By THE STAR
Added: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Gary Walsh for the link.

http://www.thestar.com/article/510711

Opiate of the masses - and evolutionary aid
Joseph Hall

Christian creationists have long railed against the theory of evolution. But you may not have heard anything yet.

A new Canadian paper in the journal Science suggests that Christianity itself may be a function of evolution.

In a review article that is sure to prove controversial, University of British Columbia researchers say that the world's great religions may have emerged as a codification of cultural traits that allowed people to be more successful breeders.

"We're setting aside the question of whether religions are true in a metaphysical sense," says Ara Norenzayan, a UBC psychologist and lead author of the paper. He and his team reviewed dozens of studies on the emergence of religions from disciplines as diverse as psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, economics and ethnography.

"We're trying to understand what religion is and explain it in terms of human nature and human culture."

The paper argues that social co-operation and altruism conferred an evolutionary advantage as populations grew larger, and that moralizing religions were key to creating large-scale cohesion.

The theory of evolution holds that all creatures are driven by a biological urge to pass on as many of their own genes as possible to the next generation.

This urge inevitably leads to competition to be the more successful breeder. Any mating advantage an individual possesses could itself be passed on to its offspring.

But biologists have wondered, in this breeding free-for-all, why altruism and co-operation exist, especially in the human setting.

Norenzayan says that familial co-operation is understandable because members of the same clans would posses many of the same genes.

"The idea here is that to the extent we are interacting with someone who is genetically related to us, we are going to be altruistic just because it will benefit our (shared) genes to help."

In smaller social groups, he continues, a sense of built-up trust between individuals would allow for longer survival — and better breeding opportunities — because an "I scratch your back, you scratch my back" existence can greatly ease life's burdens.

However, while the evolutionary advantages of living in large groups are obvious — large groups do better than small ones in the competition for resources — the mechanism for large-scale altruism and cohesion has been puzzling.

"There is a strong incentive for people ... to get the benefits of co-operation, but not return co-operation and do better than the co-operators," Norenzayan contends. "The best strategy is not to co-operate but pretend to co-operate."

And this is where religion comes in.

"One explanation for why religions have had such a staying power throughout human history and human societies," he says, "is that they play a role in promoting altruistic tendencies in very large groups.

"This is something that is very hard to get."

Thus religious thought, while cultural in origin, meshed ideally with the evolutionary imperative for group co-operation, Norenzayan says.

"Of course it's not a genetic process; it's a cultural process," he says. "But it's feeding back into our evolutionary adaptation and then making possible co-operative tendencies in larger and larger groups."

It's likely no coincidence, Norenzayan says, that all the world's great religions emerged as human populations were exploding.

And common among all of these creeds are messages of altruism, selflessness, compassion and co-operation.

University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson says the review is a quality piece of work that makes a good case for setting religion squarely in the context of human evolution and biology.

Indeed, he adds, its findings should almost be obvious, given the acceptance of other universal human traits, such as cognition and language, as being evolutionary in origin.

"Religion is a human universal," says Peterson, an expert in the biological basis of religious thought. "And the probability that a human universal didn't evolve? I think you have to assume that it evolved and prove the opposite. That isn't normally what happens when people are discussing religion."

Peterson says the paper's linkage of growing group size and the emergence of moralizing deities is an important new concept in the field.

Norenzayan cautions, however, that the demise of religion in many Western countries does not augur a collapse in social cohesion.

He suggests that other, secular mechanisms such as enlightenment-influenced laws, courts and effective policing can serve in place of severed religious regulations.

"There are other ways to be less selfish, more co-operative; you don't have to necessarily have religion to solve that problem."

TAGGED: EVOLUTION, RELIGION