The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (58 page)

But I soon realized that my definition was inadequate, for reasons that
are also instructive. Belief in supernatural agents characterizes not only religions but also phenomena that no one would consider religious—such as belief in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs. Why is it religious to believe in gods, but not necessarily religious to believe in fairies? (Hint: believers in fairies don’t meet on a specified day each week to perform certain rituals, don’t identify themselves as a community of fairy-believers separate from fairy-skeptics, and don’t offer to die in defense of their belief in fairies.) Conversely, some movements that everyone considers to be religions don’t require belief in supernatural agents. Numerous Jews (including rabbis), Unitarians, Japanese people, and others are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves, and are considered by others, to belong to a religion. The Buddha did not associate himself with any gods and claimed that he was “merely” teaching a path to enlightenment that he had discovered.

A big failing in my definition was that it omitted a second attribute of religions: they are also social movements of people who identify themselves as sharing deeply held beliefs. Someone who believes in a god and in a long list of other doctrines that he invented, and who devotes part of every Sabbath to sitting in a room by himself, praying to that god, and reading a book that he has written himself but shown to no one else, doesn’t qualify as practising a religion. The closest actual equivalent to such a person is hermits who live in isolation and devote themselves to prayer. But those hermits arose from a community of believers who provided the hermits’ beliefs, and who may continue to support and visit the hermits. I’m not aware of hermits who devised their own religion from scratch, went off into the desert to live alone, and refused food offerings and discouraged visitors. If someone should show me such a hermit, I would define him as a non-religious hermit or else as a misanthrope, while others might consider him to be a typical religious hermit except for failing the test of sociality.

A third attribute of many religions is that their adherents make costly or painful sacrifices that convincingly display to others the adherents’ commitment to the group. The sacrifice may be of time: e.g., interrupting other activities five times per day to face towards Mecca and pray, or spending part of every Sunday in church, or spending years memorizing a complex ritual, prayers, and songs (possibly requiring learning another
language), or devoting two years to missionary activities as a young adult (expected of Mormons), or joining a crusade or a pilgrimage or visiting Mecca at one’s own expense. The sacrifice may be of money or property donated to the church. One may offer a valuable domestic animal: one sacrifices to God one’s own lamb, not some captured wild animal that cost nothing. Or the sacrifice may be of one’s bodily comfort or integrity, by fasting, chopping off a finger joint, circumcising or subincising (splitting lengthwise) the penis, or spilling one’s blood by cutting one’s nose or tongue or penis or inside the throat or other body part. All of those costly public or painful displays serve to convince other believers that one is serious in one’s commitment to their religion and will even sacrifice one’s life if necessary. Otherwise, if I merely shouted “I’m a Christian!,” I might be lying for personal advantage (as some prisoners do in the hopes of gaining parole), or to save my life. While the second and third attributes (i.e., a social movement and costly sacrifices) seem to me necessary conditions for a movement to count as a religion, they’re not sufficient conditions by themselves. There are also non-religious social movements sharing deeply held beliefs and demanding costly sacrifices of their adherents, such as patriotism.

The next-to-last attribute of religions is that belief in gods and other postulated supernatural agents has practical consequences for how people should behave. Those rules of behavior may variously take the form of laws, moral codes, taboos, or obligations, depending on the type of society. While virtually all religions have such rules of behavior, it is not the case that rules of behavior stem only from religion: modern secular state governments, countless non-religious groups, and atheistic or agnostic citizens also have their own rules.

Finally, many religions teach that supernatural agents not only reward virtuous rule-obeying people and punish evil-doers and rule-breakers, but also can be induced by prayers, donations, and sacrifices to intervene on behalf of mortal petitioners.

Thus, religion involves a constellation of five sets of attributes, which vary in strength among the world’s religions (including traditional religions). We may use this constellation to understand the differences between religion and several related phenomena that share some but not all of the attributes of religion. Patriotism and ethnic pride resemble religion
in being social movements distinguishing their adherents from outsiders, demanding sacrifice (even of one’s life) as a display of one’s commitment, and celebrated in rituals and ceremonies such as (for Americans) Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Memorial Day. Unlike religion, patriotism and ethnic pride do not teach belief in supernatural agents. Sports fans, like religious believers, form social groups of adherents (e.g., Boston Red Sox fans) distinct from adherents of other social groups (e.g., New York Yankee fans) but don’t espouse supernatural agents, don’t demand great sacrifices as proof of affiliation, and don’t regulate a broad range of moral behavior. Marxism, socialism, and other political movements do attract committed groups of adherents (like religions), motivate adherents to die for their ideals, and may have broad moral codes, but don’t rely on the supernatural. Magic, sorcery, superstition, and water-witching (the belief that underground water can be located by a divining rod) do involve belief in supernatural agents with consequences for everyday behavior. However, magic, superstition, and related phenomena do not serve as defining attributes of committed social groups akin to believers: there are not groups of believers in the dangers of black cats who meet every Sunday to re-affirm their separateness from non-believers in the dangers of black cats. Perhaps the grayest borderline area involves movements such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, about which there are varying degrees of uncertainty whether they constitute religions or else philosophies of life.

Religion is nearly universal in humans, but nothing even remotely resembling it has been described in animals. Nevertheless, we can inquire about—indeed, we have to wonder about—the origins of religion, just as we wonder about the origins of other uniquely human traits such as art and spoken language. Six million years ago, our ancestors were apes that surely lacked religion; by the time that the first written documents appeared around 5,000 years ago, there was already religion. What happened in the intervening 5,995,000 years? What were religion’s antecedents in animals and in human ancestors, and when and why did it arise?

A method termed the functional approach has been the commonest framework adopted by scholars of religion since they began studying it scientifically almost 150 years ago. They ask: what functions does religion fulfill? They note that religion often imposes heavy costs on individuals and societies, such as impelling many people to live celibate lives and to forgo having children, to go to the effort and expense of building huge pyramids, to kill one’s valuable domestic animals and occasionally even one’s own child and oneself, and to spend much time repeating the same words over and over again. Religion must have functions and bring benefits to offset those heavy costs; otherwise, it wouldn’t have come into being and couldn’t be maintained. What human problems did the invention of religion solve? A brief summary of the functional approach might be to assert something like this: religion was invented in order to carry out certain functions and solve certain problems, such as maintaining social order, comforting anxious people, and teaching political obedience.

Another approach, emerging more recently from the field of evolutionary psychology, objects: religion surely didn’t evolve and wasn’t consciously invented for any specific purpose or to solve any specific problem. It wasn’t the case that some budding chief got a brilliant idea one day and invented religion from scratch, foreseeing that he could more easily hold his subjects in sway if he convinced them of religious reasons to build a pyramid. Nor is it likely that a psychologically attuned hunter-gatherer, concerned that his fellow tribesmen had become too depressed by a recent death to go hunting, made up a story about the afterlife in order to console them and give them new hope. Religion instead probably arose as a by-product of some other capacities of our ancestors and of their own animal ancestors, and those capacities had unforeseen consequences and gradually acquired new functions as they developed.

To an evolutionary biologist like myself, there is no contradiction between these two different approaches to the origin of religion, in effect postulating two stages. Biological evolution itself similarly proceeds in two stages. First, variation between individuals is generated by mutations and recombinations of genes. Second, because of natural selection and sexual selection there are differences among the resulting variant individuals in how they survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes to the next
generation. That is, some of those variant individuals turn out to perform functions and to solve life’s problems better than do other variant individuals. A functional problem (e.g., surviving in a colder climate) isn’t solved by an animal realizing that it needs thicker fur, nor by cold climates stimulating mutations for a thicker fur. Instead, something (in the case of biological evolution, the mechanisms of molecular genetics) creates something else (in this case, an animal with thicker or thinner fur), and some life conditions or environmental problems (in this case, cold temperatures) endow some but not others of those variant animals with a useful function. Thus, gene mutations and recombinations provide the origins of biological diversity, while natural selection and sexual selection sieve that starting material by the criterion of function.

Similarly, evolutionary psychologists assert that religion is a by-product of features of the human brain that arose for reasons other than building pyramids or comforting bereaved relatives. To an evolutionary biologist, that’s plausible and unsurprising. Evolutionary history is chock-full of by-products and mutations that were initially selected for one function and then developed further and became selected to fulfill another function. For example, creationists skeptical of the reality of evolution used to point to electric eels that electrocute their prey with 600-volt shocks, and then argued that a 600-volt eel could never have arisen from a normal no-volt eel by natural selection, because the necessary intermediate stages of low-voltage eels couldn’t electrocute any prey and wouldn’t be good for anything. In fact, it turns out that 600-volt eels evolved through changes of function, as a by-product of electric field detection and electricity generation in normal fish.

Many fish have skin sense organs sensitive to electric fields in the environment. Those fields can be either of physical origin (e.g., from ocean currents or from the mixing of waters of different salinities), or else of biological origin (from the electrical triggering of animals’ muscle contractions). Fish possessing such electric-sensitive sense organs can employ them for two functions: to detect prey, and to navigate through the environment, especially in muddy water and under nighttime conditions where eyes are of little use. The prey reveal themselves to the animals’ electric field detector by having a much higher electrical conductivity than does fresh water. That detection of environmental electric fields may be
termed passive electrodetection; it does not require any specialized electricity-generating organs.

But some fish species go further and generate their own low-voltage electric fields, which let them detect objects not only by an object’s own electric field, but also by its modification of the electric field set up by the fish. Organs specialized to generate electricity evolved independently in at least six separate lineages of fish. Most electrical organs are derived from the electricity-generating membranes of muscles, but one fish species develops its electric organs from nerves. The zoologist Hans Lissmann furnished the first compelling proof of such active electrodetection, after much inconclusive speculation by others. Lissmann conditioned electric fish, by food rewards, to distinguish an electrically conducting object from a non-conducting object of identical appearance, such as a conducting metal disk versus an identical-looking non-conducting plastic or glass disk. While I was working in a Cambridge University laboratory near the building in which Lissmann was doing his studies, a friend of Lissmann told me a story illustrating the sensitivity of electrodetection by electric fishes. Lissmann noticed that a captive electric fish that he was maintaining in his laboratory got excited around the same time in the late after-noon of every weekday. He eventually realized that it was because his female technician was getting ready to go home at that hour, stepped behind a screen, and combed her hair, which set up an electric field that the fish could detect.

Low-voltage fish use their electricity-generating organs and their skin electrodetectors for improved efficiency of two different functions, both shared with the many fish possessing electrodetectors but lacking electricity-generating organs: prey detection and navigation. Low-voltage fish also use each other’s electric impulses for a third function, that of communicating with each other. Depending on the pattern of the electric impulses, which varies among species and individuals, a fish can extract information and thereby recognize the species, sex, size, and individual (strange or familiar) of fish generating the impulses. A low-voltage fish also communicates social messages to other fish of its species: in effect, it can electrically say, “This is my territory, you get out,” or “Me Tarzan, you Jane, you turn me on, it’s time for sex.”