The Cultural evolution of Prosocial Religions (original) (raw)
Related papers
The origins of religion : evolved adaptation or by-product
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2010
Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background, individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions, but that it may then have been subject to selection, creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.
The Cultural Evolution of Religion
Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 2013
Religion may be one factor that enabled large-scale complex human societies to evolve. Utilizing a cultural evolutionary approach, this chapter seeks explanations for patterns of complexity and variation in religion within and across groups, over time. Properties of religious systems (e.g., rituals, ritualized behaviors, overimitation, synchrony, sacred values) are examined at different social scales, from small-scale forager to large-scale urban societies. The role of religion in transitional societies is discussed, as well as the impact of witchcraft, superhuman policing, and the cultural evolution of moralizing gods. The shift from an imagistic to a doctrinal mode of religiosity is examined, as are the relationships between sacred values and secular worlds. Cultural evolutionary approaches to religion require evidence and methods from collaborative and multidisciplinary science. The chapter concludes with an overview of several projects that are working to provide conceptual, methodological, and empirical groundwork.
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.
The Evolution of Prosocial Religions
Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 2013
Building on foundations from the cognitive science of religion, this chapter synthesizes theoretical insights and empirical evidence concerning the processes by which cultural evolutionary processes driven by intergroup competition may have shaped the package of beliefs, ritual, practices, and institutions that constitute modern world religions. Five different hypothesized mechanisms are presented through which cultural group selection may have operated to increase the scale of cooperation, expand the sphere of trustworthy interactions, galvanize group solidarity, and sustain group-benefi cial beliefs and practices. The mechanisms discussed involve extravagant displays, supernatural monitoring and incentives, ritual practices, fi ctive kinship, and moral realism. Various lines of supporting evidence are reviewed and archeological and historical evidence is summarized from early China (roughly 2000 BCE-220 BCE), where prosocial religion and rituals coevolved with societal complexity.
Origins and Evolution of Religion from a Darwinian Point of View: Synthesis of Different Theories
Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences, 2014
The religious phenomenon is a complex one in many respects. In recent years an increasing number of theories on the origin and evolution of religion have been put forward. Each one of these theories rests on a Darwinian framework but there is a lot of disagreement about which bits of the framework account best for the evolution of religion. Is religion primarily a by-product of some adaptation? Is it itself an adaptation, and if it is, does it benefi ciate individuals or groups? In this chapter, I review a number of theories that link religion to cooperation and show that these theories, contrary to what is often suggested in the literature, are not mutually exclusive. As I present each theory, I delineate an integrative framework that allows distinguishing the explanandum of each theory. Once this is done, it becomes clear that some theories provide good explanations for the origin of religion but not so good explanations for its maintenance and vice versa. Similarly some explanations are good explanations for the evolution of religious individual level traits but not so good explanations for traits hard to defi ne at the individual level. I suggest that to fully understand the religious phenomenon, integrating in a systematic way the different theories and the data is a more successful approach.
On the Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief
Religious belief is a byproduct of evolutionarily designed cognitive mechanisms. The ubiquity of religious belief and experience across human cultures is explained by our common human psychology; our domain-specific cognitive mechanisms give rise, collectively, to the phenomenon of byproduct religious belief/experience. In this thesis, I will examine what I call religion-generating cognitive mechanisms, and I will argue that byproduct raw god-beliefs are developed by cultures into refined god-beliefs. These refined god-beliefs are co-opted by evolutionary processes and are cultural adaptations. My conception of “religious belief” in terms of raw and refined god-beliefs allows a disambiguation of the term “religion,” and it contributes to the ongoing debate between byproduct theorists and adaptationists by clarifying that raw god-beliefs are biological byproducts while refined god-beliefs are cultural adaptations.
The Evolution of Religion: Three Anthropological Approaches
2006
This article examines three anthropological theories explaining how religion has evolved and continues to evolve. They are: commitment theory, which postulates that religion is a system of costly signaling that reduces deception and creates cooperation within groups; cognitive theory, which postulates that religion is the manifestation of mental modules that have evolved for other purposes; and ecological regulation theory, which postulates that religion is a master control system regulating the interaction of human groups with their environments. An assessment of the success of the theories is offered. The idea that the biological evolution of the capacity for religion is based on the group selection rather than individual selection is rejected as unnecessary. The relationship between adaptive systems and culturally transmitted sacred values is examined cross-culturally, and the three theories are integrated into an overall gene-culture view of religion that includes both the biological evolution and the cultural evolution of behavioral systems.
Religion as Adaptive 3: Cultural Evolution
2021
This chapter discusses evolution of religion in terms of cultural evolution. We argue that there are good reasons to study religion in terms of cultural evolution. Basic concepts and theories within cultural evolution studies are discussed such as memetics, sociobiology or dual inheritance theory. This chapter also discusses the concept of religion as cultural niche, and the distinction between content biases and context biases.