Religion & Law

Aping Religion

By John Pieret

There is a semi-interview in the Toronto Star with Ara Norenzayan, a University of British Columbia psychologist and lead author of a review paper in Science on the role of religion in expanding social traits such as altruism and cooperation beyond kin groups.

The paper argues that social co-operation and altruism conferred an evolutionary advantage as populations grew larger, and that moralizing religions were key to creating large-scale cohesion. ...

Norenzayan says that familial co-operation is understandable because members of the same clans would posses many of the same genes.

"The idea here is that to the extent we are interacting with someone who is genetically related to us, we are going to be altruistic just because it will benefit our (shared) genes to help."

In smaller social groups, he continues, a sense of built-up trust between individuals would allow for longer survival ? and better breeding opportunities ? because an "I scratch your back, you scratch my back" existence can greatly ease life's burdens.

"There is a strong incentive for people ... to get the benefits of co-operation, but not return co-operation and do better than the co-operators," Norenzayan contends. "The best strategy is not to co-operate but pretend to co-operate." ...

"One explanation for why religions have had such a staying power throughout human history and human societies," he says, "is that they play a role in promoting altruistic tendencies in very large groups.

"This is something that is very hard to get."

Thus religious thought, while cultural in origin, meshed ideally with the evolutionary imperative for group co-operation, Norenzayan says.

"Of course it's not a genetic process; it's a cultural process," he says. "But it's feeding back into our evolutionary adaptation and then making possible co-operative tendencies in larger and larger groups."

[Norenzayan] suggests that other, secular mechanisms such as enlightenment-influenced laws, courts and effective policing can serve in place of severed religious regulations.

"There are other ways to be less selfish, more co-operative; you don't have to necessarily have religion to solve that problem."

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on October 04, 2008 (boomark / email).