I preferred [b:Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict|17942053|Big Gods How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict|Ara Norenzayan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1376877965s/17942053.jpg|25154244], but this was a worthy follow up listen (I have a long, slow commute.) I almost hesitate to say too much, but like "Big Gods," I feel this listen will not leave anyone with a stake in promoting or demoting religion "happy." But it was interesting food for thought. ( )

This book had untold potential to tell the story of the evolution of religion, biologically and culturally, within human societies. Wade squandered it through chapters full of navel-gazing anecdata tortured into pretending to support his theses.

The first half of the book was slow and repetitive but interesting. The book's central hypothesis is that religion evolved through forms of kin selection, by providing advantages to societies largely in the form of greater cohesion and conformity. Keep in mind that for the first 45,000 years or so of the existence of modern humans, we lived in small tribes with no formal hierarchies, no legal systems, no penal code. Somehow, a common moral code must be not only developed but enforced, even when no one is watching. Enter gods, who can see you everywhere and are for mysterious reasons deeply interested in the minutiae of human behaviour.

The above was a throwaway reference to the biological evolution of religion I first encountered in a book primarily about the biological evolution of fiction, and I was hoping Wade would further expand on what's known and provide an overview of the science--after all, that's what he proposes in the book copy. No such luck. Instead, while he frequently repeats his assertion that religion facilitates the successful expansion of pre-state societies by bonding warriors together and providing them with reasons to sacrifice their lives for their tribe-mates, he provides no evidence whatsoever, and instead treats the reader to extensive digressions about his own prejudices.

There were small elements of science--sciencelets, let's call them--in the early chapters. He discusses recent neurological and psychological research on moral reasoning and moral intuition that were a pleasure to read, although if you're interested, you can find better accounts elsewhere with less baggage. Or here: science has pretty conclusively shown that people jump to moral conclusions via intuition and then reason their way into those conclusions after the fact. That's the short version. Now you can skip that chapter too.

Other than that, he quotes no science, instead relying on just-so cherry-picked anthropological anecdotes about different religions that support whatever point he's trying to make in that chapter. About halfway through, he careens right off course--dumping any pretense at talking about biology, evolution or neurobiology, and instead diverging weirdly into chapters about the historical accuracy of the bible and the koran, the role of christianity in modern american politics, and population control.

I would be less frustrated if the entirely speculative nature of this book were due to a lack of science or research on the biological underpinnings of religion. But the simplest google search shows that there is a ton out there on connections between certain genes and religious behaviour, or the neurological components or functions of religious beliefs, much of it available before the book's 2009 publication date. Wade does not discuss a single one. How do you write a 300 page book about the evolution of the faith instinct without once using the word "gene"?

You also get to read lovely bits like the following:

As other ethnic groups went through the WASP school system, they assimilated the same values, particularly the Protestant art of forming associations of all kinds. But the balance between individualism and community-building has shifted dramatically toward the former in the last fifty years .... Groups demanding rights for specific sections of the population have also undermined community in unintended ways. (p. 202)

Yup. It would be better, you see, if those uppity women and black people had kept subordinating their selfish desires to be seen as human beings and individuals. Then we would still have a sense of community. Our bad!

The Church felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group .... Some 95 percent of Americans are Christian or belong to no religion. Minorities--including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. (p. 267)

Yep. He went there. Let's ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with "no religion," aka atheists, would be alarmed and displeased to the extreme to be lumped in with Christians when it comes to religious education in the classroom. Those 5 per cent of Americans are real people! The whole point of rights is that they belong to everybody! You don't get to decide they don't count because it's a minority--that's the whole point of legal fucking rights! No one took away the Christians' rights to religious education; they just took away state funding for it, for god's sake. I'm pretty sure that people besides lawyers were very very happy to get bible learning out of the public education system.

Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. (p. 125)

Those days never existed, asshat. If he could distinguish scientific facts from a hole in the ground, he might be familiar enough with anthropological research to know this. And it's not just here. Unwarranted observations about the role and characteristics of men vs. women are scattered all over the book. None of them relate to his thesis, and all of them are demonstrably false. Worst is his constant insistence that religion = initiation rites for male adolescents = military training = success in warfare. Where's the evidence? Well initiation rites for boys are often painful (initiation rites for girls are not discussed, at all), and war is painful, so abracadabra, and let's just ignore every bit of archaeological evidence we have for the presence of female warriors throughout prehistory.

Oy.

Last criticism, promise:

It's too black and white.

There are some evolved characteristics that are required for survival, and these are universal. Like breathing. If you don't breathe, you don't live, so the biological and neurobiological mechanisms exist in all of us. To the extent that breathing is not universal in our day and age, it's because we have created some pretty fancy medical equipment that can take over this function and provide it for people who can't breathe on their own. Same for eating, sleeping, swallowing, etc, and some characteristics that are required for reproduction (the other component to evolution).

There are some traits that are not required for survival or reproduction, but which confer enough of a benefit to be very common. These exist on a continuum between almost-necessary and almost-optional. Personality and character traits are placed all over this continuum, and the same trait can have different outcomes depending on the environment. Not just in humans, by the way--I remember one fun study about extraversion in a minnow species, and how genes associated with extraversion were adaptive in some environments and non-adaptive in others (calm waters vs. rapids, though I can't remember which was better or worse for the outgoing fishies).

Well--isn't it really, really bloody obvious that the same would be true for religiosity?

Religiosity exists on a continuum. Some people are fanatical, other people are committed, some flexible, more-or-less half-hearted, willing to go along but not a believer, or committed non-believer. Much like extraversion, sensitivity, and intelligence, among other personality traits. And so like other personality traits--obviously what's adaptive and what's not adaptive varies depending on environment, including the culture.

There have always been some atheists and non-believers. I don't believe for a second that ancient hunter-gatherers didn't have any skeptics among them. That there were no people who were just going along because they enjoyed the dancing and the feasting and didn't really care if the gods existed or not. And it's a matter of historical record that in societies where religion was outlawed, some people risked their lives to continue practicing their faith. Cultures are not 1 or 0, yes or no, religious or not religious, and neither are individual people.

This could have been such a fascinating avenue for discussion. If religion is a means of enforcing social and moral conformity in pre-state societies, which I can accept as a plausible argument, then there are a range of possible adaptations and individual responses to that context. Adhering strictly to the culture's religion is one way of enhancing survival and reproductive success, but finding ways to exploit the religious beliefs of others becomes another adaptation. Like altruism: highly altruistic individuals are good for societies but their own survival and reproductive success can suffer if they give away too much; individuals very low in altruism (eg. sociopaths) can be very successful individually if they're not caught, but too many sociopaths and you don't have a society, certainly not one in which cooperation and mutual trust can flourish. So you have a tug of war between these two poles, with the optimal level of altruism at an individual and societal level being continually negotiated between shifting norms, resource levels, social commitment and conformity, and so on.

He hints at this in his chapter on the links between religious conformity, trust and commerce--particularly when briefly describing how charlatans can exploit religion to create undeserved trust--but this is a subject that deserves a lengthy and detailed discussion in any book that is truly going to explore and explain the evolutionary basis for religion.

Were prehistoric atheists well-adapted to exploit the religious beliefs of their more fervent neighbours for selfish ends? Would this have created evolutionary pressures for more in-the-middle folks--skeptical believers, if you will? What implications would this have had for the warfare-bonding or other cohesive functions of religion in society? Does religion still 'work' in this way if its adherents are 50% or 75% committed? (Though come to think of it, he spends the first chunk of the book talking about religion as a social bonding mechanism that works through ritual, not belief; and then the second half of the book talking about religion as requiring belief--this needs better teasing out before these discussions would have any meaning. "Belief" in the former context has no meaning--one could be an atheist and very devout, simultaneously.)

I would have loved to delve into a discussion on these topics, but it wasn't there. Practically nothing was there. I got more out of the evolution-of-fiction book and its throwaway line than I did from this entire manuscript. ( )

skimmed this one, basically states that religion followed the evolutionary path with human development - not sure all of the hard science evidence is here ( )

interesting ( )

I read it again in July 2015.