For the last couple of years I have been arguing on this blog for a dual inheritance account of religion. Earlier this year Scott Atran and Joe Henrich published in Biological Theory a paper that, I believe, is the most sophisticated dual inheritance account currently available. Now, it turns out that this paper – “The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions” – is freely accessible. I think that anyone who would wish to understand religion would greatly benefit from reading it:
Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people’s commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today’s world.
Like this:
Like Loading...
John S. Wilkins
October 16, 2010
I have a concern with dual inheritance theories (and I will, of course, read that linked essay; thanks). It is this. It presumes that there are two well demarcated domains in which inheritance may occur (in this case, WRT religion). I suspect that there are many, and they are not well demarcated. For example, I do not think that the experiential aspects of religious fervour are necessarily founded just on some inherited biological propensities; niche construction plays a critical role here, and this can be economic, social, technological and biochemical. Likewise, “memetic” accounts suppose that ideas/memes are passed on in ways that are, to use Toulmin’s term, “decoupled” from biology. Then there is the problem of the several kinds of biological inheritance, such as, apart from genetic, methylation, immunological and so forth.
Why should we stop at two domains? It’s either one domain with a plurality of processes of inheritance, or it’s several domains each defined by the actual mode of inheritance. I’m presently unsure which of these alternatives I prefer.
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
October 16, 2010
I think that’s a great criticism and a similar to the one that I make concerning dual process accounts of reasoning. I would be far from disagreeing with it. What I would say in defence of dual inheritance is that looking at religion from this point of view is useful at this stage in so far as it helps us to think about the various interactions that take place between different processes occuring on cultural and biological levels. You just can’t do that if you start from an evolutionary psychology point of view, for example. But that does not mean that Boyd and Richerson are the final word, just the latest one.
Hope this makes sense. It is now past 3 am and I’m almost too tired to sit. Thanks for the comment.
Andrew Atkinson
October 16, 2010
Excellent! But now there’s no point in finishing my PhD as they’ve basically argued everything I do – but better. Damn. What now?
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
October 16, 2010
Well, guess how I felt upon reading it?! On the one hand – Hurray, people saying much of what is supposed to be in my book! But – Oh no, people saying much of what is supposed to be in my book!
Don’t worry, there’s plenty to be done still.