Darwin's God

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html>
March 4, 2007
Darwin's God
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

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Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as [Scott] Atran does,
"belief in hope beyond reason" — whatever you call it, there seems an
inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent,
unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or
understanding of science. "Why do we cross our fingers during
turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?" asked Atran when we
spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is
55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific
Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of
Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His
research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology,
and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends
is an African relic. "If you have negative sentiments toward
religion," he tells them, "the box will destroy whatever you put
inside it." Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God,
but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something.
Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the
nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver's license, he says,
and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells
them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s, when
he was at Cambridge University studying the nature of religious
belief. He had received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia
University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of
religion everywhere he looked — at archaeological digs in Israel,
among the Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. Atran is Darwinian in his
approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might
once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early
ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems
might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up
physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival.
Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something
that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why
humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were
doing back in the '80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as
scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in
God exists — not whether God exists, which is a matter for
philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

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The debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and
adaptationists. You might think that the byproduct theorists would
tend to be nonbelievers, looking for a way to explain religion as a
fluke, while the adaptationists would be more likely to be believers
who can intuit the emotional, spiritual and community advantages that
accompany faith. Or you might think they would all be atheists,
because what believer would want to subject his own devotion to
rationalism's cold, hard scrutiny? But a scientist's personal
religious view does not always predict which side he will take. And
this is just one sign of how complex and surprising this debate has
become.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk
religions since mankind first started telling stories. Charles Darwin
noted this in "The Descent of Man." "A belief in all-pervading
spiritual agencies," he wrote, "seems to be universal." According to
anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features —
belief in a noncorporeal God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief
in the ability of prayer or ritual to change the course of human
events — are found in virtually every culture on earth.

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Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less
mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one's mind.
Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind,
something that took no cognitive effort at all.

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Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who
died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed "spandrel"
to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They
borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to
the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The
structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is
what happens when arches align.

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The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way
of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what,
exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain
cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of
organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for
natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their
own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call
these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and
theory of mind.

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent —
which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior
— is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on
the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect
out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from,
even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling
of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling
was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider
and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic
that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment,
subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When
asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like
"chase" and "capture." They did not just see the random movement of
shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is
caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move
independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of
people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear
for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our
brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even
when such presence confounds logic. "The most central concepts in
religions are related to agents," Justin Barrett, a psychologist,
wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, "Why Would Anyone
Believe in God?" Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote,
"people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or
disembodied minds that can act on us and the world."

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal
reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a
narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on
whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. "We
automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why
things happen to us," Barrett wrote, "and 'stuff just happens' is no
explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and
their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many
of these unusual events." The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the
sound of Zeus's thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose
cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to
explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool
for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it
to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory
of mind. It's an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word
"theory" suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have
been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social
cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses:
folkpsychology.

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to
getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since
prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others
and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at
the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker.
People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are
impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people's heads.

The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and
others', that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost
instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible)
and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people
that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a
psychologist and the author of "Descartes' Baby," published in 2004,
it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored
to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to
positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

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Intriguing as the spandrel logic might be, there is another way to
think about the evolution of religion: that religion evolved because
it offered survival advantages to our distant ancestors. This is where
the action is in the science of God debate, with a coterie of
adaptationists arguing on behalf of the primary benefits, in terms of
survival advantages, of religious belief.

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One of the most vocal adaptationists is David Sloan Wilson, an
occasional thorn in the side of both Scott Atran and Richard Dawkins.
Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York
at Binghamton, focuses much of his argument at the group level.
"Organisms are a product of natural selection," he wrote in "Darwin's
Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society," which came
out in 2002, the same year as Atran's book, and staked out the
adaptationist view. "Through countless generations of variation and
selection, [organisms] acquire properties that enable them to survive
and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to see if human
groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as
organismic in this sense."

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Wilson eventually chose to study religion not because religion
mattered to him personally — he was raised in a secular Protestant
household and says he has long been an atheist — but because it was a
lens through which to look at and revivify a branch of evolution that
had fallen into disrepute. When Wilson was a graduate student at
Michigan State University in the 1970s, Darwinians were critical of
group selection, the idea that human groups can function as single
organisms the way beehives or anthills do. So he decided to become the
man who rescued this discredited idea. "I thought, Wow, defending
group selection — now, that would be big," he recalled. It wasn't
until the 1990s, he said, that he realized that "religion offered an
opportunity to show that group selection was right after all."

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"The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs," Wilson
wrote in "Darwin's Cathedral." It might seem disadvantageous, in terms
of foraging for sustenance and safety, for someone to favor religious
over rationalistic explanations that would point to where the food and
danger are. But in some circumstances, he wrote, "a symbolic belief
system that departs from factual reality fares better." For the
individual, it might be more adaptive to have "highly sophisticated
mental modules for acquiring factual knowledge and for building
symbolic belief systems" than to have only one or the other, according
to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded
realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that
"what seems to be an adversarial relationship" between theists and
atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor
that "keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel."

Even if Wilson is right that religion enhances group fitness, the
question remains: Where does God come in? Why is a religious group any
different from groups for which a fitness argument is never even
offered — a group of fraternity brothers, say, or Yankees fans?

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In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in Natural History that
called for a truce between religion and science. "The net of science
covers the empirical universe," he wrote. "The net of religion extends
over questions of moral meaning and value." Gould was emphatic about
keeping the domains separate, urging "respectful discourse" and
"mutual humility." He called the demarcation "nonoverlapping
magisteria" from the Latin magister, meaning "canon."

Richard Dawkins had a history of spirited arguments with Gould, with
whom he disagreed about almost everything related to the timing and
focus of evolution. But he reserved some of his most venomous words
for nonoverlapping magisteria. "Gould carried the art of bending over
backward to positively supine lengths," he wrote in "The God
Delusion." "Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? . . . A
universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind
of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?"

The separation, other critics said, left untapped the potential
richness of letting one worldview inform the other. "Even if Gould was
right that there were two domains, what religion does and what science
does," says Daniel Dennett (who, despite his neo-atheist label, is not
as bluntly antireligious as Dawkins and Harris are), "that doesn't
mean science can't study what religion does. It just means science
can't do what religion does."

The idea that religion can be studied as a natural phenomenon might
seem to require an atheistic philosophy as a starting point. Not
necessarily. Even some neo-atheists aren't entirely opposed to
religion. Sam Harris practices Buddhist-inspired meditation. Daniel
Dennett holds an annual Christmas sing-along, complete with hymns and
carols that are not only harmonically lush but explicitly pious.

And one prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, is an
observant Christian who believes in "an all-knowing, all-powerful,
perfectly good God who brought the universe into being," as he wrote
in an e-mail message. "I believe that the purpose for people is to
love God and love each other."

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Robin Marantz Henig, a contributing writer, has written recently for
the magazine about the neurobiology of lying and about obesity.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>