantro lovers don’t share. Cilantro “tastes” rather like soap to us. William James speculated a hundred years ago that he—but not everybody—had a brute need for religion: “Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism” (letter to Leuba, quoted in introduction to James, 1902, p. xxiv). James’s mystical germ might actually be a mystical gene. Or it might be, just as he said, a mystical germ, something that spread from person to person not “vertically” (by descent from parents) but “horizontally,” by infection.

Â

Symbiont theories: Religions might turn out to be species of cultural symbionts that manage to thrive by leaping from human host to human host. They may be mutualists—enhancing human fitness and even making human life possible just as the bacteria in our gut do. Or commensals—neutral, neither good for us nor bad for us, but along for the ride. Or they might be parasites: deleterious replicators that we would be better off without—at least so far as our genetic interests are concerned—but that are hard to eliminate, since they have evolved so well to counter our defenses and enhance their own propagation. We can expect that cultural parasites, like microbial parasites, exploit whatever preexisting systems come in handy. The sneezing reflex, for instance, is in the first place an adaptation for ridding the nasal passages of foreign irritants, but when a germ provokes sneezing, it is typically not the sneezer but the germ that is the principal beneficiary, getting a high-energy launching into a neighborhood where other potential hosts can take it in. Spreading germs and spreading memes may exploit similar mechanisms, such as irresistible urges to impart stories or other items of information to others, enhanced by traditions that heighten the length, intensity, and frequency of encounters with others who might be likely hosts.

When we look at religion from this perspective, the cui bono? question changes dramatically. Now it is not our fitness (as reproducing members of the species Homo sapiens) that is presumed to be enhanced by religion, but its fitness (as a reproducing—self-replicating—member of the symbiont genus Cultus religiosus). It may thrive as a mutualist because it benefits its hosts quite directly, or it may thrive as a parasite even though it oppresses its hosts with a virulent affliction that leaves them worse off but too weak to combat its spread. And the main point to get clear about at the outset is that we can’t tell which of these is more likely to be true without doing careful, objective research. Your religion probably seems obviously benign to you, and other religions may well seem to you to be just as obviously toxic to those infected by them, but appearances can deceive. Perhaps their religion is providing them with benefits that you just don’t understand yet, and perhaps your religion is poisoning you in ways that you have never suspected. You really can’t tell from the inside. That’s how parasites work: quietly, unobtrusively, without disturbing their hosts any more than is absolutely necessary. If (some) religions are culturally evolved parasites, we can expect them to be insidiously well designed to conceal their true nature from their hosts, since this is an adaptation that would further their own spread.

Â

These two families of theories, sweet tooth and symbiont, are not exclusive. As we have already seen with the example of the alcohol-excreting yeast, there are symbiotic possibilities that may combine several of these phenomena together. It may be that an initial craving is exploited by cultural symbionts that include both mutualist and parasitical forms. A relatively benign or harmless symbiont may mutate under some conditions into something virulent and even deadly. For millennia, people have imagined that other religions might be a form of disease or sickness, and apostates often look back on their earlier days as a period of affliction which they have somehow survived, but the evolutionary perspective allows us to see that there are just as many positive as negative scenarios once we start looking at religion as possibly a cultural symbiont. Friendly symbionts are everywhere. Your body is composed of perhaps a hundred trillion cells, and nine out of ten of them are not human cells (Hooper et al., 1998)! Most of these trillions of microscopic guests are either harmless or helpful; only a minority are worth worrying about. Many of them, indeed, are valuable helpers that we inherit from our mothers and would be quite defenseless without. These inheritances are not genetic. Some of them may be passed on via the shared bloodstream of mother and fetus, but others are picked up by bodily contact or proximity. (A surrogate mother who makes no genetic contribution to the fetus implanted in her womb nevertheless makes a major contribution to the microflora that the infant will carry with it for the rest of its life.)

Cultural symbionts—memes—are similarly passed on to one’s offspring by nongenetic pathways. Speaking one’s “mother tongue,” singing, being polite, and many other “socializing” skills are transmitted culturally from parents to offspring, and infant human beings deprived of these sources of inheritance are often profoundly disabled. It is well known that the parent-offspring link is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Children grow up speaking their parents’ language and, in almost all cases, identifying with their parents’ religion. Religion, not being genetic, can be spread “horizontally” to nondescendants, but such conversions play a negligible role under most circumstances. A dim appreciation of this has led in the past to some crude and cruel programs of “hygiene.” If you think that religion is, all things considered, a malignant feature of human culture, a childhood disease of sorts with lingering aftereffects, the public-health policy to deal with it would be politically drastic but quite simple: inoculation and isolation. Don’t let parents give their own children a religious upbringing! This policy has been tried, on a major scale, in the former Soviet Union, with dire consequences. The rebound of religion in post-USSR Russia suggests that religion has roles to play and resources undreamt of by this simple vision.

A completely different sort of evolutionary possibility is represented by sexual-selection theories. Perhaps religion is like a bowerbird’s bower. Male bowerbirds devote extraordinary time and effort to building and decorating elaborate structures designed to impress females of the species, who choose a mate only after assessing rival bowers carefully. This is an example of runaway sexual selection, the subvariety of natural selection in which the pivotal selective role is played by the choosy female, whose preferences may, over many generations, snowball into highly specific and onerous demands, such as the whims of peahens that oblige peacocks to grow spectacular—and spectacularly expensive and awkward—tails. (See Cronin, 1991, for a fine overview.) The bright coloration of male birds is the best-studied example of sexual selection. In these cases, an initial bias in the innate whims of females, such as a preference for blue over yellow, gets amplified by positive feedback into intensely blue males, the bluer the better. Had a majority of the females in an isolated population of the species just happened to prefer yellow over blue, the runaway selection would have ended up with bright-yellow males. There is nothing in the environment that makes yellow better than blue or vice versa except for the reigning taste of the species’ females, which exerts a powerful, if arbitrary, selection pressure.