How might something like the runaway sexual selection process shape the extravagances of religion? In several ways. First, there might have been straightforward sexual selection by human females for religion-enhancing psychological traits. Perhaps they preferred males who demonstrated a sensitivity to music and ceremony, which could then have snowballed into a proclivity for elaborate rapture. The females who had this preference wouldnât have had to understand why they had it; it could just have been a whim, a blind personal taste that prompted them to choose, but if the mates they chose just happened to be better providers, more faithful family men, these mothers and fathers would tend to raise more children and grandchildren than others, and both the sensitivity to ceremony and the taste for those who loved ceremony would spread. Or the same whim could have had a selective advantage only because more females shared that whim, so that sons who lacked the fashionable sensitivity to ceremony were passed over by the choosy females. (And if an influential sample of our female ancestors had happened, for no good reason, to have a taste for males who jumped up and down in the rain, we guys would now find ourselves unable to sit still whenever it rained. Girls might or might not share our tendency to jump under these conditions, but they would definitely go for guys who didâthat is the implication of the classic sexual-selection hypothesis.) The idea that musical talent is the royal road to the embrace of a woman is certainly familiar; it probably sells a million guitars a year. And there may well be something to it. This could be a genetically transmitted proclivity, with significant variation in the population, but we should also consider cultural analogues of sexual selection. The potlatch ceremonies found among the Native Americans of the Northwest are striking: ceremonial demonstrations of conspicuous generosity, in which individuals compete with one another to see who can give away the most, sometimes to the point of ruin. These customs bear the marks of having been created by a positive-feedback escalator like those that establish peacock tails and giant Irish-elk antlers. Other social phenomena also exhibit inflationary spirals of expensive and essentially arbitrary competition: tail fins on cars of the 1950s, teen-agersâ fashions, and outdoor lighting displays at Christmas are among those most often discussed, but there are others as well.
For more than a million years, our ancestors made beautiful âAcheulean handaxes,â pear-shaped stone implements of varying size, lovingly finished and seldom showing any sign of wear and tear. Clearly our ancestors spent a lot of time and energy making these, and the design hardly changed over the eons. Large caches of hundreds and even thousands of these have been found (Mithen, 1996). The archeologist Thomas Wynne (1995) has opined that âit would be difficult to over-emphasize just how strange the handaxe is when compared to the products of modern culture.â âTheyâre biofacts,â said one archeologist, coining a new term, and inspiring the science writer Marek Kohn (1999) to come up with a striking hypothesis. Geofacts are what archeologists call stones that look like artifacts but arenâtâthey are just the unintended product of some geological process. Kohn proposes that these handaxes may not be artifacts so much as biofacts, more like a bowerbirdâs bower than a hunterâs bow and arrow, conspicuously expensive advertisements of male superiority, a ploy that was transmitted culturally, not genetically, in a tradition that dominated the battle of the sexes for a million years. The hominoids who worked so hard to participate in this competition no more needed to understand the rationale of the enterprise than do the male spiders who catch an insect and wrap it neatly in silk to present as a ânuptial giftâ to females during courtship. This is a highly speculative and controversial claim, but it is not yet disproven, and it usefully alerts us to the possibilities that might otherwise elude us. Whatever the reasons for it, our ancestors lavished time and effort on apparently unused artifacts whenever they could, a precedent worth remembering when we marvel at the expense of tombs, temples, and sacrifices.
The interplay of cultural and genetic transmission should also be explored. Consider the well-studied case of lactose tolerance in adults, for instance. Many of us adults can drink and digest raw milk without difficulty, but many others, who of course had no difficulty consuming milk when they were babies, can no longer digest milk after infancy, since their bodies switch off the gene for making lactase, the necessary enzyme, after they are weaned, which is the normal pattern in mammals. Who is lactose-tolerant and who isnât? There is a clear pattern discernible to geneticists: lactose tolerance is concentrated in human populations that have descended from dairying cultures, whereas lactose intolerance is common in those whose ancestors were never herders of dairy animals, such as the Chinese and Japanese.15 Lactose tolerance is genetically transmitted, but pastoralism, the disposition to tend herds of animals, on which the genetic trait depends, is culturally transmitted. Presumably it could have been genetically transmitted, but, so far as we know, it hasnât been. (Border collies, unlike the children of Basque shepherds, have had herding instincts bred into them, after all [Dennett, 2003c, d].)
Then there are money theories, according to which religions are cultural artifacts rather like monetary systems: communally developed systems that have evolved, culturally, several times. Their presence in every culture is readily explained and even justified: itâs a Good Trick that one would expect to be rediscovered again and again, a case of convergent social evolution. Cui bono? Who benefits? Here we can consider several answers:
A. Everybody in the society benefits, because religion makes life in society more secure, harmonious, efficient. Some benefit more than others, but nobody would be wise to wish the whole away.
B. The elite who control the system benefit, at the expense of the others. Religion is more like a pyramid scheme than a monetary system; it thrives by preying on the ill-informed and powerless, while its beneficiaries pass it along gladly to their heirs, genetic or cultural.
C. Societies as wholes benefit. Whether or not the individuals benefit, the perpetuation of their social or political groups is enhanced, at the expense of rival groups.