Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural...

Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction An Adaptationist Alternative to Th e Cultural

Maladaptationist Hypothesis

Joseph BulbuliaVictoria University of Wellington P O Box 600 Wellington New Zealand

josephbulbuliagmailcom

Abstract Th is paper develops an alternative to Dennettrsquos meme-theoretic explanation for religious com-mitment First I build an argument in defense of Dennettrsquos position drawing on a cultural evolu-tion literature that he mentions but does not develop (Dennett 2006) Th en I describe data that even this enhanced account leaves poorly explained Next I draw on commitment signaling theory to produce an account that explains these puzzling data I show how religious culture provides a pervasive example of human epistemic niche construction An adaptationist analysis of religious culture exposes how the propagation of costly misunderstandings massively reduce the cognitive burdens of Machiavellian social complexity

Keywords cognition commitment costly-signaling cultural evolution God handicap principal meme metarepresentation religion social complexity

Introduction

Dennett argues that religious ideas endure because they are adapted for their own survival not ours (Dennett 2006) Our minds are superbly adapted for promoting the biological success of the gene lineages that build them but they are also prone to error In particular they are attracted to reproductively dam-aging ideas and practices configured to infest them For Dennett religion endures because religious culture is adapted for replication Th is promotion can harm us We are used to thinking of selection as operating on genes but ldquoMother Nature is not gene centristrdquo (Dennett 2006 127) We should not look to genetic evolution alone when naturalizing religion (

Measured by our own biological interests religion does appear strikingly maladaptive It seems unwise to spend time worshiping carvings or fearing demons Moreover it appears straightforwardly harmful to walk fires incise

copy Koninklijke Brill NV Leiden 2008 DOI 101163157006808X260241

Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107 wwwbrillnlmtsr

METHOD THEORY in the

STUDY OFRELIGION

amp

onersquos genitalia play with snakes and become celibate for life Why otherwise sensible agents so afflict themselves certainly needs to be explained In addi-tion religious ideas have cultural staying power Th e religions of ancient herd-ing peoples remain our religions and even religious persons may consider the religious beliefs of others to be wild impairing superstitions We feel lucky to have escaped whatever influence that brought the Branch Davidians to Waco or led tens of thousands to embrace Scientology

I think Dennettrsquos proposal that these ideas endure because they are good replicators has convincing intuitive appeal For religions appear to persist because of their perceived rather than actual benefits (Naturalists do not sup-pose there is a pie in the sky waiting to benefit us) But Dennettrsquos case can be made more compelling In what follows I first connect Dennettrsquos claims about religion to a wider range of empirical and theoretical materials on cultural evolution I call this enhanced thesis ldquothe cultural maladaptationist hypothe-sisrdquo (CMH) In Parts I II III I advance what I take to be the strongest version of this hypothesis

My second aim is to show that CMH does not adequately explain the data on religion Religion endures because it is attractive But it is attractive in part because it fosters the success of religious agents What looks to be mal-adaptive in religion is exquisitely functional not merely from the vantage point of religious cultures but also from the position of the faithful who sus-tain them Beginning in Part IV I sketch an alternative to cultural maladapta-tionism which I call ldquothe religious niche hypothesisrdquo Th is conjecture explains how the maladaptive aspects of religious cognition and culture are (in most contexts) only apparent Obviously religion is sometimes maladaptive but I urge that it is so precisely because religiosity pre-commits us to a social order even when doing so opposes our immediate interests Effective social policing requires investment and vigilance and the costs of religion I urge are well accounted for as policing costs Moreover I argue that religion endures because we possess a layer of specialized cognitive adaptations designed to support and respond to religious culture Th e data suggest that we are predisposed to pro-duce learn and modify a religious niche Th is niche in turn modifies us and subsequent generations who inherit and further modify religious culture Reli-gion and religious minds elaborate each other We are adapted to learn and transform our religious situation Religion should not be contrasted with functional technology it rather exemplifies it

68 J Bulbulia Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107

J Bulbulia Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107 69

I Th e Standard Picture of Evolutionary Psychology

I begin by motivating a partial rejection of what might be called the ldquostandard picture in evolutionary psychologyrdquo Th is rejection is fundamental to under-standing Dennettrsquos cultural maladaptivism and it is also critical to under-standing the alternative I propose For I agree with aspects of this rejection1 Although specialized cognitive adaptations are required to support the reli-gious niche our understanding of this design need not be linked to some of the more controversial commitments of traditional evolutionary psychology

According to the standard picture biological complexity is best explained as an outcome of blind natural selection Th e differential success of the traits that variants of genes reliably build eventually produces spectacular biological designs Given genetic variation competition reliable inheritance and reli-able phenotypic construction selection will target those gene-variants that best advance the reproductive interests of their carriers Th ese natural pro-cesses are blind but over time they produce intricately functional effects2 We call these effects adaptations specialized design features that equip organisms for survival and reproduction Adaptations are ldquofuels for successrdquo Th ey power functional solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction that organ-isms face in a hostile world

On the standard picture selection has designed our bodies hence it has also designed minds in that our minds are emergent properties of our brains Consider

a) The mindbrain manifests functional organic design b) Natural selection operating on gene lineages explains functional organic

design c) Thus natural selection explains mindbrain design

Moreover

d) Natural selection favors proximate designs that ultimately foster reproduc-tive success in the typical environment for which the designs have been selected

1 So too do many current evolutionary psychologists including Leda Cosmides and John Tooby on whose work I draw below

2 Organisms are not perfect Selection can only work with the variation that is supplied to it Moreover benefiting enhancements may never come or may never establish (the keen-sighted bird gets eaten or fails to mate) Environments change the asteroid strikes and combusts or the ice descends Nevertheless given variation in genetic resources selection on the phenotypes these resources reliably build and retention of successful gene-variants through reproduction inte-grated functional designs eventually follow


e) Thus the proximate functions of the mindbrain are ultimately designed to foster reproductive success

Increasingly elaborate cognitive systems equip agents to solve increasingly tougher problems Migratory birds are outfitted with the cognitive wears to navigate great distances by registering the relative positions of celestial objects Th ese stargazers know where they are relative to where they need to be With-out such capacities the birds would fall exhausted into the oceans Th e abili-ties of bats to echolocate representations of distal affairs precise enough to strike the necks of ungulates and to fly at speed through the cramped interiors of caves are likewise astounding but they are not unique Innumerably many lineages have evolved sophisticated powers to track and respond to environ-mental complexity and such capacities give witness to selectionrsquos power to build immensely intricate and functional cognitive designs Given enough time a steady supply of variation and stable inheritance almost-miraculous minds will follow

While selection forges adaptive minds it does not build god-like intelli-gence Like any adaptation a psychological design is subject to the vagaries of evolutionary histories and to chance Importantly minds are also constrained by the mathematics of computation Formal constraints on the computability of information strongly limit the universe of what brains can do According to the standard picture we can use these constraints to formulate hypotheses about how cognitive systems meet adaptive challenges

For thought to be effective raw data must be rapidly segmented decom-posed analyzed and integrated with various control systems Th ese demands present significant engineering challenges Take vision How does a system interpret a scattering of light falling on perceptual sensors Th e visual appara-tus must rapidly build a distal representational structure from unstructured data (of varying degrees of quality) Surfaces and edges are inferred from the distribution of photons striking retinal sensors Fast and furiously the visual system exploits assumptions about external environments to construct a three dimensional representation (built quickly from a 2 and 2 12 dimensional proto-representations) Th e algorithms the system exploits are massively intri-cate and tough problems are solved almost instantaneously But achieving a reliable 3-d representation is only one problem Discerning colors through a range of lighting conditions is also significant In dim lighting chalk reflects at the frequency that black slugs do in daylight but we still see the chalk as white Our eyes compute lighting intensities and adjust for the difference And beyond the image there is the question of object recognition and response Structured visual representations are thus fed and integrated to other compu-tational devicesmdashface or object recognition automated predator heuristics


mating profiles Here the image will be processed further Along the way a modified representational structuremdashsay of ldquoPeterrdquomdashis assembled parsed by memory systems and exported to motivational and affective centers Th is may eventually set off a cascading series of behaviors a smile sequence an evasion protocol body reorientation to improve data quality (ldquoLet me see is it really Peterrdquo) or perhaps no behavior at all In seeing and registering a world we accomplish heroic computational feats We do so without effort and we do so in innumerably many other domains as well

Any cognitive system possessing rich and diverse information processing power faces the ldquoframe problemrdquo A universe of possibilities cannot be visited each time a problem is addressed Search spaces must narrow to specificmdashoften very specificmdashproblem domains Cognition must be framed by assump-tions about how to solve a problem Th is constraint gives rise to the modular mind hypothesis General-purpose information processors are too weak to compute solutions to adaptive problems in finite time Th e systems that con-trol vision would face computational paralysis if asked to simultaneously con-trol say locomotion memory and language In place of a general-purpose computing device evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that to a first approximation something like a modular framework embeds all human cog-nition In such a system each module has its own narrow domain for problem solving Large incomputable problems are decomposed to smaller and solvable component problems Each design element is integrated to a broader func-tional design yielding new integration problems presumably solved by other modular elements though see But a module resolves problems in its own narrow domain of functionality Baldwin effects lead to entrenchments in par-ticular design elements for small enhancements in efficiency accuracy and speed will be targeted and elaborated (for an overview see Dennett 1995) Advocates of the standard picture urge that only a massively modular architec-ture will satisfy such harsh computational constraints3

3 Th ere is further evidence for modularity as well Selective cognitive impairments provide prima facie evidence for existence and the independence of modular sub components Brain injury and disease can lead to what seem to be peculiar dissociative impairments Patients can recognize objects but not faces (prosopagnosia) Or visual experience is given as a series of por-traits without any apparent motion (parietal lesions) Or persons are recognized but without any emotional association leading to accusations that familiar persons are impostures (Capgras dis-orders) Evidence supporting cognitive entrenchment comes from developmental psychology For children appear to know more about the world than they ever acquire from others Th ey resolve problemsmdashfor example grammatical generalizations or understanding gravity or ele-ments of a theory of other mindsmdashwithout ever learning the rules by which they resolve these problems


A massively modular architecture empowers an organism to functionally interact with its world in subtle intricate and spectacular ways What was once only achievable through slow deliberate learning or trial and error exper-imentation becomes rapidly solvable as natural selection identifies solves and internalizes structural features of a problem Over immense geological time spans selection compares alternative designs and gradually compiles improve-ments Real world information processing problems become more tractable as lineages slowly ascend the fitness peaks of their adaptive landscapes

Evolutionary psychologists combine the modular picture of mind with Darwinian scruples about the causes of design Because cognition reflects adaptive design we can use data about the problems organisms reliably faced throughout their evolutionary histories to refine and test predictions for how they think now We are also able to formulate promising hypotheses about known cognitive functions whose purposes seem obscure On the Darwinian view of cognitive evolution the modular mind is engineered to foster repro-ductive flourishing Its ultimate problems are those of sex and survival For-mulating optimality models for given capacitymdashsay of the tradeoffs a mother bird faces in when deciding how much food to carry balancing the weight of the load distance to a nest and the number of its fledglingsmdashcan help us understand how precisely calibrated an organismrsquos cognitive systems are to the biological problems it faces

Moreover the approach deepens our explanations for widespread but baffling psychological features like morning sickness differential spatial rea-soning among the sexes mate preference depression cheater detection self-deception and a range of other psychological dispositions and strategies For such features may well appear less baffling when placed in an evolutionary frame Bizarre costly and universal features of mind often manifest subtle designs And some of these designs are no longer relevant outside the contexts for which they evolved We can therefore throw light on these subtle designs by reverse-engineering the functional ancestral problems for which they provided solution Th is reverse-engineering stance may well disclose further subtlety

Th us the standard picture of evolutionary psychology draws inspiration from two sources From cognitive psychology researchers view the mind as an information-processing device assembled from various sub-processors each with a dedicated purpose and packed with internally structured information Th e picture portrays these adaptations as integrated into a larger functional architecture adjusted to regulating an organismrsquos internal states and to medi-ating its involvement with its world From evolutionary biology researchers describe modular elements as adaptations arrayed for solving the long endur-


ing problems that faced ancestral populations Cognitive designs are function-ally organized to produce accurate rapid solutions to the standard problems of reproduction and survival

Dennett shares the basic commitments of this picture of mind He believes that cognition must be framed and that selection will tend to build elaborate cognitive functional designs over time But he also doubts that natural selec-tion can adequately explain all mental design ldquo[ ] the process of natural selection itself doesnrsquot require that all valuable information move lsquothrough the germ linersquo (via the genes) On the contrary if the burden can be reliably taken over by continuities in the external world that is fine with Mother Naturemdashit takes a load off the genomerdquo 128) Much of our mental design is structured externally by cultural innovations that arise and spread in historical not evo-lutionary time And on Dennettrsquos view this offloading of information to the environment leaves our minds exposed to informational infection We become breeding grounds for ldquomemesrdquo

II Reservations with the Standard Picture

In the standard picture selection affects genes by acting on the traits that they build Th is is problematic for genes do not build traits Geneenvironment interactions do Under varying conditions identical alleles will have different phenotypic effects (and sometimes identical traits will emerge from different alleles) Much of this variation is adaptive A gene that promotes hair loss in warmer temperatures helps the balding creature cope with heat Besides sensi-tivity to environmental features there are countless examples of epigenetic systems for adaptive informational transfer A mother rat transmits food pref-erences through her milk not her genes Chimp groups have different meth-ods for harvesting resourcesmdashsome ldquofishrdquo termites with sticks others break nuts with rock hammersmdashand they transmit these techniques through social learning Th us the details of trait construction matter for an evolutionary account of why a trait is common Dennett has such examples in mind when he observes that selection doesnrsquot specify all functionally useful knowledge by writing it into a genome

Th e causal details of mental trait construction are especially important when considering our lineage Th e capacity to build fire is a cultural universal No society lacks this technology It has been a general feature of hominid life for over 500000 thousand years But there is no fire-combustion gene Th e relevant knowledge is transmitted through social resources And many other properties of cognitive phenotypes emerge through very specific structured


social interactions Pete Richerson and Bob Boyd observe that non-genetic information flows vertically from parents to children through the ideas that parents impart Moreover there is a flow of non-genetic information obliquely from non-parental sources to childrenmdashfrom other relatives neighbors and teachers with local expertise Information flows horizontally within a genera-tion as well through peer-to-peer interactions and often this information is salient From infancy we swim in a sea of information and none of this infor-mation springs from our genes

Th e capacity to retrieve and store socially acquired information dramati-cally widens the scope for hominid behavioral plasticity We sometimes do as we are told not as we feel and the knowledge we import from others adapts our minds Th ough disgusting we take the bitter medicine and are healed We do so against our creature feelings because we are told to do so Moreover we observe norms and customs and these greatly enhance the co-coordinating power of culture Culture also enhances developmental plasticity childhood and a long adolescence enable us to import a massive amount of data about our local natural and social ecology A wide developmental window enables us to build intricate skills which in turn become stable features of adult pheno-types We are plastic by design for in our culture-soaked lineage plasticity strongly affects survival Knowing how to make a fire an arrow or a sled how to cook and what to do when the wells dry up will matter to survival in the wild In urban contexts knowledge of how to read and write how to accumu-late money how to negotiate complicated transport and information net-works proves more important than bush-craft We now kill with our wallets not our hands And the skills for accumulating money are learned often through years of specialized training

Moreover we do not just evolve tight fits to predetermined environments we also change our environments Th e ability to make a spear makes it easier to catch large game and so extends the foraging opportunities of those equipped with this technology Children inherit worlds modified by their parents which they use as a platform for further modification and transmission So the inno-vations of one generation affect the conditions of life downstream An Inuit forager lives in an extreme environment with few obvious resources Life there would be impossible without mastery of much specialized locally adaptive knowledge how to build kayaks and shelters from bone wood and hide how to extract food from frozen seas and how to prepare store and cook it how to keep warm in extreme cold techniques for clothing manufacture and repair how to build sleds how to make oil lamps and much else A similarly com-plex but different body of knowledge is necessary to survive the harsh interior deserts of central Australia or the dense Amazonian jungle or the mild but


predator infested savannah Our marvelous capacities for local improvisation have resulted in a spectacular array of subsistence and extraction technologies they also have generated a tremendous range of varying social organizations and arrangements Th ese too must be considered adaptations For these innovations accommodate humans to their local worlds and to each other with tight adaptive fits But they are not adaptations that are assembled from genetic resources Placing a child on the ice will not initiate the Inuit survival module

Th us many functional elements in cognitive design come from resources held outside our genesmdashnamely through the intergenerational flow of infor-mation that cultural groups supply Th e ability to acquire and improve cultur-ally structured information has enabled our lineage to rapidly penetrate virtually every terrestrial habitat on the planet For better or worse culture has transformed us into an uberspecies (for an application of this point in religion see Day 2004) Capacities to learn socially transmitted information are power-fully adaptive and enable a very rapid accumulation of complex mental design But how does a mind strongly constrained by the frame problem become plastic How can we accommodate cultural information we cannot anticipate

For contemporary critics of the standard picture one important capacity is imitative learning Chimpanzees are able to learn rudimentary tool use by observing others but they do not learn much Th ey learn that a tool produces effects on the environmentmdashfor example that a rake can be used to obtain a ball But they do not learn how to copy other behavioral strategies Th ey do not learn specific techniques for rake-ball manipulation Th ey do not interpret tools as the means by which others achieve goals and they are unable to repro-duce anotherrsquos actual behavioral strategies towards a goal Informational trans-fer in non-human lineages does not facilitate the hi-fidelity reproduction that characterizes hominid cultural transfer Rudimentary techniques are invented and passed on but they are resistant to improvement Presumably innovations arise among tool using apes But if an innovation cannot be understood as better or cannot be imitated precisely it will die with its inventor By contrast human cultural evolution is cumulative Knowledge is transferred relatively faithfully Th e capacity to precisely imitate behavior and to accurately repre-sent these behaviors as means to achieving specific and varying goals estab-lishes complex cultural design over time Relatively precise learning-capacities act as what Michael Tomassello calls ldquoa ratchetrdquo We maintain successful cul-tural variants as a platform for further downstream modification and enhance-ment For Tomassello ldquoeach human child [ ] grows up in the context of something like the accumulated wisdom of its entire social group past and presentrdquo 38)


Th ere are important psychological adaptations that promote our capacity for imitative and social learning Joint-attentionmdashtuning into others and holding their interestmdashappears in infants at around 9 months and sets the stage for sharp increase in the imitative learning of tools artifacts and sym-bolic representations that occurs from about two years onward Th e emer-gence of Th eory of Mind processing which occurs somewhat later (beginning at about the age of 3 or 4) powerfully enhances a childrsquos capacity to under-stand purposeful behavior Th is is a prerequisite to acquiring robust evolvable cultural platforms as advanced theory of mind capacities enable children to conceive of other agents as the bearers of knowledge that children do not themselves possess

Clearly linguistic capacitiesmdashwhich may have evolved through imitative capacitiesmdashgreatly enhance the faithfulness of cultural transmission as well as its scope With language knowledge can be explicitly and precisely repre-sented and stored through various external means Before the era of writing knowledge was likely stored through songs chants poems narratives artifacts and visual representations More recently such transfer has been facilitated through writing conventions and record keeping technology Social networks establish and maintain hi-fidelity information gradients along which ideas migrate rapidly and faithfully through social groups Moreover these networks store and transform information externally without needing to program information into our genes

Language also makes possible the explicit instruction required to transmit intricate knowledge and complicated skills to effectively minimize and cor-rect error Adults teach children but children can also seek out adults as potential guides to the specific information they require Joint-attention means that difficult techniques can be broken down into more manageable components which educators may slowly and deliberately walk through Tasks can be simplified and risky elements can be removed (ldquoImagine this cord is a snake rdquo) Th rough language the function of tools and artifacts can be demonstrated as well as explained humans use artifacts and tools to alter the ways in which agents and their social groups interact with local ecologies Th e invention and accumulation of tools and artifacts early in hominid evolu-tion selected for agents who could rapidly and precisely acquire the skills to learn them

Consider this matter more fully Clearly cultural instruments and tech-nologies remove or mitigate various dangers but they also select for agents able manage novel skills and expertise With language children are born vir-tuosos much of the faculty that enables children to acquire natural languages is biologically entrenched Grammars and meanings can be standardized with


only pronunciations and a few grammatical settings left to vary Th us rapid language acquisition can form the target of natural selection as it falls under Baldwin-effects faster more efficient and articulate linguists leave more offspring But such is not true of the skills and knowledge that underwrites a massive body of locally adaptive mental organization Selection cannot fit organisms to environments their ancestors have never seen indeed could never have imagined When compared with other primates juvenile dependence in the hominid lineage is very long and costly Th is life history effect gives further evidence that the accumulation of a dense body of culturally supplied infor-mation was extremely important in our evolutionary history To give time for the cultural download selection invented the teenager Th e 20 or so years that a forager requires before she can generate positive nutritional returns exacts an enormous resource debt and this debt must be repaid Th e costs of cultural learning are highmdashso high that it appears to have evolved robustly in only one lineagemdashbut the benefits are likewise enormous

Cultural transmission is further accommodated by success and conformist biases Richerson and Boyd see these as particularly important to the transmis-sion of religious information A child is born to soak up culture How shall she organize her search Global skepticism would be disastrous for to question everything would be to learn nothing An optimal design will bias its judg-ment to accepting the practices and understandings of the generation that has preceded it It should be conformist biased for the live bodies around us are for the most part case studies in success Th ey have minimally survived as models for imitation Th is fact alone is impressive For what they have believed and done has at the very least not killed them Yet Richerson and Boyd note that biases that are too strictly conformist are maladaptive they do not allow the flexibility required to acquire good ideas Culture would stagnate were we not able to learn from the successful Indeed for culture to evolve innovations must become common from instances where they are few If we always gravi-tated to the largest mass innovation would be stifled Th us success biases also foster cultural evolution We not only conform we also identify and imitate success Th ese simple heuristics working with Tomassellorsquos ratchet help to build increasingly sophisticated cultural animals

Kim Sterelny observes that such biases may explain a discernable pattern to the cultural maladaptations that beset groups And in doing so I think Sterelny expresses the theoretical core of Dennettrsquos position Success in some problem domains is fairly straightforward It is readily apparent when a forager fails to detoxify seeds or invents an improved warfare technologymdashthe forager dies or his enemy dies It is therefore not surprising that improvements steadily accumulate in resource extraction and weaponry In other domains what


counts as success is less apparent It is difficult to know how the world began what happens after death what medicines to use how to raise children We rely on the explanations supplied by those who have come before us and by those we take to be exemplars of success Th is cultural information is good at sustaining itself but not necessarily good at sustaining us For it is not easy to know whether our biases have latched on to genuinely benefiting informa-tion Some problems are empirically inscrutable and for these there is wide scope for attractive but harmful ideas to breed answers As Sterelny puts it ldquoIn some aspects the people of a particular culture will respond to their world in an extraordinarily nuanced subtle and informed way [ ] In other respects these very same people will seem barking mad prisoners for example of vastly disabling beliefs about the polluting power of female menstruation [ ]rdquo 165)

Summing it up evolutionary psychologists correctly notice that our minds are adapted for biological success But evolutionary psychologists have under-rated the extent to which distinctive features of hominid cultural histories have mattered to cognitive evolution Th e cognitive capacities that power cul-tural acquisition and high-fidelity transmission unleash dramatic behavioral plasticity With these ldquofuels for successrdquo we are able to adjust to contingent variable circumstances and culture itself forms part of that variability A childrsquos mind needs to be flexible enough to exploit information whose characteristics it cannot anticipate Children are unable to forecast their learning and selec-tive environments they cannot forecast the technologies norms and practices their social groups will use to negotiate the world and each other Cultural variability selects for developmental plasticitymdashcapacities to usefully interact with variable cultural resources and to build functional behavioral disposi-tions from these local varying resources

III Cultural Maladaptations

We have seen that cultural information endures through hi-fidelity transmis-sion It is also subject to a kind of struggle not all cultural information will endure with the same degree of success Th us gene-lineages are not the only information bearing units subject to evolutionary dynamics4 Given variation

4 Richerson and Boyd emphasize that cultural evolutionary processes are analogous to genetic evolution but not identical Whereas genetic information flows only vertically cultural informa-tion flows obliquely and horizontally as well Moreover genes are discrete units for selection but it is not obvious that such units exist in culture information transfer where there is much blend-ing of information Th ere are no clear cultural parallels to mitosis and meiosis and so on (Rich-erson and Boyd 2005 ch3)


differential success and hi-fidelity transmission cultures also adapt and evolve Yet because culture evolves cultural variants may be common for no other reason than that they are good at replicating Th e art of working a sexton for navigation is a lost art in a world of navigational gizmos and so it all but dis-appears On the other side commercials that enflame desire will become com-mon and they are arrayed to detach our desires from our needsmdashfor their sole purpose is to leave us out of pocket Our various addictions may well reflect design features of informational packages that leave us hooked Anti-natalist fads illustrate this prospect well From a genersquos eye-view birth control is as lethal as a viper but birth controlrsquos disastrous effect on our genes does not save its enormous popularity Indeed such effects provide the reasons for its popu-larity Th e cultural niche is saturated with genetic poisons Religious practice resembles drug addiction and scholarship for its deleterious effects on human germ lines Such practices ldquopick the locksrdquo of the pleasure circuits that safe-guard human biological interest5 Cultural transmission enables humans to produce ever more adaptive fits to local circumstances But much in culture is biologically maladaptive Th at which makes cultural usefulmdashhigh fidelity transmissionmdashalso makes it dangerous Th e special biases and capacities that enable us to inhabit our cognitive niche also allow for the transmission of false and inefficient beliefs and practices that are themselves artful replicators Dennett observes that religion provides a spectacular example of where genetic and epigenetic interests come apart

Letrsquos develop this point through a thought experiment It is easy to know it is raining but it is hard to know why Learning biases give credibility to the views of others especially successful others If the tribe claims that rain comes from ZORG then given learning biases we will likely believe it so Moreover it is hard to know how to respond to a supernatural agent If others bow and beg before the heavens then given these same biases we will likely adopt the ZORG-fearing behavior It is hard to disconfirm ZORG and facing the unknown our best lights are to follow others Biases to accept the word of others free us from reinventing all wisdom for ourselves Th us by imitative biases ZORG religion is propagatedmdashand so it is with many other culturally maladaptive beliefs and behaviors Of course we are not always tempted by the religions of yore Supernaturalisms are sometimes suppressed rejected or forgotten But learning biases appear to give religion its inertia

Notice Dennett does not have difficulty explaining cultural maladapta-tions Th e theory of high-fidelity cultural transmission predicts them For if culture evolves in a quasi-Darwinian fashion then the cultural information common to any generation tells an evolutionary success story Th e information

5 Th is adapts Pinkerrsquos apt phrase 524-525)


that makes up generation N was attractive enough to endure a selection at generation N-1 Much cultural information succeeds because it fosters suc-cess Good tricks spread for their utility but false and harmful information may be more transmissible than what is true and helpful Th e same biases that protect our interests lead to maladaptive seepage Rules of thumb do not speak ex-cathedra On the other side evolutionary psychologists typically describe maladaptive cognition as resulting from a disjunction between the demands of Pleistocene life-ways and those of our more contemporary worlds

Here the evidence is critical Evolutionary psychology predicts that cultural maladaptations will be less common during the Pleistocene Modern social and technological worlds dramatically differ from ancestral conditions resulting in maladaptive fits when adapted modular minds take to the streets of McWorld Cultural evolutionists on the other side predict overall enhanced functional intelligence as cultural wisdom accumulates adaptive sophistication and it also predicts continued susceptibility to maladaptive misinformation

Th ere is evidence from population expansion over recent hominid history that we are becoming better at survival Richerson and Boyd note that human population explosion coincided with the emergence of agricultural societies ch 4) Th is rate steepened with the social and technological innovations of the industrial revolution with more massive and highly differentiated division of labor new economies of scale and the proliferation of mass markets We seem to be getting better at exploiting and distributing resources though perhaps only over the short term6 Th e data suggest that our recent population explo-sion was made possible by social and technological inventions for life that cumulative cultural adaptation perfected bringing lower mortality and an increased population capacity to human co-operative groups Th is is not the sort of data we would expect from a mind adapted for a Pleistocene life way but maladaptive after the transition to modernity But it is the data we would expect from somewhat plastic minds outfitted to adopt modify and exploit novel locally adaptive information

Cultural maladaptivism has a further advantage it is theoretically parsimo-nious It minimizes the attribution of complexity and design to the cognitive systems that underlie supernatural commitment It requires no fancy story explaining hidden functions Religion appears maladaptive because it is and it is maladaptive because cultural cognition is imperfect

Finally I think the theory is intuitively persuasive It is puzzling how social others so good at making a living in the world could fall prey to supernatural

6 Looking to the longer horizon our fate may well coincide with those late inhabitants of Easter Island who perhaps cursed the ingenuity of their forbearers before they vanished


errors But it is intuitively correct that our best lights are generally those of others around us especially the successful Where maladaptive belief is com-mon it seems plausible to think that in the absence of obviously better alter-natives it will tend to remain so Moreover it is true that sometimes religion really is catastrophically maladaptive (consider Jonestown)

Th us selection has accommodated us to the cognitive niche Without this accommodation the benefits of cumulative social learning remain forever out of reach So part of the complexity of our elaborate mental design is locally imported Our knowledge of how to make the technological world is locally imported but so too is much of our mythological knowledge and the prac-tices that surround it Th is knowledge is false attractive and eminently trans-missible It endures because it is configured to endure We need not explain the success of religion by appealing to a story-of-Eden or Hajj gene Religious information comes to us but not it seems because our parents had sex

IV Th e Limits of Cultural Maladaptationism

Having used the literature on cultural evolution to enrich Dennettrsquos meme-theoretic account of religion letrsquos consider what it doesnrsquot explain At the outset it is important to acknowledge that the niche constructionist alterna-tive I propose faces a significant obstacle It attributes more complexity to the cognitive and cultural designs that support religious life than does CMH All things equal we should prefer the more parsimonious explanation Neverthe-less there are many facts about religious thinking that CMH leaves poorly explained

First there is the poverty of stimulus to keep in mind Religious commitment targets the non-natural but there is only nature7 Given the absence of reli-gious reality it is puzzling why any person would come to believe in it CMH places a heavy theoretical burden on the claim that reality is vague and that it is hard to test religious ideas8 But with spirit worlds there should be no

7 We discount the non-natural in science because in the past doing so has advanced scientific knowledge It may be that eventually we decide that we cannot explain why otherwise intelligent organisms come to believe in the gods without appealing to the reality of the gods Given the pragmatic benefits of methodological naturalism however no sensible researcher would assume that stance at the outset Nor would they cede to it without overwhelmingly significant evidence For that assumption has made science possible without it it seems anything goes

8 Shock and wonder explanations also remain insufficient (cf Whitehouse 2004) Given secular nature it remains mysterious why we do not respond to the wondrous with skepticism and blank stares in the way we might respond to an authority suggesting that because the inner moon is cheese fill we must tithe


vagueness the elephant-headed deity doesnrsquot exist and can give no evidence It should take great cognitive effort for a creature adapted to terrestrial reality to commit to the existence of such a being All things equal we would predict an extreme poverty of stimulus for supernatural reality but it is not difficult for agents to believe in deities Indeed we shall see that it is difficult to per-suade people not to believe Supernaturalism is a cognitive default

Furthermore there is the cost problem We have seen that religious commit-ment brings epistemic and practical costs We get the world wrong and we pay for it Such costs only enhance the strangeness of religion Given these costs it appears that we should have evolved skeptical biases Given the recur-rence of expensive of religious thinking over generations it seems selection should have implanted a bias for intolerance of any religious concept We all should have evolved to naturally dislike and reject religion as much as Dennett does Yet supernatural commitment arises easily and everywhere

Additionally there is threat of manipulation Religious commitment exposes agents to exploitation Cultural evolutionists tend to underestimate the prob-lem of co-operation in their discussion of maladaptive transmission Society is composed of agents whose interests imperfectly overlap and so religious agents remain exposed to information arrayed to deceive defraud and manipulate them Such agents run the risk of dispossession at the hands of religious elites Acceptance of supernatural realities when combined with trusting disposi-tions towards their earthly prophets is an invitation to mistreatment Clearly not all priests rob the coffers and attack children But we should be very mis-trusting of them for they wield much power More subtly conformist biases leave individuals open to exploitation by their groups What might form part of the collectiversquos interest may well form no part of our ownmdashfor example a call to missionary work among cannibals but there are such missions It remains puzzling that we did not evolve the bias ldquoReligion but not when it hurtsrdquo or ldquoTar and feather any religious authorityrdquo Also religious authorities and groups should be more damaging to individual interests than they are

Yet another factor is the presence of intricate social learning CMH underes-timates the cultural practices conventions and resources that structure reli-gious experience Th at is it underestimates the importance of stable religious niche construction From an early age parents instruct their children about the supernatural Parents rehearse religious prayers and incantations and help their children to remember them Th ey may kneel by their children Parents break down important rituals into their component sequences simplifying repeating or exaggerating elementsmdashas they do when teaching children about practical skills Sometimes a childrsquos hands will be directed through a motion such as ldquothis is how you make the sign of the crossrdquo Such practices continue


into adolescence and in some religious traditions are supported through a long period of adult religious training Agents characterize some experience as religious in part because they are taught techniques for cultivation super-natural consciousness and feelings Th rough religious education people learn specific prayers body postures breathing techniques chants and mantras dance techniques for meditationmdashall of which strongly affect their natural and social understandings their patterns of valuing and their emotional ori-entations and expressions Emotion-saturated religious practices are frequently repeated and are used to support the epistemic basis of religious conviction Habitual religious performance produces intrinsic motivations to participate for the feeling associated with them are overwhelmingly positive Religious persons learn many religious and moral norms when to show onersquos conviction and to what degree what is expected of them and what to know Th e care and seriousness with which educators and students approach the transmission of religious knowledge gives the impression that religious education is esteemed to be every bit as important as the transmission of essential subsistence and extraction technologies It is hard to see how conformity or success biases can be made to carry the very substantial explanatory load for why and how individuals learn maintain and teach their religion We need an account of social learning that helps to elucidate the transmission and cultivation of reli-gious technologies Catching a richly articulated religion is harder than catch-ing a cold

Consider also how religion is affected by encapsulation and self-deception Religious commitment is often expressed as a belief but if religious proposi-tions were believed in the same way that ordinary unrestricted empirical prop-ositions are they would be deadly Indeed religiosity would not merely resemble schizophreniamdashthe two would be indistinguishable For motivating beliefs and experience of supernatural powers that do not exist leads to very unwelcome inferences If caring all-powerful deities really existed it may seem natural to suppose that we should not worry over our lives for the gods will provide But such a lack of concern is not generally advantageous to den-izens of hostile nature Worry is adaptive Religious persons who express beliefs in happy afterlives will nevertheless struggle kicking and screaming to the gallows Religious agents believe the gods will provide but they till fields and chase game Th ey believe in cosmic justice but still protect their resources and punish cheats Th is suggests design specification beyond those we would expect from merely socially biased transmission Th ere is no evidence that children are explicitly taught to make these inferences Each child is not explicitly taught that it would be wrong to ask whether in communion some of us are unlucky enough to consume Jesusrsquo hindquarter


Finally there are moral attitudes and functional integration to confront Reli-giosity is not just accepted as technology religious matters are expressed with moral passion We do not come to blows when we disagree over the utilities we assign to artifactsmdashwe donrsquot hate our neighbor for paying too much for a shoddy lawn mower Yet we often exclude religion from civilized discussion because of the ill-feelings differences can cause Religion tends to be a conver-sation stopper

In short religion looks maladaptive enough for selection to have eliminated religious tendencies Instead religious beliefs are connected to powerful emo-tional and motivational systems they are impervious to scientific criticism and constrain thought and behavior in manifold ways Th ey impair us To understand why this is so we need to consider how this self-imposed impair-ment functions to signal our co-operative commitments to those around us In developing an alternative to cultural maladaptivism we must consider a hypothesis that Dennett ignores the commitment-signaling theory of religion (Dennett 2006)

V Social complexity commitment and pre-commitment

Th e literature on dual inheritance stresses the technological mastery that comes through minds empowered to learn the collective wisdom of a tribe Our minds are adapted to acquire know-how for dealing with fast-changing ecological circumstances and artifact worlds One of the drivers of human cognitive evolution was surely the presence and increasing utility of sophisti-cated technological mastery and material culture Yet another related driver was the Machiavellian world of other social agents the most crucial and most fast-changing strategic targets in nature are other people By creating common cause and coordinating our efforts vastly many more goods become available that would otherwise be impossible to secure on our own We have much to benefit from each other but we also have much to lose Notoriously co-operation is fragile Prisonerrsquos dilemmas and tragedies of the commons threaten social exchange While often the best plan for all is collective action individuals frequently do better still by accessing collective benefits without paying the price

Th e ldquosocial complexity hypothesisrdquo holds that increasing social complexity selects for increasing cognitive complexity creating a feedback loop in which social and cognitive complexity elaborate each other As social groups grow larger the memory demands for tracking behavior grow sharply Agents must be able to store and update information about other agentsrsquo skills and charac-


ter But agents also need to track the relationships of other agents to each other So the number of potentially relevant connections grows much faster than the number of new group members Moreover information must be regularly updated to reflect changes in a social landscapemdasha falling out a female coming into season injuries a challenge to authority marital troubles or the acquisition of new resources by a belligerent thug Furthermore the prospect for intra-group formation produces vastly more complexity for social units because a social group is more than a collection of individuals Within groups there are informal and formal alliances and these will matter to social outcomes You probably could take that tiny punk but not if his friends carry bats Proto-group structures such as kin groups and clans hunting and trading groups military units symbolically marked structures (such as totems) polit-ical affiliates economic partners and other salient individuals also must be monitored Th eir relationships to each other and other individuals must also be tracked Th us vertical complexity creates further dimensions of exponen-tially enlarging complexity Th e playing out of social chess matches at all these levels makes a complex social world extremely unpredictable Th ere are few stable targets here for natural selection to identify in advance of actual social dramas Default modular and stereotyped solutions are unavailable Unlike the complexity of a visual landscape or the grammar of language we cannot build all the information we need before inhabiting a social world Th e com-putational problems are genuinely intractable for unlike ordinary chess the rules of the game and its parameters are subject to change with each move Th us while social complexity and social intelligence will elaborate each other internal competition the threat of defection and the escalating demands of Machiavellian memory and maneuvering mean that social intelligence will not keep pace

Recent work on the evolutionary transition to co-operative life has focused on norms and social marking as mechanisms that dramatically reduce the cog-nitive load of social complexity Norms render expectations explicit Fair-minded well-intentioned altruists may nevertheless disagree over what is due to them Yet rules standardize these expectations Th is eases the computa-tional burden of co-operative living Th e relevant distribution of goods and services does not need to be worked out each time a pig is killed or a border is defended Moreover norms alter payoff schedules for defection Norm viola-tions can be cheaply punished and their negative impact can be delivered immediately as opposed to at some future time In Sterelnyrsquos words ldquoNorms against (say) drunkenly groping your superiorrsquos partner will have immediate and hence motivationally salient costs not just distant disutilityrdquo In a norm-governed world failures to co-operate become easier to detect and so easier to


punish Th us norms amplify the signals that make co-operation possible Norms bring predictability Th ey lay stable tracks for social interaction

Moreover norms that regulate group membershipmdashconventions of symbol markingmdashincrease the internal homogeneity of groups and this also increases external differentiation between groups Marking conventions thus provide a foundation on which group selection can target group-benefiting norms Th ere may well be no social life whatsoever outside a group this is particularly so if the relevant social markings are visible and permanent Scars circumci-sions tattoos neck elongation and body piercings all motivate good behavior towards onersquos fellows because once one has been marked as a member of one group defection to another isnrsquot possible Permanent marking is a pre-commitment device A Nazi with ldquoHITLERrdquo tattooed to his forehead will not fair well if neighboring Antifas overwhelms the group that marked Nazi is thus more predictably trustworthy in a fight Th e success of his group is his only chance Finally conventions regulating the distribution of merit and shame can further reinforce social marking practices by linking public mark-ings to a system of social prestige Th ese conventions cheaply reinforce exchange by standardizing relations (and expectations) of power If a ldquoHITLERrdquo tattoo signifies high social status all will have an incentive to obtain one

Th e upshot of this recent literature on social and cognitive evolution is that in a world braced by norms and symbolic conventions self-interest and social benefit will frequently converge Such a world is one that powerfully dimin-ishes the cognitive costs of social complexity Norm-governed worlds lead to salient unambiguous co-operation and co-ordination signals

Th e problem however is that norms do not secure co-operation For even where they are easily punished norms remain only extrinsically motivating Because defection still pays norms select for subtle cheaters Moreover norms do not secure commitment when it is against onersquos interests to commit I may well violate a norm against retreating from an enemy if I think therersquos a good chance they will scalp me but where all retreat all get scalped

Permanent symbolic marking does pre-commit individuals to act for the welfare of a group as a group competes with other groups But it does not pre-commit individuals to social exchange in domains unrelated to group selection Th at tattooed Nazi may still steal his neighborrsquos goat or attempt an extra pair-bond copulation We shall see that religion evolved to support these exchange norms by providing them with intrinsic motivational power Norms build commitments but religion builds normative pre-commitments


VI Th e Religious Niche and the Propagation of Religious Illusions

Call a ldquoreligious nicherdquo a system of organized behavior and knowledge together with whatever artifacts and other symbolic structures (musical scores texts religious architecture) that are supported retained improved and transmitted at least in part because we possess the cognitive capacities to believe and mor-ally commit to supernatural realities and purposes For now leave open the question of whether the relevant cognitive capacities are dedicated and cogni-tively entrenched (I raise this question below) Whatever its psychological basis the religious niche reduces social complexity by strengthening and dis-ambiguating signals of co-operation It does so by rendering norms intrinsi-cally desirable9

Begin by considering the solidarity effect of very specific supernatural illu-sions Suppose a group of co-operating individuals were routinely and system-atically to attach erroneous values to non-cooperative strategies Th ese distortions and biases favor mutually benefiting exchanges Here we would find that very specifically configured misperceptions might reliably link religious commit-ment to social commitment If exchanging agents think that cooperation pays best defection threats vanishmdashno matter what they actually pay

Let us focus on a co-operative exchange problem called a generalized pris-onerrsquos dilemma I will use the prisonerrsquos dilemma only to illustrate a threat of defection that faces agents living in co-operative groups where interests only partially overlap I do not believe that all exchange problems are generalized prisonerrsquos dilemmas Indeed many are pure co-ordination problems even those requiring substantial personal investment To catch a stag all must act or none will benefit Nevertheless even in a heavily norm-bound co-operating culture there remain incentives to skirt the rules and where skirting is com-monmdashor needs to be policedmdashall fare less well than they could

Suppose a pig is charging If Ricardo and LeBul work together they will catch it But collective action comes at a costmdashboth will come off smelling of pig If both flee neither will get a portion of the dense nutritional package If only one flees the pig will maul the altruist Th is mauling will slow the pig making it an easy kill thus doubling the nutritional package to the defecting partner (dead friend + dead pig) What to do Th e smart choice is mutual cooperation Yet the economically rational choice is mutual defection to get nothing even if the value of

9 It may do more besides It may provide ldquomeaningrdquo and ldquohoperdquo give answers to existential or scientific questions help agents to cope with grief and unleash the bodyrsquos capacity for placebo healing But I set other candidate functions to the side here to focus on the social solidarity func-tion For an argument that collapses these functions see Bulbulia (2006)


Pig-smell + dead pig gt Ordinary-smell + no pig

Much is at stake No one wants to stand a charging pig alone And no matter how the other agent acts one always does better by defecting Let T = tempta-tion (defect on a co-operator) R = reward (mutual co-operation) D = defec-tion (mutual defection) S = suckerrsquos payoff (co-operate with a defector) Assume the true payoff schedule favors mutual defection even though mutual co-operation pays better Th us T gt R gt D gt S

For each player Ricardo LeBul Preference 1 T T Preference 2 R R Preference 3 D D Preference 4 S S

Th is scheme describes the natural payoff matrix for exchange Preference 2 is available to both agents But rational choice theory predicts agents will opt for Preference 3 though it produces less utility Preference 3 is the Nash equilib-rium in a two-party prisonerrsquos dilemma Natural selection comparing alterna-tive designs over evolutionary history will target the most economical design So it seems natural selection will ratify strategies of defection

Notice however that in a prisonerrsquos dilemma it would each player if both were to misunderstand the payoff matrix for example judging that (R or S) gt (T or D)

For each player Ricardo LeBul Preference 1 R R Preference 2 S S Preference 3 D D Preference 4 T T

Call this interaction based on mutual misunderstanding ldquothe illusion gamerdquomdashwe assume the actual payoff matrix remains the same What form may such an illusion take Consider extrinsically motivating beliefs defectors face eternal suffering in an afterlife or will be menaced ancestor spirits or will be harmed by the accumulation of karma or will get done in by a spirit Such commit-ments alter the utilities that agents attach to actions by altering their expected outcomes Agents must factor the uncertainty of their belief with the size of the reward and the timing of its delivery All of these factors play into an agentrsquos decision Even low certainty for a reward that comes in the future will have motivating influence if the expected return is infinitely largemdashthe cor-nerstone of Pascalrsquos wager

Much of the literature on ldquosupernatural punishmentrdquo has stressed extrinsic rewarding But intrinsically rewarding supernaturalism is both available and


more powerful for the intrinsically motivated payoff structure alters the per-ceived utilities that agents attach to defection acts themselves Intrinsic motiva-tions do not require a conscious misunderstanding of future payoffs By thinking of morality as either sacred in itself or inherently pleasing to a beloved god immediate motivational power can be imparted to otherwise undesirable altruistic exchange options

Supernatural norm re-enforcement looks adaptive but as I have conceived of them such capacities are un-evolvable A disposition to believe in intrinsic or extrinsic supernatural support cannot spread in a population when it is rare Defectors will always fair better by exploiting proto-religionists Moreover even in a population of altruistic exchangers belief in policing illusions will come under negative selection pressure for such a community is subject to invasion by defectors who may pretend religion only to steal the prize While co-operation brings benefits defection strategies often pay better and these strategies will eventually swamp moralizing religion Th e returns from the accurate perception of outcomes plus a disposition to fake religion exceed the value of moralizing religion Religious co-operators therefore face a recognition constraint For religious altruism to evolve religionists need access to signals of religious commitment that are clear unambiguous and hard to fake

For religious solidarity to work co-religionists must track the behavior (and other indirect evidence) of fellow co-religionists and from these data discern their intentional and motivational states Th is assessment is critical to forecast-ing future behavior In a hostile world such judgments will sometimes need to be made rapidly with life and death at stake Under siege we cannot pon-der and ruminate over options

Language is an adaptation for communication of near-telepathic possibility but the capacity to convey information by linguistic means will not solve the recognition constraint Defectors or course can lie Th ey can say ldquoI am religiousrdquo and mean ldquoI am not religiousrdquo With language they can do this just as easily as you can say ldquoIt is Tuesdayrdquo knowing it is Friday Crucially this fact about language applies to norms It is easy to articulate a norm but we cannot presuppose that selection will favor strategies to enforce norms Punishing the norm violator will generally exact a cost which an audience to defection will seek to avoid this is true even when the net cost of punish-ment is low What Darwin has called ldquoa grain in the balancerdquo will tend to favor the economically optimal strategy Th e benefit of a natural perception of outcomes (and defection motivations) plus the disposition to produce false linguistic statements exceeds the value of truthful avowal of genuine religious illusions Selection cannot ratify the linguistic option because language is not


an effective security technology10 We need a signal that only religious agents can produce

Emotional signals go part of the way to solving the recognition problem Religious commitment is not only social commitment it is passionate moral commitment And these passions are open to public scrutiny Th e gods of the folk are not the gods of the philosophers Th e folk drop to their knees for their religion and some will want to hang you for not joining them Try to fake the knee-dropping posture and the ldquohang yourdquo expression it is not easy Th is is because emotional expressions are processed outside the cerebral cortex and are difficult to manipulate on cue Most of us could not present a credible expression of committed love for a cosmic deity named ldquoBobrdquo Without the relevant commitment we cannot convincingly affirm ldquoTh e devil wants to take your soulrdquo If you canrsquot so much as fake a smile for the camera how can you fake religion Th ere is evidence we do use emotions to predict future behavior So there are good prima facie reasons to think we do so for religious emotions For these are just emotions expressed toward a supernatural target If emotional states are visible markers of the relevant moral motivations and exchange intentions then selection can target and amplify emotional signals All of us have an incentive to solve a prisonerrsquos dilemma However in larger cohorts it is often difficult to individually scrutinize the religious emotions of all Emotional signaling alone is insufficient to solve the co-operation dilem-mas that faced our ancestors

Public rituals that elicit cultivate and broadcast religious emotions furnish a powerful exchange technology My use of ldquotechnologyrdquo here is deliberate If religious signaling stably re-enforces exchange then rituals are not best ana-lyzed as cultural maladaptations With signaling technologies any gradual improvement in the generation and filtering of reliable signals will be cultur-ally selected as Tomasellorsquos ratchet turns over religious practice

Irrespective of the emotions it produces merely observing a ritual involves non-trivial participation costs Th is is important Th e undertaking of these costs too is a reliable index of commitment Normally only the committed will be willing to pay for ritual expense the opportunity cost of lost time the metabolic costs of physical investment the material loss incurred by capital

10 Andrew Mahoney has pointed out to me that the theological knowledge displayed in reli-gious language can function as a hard-to-fake signal of religious learning and so of religious commitment However theology is not ordinary (denotational) language It is the medium through which agents display past intellectual investments Moreover I am setting aside the potential of language to convey emotional informationmdashnot by what is said but by how it is said For the modulations of our voice may for example give hard to fake evidence of how we feel


outlay the financial support of clergy the risks and pain associated with dan-gerous and invasive procedures meditating among wild animals ritual immo-lation ordeals by knife or fire or substantial body piercing Ritual costs are not trivial costs and we do not suppose the gods repay them Yet co-operative signals are critical to social flourishing So there is scope for culturally trans-mitted technology to build refine and amplify co-operative signals through the configuration of cost

Commitment-singling theory predicts that signaling technologies will iden-tify the following utility function in religiously committed agents

Expected religious costs x frequency lt expected utility of religious practice + con-ditional expectation of altruistic exchange

Defectors will not seek to undertake substantial ritual costs because they do not believe the gods will repay the investment and they find no sacred value Moreover such would-be signaling defectors have to factor the conditional risk of getting caught and punished as they cannot easily manage the emo-tional signals that will be scrutinized in public gatherings So their expected utility from costly religious practice may well exceed their perceived utility in faking signals and cheating the devout Defectors will perceive no super-natural benefit and they face non-trivial punishment risks Th us for non-religiously committed agents

Th e conditional probability of value from cheating the devout lt expected reli-gious costs x frequency + conditional expectation of altruistic punishment

Because scrutiny is imperfect religious imposters may nevertheless invade reli-gious communities Th e threat is particularly high when the benefits of defec-tion are high An optimal signaling regime will assess not just the presence but also the strength of religious devotion We can therefore predict that ritual costs and frequency will correlate with defection incentives When facing a crisis the model predicts that religious individuals will devote more time and material resource to costly ritual participation than when times are better Th is is a non-trivial prediction We would ordinarily predict conservation strategies as resources dwindle and threats on them increase but this isnrsquot what happens For example Daniel Chen observes that during Indonesian financial crises of the late 1990s Muslim families devoted more resources to religious institu-tions as the crisis deepened Th ough apparently maladaptive Chen argues that religious institutions provide social insurance Th ey minimize risks to individuals and their families by providing collective support to the most needy Here costly observance in insurance societies makes the join-defect-leave strategy more expensive Th us ritual cost functions as an elaborate polic-ing technology to prevent raiding by committed defectors Th e costs police


behavior because they assess the strength of commitment Religious practice tests the bond

William Irons Lee Cronk and Shannon Steadman found that among the Island people of Utila men prefer to marry women who frequently attend church On Utila religious piety is associated with female desirability How-ever Irons reports this preference is not reversed He explains that the men of Utila are fishers who spend a substantial portion of their time away from home Given frequent and long enduring mate separation the risks for sexual infidelity (and more importantly for cuckoldry) are especially high for men Irons suggests that Utilan women are pious as a signal of sexual virtue Other-wise these discrepancies between male and female religious preferences are hard to explain

Richard Sosis and his colleagues have collected an impressive body of evi-dence for commitment-signaling technology In a comparative study of two hundred religious and secular communes in the 19th century Sosis deter-mined that the religious communities were far more likely to outlast their non-religious counterparts Impressively they were four times as likely to sur-vive in any given year In a subsequent study Sosis and Bressler showed that religious communes imposed over twice as many costly requirements on their members than did secular communes Th e authors also demonstrated that the number of costly requirements was positively correlated with group lifespan No such effect was observed for secular communes Th ere costly requirements did not correlate with secular commune lifespan Th is suggests that supernat-ural commitments are especially motivating of co-operative commitment

Moreover Sosis and Ruffle designed experiments to show that religious ritual influences co-operation in contemporary religious kibbutzim Using common-goods resource games the authors found that religious males were significantly more altruistic in their play than were religious and secular females and secular males Th e authors discovered no sex differences in co-operation among the secular kibbutz members thus eliminating the possibil-ity that there were more basic differences in the ways males and females play the game Noting that only orthodox men are expected to participate in inten-sive communal prayer regimes Sosis and Ruffle concluded that costly ritual participation accounts for the discrepancy

Clearly more studies in the area are needed I have focused on those elements of a religious niche that distill and amplify signals of co-operation But there are many other benefits that public religiosity brings To be very clear I do not suppose that signaling is a religious nichersquos only function For example symbolic marking secures commitment differently Marking tech-nologies (especially permanent marking technologies) do not merely assess commitmentsmdashthey forge them by making defection especially costly Once


marked forever branded Moreover dramatic religious rituals may support religious experience and the storage of religious knowledge in semantic for-mats Th ese formats are an especially useful means by which to link religious belief with moral emotions as episodic memory is experiential memory Th e motivations recalled through re-experiencing the gods in contrived emotional settings may well enhance social solidarity (I will return to Whitehouse momentarily) Such rituals are also important in their developmental role as a means for directing childhood and adolescent religiosity to specific mature psychological end states Here the costs of religious practice reflect the expense of schooling more than signaling Moreover religious thought and behavior may bring costs that are never repaid It may be dysfunctional particularly in the modern period in a world vastly different than the one that selected for it Kashmir Northern Ireland the Balkans Palestine and other hotbeds of religious conflict give vivid evidence for the scale of damage that unrelenting social pre-commitments may bring

Pulling these threads together the evolutionary transition to co-operative life happened because our ancestors were able to the overcome significant evo-lutionary barriers to cooperation Even in societies where group migration was not easy defection in exchange could never have been eliminated Subterfuge and deception secret agendas the formation of cabals unauthorized sexual liaisons lying pact breaking retributive violence and theft all characterized the ancestral world as they do ours We have seen how belief in immediate and substantial (typically intrinsic) supernatural utilities would have strongly enhanced solidarity and the costly signals of commitment that authenticated these beliefs would have been targets for ritual expression as the technologies that implant structure and refine religious thought and feeling began to scaffold early religious communities Religious cultural variants (ldquomemesrdquo) did not evolve as virulent information that infests gullible minds I have tried to make a compelling case for viewing religious culture as evolved to promote the success of religious individuals and groups

VII Entrenched Psychological Features

Suppose we treat religious culture as adaptive technology A dual inheritance model seems salvageable It may appear that we can retain everything in the cultural maladaptationist hypothesis except the ldquomalrdquo11 We can think of

11 Such appears to be the position of Wilson (2002) who views religious systems as discrete collections of group-level adaptations


religious cultural systems as smoke and mirror houses intricately arrayed to modify the flow of information to religion-prone agents about otherworldly police forces Given the functionality of religion the expectation is that ritual technologies will evolve to generate dramatic and convincing evidence for religious commitment We can use to elucidate these functions Whitehouse suggests that ldquoextreme sensory pageantryrdquo characterizes a distinctive mode of ritual organization and that ritual events are arrayed to generate lasting highly emotional episodic memories We do not forget that day when the knife was taken to our genitalia or when we leapt headfirst from an extraordinary height or when we fled the charging bulls Whitehouse also suggests that mundane repetitive ritualsmdashthose performed in the ldquodoctrinal moderdquo of religiositymdashgenerate semantic memories that embody the collective norms and wisdom of a tribe and support institutional and sociopolitical arrangements We may also view doctrinal practices as functional props and screens that assess (as well as instill) moral commitments It would seem that agents lacking spiritual commitment do not easily suffer rituals It makes little sense to perform rituals that one consciously believes bring no effect Whatever the correct analysis of religious functions it may seem plausible to view religious technology as one of a number of cultural technologies we inherit improve and transmitmdashone that creates and tests the bonds of religious (and so exchange) commitments (and potentially much else besides)

However cultural resources and conformistsuccess biases alone do not appear adequate to motivate adaptive religious commitments Whatever pomp and display the religious niche can manage the poverty of supernatural stimu-lus is next to complete We assume there are no gods to support our experience of the gods so it is striking that many are able to characterize some of their experiences as of the gods It is astonishing that religious beliefs do not face more strenuous epistemological questioning than they do It is even more astonishing that such agents are able to morally condemn those who are suspi-cious of religion for its lack of empirical support Recall Sterelnyrsquos point that religious fantasy is easily maintained in domains where cultural groups lack the science necessary to answer basic questions Not able to scientifically examine our origins and fates we fall back on wild and astonishing tales However two facts count against this interpretation First as we examined above foragers and agrarian peoples are technological masters of their domains Th e efficiency skill and productivity that ldquountutoredrdquo peoples manage deal-ing with each other and their harsh environments are truly spectacular Given these wondrous capacities and technologies it seems well within the cognitive reach of such persons to admit ldquowe donrsquot knowrdquo to such large and overwhelm-ing questionsmdashor even to find such questions uninteresting Given the costs


of the alternativemdashbelieving that the sun god is thirsty for blood that the lords of the universe require you to walk a fire or that it is our sacred duty to flagellate and mutilate our bodiesmdashldquowe donrsquot knowrdquo seems perfectly sensible Holding aside commitment-signaling advantages it would appear that cul-tural and individual selection pressures would strongly favor spiritual circum-spection Moreover we should not lose sight of the importance of religion in the lives of many of our scientifically enlightened contemporaries Were some-one to tell you that an individual named ldquoBobrdquo wanted to give you a million dollars for worshiping him you would probably be deeply incredulous Were you furthermore informed that Bob savages those who do not worship him but is also worthy of worship you may think a not-very-funny joke was at play If you were told that Bob allowed thugs to nail the hands and feet of his son John-boy to some wood just before killing John-boy so that he could forgive these thugs their sins you would think this unpleasant joke had turned perverse and morbid Were someone to persist in an attempt to persuade you of this all-important ldquoTruth about Bobrdquo you would likely judge her either not very intelligent or not very sane But such is the position of millions of other-wise functional clever sensible and intellectually responsible persons world-wide I think this ought to strike us as uncanny

We have seen how the advantages of erroneous supernatural beliefs more than repay their costs Yet because effective defection pays better audience agents will evolve or develop capacities and strategies for the accurate assess-ment of religious belief Th us religiosity is bounded by the conviction con-straint To remain adaptive religiosity requires substantial motivational commitment For it is precisely this moral conviction that emotional signaling and commitment-signaling technology must assess Any reduction in convic-tion to a norm-supporting god threatens social commitment by reducing its perceived utility (because a utility curve must factor [benefit x degree of cer-tainty] and divide his amount by the timing of a reward) Were you to doubt the watchful god ldquoBobrdquo you might also doubt Bobrsquos prohibition against (say) pig thievery and so your neighborrsquos pig may go missing in the night Were such uncertainty to spread in the absence of further defection controls much co-operative exchange would be threatened Yet living among the Bob-fear-ing we do not need to look over our shoulders

To enhance confidence in a supernatural world religiosity benefits from a biasing and distorting of information what Trivers calls ldquoself-deceptionrdquo By retrieving confirming evidence for religious commitment certainty will rise But critically we cannot instruct children in self-deception without losing the deception We cannot ask children to believe with moral conviction in an idea that is false Stable religious commitment must derive from biases to form and


retain religious commitment Th e conviction constraint is resolved by an inter-nal psychological propensity to strongly believe in supernatural characters

Consider the evidence It appears that children have an easy time imagining god-like beings Using a standard false belief task showed that young children better conceptualize the mind of God than they do the minds of natural per-sons Th e authors attribute this result to the fact that God conceptualization is less computationally intensive than are theory of mind capacities Coming to understand that agents have imperfect knowledge is an achievement one that children before the age of 4-5 cannot manage Th at young children come equipped with the capacity to acquire religious understandings very early sug-gests that children may be ldquointuitive theistsrdquo naturally preferring teleological and intentional purposes in explanations about the natural world When asked the question ldquoWhat is this forrdquo children find intentional explanations appro-priate not only for body parts and artifacts but also for living things (ldquoto go to the zoordquo) and non-biological kinds (clouds are ldquofor rainingrdquo) Keleman also found that children prefer teleological accounts for how nature came to be for example preferring the explanation that rocks are pointy ldquoso that animals would not sit on them and smash themrdquo to natural explanations like ldquobits of stuff piled up for a long period of timerdquo In recent work Keleman and col-leagues have suggested that intentional and teleological ascriptions may be linked Children prefer attributing agents as the causes of these teleological functions Similarly a striking series of experiments shows not only that chil-dren prefer creationist accounts for the world around them but even children raised in non-religious households prefer creationist accounts with the effect only moderating in 11-13 year olds Children are probably not learning this religious bias from their parentsmdashat least not straightforwardly Moreover Bering has recently shown that when primed to believed that there are super-natural agents in their midst 5 year olds exhibit a tendency to modify and police their actions Children are not only intuitive theists they appear to be intuitive supernatural moralists

I donrsquot want to overstate the case for entrenched cognitive design Th e developmental literature does not evidence a dedicated ldquogod modulerdquo But it does suggest that the acquisition of locally common religious commitments will not be difficult and it suggests that these commitments have the power very early in development to motivate pro-social behavior Children are pre-pared to interpret their world as animated by supernatural beings who have created it and who are capable of observing and policing prohibited behavior It does not require special cognitive effort to persuade children to find evi-dence of supernatural beings for this is their default interpretive strategy If anything the data suggest naturalism is difficult to learn


Letrsquos take the case for internal cognitive design further We assume that gods do not form part of the causal explanation for why agents believe in gods Th us strictly speaking we assume that religious commitment is false belief Critically then religious information needs to be managed so that it does not come into contact with core practical domains outside co-operative contexts Religious persons not only face a conviction constraint they also face an encapsulation constraint In many domains belief will be extremely maladaptive unless it is inferentially inert Religious persons cannot believe in the reality of benevolent superhuman agents when deciding for example whether to rely on these agents to pay their wages Practically we cannot ask the gods to deliver us our daily bread or else we will have no bread the gods cannot be called upon to deliver us from our enemies lest those enemies overwhelm us Moreover though the gods are imagined to police behavior it would be extremely maladaptive to leave the punishment of defection in their hands Only the faithful can load rocks onto the chests of defectors and tighten head screws (supposing the gods are causally inert) Put another way religious agents must believe with conviction (the certainty constraint) but must not be literal-minded about religion On the adaptationist model religious belief must be corralled to only those domains in which its expression will be func-tional Here again we cannot explicitly teach children to erect cognitive fire-walls around religious commitment without threatening commitment Yet how can agents meet the substantial demands of information management

Counterfactual and fictional reasoning may shed light on how agents man-age both rock-jawed religious certainty on the one hand with a tendency to separate religion from the hard demands of life on the other In counterfac-tual and fictional reasoning we find fairly straightforward examples of how psychological mechanisms permit agents to separate representations for off-line treatment Counterfactuals and fictions are lies we take seriously When planning how to retrieve a coconut from high in the palm tree we can simu-late a number of possible scenarios to help us develop an effective plan

ldquoEven if I hit the coconut with a projectile I am unlikely to bring it down these short branches will not reach it this long one is too thin if I were to climb the arch I could position myself to strike the fruit with this thick stick though this might be dangerous (simulation of a hard fall) HENCE rarr (practical inference) command young Friday up the tree rarr (execute) lsquoHey Friday go up that tree rsquo rdquo

Considering a future course of action is very different from believing that these actions are actual In thinking about what we might throw we do not take ourselves to be actually (now) throwing We bracket off the representa-tion of the merely possible from ontological commitment to the actual


Contemplating fictional scenarios also requires bundling a set of representa-tions for special off-line consideration Here there is no thought that what is imagined connects with a possible future We can ask ourselves whether Anna Karenina was unwise and feel sorry for her fate without actually believing either that Anna Karenina is an actual person or that she ever was or will be actual Fictional thought requires a meta-representational capacity to remove certain representations from directly feeding inferences to motor and behav-ioral systems Notice again that without a substantial cognitive firebreak there would be little to distinguish fictional thought from schizophrenic impair-ment To wonder about Anna Karenina is one thing to believe she exists quite another

Call ldquoIMAGINErdquo the meta-representational operator that binds a collec-tion of representations for fictional consideration

IMAGINE + [REPRESENTATIONS OF FICTION]

For example

IMAGINE + [1) ANNA KARENINA COMMITS SUICIDE FOR REVENGE rarr fictional inference 2) ANNA KARENINA WAS UNWISE] +3) ANNA KARENINA DOES NOT EXIST

Without the IMAGINE operator binding a set of representations for special consideration we could not simultaneously hold 1 2 and 3 to be true More-over because the contents of a collection of representation are in this instance bound we can draw specific inferences about (for example) characters of a drama that are not specifically stated within the context of a drama 2 and 3 can simultaneous be held without contradiction because fictional represen-tations are separated from actual representations in a format that avoids confusion

Th e simplest assumption is that something like a fictional meta-representa-tional operator underlies our capacity for contemplating supernatural worlds as the functions are in many respects similar Certain representations must be bound and bracketed so that internal inferential relations do not spill over into practical domains Th e difference of course is that to satisfy the conviction constraint the systems that represent belief to self-consciousness need to read religious representations as true indeed as certainly true Yet we have seen how that same system needs to remove religious representations from practical involvement again much like counterfactual and fictional meta-representa-tional markers do Postulating specific meta-representational powers enables us to understand why religious commitments though genuinely believed do not disengage organisms from practical planning and from fearing all the many obstacles that threaten life and human flourishing


Call the operator that binds religious representations the regIMAGINE operator and examine the properties we can infer through an understanding of the design constraints of a functional (indeed non-lethal) commitment-signaling system

regIMAGINE + [(religious) FICTION]

Here we suppose that regIMAGINE operator directs information to the sys-tems that self-consciously represent information as ldquoTRUErdquo and also directs information to the systems that mediate interaction with hostile reality as ldquoFICTIONrdquo12 Given the restrictions and movements of such an operator religious agents may find it plausible to hold

1) I believe that after death I will immediately go to a supremely wonderful place

And

2) I worry about death

But without substantial qualification the following will appear strange

1) I believe that after leaving I will immediately have a supremely wonderful time

And

2) I worry about leaving this building

Of course if religion is to be adaptive the scope operator must allow certain moral permissions Religion not only faces an encapsulation constraint but also an integration constraint Religious scope operators cannot be mere fictio-nal operators and still remain functional Minimally religious cognition must also allow for the production of hard to fake signals of commitment it also requires a willingness to act on such commitments Without authenticating signals and moral connections religious beliefs would not be interesting to an exchange audience Th e costs of religion would not be repaid with adaptive benefits Hence religious scope operators must be informationally porous Th ey must allow specific types of information to migrate from bounded religious fictions to the systems that guide social action Th ey must also feed informa-tion to the systems that produce authenticating emotions and motivations

Here we suppose that the regIMAGINE marker directs information to the systems that self-consciously represent religious information as ldquoTRUErdquo and

12 For a non-adaptationist discussion of scope restriction and religious commitment see Pyysiainen 2003


also directs information to the systems that mediate interaction with hostile reality as ldquoFICTIONrdquo Given the presence of such an operator religious agents may find it plausible to hold

regIMAGINE + [1) Unborn children have souls rarr2) Abortion is the deliber-ate taking of innocent life] PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (SIGNALING) rarr 3) March in the Abortion protest PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (GROUP EFFECT) rarr 4) Get angry with abortion doctors PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (PERSONAL EFFECT) rarr 5) Never have an abortion THEORETICAL MORAL COMMITMENT rarr 6) It is morally OK to kill to prevent the deliberate taking of innocent life PRACTICAL OVERRIDE rarr 7) Donrsquot kill an abortion doctor

It would seem that because agents assume 2 and 6 then they cannot coherently hold 7 For if abortion is murder and one can kill to prevent murder it seems morally okay to kill abortion doctors Yet few would draw this moral conclusion at least in practice (thankfully) Th e occurrence of 2 within the parameters of a religious scope operator resolves the paradox For while religious commitments are believed with strong conviction they are not believed unrestrictedlymdashfor example when doing so would violate more highly prioritized practical commitments However that religious moral infer-ences are taken seriously is born out by the coherence of such moral inferences as described in 3 4 and 5 Th ese moral inferences seep through the pours of religious scope restrictions for people do act on religious conviction often at substantial personal cost

Abortion morality illustrates the impact of external cultural variance on the norm-inferring systems that guide religious morality For example in Japan abortion is considered the deliberate taking of a life which Buddhism prohib-its Yet abortion occurs on a massive scale in Japan probably over 400000 per year (accurate statistics are not kept) But abortion does not rend Japanese society in two as it does for example in the United States Th e same Buddhist communities that view abortion as the woeful ending of life also provide ritu-als for addressing the complex emotions that those participating in abortion practices experience Th ey call these Mizuko Kuyo rituals Mizuko means ldquochild of the watersrdquo and Kuyo ldquoto give nourishmentrdquo Parents partake in a symbolic gifting of an intimate resource to the souls of their children who are acknowledged in these rituals and they do so in highly public settings with other parents Th ese are not rituals of profound contrition and shame Nor is abortion understood to be nothing but an ordinary medical procedure Th ese rituals are death memorials An offspringrsquos life ends before that of its parents


a supreme tragedy But parentsmdashfor an array of complex reasonsmdashmay also feel relief for the ending of that life Mizuko Kuyo rituals deal with complex and contradictory feelings that the wide-scale practice of abortion generates Th ere certainly are moral inferences that the religious interpretation of this practice yields but they are inferences that focus on spiritual healing rather than on the tropes of murder and liberty for a contrary interpretation see I have urged that an invariant and core function of religious conviction is to inspire moral commitment yet which moral judgments religious commit-ments inspire vary widely Local and contingent cultural histories are relevant to that causal story

VIII Conclusion

Letrsquos consider how the religious niche alternative fares against the Cultural Maladapationist Hypothesis

First the poverty of stimulus Religious commitment targets the non-natural but there is only nature I have urged that we tend to believe in gods because we possess cognitive dispositions that bring conviction to the religious infor-mation supplied through local cultural encounters Th e systems that control religious cognition distort and bias information flow to support supernatural belief and practice We have these cognitive dispositions because over the long course of human evolution they helped to reduce Machiavellian social com-plexity Th e adaptationist hypothesis suggests that only a few modifications to the metarepresentational systems that support counterfactual and fictional thought yield a functional cognitive design capable of supporting non-damaging func-tional religious commitment I urged thinking of religious conviction as nor-mative belief that is marked to self-consciousness ldquoas truerdquo on the one hand but which on the other hand is silently not applied to many practical domains Picasso famously called art a lie that tells the truth Such also is true of reli-gious culture We mistakenly believe in the gods yet for this mistake are rewarded dearly Th ese rewards are not supernatural benefits (so we suppose) but rather those benefits uniquely accessible to highly cooperative groups

Second the cost problem Religious commitment brings epistemic and prac-tical costs We get the world wrong and we pay for it Given these costs it appears that we should have evolved skeptical biases We should have evolved to fear and hate religion Yet supernatural commitment arises easily and everywhere Th e adaptationist alternative explains these costs as adaptations that promote fragile but mutually benefiting co-operative exchange Th e the-ory suggests that many (though not all) of these costs are signals that support


social exchange by vindicating the religious (and so moral) intentions of reli-gious exchange partners Other costs can be viewed as investment costs that support and maintain external religious environments as technologies for co-operation and there may be other functions besides

Th ird the reality of manipulation Religious commitment exposes agents to exploitation Religious agents remain exposed to information arrayed to deceive defraud and manipulate them However because religious organiza-tions are generally functional and because religious authorities will generally have survived the costly testing of their commitments the risks for manipula-tion are significantly reduced Clearly the risks are not eliminated Th e guru intent on a harem will always remain a threat but the commitment-signaling model predicts that the commitments of religious authorities will generally be co-operative commitments Even where they are not genuine the benefits of exchange may be so favorable as to tolerate the costs of propping up sacred tyrants Clearly further analysis is required here Th e worry that religion is a tool elites use for the oppression of the masses is expressed vividly in and enters into current evolutionary theory in and We do not exclude such mal-adaptive variants of religious systems Nevertheless given the entrenchment of religiosity in our psychological design we think that the best explanation for psychological dispositions to structured religious pre-commitments is that they best served the biological interests of those who were prone to them over the vast epochs of human evolution Th e evidence suggests they helped to make large scale cooperative exchange an evolutionary reality deep in the human lineage

Fourth the role of intricate social learning Th e Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis underestimates the cultural practices conventions and resources that structure religious experience Th at is it underestimates the importance of stable religious niche construction Commitment signaling moves religious expression to the center of social life as the commitments that underlie reli-gious exchange would have been critical in the vast eras before democratic policing Parents have an interest in cultivating and orienting religious com-mitments (which as we have seen come easily to children) for the benefits these commitments bring to children over the long haul In living in a group of strongly motivated co-religionists who reliably recognize the genuine com-mitments of others no external policing is required to support social sacrifice Th is may be true even in the face of substantial temptation to act in our self-interest For unlike ordinary extrinsically policed norms religiously held val-ues may be intrinsically satisfying but these values do not appear merely because we hold a belief Strongly held convictions typically come through powerful emotional experiences Th e vast diversity of spiritual practicesmdashbody


manipulations postures chants and song prayer dance and the likemdashgenerate forms of consciousness that support supernatural commitment Th ese prac-tices are poorly explained through conformist and success biases alone Th ey are aspects of a peculiar form of human epistemic niche construction one in which cultural practices are artifacts arrayed to support very specific misun-derstandings which in turn are identified and dispersed in highly emotional formats to police and co-ordinate the social activities of a tribe

Fifth the impact of encapsulation Religious commitment is often expressed as a belief If it were believed as an ordinary unrestricted proposition it would be deadly Motivating beliefs and experiences of supernatural powers that do not exist leads to very unwelcome schizophrenic-like inferences We have seen how the encapsulation constraint may be satisfied through specialized reli-gious scope operators that minimize inferential damage For if information is bound so that it does not migrate without limit from within an inflected domain then functional religiosity becomes available We have seen how counterfactual and fictional operators satisfy the encapsulation constraint I observed that only a minimal modification to these inflectors produces a porous representational system one that allows for the migration of religious information to moral domains but not others

Sixth the patterns of moral integration Religiosity is not just accepted as technology we experience moral passion over religious matters We have seen how religious commitments when linked with pro-social exchange emotions generate powerfully adaptive solutions to core problems that beset a social spe-cies equipped with Machiavellian minds and living in extended internally differentiated groups In this way selection has forged links that interfuse religious commitments with moral commitment It does so to empower co-operative norms by rendering pre-commitment to those norms open to public scrutiny From a naturalistic stance religiosity could be described as a kind of adaptive madness as fictional understandings and moralistic wonderment guides religious agents to the enormous benefits and efficiencies of reliable cooperative life

In the preceding I have urged that Th e Cultural Maladaptationist Hypoth-esis does not adequately explain the data surrounding religious culture After explaining CMH I presented an adaptationist alternative I demonstrated how the apparently maladaptive epistemic and practical costs that surround religious commitment are adaptations that better equip agents to solve the exchange problems that arise in complex social environments Th ese adapta-tions function at two related levels Cognitive adaptations function to bias and distort information flow giving credibility to judgments that religious worlds are real I observed that the capacities that underwrite our beliefs in such


worlds are similar to the capacities that underwrite our ability to contemplate counterfactual and fictional scenarios Yet whereas fiction helps us to under-stand social complexity religion helps us to reduce it For religiosityrsquos most basic evolutionary function is to support the norms of exchange that build functionally integrated and efficient communities Religious adaptations also function at a cultural level I argued that culturally transmissible features of religion are best explained as technologies adapted to foster locally adaptive religious commitment In particular I focused on technologies that identify and project hard-to-fake signals of co-operative intention and motivation I also cited evidence that such technologies modify the social worlds agents inhabit by supporting the norms on which co-operative patterns of exchange depend Th us religious agents inhabit a strange but immensely functional epistemic niche Th ough fictional the religious niche enables us to adjust to the difficult circumstances of life by better adjusting us to each other Th ough not always adaptive religiosity evolved as a powerful fuel for biological success

References

Alcorta Candace and Richard Sosis (under review) Religion Emotion and Symbolic Ritual Th e Evolution of an Adaptive Complex

Anderson Carl and Nigel Franks (2001) ldquoTeams in animal societiesrdquo Behavioral Ecology 12(5) 534-540

Barrett Justin L (2001) ldquoDo children experience God as adults dordquo In J Andresen (ed) Reli-gion in Mind 173-190 Cambridge University Press Cambridge

Bering Jesse M (2004) ldquoTh e evolutionary history of an illusion Religious causal beliefs in children and adultsrdquo In B Ellis and D F Bjorklund (eds) Origins of the Social Mind Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development 411-437 Guilford Press New York

Bering Jesse M and Becky D Parker (2006) ldquoChildrenrsquos attributions of intentions to an invis-ible agentrdquo Developmental Psychology 42(2) 263-262

Bering Jesse M and David F Bjorklund (in press) ldquoTh e natural emergence of ldquoafterliferdquo reason-ing as a developmental regularityrdquo Developmental Psychology

Boehm Christopher (1999) Hierarchy in the Forest Harvard University Press Cambridge MA Boyd Robert and Peter Richerson (2001) ldquoNorms and bounded rationalityrdquo In G Gigerenzer

and R Selted (eds) Bounded Rationality Th e Adaptive Toolbox 281-296 Th e MIT Press Cambridge MA

Bulbulia Joseph (2004a) Religious costs as adaptations that signal altruistic intention Evolution and Cognition 10(1) 19-38

mdashmdashmdash (2004b) ldquoTh e cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religionrdquo Biology and Philoso-phy 18(5) 655-686

mdashmdashmdash (2005) ldquoAre there any religionsrdquo Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 17(2) 71-100

mdashmdashmdash (2007) ldquoEvolution and Religionrdquo In R I Dunbar and L Barrett (eds) Oxford Hand-book of Evolutionary Psychology Oxford University Press New York

Chen Daniel (submitted) ldquoEconomic distress and religious intensity Evidence from Islamic resurgence during the Indonesian financial crisisrdquo American Economic Review


Chomsky Noam (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind Cambridge Univer-sity Press Cambridge

Cosmides Leda and John Tooby (1992) ldquoTh e psychological foundations of culturerdquo In J H Barkow L Cosmides and J Tooby (eds) Th e Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 19-136 Oxford University Press New York

mdashmdashmdash (1994) ldquoOrigins of domain specificity Th e evolution of functional organizationrdquo In L Hirschfeld and S Gelman (eds) Mapping the Mind 85-116 Cambridge University Press Cambridge

mdashmdashmdash (2000) ldquoConsider the source Th e evolution of adaptations for decoupling and meta-representationrdquo In D Sperber (ed) Metarepresentation 53-116 Oxford University Press New York

Cronk Lee (1994) ldquoEvolutionary theories of morality and the manipulative use of signalsrdquo Zygon 29(1) 81-101

Darwin Charles (1871 [1981]) Th e Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Princeton University Press Princeton

Dawkins Richard (2006) Th e God Delusion Houghton Mifflin Boston Day Matthew (2004) ldquoReligion off-line cognition and the extended mindrdquo Journal of Cogni-

tion and Culture 4(1) 101-121 Dennett Daniel C (1995) Darwinrsquos dangerous idea evolution and the meanings of life Simon amp

Schuster New York mdashmdashmdash (2006) Breaking the Spell Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Viking New York Dunbar Robin I (1998a) ldquoTh e social brain hypothesisrdquo Evolutionary Anthropology 6 178-190 mdashmdashmdash (1998b) Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language Harvard University Press

Cambridge MA mdashmdashmdash (2003) ldquoTh e social brain Mind language and society in evolutionary perspectiverdquo

Annual Review of Anthropology 32 163-181 Durkheim Emile (1915 [1964]) Th e Elementary Forms of the Religious Life George Allen amp

Unwin Ltd London Evans E Margaret (2000) ldquoTh e emergence of beliefs about the origin of species in school-age

childrenrdquo Merrill Palmer Quarterly 46(2) 221-254 mdashmdashmdash (2001) ldquoCognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems

Creation versus evolutionrdquo Cognitive Psychology 42(3) 217-266 Fodor Jerry A (1983) Th e Modularity of Mind MIT Press Cambridge MA Frank Robert H (1988) Passions within Reason Th e Strategic Role of Th e Emotions Norton and

Company New York mdashmdashmdash (2001) ldquoCooperation through emotional commitmentrdquo In R Nesse (ed) Evolution

and the Capacity for Commitment 57-77 Russell Sage Foundation New York Godfrey-Smith Peter (1996) Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature Cambridge Uni-

versity Press Cambridge Gruber Howard E and Paul H Barrett (1974) Darwin on Man A Psychological Study of

Scientific Creativity Together with Darwinrsquos Early Unpublished Notebooks Dutton New York

Hardacre Helen (1999) Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan University of California Press Berkeley

Henrich Joseph and Richard McElreath (2003) ldquoTh e evolution of cultural evolutionrdquo Evolu-tionary Anthropology 12(3) 123-135

Irons William (1996) ldquoMorality religion and evolutionrdquo In W M Richardson and W J Wildman (eds) Religion and Science History Method and Dialogue 375-399 Routledge New York

mdashmdashmdash (2001) ldquoReligion as hard-to-fake sign of commitmentrdquo In R Nesse (ed) Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment 292-309 Russell Sage Foundation New York


Jablonka Eva and Marion J Lamb (2006) Evolution in Four Dimensions Genetic Epigenetic Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life Th e MIT Press Cambridge MA

Jackson C Wesley and E Lowell Kelly (1962) ldquoInfluence of suggestion and subjectsrsquo prior knowledge in research on sensory deprivationrdquo Science 135 211-212

James William (1908 [1928]) Th e Varieties of Religious Experience Longmans Green and Co London

Johnson Carolyn (2003) ldquoDuring economic turmoil religion is lsquoinsurancersquordquo Science and Th eol-ogy News 4(4)

Johnson Dominic D P (2005) ldquoGodrsquos punishment and public goods A Test of the supernatu-ral punishment hypothesis in 186 world culturesrdquo Human Nature 16(4) 410-446

Kelemen Deborah (1999) ldquoWhy are rocks pointy Childrenrsquos preference for teleological expla-nations of the natural worldrdquo Developmental Psychology 35(6) 1440-1452

mdashmdashmdash (2004) ldquoAre children ldquointuitive theistsrdquo Reasoning about purpose and design in naturerdquo Psychological Science 15(5) 295-310

Kelemen Deborah and Cara DiYanni (2005) ldquoIntuitions about origins Purpose and intelligent design in childrenrsquos reason about naturerdquo Journal of Cognition and Development 6(1) 3-31

LaFleur William (1994) Liquid Life Princeton University Press Princeton Marr David (1980) Vision Freeman and Company New York Marx Karl (1867 [1992]) Capital a Critique of the Political Economy Th e Penguin Group

New York Mithen Steven (2006) Th e Singing Neanderthals Th e Origins of Music Language Mind and

Body Harvard University Press Cambridge MA Odling-Smee F John Kevin Laland and Marcus Feldman (2003) Niche Construction Th e

Neglected Process in Evolution Princeton University Press Princeton Pargament Kenneth I (2002) ldquoTh e bitter and the sweet An evaluation of the costs and benefits

of religiousnessrdquo Psychological Inquiry 13(3) 168-189 Pinker Steven (1997) How the Mind Works WW Norton amp Company New York Plotkin Henry (1998) Evolution in Mind An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology Harvard

University Press Cambridge MA Pyysiaumlinen Ilkka (2003) ldquoTrue fiction philosophy and psychology of religious beliefrdquo Philo-

sophical Psychology 16(1) 109-125 Richerson Peter and Robert Boyd (1989) ldquoTh e role of evolved predispositions in cultural

evolution Or human sociobiology meets Pascalrsquos wagerrdquo Ethology and Sociobiology 10 195-219

mdashmdashmdash (2005) Not By Genes Alone How Culture Transformed Human Evolution Th e University of Chicago Press Chicago

Roes Frans L and Michel Raymond (2003) ldquoBelief in moralizing godsrdquo Evolution and Human Behavior 24(2) 126-135

Rossi Ascanio M John B Sturrock and Philip Solomon (1963) ldquoSuggestion effects on reported imagery in sensory deprivationrdquo Perceptual and Motor Skills 16(1) 39-45

Shepard Roger (1992) ldquoTh e perceptual organization of colors an adaptation to regularities of the terrestrial worldrdquo In J H Barkow L Cosmides and J Tooby (eds) Th e Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 495-532 Oxford University Press New York

Skyrms Brian (1996) Evolution of the social contract Cambridge University Press New York mdashmdashmdash (2004) Th e Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Sosis Richard (2000) ldquoReligion and intragroup cooperation Preliminary results of a compara-

tive analysis of utopian communitiesrdquo Cross-Cultural Research 34(1) 70-87


mdashmdashmdash (2003) ldquoWhy arenrsquot we all Hutteritesrdquo Human Nature 14(2) 91-127 Sosis Richard and Eric R Bressler (2003) ldquoCo-operation and commune longevity a test of the

costly signaling theory of religionrdquo Cross-Cultural Research 37(2) 211-239 Sosis Richard and Bradley J Ruffle (2003) ldquoReligious ritual and cooperation Testing for

a relationship on Israeli religious and secular kibbutzimrdquo Current Anthropology 44(5) 713-722

Sperber Dan (1996) Explaining culture a naturalistic approach Blackwell Oxford Sterelny Kim (2003) Th ought in a Hostile World Th e Evolution of Human Cognition Blackwell

Oxford mdashmdashmdash (2006) ldquoTh e evolution and evolvability of culturerdquo Mind and Language 21(2) 137-165 mdashmdashmdash (2007 forthcoming) ldquoSocial intelligence From brain to culturerdquo mdashmdashmdash (forthcoming) ldquoMade by each other organisms and their environmentrdquo In J Odling-

Smee K Laland and M Feldman (eds) Niche Construction Th e Neglected Process in Evolu-tion in Biology and Philosophy

Taves Ann (1999) Fits Trances and Visions Princeton University Press Princeton Tomasello Michael (1997) Primate Cognition Oxford University Press New York mdashmdashmdash (1999) Th e cultural origins of human cognition Harvard University Press Cambridge

MA mdashmdashmdash (2000) Culture and cognitive development Current Directions in Psychological Science

9(2) 37-40 Tooby John and Leda Cosmides (2001) ldquoDoes beauty build adapted minds Toward an evolu-

tionary theory of aesthetics fiction and the artsrdquo SubStance 9495 6-27 Trivers Robert (1991) ldquoDeceit and self-deception the relationship between communication

and consciousnessrdquo In M Robinson and L Tiger (eds) Man and Beast Revisited 175-191 Smithsonian Washington DC

Whitehouse Harvey (1996) ldquoRites of terror Emotion metaphor and memory in Melanesian cultsrdquo Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 703-715

mdashmdashmdash (2004) Modes of Religiosity A Cognitive Th eory of Religious Transmission AltaMira Press Lanham MD

Wilson David S (2002) Darwinrsquos Cathedral Evolution Religion and the Nature of Society Uni-versity of Chicago Press Chicago

Zahavi Amotz and Avishag Zahavi (1997) Th e Handicap Principle A missing piece of Darwinrsquos Puzzle Oxford University Press New York

onersquos genitalia play with snakes and become celibate for life Why otherwise sensible agents so afflict themselves certainly needs to be explained In addi-tion religious ideas have cultural staying power Th e religions of ancient herd-ing peoples remain our religions and even religious persons may consider the religious beliefs of others to be wild impairing superstitions We feel lucky to have escaped whatever influence that brought the Branch Davidians to Waco or led tens of thousands to embrace Scientology

I think Dennettrsquos proposal that these ideas endure because they are good replicators has convincing intuitive appeal For religions appear to persist because of their perceived rather than actual benefits (Naturalists do not sup-pose there is a pie in the sky waiting to benefit us) But Dennettrsquos case can be made more compelling In what follows I first connect Dennettrsquos claims about religion to a wider range of empirical and theoretical materials on cultural evolution I call this enhanced thesis ldquothe cultural maladaptationist hypothe-sisrdquo (CMH) In Parts I II III I advance what I take to be the strongest version of this hypothesis

My second aim is to show that CMH does not adequately explain the data on religion Religion endures because it is attractive But it is attractive in part because it fosters the success of religious agents What looks to be mal-adaptive in religion is exquisitely functional not merely from the vantage point of religious cultures but also from the position of the faithful who sus-tain them Beginning in Part IV I sketch an alternative to cultural maladapta-tionism which I call ldquothe religious niche hypothesisrdquo Th is conjecture explains how the maladaptive aspects of religious cognition and culture are (in most contexts) only apparent Obviously religion is sometimes maladaptive but I urge that it is so precisely because religiosity pre-commits us to a social order even when doing so opposes our immediate interests Effective social policing requires investment and vigilance and the costs of religion I urge are well accounted for as policing costs Moreover I argue that religion endures because we possess a layer of specialized cognitive adaptations designed to support and respond to religious culture Th e data suggest that we are predisposed to pro-duce learn and modify a religious niche Th is niche in turn modifies us and subsequent generations who inherit and further modify religious culture Reli-gion and religious minds elaborate each other We are adapted to learn and transform our religious situation Religion should not be contrasted with functional technology it rather exemplifies it









Moreover




























































































































































For example









And




And












VIII Conclusion















References




















































































Moreover




























































































































































For example









And




And












VIII Conclusion















References





































































































































































































































For example









And




And












VIII Conclusion















References


















































































And




And












VIII Conclusion















References




















































































VIII Conclusion















References
























































































References













































































Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural...

Documents

Transcript of Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural...