Mechanisms of evolution
Scientists generally agree with the opinion that a propensity to engage in religious behavior evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation, in which case religion conferred some family of evolutionary advantage. The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors, such(a) as the concept of a protogod,
may gain emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits without initially being selected for because of their own benefits. A third suggestion is that different aspects of religion require different evolutionary explanations but also that different evolutionary explanations may apply to several aspects of religion.
Religious behavior often involves significant costs—including economic costs, celibacy, dangerous rituals, or the expending of time that could be used otherwise. This wouldthat natural selection should act against religious behavior unless it or something else causes religious behavior to have significant advantages.
Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta have reviewed several of the prominent theories for the adaptive value of religion. numerous are "social solidarity theories", which impression religion as having evolved to reclassification cooperation and cohesion within groups. multiple membership in turn helps benefits which can upgrading an individual's chances for survival and reproduction. These benefits range from coordination advantages to the facilitation of costly behavior rules.
Sosis also researched 200 utopian communes in the 19th-century United States, both religious and secular mostly socialist. 39 percent of the religious communes were still functioning 20 years after their founding while only 6 percent of the secular communes were. The number of costly sacrifices that a religious commune demanded from its members had a linear effect on its longevity, while in secular communes demands for costly sacrifices did not correlate with longevity and the majority of the secular communes failed within 8 years. Sosis cites anthropologist Roy Rappaport in arguing that rituals and laws are more powerful when sacralized. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship. Evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse and theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard have argued instead that because humans with altruistic tendencies are preferred as social partners they get fitness advantages by social selection, with Nesse arguing further that social alternative enabled humans as a variety to become extraordinarily cooperative and capable of devloping culture.
Edward O. Wilson's theory of "eusociality" strongly suggests companies cohesion as the impetus for the developing of religion. Wilson posits that the individuals of a small percentage of species including homo sapiens, ants, termites, bees and a few other species replicated their genes by adhering to one of a number of competing groups. He further postulates that, in homo sapiens, thanks to their enormous forebrains, there evolved a complex interplay between group evolution and individual evolution within a group.[]
These social solidarity theories may assist to explain the painful or dangerous nature of many religious rituals. Costly-signaling theory suggests that such(a) rituals might serve as public and hard-to-fake signals that an individual's commitment to the group is sincere. Since there would be a considerable improvement in trying to cheat the system—taking usefulness of group-living benefits without taking on all possible costs—the ritual would not be something simple that can be taken lightly. Warfare is a model of a symbolize of group living, and Richard Sosis, Howard C. Kress, and James S. Boster carried out a cross-cultural survey which demonstrated that men in societies which engage in war do submit to the costliest rituals.
Studies that show more direct positive associations between religious practice and health and longevity are more controversial. Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79% showed a positive influence. such(a) studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR code which specified University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality correlated with a lower viral load and modernizing immune-cell levels in HIV patients. Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health." Debate keeps over the validity of these findings, which do not necessarily prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between religion and health. Mark Stibich claims there is a clear correlation but that the reason for it maintain unclear. A criticism of such(a) placebo effects, as alive as the advantage of religion giving a sense of meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than religious behavior couldsuch goals.
Stephen Jay Gould cites religion as an example of an exaptation or spandrel, but he does not himselfa definite trait that he thinks natural selection has actually acted on. He does, however, bring up Freud's suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal with the concept of personal mortality. Religion may have been one total to this problem.
Other researchers have produced specific psychological processes that natural selection may have fostered alongside religion. Such mechanisms may increase the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm agent detection, the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events etiology, and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions theory of mind. These three adaptations among others permit human beings to imagine purposeful agents late many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life.
Pascal Boyer suggests in his book Religion Explained 2001 that there is no simple relation for religious consciousness. He builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology. He argues that one such component is that it has, in near cases, been advantageous for humans to remember "minimally counter-intuitive" concepts that are somewhat different from the daily routine and somewhat violate innate expectations approximately how the world is constructed. A god that is in many aspects like humans but much more powerful is such a concept, while the often much more abstract god discussed at length by theologians is often too counter-intuitive. Experiments assist that religious people think approximately their god in anthropomorphic terms even if this contradicts the more complex theological doctrines of their religion.
Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyerthat humans evolved a "hazard-precaution system" which helps them to detect potential threats in the environment and to effort toappropriately. Several attribute of ritual behaviors, often a major feature of religion, are held to trigger this system. These put the occasion for the ritual often the prevention or elimination of danger or evil, the destruction believed to result from nonperformance of the ritual, and the detailed prescriptions for proper performance of the ritual. Lienard and Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system itself may have featured fitness benefits, and that religion then "associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".
Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God? 2004 suggests that belief in God is natural because it depends on mental tools possessed by all human beings. He suggests that the configuration and development of human minds make belief in the existence of a supreme god with properties such as being superknowing, superpowerful and immortal highly attractive. He also compares belief in God to belief in other minds, and devotes a chapter to looking at the evolutionary psychology of atheism. He suggests that one of the essential mental modules in the brain is the Hyperactive agency Detection Device HADD, another potential system for identifying danger. This HADD may confer a survival benefit even if it is for over-sensitive: this is the better to avoid an imaginary predator than be killed by a real one. This would tend to encourage belief in ghosts and in spirits.
Though hominids probably began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition and mates, culture", as this would counter the sense of insignificance represented by death and provide: 1 symbolic immortality through the legacy of a culture that lives on beyond the physical self "earthly significance" 2 literal immortality, the promise of an afterlife or continued existence featured in religions "cosmic significance".
] their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses". In such a conception, it is fundamental that the individuals who are unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions created a behavioral sample that elevated biological fitness for believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer and rarer in the population. See denialism.
This good example holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect" the presence of other humans or predators for example: momentarily mistaking a vine for a snake. For instance, a man might report that he felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked around.
Stories of these experiences are particularly likely to be retold, passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of requirements ontological categories person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object with counterintuitive properties humans that are invisible, houses that remember what happened in them, etc.. These stories become even more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated expectations for the ontological category houses that "remember" activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically qualifications thought processes to them.
One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings evolutionary behavioral guidelines. In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules grown-up identification and behavior prediction keep on to run decoupled from reality, producing incompatible intuitions that the dead are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human predisposition to see misfortune as a social event as someone's responsibility rather than the outcome of mechanical processes it may activate the intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" bit of the human theory of minds, compelling the bereaved to try to interact and bargain with supernatural agents ritual.
In a large enough group, some individuals willbetter skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As societies grow and encounter other societies, competition will ensue and a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to change their concepts to give a more abstract, more widely acceptable version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group or guild with its attendant political goals religion.