The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origin of Faith and Religion (review)

The fifteen essays in this volume are taken from a symposium held in July 2008 at the University of Bologna, with contributions coming from ethology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology, and with some sophisticated psychology of religion. The essays are of such high caliber and so free of wooden materialism that they are well positioned to invoke or provoke ongoing query.

If one simply grows weary of the creationism vs. neo-Darwinian battles, it comes as a liberating moment when you can cast your Darwin-friendly eyes "downward" into the realms where evolutionary traits are observable in a roughly delineated way. Yes, and you can get predictions too. Peirceans will note that these scientists are more than willing to make abductions (hypothesis from law to case, namely, from thirdness giving its blessing to unruly secondness).

We need to remind ourselves of the basics. Evolutionary theory asserts that biological life embodies descent with modification. All (random) variations in habit must work almost instantly or the organism and its "inclusive fitness" cohorts will fail to reproduce. Almost all mutations are fatal, and it only brooks confusion to see these changes as somehow "creative" or as mobile little improvements somehow pleasing to the deity. Teleology got the bums rush some time ago, yet its appeal seems as strong as ever. The burden for evolutionary theory of the human and the religious is that it must secure its worldview without falling into the temptation to "find" something that is purposive in our species/nature interaction. For me, purpose is best discussed within the realms delineated by neo-Platonism; Darwin meets Plotinus as it were.

Adaptation as a concept has some anthropomorphic echoes where we might say, "Yes, I will choose to adapt to the new evolutionary microniche." I prefer to say that nature (via our species-being) imposes the narrow band where we adapt or fail to reproduce enough to outpace the death rates in our specific population. It really is more like a key and a lock than as seen in the idealistic/panpsychist framework where both locks and keys coevolve (seamlessly?) together.

We have natural selection, adaptation, and sexual selection. Darwin marveled at the astonishing growth in male peacock feathers and did not see how they were a natural selection or a viable adaptation. The extra feathers were seen as an unnecessary by-product (what today is called a "spandrel"—an epiphenomenon that rides piggy back on an adaptive structure on its own right).

The discovery of the absolute centrality of sexually selected traits enabled Darwin and the rest of us to grasp the astonishing drive toward the high end of genetic pairing. My big peacock tail does take me a bit longer to get airborne, but when it comes to mate selection, I have an even more valuable commodity. Studies have shown that when a female bird selects the sexy partner, she is also getting a partner with the fewest internal parasites and therefore, the strongest immune system, remembering that bad parasites can bring more death to a population than external threats.

Religion also functions via natural selection, that is, it makes community inclusion more secure and adaptive as you have to pay a steep price to be accepted as one of the in-group, and part of the price is the almost automatic demonization of nonclan members. Identity and violence are part of an ancient species logic that may never be overcome no matter how strenuous our religions' peace-making efforts.

Many of the authors are persuaded that religion has been on the side of the devils in our nature, although it can also uphold some modest eschatological visions that may themselves be adaptive in a different way. A controversial twist on this argument has to do with the alleged "evolutionary time lag" hypothesis that asserts that the foundation of our religious behavior goes back to the Pleistocene era (c30.000 BCE) and...