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The evolution of religion and the (unfulfilled) promise of a sociological contribution
Decades of scholarly efforts to reignite the theoretical integration between sociology and biology have come to partial fruition in the birth of evolutionary sociology at the turn of the twentieth-first century. This paper examines one of the most elaborated versions of the paradigm—“new evolutionary sociology” (NES)—proposed by Jonathan H. Turner and colleagues. NES emphasizes purposeful, multilevel selective pressure targeted at corporate units, groups, or societies—rather than the blind, Darwinian natural selection on individuals—from which institutional systems are developed. Despite its contribution, NES possesses conceptual lacunae that have fettered NES in specific and evolutionary sociology in general from becoming a novel and truly evolutionary-cum-sociological paradigm in explaining social phenomena. This paper identifies three conceptual hiatuses of NES, in that it lacks due deliberation of (1) the gene-culture interaction that bridges individual behaviors—via natural, sexual, group, and multilevel selections—with the emerging sociocultural formations; (2) the epistemic role of fitness as a post factum propensity in empirical analysis; and (3) the concept of causal mechanism utilized to explain the diverse paths leading to the emergent phenomena.
Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz, The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection
The specific concerns attributed to supernatural agents vary considerably across populations. Evidence from evolutionary psychology suggests that commitment to supernatural agents facilitates prosocial behavior, and ecological studies have shown that costly rites can increase trust and cooperation. While there has been little systematic treatment of what the gods will know and care about, the contents of supernatural agents' minds seem to rest on a continuum between concerns of ritual behavior and concerns of interpersonal social behavior. In the Tyva Republic, many regions and resources are believed to possess protective ''masters of the place'' (cher eezi). Tyvans offer their appreciation for cher eezi at ritual cairns by offering food, prayer ties, and/or money. Survey and free-list data demonstrate that spirit-masters are neither omniscient nor concerned with morality, but are acutely concerned with ritual behavior and conservation practices. Moreover, their knowledge breadth is primarily limited to their domains of governance. Survey results nevertheless suggest that Tyvans show a tendency to attribute spirit-masters with knowledge of nearby moral behaviors even though these are not their readily listed concerns.
Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions is their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Cognitive science models that account for many properties of religion can be extended to these religions. Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. The cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, could be explained based on proportionality.
Religion is one of the most universal and most studied human phenomena, yet there exists no widely shared definition of religion. This ambitious study attempts to provide and defend such a definition. Stewart Guthrie argues that religion is best understood as systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or events. Many writers have seen anthropomorphism as a superficial characteristic of religion. For Guthrie, however, it is central; religion consists in seeing the world as human-like. Guthrie begins by demonstrating that we find plausible, in varying degrees, a continuum of human-like beings including gods, spirits, demons, gremlins, abominable snowmen, Hal the Computer, and Chiquita Banana. We find messages from such beings in phenomena such as weather, earthquakes, plagues, traffic accidents, and the flight of birds. Guthrie argues that this represents an adaptive strategy; we “bet” on the most important possible interpretation of our perceptions of our world – it is better to mistake a boulder for a bear than the other way around. Because of the extreme importance for us of other human beings and their actions, we project human characteristics onto what we see. Guthrie then shows how this explanation can be applied to virtually every belief and experience classified as religious. The result is a provocative and disturbing book that should be both influential and controversial.
Written by leading theorists and empirical researchers, this book presents new ways of addressing the old question: Why did religion first emerge and then continue to evolve in all human societies? The authors of the book-each with a different background across the social sciences and humanities-assimilate conceptual leads and empirical findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neurology, primate behavioral studies, explanations of human interaction and group dynamics, and a wide range of religious scholarship to construct a deeper and more powerful explanation of the origins and subsequent evolutionary development of religions than can currently be found in what is now vast literature. While explaining religion has been a central question in many disciplines for a long time, this book draws upon a much wider array of literature to develop a robust and cross-disciplinary analysis of religion. The book remains true to its subtitle by emphasizing an array of both biological and sociocultural forms of selection dynamics that are fundamental to explaining religion as a universal institution in human societies. In addition to Darwinian selection, which can explain the biology and neurology of religion, the book outlines a set of four additional types of sociocultural natural selection that can fill out the explanation of why religion first emerged as an institutional system in human societies, and why it has continued to evolve over the last 300,000 years of societal evolution. These sociocultural forms of natural selection are labeled by the names of the early sociologists who first emphasized them, and they can be seen as a necessary supplement to the type of natural selection theorized by Charles Darwin. Explanations of religion that remain in the shadow cast by Darwin's great insights will, it is argued, remain narrow and incomplete when explaining a robust sociocultural phenomenon like religion. © 2018 Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz. All right reserved.