A Strong History of Natural Selection Favoring Religiosity?

Dr. Paul J. Watson

Department of Biology, UNM

E-mail: pwatson@unm.edu

Course offering each Fall semester: “The Evolution of Religiosity and Human Coalitional Psychology”

Offered for Biology, Religious Studies, and Peace Studies credits.

Combination seminar and lecture format.

Two Complimentary Adaptationist Proposals: Based on principles about how communication evolves, specifically, honest signaling theory.

Informational boundaries hypothesis.

Religion is the most powerful way to set up strategic boundaries to modulate social-distancing between human groups and sub- groups, boundaries that maximally protect a group’s vital human capital and intellectual property.

Supernormal placebo effects hypothesis.

Placebo effects are real health effects, not just “sham treatments.”

Will offer an evolutionary explanation, not just a mechanistic one, of the placebo effect, resolving the so-called “placebo paradox.”

Why do we “wait for permission” to unleash full power of our immune system in fighting disease?

Functionalist View of Religiosity How Having Supernatural Social Partners Could Constitute a

Pivotal Multi-Function Human Psychological Adaptation

Won’t be talking about parasitic memes.

Capacities always co-evolve intimately with regulatory mechanisms, the human cortex included.

Misleading to think of our sub-cortical “regulatory” brain regions strictly as “reptilian” or “basic mammalian” in their functional design.

They do not just serve to generate crude instinctual drives or maintain physiological homeostasis.

They have enormous ascending projections: You can do what you want, but you cannot choose what you want. “The Matrix has you.”

Naïve to think that human mind is constructed to allow takeover by ideas, however “crazy,” that are maladaptive. There is a strong intrapsychic immune system.

Not a by-product theorist, although they enable us to understand origins of religiosity.

Natural selection isn't blind.

Cognitive by-products are exposed to selection and will be tuned, pruned, and elaborated.

Where is religion going? We had better figure it out.

1. The enlightenment is long gone. Secularization of societies is slowing and reversing. People lose fascination with technology, knowledge, verifiable evidence, especially about what happened in the past, and revive religion for inspiration, psychological healing, physical health, and social guidance.

2. Religion is dying; recent resurgences are its death throes. Vatican City and Mecca become museums.

3. Religions become creedless self-help clubs that get along well. Kind of like sports or rotary clubs.

4. Religion loses prestige, kind of like smoking. It is no longer a status symbol. It becomes rude to mention another’s religious beliefs - they are considered awkward or private.

5. Judgment day actually arrives.6. Spiritual elements of religion come to the fore, potentiating more

moral behavior toward in-group and out-group members. They come to play a substantial and perhaps essential role in rescuing earth and mankind. Religiosity is harnessed to promote wide prosociality and an ecological conscience.

Paraphrased from Daniel Dennett’s book, “Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon.”

Every one of these scenarios is thought preposterous by some,but is yearned for and sought after by others.

Obama recently at “National Prayer Breakfast”

“History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people, including the freedom of religion, are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.”

“Nations that do not uphold these rights sow the bitter seeds of instability and violence and extremism. So freedom of religion matters to our national security.”

G-protein-coupled membrane signaling complex.The most widely-used signal transduction mechanism in nature, they

mediate the majority of a cell’s responses to hormones and neurotransmitters, and to the senses of sight, olfaction and taste.

Natural Selection creates adaptations

of staggering complexity.

Zero’s in on genes coding phenotypic designs maximizing effectiveness and efficiency solving reproductive problems.

Retains designs that work; elegantly modifies and builds on them to solve many specific problems.

Does not care how crazy or jerry-rigged the design is, per se.

“Utilitarian extravagances” resulting from intraspecificarms races to display good genes.

How might natural selection have favored costly,

elaborate religiosity across all ecological

contexts?Can we make Darwinian sense of the origin, maintenance, tuning, and elaboration of genetically encoded religiosity instincts that drive us, cross-culturally, to create, and contingently buy into, elaborate supernatural belief systems: religions?

Must identify the pan-human life history traits that make religiosity relevant to solving key reproductive problems.

Briefly, a word about epiphenomenal origins of our religiosity instincts…

Religiosity instincts started as by-products of other diverse cognitive adaptations.

Hyperactive Agency Detection Mechanism

Bargaining Instincts

Mystery Instinct / Rationality Switch

Attachment Mechanisms

Essentialist Thinking (inherence heuristic)

About 10-12 others…

All by-products would have had behavioral effects exposed to natural selection.

Expect tuning, pruning, and consolidation: modifications to maximize adaptive significance.

By-products may have become adaptations.Paul Klee, “The Golden Fish” Evokes the mystery instinct?

Honest Signaling Signaling costs evolve in evolutionary arms races between signalers and receivers, making dishonesty uneconomical.

1. Members of a social group vary in some underlying attribute that is difficult or impossible to observe but could, in principle, be reliably signaled, such as physical condition, resource endowment, generosity, morality, or need.

2. Observers can gain from getting reasonably accurate information about this variation in attribute quality of signalers.

3. Signalers and recipients have conflicting interests: successful deceit would benefit signalers at the expense of the recipients (e.g., signalers appearing to be a better mate or a more valuable social partner than is in fact the case).

4. Signal’s cost or benefit (for the signaler) is quality dependent (i.e., the marginal cost of the signal is negatively correlated with the signaler’s quality, or the marginal benefit is positively correlated with the same).

5. When these conditions are met, we expect natural selection to design signal senders and receivers to communicate via a costly-signaling framework; a key evolutionary basis for trust and investment in others (sociality).

The Informational Boundaries Hypothesis

….celebrating several key human natural history traits:Informivory

Contractual ReciprocityComplexly Structured Communities: Metagroups

Special systems are required for honest need and commitment signaling.

The Informational Boundaries Hypothesis

Provides a Specific Role for Supernatural Thinkingin Strategic Social Distancing Amongst Subgroups, which

Maximally Protects Human Capital and Intellectual Property.

Mastery of Intellectual Property

Mastery of Strategic Information

Proposed Context for Selection Favoring Religiosity

Humans are “informavores.” For us, information is the supreme commodity.

Fitness depends on reciprocity contracts.

Social exchange contracts form not just amongst individuals, but also amongst subgroups with high internal cooperation, but also operating together within moderately cooperative metagroups.

Such subgroups always are involved in a mixture of cooperative and competitive relationships, one with another.

Social distancing mechanisms that protect private information are crucial for subgroups to thrive, and so deliver maximal benefits to individual members. Homo erectus says, “Obviously.”

Supernaturally saturated world views maximally protect intellectual property.

Genes supporting diversified elaborate group-specific religious behaviors and underlying supernatural beliefs, help subgroups thrive in metagroup contexts by helping secure their intellectual property and human capital.

Humans always live in metagroups, composed of subgroups, even as hunter-gathers.

Hazda Campmate Networks vs. Generosity

From: Apicella et al., 26 January 2012, Nature; Hadza Metagroup, males left, females right.

Three Ways to Honestly Communicate Commitment: -- the first two do not “seal the deal” in metagroups --

Religiousness Mainly Potentiates the Third Way1. Ritual Debt Accumulate diverse debts to members

of own group, e.g., by performing costly rituals, or allocating costly altruism, e.g., in-group sacrifices, in ways that only members of your current sub-group observe or appreciate. Fallible in Metagroups!

2. Punishment Direct and indirect forms. Pre-pay to face punishment from members of your current sub- group if you defect or cheat. Fallible in Metagroups!

3. Strategic Stigma Cultivate potent yet calibrated degrees of distrust, between yourself and members of other sub-groups, which share contingently permeable boundaries with your own, preemptively diminishing selfishly lucrative but covert, unsanctioned social exchange opportunities outside your current sub-group, exchanges that would place your subgroup’s talent pool and intellectual property at risk.

Claiming pervasive supernatural sub-group specific influences

does two things:

1. Transforms you, in the eyes of out- group members, from a standard psychological puzzle to a “mystery,” making your mind ‘s workings seem systematically beyond investigation.

2. Makes your techniques and technologies seem not worth trying to steal. While your subgroup’s finished products might be transferable via strict, sacred trading procedures, the formulae for making them contain spiritual ingredients only available to members of your own sub-group.

Sherman and Emlen devised esoteric low performance cost behaviors to make themselves appear impervious to standard theory-of-mind analyses (e.g., Sherman’s hat, Emlen's hand signal).

Here, Sherman and Emlen masterfully destroy the motivation of a rival clan of evolutionary behavioral ecologists (not pictured) to inquire about NB&B secrets of effective field work.

Long ago….

Emlen and Sherman, shrewd leaders of Cornell’s Section of Neurobiology and Behavior Subgroup

Ghosts In Your Machine and Spiritual Spices In Your Recipes

Resembles the late, greatChristopher

Hitchens.

Who knows?

Ghosts In Your Machine and Spiritual Spices In Your Recipes

Summary: The function of religious fractionation within metagroups is to help sub-groups guard their human

capital and intellectual property.

Spiritualizing your moral deliberation processes makes you seem unpredictable to outsiders.

Spiritualizing your recipes for survival makes them seem unusable by others.

For outsiders, your mind and knowledge appear deeply “encrypted,” which may deter buyout efforts and attempts to illegitimately obtain group secrets.

Protecting Intellectual Property via Preemptive Retardation of Social Mobility or Opportunity

Qualitative transformationof signaler frompsychological

puzzle to psycho- spiritual mystery.

Predicted Data Pattern: Differential effects of contagion and informational boundary

issues on xenophobia vs. religiosity

Religion May Best Provide Highly Adaptive Supernormal Placebo Effects

A placebo effect is a real health outcome attributable to the context of treatment.

What is a supernormal stimulus?

Any evolved response to a stimulus may be vulnerable to being hyper-stimulated by an evolutionarily novel stimulus.

Such hyper-stimulation can be adaptive.

We have become masterful in identifying such hyper-stimuli, e.g., much art, ornamentation, makeup, photoshopping, etc. Manage minds, don’t just read them.

Religious rituals consolidate (sensu Matt Rossano) highly emotionally engaging stimuli to maximize strength of a full package of impressions made on the receiver's CNS.

Needs must be signaled consistently and reliably in systems of contractual reciprocity. That’s costly.

When individuals in a group have some degree of conflicting reproductive interests, costly signaling systems are favored by selection.

An honest signal is one that either is impossible to fake, or one that, due to its costs, is uneconomical to fake.

Example: exaggerating your need (lying) with a signal so costly that the net benefit of succeeding in getting the need filled is negative.

In contractual reciprocity, you don’t want to obligate yourself to partners who do not really need what you can provide, because your expected paybacks are low.

Religious Rituals Provide Supernormal Stimuli That Costly Signaling Has Been Accomplished

Consider a traditional healing ritual

Much more than the giving of a medicine is involved.

A complex emotional, hyper- stimulating treatment context is created.

This drives home the message that the patient’s need’s are recognized, even by group leaders and key supernatural agents, and they will be taken care of!

So, energy and other costly physiological states necessary to make signals of need convincing and honest can be redirected / altered.

This is why stress is relieved: need signaling is perceived as DONE, and immune system now can tap your full reserves. Hey! It’s alright. You can stop your

need and commitment signaling!

The End. Thanks for enduring.