The Emergence of Religion & God as an Evolutionary Strategy

Religion & God are so deeply entwined with — & in fact, inseparable from — the human condition. The origins of which possess an ambiguity & opacity that escape logic. Here we examine a plausible premise on which Religion & God may have arisen: perhaps nothing more than a function of evolution.

Does the Prosperity of Tribals Societies Necessitate Religion & God?

Evolutionary Primer

Evolutionary thinking is a fundamental tool for logic & reason. From biology to culture to everything in between — things are only truly understood in the context under which they originate & the pressures that drive them. Here I detail evolution, not for biologists & geneticists — but rather as an abstract framework for problem-solving.

To this aid, I wrote an evolutionary primer: explaining the basic mechanism, advanced & shortcomings in evolutionary theory. It’s available here:

Evolutionary Primer Available Here

Evolution of Religion

Now that we have our evolutionary primer, we can apply this logic to the emergence & prosperity of religion. There’s something peculiar about human civilization: we’re just not built for the world we live in. Most of our evolutionary track occurred in a very different world than that which we currently occupy. Any number of the ills of modern society, from undue violence to chronic loneliness can — in one way or another — find origin or explanation in our evolutionary track. We’ll only focus on one element of this:

The Invention of the Stranger

150 & Me

For the majority of human history (hunter-gatherer societies), we lived in pretty small groups. Current estimates are around 150. At first, this might just sound like an arbitrary fact, but it carries a lot of weight. It’s known as Dunbar’s number & research suggests it’s the amount of social connection we can handle, given our brain size. By all evidence it appears, there’s a ratio between brain-sizes & group-sizes in primates (including humans), the number approximately 150.

The ratio of the size of the neocortex — the region of the brain associated with cognition & language — to the size of the body is linked to the size of social groups.

As a consequence 150 estimates how many social interactions we can handle.

150 → 10'000

Around 12'000 years ago, the human race went through a major transition. For exceedingly long periods the human race lived in hunter-gather-societies (80'000 years +), then about 12'000 years ago the Neolithic Revolution began & agriculture was invented. All of a sudden groups could take on specialized roles & survive in much larger numbers.

12'000 years ago, human settlement groups exploded from around 150 people to anything up to 10'000 people. What else happened about 12'000 years ago? A major shift in religious beliefs & practices, moving towards what we know of modern relgions today.

The Invention of the Stranger

This explosion in numbers undoubtedly brought a whole myriad of contemporary issues. Although societies could become far more efficient through specialization, the human race — nor any other species — had ever lived in groups larger than they could cognitively manage: thus the invention of the stranger.

This breaks our wiring, we’re not built to handle casual strangers. Other people should either be in-tribe (who can be trusted) or out-tribe (who should probably be eliminated).

These ramifications are still omnipresent, some geneticists attribute our innate altruism to be a byproduct of this revolution. Selfish genes receive no benefit from altruistic behaviour. ‘Undue’ altruism could then possibly be a consequence of the ability to connect with arbitrary strangers, classifying them as one-of-us.

Of course, the negative ramifications are equally evident. Ever wonder why we’re able to walk past a homeless person & feel totally detected? Able to objective a person who is clearly suffering greatly? Again, a mechanism for handling strangers (this time, less noble).

Religious Law

When this Neolithic Revolution began, we needed new mechanisms to structure society. Consider the cascade of new challenges:

1. Who can you trust?
2. When should we cooperate?
3. How do hierarchies emerge & how/why do those of ‘lower rank’ accept their position?
4. Does society have leadership/governance?
5. Do individuals have a commonality in goals & life objectives?

The list is endless.

Though religion greatly predates this revolution, firmer, contemporary religious beliefs emerged as the mechanism to resolve these issues.

From a pragmatic view, consider how religion addresses these issues:

1. Provide a ground for trust/commonality.
2. Create shared goals & objectives that create community & comradery.
3. Provide a framework for law — religion was inseparable from law for most of its history — that all could appreciate as just.
4. Provide an explanation of hierarchy, serving those in higher positions in society by keeping ‘lower rank’ individuals happy with their place in society, because this is all they should need by God's law.
5. Provide a framework for common goals & working together.
6. Setting a moral obligation.
7. Create meaning in life that supersedes our current suffering — encourage self-sacrifice for the benefit of the group.
8. And so much more.

It’s an endlessly interesting topic, but here are a few small examples of behaviour that highlights the benefits:

• Fighting for nation & God are easily cast as noble, one should be happy to lay down their life (the ultimate selfish-gene sabotage) for the greater good. Undoubtedly a prerequisite for a powerful society.
• Religion defines trust, which allows small communities to focus on productive outputs, allowing for great specialization & maximum productivity on behalf of the group. We also see this in modern society today: consider how small groups of a particular religion dominate certain sectors (finance/law etc) by giving each other business, lower rates etc.
• Provided a greater divide with others: if we are of the same religion, we are ‘brothers’. That makes it so much easier to cast non-believers as inferior/unenlightened — now consider most modern war justifications?
• Donations & helping others are often a core doctrine of religion — obviously promoting the prosperity of the group.
• ‘Serve your god & everything you ever want will return to you’ — chasing utopia, in another life, brings us sanity & peace with our own situations whilst requiring we sacrifice for a greater good — again promoting the collection group selection.
• If we have this commonality, all other discrepancies are secondary.
• Religion as law greatly serves those in power, increasing societal structure & obedience.

Now, this addresses the practicalities of theology, it doesn’t speak of its origin.

What if Religion & God are an emergent property of the evolutionary track of cognitively complex beings?

Religion as an Evolving Organism

Although providing a great organizational framework & although it may serve those who lead a society, religion was almost certainly not a top-down autocratic system — but rather emergent from the interactions of society.

Religion & God may be despotically gifted from one generation to another, however, it’s highly improbably that a central autority dictate much of it’s policy. Hypocrical as it may appear — as belief in a deity is defined as a top-down centralized system — Religion probably emergent through the interation of individuals in a bottom up fashion: emergent from interaction, convergent to an meta-stable state.

The reason we began with an evolutionary primer, is to apply this thinking to religion. It’s foolish to analyze anything statically, things only make sense in the context under which they originate — as a consequence, everything is only understood in contrast with its history, competitors, era & general environment. Evolutionary thinking is also in thinking about converging to an optimum, survival of the fitness (& broader selection mechanisms) are applicable to so much more than biology: trends, cultures, social norms, ideas, innovations & yes, religion.

Darwinian Evolution of Religion

Undoubtedly hereditary — so much so some cynics remark “isn’t it convenient that all religious people were born into the only true religion”. Of course, we’re using metaphors & it’s not inherited genetically, but inherited from one generation to the next (metaphors will be used throughout with explanation).

Variability & mutation are also omnipresent in religious practices: although the core ideologies can persist for centuries — religious doctrines do, in fact, mutate (change in certain areas as opposed to others) so much so that new religions can emerge & diverge from older ones. Some of these mutations adaptive, others not.

Adaptiveness would then explain the religion’s ability to thrive. Just as genotypes encode phenotypes that make an organism thrive or suffer in nature, certain religion ‘encode’ genotypes (beliefs) that manifest as phenotypes (practices) that make one religion more adaptive than another. Consider two religions, one which encourages people to have many children & one which encourages no children, which is more likely to die off? Or one that encourages war vs encourages negotiation? Contextual, thus adaptive to an environment.

Selection Operators

Now we can think of beliefs & traditions ebbing & flowing throughout history, those that (ironically) serve their follows the best, survive. Religious practices are then, just as in nature, subject to selection operators. Applications of natural selection are self-evident— assessing a religion’s adaptiveness (say based on its policies on violence) as a function of its time period. For example, a deeply violent religion may have greatly populated the earth (Christianity) for centuries, but thereafter adapt to more docile practices to fit the socially accepted ideology of the day.

Sexual selection may allude to psychological factors & willingness to participate for no other reason than appeal, peer pressure, social norms, etc. Again we abstract from direct notions & work in metaphors. One could also consider how within-group religious practices spread by signaling (a core constituent of sexual selection) for example:

Religious rituals can be considered a symbol of authenticity — just a peacock’s displays it’s feathers to sigal their health (only able to grow such magestic, superfluous, displays if extremely healthy); human undergo rituals to signal commitment & authenticity of thier faith.

Stable steady-state phenomena like rock-paper-scissors selection are self-evident & need no discussion.

Cooperations, reciprocal altruism & kinship selection are, however, probably the defining factors of a religion’s prosperity. Self-evident from our prior discussion, but ultimately guiding the cooperations & organizational structure — driven by “trust over commonality” & “shared objectives” — that ultimately defines the success of a theological group.

Our Objective

Undoubtled complex subject matter, which by nature is so multifacet that a fully comprehensive analysis is farcically out of reach, so instead:

We aim to build a simple computational Agent Based Model (ABM) model to ask the question:

Does the Prosperity of Tribals Societies Necessitate Religion & God?

Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling (ABM)

Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is a computational simulation technique used to investigate phenomena by simulated a process & assessing the outcome. It’s closely linked with exploratory work & Complex Adaptive Systems. We’re going to design an ABM to model the emergence of Religion & God.

The premise of ABM is to simulated how individual elements interact, given a set of interaction rules, & study the emergent properties of the system at large.

An entirely different phenomenon than modeling system dynamics. For example, one might model road congestion (for city planning) by aggregating average traffic patterns, labour markets & social hubs, to predict which roads would experience the highest volume & in which period. One might, instead, use an agent-based approach to simply define the simulation environment & interaction rules & thereafter run the simulation & see where traffic burdens arise.

The danger of ABM is the environment needs to be sufficiently specified in-order-to capture or represent any meaningful relationship between agents. It’s also substantially computationally expensive. By nature, the stochasticity requires we recompute many runs & average results.

ABM offers a new paradigm for thinking about complexity & emergence, an entirely new school of thought & philosophy around predictive systems.

Model Simulation

To illustrate this point, I built a model that simulates agent interactions in a tribal setting. Agents have an action space consisting of farming, scavenging, praying & invading the domain of tribes.

Policy := {Pray, Farm, Scavenge & Invade}

The agents act individually but sample their policies probabilistically based on 4 inate characteristics:

Characteristics := {Selfishness, Faith, In-Group Altruism, Out-Group Altruism}

Our Netlogo model illustrates that religious doctrine — coupled with deep in-group trust and severe out-group hatred (i.e. tribalism) — can result in an emergent behaviour of a society that dominates other groups. Thus we provide a theory of the emergence of religion as a consequence of evolution — more specifically group selection — that allows some groups (tribes) to drive others into extinction.

We showed that religion can serve as a powerful tool to get members of the tribe to act for the good of the tribe, often to their own detriment, serving the collective & thus on average leading to prosperity. Coupled with in-group out-group tendencies, which are so omnipresent even in modern culture, religion can lead to group organization that drives the ’other’ to extinction by requiring self-sacrifice on the part of the individual.

Here are the findings, the full model is available on request.

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Philosophical Consideration

Convince a man of God & he is destined to live well. Irrespective of his place in society, his accomplishments, or what he has done for others. Deprive him on his primal needs, but give him God & he will be, wholeheartedly, satisfied. For through God he can achieve what matters most to the psyche — in undue abundance: Purpose & Love.

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If you disagree, I’d love to hear from you! I understand these topics are far more complex than I’ve done justice, I also understand they are deeply personal & sensitive matters — this is exactly why we must attempt to comprehend these issues. We should ask the biggest questions we can imagine, anything else would be a waste of our biology ;).

I can’t wait for someone to tell me I’m missing the point & explain why I’m horribly wrong.

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