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pernatural agents, that is, offering and sacrifice (offerings of goods, property, time, life)”• “Mastering by supernatural agents of people’s existential anxieties (death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss)”• “Ritualized, rhythmic sensory coor-dination [of the above], (communion congregation, intimate fellowship, etc.)” (1) These are curious. Belief in the verifiably false, futile commitment and sacrifice – these are all costly cultural practices, and to make a case that reli-gion is an evolutionary adaptation, one would need to prove that religion pro-vides some kind of benefit to humans that exceeds these costs. Some scientists, notably Dean Hamer in The God Gene, have argued that the benefits conferred upon the group in the form of group solidarity and the ability to distinguish outsiders outweigh the costs of adopting religious prac-tices. This may be true, but it does not explain why a supernatural entity is nec-essary to achieve these ends. Speaking on Hamer’s position, Harvard psychologist and science writer Steven Pinker argues, “Why, if there is a subgoal in evolution to have people stand together to face off common enemies, would a belief in spirits, or a belief that ritual could change the future, be necessary to ce-ment a community together? Why not

just emotions like trust and loyalty and friendship?” (2). Herein lies the distinction between what a scientist defines as an evolution-ary adaptation and an evolutionary by-product, or exaptation. The criteria for assessing a true adaptation are many, but the essence is that the trait must be a priori beneficial – that is, given only the bare facts about problem X, solution Y follows. A bird’s wing satisfies this – it is how a human engineer would design a system for flight, knowing the laws of physics (gravity), the energy limitations of biological animals (jet engines are out of the question), and that an in-termediate not-quite-a-wing incapable of true flight would also be beneficial (gliding). But religion does not pass the a priori test. One can say a posteriori that religion leads to group solidarity and that this makes a group more suc-cessful, but given the problem, how to create solidarity, “believe in Jesus” is not an a priori logical solution. But what does it mean to say that a social trait is an exaptation rather than an adaptation? It would mean that the traits which predispose man to religion were selected for not because they pre-dispose man to religion, but because they predispose man to other, adaptive traits. How might one go about proving this? Well, for starters, he would need to find independently beneficial psychological universals capable of generating agent-

It has been a long fight, but if the de-batable “intelligent design” argument

is the best that modern-day creationists can muster, then, as far as the scientific establishment is concerned, evolution has won. But having conquered reli-gion and become the dominant idiom for the explanation and discussion of life, science must turn back on its erstwhile opponent and, as science is wont to do, explain it. For if religion has arisen relatively independently in every known civilization in history, it cannot be considered an idiosyncrasy of cul-ture. Instead, it must be discussed in the parlance of evolution: religion (or, more correctly, the tendency towards reli-gion) is a natural trait. The question of how and why religion arose in nature is one of the most interesting challenges currently being tackled by cognitive and social psychologists.

Adaptation and ExaptationA scientist studying religion in the con-text of evolution must first define what exactly religion is. What are the com-mon threads of the world’s religions? According to psychologists Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, there are four: • “Widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.)”• “Hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to su-

By Matthew McFarlane

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based religious concepts, and then show that these very probably lead to the emergence of religion in a group of people who were not told about a god in the first place. In a recent paper entitled “Religion’s evolutionary land-scape,” Atran and Norenzayan have done just that.

Faces in the CloudsWhenever humans observe something out of the ordinary, they instinctively search for agency, or intelligent re-sponsibility. In the words of Atran and Norenzayan, “our brains…are trip-wired to spot lurkers (and to seek protectors) where conditions of uncer-tainty prevail” (1). What will they look for? In most cases, signs of humans – the specific patterns of shapes that indicate a face or a body. However, if no actual person can be found who is responsible (perhaps the offender has fled the scene or perhaps it was an act of nature and nobody was responsible in the first place), there is a high prob-ability that the agency-detection mental subroutines, ardently searching the environment for signs of an intelligent creature, will be fooled. Consider Grog, a hapless prehistoric human caught in a rainstorm. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning surges out of the sky and destroys his shelter. He looks around to find the person responsible, but he cannot find anyone. Grog, whose agency detector is on high alert, continues to scan his surroundings to find the responsible party. Unable to discover who burned down his hut, he lies down on the ground and rests. He looks up and sees something in the clouds that looks like a smiling face. Grog feels a pang of fear in his gut – does a man live in the clouds? Did he destroy my house? Voila, a spirit is born. And before you call poor Grog foolish, recall the widespread fascination with the photograph of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks shown in Figure 1. And, presumably, we know people do not live in the clouds. (1)

When Man Created GodOn the way back to his village, our friend Grog, still in a state of shock, contemplates his experience. As far as he knew, no men lived in the clouds. Are the clouds alive? Perhaps not…but the face he saw looked so…human. Grog is having a difficult time because his experience has pitted his mind against itself. His innate facial recogni-tion software has made him reasonably certain that he saw a face in the clouds, but the idea of a man suffusing the clouds runs counter to what a cogni-tive psychologist would call his “innate

drives their growth and bodily func-tions” (3). Folkpsychology, our innate sys-tem for understanding other humans, interprets and predicts human actions according to beliefs and desires (3). These intuitive psychologies are usually accumulative – that is, humans have all that animals have plus beliefs and de-sires, animals have all that plants have plus the ability to move by themselves, and plants have all that solid objects have plus a “living essence.” How-ever, the mind is capable of processing what psychologist Pascal Boyer calls “minimal counterintuition”: it can shut

ontology.” Grog’s mind, like any hu-man’s, makes cer-tain assumptions about the world. These assumptions are held in innate mental modules, which humans use to process things of the same type. In order to prop-erly activate these mental modules, humans must as-sign the proper on-tological category (i.e. substance, plant, animal, person) to everything they see (Figure 2). If an object is identified as “sub-stance,” it activates all sorts of assumptions about matter which, in aggregate, scientists term folkmechanics. Examples of innate as-sumptions about solid objects are that they have boundaries, cannot pass through one another, and will not move unless given “impetus.” The other three categories, plant, animal or person, subsume progressively more complex assumptions about objects: plants and animals are processed using folkbiology, the core intuition of which is that “liv-ing things house a hidden essence that gives them their form and power and

off one or more of these intuitive mechanisms while keeping others in-tact. For example, all of person minus folkmechanics pro-duces a ghost or spirit, whereas all of plant plus beliefs and desires produc-es a thinking tree. Play around with Figure 2. See how many re l ig ious concepts you can find by changing the signs in the boxes. This modular, in-tuitive psychology is important also because it allows certain concepts to

be carried over wholesale from intuition to counterintuition without forcing a person to relearn everything. If Grog interprets his cloud-face as all of person minus substance, he does not have to relearn what it means to have beliefs and desires – he will understand his new god as being essentially human, but without a solid body. Everything Grog intuitively knows about humans will carry over to this new creation. This makes the adoption of rather strange concepts seem almost natural and fa-cilitates the creation of gods.

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Figure 1. A photograph of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In times of high anxiety and stress, our agency detectors are primed to look for intelligent responsibility.

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But the idea of counterintuition raises an important question: how? How can our brains allow us to dispose of certain fundamental concepts about the world? Atran and Norenzayan at-tribute this to an evolved trait of the mind called metarepresentation, which can broadly be defined as the ability to think about thoughts and propositions – to think what if [x] or John thinks [y]. In other words, by metarepresenting, a person can divorce his thoughts from the current, observable world, and can imagine (1).

Why Religion Sticks AroundReligion’s essential counterintuitiveness is also important because it makes reli-gion interesting and, therefore, memo-rable. When Grog travels to his village and tells his friends that he has seen a man in the clouds, and that this man destroyed his home, his story is likely to be remembered and transmitted for a long time (1). But the mere novelty of the idea of a God does not produce a religion. Religion happens when super-natural, counterintuitive ideas become embedded in cultural practices, social structures and philosophy. And this hap-pens when humans enlist the existence of a supernatural agent to answer the following set of problems inherent to the human condition:

Mystery, Complexity, IgnoranceThe world is very, very complicated. It has taken modern science hundreds of

years to decode the mysteries of chem-istry, biology, and physics, but these mysteries have existed since the dawn of time. Mix insatiable human curios-ity with lightning, wind, day and night, seasons, eclipses, rain, medicinal plants, viruses, death, and you have some very puzzled humans. Once the idea of a supernatural agent has been broached, it is no stretch of the imagination to connect the dots and apply the concept toward these unexplainables (2). And since humans are naturally in-clined to view things in terms of cause and effect, and furthermore, since the cause of complex things in day-to-day life tends to be an intelligent, indepen-dent entity (another person), we are, in fact, naturally predisposed to associate complex things (such as, say, animals) with intelligent designers. As an idea, this dies hard.

Group SolidarityThis is a big one. How can large human groups maintain order and cooperativ-ity in the face of myriad competing personal interests? It is a problem so acute for early humans that many, like Dean Hamer in The God Gene, have concluded that religion is an adapta-tion specific to solving this problem. And, although religion did not evolve specifically to solve this problem, it was certainly co-opted for maintaining group solidarity (2). First, there is the problem of inter-group mixing. Consider a leader who

wants his people to remain loyal to his group. He is smart and a little devi-ous, and he needs a way to convince people that treason is a bad idea. If his group were favored by a vengeful god set to punish any treasonous act with, say, an eternity in hell (is it mere hap-penstance that the innermost circle of hell in Christian theology is reserved for traitors?), this would be a strong disincentive to betraying group inter-ests. In addition, groups might adopt certain social practices which make it easy to see whose trust and dedication the group may truly claim – forcing parents to hand over their newborn sons for mandatory foreskin removal qualifies. Other religiously-linked so-cial practices, such as food-taboos, link treason with disgust. One who cannot eat with the enemy, or who finds the enemy’s practices unappealing is less likely to find their cause compelling or to consider joining their group after betraying his own (2).

Status and Social HierarchyOrdinarily, if an individual in nature wants power and status, he must be big, strong, brave, cunning, well-connected, or some combination of the above. If not, he will quickly be challenged by someone who is and will end up either dead or a few rungs down on the social ladder. But suppose he could threaten others not with his own physi-cal strength, but with the allegiance of an omnipotent, omniscient god. The

Ontological Categories Conceptual Domains and Associated PropertiesFolkmechanics Folkbiology Folkpsychology

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Figure 2. A table of ontological categories and human conceptual domains.

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Focus: Science, Religion, and Politics

threat of an unlimited, unstoppable force is a formidable one, and provides a strong incentive to convert others to your own brand of beliefs and convince them that you are favoured by the Al-mighty. Combine that with a few parlor tricks, and you give people a strong incentive to convert.

Existential AngstThink Hamlet. Man, the intelligent animal, is the most acutely aware of his own mortality. We die, people we love die, and dealing with loss and the idea of life ending is a difficult one, one which humans have a powerful incen-tive to mitigate. Moreover, people die in often curious ways – and sometimes without visible change to their bodies. How can “life” leave a person? This idea of an animat-ing force or “soul” which leaves the body at death is a common aspect of religion. Our language reveals this link: we get the word “animation” from ani-mus, Latin for soul. But once this “soul” leaves the body, where does it go? If

we have already supposed a world of gods – immaterial gods – perhaps we might think that that is where the soul goes. And, just like that, religion gains an afterlife (2).

Modern ReligionThus, religion branches out from an original concept of supernatural agency until it permeates social life to the point that it becomes inseparable from what we would consider culture (Figure 3). As religions branch out, they come to subsume everything from how we get married to what we paint pictures of and write music about. In the process, culture comes to cement the deity in the group-consciousness, until under-standing everyday life itself becomes dependent upon religion. And then there was science. The concept of a falsifiable hypothesis revolutionized the way we think about the world, and the story of the last few hundred years has been one of a gradual retreat of religion. As we came to explain life and the universe

using biology, chemistry, physics and psychology, and secular institutions (governments) took over the roles once filled by a complex set of taboos and rituals, we gradually lost our need for a man in the clouds. But what does this mean for religion? Some scientists, such as the biologist and author Kenneth Miller, believe that science and religion are reconcilable – that once modern day creationists drop the necessity for God to explain life, and instead view the concept of a God as a sort of sum of the laws of na-ture, that God can be seen as a creator through science, not in spite of science (4). Others would invoke Occam’s razor and argue that if we cannot explain the laws of the universe, then positing the existence of an unexplainable agent to explain them is simply a deference of inexplicability to an (unnecessary) higher level. But since the origin of the universe is unlikely to be explained by science anytime soon, the abstraction of a personal God like Miller’s is not catastrophically unscientific. If religion makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy, then so be it: create your own God. Just don’t put it on a sticker inside a biology textbook.

—Matthew McFarlane ’08 is a Biochemical Sciences concentrator in Leverett House.

References1. Atran, S., and A. Norenzayan. “Religion’s evolu-tionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2004) 27, 713-770.2. Pinker, S. The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion. Speech Transciption. Delivered at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, 29 October 2004. URL: <http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ articles/media/ 2004_10_29_religion.htm>3. Pinker, S. The Blank Slate. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.4. Miller, K. Excerpt from Finding Darwin’s God. URL: <http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Brown_Alumni_Magazine/00/11-99/features/dar-win.html>

The author would like to thank Johnstone Fam-ily Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker for helping him clarify his ideas in an interview.

Figure 3. The modern scientific explanation of religion: agency detection leads to supernatural agent concepts, which then become incorporated into culture in various ways. White boxes represent naturally occuring phenomena, black boxes represent religious creations.