Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Part of what is tantalizing about this research avenue is how nonreductionistic it is! McClenon and Hamer have worked independently of each other, so far as I know. Neither mentions the other, in any case, and neither is treated by Boyer or Atran or the other anthropologists. This is not surprising. The collaboration between geneticists and neurobiologists on the one hand and anthropologists and archeologists and historians on the other, pioneered by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, is a recent and spotty trend. False starts and disappointments are bound to outnumber triumphs in the early days of such interdisciplinary work, and I make no promises about the prospects of the specific hypotheses of either McClenon or Hamer. They make a vivid and accessible example of the possibilities in store, however. Recall Dawkins’s point quoted in chapter 3: “If neuroscientists find a ‘god center’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not?” (2004b, p. 14). We now have one eventually testable answer to Dawkins’s question, and it invokes not just biochemical facts but the whole world of cultural anthropology.⁶ Why did those with the genetic tendency survive? Because they, unlike those who lacked the gene, had health insurance! In the days before modern medicine, shamanic healing was your only recourse if you fell ill. If you were constitutionally impervious to the ministrations that the shamans had patiently refined over the centuries (cultural evolution), you had no health-care provider to turn to. If the shamans had not existed, there would have been no selection advantage to having this variant gene, but their accumulated memes, their culture of shamanic healing, could have created a strong ridge of selection pressure in the adaptive landscape that would not otherwise have been there.

This still doesn’t get us to organized religion, but it does get us to what I am going to call folk religion, the sorts of religion that have no written creeds, no theologians, no hierarchy of officials.⁷ Before any of the great organized religions existed, there were folk religions, and these provided the cultural environment from which organized religions could emerge. Folk religions have rituals, stories about gods or supernatural ancestors, prohibited and obligatory practices. Like folk tales, the sayings of folk religion are of such distributed authorship that it is better to say that they have no authors at all, not that their authors are unknown. Like folk music, ⁸ the rituals and songs of folk religion have no composers, and their taboos and other moral injunctions have no legislators. Conscious, deliberate authorship comes later, after the designs of the basic cultural items have been honed and polished for many generations, without foresight, without intent, by nothing but the process of differential replication during cultural transmission. Is all this possible? Of course. Language is a stupendously intricate and well-designed cultural artifact, and no individual human designers get to take credit for it. And just as some of the features of written languages are clearly vestigial traces of their purely oral ancestors, ⁹ some of the features of organized religion will turn out to be vestigial traces of the folk religions from which they are descended. By vestigial traces, I mean this: the preservation over many generations of a folk religion—its self-replication in the face of inexorable competition—demands adaptations that are peculiar to an oral tradition and that are no longer strictly necessary (from a reverse-engineering point of view) but that persist simply because they haven’t yet been sufficiently costly to be selected against.

5 Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures

The total corpus of Baktaman knowledge is stored in 183 Baktaman minds, aided only by a modest assemblage of cryptic concrete symbols (the meanings of which depend on the associations built up around them in the consciousness of a few seniors) and by limited, suspicious communication with the members of a few surrounding communities.

—Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea

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Humans, it appears, are the only animals that spontaneously engage in creative, rhythmic bodily coordination to enhance possibilities for cooperation (e.g., singing and swaying when they work together).

—Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust

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Every folk religion has rituals. To an evolutionist, rituals stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade. They are usually stunningly expensive: they often involve the deliberate destruction of valuable food and other property—to say nothing of human sacrifices—are often physically taxing or even injurious to the participants, and typically require impressive preparation time and effort. Cui bono? Who or what is the beneficiary of all this extravagant outlay? We have already seen two ways rituals might pay for themselves, as psychologically necessary features of divination techniques, or hypnotic induction procedures in shamanic healing.¹⁰ Once they were established on the scene for these purposes, they would be available to be adapted—exapted, as the late Stephen Jay Gould would say—for other uses. But there are other possibilities to explore.

Anthropologists and historians of religion have theorized about the meaning and function of religious ritual for generations, usually from blinkered perspectives that ignore the evolutionary background. Before we look at speculations about rituals as symbolic expressions of one deep need or belief or another, we should consider the case that can be made for rituals as memory-enhancement processes, designed by cultural evolution (and not by any conscious designers!) to improve the copying fidelity of the very process of meme transmission they ensure. One of the clearest lessons of evolutionary biology is that early extinction lies in the future of any lineage in which the copying machinery breaks down, or even just degrades a little. Without high-fidelity copying, any design improvements that happen to occur in a lineage will tend to be frittered away almost immediately. Hard-won gains accumulated over many generations can be lost in a few faulty replications, the precious fruits of R & D evaporating overnight. So we can be sure that would-be religious traditions that have no good ways of preserving their designs reliably over the centuries are doomed to oblivion.

We can observe today the birth and swift death of cults, as the early adherents lose faith or lose interest and drift away, leaving hardly a trace after a few years. Even when members of such a group fervently want to keep it going, their desires will be thwarted unless they avail themselves of the technologies of replication. Today, writing (not to mention videotape and other high-tech recording media) provides the obvious information highway to use. And from the earliest days of writing, there has been a keen appreciation of the need not only to protect the sacred documents from damage and decay, but to copy them over and over, minimizing the risk of loss by ensuring that multiple copies were distributed around. For many centuries before the invention of movable type, which made possible for the first time the mass production of identical copies, roomfuls of scribes, shoulder to shoulder at their writing desks, took dictation from a reader and thus turned one frail and dog-eared copy into dozens of fresh new copies—a copy machine made of people. Since the originals from which the copies were made have mostly turned to dust in the meantime, without the efforts of these scribes we would have no reliable texts for any of the literature of antiquity, sacred or secular, no Old Testament, no Homer, no Plato and Aristotle, no Gilgamesh. The earliest known copies of Plato’s dialogues still in existence, for instance, were created centuries after his death, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi gospels (Pagels, 1979) are copies of texts that were composed hundreds of years earlier.