Animal Animism: Evolutionary Roots of Religious Behavior

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Stewart Guthrie
Animal Animism: Evolutionary Roots of Religious Cognition
There is no fundamental di!erence
between man and the higher mammals
in their mental faculties . . . the
tendency in [humans] to imagine that
natural objects and agencies are
animated by spiritual or living
essences, is perhaps illustrated by . . .
my dog [which] was lying on the lawn
during a hot and still day; but at a little
distance a slight breeze occasionally
moved an open parasol . . . every time
that the parasol slightly moved, the dog
growled fiercely and barked. He must
[unconsciously have felt] that
movement without any apparent cause
indicated the presence of some strange
living agent.
– Charles Darwin, The Descent of
Man
Permeated by [divine] power is
everything that moves in the universe.
– First mantra, Isa Upanishad
Introduction
Despite Darwin, most scholars still see religion as marking a sharp
divide between humans and nonhuman animals. Religion, in their
view, involves symbolism, wishful thinking, explanation, or some
combination of these activities, of which only humans are capable.
Thus any explanation of religion begins and ends with ourselves. A
few writers, however, root religion in a biological matrix shared by

other animals. A key part of this matrix is that we and other animals
all inhabit ambiguous environments that we must scan for hidden
agents. In scanning for such agents, we encounter false positives:
we think we see agents where none exist.
I hold, then, that nonhuman animals display the common
denominator of religions: seeing more organisation in things and
events than these things and events really have. Like us, other
animals appear to attribute characteristics of life and agency to the
inanimate world. In this sense, other animals are animists. This is
because we all respond to perceptual ambiguity in a strategic way,
produced by natural selection: when in doubt about whether
something is animate or intentional, or is the result of action by
something animate or intentional, we assume that it is. Because all
perception is ambiguous and because natural and human
deceptions increase this ambiguity, both we and other animals
always must assume that there is more to the world than meets the
eye.
" Previously I have argued that religion is grounded in a general
perceptual and cognitive strategy. I now am extending this
argument by suggesting continuities and similarities between
religious thought and action on the one hand and nonhuman animal
perception and behaviour on the other. Far from requiring unique
explanations, religious ideas are generated by cognitive
mechanisms that are not only ordinary (Hume 1957 [1757]; Darwin
1871; Tylor 1871; Horton 1960, 1993; Guthrie 1980, 1993, 1997a,
1997b, 2001; Lawson and McCauley 1990; Boyer 1994; Barrett
2000) but also broadly distributed in the animal world.
"Religion doubtless has uses — “functions” — that are typically
human (McCutcheon 1997), but its existence cannot be explained
primarily by such uses. It can be explained, however, as a byproduct
of something else: a perceptual and cognitive strategy. As it arises,
religion may well serve various purposes – just as do other
accidental products of evolutionary process – and serving such
purposes may encourage it.
" The fundamental question is, however, why religion arises.
(Jensen, this volume, remarks that this always has been the grand
question; and Anttonen, this volume, writes that “for scholars, there
is hardly a more serious task.”) My answer is avowedly reductive. I

find it in religion’s continuities with other thought and action,
including those in nonhuman animals, and in features of the natural
environment in which such thought and action evolved. This
approach agrees with recent assumptions in cognitive science about
the fit between minds and the environments in which they have
evolved, as well as with older assumptions in biology (e.g., Uexküll
1992 [1934]). Cosmides and Tooby (1994: 103), for instance, write
that because “ancestral environments caused the design of
psychological adaptations”, investigating environments should
guide “exploration of our cognitive mechanisms.” That is,
understanding the natural environments of our ancestors will help
clarify how our own cognition works. Such clarification aims at what
Sperber (1996: 4) calls the “prototypical natural-scientific goal”,
namely, to “discover some natural mechanism that explains a wide
range of phenomena in a testable manner.”
What is at stake in my argument is not so much the question of
what analogues to religion nonhuman animals may have, as what
the answer can tell us about what humans have and why they have
it. I have argued earlier (1980, 1988, 1993, 1996b, 1996c, 1997a,
1997b, 2001) that religion may best be considered cognitively, as a
form of anthropomorphism (and of the related phenomenon of
animism). I’ve argued moreover that the cognitive processes
producing anthropomorphism and animism are deeply intuitive —
as this term is used by Sperber (1996: 89), for example, who
describes intuitive beliefs as “typically the product of spontaneous
and unconscious perceptual and inferential processes; in order to
hold these intuitive beliefs, one need not be aware of the fact that
one holds them, and even less of reasons for holding them.” This
describes most anthropomorphism and animism very well indeed —
and hence, in my view, most religious thought and action.
In contrast, however, Sperber himself (1996) and Boyer (1994
and this volume), Pyysiäinen (this volume), and some others regard
religion as in conflict with intuitive thought and action. Indeed the
latter two scholars find the explanation for the existence of religion
in this very conflict. Thus although we all approach religion
cognitively, we do so from quite di!erent directions. Our diversity,
however, is not unusual among theorists of religion, who, as
Anttonen (this volume) notes, still are quite heterogeneous.

Is Religion Uniquely Human?
The prevailing answer to the question whether religion is unique to
us is yes (e.g., Lessa and Vogt 1979; Carey 1995; Atran 1995;
Mithen 1999; Rappaport 1999). In this view, religion is di!erent
from anything in nonhuman animals. It is diagnostically and
decisively human, and depends on capacities and preoccupations
that set us o! radically.
"One familiar analysis of religion (Feuerbach 1972; Freud 1964;
Malinowski 1948) that limits it to humans is that it consists of
wishful thinking. Caught in various existential traps, not least our
knowledge of our mortality, we fantasize ourselves rescued by gods
and enjoying some comfortable post-mortem existence. Since only
humans know that they will die, and only humans imagine
something better, only humans have religions
" This wishful-thinking account (which appears as early as the
Greeks and as recently as Stark and Bainbridge 1987) doubtless has
some truth, but it appears insu#cient. For one thing, many religious
ideas picture a world we would not wish for, with demons, angry
gods, or terrifying afterlives. Indeed Burkert, noting that many
religions are frightening, writes, “to transmit religion is to transmit
fear” (1996: 30-31). For another, we do not believe just anything we
want. As Pinker (1997: 555) puts it, people freezing to death don’t
comfort themselves with a belief that they are warm. That is, even if
all religious beliefs were comforting, we still would need to know
why they are plausible. Thus the wishful-thinking theory is weak,
and an absence of wishful thinking in other animals would not
necessarily mean the absence of the basis for religion.
A second analysis of religion, often called intellectualist or,
more generally, cognitivist, is that it constitutes explanation (Hume
1757; Tylor 1871; Horton 1993) and, of course, only humans
explain. Again there is some truth here. Religions often do o!er
explanations, and these, as far as explanation is propositional,
require language and symbols. But, as Lawson and McCauley (1990)
argue, explanation is closely interwoven with interpretation and is
hard to distinguish from it; and certainly other animals interpret the

world, since all perception is interpretation, as Wittgenstein pointed
out.
"A recent cognitive account of religion that also seems to make
it unique to humans is Boyer’s (1994, partly adopted by Pyysiäinen
and by Anttonen, both this volume). This account explains not how
religious ideas arise, but why they persist. As in Darwinian selection,
they persist because of a selective advantage: here, their
memorability. Memorability is conferred by a combination of
intuitiveness and counter-intuitiveness. Ideas with this combination
are variously “supernatural”, “non-natural”, and “extra-natural”. As
this account relies heavily on the notion of the counter-intuitive,
and as animals give little or no instruction (much less in
metaphysics), we might conclude once more that animals cannot
share the common denominator of religion.
"Several problems with this theory arise, however, that are
pertinent to my own argument. The most basic is that because the
reproductive success of ideas is independent of the success of their
bearers—unlike the relation of genes to their bearers—the theory is
inconsistent with the Darwinian account of selection. Only by
conceiving of ideas themselves as life forms (as does Sperber,
below) can this inconsistency be avoided. But such a conception,
giving life to ideas, is both reifying and animistic and hence best
avoided.
Another problem arises, as Talmy (1995:647) and Guthrie
(1996a) note, because Boyer describes the counter-intuitive
components of religious ideas as generated randomly. Which ideas
persist and which do not is determined solely by the need for some
balance of intuitivity and counter-intuitivity. Thus, memorable non-
natural ideas should encompass an endless range of combinations.
But instead certain features, such as the frequent invisibility and
intangibility of agents, in fact commonly recur while virtually
limitless others, equally counter-intuitive, do not occur at all.
"A third, related problem is whether invisibility and intangibility
are indeed counter-intuitive or merely, as Talmy suggests,
consistent with experience in natural environments. Ethology and
human experience alike suggest that the latter is the case. First,
animals in the wild not infrequently behave as though in the
presence of unseen agents (for example, even with no predator in

sight, they often act cautiously – though occasionally, as in the
chimpanzee rain dance, with bravado). This behavior is not
surprising, since invisible agents are common in nature and in
human experience, and intangible ones are not unusual (Guthrie
1993 and below). And it is, of course, in a natural context that
human intuitions also have evolved.
Further, the ethologist Uexküll (1992: 377) recounts instances
of animals from various phyla acting in Umwelten (subjective worlds
of perception and action) that possess “phenomena which, however,
are visible to the subject alone and are bound to no experiences.”
Such phenomena include search images triggered in the absence of
any objective stimulus. One might call such phenomena “imaginary”,
but Uexküll calls them, together with the consequent behaviour,
“magical.” For example, a pet starling, which never had caught or
even seen a fly, one day was seen to “suddenly rush toward an
invisible object, catch it in mid-air, return with the object to its
perch, peck away at it with its bill as any starling will do with a
captured fly, and finally swallow the invisible thing . . . There was no
doubt that the starling had had the apparition of an imaginary fly in
its Umwelt. Evidently the starling’s whole world had been so charged
with the ‘feeding tone’, that even without the appearance of a
sensory stimulus, the functional image of fly-catching, which was in
readiness, forced the perceptual image to appear, and this released
the entire action chain. This experience indicates that otherwise
utterly puzzling actions by various animals should be interpreted
magically” (Uexküll 1992:378).
" Moreover, in human experience, people commonly act at a
distance, as through place markers, projectiles, land mines, and
other artifacts. This produces what Gell (1998) calls the “distributed
person”: the fact that persons, through their distributed artifacts,
typically are agents in various places at the same time. They need be
neither visible nor tangible to have a presence.
On the other hand, the invisibility and intangibility of most gods
and spirits, like those of most animals, are neither complete nor
intrinsic but only partial and contingent (Guthrie 1993). They are
achieved by the Greek gods, for example, by producing a screen of
fog or smoke. Burkert (1996, like Guthrie 1993) notes that dealing
with gods we never see is little di!erent from dealing with monarchs

or distant trade partners we never see. In addition, many gods, such
as those of the Hawaiians and Aztecs, not only have been perfectly
visible and tangible but also have looked very much like humans —
thus enabling Captains Cook and Cortez to be mistaken for
returning deities.
Reports of agents who are invisible and intangible may demand
our attention. As Burkert suggests, however, this probably is simply
because these features make such agents more powerful — and
sometimes more sinister — than agents without them. The same
attention would be demanded by reports of camouflaged men in the
woods or reports of invisible microbes on one’s food. No
“supernatural” qualities are required.
This conclusion avoids a potential ethnological problem,
moreover, since, as Hallowell (1960) and Saler (1977) argue, the
very notion of supernatural is Western and culture-bound. As
Horton (1993) observes, applying this notion to traditional African
religions is no more useful than applying it to nuclear physics on the
grounds that physics invokes invisible entities and powers. Rather,
Horton continues, both science and religion begin with familiar
models — those of common sense — and adapt them to account for
a broader range of phenomena by changing or dropping certain
features. The planetary model of the atom, for example, began with
the model of our solar system, but changed the scale and dropped
such features as color. Similarly, such religious models as those of
ancestors begin with persons and lineages, and modify or drop
features such as embodiment. Gell (1998) similarly argues that
magical thinkers using principles of contagion and sympathy do not
so much contradict modern physics as simply do without it; and
Saariluoma, this volume, also finds “nothing unintuitive in inferring
the properties God has in the human mind, culture, and existing
religious texts.”
A corollary of Horton’s comparison of religious and scientific
theories is that the more abstruse versions of both are the province
of professional scientists and theologians. Most of us stick closer to
home, where matter remains solid and gods are neither totally Other
nor totally disembodied. (Barrett 1999 and 2000 also makes this
point, distinguishing ordinary religious ideas from theological ideas.
In this volume he writes similarly that “regardless of theological

tradition, in non-reflective contexts, concepts of gods conform to
intuitive expectations . . . about all intentional beings.” For most
people, for example, God is not omnipresent but can be in only one
place at a time.)
The third and last human capacity held to make religion unique
to our species is that for language and associated symbolism.
Scholars who assume that religion essentially is symbolism are a
majority; just a few of the best-known include Durkheim (1915),
Turner (1967), Geertz (1996), and Rappaport (1999). For most
scholars, religious symbolism is a means indirectly to express,
promote, or control certain social relationships and our feelings
about them (Anttonen 1996, 2000 o!ers persuasive versions of
this view); and for most of these scholars, the uniqueness of
humans is hardly in question. Rappaport (1999: 16) writes in his last
book, “religion emerged with language. As such, religion is as old as
language, which is to say precisely as old as humanity.”
Against the view that symbols are uniquely human, one might
counter that chimpanzees and other apes have rudimentary
symbolism (e.g., branch-dragging to suggest a direction of travel
and occasional false warnings, which Rappaport 1999: 55 calls
“proto-lies”). Moreover Rappaport, who sees ritual as the source of
religion, makes plain that ritual is not only human but is shared also
by “the birds, the beasts and even the insects” (1999: 25). As an
ethologist writes, “attempts to place humans apart from and above
nonhumans, have, in a sense, backfired. Comparative research in
animal cognition has demonstrated evolutionary continuity in many
cognitive abilities. It has also shown how connected humans are to
other animals” (Beko! 1998: 176). Nonetheless, religion as such —
like most human institutions — typically does involve well-
developed symbolism including language, and other animals do not
have this. Language, of course, makes a big di!erence. Among
other things (as Jensen, this volume, puts it) it “permits us to
imagine collectively.”
Animal animism, then, is not a system of symbols but rather a
set of non-symbolic features of perception, cognition, and action
that appear basic to religion and that are present also in nonhuman
animals. These features include, as noted, perceptual uncertainty
(Kahneman and Tversky 1982), a need to discover hidden agents,

and an overestimation of agency. Although these features are
unsystematized and non-symbolic in most nonhuman animals (the
chimpanzee “rain dance”, which appears cultural and systematic,
may be a borderline case), they are crucial both to humans and to
nonhumans.
Religion in a Biological Matrix
A few scholars of religion have tried to bridge the gap between
humans and nonhumans. One is A.F.C. Wallace (1966). For Wallace,
religion is mainly ritual, and to understand it we must set it in the
wider context of ritual in other animals. Wallace’s evolutionary
rationale is similar to mine: one can regard religion “as a special
case . . . of a more widespread pattern” (1966: 217). However, his
(functionalist) view of religion as essentially ritual that promotes
cooperation among humans encounters the problem found in all
functionalist accounts: one cannot explain how something arises by
the uses to which it may be put.
More recently, Walter Burkert (1996) also tries to place religions
within a “biological landscape” (1996: 65). Burkert sets this
biological context partly by finding analogies for religion in
nonhuman-animal behavior. Many of his analogies are
unpersuasive, such as that between religious sacrifice and the
abandonment by zebras of one of their number to lions, or the
abandonment by a lizard of its tail to an attacker. These analogies
(as Saler 1999 notes) are distant or coincidental.
Nonetheless, Burkert produces a substantive, family-
resemblance account of religion that is somewhat plausible. In his
account, religion grows directly from innate dispositions that we
share with other animals, especially with other primates. Most
important are dispositions to deal with the world in general as
though it were social and communicative. For all animals, Burkert
(1996: 156) writes, the world is composed of signs and signals.
Among humans, who attribute “language . . . to nature” (p. 163), the

abundant signs in nature turn “into [voices everywhere] . . . as if
every being, everywhere, were telling a message” (p.160).
What is lacking both in Wallace and in Burkert is a unified
account of what makes these (usually) unseen agents credible.
Burkert (1996) does note — crucially, in my view — that we have
inborn tendencies to think and act in social and linguistic ways vis-
à-vis the world at large, and that the ambiguity of the natural
environments against which these tendencies play out provides
fertile ground for them (p. 118). Nonetheless, he concludes that the
problem of explaining religion – “serious communication with
powers that cannot be seen” (p.176) – has no single solution.
Instead, he simply proposes that there are “biological patterns of
actions, reactions, and feelings” that stem from our ancestral
contexts of evolution. Well and good. But what were those contexts,
and how and why do the resulting patterns of perception include
humanlike, but non-human, others?
Animism Explained
The diverse biological patterns to which Burkert points may be
unified under the more general heading of animism. Animism, of
course, has meant many di!erent things. Even within anthropology,
the discipline that e!ectively created the term, it is ambiguous,
sometimes meaning the belief (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 24-25) that
“not only creatures but also inanimate objects have life and
personality” and sometimes the belief that “in addition they have
souls.” In Tylor’s famous formulation, animism is the “belief in spirit
beings” — though exactly what spirit beings are remains unclear, as
Saler points out (1993: 88-93). At present, owing largely to its
widespread use by post-Tylorian comparative religionists, animism
most commonly means a “belief in living, personal powers behind
all things” (Pals 1996: 24).
The varied meanings fit, I think, within animism as defined by
Piaget and other developmental psychologists, namely as the
attribution of characteristics of animacy to nonliving things and
events. For the kinds of life that most concern humans, these
characteristics may include form, such as eyes and bilateral

symmetry. (As Dennett 1993 notes, through much of human
evolution such symmetry may have represented the face of a
predator gazing at us.) More important, however, is behavior,
including spontaneous motion, responsiveness, and orientation to a
goal. In cognitive ethology, for instance, a philosopher and an
ethologist remark that it may be a mistake to assume that animals
perceive predators mainly by “morphology. Instead, predators may
be conceptualised according to what they typically do” (Allen and
Beko! 1997: 121). Similarly, Uexküll, having described a tame
jackdaw that chose a series of companions including Konrad Lorenz,
a younger jackdaw, and crows, notes that “there is no uniform
perceptual image for the companion in the jackdaw’s world. Nor
could there be one, since the role of the companion changes all the
time” (1992:371).
For such situations, Uexküll suggests, we should posit that
animals employ not specific search images but instead “search
tones”, which are more general. “Now we do not always look for a
definite object with a single receptor image, but far more often for
one that corresponds to a specific functional image. Instead of a
specific chair, we look around for something to sit on, that is, for a
thing that may be connected with a certain performance tone. In
this case we cannot speak of a search image, but only of a search
tone” (1992:375; emphasis added). This, together with the case of
the jackdaw and the imaginary fly, suggests once again that an
emphasis on visibility and tangibility in agents, with its corollary of
an expectation of specific form, may be misplaced.
Animism, in the sense of the attribution of agency to objects
that do not have it, appears widespread among both humans and
animals. I shall first address the question why this should be and
then cite examples. Because I’ve o!ered a general theory both of
animism and of the related phenomenon of anthropomorphism in
other places (e.g., Guthrie 1993), the explanation here will be
condensed. However, a preliminary note about what my explanation
is not may be in order. This is the common notion that animism
and anthropomorphism are “projections”, a notion popularised by
Freud and adopted (and attributed to me) by Boyer in this volume.
Projection has no place in my explanation. Indeed, the whole of
Guthrie 2000 is an argument that, as a psychological concept,

projection is without merit. (Its principal basis apparently is a folk
psychology, dating back to the Greeks, of vision as a projection of
beams from the eye.) Rather than projections, “animism” and
“anthropomorphism” describe certain perceptions that we have
decided, after the fact, were mistaken. The perceptual stance that
produces these mistaken perceptions as occasional byproducts,
however, is no mistake but a vital and unavoidable strategy.
In brief, we and other animals live in a perceptual world that
always is ambiguous (as one writer on primate behaviour puts it,
“nature cloaks herself in many modes of unpredictability” [Miller
1997: 312]). In this world, we need to distinguish, among other
things, what is animate from what is not. The world is ambiguous
(though normally we’re not aware of this) because even the simplest
perception is an interpretation – or, as Gombrich (1973) puts it, a
bet. (Quiatt and Reynolds 1993: 5, writing of primates, note
similarly that “perception, for all species, is the interpretation of
sensations.”) Interpretation, in turn, aims at significance or
meaning. The most meaning, finally, is in things that are alive, not
inanimate. Hence we spontaneously interpret a tapping at our
window as a visitor, not a branch, and a tickling on our neck as a
bug, not a loose thread.
Interpretation may be urgent, for example when what is alive is
something we may want to capture [figure 1], or something that
may want to capture us [figure 2].
Insert figures 1 and 2 about here
---------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------
Because ambiguity is chronic and time is short, we generally must
interpret without enough evidence to be sure. In this situation, our
strategy is, better safe than sorry (Guthrie 1993, 1997a, 1997b,
2001, forthcoming; Boyer this volume adopts the idea): when in
doubt, we assume that it is alive. An S-shaped object on a
woodland path might be either a stick or a snake, for example, but
we tend automatically to see it first as a snake. As Ristau (1998:
139) puts it, a “fail-safe mechanism for most species would be to
interact with an unknown object as though it were animate, and
probably predaceous.”
"

When we look at the world of animals, the ambiguity of
perception is exacerbated by deception. This deception includes
various means to invisibility and intangibility. These means are
widely diverse and almost universal among wild animals, since “if an
animal is seen, heard or smelt it is potentially in danger [and hence]
deception as a way of life occurs throughout the animal
kingdom” (Owen 1980: 9,17).
Visual deceptions alone include at least five distinct sorts (Owen
1980). These are camouflage (which makes the animal look like its
background, often with countershading that destroys the
appearance of solidity), colors that are diverse or changeable in
individuals (this makes forming a search image di#cult), structures
and colors that divert (this distracts predators from vital parts)
[figure 3], colors and patterns that startle, and imitation of noxious
animals or material [figure 4]. Because of these deceptions, we and
other animals often encounter others without knowing it. As a
corollary, we often judge that others are there when they are not.
The world is, in fact, full of invisible others, and we must always
assume more than we see.
Insert figs. 3 and 4 about here
In addition to animals that are invisible, many animals are
virtually intangible, for one of three reasons. One is a di!raction
grating producing a shimmering opalescence that makes size and
location di#cult to judge (Hinton 1973). A second is swarming,
flocking, or schooling. This, too, presents predators with a target of
indefinite location. A sea lion trying to feed on a school of sardines,
for example, may be ba$ed by the constantly shifting pattern
confronting it. A third kind of intangibility — coupled with
invisibility until microscopes appeared — is that of being very small,
as in microorganisms. One result of the invisibility and intangibility
of microorganisms is that until recently, most people saw
contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, and
plague, as the work of intentional but invisible agents. As I have
noted earlier (Guthrie 1993), people usually think they detect gods
not by seeing them--though this also happens--but by seeing
natural phenomena as the results of their actions. (Some see AIDS,
for example, as divine punishment.) Moreover, recognizing invisible

agents does not require sophisticated (or counterintuitive) thought,
as a study of preschoolers’ understanding of germs suggests:
“three-year-olds recognized that the causes of illness may be
invisible . . . . children will focus on a specific invisible entity when
judging a potential causal relationship within the domain of
biology” (Kalish 1996: 99, 100).
Another kind of deception often occurs within groups of animals:
misleading communication, such as warning calls when no danger is
present. Such deceptions typically distract competitors. Shrikes
living in mixed-species flocks, for instance, occasionally give false
hawk warnings when a bird of another species is about to seize an
insect, causing the other to flee for cover and leave the bug for the
shrike (Gould and Gould 1994: 134).
Primates also deceive, often with apparent intent. Indeed,
primate intelligence may be largely “machiavellian,” or devoted to
deceiving, and avoiding being deceived by, their fellows (Byrne and
Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1997). A vervet monkey on the
losing side of a fight between troops may give a false leopard alarm,
frightening o! the combatants and resetting the contest at zero
(Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). A baboon chased by another may stop
and stare as though at a predator, halting the pursuer (Byrne 1995:
125).
Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans appear even more
deceitful. Both wild and captive chimpanzees have been seen
leading others away from hidden food that was known to the leaders
but not to the led (Goodall 1972:96, Byrne 1995:132). A captive
chimpanzee, subordinate to another that was afraid of the dark,
went outside after dark, made banging noises and other strange
sounds, and came back inside looking scared. His erstwhile
oppressor, now frightened, approached him for reassurance
(Savage-Rumbaugh 1988: 228).
Capacities for deceiving others are related to capacities for self-
deception and for play (Mitchell and Thompson 1986). Two captive
chimpanzees developed a game in which they pretended to attack
an imaginary opponent in a cage, and a captive bonobo has
produced imaginary playmates (Savage-Rumbaugh 1988). The
sign-using orangutan Chantek signed “cat and dog – animals which
frightened and fascinated him – when he wished to prolong or start

a walk, acting as though seeking out a hidden cat or dog” (Mitchell
1993: 81).
Burkert, invoking work on primate deception to help
understand religion, writes:
The suspicion has been voiced repeatedly that religion is
mainly trickery
and make-believe produced by those who profit from it.
Forms of deceit
abound already at prehuman stages. . . . The unseen in
particular can be
the object of manipulation. [Monkeys, for example] may
avoid
confrontation by staring into a corner and voicing sounds of
alarm, as if
reporting “there is a monster in the corner” (1996: 24-25;
emphasis
added).
Burkert also says religion assumes humanlike beings whom we
normally do not see. He notes, with Lawson and McCauley (1990),
that ritual “refers through formulaic acts to nonpresent partners.”
However, deceptions in themselves “would be a grossly insu#cient
foundation for the origin of religion. Even among monkeys the trick
cannot be repeated very often without being recognized . . . The
point is that the common world of language characteristically
produces contents beyond any immediate evidence” (Burkert 1996:
25).
"In human communication, recent researchers have noted the
“ubiquity [and] sheer ordinariness” of deception (Lewis and Saarni
1993: v) and maintained that it is a normal consequence of
communication and information (just as illusion is a natural
outgrowth of perception). Communication, deception, and play all
appear interlinked. Creative abilities in this realm constitute abilities
to envision a world and an alternative, what is present and what is
not. These abilities are graded among animals and seem present
among vervets and even among shrikes.

One consequence of ubiquitous deception, in addition to the
inherent ambiguity of perception, is that it is perpetually di#cult to
tell what is living from what is not (Guthrie 1993, chapter 2). This
prevents us from easily and reliably applying any domain-specific
expectations we may have to any particular part of our environment.
Carey (1995) levels this point against the notion, shared by Sperber
(1994) and Atran (1994), that such domain-specificity can
characterise folk biology and indeed make such biology an innate
“core module” of the human mind. She notes, for example (1995:
275), that in “one of the cultures that Atran has studied, the Itza
Maya, fungi and lichens are not considered alive.” Raising the
“problem of perception”, she asks (p. 278), “On what basis does the
[Sperber-Atran] input module categorize entities as animals? The
folk-biology module will be useless unless the cognitive system can
identify the animals in the world.”
Animism Among Animals
The attribution of characteristics of animacy to the nonliving and to
plants appears widespread among complex organisms. Because
illusion is an inevitable concomitant of perception, such attribution
may be universal. Among invertebrates, known instances of
susceptibility to such illusion range from echinoderms to insects.
Regarding sea urchins, for instance, Uexküll remarks that “a
receptor image held in . . . general terms can always give rise to
mistakes. This has already been shown in the sea urchin, in whose
world cloud and ship are constantly confused with the enemy fish,
because the sea urchin responds in the same way to any darkening
of the horizon” (1992:370). Various insects are fooled by insect-
eating plants, such as the Venus fly-trap; and some flowers, by
resembling bees or wasps, fool these insects into pollinating them
as they attempt to mate.
Among vertebrates, evidence of hard wiring to detect signs of
life, and evidence of corresponding illusions, are abundant both
from experimental settings and natural settings. The possible signs
of life include both form and motion. Regarding form, for example,

“we and many other creatures are built to be extremely capable of
detecting eyes” (Ristau 1998: 141) and we respond readily to
anything that resembles them. Ethologists have found sensitivities
to eye-like displays in fishes (even larval ones; Miklosi et al. 1995),
iguanas (Burger et al. 1991), garter snakes (Bern and Herzog 1994),
wild birds (Scaife 1974), domestic chickens (Gallup 1971), and
human infants (Morton and Johnson 1991). The eye displays need
not be convincing to a human observer: even marbles on the ends
of two sticks su#ce to alarm chickens (Gould and Gould 1994: 135).
This sensitivity also is exploited by many species, especially those of
insects and fishes, that display false eye-spots as a means of
defense. Similarly, sensitivity to bilateral symmetry, a feature of
most mobile animals, has been shown in animals ranging from
insects to birds to dolphins and other mammals.
" Humans often exploit the animal tendency to animate.
Fishermen can catch various fishes with nothing more than a bit of
white rag on a hook. Hunters can lure waterfowl and other birds
even with crude decoys. To frighten parrots from an orchard, I have
set out a simple, weather-beaten plastic owl and found it mobbed
within seconds by blue jays, blackbirds, and a cardinal. Human-like
scarecrows the world over are e!ective even with only a sketchy
resemblance to people. Inuit, for example, are able to funnel
caribou into ambush using scarecrows consisting of tall rockpiles.
"In natural settings as well, birds and mammals may treat inert
matter as though it were alive. Beko! (personal communication)
reports young coyotes mistaking sticks for grasshoppers, and a
coyote stalking a blowing sage brush. Hinton (1973) reports birds
mistaking twigs for caterpillars, and Marshall Thomas thinks “many
dogs treat cars as though they were animate” (1993: 12).
" Primates animate at least as broadly. Menzel (1997: 231) writes,
“So-called ‘social’ behaviour patterns can be directed toward
inanimate objects. Rhesus macaque (monkey) infants form
attachments to cloth-covered surrogate mothers; tamarins (a kind
of monkey) will groom a fur-covered object; an infant chimpanzee
will threaten an unfamiliar piece of food.” Vervet-monkey infants
give the aerial-predator call on seeing falling leaves (Cheney and
Seyfarth 1990), and, as noted, a young adult vervet’s false
terrestrial-predator call caused opponents to flee from a “phantom

leopard” (Gould and Gould 1994: 135). Macaques on Gibraltar have
threatened an electric fence. When an observer there accidentally
stepped on an electric cable in the grass, an infant macaque
screamed at its motion, evidently taking it for a snake (Anne Zeller,
personal communication). A baboon being chased may, as noted,
stop and stare at nothing, apparently producing a phantom predator
that deters the pursuer.
"Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans show the most varied
animism. In captivity, as noted, they all may produce phantom
playmates or monsters (sometimes to fool a fellow ape or a
caregiver). The orangutan Chantek “engaged in chase games in
which he would look over his shoulder as he darted about, although
no one was chasing him. He also signed to his toys and o!ered
them food and drink. Like children, Chantek showed evidence of
animism, a tendency to endow objects and events with the
attributes of living things” (Miles 1993: 49). A captive chimpanzee
also has directed alarms calls toward its own shed teeth. Its
caregiver (Sally Boysen, personal commnication) thinks it saw the
teeth as beings that had made its mouth hurt and bleed.
" Finally and most tellingly, wild chimpanzees (Goodall 1975,
1992, personal communication; Whiten et al. 1999) often respond
to thunderstorms, to rapid streams, and to waterfalls with the kind
of display (shaking and dragging branches and rushing about
vigorously) that they use as a threat against predators and other
chimpanzees. Observers have reported this behaviour in six
communities of African chimpanzees, out of nine communities that
have been closely studied (Whiten et al. 1999). Goodall and many
other chimp-watchers think this behaviour is indeed a threat
directed toward these inanimate targets as though they were alive.
The response is both widespread and indiscriminable from those
toward actual, natural agents, visible or not. Although no one
knows whether chimpanzees think of storms and streams as
“supernatural,” any hypothesis that they do so seems unnecessary.
More likely, as Pyysiänen (this volume) puts it, “the thunderstorm
triggers the same reaction as does a predator, without a
representation of a . . . counter-intuitive agent being involved.”

Animism and Anthropomorphism in Humans
"Most scholars (e.g. Piaget 1929) concerned with animism attribute
it to children and to people in small-scale (“tribal” or “primitive”)
societies, and most scholars see anthropomorphism – the
attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events
– as unrelated to animism and as a minor though lamentable
problem in human cognition (Mitchell et al. 1997 present a recent
set of exceptions). In contrast, I see animism and
anthropomorphism as pervasive in human thought and action, and
as closely related, spontaneous over-attributions of organisation to
things and events (Guthrie 1993; 1997a; 1997b). Just as animism
may be seen as one result of a better-safe-than-sorry strategy of
perception in an ambiguous world, anthropomorphism may be
understood the same way. The two often overlap.
"Anthropomorphism has been the object of criticism for
hundreds of years, yet it continues to flourish. It flourishes in the
arts and even the sciences (Kennedy 1992; Guthrie 1993,
forthcoming; Mitchell et al. 1997). It also flourishes in the
spontaneous perceptions of daily life, as when we hear voices in the
wind or the plumbing, or see some mechanism as resisting us.
Animism is similarly widespread. Evidence of the pervasiveness of
anthropomorphism and animism, even in complex, industrial
societies, comes from many sources (Guthrie 1993). Here I’ll only
draw briefly on developmental, experimental, and clinical
psychology, and on commercial art.
Systematic work in psychology on animism and
anthropomorphism began with Jean Piaget (1929), who called them
both animism and found them universal among young children.
Piaget’s basic finding — that child animism and anthropomorphism
are spontaneous and ubiquitous — has been disputed in some
details, such as its relation to his scheme of cognitive stages.
Generally, however, it has been broadly supported (e.g., Inagaki and
Hatano 1987; Inagaki 1989; Ochiai 1989; Cherry 1992; Berry and
Springer 1993; Harris 1994; Poulin-Dubois and Héroux 1994; Carey
1995). Harris (1994: 308) writes, for example, “A long tradition of
work on animism shows that children extend psychological
explanations to . . . rivers, clouds, and so forth.”

Among the features that produce animistic and
anthropomorphic responses, motion appears preeminent, as my
epigraphs suggest. (Indeed Aristotle made a capacity for self-
movement the chief criterion of animacy.) Berry and Springer (1993:
275), for instance, write that “very di!erent methodologies have
shown that certain movements by inanimate objects elicit
attributions of animacy from preschoolers”, and Poulin-Dubois and
Héroux (1994: 329) similarly find that “over-attribution of mental
states” characterises preschoolers’ responses to moving objects.
Such responses, of course, reflect the importance of motion. As
Barry (1997: 46) writes, “movement perception is so essential to our
being . . . because the visual system has evolved to alert us to
danger or to the presence of potential food.”
We not only animate the inanimate, but we also
anthropomorphise the animate or the apparently animate (Guthrie
1980, 1993; 1997a; 1997b, 2001, forthcoming), whether moving or
not. As Gigenrenzer (1997: 275) writes, “human intelligence cannot
resist [attributing] human social categories, intentions and morals
[to] non-humans.” Carey (1995: 279) notes that “infants attempt to
interact socially with a mobile that moves in response to a leg kick.”
Richards and Siegler (1986) write that children over a wide range of
ages teleologically attribute anatomical and other features of
organisms (plants, for example) to the “purposes” of those
organisms. More generally, Dennett (1987) posits an innate
“intentional” or design stance with which we interpret the world, Keil
(1994: 251) sees both teleological and intentional “modes of
construal” as attitudes with which people are natively endowed, and
Kelemen (1999: 280) proposes that an innate “promiscuous
teleology” makes humans “prone to systematic biases in their
reasoning about the natural world.” Most directly to my point,
Kelemen also writes that “one of the best indicators that people are
compelled to reason in teleological terms is provided by the
ubiquitous phenomenon of religion. Adults’ propensity to view
objects and events as purposefully caused by intentional agents or
gods is . . . prevalent . . . . [F]or all the profound di!erences
between religions and their associated mythologies, a common
moral tends to underlie most: objects and events have an intended
purpose. Everything has a function to perform within a contrived

natural order of which humanity is a significant part” (1999:280).
This closely parallels Piaget’s classic description of teleology in
young children. The phenomenon also supplies (as Guthrie 1993
notes) an answer to Hume’s (1932:I, 157) quandary about the nature
of our sense that the world shows design—a sense so strong as to
underlie the Argument from Design, for God’s existence. As a
Hume scholar writes, there is an apparently universal “propensity of
the mind to ‘see’ design in natural order” and an “insistent feeling in
most of us that natural order springs from a designer” (Gaskin
1988:127, 6; emphasis his). Kelemen dubs this phenomenon
“Promiscuous Teleology”, noting that it “is not inherently restricted
to any category of objects” (1999:290). Bacon (1960), of course,
centuries ago began a scientific revolution by pointing out that
humans, but not nature or even living things in general, have goals,
and that the widespread human failure to understand this
constitutes anthropomorphism.
Equally important for my purposes is one major correction of
Piaget, made by various developmental and cognitive psychologists.
The correction is that, contrary to his claim that animism disappears
by age twelve, it appears to persist throughout life (Dennis 1953;
Sheehan, Papalia-Finlay, and Hooper 1980-81; Tamir and Zohar
1991; Cherry 1992, Kelemen 1999). Hauser and Carey (1998: 84)
write that people generally are “primed, perhaps innately so, to take
an intentional stance . . . toward a wide array of moving objects”.
Similarly, Barrett (this volume, pace Pyysiäinen, this volume) writes
that “given only enough evidence to believe an object can willfully
initiate its own action . . . children and adults automatically attribute
a host of human-like psychological properties. To illustrate, when
trying (with little success) to place small magnetized spheres in a
particular configuration, college students described the marbles as
having beliefs, desires, and even personality traits, accusing some
marbles of ‘attacking’ others and being deliberately mischievous.”
The pervasive tendency to animate and anthropomorphise,
moreover, is not limited to spontaneous interpretations such as
those of young children and the college students cited but appears
as well in more considered interpretations, including more-or-less
scientific work. Of numerous examples (Guthrie 1993, esp. chapter
6), a particularly relevant one is Dawkins’s (1978) genes, which

notoriously are selfish, and his “memes,” which similarly are self-
interested and which “replicate.” Even more strikingly, Sperber
(1996: 1) describes ideas as “born in” and as “invading” brains, as
“propagating”, and as having “descendants.” Whereas the Greeks
saw the anima or life force as the central causal principle for the
behaviour of human (and other) bodies, Sperber gives this role to
ideas. “The central theme of this book is quite simple,” he begins (p.
1). “Our individual brains are each inhabited by a large number of
ideas that determine our behavior.” These determinative ideas not
only “are born, live and die” but also constitute “families” (pp. 81
and 83).
"One might consider Sperber’s terminology here as mere
metaphor (on p. 2 he calls it “barely metaphorical”) except that his
central notion, an epidemiology of culture, depends on it. Equally
important, if, as Lako! and Johnson argue (e.g., 1999, echoing
Nietzsche 1966), most human thought is metaphoric, “mere
metaphor” is an oxymoron. What matters is not whether a given
model is metaphoric or not, but whether it is useful or not. In the
standard view — which I share — animistic and anthropomorphic
models are not useful (though the strategy of perception that
produces them as byproducts, i.e., scanning first for what matters
most, certainly is). That animistic accounts such as Dawkins’s and
Sperber’s nevertheless are appealing illustrates the continued
vitality of animism among us all.
Other evidence of pervasive animism and anthropomorphism
comes from clinical psychology, for example in Rorschach testing.
Respondents see ink blots mostly as humans or parts of humans,
and as certain animals such as bats and butterflies (Beck and Molish
1967). Other animals come next, followed distantly by plants and
inanimate objects. A cross-cultural study (De Vos and Boyer 1989)
suggests that this pattern is widespread. Still other sources of
evidence include folklore (Thompson 1955), literature, and graphic
art, in which personification and other forms of anthropomorphism,
as well as animism, are common worldwide (Guthrie 1993, figure 5).
In sophisticated art, these phenomena are, to be sure, often self-
conscious and sometimes manipulative, not spontaneous; but their
pervasiveness and diversity there nonetheless reflect their power.

Insert fig. 5 about here
"Neither anthropomorphism nor animism in itself, of course,
constitutes religion. Rather, religion is a form of them that is
systematised, symbolically elaborated, and taken seriously (Guthrie
1980; 1988; 1993; 1996; 1997; 2001). In this form, they are
adapted to varied political, economic, military, and other social
purposes.
Conclusion: An Evolutionary Framework for Explaining Religion
Earlier writers on religion as anthropomorphism (most notably
Spinoza 1955, Hume 1957; Feuerbach 1972; Freud 1964; and
Horton 1993; and recently in a vein similar to my own, Wenegrat
1990) or as animism have disagreed on the nature of these two
phenomena and have produced no broadly convincing explanation
of them. As a result they have produced no broadly convincing
theory of religion. Part of what has been lacking, in my view, is a
cognitive account of anthropomorphism and of animism that
addresses them in general rather than only in religion. I have aimed
much of my work at just such an account.
"A related part of what has been lacking is an evolutionary
framework for the issues in question. Such a framework, still very
much in the making, potentially can link us to our animal relatives
by joining cognitive science to ethology. Such a framework would
encourage us to see that in chimpanzees, for example, both the
ability to create an imaginary playmate or monster, and the ability to
track other chimpanzees through the forest by visual signs such as
litter and broken foliage, are the ability to imagine what is not
present. It is no great leap to the ability, famous in hunter-gatherer
peoples, to “see” game from tracks and other traces. This ability
means putting together a world from indirect evidence. This daily-
life activity, of course, is the same in science as well (for example, in
positing subatomic particles from their bubble tracks) and in
religion (for example, in the Argument from Design).

In the search for an explanation of religion, I believe, we have
been beguiled by symbolism and misled by a false sense of human
uniqueness. As a result, we have forgotten a vital need that we
share with other animals: to interpret an ambiguous world and to
discover real agents hiding in it. In the course of discovering those
real agents, all of us inevitably think we see agents where, in reality,
none exist.
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