Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion: Body, Brain, Belief (New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion, 10) 3030704076, 9783030704070

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New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion Series Editors: Lluis Oviedo · Aku Visala

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Hansjörg Hemminger

Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion Body, Brain, Belief

New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion Series Editors Lluis Oviedo Pontifical University Antonianum, Roma, Italy Aku Visala Helsingin Yliopisto, Helsinki University, Finland Editorial Board Helen de Cruz Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Nathaniel Barrett University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain Joseph Bulbulia Victoria University, Kelburn, New Zealand Miguel Farias Coventry University, Coventry, UK Jay R. Feierman University of New Mexico, Rio Rancho, NM, USA Jonathan Jong Oxford University, Oxford, UK Justin McBrayer Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO, USA

Introduction to the Series This series presents new approaches to the scientific study of religion, moving from the first generation of studies that try to ‘explain religion’ towards a more critical effort to explore alternative paths in correspondence with this highly complex human and social feature. The series supports the development of new scientific models that advance our understanding of religious faith, emotions, symbols, rituals, meaning, and religions’ anthropological and cultural dimensions, integrating them into more complex models. Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in the study of religious mind and behavior from new disciplinary fields, such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience and bio-evolutionary science. The amount of published research is impressive and has reached a level that now calls for evaluation and revision of current models and developments. This new series supports this fast-moving development, encouraging the publication of new books that move on from current research towards larger horizons and innovative ideas. This series: • Increases academic communication and exchange in this multi-disciplinary research area. • Gives a new impetus to the science and religion dialogue. • Opens up new avenues of encounter and discussion between more scientific and more humanistic traditions. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15336

Hansjörg Hemminger

Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion Body, Brain, Belief

Hansjörg Hemminger Doctor of Science with Habilitation University of Freiburg Baiersbronn, Germany

ISSN 2367-3494     ISSN 2367-3508 (electronic) New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion ISBN 978-3-030-70407-0    ISBN 978-3-030-70408-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction

The study of religion from the perspective of both the humanities and social sciences has become increasingly ripe for a re-look from an evolutionary perspective. Usually, the history of religion is regarded as a social history. Yet recently, a consensus has developed that it could be elucidated by concepts taken from evolutionary biology. A copious body of scientific literature from the last two decades aims at such an interdisciplinary approach, with widely different preliminary results. If, and to what extent, the social history of human religion, from a scientific perspective, might be turned into a natural history is a question which has provoked contradictory answers. The title of this book presupposes that both perspectives might be valid. But so far, their proper relation within the scientific study of religion has not been definitely framed. Some scholars model the evolution of human religion in strictly Darwinian terms. Others propose a synergy between evolutionary processes that are literally driven by biological evolution, and superimposed processes which may be considered Darwinian by some sort of analogy. Many other researchers have called for the allowance of developments in the history of religion which are plainly non-­ Darwinian. A successful synthesis is far off; despite the inspiring and prolific work already done. Therefore, the scientific study of religion, at present, is not a strong interdisciplinary project. Biological concepts transferred to constructs modeling the evolution of religion are often fragments, or simplifications, of the “state of the art” of evolutionary biology. One reason, beside the well-known difficulties of interdisciplinary work in general, might be that the biological research community (with few exceptions) takes little part in the enterprise. The evolutionary approach, however, requires a “strong” interdisciplinarity, which would mean the involvement of evolutionary biologists, especially those with both methodological and theoretical leanings. Accordingly, this book undertakes to invert the line of vision which at the moment dominates the field. Its guiding question is: How do the interdisciplinary models of religious evolution, which have so far been proposed, look from the perspective of biological methodology, and of the biological theory of evolution, as they currently stand? The question has no simple

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Introduction

answer, but reveals a number of epistemic and methodical difficulties which have to be dealt with separately: –– How can the subject area of religion be defined or described from the perspective of behavioral biology, so that it can be regarded as a biological research topic? –– There are subsequent versions of evolutionary biology that extend from the original Darwinism to the recent Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. So far, the evolution of religion has been modeled according to biological concepts pertaining to various versions, from simple “selection stories” to constructs which take advanced concepts into account, e.g., epigenetics, inclusive fitness, and group selection. –– The most important biological concept used in modeling the evolution of religion is coevolution: Most researchers currently propose gene-culture coevolution as the basic causal explanation of the evolutionary dynamic towards religion. From a biological perspective, one has to assess the fact that, in this proposal, the term coevolution denotes a process quite different from the process normally signified by the biological term. –– Important theoretical concepts of evolutionary biology, so far, rarely appear in models of religious evolution, e.g., neutral evolution, evolutionary drift, drift barrier, developmental evolutionary biology, system theory of evolution, and evolutionary constraints. Could it perhaps be important to include such concepts into an interdisciplinary approach to the evolution of religion? –– How can a biological approach deal with the asymmetry between the scarce empirical knowledge of prehistoric religion, and the immense body of knowledge concerning extant and historic religions, which has been assembled outside the natural sciences? –– How does paleoanthropological knowledge about evolution from Hominidae to Homo sapiens relate to the evolution of human religion? Are there recognizable evolutionary pre-adaptations of hominin behavior, cognition, and sociality? –– Does the cognitive science of religion (CSR), an important source of current explanations for the evolution of religion, assort well with behavioral biology and with the brain sciences? How should CSR concepts be interpreted biologically? –– Functionally, religion can be regarded as a bidirectional, individual, and cultural coping system to deal with life’s contingencies, risks and evils by rendering practical support, and by providing meaning for human existence in this world. How did these functions arise synergistically or perhaps competitively, in evolution? –– What can be learned about the psychodynamics of religious attitudes and experiences, and in turn about their possible phylogeny, by analyzing deviant, zealous, and rigorist forms of religion from an evolutionary perspective? –– Religion is part of human culture. Culture, in turn, is supported by a complex, multi-level system of behavioral, cognitive, and social features. How can such a system be modeled scientifically without reverting to a misleading reductionism and without inadvertently introducing non-scientific concepts?

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These and some other questions will be addressed in the following 16 chapters. Part I (Chaps. 1–4) deals with the epistemological and methodological requirements for the book’s enterprise. Part II (Chaps. 5–7) describes the “state of the art” of evolutionary biology in reference to hypotheses modeling the evolution of religion. The subsequent part III (Chaps. 8–10) summarizes the available data and “documents” which relate to the prehistory of religion, as it appears from the archeological and paleontological perspective. Part IV (Chaps. 11–14) discusses evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) in the context of a general psychology of religion. The final part V (Chaps. 15 and 16) presents multi-level concepts which might serve to model the evolution of human culture including religion.

Contents

Part I Religion Through the Eyes of a Biologist  Evolution in All Its Facets ������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   12  The Scientific Approach to Religion��������������������������������������������������������������   15 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   24  What Do We Know? What Can Be Known? ������������������������������������������������   25 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   40  Understanding Religion from the Inside��������������������������������������������������������   43 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   56 Part II About Evolutionary Biology and the Evolution of Religion Evolution: The Modern Synthesis������������������������������������������������������������������   59 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   70  Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Epigenetics and the Contingency of Evolution������������������������������������������������������������������   73 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   86 Gene-Culture Coevolution������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  100 Part III Phenomenology of Paleolithic Religion A Story Told Backwards����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  103 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  111

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 The Beginning and the End: Pre-Human and Neolithic Religion ��������������  113 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  121  Hominin Pre-Adaptations: Background to the Evolution of Religion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  123 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  133 Part IV CSR: The Cognitive Science of Religion  Evolutionary Psychology and Religion����������������������������������������������������������  137 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 Religious Fanaticism����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  166  Practical Religion and Spirituality ����������������������������������������������������������������  167 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  179  Magic, Religion and Evolutionary Ethics������������������������������������������������������  181 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 Part V Modeling the Evolutionary Path to Culture and Religion  Multi-Level Models of Religious Evolution ��������������������������������������������������  197 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  203 Conclusion and Outlook����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  205 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  212

Part I

Religion Through the Eyes of a Biologist

Evolution in All Its Facets

The purport of this book is a scientific one and the principal power of scientific methods to answer appropriate questions is presupposed. General-purpose criticism of science—which usually involves criticism of evolutionary theories—is not discussed here. Neither those who believe that the scientific study of religious evolution in general is flawed because of an ideological motive to refute religion, nor those whose studies disclose just such a motive, will get a hearing. The scientific understanding of the evolutionary processes leading up to human religion neither diminishes nor reinforces the truth of religious ideas on the ontological (the metaphysical or existential) level of human knowledge. Religious ontogeny, the stages in which individual religious thinking develops in Western culture, has been studied much earlier than religious phylogeny, by Jean Piaget (1954), Oser and Gmuender (1997) and others. These studies did not answer metaphysical questions of truth. Neither will the scientific study of religious phylogeny answer them. The epistemology of science excludes proofs and disproofs of religious world-views. The common response to such a dictum is, of course, logically or empirically irrefutable, scientific conclusions concerning the veracity of world views are impossible. But in view of the evolutionary history of human religion, is it not overwhelmingly probable that no external reality corresponds to religious ideas, and that a naturalistic monism is the only plausible metaphysic option? Or in view of the purposefulness and richness of human evolution, is it not overwhelmingly probable that there is a hidden agenda behind it, a reality beyond the scientifically explored world, and that supernaturalism is the only plausible metaphysic option? In principle the author is quite willing to debate the different degrees of plausibility which could be assigned to metaphysical premises by philosophical arguments, but not here. A book with this topic (which the author, a scientist, will never write) might start with David Hume’s “A treatise of Human Nature” and go on to Plantinga (2000), Visala (2011), Schults (2014) and many others. In this book, only degrees of scientific plausibility will be considered. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_1

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Evolution in All Its Facets

That, however, is easier said than done. For 300 years, while the modern, secular and scientific western culture developed, evolutionary concepts denoted and still denote many different ideas which relate to world views, philosophical ontologies, concepts of human nature, historicist ideologies and so on. For most contemporaries, the word evolution generates the image of an all-embracing cosmic, terrestrial and biological history encompassing billions of years, including the comparatively short history of humanity. The majority remains confident—even while the authority of science deteriorates to a certain degree—that this monumental history is based upon scientific knowledge. At the same time many educated persons may be aware that the great evolution tableau is, in its entirety, not a scientific theory. It interprets several related theories ontologically (in traditional language: metaphysically) and provides a grand narration which transports meaning for those who agree with it. The dazzling story tells everything (so it seems) about the origin and development of the world, life and mankind and exerts fascination far beyond its scientific role. Hertel, a biologist, (Hertel 2010, p. 4) distinguishes between the “straightforward biological sense” and the “grand, all-encompassing, philosophical sense” of the word evolution. “The biological enterprise, that is evolutionary biology, was shaped by Neo-Darwinism and deals with the variation (mutation and recombination) of organisms, with selection and adaptation, ecological niches and species formation … The larger, philosophical edition of the evolution story can be regarded as picturing the historic course of the world and the Weltgeist. The enterprise deals with the birth and development of stars at one end and with the evolution of culture and the economy at the other end. Biology is only the middle part of the trajectory … The grand theory emphasizes the continuous emergence of novelties … and tells us the way the world went on and on from helium to spirit” (translation by the author). Some authors christen the grand philosophical picture of cosmic evolution developmentalism, to distinguish it from inner-scientific theories dealing with cosmic, geological and biological evolution. Unlike scientific evolution theories developmentalism does not need a unifying causal background theory. Primarily, its character is descriptive and narrative. Nonetheless, the picture it draws inspires efforts to base the grand tableau of evolution upon an encompassing causal theory. Perhaps there are universal laws which govern evolution from the Big Bang to the final contraction of the cosmos—if it should indeed be a closed cosmos. If that is asking too much, at least the course of evolution from the first macromolecules in a hypothetical primal ocean up to human culture should be consistently explainable. There must be, developmentalism supposes, a theory of everything which grows and develops by natural causes. The hope behind this expectation is that not only the social sciences and the humanities, but also philosophy as a whole, could be integrated into an extended evolutionary biology like some evolutionary Genghis Khan adding conquered provinces to his realm. This hope was prophetically expressed by E.O. Wilson in the last chapter of his pivotal work “Sociobiology” (Wilson 1975, p. 271): “Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth.

Evolution in All Its Facets

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In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species.” The sweeping, radical reductionism behind this program will be discussed several more times in the following chapters. It anticipates a complete and final biological explanation of phenomenology and the evolution of human religion. By the way, the term phenomenology, in this book, is used with its common, scientific meaning: A phenomenological description (or explanation) depicts the empirically determined interactions of phenomena, without referring to theoretical inferences as to why this or that relationship between phenomena is observed. Thus, the phenomenology of religious evolution is more or less congruent with the phylogeny of religion, with the pedigree of religious forms and functions. A causal explanation of evolutionary trajectories, on the other hand, has to refer to theoretical principles of evolution theory. Historically, studying the phenomenology of religion (with and without evolutionary concepts) was rather a philosophical than a scientific enterprise, with the result that the academic discipline of religious studies was usually grouped with the humanities, not with the sciences. (Phenomenology as a philosophical movement does not concern the book’s topic, except during a single digression in Chap. 4.) In this first chapter, it suffices to state ex ante that a program of radical reductionism is impossible to perform by scientific methods. It is based upon a profound misunderstanding of what the natural sciences actually do, and principally can do. Biology and the philosophy of developmentalism will not merge with and will not turn into the content of an eternal textbook. Nonetheless, the desire to integrate all human world knowledge in a single, universal vision is understandable: The mythopoetic turn of the human mind demands a grand narrative which puts gods (if they populate the respective world), humans, nature, past and future in an imaginable, esthetically satisfying—and in this sense homogeneous—relationship. But this longing, universal as it may be, is not science, but competes with science. Grand narratives, including developmentalism’s grand vision of universal evolution, cannot be scientifically objectified. The hope for homogeneity of all knowledge within one system of “statements about everything” is a hope for absolute truth, for an eternal textbook, which science will never provide. Any homogenous thought system is fragmentary and often unrealistic. Complete homogeneity of knowledge, in science and everywhere else, is neither possible nor desirable. Efforts to turn the grand evolutionary vision into a unified scientific theory are as unavoidable as they are futile. But they predictably return again and again in the history of science. We will see (part III) that within the last decade, some schools which take part in the scientific study of culture and religion have turned down that well-­ travelled road. That is why this book, which purposes to study the evolution of religion scientifically, still has to address the culturally rampant vision of a grand philosophical evolution. This scientific study is an interdisciplinary project, which is always influenced by the history of evolutionary thought outside science. Consequently, it

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becomes repeatedly necessary to separate scientific knowledge from convictions generated by the general atmosphere of beliefs: the so-called public convictions. That is far from easy. Chapter after chapter we will meet amalgams of scientific theories and popular narrations of evolutionary history which, well beyond what science knows, aim at expressing the cultural identity of those who share these narratives. To put it pointedly: Western modernity comprises not only scientific knowledge about the evolution of religion. A religion of evolution interacts with scientific knowledge and interprets it on a number of fields of public discourse. An exemplification: Many scientists are convinced—and express the conviction in their writings—that, before Charles Darwin published his great work “On the origin of species…” in 1859, western culture was dominated by a static world view. This view in turn depended upon religious ideas which proposed the dominant position of mankind within a divinely created world order. The “Origin of species…” supposedly revolutionized this view by replacing the static picture of natural history with an evolutionary one. The throne of humankind was overturned by science. Humans became one of the many animal species which appear, and will disappear, in evolution. Now that historic conviction is a half-truth at best. The nineteenth century was awash with evolutionist (or better developmentalist) ideas long before Darwin. To a certain degree these developmentalist views were expressed by science, but mainly in the fields of philosophy and art. Indeed, Darwin caused a scientific revolution, together with Alfred R. Wallace and some predecessors. But that turning point in biology did not produce evolutionary philosophies as spin-offs. Darwin’s work was taken up by already existing philosophical and political positions and re-used for their purposes. The best-known example is historical and dialectical materialism, an important part of the political philosophy later called Marxism, which was well in place at the time Darwin published his main work. Marxism, in turn, was only one expression of the modern belief in evolutionary progress, which has governed western culture since the time of the enlightenment. It included the conviction that science would not only eliminate external evils of human life, but would produce a New Human, as a future step in the evolution of humanity. The New Human would not be the old Homo sapiens living a better life. It would be a new species of super-­humans. Küenzlen (1994) analyzes the central role of this hope in the history of modernity, which it occupied long before Transhumanism became its recent expression. An impressive instance of nineteenth century developmentalism which predates Darwinism is Richard Wagner’s Ringcycle. The libretto was published in 1853 (Fig. 1). MacInnis (2016) quotes C.S. Lewis’ assessment of Wagner’s world view: “The tragedy of the Evolutionary Myth has never been more nobly expressed than in his Wotan: its heady raptures never more irresistibly than in Siegfried. That [Wagner] himself knew quite well what he was writing about can be seen from his letter to August Rockel in 1854. ‘The progress of the whole drama shows the necessity of recognizing and submitting to the change, the diversity, the multiplicity, the eternal novelty, of the Real. Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own downfall. This is all we have to learn from the history of Man—to will the necessary and ourselves to bring it to pass.’”

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Fig. 1  Siegfried: The composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), in his Ringcycle, interpreted the medieval Lay of the Nibelungs as a vision of the New Man, impersonated by Siegfried, who would appear in future human evolution. The famous illustrations of “Siegfried and the twilight of the gods” by Arthur Rackham (London 1911: Heinemann p. 34) depict the hero, as he appears in the opera. The Ringcycle is an impressive example of evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century before the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the origin of species”. (public domain)

Wagner composed “a powerful expression of the dominant story told by modernity, one of inexorable progress and development until our eventual undoing, the heat death of the universe—the twilight of the gods.” Of course, the biological theory of Darwin and Wallace, up to a point, was welcome to the proponents of developmentalism’s political and metaphysical visions. Nonetheless, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin could not agree upon a joint view of evolution, but that is another story. We know from Darwin’s autobiography that he was generally uncomfortable with the inclusion of scientific results into grand, evolutionistic philosophies. His intellectual honesty and his talent for constructive doubt led him rather to a cautious, agnostic metaphysic, certainly not to an evolutionistic ideology. By the way, Sigmund Freud, the founder of Psychoanalysis, is partly to blame for the misconception that Darwin’s scientific work engendered philosophical developmentalism. His dictum that science delivered three mortal insults to humanity by Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin and himself, firmly planted that misconception into the collective mind of western intellectuals. However, innovative scientific theories, even of the most sweeping kind, do not hit the world of thought as the Chixculub meteorite hit the ecosystem of the dinosaur world, leaving a completely altered biosphere behind. Scientific innovations come into being by historic

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developments, not by catastrophes. In turn, they cause new developments, but no new world order. The story of the three insults by science to humankind is charming but has little to do with the complicated historic reality. Not that this writer would concede for a moment that Sigmund Freud, even within science, can claim an equal standing with Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, or with Albert Einstein,  Charles Darwin, Alfred R. Wallace and Isaac Newton. A hundred years of empirical psychological research has demonstrated to the scientific community that the New Psychology (as Psychoanalysis was called at the beginning of the twentieth century) was a mixed scientific blessing. Its contributions to the study of religion certainly did not help towards developing a solid scientific approach. Have we already forgotten the mystery story from Sigmund Freud’s “Totem and Taboo” (part 4: The return of totemism in childhood) which told us that human religion began with a primeval murder? According to Freud, the tribal patriarch was clubbed dead by his oppressed and cruelly expelled sons. What the equally oppressed and sexually exploited daughters had to do with the murder, if they were a party to it or abhorred it, the sleuth S.F. who uncovered the primeval crime never told us. In any case, the bloody-handed sons, to ease their consciences, made their father into a god figure. That was the beginning of all religion. His psychoanalytical theory of religion’s origin was heavily criticized from the beginning, but it also exerted an immense influence upon the contemporary psychology of religion, anthropology and ethnology. Freud supposed, against all contemporary ethnological information he could have used, that early human societies consisted of a single alpha-male who assembled a harem of females. That assumption had no empirical basis. On the other hand, it was a common conviction in his time that human religion began with totemism. But hardly any experts believed that totemism started with a singular event in a prehistoric society, which resembled that of the genus Gorilla, not that of the genus Homo. In addition, Freud ignored all knowledge of historic religions and followed his own, rather obsessive, ideas. He identified the beginning of society, religion and the Oedipus complex all together with this one event in human prehistory. Religion, he concluded, was and is a collective system of guilt repression, and an effort to deal with the unconscious, psychic ambivalence caused by the killing of the respected and hated father figure. Today, nobody in developmental psychology mentions the Oedipus complex, and nobody who studies religion scientifically mentions “Totem and Taboo”. That example alone should be ample warning not to put too much trust into the momentary stages of scientific discourse about the origin and evolution of religion, and even less trust in its popular expressions. Today as well as in the past, degrees of scientific plausibility should be painstakingly separated from degrees of “narrative” plausibility which a good story will always have, especially if it is a story which sits well with our general convictions. The task is never easy and sometimes, at least for a time, might be almost impossible to perform. But what, exactly, is meant by the term “scientific plausibility”? How does science produce reliable knowledge? The answer in shorthand is that science produces, as a first step, descriptive knowledge of the natural world by substantive definitions

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of natural things, of the res naturalia. The descriptive knowledge has the format of typological, metering and procedural data. However, this knowledge is not simply factual. The desired data are distilled by both commonplace and specialized empirical methods (observation, experiment, documentation etc.) from the sensory input which connects humans with the world they live in. Descriptive knowledge, thus provided, serves as the basis for theories explaining causal interactions between natural objects and processes by using theoretical concepts, for example species and fitness in biology. The term evolution, at least within science proper, is usually such a theoretical concept. Consequently, the scientific study of religion treats its subject as part of the res naturalia which science can investigate, regardless of the ontological status of religious beliefs the researchers might hold. Therefore, scientific knowledge is subject to what we have called the “reflexive-phenomenon”, because scientists, including the content of their brains, also belong to the res naturalia. All scientific knowledge must be reflexive, like gazing into a looking-glass, because the subject of scientific research is also its object just as a person looks into a mirror with the object of viewing his or her own reflection. Scientific knowledge about the evolution of culture is knowledge about the evolution of science. The evolution of the religious mind is also the evolution of the scientist’s mind which develops hypotheses about its own phylogeny. Solid-state physicists and mineralogy experts, among others, can probably ignore remote, anthropological reflections of their results year in, year out, and produce good science. But scientists analyzing human evolution cannot abstain from reflecting on the effect of their results upon their own beliefs. The self-­ reference is too direct and too massive. For one thing, the metaphysical abstinence of science proclaimed here will merely be an abstinence in name, if one does not reflect carefully how one’s scientific knowledge relates to one’s image of humanity and one’s world view. Particularly the mutual influence of evolutionary concepts in science and developmentalist beliefs should be kept in view. That point will be taken up again in Chap. 3. For another thing, we have no pre-scientific knowledge of Brownian molecular motion and crystal lattice structures. We know only from science that they exist. But we have a universe of knowledge about humanity, including ourselves, outside the realm of science, from deep-set intuitions up to solid experiences forged into monumental cultural traditions. Scientific knowledge about the evolution of culture and religion has to elucidate what we already know about culture and religion, or its realism must be questioned. Does the scientific community ever disregard such an obvious aspect of its method? Regrettably, the answer is yes. Hypotheses have been posited, which regard the religion of a Neolithic priest in the Near East or of an Aurignacian big game hunter as if our ancestors were not people at all, but odd bipedal mammals functioning quite differently from modern scientists. They did not. The issue pertains to a number of pivotal arguments which will be developed in this book, up to the last chapter, which will present general conclusions and a final outlook. Returning to the scientific method: To speak of evolution as a theoretical concept might be a stumbling block for some readers who contend, perhaps in discussions

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with critics, that evolution is simply a fact. In doing so, they are far from wrong, but they are not speaking scientifically. If the arguments exchanged in such a dispute are judged by criteria of good common sense, one can imprudently uphold that evolution is a fact. In scientific theories, however, there are no plain facts. There are only data and their theoretical explanation. Scientifically the concept “evolution” provides for an immense range and depth of multiple scientific explanations not only in biology, but in cosmology, geology etc. No other theoretical concept is in sight which could replace it, without sliding into ridiculous parodies of scientific explanation. Of course, this perception is the background for the, within its own framework entirely correct, conclusion of “folk philosophy” that evolution is a fact. If the term evolution were to be used only in a scientific context and in folk philosophy based upon common sense, there would be no need to say more about it. But even outside the world views of developmentalism, the term is widely and indiscriminately used in many fields of discourse for almost every process that includes some sort of unidirectional development in time. Some sort of competition between different possible directions is usually involved, but even this is not always the case. Sometimes the processes depicted as evolutionary show more or less close analogies with biological evolution. Other processes which are equally presented as a form of evolution are at best remotely analogical with the evolution of organisms, sometimes the versatile word is even used metaphorically, without any claim to a kinship with biology. Such metaphorical allusions to the evolution of organisms have a secure place in technical history and in economy (e.g., in the work of Friedrich August von Hayek), in the history of fashion and so on. It is important to distinguish this inflationary use of “evolution speak” from genuine interdisciplinary projects: evolutionary epistemology, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary psychology and, of course, the topic of this book: the scientific study of religious evolution. Therefore, in this introductory chapter, it remains to consider what the concise, abstract definition of the scientific methodology sketched above may mean for the practical scientific project in question? An equally practical, but comparatively simple, example might lead towards a preliminary answer. In Homer’s Odyssey (Book I, 213) the goddess Athena asks Telemachus if he really is Odysseus’ son. Telemachus replies: “My mother tells me that I am his son. But I do not know, because nobody knows his father for certain.” It was always like that in human history. Neither gods nor mortals could be sure which father begat which child, except (usually) the mother. It was sometimes possible to exclude certain parentages. If Desdemona had come down with a blond, blue-eyed son, Othello, the “moor of Venice”, could not have been the father. But it is rare that all paternities except one could be excluded. Today science knows what nobody knew before: A comparative analysis of parental and filial DNA determines fatherhood with a very high degree of certainty. The analysis requires a wealth of descriptive knowledge, which was amassed during the century-long history of science: about the cellular structure of organisms, the features of their germ cells, the material coding of hereditary information, the process of genetic recombination in sexual propagation, and so on. Science describes all these phenomena with the terms, categories and measures of its specialized

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language. Scientific theories explain the causal interactions between the respective, natural phenomena. Thus, they model the relevant natural processes: in case of a paternity test the stochastic appearance of parental genetic “markers” in the filial genome. The scientific knowledge behind the test is reliable. Precisely, it is irreversible and progressive: It increases continuously by the ongoing scientific enterprise. It is also unambiguous, as soon as it becomes irreversible. Alternative descriptions and explanations disappear or retreat into pseudoscience. However, the term “irreversible” does not mean that the momentary content of textbooks or the conclusions of scientific papers will stand firm forever. Irreversibility is the end result of a long process of trial and error. As will be explained later, the scientific study of religious evolution has not reached this level of certainty. Not that relevant descriptive knowledge is lacking. In Chap. 3 it will be outlined that the scientific study of religion can rely upon a large, though asymmetrically distributed, store of data. Usable theoretical concepts are also available. That is the topic of the following chapter. The difference between explaining the ontogeny of Telemachus scientifically, and explaining the phylogeny of religion scientifically, is the immense difference in complexity between involved systems. But is the human genome not a very complex system? Compared with the human behavior system, and with the ecosystem in which humans live and play their part, it is not. The data volume of the genome is large, but its structure is simple and uniform. In addition, the structure is stable. The genome of an individual does not change significantly during a human lifetime. If the genome of Odysseus were analyzed 20 years after Telemachus was born, it would have remained almost identical since the time of conception. The gene-pool of the species, however, changes constantly during its evolution. The superimposed social, cultural and religious performance patterns change even faster and more erratically, and with them their interaction with the surrounding ecosystem. To explain the evolutionary trajectory toward religion, which these systems produce by their constant interaction, in a detailed manner is almost hopeless. Only highly simplified, certainly not irreversible, models might be within reach. We will see (part III of this book) that the scientific study of religious evolution usually evades this almost insurmountable problem. It resorts to adaptationist or selectionist or, if one wishes to use the concept, ultimate hypotheses. They postulate an indirect or direct adaptive advantage of religion and trace a possible course for its gradual emergence. To analyze the value and the risk of such hypotheses is one of the main topics of this book. It is significant that experts in the field express contradictory opinions concerning the “state of the art” reached so far by the scientific study of religious evolution. Wunn and Grojnowski (2019) are confident that they found “the first correct theory of religious evolution”, starting with “an analysis of evolution in biology” and ending “with a discussion of what a proper theory of religious evolution should look like.” In a radio interview, their colleague Krech (2019) explained why any new attempt to depict religious evolution scientifically could expect, as the best possible result, to fail less foolishly than before. Most expert assessments undulate between these extremes.

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The question where science stands in this matter is not a spurious one. In fact, the epistemological difficulty to explain the evolution of religion scientifically is one instance of an overarching problem for science which may be labeled the measureless complexity of the mesocosm. Organisms and their phylogeny are phenomena of the mesocosm, the middle dimension of nature. They possess neither the surprising simplicity of the microcosm, with its elementary forces and particles, nor the ordinate structure of the periodic table and the bonding forces which build molecules, up to the macromolecules of biochemistry. Organisms lack the serenity of the macrocosm, with its cosmic expansion and the development of stars, with its singular beginning and the cosmic background radiation which still tells of this origin. Even when regarded at one point in time, living systems are by comparison very complex and lack clear patterns. Their development in time adds more dimensions of complexity. An explanation of evolutionary change in human evolution has to consider processes on several system levels: molecular, cellular, physiological, perhaps ethological and psychological, sociological and cultural. All these levels are causally connected by upward and downward interactions, which are seldom linear and constant, but follow every conceivable pattern; from meshed regulatory circles to tipping processes. No wonder research programs circumvent the necessity to model the evolution of such a system causally. However, at the end of this chapter a possible misunderstanding has to be prevented: The “measureless complexity of the mesocosm” is no reason to believe that science is not competent to analyze its phenomena. Certainly, it is no reason to introduce non-scientific concepts, or to blur the distinction between science and philosophy. The practical consequence is different: The theoretical concepts science uses must be adequate for the phenomenological level they are applied to. Another consequence is that, to model interactions within the system, simplified theoretical constructs ought to be accepted. Therefore, how should one approach the phenomenon called religion, a universal and central part of human culture, from a biological perspective?

References Hertel, R. (2010). Evolutionsbiologie, Ethik und die Furcht vor der Ungleichheit. In J.  Fehrle, R. Heinze, & K. Müller (Eds.), Herausforderung Biologie: Fragen an die Biologie, Fragen aus der Biologie (pp. 3–27). Berlin: Lit. Krech, V. (2019). Gescheiter scheitern. Interview by Christian Röther. Retrieved November 31, 2019, from https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/evolution-­der-­religion-­gescheiter-­scheitern.886. de.html?dram:article_id=435634. Küenzlen, G. (1994). Der Neue Mensch: eine Untersuchung zur säkularen Religionsgeschichte der Moderne. München: Fink. MacInnis, J. (2016). A medium for meeting god: C.S.  Lewis and music (especially Wagner). Faculty Work, Comprehensive List. Paper. 549. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from http://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work/549. Oser, F., & Gmuender, P. (1997). Handreichungen zum Lehrplan für das Fach Kath. Religionslehre in Baden-Württemberg. Rottenburg: Erzbisch. Ordinariat Freiburg, Bisch. Schulamt.

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Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic Books. Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schults, F. L. R. (2014). Theology after the birth of god. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Visala, A. (2011). Naturalism, theism and the cognitive study of religion, religion explained? Guildford: Aldershot Press. Wilson, E.  O. (1975). Sociobiology: The abridged edition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2019). Religious speciation: How religions evolve. Berlin: Springer.

The Scientific Approach to Religion

On the one hand, the biological theory of evolution comprises an account of the phylogeny, of the natural history of the biosphere. Its components are the phylogenetic system of past and present life forms, the history of their geographic distribution, the descent of their genetic information etc. On the other hand, the theory provides causal explanations by modeling the forces which drive evolutionary change. Accordingly, from a biological perspective the evolution of religion can be studied phenomenologically as the natural history of religion, and causally by modeling the interactions of behavioral innovations with the environment which led to religion. This book does not cover the history of historic religions in the plural. It focuses upon the prehistoric evolution of religion as a feature, or an ability, of the species Homo sapiens and perhaps the Hominini preceding it. The book’s focus is on the evolution of religiosity not religion as defined by Angel (2019). He defines religiosity as an anthropological term denoting the ability to believe in a religious sense, and the presence of the behavioral, cognitive and social abilities to take part in a religious culture. For the sake of fluent reading, the terminological distinction between religion and religiosity is not consequently applied in this book. But the substantial distinction is nonetheless important. A related distinction should be made between religious capacities and religious performances. The categories were suggested by Haidle et al. (2015, see also Chap. 15). Capacities are denoted by comprehensive theoretical terms; an example is the term niche construction, which will turn up frequently in this book. Performances are the actual behavior patterns which can be empirically researched and turned into descriptive knowledge, for example the influence of large herbivores on the flora of their habitat, one instance of niche construction. Accordingly, religious capacities emulate a certain aspect of human religiosity, which is scientifically described or explained by a theoretical notion. For example, the term sense of transcendence denotes within the scientific method (not in philosophy and theology) such a theoretical construct. It cannot be directly researched by empirical methods. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_2

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empirical data consist of documented beliefs in higher and lower worlds, of reported experiences with otherworldly dimensions of reality, of rituals addressing transcendent beings etc. Such phenomena can be described scientifically by substantive definitions, and (in part) theoretically explained by the capacity called “sense of transcendence”. On the one hand, it is obvious that a scientific model of the evolution of human religiosity has to conceive the phylogeny of religious performances. On the other hand, their emergence might be explained theoretically by the evolutionary formation of a certain religious capacity. In principle it is possible, however, and indeed it will turn out to be the case, that the causal conditions driving the phylogenetic emergence of religiosity in Angel’s sense do not likewise explain the phylogeny of specific religious performances. Religious performances, by a further distinction typical for biological methodology, have both a form and a function. Feierman (2019, 37) explains that religious forms “are what religious things are. They are in the ‘physical’ ontological realm of mass, energy, force, space, time and information. Religious functions are what religious things do. They are non-‘physical’ concepts …” Thus, religious forms are conceived by descriptive knowledge, by procedural, typological and metering data. They comprise religious beliefs, which are available for empirical study as information communicated and documented by individuals, or by a religious community. E.g., a gesture of religious supplication (kneeling before an altar, lowering the head, using traditional prayer formulas etc.) has a form which can be described physically, and which is rooted in the history of human morphology, emotionality and sociality. The gesture has a religious function as well, which is theoretically ascribed to it (disregarding, for the moment, the fact that the supplicant can be asked what he sees as the function of his behavior). In this case, perhaps the help of an otherworldly being is sought, or retribution for evil deeds may be averted: The religious function of the gesture serves to influence otherworldly actors. The psychological function might be coping with existential fear, the social function might be the upholding of social status. From this point of view, the evolution of religion in general is an evolution of religious forms which implies an evolution of their functions. From a straightforward Darwinian perspective, selective pressure upon the adaptivity of functions is the driving force of religious evolution. It will be one of the main topics of this book to look into the applicability of adaptationist or selectionist models of the phylogenetic appearance of religiosity, and of religious forms or performances. Depending upon the result, the biological distinction between proximate and ultimate causation will apply in different ways. In evolutionary biology, ultimate causation explains features in terms of selective forces which stabilize or change them. Proximate causation refers to the immediate factors which, for example, cause a believer to partake in a religious ritual. There are always superimposed causes to every conceivable proximate explanation, up to a “first cause” (which cannot be part of a scientific theory). For example, a superimposed cause for attending a religious ritual, behind the immediate personal reasons for attendance is its cultural availability. That in turn has historic causes and so on. On every level, it is possible to look for ultimate explanations. But it may not be always expedient to do

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so. The crucial question is which part Darwinian processes play in the architecture of causations which have to be taken into account for modeling the evolution of religion, and which part is played by other processes, e.g., by undirected drift processes, or by the goal-orientated actions of social agents. Parts II and V of this book will address this question. It will turn out that the classic, theoretical distinction between proximate and ultimate causation cannot be consistently upheld within the current framework of evolution theory (see Chap. 5). The distinction between the form and function of biological features, or performances, has no direct counterpart in other sciences. Therefore, the appearance of the theoretical term “function” in many causal biological explanations regularly leads to epistemological confusion. It is not self-evident, and is easily misunderstood, that functions, purposes, intents, aims or motives have to be attributed to the “natural things” science investigates. If one adheres to Feierman’s (2019) exposition that biological functions are not in the “physical” ontological realm, confusion can be avoided. But the matter deserves a more detailed analysis, because teleological concepts have played an important role in the history of biology up to the present. Formerly, scholars imported them into science from the philosophies of their respective periods to deal with the functionality of biological features. Philosophical teleology ascribes an intrinsic purpose or objective (telos) to nature. According to Plato, a demiurge created the world in accordance with the pattern of eternal ideas. In his philosophy, the source of nature’s purpose and meaning is external, it transcends nature. Other philosophies ascribe an internal or immanent purpose to the world which is part of its essence. Usually that applies to pantheistic systems and to the natural philosophy of the nineteenth century, for example to Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (Ruse 2010, 25f, 150ff). Aristotle’s philosophy, which strongly influenced early science, knows both an external telos (the prime mover) and an internal teleology (entelechy) of living things. The question whether teleological concepts could and should enter into biological theories was for long controversial. Immanuel Kant argued that such concepts compromise the naturalist and determinist premises of science. The functionality of biological features was for him no reason to assume that living beings are subject to different causal forces than those operating on inanimate matter. Insofar, he contradicted Aristotle. But on the basis of the biology of his time he found no way to combine the two fact patterns he wished to uphold: the functionality of living beings and the causal determination of nature (Kritik der Urteilskraft 1790, part II). In any case, Kant saw clearly that it is impossible to explain organs and behavior patterns of organisms without ascribing a function to them. Even the features of plants have purposes. In a description of the ecology of roses, it is hard to avoid the assertion that their thorns deter herbivores. The natural dentition of predatory mammals is built for hunting and consuming meat. Its phylogenetic and ontogenetic development cannot be turned into scientific, descriptive knowledge without describing its function. Animals have motives in the sense that the functions of their behavior patterns are represented in their cognitive space, in the overall control system which governs their acts.

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Sciences other than biology do not need a concept of functionality. If a chemist tells us that the outer electron shell of a carbon atom has the function to bond with four other binding sites, he is speaking metaphorically. The colloquial sentence could be translated into an abstract formalism which includes no concept of functionality. In biology “function” is no metaphor. Thus, the step from teleological metaphysics to biological explanations seemed, for a long time in the history of science, an obvious one. Therefore, many biologists adopted the idea of a building power (nisus formatives) and of a life force (vis vitalis) from natural philosophy. With the neovitalism of Hans Driesch, a teleological explanation (in this case of the purposefulness of ontology) persisted into the twentieth century. One can say with some justification, that it was the project of Charles Darwin to solve the dilemma posed by Immanuel Kant. He set out to construct an explanation for the origin and development of biological functionality consistent with the methodological naturalism of science. He succeeded. But to this day, philosophers, theologians and assorted anti-scientists disagree with the fact that he succeeded. From many directions, one hears various arguments which try to substantiate that, contrary to Darwin and the entirety of modern biology, functional explanations in biology represent a hidden teleology which actually contradicts Darwinism. Creationists believe that the scientific community is aware of this fact but denies it publicly for ideological reasons. The Intelligent Design movement (ID) even argues that biology needs an external teleology to become a proper science. An inner teleology, e.g., a regression towards vitalism, would fit with ID arguments even better; however, an inner teleology would not fit with their theological and political objectives. Therefore, the advocates of ID ignore their best philosophical option. In any case, it would not be a viable scientific argument. According to the restrictions set forth in Chap. 1, opinions such as these will get no hearing in this book. To repeat the constructive question which pertains to the theoretical concept “functionality” in biology: How far-reaching is Darwin’s solution (of course in the form of present-day evolutionary biology) as a source of causal explanations ranging upwards from the basic, genetic level of human beings’ complex behavioral system, to culture and religion? The next step towards an answer concerns the descriptive knowledge of religion which biology, like any other science, needs to consider causal explanations at all. Is there an overall definition of the behavioral, cultural and cognitive phenomenon called religion, which biology could use? Obviously, the notions religion and religiosity are theoretical constructs which serve as comprehensive categorizations of a wide variety of cultural performances and individual experiences. They have certain features in common but differ in detail. Thus, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to formulate an abstract definition which marks the boundary between religious and nonreligious behaviors, ideas and artifacts. The difficulty is in stark contrast to the everyday experience that one knows what religion is, as long as one is not compelled to define it in a diacritic manner. This is a strong indication that, from a biological perspective, the term religion designates a subject area which does not allow clear-cut demarcations, and thus has no definition in a logical sense. Instead religion is a projective concept (in

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Fig. 1  Virus particles: A virus particle is neither unambiguously alive, nor is it simply dead matter. In biology, “life” is a theoretical term which is regarded as an injunction: There is no clear demarcation between biotic and abiotic phenomena, but a transition zone which has to be described. Analogically, there is also no clear distinction between religious and nonreligious human performances. Thus “religion”, if the term is used in biological descriptions and explanations of human behavior, has the features of an injunction. (Christian Daum/pixelio.de)

theoretical biology an injunction) which is identified by describing the transitions to adjacent areas (e.g., art, society, knowledge, worldview, philosophy) as precisely as possible. In theoretical biology, injunctive terms are common: gene, body, plant, animal, heredity etc. A prime example is the term life, which is as hard to define as religion, and as easily to apprehend by a description of the transition between living and inanimate things or between life and death (Fig. 1). By the way, the theoretical terms culture and cultural evolution are even more difficult to define. For a detailed analysis of these difficulties, see Heyes (2020). In this book, the terminological problems will be avoided by using the word culture, more or less, as in everyday English: It denotes socially transmitted knowledge and behavior patterns which characterize a particular human population. In addition, it is assumed that a common cultural capacity designates the species Homo sapiens. Thus, the term cultural evolution includes both the evolution of this capacity, and of specific cultural performances. Accordingly, the following passages will not try to define religion, but to construct an injunction. As a first step, the outline of Tim Crane (2017, x-xi) might serve, Crane states that a religious world-view “should... be seen as a combination of two fundamental attitudes. One is what I call ‘the religious impulse’: a sense of the transcendent, of there being ‘more to it all than just this’. The other is an attitude to other people that I call ‘identification’: belonging to a historic tradition and making sense of the world through ritual and customs as an expression of this tradition. (This includes the moral element in belief too.) The link between these two attitudes is given by the idea of the sacred.” The merit of this short description is that it depicts the two levels on which religious performances can be empirically investigated: religious experiences of individuals and groups psychologically, social and cultural forms of religion by

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behavioral and social sciences. These levels, Crane proposes, are connected by the idea of the sacred, which interprets religious experience and justifies organized religion. All three notions (the religious impulse, the identification with a religious tradition, and the idea of the sacred) are, from a biological point of view, theoretical constructs denoting religious capacities. They serve to describe the transition between religious and non-religious phenomena: If the religious impulse is lacking or only weakly present—if there is no traditional expression of religious experiences, or traditions are about to disappear—if no idea of the sacred interprets individual experiences and cultural traditions—then the performances reside in the outskirts of religion, or do not belong into the religious field at all. However, the transition between presence and absence of religious impulses is difficult to depict in detail. (The strength or weakness of religious traditions is much easier to describe.) According to the classical description by Rudolf Otto (1917), the experience of the sacred subsists in an inexorable tension between the mysterium tremendum, the secret which causes awe and fear, and the mysterium fascinosum, the secret which causes longing and rapture. Otto coins the term numinosity to integrate the incomprehensible and the intimate, the scary and the enchanting, into the idea of the sacred. Therefore, cultural performances and individual experiences are more religious the more obvious it is that the numinous plays a central role. Consequently the religious impulse, the sense of transcendence, the spiritual conception of the world, can be regarded according to Clottes (2016, 27) as the “awakening of a thought that goes beyond the circumstances of everyday life, the mere adjustment to material necessities demanded by foraging, reproduction, and survival”. Spirituality might be understood as receptivity, as sensitivity, for a transcendent dimension of existence. Thus, the presence or absence of this receptivity marks the closeness or the distance of cultural performances and experiences to religion. Clottes alleges that spirituality in this sense is a human universal preceding culturally shaped religions, which evolved later as “organized spirituality”. Consequently, the initial stage of religious evolution would be the emergence of religiosity in the form of basic spiritual experiences, which by their integration into culturally passed-on knowledge led to a spiritual dimension of world perception. Clottes’ position has been widely held in the anthropology of religion, based upon the fact that animistic beliefs are inherent in most indigenous cultures (Fig. 2). Animism implies that all living beings, as well as certain material objects, sites, rivers, weather phenomena etc. partake in a spiritual essence, and are thus somehow alive. To put it more vividly: Animism expects no categorical distinction between animate beings which have agency, and inanimate things which have not. Neither is there a fixed border between a spiritual and a physical dimension of the world. Thus, sentience is an attribute not only of humans and animals; but (in changeable degrees) of plants, minerals, mountains, rivers etc. They may be personified as water spirits, tree deities etc. The concept might pass across to virtual symbols: words of power, true names and magically potent expressions. It should be noted in passing that this view is difficult to combine with some propositions of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) which will be discussed in Chap. 11.

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Fig. 2  Water spirit: The Wooden Water Spirit head crest (pipligbo) is an example of masks which are used by male coalitions of the Kalabari Ijo people (Niger Delta Valley, Nigeria) to revere water spirits. Together with ancestral spirits, they represent in their religious system natural forces which influence the fortunes of the living. Such animistic beliefs are supposed to reach far back into the prehistory of human religion. The exhibit is from the early twentieth century CE , shown by the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (public domain)

If animism is a genuine religion, or rather a common, basic element of various religions of indigenous people is an open question. Either way the conclusion is attractive that an intuitive perception of the ambiguity of the world, of realities beyond everyday life, was an initial capacity on the evolutionary way to religion. It might have led to the advanced belief that invisible reality is more solid and perfect than the visible world, devoid of the dangers and sufferings of everyday life, and that the visible world is only its shadow. The supposition that the intuitive aspect of spirituality comes first in evolution, and that elaborate ideas of the supernatural, which are communicated by organized religion, are a later aspect, seems plausible, but it is hard to prove conclusively. (The following Chap. 3 will explore epistemic difficulties.) Descriptions of religion from a sociological perspective usually take the human religious capacity for granted. They focus upon the macro- and meso-levels of social and individual identification with organized religion, and consequently define and systematize religion as an array of performances and functions. Turner (2018, 191) depicts religion as a communication system which construes the meaning of life by means of culturally implemented beliefs and rituals. Thus religion is defined as the “conception of the supernatural” in a community which shares “common beliefs about the nature of a supernatural realm and the forces and entities inhabiting this realm”, which engages “in individual and collective rituals directed at totems symbolizing this realm and its inhabitants”, and who “are members of a cult structure where rituals are practiced, often under the guidance of religious specialists.”

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The description implies that organized religion functions as a coping system. Its cult structure and the shared beliefs deal with life’s contingencies, risks and evils. Rituals ensure by means moderns call “magical” that the good order of life is maintained, and that the unpredictable, unmanageable forces of the world will, nonetheless, supply people with what they need. Individuals who are afflicted by illness, sorrow and loss experience cultic and cognitive support. Religious narratives tell the people what they are and what they should be, what the world is like and how it came to be. Thus, religion provides meaning for the whole of human existence in this world. Sosis (2018, 48) describes organized religion similarly, but in more phenomenological detail, as an assembly of several, interacting cultural performances or—in Feierman’s terms—forms: “Religious systems typically maintain eight core elements: authority, meaning, moral obligation, myth, ritual, sacred, supernatural agents, and taboo. Each of these elements is most usefully conceived of as a unique category that may have an independent phylogenetic history, but within religious systems they are inherently interconnected to the other elements within the system.” In this way, both authors depict religion as it appears from a bird’s eye view of the social sciences. They outline the various forms by which, on the basis of an idea of the sacred, spirituality is organized in a given culture, and the functions which they obviously have for the community, and for individuals. Yet any causal theory modeling the factors which drive the evolution of religion also has to account for religiosity in general: for the capacity to have spiritual experiences as well as for the origin of its organized forms, and their individual and cultural functions. Indeed, humans experience a world which defies easy interpretation. It is beautiful and odious. It causes ecstasy and terror. It is well-arranged and chaotic, understandable and obscure. Without any scientific knowledge about the constant change of organisms in evolution, about the inevitability of extinction and ecological renewal, without any idea of cosmic transience, our remote ancestors must have known that there is no permanence in life. The only certainty is death. Religion provides an all-encompassing meaning for these contrasting, stirring and sobering existential experiences. And it provides, in its organized form, means to deal practically with loss and suffering, joy and success. But why did this evolve, and no other, answer to the (at some point of cognitive and cultural evolution) inexorable need for a comprehensive meaning of existence? To us it appears to be a natural answer, because we are human. But from a functional point of view, the spiritual option is not an obvious, maybe not even a probable, way to understand the ambiguities of existence, and to deal with its practical consequences. There must have been an emotional and mental predisposition to lean toward a spiritual option. Another example: In the social life of humans there are moral obligations. All religions are concerned with the upholding of moral norms, though not all religious systems enforce the rules of their societies, and not all reckon on divine retribution. If they do or not: The prevalent belief in a sacred, universal, cosmic order, from which the moral law derives its authority, exceeds the social functions of moral norms. There have to be other, psychological or spiritual, purposes of this specific religious form. The equally widespread conviction that the sacred moral law

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demands a behavior which neither individuals nor societies ever achieve is accompanied by a numinous experience: the peculiar mixture of awe and dread linked with the believed existence of another, purer and holier world. Spiritual experiences of individuals and religious performances of societies evolved together, conditioning each other, but were shaped by different factors. To describe and—perhaps—explain their evolution demands a holistic approach. Efforts to identify a single behavioral capacity, or a single religious function, as the starting point of the natural history of religion are unconvincing. For example, proponents of neurotheology (Newberg 2010) regard altered states of consciousness as the initial core of human religion. But there is little reason to agree with them. ASCs are experienced (at least in modern times) outside as well as inside religious systems. A spiritual perception of the world does not depend upon them and does not follow from them. One hundred years ago, dreams were proposed as the initial spiritual experiences of mankind. Indeed, sleeping and dreaming are states of altered consciousness everybody experiences. But religion entails the spiritual significance of dreams, not the other way round. Dreaming is but one particular experience of many which are meaningfully interpreted by religious belief. To mention a classic view in passing: Emile Durkheim thought that totemism was the ultimate starting point for all religions, and that the sacred emerged from taboos evoked by totemistic beliefs. They postulate a kinship or a relationship between humans (individuals and groups) and certain animals and plants. Totems interact spiritually with believers, serve as their emblem and are part of their identity. In this way the totem confers spiritual benefits to the related humans, depending upon the keeping of the taboos associated with it. It should not be damaged or killed, sometimes not even touched or mentioned in ordinary talk. Totems are in this sense sacred or holy; as well as certain objects and places which are equally off-limits. Living beings, things and places which are taboo are thus strictly different from those which are profanely used. Yet the forms of totemism known to science are part of complex religious systems which differ considerably, and which are not all hunter-gatherer-religions. It is not at all probable that genuine totemism came at the beginning of religious evolution. Compared with the ubiquitous animism of indigenous cultures, it has a decidedly advanced appearance. Accordingly, it cannot be ascertained that the idea of the holy emerged from it, although Durkheim’s idea remains a conceivable possibility. Narr (2008) points out that there is a related, but more basic form of belief he calls animalism, which is known from extant cultures as nagualism and theriocentrism. It is characterized by spiritual ties between humans and animals. It goes hand in hand with typical rituals: placating the spirit of dead prey, performing oracles with animal bones, mimicking game animals and conducting fertility rites for them. Some (or at least all important) animals are thought to have spiritual essences or souls and magical powers. They can be guardians, power animals or consorts. Human and animal forms are seen as interchangeable, and deities are envisioned theriomorphically. They change between human and animal forms and form a bond between them. It is imaginable that animalism was among the first forms of religion to evolve, and that it later evolved into full-fledged totemistic systems. It is also

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possible to imagine that an unspecified type of animism came first and developed into a more specific animalism in cultures dependent on big game hunters for their livelihoods. So far, we do not really know. That, which can be concluded about prehistoric religious performances from archaeology and paleontology will be described in part III of this book.

References Angel, H.-F. (2019). The processes of believing in religion’s evolution: A cognitive neuroscience hypothesis. In J. R. Feierman & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 87–103). Abington, New York: Routledge. Clottes, J. (2016). What is Paleolithic art? Cave paintings and the dawn of human creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crane, T. (2017). The meaning of belief: Religion from an atheist’s point of view. Review by Neil Spurway. ESSSAT News and Reviews, 28, 3–4. 2018. 27–30. Feierman, J. (2019). The evolutionary biology of religion specific beliefs and inter-religious conflict. In J.  R. Feierman & L.  Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 37–45). Abington, New York: Routledge. Haidle, M.  N., Bolus, M., Collard, M., Conard, N.  J., Garofoli, D., Lombard, M., Nowell, A., Tennie, C., & Whiten, A. (2015). The nature of culture: An eight-grade model for the evolution and expansion of cultural capacities in hominins and other animals. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 93, 43–70. https://doi.org/10.4436/jass.93011. Heyes, C. (2020). Culture. Current Biology Magazine, 30, R1246–R1250. Narr, K. J. (2008). Prehistoric religion. Britannica online encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2008-04-09. Accessed 20 February 2020. Newberg, A. B. (2010). Principles of neurotheology. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Otto, R. (1917). Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. Breslau: Trewendt & Granier. (Reprint München: Beck. 2004). Ruse, M.  S. (2010). Science and spirituality: Making room for faith in the age of science. Cambridge Mass: Cambridge University Press. Sosis, R. (2018). Why cultural evolutionary models of religion need a systemic approach. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 45–61). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Turner, J. H. (2018). Religion as an artefact of selection pressures to make hominins more social. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 190–205). Leiden/Boston: Brill.

What Do We Know? What Can Be Known?

For scientific research into the early evolution of human religion, basically two sources of descriptive knowledge are available. On the one hand, there are traces of religious ideas and practices from prehistoric cultures, preserved by fossils and artifacts, and described by the methods of prehistoric archaeology, of paleoanthropology and supportive disciplines. If it were possible to relate specific genetic information to religious capacities, the analysis of “gene fossils” by modern genomic methods (paleogenetics) would be another source of descriptive knowledge. That is not to be expected, however. On the other hand, there is extensive knowledge concerning the religious ideas and practices of historic human cultures, including cultures that no longer exist, which are well documented and multifaceted. This knowledge is provided by an impressive array of diverse methods: by historical, ethnological and ethological research, by the sociology of religion, religious psychology, by literary studies and the history of art. For example, developmental psychology models the ontogenesis of religious ideas under modern western conditions; comparative ethology describes differences and similarities between the social behavior of great apes and humans, and of their cognitive development, including the development of moral judgement. Sociology, by explaining the social communication of religious forms and functions, extracts common, even universal, features from the diverse religions of extant Homo sapiens. There are universal patterns of human cognition, described by cognitive psychology, which have a role in religious thinking, and might be traced back to early hominin adaptations. There is human morality with its relationships to religion and so on through many other fields of research. This huge knowledge domain allows the formulation of retrospective hypotheses, both phenomenological and causal ones, about the evolutionary path or prehistoric process by which the various emotional, cognitive, social and cultural capacities connected to human religiosity came about. For example, both the differences and the similarities of the ontogenetic paths leading towards the respective social and cognitive abilities of humans and apes © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_3

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have led to conclusions about the evolutionary adaptations behind human peculiarities, which in turn might figure as causes for the emergence of religious behavior. Such retrospective hypotheses interpret the scarce archaeological and paleontological “documents” of prehistoric religion by applying analogies with present and historic religions. The most famous figurative cave paintings with a probable religious meaning are those from the Cave des Trois Frères (Ariège department, France), which were created between 33,000 and 25,000 BCE. One depicts an apparent hybrid between a man and a stag, initially thought to be a “sorcerer”. This interpretation depends upon an analogy with the hunting magic known from shamanic cultures, where hunters enact their intended prey animal. Later, however, the interpretation of the stag-man as a spirit or deity gained ground, drawing upon an analogy with animalism. Higher beings are envisioned in animal form, or as being able to change between human and animal forms, thus uniting them. According to Krech (2019) “from 3000 BCE on the belief in spirits, demons and other intermediate beings” is well documented, including metamorphoses from animal to human and vice versa. If the antlered man represents a supernatural being analogous with those envisioned 20,000  years later, the idea of an otherworld inhabited by spirits might have been already present. But caution is expedient  (Fig. 1). In an analysis of the much later (from 13,000  BCE to the present) paleoindian rock art of the American Southwest, Malotki (2018) states: “Rock art scholars concur that any attempt of Western observers, conditioned by their own biases and conceptions, to arrive at the emic significance of deeptime ‘fossil art’ is a fruitless exercise. Nonetheless, some of the major hypotheses that have been advanced in search of the art’s meaning—hunting magic, totemism, and shamanic belief—offer some seductive, if unverifiable, exegetic possibilities.” It will be discussed in Chap. 8, that similar interpretations are offered for the middle Paleolithic cave paintings of southwest Europe. They illustrate the importance of big-game hunting for the artists, as well as their intimate connection to the animal world. Everything known about the Aurignacian technology and economy demonstrates that they occupied the ecological niche of a highly adaptable apex predator. Their religion (whatever it was) must have been part of the architecture of cultural symbols by which they made sense of this way of life. That allows at least speculative conclusions about its contents. This example illustrates a methodical forestructure of the pertinent research: There is an immense asymmetry between the two bodies of descriptive knowledge, the rare “documented” traces of prehistoric religiosity on the one hand, even if it is augmented by additional paleoanthropological data, and the vast accumulated knowledge about the forms and functions of extant and historic religions on the other hand. The first is easily summarized (see Chap. 8). In contrast, the body of descriptive knowledge about extant and historic religions is too vast to be comprehended by one researcher. Therefore, it comes into full play only by the cumbersome processes of “normal science”, by decade-long arguments which sway to and fro between the disciplines, schools and competing institutions. In due course the understanding of a document of prehistoric religiosity, like the “sorcerer” of Trois

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Fig. 1  Petroglyphs: The so-­called Newspaper Rock in Utah carries a large number of petroglyphs left by Native Americans. The oldest images are about 2000 years old. Others were inscribed into the rock surface no more than 200 years ago. Although the images are historically young, compared with prehistoric rock art, interpreting the stories they tell, and the ideas they represent, is very difficult. This includes possible religious messages. The abstract symbols used by the artists are no longer known, their meaning is lost. (Luigi Anzivino, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Newspaper_Rock_ petroglyphs.jpg, “Newspaper Rock petroglyphs”, https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-­sa/2.0/ legalcode)

Frères, develops because the concerned disciplines run it through all the paces at their command. Thus, the stag-man was not a sorcerer but a deity, or a representation of clan totemism. Or perhaps it was misrepresented and, on closer inspection, shows no hybrid being at all. (This over-critical position was debated and justly discarded.) Or the stag-man was something or somebody we know nothing about, notwithstanding our extensive knowledge of historic religions. Analogies with historic religions inevitably dominate how the evolution of religiosity is modeled. They provide blueprints for the path evolution might have taken to give rise to a religious capacity. In Chap. 1 the argument was developed that the “immeasurable complexity of the mesocosm” renders it almost hopeless to provide a sufficiently intricate model for the interchanges of all the selective and systemic processes which must have contributed to religious evolution. (We will have another look at this question in the subsequent Chap. 5, and in part V at the end of this book.) Analogies with the known—or sometimes suspected—developments of historic religions offer an alternative for the construction of hypotheses. Often, they are

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used as a matter of course, and the question does not even appear whether there is critical evidence to verify the usefulness of a respective analogy. For example, according to most anthropologists the idea of the sacred (constructed by science as a theoretical concept) is a product of rituals. They evoke numinous experiences, which make the invariable, canonical content of the ritual sacred. The conclusion is based on extensive evidence and is certainly trustworthy (though perhaps not universally applicable) as far as extant religions are concerned. But does it tell us that the initial hominin ideas and experiences of the sacred depended upon rituals? Perhaps it was the other way round: Rituals evolved to “organize” the religious impulse. Numinous experiences might have evolved from existential fear, as Wunn (2018) thinks, and became embedded into a religious system, including its rituals, in subsequent stages. The sequence of evolutionary steps is impossible to verify by prehistoric evidence. The analogy with recent religions leads to reasonable grounds for speculation, no farther. The entry “Prehistoric religion” in the Encyclopedia Britannica (Narr 2008) is an instructive example of scientific scepticism, although even there some critical evidence (e.g., concerning middle Paleolithic animal cults and sacrifices) is disregarded. The author works his way chronologically from Homo neanderthalensis to the Neolithic civilizations, and thematically from cannibalism to magic, accompanied by the monotonously repeated caution that an attractive analogy with modern religion is indecisive, that the scarce data allow different interpretations, and that one speculation or another did not pass the test of time. There are good reasons for these cautions, because the publicly available scientific “state of the art” is Janus-­ faced: On the one hand, there is the in-depth discussion of new and old data, of competing hypotheses and interpretations, which make up “normal science”. On the other hand, there are well-drawn pictures which cut across this tedious discussion and tell us exactly how the evolution of religion happened. They consist of mutually dependent assumptions, which singly might be reasonable enough, but become unrealistic, taken together. That probabilities of assumptions, if they are regarded as propositions in formal logic, have to be multiplied, not added up, is a platitude. But it goes against the grain of our imaginative mindset. Concept A is to 50% true. The same can be said of B, C and D.  The complete picture, if all four concepts are needed, has a probability below 10% (if we abstain from drawing up formal truth tables). But often the assumptions on which a picture of one evolutionary process or another relies are simply added up: tesserae which have to be fitted together. An example of such an attractive, but speculative, picture is the work of Mithen (2005) about the “singing and dancing Neanderthals “. Music is a universal form of human behavior having important psychological, social and cultural functions in all known human societies. Its evolution, including singing as a form of musical communication, is a striking example of a so-called gene-culture coevolution, similar to that of religion. (The theoretical concept coevolution will be analyzed in more detail in Chap. 7). There are anatomical requirements for singing, e.g., adequate hearing and vocalization. Neurobiological functions had to evolve (cortical systems connected with music and language), linguistic capacities had to be established biologically and socially etc. As in the case of religious evolution, there is a vast body of

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knowledge concerning the history of music in many cultures including its actual practice, the individual development of musical aptitudes in childhood, and other factors bearing on human musicality. There is even impressive information about the acoustic behavior patterns of animals, which encompass a number of elements present in human music. On the other hand, the body of archaeological and fossil evidence for the musical capacities of Hominini is meager, similar to the evidence for prehistoric religious forms. Mithen combines a number of retrospective analogies to propose that Neanderthals used a special form of proto-music instead of the conceptual language typical for Homo sapiens. The author calls it (Mithen 2005, 172, 234, 245, 267) “a prelinguistic musical mode of thought and action” and a “music-like communication system that was more complex and more sophisticated than that found in any of the previous species of Homo”, although he adds that for Homo ergaster “singing and dancing may have provided both indicator and aesthetic traits for females when choosing mates” (Mithen 2005, 187; see also Dissanayake 2005). He supposes that Homo sapiens lost some musical capacities, which were inherited from late (or even early) Homo erectus, by the evolution of language. It is hardly necessary to mention that these statements are entirely beyond anyone’s knowledge. First of all, there were other contemporary clades of Homo besides Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, which are mainly known from genomic research, and whose cultural evolution is completely unknown. Mieth’s first assumption is that music had adaptive value for prehistoric Homo and did not arise as an evolutionary by-product of other innovations. The assumption is reasonable, but far from certain. The same unresolved discussion goes on about the initial or derived adaptive value of religious intuitions, as Norenzayan (2013) calls them. The reasoning continues with the second assumption that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis alike inherited musical capacities from some hominin ancestor which were much farther evolved than the musical elements in the known acoustic behavior of the Hominidae. The alternative is that the evolution of human music began after the split of the latest Homo clades, perhaps during the more than 200,000 years of Homo sapiens’ evolution in Africa. There is no evidence for or against either alternative. The third, crucial assumption: Homo neanderthalensis had the respiratory and vocal abilities for speech, but not the cortical “hardware” to form the associations and metaphors necessary for human language (Mithen 1996). He could not know that paleogenetic research in 2007 would show that Neanderthals possessed a FOXP2-gene identical with that of Homo sapiens. The gene is important for the development of language. Its presence is no conclusive proof that Neanderthals could speak. But the only argument against it is weak, namely the rarity of artifacts which imply symbolic thought. The fourth assumption is that Neanderthals, which were big-game hunters and relied on a complex family life, required advanced communication. They certainly did, but there are a number of possibilities regarding how this communication could have worked with or without a fully developed linguistic or “musical” language.

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The assumption does not support any conclusions about dancing and singing, and about the lack or the presence of speech. Chimpanzees are well able to coordinate their occasional hunting of small monkeys and other prey in male groups. They neither sing nor speak, but rely upon mimic and gestic signs, and upon a close observance of how the other members of the group act. It would probably have required more coordination, and much more foresight, to be able to hunt the giant Irish elk and the elephant-sized Steppe Rhinoceros of the late Pleistocene with flint-­ tipped, wooden lances. The Neanderthals somehow managed these feats. But how exactly, remains an open question. Although A, B, C and D add up to an attractive picture of singing and dancing Neanderthals, this picture is almost certainly unrealistic because of its reliance on several assumptions of moderate probability. But outside highly specialized scientific discourse, such skepticism is counter-intuitive. After all, the tesserae form a coherent picture, which harmonizes with many details of the vast body of knowledge about human singing and music. But this is the trap, which science must avoid. The dancing and singing Neanderthals are characters of an evolutionary “just so story” (Steven Jay Gould). Rudyard Kipling told us “how the leopard got his spots”. Similarly, attractive and entertaining stories tell us how humanity got religion. The literature about the evolution of religion is cluttered with examples. Some are mentioned by Wunn and Grojnowski (2016, 40–44) and Rova (2018, 600–608). The study of religious evolution partakes in a public discourse where speculative storytelling competes with the reliable results of scientific research. Doubt and indecision are not the results modern culture expects from science. It expects (besides practical technical usages) indisputable truths, which can be made into identity-building narratives. Cultural and national identity are established by stories, as well as are the identities of a village, a clan, a family and a person. Stories of origins are indispensable. Ethiopia came into being by a fateful affair between the Queen of Sheba and Salomon; the USA by a (more recent) exodus of brave, pious protestants from England. It is unavoidable that, in a scientific culture, scientific knowledge about human origins blooms into identity-building stories. An indication is the reaction of the Op-ed pages to new discoveries, which predictably consists of some variation of “Until now it has been thought that... But now we know that...” What has been thought until now was usually not established scientific knowledge. It was “how we told the story”. The impact of some new discovery is always overstated. The history of human religion, according to popular news, would have to be rewritten about twice a year, while in fact only some details were added to the overall picture, or were cast into doubt by new results. Generally, mass media cover scientific data related to evolution not in their established, irreversible form. They report new discoveries and ongoing discussions, which have not yet reached the textbooks. Paleoanthropological finds (“hobbits” from Flores, Homo naledi from South Africa) are addressed when they are new and controversial. Established results of scientific discourse are rarely reported. Preliminary speculations and skirmishes between experts are treated as sources of “scientific truth” with all the authority science still has in late modern western culture.

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A comparatively harmless example (not about religion) is the communication of a new study of hominin dental evolution (Gómez-Robles 2019) which proposes that the evolutionary split between the lineages of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis occurred not about 400,000 BCE, as “has been thought until now”, but happened up to one ma ago. (That would place our hypothetical, musically gifted Homo erectus ancestor even before that time.) Yet the scientific community was well aware that the last common ancestor of the two clades could only be tentatively placed on the phylogenetic timescale, mostly by genomic methods. This imprecision remains, because the conclusions based on dental evolution, though interesting, rely on hypothetical premises which are open to discussion. Science always includes a fringe of incomplete hypotheses, speculations and imaginative suppositions. They are part of the scientific enterprise and are often fertile. But ideas at large in this volatile fringe are often short lived (reversible). Sometimes they promote errors, they are regressive. Nonetheless, their incessant succession in the mass media dominates the public perception of scientific theories. Therefore, scientific knowledge about our own evolution and about evolution in general, appears in the media as much more controversial and much less irreversible than it actually is. That amplifies the tendency to take the fragmentary knowledge available outside expert milieus as “the latest word of science” and to concoct interpretations and meanings which fit in with respective preconceptions. There are good reasons why this tendency is almost impossible to overcome within and without the scientific community. Contemporary science is divided into highly specialized branches, even within one traditional discipline. To a larger public, its results are often unavailable, or only in a simplified, pictorial mode. Most people receive science in the form of “thumbnails” which show DNA’s double helix, wooly mammoths with a glacier in the background, Lucy the Australopithecus female on the African Savannah, the Big Bang like the explosion of an atom bomb, and the cosmos expanding like a balloon. Such picturesque images are not only simplified, they are often misleading. For example, most non-biologists know the term survival of the fittest. But they understand it in a way which is only remotely connected to its meaning in evolutionary biology. That is no anecdotal remark. A number of didactic studies in Germany (e.g., by Dietmar Graf, Giessen University) have shown that even the majority of teacher trainees who will become biology teachers misunderstand the theoretical concept “fitness”, as it is used in the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology (see part II of this book) (Fig. 2). Neither humans nor gods know which mental images are induced by the word Big Bang in a newspaper. Certainly, they have little to do with astrophysics, because a time-space singularity cannot be imagined. Strictly speaking, all scientific explanations derived from theories which include abstract, theoretical concepts are unimaginable, except when they refer to events perceptible by our senses. The term Big Bang can be regarded as a metaphor at best. It cannot be replaced by a literally correct term from natural language. “Literally” correct is only the mathematical language of astrophysics. Many educated people are aware that they do not understand this language. This writer does not understand it. But evolutionary biology is

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Fig. 2  Dunes—Several grass species are adapted to the extreme growing conditions of coastal dunes. They withstand blowing sand, high salt concentrations and freshwater shortage. In popular understanding, even in biology courses at school, “fitness” is understood as a successful adaptation of this kind. That makes “fitness” a descriptive term. The conclusion is that, for example, well adapted grasses have a high fitness. In biology, however, fitness is a theoretical term which either indicates that a genetically mediated, evolutionary innovation increases the propagation success of the respective population (absolute fitness). Or the term expresses the relation between the propagation successes of genetically different populations (relative fitness.) The ecological success of a species and the fitness of evolutionary innovations are not necessarily correlated. (source: author)

in a different position. It deals (at least partly) with vivid, eidetic phenomena, with plants, animals and their struggle for survival. Thus, biological “thumbnails” are easily confused with theoretical and practical knowledge. Many educated people are not aware of the fact that their understanding of the language of evolutionary theory is as small as their comprehension of astrophysics. Their vivid mental picture of lions struggling for survival by hunting zebras, and zebras struggling for survival by running from them, is not about evolution as science explains it. However, they are not aware of this discrepancy. The discrepancy between scientific knowledge and its public reception is unavoidable. It turns into a social and political problem if one forgets that scientific knowledge is illustrated, but cannot be fully understood, by the accompanying “thumbnails”. Sadly, with regard to evolution that is rather the rule than the exception. The mass media transfer the impression (the social media even more so) that their consumers know all about evolution, at least all they need to know to draw

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their own conclusions. In addition, the stories of human evolution communicated by high school textbooks, popular scientific books, TV documentaries, high-brow journals and youtube clips are more than simplified, representing overconfident information about the results of science. They are also (sometimes mainly) part of an ongoing political and cultural discourse about what we are, and what we should be. Conflicting worldviews with their alternative images of humanity compete by different narratives, which nonetheless are usually based on roughly the same scientific information, minus its ambiguities. Pointing out the many lacunae would not serve their purpose. The universal human narrative urge, born by the irresistible mythopoetic character of our imagination, is in constant conflict with the scientific enterprise, because—as Berthold Brecht has aptly put it in his Galileo Galilei—science is the art of doubting. Shaping narrative identity is the art of assuring, of creating a consent in a community by means of shared narrations. Doubting and assuring are uneasy partners at best. It is not surprising that scientists sometimes play the game both ways. Like everyone else, researchers are social and cultural beings and tend to confirm their own Weltanschauung by the way they communicate results to the public. They ascertain their view of religious evolution by narratives consistent with their scientific knowledge, but which surpass it in scope and assuredness. Scientific depictions of the evolution of lichens, or of the dynamics of volcanism, do not expose researchers to similar temptations. The public is not exposed to lurid tales regarding the cunning means by which a sac fungus forces green algae into miserable slavery nor to the exploits of a fibrous despot as the anti-hero of an epic story about liberty lost and regained by valiant monads. The skyward struggle of a mantle plume’s fiery tongue of magma through the cold wasteland of a tectonic plate might invoke a comparison with the ascent of the world spirit through gross matter towards cosmic consciousness. But somehow scientists and their popularizers alike seem to miss the golden opportunity to spread spiritualism by popular geology. Not so if the ascending heroes are our own ancestors, who struggle against near-impossible odds, come close to tragedy, but finally emerge victoriously as ourselves. Stories of narrow escapes make good yarns. Genomic data indicate that early Homo sapiens went through a population bottleneck. We all seem to have originated from a small population of a few thousand African individuals. Several accounts of the rise of modern Homo sapiens exploit the theme and report that a few individuals survived near-extinction along the African coastline living on seafood and with scarce water sources, eventually developing into the technically minded, ingenious creatures which became us. But the genetic bottleneck, by itself, is no proof of high environmental stress. A separate, small and rapidly evolving population might spread out later and replace other populations of the same species. Usually, good scientific theories do not make good stories. For example, Tomasello (2016) concedes that his sketch of the evolution of human morality in part depends upon “imaginative reconstruction”. According to the review by Sullivan (2016, 37) he summarizes the pertinent, descriptive knowledge very well. But his causal hypotheses, the reviewer states, resort to “untested adaptationist thinking”, with the laudable difference to other authors that Tomasello points out his own use of imagination.

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The transformation of scientific knowledge into publicly acceptable, identity-­ asserting narratives is facilitated by the rampant subjectivism and individualism of our late modern culture. The scientific quest for objective truth (a difficult epistemological concept) is not popular. No need to point out what this deplorable development does to politics and decision-making in general. The examples are everywhere. Scientific knowledge aside, the majority of citizens judge the validity of facts mainly, or exclusively, by their acceptance within the particular scene or “opinion bubble” which is socially shared. Stronger claims to truth, especially scientific conclusions related to personal interests are rejected as presumptuous and intolerant. Usually this does not mean that science is generally maligned. But the scientists who insist on telling the public facts that one or the other milieu does not wish to hear, are maligned indeed. The claim that scientific knowledge is objectively (better: intersubjectively) true usually will not be directly denied. But in public, one presents one’s own subjective version of the scientific truth. The array of convictions which are supposedly proven by evolutionary biology encompasses racist ideologies, esoteric cosmologies, anti-vaccinationist movements, creationist ideas, and last but not least arguments against man-made climate change. Scientific publications are not immune to the subjectivist and individualistic cultural atmosphere, neither are scientific methods. It has been argued already that the evolution of religion and human evolution in general are topics which are especially prone to non-scientific influences and temptations from public fields of discourse. To provide examples is not an agreeable task. But some exemplifications, at least, cannot be avoided, or the critical perspective taken by this writer may appear over-­ skeptical to many readers. Do reputable scientists really “ascertain their view of religious evolution by narrations consistent with their scientific knowledge, but which surpass it in scope and assuredness”? Can we not trust our scientists to do better? No, they are not to be trusted, including the author of this book. However, the scientific enterprise as a whole is to be trusted to produce, in the long run, irreversible and progressive knowledge. It does so by constantly exercising the “art of doubting”, especially of doubting first oneself, then other scientists. One of the most popular, voluminous and especially well-written accounts of human evolutionary history is the book “From Lucy to language” (Gamble et al. 2014). It presents the results of a project by the British Academy which was accomplished between 2001 and 2010. “Lucy” is the name of an unusually complete, 3.2 ma old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. A scientific assessment of the project’s results requires the inclusion of the “benchmark papers” (Dunbar et  al. 2014). The popular book version offers a vivid and instructive view into the scientific study of human evolution. But it also contains quite a collection of imaginative “adaptation stories” (Hemminger 2017). The authors support the hypothesis of the “singing and dancing Neanderthals” because it fits in with their overall conviction that mutual comforting or “grooming” behavior played an all-important role for the social cohesion of prehistoric Homo societies. Then we read that about 7 ma ago the African climate became more arid. The ancestors of horses migrated to the continent, with them came grasses which provided their sustenance. That, in turn, was the initial impetus for the phylogenetic

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separation of the Hominini, our ancestors, from the other Hominidae. The so-called savannah hypothesis proposes that towards the end of the Miocene grassland expanded at the expense of forests. By developing an upright gait, the first Hominini adapted to the changed climatic conditions. In fact, however, grass and grasslands existed in Africa long before the late Miocene. The first horses proper (genus Equus) arrived only 4 ma later. (The Miocene genus Hipparion reached Africa about 10 ma ago, but was no ancestor of Equus.) To distort these incidental facts is sloppy arguing but does not discredit the savannah hypothesis. However, the hypothesis is partly discredited by now, because the earliest known hominin fossils suggest that the upright gait evolved while they were still mainly arboreal. It was rather a pre-­ adaptation to a more terrestrial lifestyle than its result. But the question remains controversial. Later in the book, the reader meets a long excursus which presents information about the evolution of Homo neanderthalensis, our close cousin. It proposes that the brain of “classical” Neanderthals was differently organized than that of Homo sapiens, though their neocortex was roughly the same size. Neanderthals evolved farther north: in Eurasia, not in Africa. According to the authors, they developed larger eyes as an adaptation to the lower light intensity in higher latitudes. The increase in size would have enhanced the photosensitivity of the eye, and visual acuity under low luminance conditions (dusk, twilight). The adaptation, however, would have come with a cost: The processing of more visual information would have required the enlargement of the optical cortex (occipital cortex) at the expense of other areas. Accordingly, a smaller part of the neocortex was available for the “social brain” and for other intellectual capacities. That difference in brain organization was, according to the authors, the crucial competitive disadvantage of the Neanderthals. They became extinct when modern Homo sapiens reached Eurasia 70,000–40,000 years ago, despite their better anatomical adaptation to the cold climate of that period. In the original paper (Pearce et al. 2013) inner casts of 21 Neanderthal skulls are compared with fossil skulls of anatomically modern humans. However, only the eight skulls which are temporally close to those of modern humans are relevant. In this small sample, the average volume of the eye socket of Neanderthals was 13% larger. To interpret the difference as an adaptation to light conditions in higher latitudes, however, is unconvincing. The core geographic range of the classical Neanderthal (from about 150,000 to 40,000 BCE) was southwestern Europe, not the Arctic. Our own eyes are very well adapted to the light conditions in Spain and France by their ability to accommodate a wide spectrum of light densities during the day. Homo has no rods, which are responsible for scotopic vision, in the retinal area which transfers acute visual information to the brain: the fovea centralis. There are only cones which are inactive under low luminance conditions. To extend the fovea centralis slightly would have done nothing to enhance photo sensitivity, because the concentration of cones there is already at a maximum. Our eyes depict the environment not statically, like a film camera, but scan the visual field constantly. Photosensitivity under daylight conditions depends upon that of the fovea centralis, only marginally upon the size of orbit and lens.

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Many nocturnal mammals have large orbits and lenses, to catch more light at night. But their retina is also differently organized than that of Homo and all other Hominidae, to optimize nocturnal, scotopic vision. Our own scotopic vision depends mainly upon peripheral perception. An orbit increase by 13% could do no more than improve the visual acuity minimally under low luminance conditions (maybe in a night with cloud cover). But even that is doubtful. And it is hard to understand why, if there was an advantage, it would have been there in a European night, but not in an African one. Certainly, it would not have required more cortical capacity to process the data output of a few more rods. Why should it? The spatial distribution of pixelated information in the visual field (analogous to pixels of digital pictures) is not preserved at higher levels of data processing. The eye-brain system of humans and all their immediate primate relatives is adapted to an efficient perception of movements, shapes, patterns and colors in a wide spectrum of daylight conditions, from the first light in the morning to the bright midday sun. The sensory input collected by cones and rods is pre-processed to that purpose by the retinal network of neurons, even before it reaches the occipital cortex at all. The hypothesis that a slightly larger, peripheral retina surface, by co-adaptation, enforced a higher capacity of information processing in the neocortex to a degree that other essential brain functions were impaired, has nothing to recommend it. It is almost impossible that Neanderthals had a more elaborate visual system than other Homo species  in terms of retinal and cortical organization, given the close genetic and anatomical relationship between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, and given the fact that the visual system is an evolutionary conservative feature within the Hominidae and beyond: among the Old World monkeys (Catarrhini) in general. The hypothesis that the Neanderthals evolved into an adaptive dead end by developing larger eyes is more than speculative, it is scientifically amiss. There is a simple alternative explanation for the average, larger size of Neanderthal orbits: isometry. The Neanderthal viscerocranium was somewhat larger than that of modern humans. The orbits were larger to about the same degree. Also, the orbit size varies as much as 13%, or more, between living humans. There is no indication that these differences influence visual acuity at any luminance level. Certainly, the neocortex of all these people is organized in the same manner. The authors concede these facts themselves in subsequent papers. Online one even hears from them, under the pressure of heavy criticism, that their conclusions pertaining to the ecological competition between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens are speculative (Hughes 2013). Such rearguard actions, of course, are not reported to a wider public. It is highly probable that our Neanderthal cousins looked at their prehistoric world through eyes which were functionally identical with those we use to look at our own world. The important difference was that they thought different thoughts about what they saw and acted differently. At least that is much more probable than a difference in sensory physiology. In Chap. 9, we will return to the question as to whether Neanderthals might have had religious thoughts. Complex processes of ecological competition, if we assume that the demise of the Neanderthals was caused by the appearance of Homo sapiens in their habitat, rarely have a monocausal explanation. The Neanderthal excursus is not the only

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example of such overly simple “selectionist” narratives. The book “From Lucy to language” contains speculations about the supposedly polygamous or monogamous lifestyle of early hominids. (Chapter 10 will take up this topic.) Another example is its explanation for the split of the Australopithecines into two clades (robust and gracile) about 3 ma ago. The book explains why the braincase of the robust type (e.g. Paranthropus) shows no further increase from the Australopithecine 500 ccm level, until the clade disappeared from the fossil record about 1.2 ma ago. In the meantime, the gracile type (Australopithecus afarensis and other fossil species) gave rise to the genus Homo with its initial 800 ccm brain volume (e.g. Homo habilis). The explanation is that by walking upright, and carrying the head on top of the body, the biomechanical demands on the neck and shoulder muscles of Australopithecus were increased. Thus, the margin for a further evolutionary growth of the brain was more limited than for their four-legged ancestors. The robust type exhausted the smaller functional margin caused by the upright gait by developing its massive lower jaw and large chewing muscles. The neck could not support an additional brain enlargement. Therefore, by specializing in the consumption of hard and fibrous plants, Paranthropus and relatives were finally doomed to extinction (Fig. 3). The premise of this scenario remains mysterious. Why should it require more muscular effort to carry the head above the body’s centre of mass, as the Australopithecines did, than to carry it in front of it, as a knuckle-walking chimpanzee does? This writer cannot imagine any valid reason for that surmise. Even if one concedes that the massive chewing apparatus of the robust Australopithecines somehow limited a further increase of the head weight, it is hard to believe that a moderate brain growth would exceed that limit. The evolution from the Australopithecine level to that of early Homo would have increased the weight of the brain by about 0.3–0.5 kg at most, compared with an assumed body weight of 40–80 kg. One should think that these burly creatures could have easily dealt with such a small increase, if it would have provided a substantial selective advantage. The most obvious explanation for the constant brain size of the robust type is that they occupied another ecological niche than the gracile type. All selective effects taken together, an increase in cognitive and (perhaps) related social capacities did not bestow a sufficient selective advantage to spur a comparable brain increase. That explanation is not certain either. But it refrains from speculating about one “adaptationist” process or another, which we know really nothing about and conforms to the general characteristics of evolutionary biology as we understand them. There is a lesson to be learned from the bygone “southern apes” and their evolutionary fate: One should picture the evolutionary trajectories of highly complex organisms, which exist in highly complex ecosystems, as processes within intricate systems, not as a succession of tableaus within an imaginative narrative. Does the conclusion sound trivial and therefore dispensable? A look into the pertaining literature says otherwise. Wunn and Grojnowski offer a different explanation for the demise of the robust Australopithecines (2016, 31–32), which is more sensible, though also speculative. A climate change, they propose, caused the robust Australopithecines to specialize in tough plant food. A second change about 1.5 ma later, and competition with early

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Fig. 3  Paranthropus: Artistic reconstruction of a male Paranthropus boisei in the Museo de la Evolución Humana, Burgos, Spain. The features of the facial skull are adapted to a diet of fibrous plant material, perhaps tubers and nuts. A cranial crest supported strong masticatory muscles; jaws and teeth were large. The line of the robust Australpithecinae existed in East and South Africa from about 3 to 1.2  ma and probably shared habitats with Homo species. (José Luis Filpo Cabana, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_Paranthropus_boisei_(Museo_de_la_ Evolución_Humana,_Burgos).jpg), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­sa/4.0/legalcode)

Homo erectus, finished them off. Now we do not know for certain if the diversification of the genus Australopithecus was caused by climate change. Adaptations of isolated populations to different ecological niches might have done it. Nobody knows if, and how, a later climate change reduced available resources, because the ecological requirements of Paranthropus are not known in any detail. When the hypothesis was published, it was not clear if the clade shared its habitat with Homo ergaster at all, if the two competed, and in which way. A loose temporal correlation between the date of the last Paranthropus fossils and a climatic fluctuation proves little. Extinction may be delayed for a long time after the ecological factors which cause it have been at work (extinction debt). Also, then existing populations may not show up in the sketchy fossil record. The extinction date of a fossil clade is usually (except if it coincides with a mass extinction event) not known with sufficient

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exactitude to support a close temporal correlation with climatic or other paleontological data. In the meantime, (Herries et al. 2020) a cave in South Africa called Drimolen rendered a highly instructive array of hominin fossils from about 2 ma ago: Two partial skulls (cranium) could be attributed to the fossil species Paranthropus robustus and to Homo erectus. Both predate all other known fossils of these species. Their time range overlaps with that of Austrapithecus sediba specimens from a nearby site called Malapa. That indicates that all three hominin clades were present at the same time in the karst landscape of Southern Africa. Thus, previous speculations about causes of extinction, phylogenetic successions etc. are jumbled up once again, however (to make that point clear) without distorting the general picture of hominisation developed in the last decades. At one time, the robust Australopithecines must have co-existed in Africa for almost a million years with early Homo erectus, while the climate changed repeatedly. Competition between the two species cannot have been a major cause of the disappearance of the former, or it may have merely been one factor in the context of several interacting factors. A late Australopithecus species was also present, complicating the ecological and phylogenetic picture. The most important conclusion from Drimolen is that Homo erectus, our immediate ancestor, almost certainly evolved in Africa, not in Asia. Prior to these finds, the oldest Homo erectus fossils from about 1.8 ma ago had been discovered in Georgia (Dmanissi). Australophitecus sediba could not have been ancestral to the genus Homo, although earlier, related Australopithecus populations are still a possibility. In any case, the status of eastern and southern Africa as the “cradle of humanity” has been confirmed. The story of the pre-humans which evolved musical capabilities to ease the burden of constant social grooming is as speculative as the story of the Neanderthals who sacrificed their social intelligence to adapt to northern light, or the story of Paranthropus who exchanged a larger brain for the ability to consume tough plant food. The emergence and disappearance of clades, the complex behavior patterns which they evolve, the ecological niches which are constructed, retained or lost, do not follow from such simple causes. The evolution of almost all complex features of a species, first of all hominin species, depends upon the interaction of several, partly antagonistic, selection forces. To repeat the obvious: The evolutionary trajectory of the species as a whole is even more difficult to explain than the appearance of a single feature. It is determined by a network of mashed, regulatory circles between species, competing species and ecological conditions. In addition, contingent occurrences play their part etc. The only plausible, monocausal explanation for the disappearance of a species is that we humans exterminate it by hunting, by destroying habitat, or by introducing competing, invasive species. In summation: Theoretically, the problem with imaginative stories and single-­ line explanations of evolutionary change is that they imply selective and adaptive processes in evolution which do not concur within the “state of the art” of evolutionary biology. They are far too simple to explain anything. The analysis of this difficulty in the following part II is one focus of this book. Logically the problem is that the “just so stories” rely on hidden premises. They carry much weight toward the conclusion and should therefore be safe or at least probable. Usually they are not.

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Often, we know next to nothing about the factors and the events, which made up the causal nexus for the evolutionary steps in question. Mostly climate changes are mentioned, because other factors, for example interspecific competition, the level of predation and epidemics, usually do not show up in the fossil record. Sometimes we may safely conclude that there must have been a strong, though unknown, selective pressure, e.g., on the development of more and more complex hominin societies, or on the rapid increase of the neocortex from Ardipithecus to Homo sapiens. Informed speculations about selection factors are permissible, for example that a drier climate in Africa 200,000 years ago contributed to the evolution of Homo sapiens. Its demands may have been met by increased intelligence, leading to an improved technology and to more social cooperation. Another version of this explanation is the variability selection hypothesis. It proposes that no single climatic shift, but climatic oscillations over a longer period, enforced an increased flexibility of Homo sapiens behavior patterns. From that perspective, Neanderthal evolution took place simultaneously in Europe, likewise driven by an oscillation between glacial and interglacial phases. Given the geological knowledge about climatic fluctuations in the relevant period, the hypothesis is attractive. But it is at best a possible, and certainly a partial, explanation of the adaptations leading from late Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and to the Neanderthals. One must not, however, be too pedantic. Drastic oscillations of climate coincide with the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, and it is not unreasonable to assume a causal connection. But the difference between what is reasonable to assume, and what is known, should be kept in mind, especially if such ecological explanations are transferred to the evolution of society and cognition. Pursuing meandering speculations will lead nowhere for the scientific study of cultural and religious evolution, except on to the Op-ed pages. To outline the phenomenology of prehistoric religion without falling back on sweeping, untestable narratives is an awkward undertaking, perhaps with disappointingly fragmentary results. Nonetheless, part III of this book will attempt to do just that.

References Dissanayake, E. (2005). The singing Neanderthals. Review of singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body by Steven Mithen. Evolutionary Psychology, 3(1), 374. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300125. Retrieved February 20, 2020. Dunbar, R., Gamble, C., & Gowlett, J. A. J. (2014). Lucy to language: The benchmark papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamble, C., Gowlett, J. A. J., & Dunbar, R. (2014). Thinking big: How the evolution of social life shaped the human mind. New York, London: Thames and Hudson. Gómez-Robles, A. (2019). Dental evolutionary rates and its implications for the Neanderthal— modern human divergence. Science Advances, 5(5), eaaw1268. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv. aaw1268. Hemminger, H. (2017). Thinking big. Review of thinking big: How the evolution of social life shaped the human mind, by Gamble et al. ESSSAT News & Reviews, 27(1), 30–34.

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Herries, A.  I. R., Martin, J.  M., Leece, A.  B., Adams, J.  W., Boschian, G., Joannes-Boyau, R., Edwards, T.  R., Mallett, T., Massey, J., Murszewski, A., Neubauer, S., Pickering, R., Strait, D. S., Armstrong, B. J., Baker, S., Caruana, M. V., Denham, T., Hellstrom, J., Moggi-Cecchi, J., Mokobane, S., Penzo-Kajewski, P., Rovinsky, D.  S., Schwartz, G.  T., Stammers, R.  C., Wilson, C., Woodhead, J., & Menter, C. (2020). Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa. Science, 368(6486), eaaw7293. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw7293. Hughes, V. (2013). From Neanderthal skull to Neanderthal brain? Retrieved April 7, 2020, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/03/13/ from-­neanderthal-­skull-­to-­neanderthal-­brain/. Krech, V. (2019). Gescheiter scheitern. Interview by Christian Röther. Retrieved November 31, 2019, from https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/evolution-­der-­religion-­gescheiter-­scheitern.886. de.html?dram:article_id=435634. Malotki, E. (2018). Columbian mammoth and ancient Bison: Paleoindian petroglyphs along the San Juan River near bluff, Utah, USA. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, H. Martin, H. Luther, J.  S. Jensen, & J.  Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 562–599). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Mithen, S. (1996). The prehistory of the mind: A search for the origins of art, religion, and science. London: Thames and Hudson. Mithen, S. (2005). The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Narr, K. J. (2008). Prehistoric religion. Britannica online encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2008-04-09. Accessed 20 February 2020. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Pearce, E., Stringer, C., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.0168. Retrieved April, 7, 2020. Rova, P. J. (2018). Cosmetic alterations: Religion and the emergence of behavioural modernity. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, H. M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Sullivan, E. (2016). Tomasello, Michael (2016). A natural history of human morality. Review of A natural history of human morality, by Michael Tomasello. ESSSAT News & Reviews, 26(4), 34–38. Tomasello, M. (2016). A natural history of human morality. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Wunn, I. (2018). Barbaren, Geister, Gotteskrieger. Die Evolution der Religionen—entschlüsselt. Berlin: Springer. Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2016). Ancestors, territoriality, and gods: A natural history of religion. Berlin: Springer.

Understanding Religion from the Inside

More than a hundred years ago, still in the age of European colonialism, while the study of religion was dominated by accumulating a lexical phenomenology, the journalist and prolific writer Chesterton (1905, Chap. XI) objected vehemently to the sort of science that focuses on external phenomena rather than on our humanity. Chesterton stated: “… the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folk-lore—the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity.  …  For the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best learnt, not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man…. The mystery in the heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go into society.” Chesterton exaggerates, as he usually does. Nobody prohibits the anthropologist to do both, to study books and subscription balls. One has to remember, however, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_4

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that at that time the scientific study of religion was dominated by the approach preset by Chantepie de la Saussaye’s “Handbook of the history of religion” (1887). He maintained that science has the task to collect, order and classify historical data for a subsequent philosophical analysis. Phenomenology is, from this point of view, a distant, objective assemblage of phenomena or manifestations, ranging from the content of beliefs to rituals and organizations. One may suppose that Chesterton would have derided the current effort to collect, order and classify data for a subsequent analysis by evolution theory with equally strong words. His argument, though overdrawn, points to a real problem: Although religion must be regarded as a natural phenomenon, if it is studied scientifically, it should not be regarded solely as a collection of manifestations. The phenomenological approach in this restricted sense is not sufficient to provide the “descriptive knowledge” science needs. It has to be taken into account that all descriptive knowledge is a product of the methods applied. Knowledge about religion is not the thing “religion” in itself. Therefore, the research method ought to be attuned to the subject as closely as possible. So far in part I of this book, it has been assumed that the customary scientific method can be applied to religion as legitimately as any scientific issue. That, however, is not the whole story. The study of religion should at least approach an additional methodological dimension which is unusual (but not unknown) in science: hermeneutics. That is what Chesterton wanted, worded more diffidently. In a strict sense, hermeneutic methodology is used to interpret texts, not res naturalia. In a broader sense, however, it is a method for interpreting verbal and non-­ verbal communications, signs, symbols etc. An essential aspect of hermeneutics consists in the investigation of presuppositions, and in putting the actual understanding of whatever is communicated to a truth test. What science knows about religion is, of course, not only gained by observing and documenting relevant behavior patterns, or by sticking electrodes to the scalp of praying believers. It is also, as regards the quantity of information probably mainly, gained by verbal and non-verbal communication with religious representatives, and last but not least from religious texts. Of course, such sources of information demand a hermeneutic approach. Not for the first time, the question suggests itself if it is really necessary to mention such an unmistakable imperative at all? Again, the answer is: unfortunately, yes. Often religiosity is, for example, generally characterized by belief in supernatural actors. Influential hypotheses maintain that, in complex Neolithic societies, belief in supernatural punishment for anti-social behavior stabilized the cultural system. Usually these descriptions are given without reflecting on the meaning of the term “supernatural” for the adherents of a particular religion. It will be discussed in part IV that “supernatural” has quite a different meaning from that in modern, secular thought, if one turns to indigenous religions. Or it has no meaning at all: Animism has been mentioned as a, perhaps, primeval aspect of religious belief. From an animist perspective, everything is both natural and supernatural, or nothing is.

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A hermeneutic dimension of the method applied would have averted such shortcomings. The need for hermeneutics is thus not the consequence of a lack of data. There is an abundance of “descriptive knowledge” concerning religion: We know little about prehistoric, but much about historic, religious forms and functions. The latter knowledge is almost impossible to sort it into two different drawers: into “objective”, conventional scientific data, and hermeneutically produced, “humanistic” insights. The scarce, archeological and paleontological results consist in solid (though hard to interpret) material documents. The wealth of historic information comes predominantly from communicating with believers, taking part in their rituals, contemplating their art and reading their texts. Thus, a hermeneutic approach prevents, at the very least, an oversimplification of the essence of religion as a natural phenomenon. And yet, simplified constructs are, up to a point, unavoidable if one tries to model the evolution of religion. The more one takes into account the complex, and possibly ambiguous, features of a hypothetical, prehistoric religious system, the more demanding it becomes for one to imagine a plausible evolutionary trajectory towards it. In Chap. 2, religiosity (the capacity for religious thought and behavior) was “simplified” by the use of a few theoretical concepts: sense of transcendence, numinosity etc. Presumably, these theoretical concepts are expedient for developing a general description of the essence of religiosity; however, they do not serve to describe its essence in detail. In the social sciences, culturally established religious systems are “simplified” by phenomenological categorization: According to Sosis (2018) eight elements constitute all organized religions. Their various functions were described in a generalized way as modules of a bidirectional, individual and cultural coping system. But one must always remain conscious of the methodological situation: The necessity of systematization and generalization should not tempt us to make the mistake, which a former teacher of the author liked to call “systemic blindness”. When schematic constructs are used as the basis of explanatory hypotheses, the complexity of the actual system has to be kept in mind. For example, it is plausible that complex societies have an adaptive advantage if a shared religion builds confidence among co-believers who are personally unknown to each other. A communal religion is “trust-enhancing”. But in many historic cases religious segregation in complex societies disrupted them and weakened them from the inside. One may allege that this is not the everyday effect of an “official” religion but happens in times of social or environmental crisis. However, sooner or later, all societies must face times of crisis. Therefore, nobody knows if, and how, certain religions may have become an evolutionary liability instead of an evolutionary advantage during the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithicum. In terms of the biological theory of evolution, the net fitness-effect of religion for these societies would be determined by a balance between its fostering of social cooperation and other benefits, and its socially disruptive potential. Such a system’s dynamic is comparable to that of an economic enterprise when investments (use of resources) have to be weighed against diverse gains and risks. Evolutionary biology has adopted methods of the (originally economic) game theory to analyze such systems. Of course, in this

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case quantitative data, which would allow predictions of evolutionary outcomes under specific conditions are out of reach. A second example: Organized religion is always, beside other functions, a coping system which deals with existential fear and with social or individual misfortune. It renders practical support and encourages decisive, confident action by providing meaning for human existence in this highly contingent world. As a coping system, religion presumably offers fitness advantages not only to complex societies, but to hunter-gatherer cultures from the very beginning of religious phylogeny. On the other hand, religion may increase existential fear by taboos which can be broken and duties which can be missed. By its zealous expressions, religion causes much suffering. Nothing is more in the forefront of public debate today than these negative aspects of religion. Do we suppose that there were no oppressive, zealous, or life-threatening forms of religion during the initial stages of its evolution? Much later in this book, an answer will be attempted. Here, the point is that this question (and many others) ought to appear in the study of religious evolution, or its modeling may fall into the trap of “systemic blindness”. The demand that a hermeneutic dimension should be included into the scientific study of religious evolution opens up a wide field of interdisciplinary possibilities and difficulties. For example, how best, from an evolutionary perspective, to use the many detailed and inspiring analyses of indigenous and universal religions, which are available from religious studies, from anthropology and ethnology? A large library would be needed to contain all of these admirable depictions of religions in the plural, and a large community of researchers to utilize them by the means of “normal science” for the pending study. The respective religions were (with few exceptions) originally not analyzed as products of religious phylogeny. Certainly, buzzing like a maddened bluebottle through the imaginary library from title to title, not being able to read and process much more than the titles would achieve little. Or, to use a modernist comparison: A frenzied Google search through the immense, but lopsided, cosmos of online reports about a plethora of religions will be of no help, because the disorderly and unevaluated information is not offered in a form suitable for being passed through hermeneutic circles between the documents and their tentative understanding in the scientist’s mind. Also, reading through the immense methodological literature on hermeneutics in the humanities may be of limited help for an enterprise inspired by biology. (A pars pro toto sample, the “Philosophy of Understanding” by Jean Paul G. Ricœur, will be discussed later in this chapter.) A biological contribution to the interdisciplinary project in question would do well to start with biological methods: How do ethologists, taxonomists, physiologists and evolutionary theorists deal with the “measureless complexity of the mesocosm” in their own field? Of course, they start by specializing, and develop comprehensive hypotheses on the basis of specialized detailed knowledge. Entomologists cannot even try to understand insect life by studying all species, nor even all families of extant and extinct insects in succession. Their lifespan is not long enough for that. They have to build up explanatory theories from knowing a small segment of the six-legged multitude very well. Armed with this expert knowledge, they look for general features characterizing the myriad

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species despite innumerable exceptions, and construct explanations for the evolution of insects which, in turn, can be tested again and again by referring to additional detail knowledge. A friend of the author recently published a review paper addressing decades of research on the acoustic communication of Orthoptera, the insect order comprising locusts, grasshoppers and crickets (Ronacher 2019). From an interdisciplinary point of view, the results constitute highly specialized knowledge about the—genetically mediated—“innate releasing mechanisms and fixed action patterns” which control the stridulation of grasshoppers and crickets. We are all familiar with the phenomenon from strolls through summer fields and meadows. It may not be surprising that many of the pivotal questions of evolution theory are considered to explain the phylogeny of stridulation. One aspect the review addresses is the experimental measurement of costs and benefits of acoustic signaling behavior in terms of fitness; a question which—as mentioned—applies to the evolution of religion in basically the same way. The result suggests possible explanations for the evolution of the observed song patterns. They, in turn, can be tested by further detailed research. A sort of hermeneutic circle is an inherent part of the scientific method. That is neither a new nor an original observation: It is standard undergraduate textbook content under the heading “epistemology of science”. And yet the deductive cycle of “normal science” cannot be performed in exactly the same way while studying religious phenomenology. For one thing, biologists are usually able to experiment. By suitable experimental setups, the grasshoppers can be forced to perform under controlled conditions and answer specific questions. Experiments for studying religious behavior under controlled conditions are impossible, with very few conceivable exceptions (e.g., electroencephalograms registered while subjects meditate or pray.) On the other hand, in insect life, as in the history of religions, there are many examples to study. Systematizations and generalizations are both necessary and are expedient parts of the respective phenomenology. Good biological research usually starts by selecting adequate examples to study from the multitude of phenomena. Transferred to the evolution of religion: What are suitable examples to study, even if none of them can be experimentally manipulated? The obvious answer is that the historically oldest forms of religion might provide the most relevant results. But that is not necessarily the only answer. In part IV of this book, it will be proposed that, for example, the analysis of deviant, zealous forms of modern-day religion will lead to important insights. By the way, it is the usual state of affairs in science that the objects of research have to be carefully chosen. But there are exceptions. Cosmologists have only one universe to study. Comparisons with other samples are out of the question. Also, they cannot experiment on the cosmos, not even on a measly small sun like our own. That does not keep astrophysicists from developing scientific theories which allow predictions, which in turn can be tested empirically. In principle, one religion would also be sufficient for the study of religious evolution. In any case, however, the “testing” of hypotheses by additional sets of data relating to religion poses a methodical problem cosmologists avoid because of the comparative simplicity of the system they study.

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Thus, the argument returns to the inference that the scientific study of religious evolution should include an additional hermeneutic dimension. It is rendered possible in the first place by the strong reflexive character pertaining to scientific knowledge, then by the extra-scientific knowledge interwoven with the whole fabric of how the world is represented in the cognitive space of everybody, including scientists. The stories we listen to and the books we read deal with religion. Religion is symbolized (in a sociological sense) all around us in our lifeworld. This trivial, but extensive, knowledge of religion applies to all of them, it even applies to those religions of which we have never heard, because they are all human religions. Scholars analyzing religion scientifically are also human, although that may not be immediately apparent in some of their expositions. Because they are human, their hypotheses regarding how religion works and how it evolved, are instances of the reflexive-phenomenon. Finally, religious people are human as well as the researchers. The two parties can communicate with each other in the usual human way. To put it pointedly: One aspect of the appropriate method for studying religion scientifically is communication. The scientific community advances by communicating with their subjects and, last but not least, with itself. To make the point as clear as possible: Entomologists cannot gain insights from their deep empathy with dung beetles. Try as they might, they will not find in their cognitive space or among the windfall from their socialization history, any hidden information about the propagation biology of these fascinating creatures. Hermeneutics (except in the restricted, epistemological sense mentioned) will not help them to find out why the beetles roll dung balls through the desert. Empirical methods are required. Perhaps these hypothetical entomologists will find something else inside themselves: namely unexpected information about religion. The Sacred Scarab, revered in ancient Egypt, belongs to the family Scarabaeidae that they are studying. They are interested in beetles and encounter religion by the wayside. That does not contradict the observation that, whatever the entomologists know about beetles, has a reflexive aspect, like all science. But the reference of entomology in a strict sense both to entomologists and other humans is of a rather roundabout kind. That is different in the case of objectivizing, scientific knowledge about human religions. Here, almost everything known to science is at the same time self-knowledge. The entomologists cannot communicate with beetles as they communicate with themselves, and with other humans. It would be a big help if they could tell an apprehensive scarab what they, so far, believe to know about its life secrets, and could ask for a response. But that way is closed, even though some Nature Writers claim to be able to understand animals from the inside by “entering into their heads” and by imitating species-specific behavior. The best-known example is “Being a beast” by Charles Foster (2016). The work deserves a closer look, because it professes to surpass hermeneutics as a method to understand intra-human communication by extending it to other mammals. The not so unexpected outcome is that the attempt to share experiences with animals keeps the philosopher from understanding himself and his fellow humans. Why? Foster tried, or so he claims, to live as an otter, a badger, an urban fox, a red deer and a swift. A biologist’s immediate answer

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is that he cannot literally live like any of these animals, even by eating earthworms like a badger. He lacks the biological „forms” these mammals possess and cannot imitate their functions. For example, by eating juicy tree bark in large quantities like a red deer he would ruin his health more thoroughly than by eating exclusively McDonald fast food. (That holds true vice versa for the deer. A wise stag will keep away from McDonald refuse bins.) The philosopher’s effort to catch fish in a river by his teeth like an otter must seem ridiculous from the fishes’ point of view, if we were able to enter the fish’s-­ head to find out. The philosopher can only imitate a limited set of functions by play-­ acting and imagine a limited set of emotions and sensory inputs. By the by, Foster is too good a philosopher to try the impossible, despite his full-flavored claims. He explicitly states that a border will always remain in place between him and the animal. The aim is to get as close to it as possible. Foster calls his enterprise “literary shamanism”: Indeed, what the nature writer really achieves is the life enactment of his mental picture, or cognitive representation, of an otter and a deer. The experiment parallels to a degree, in fact, not the consciousness of the deer, but that of the prehistoric shaman who enacts animals with a purpose we moderns would call magical, and with a much more intimate conversance with their behavior and environment than moderns have. Foster misunderstands the shamanic transformation, however, by assuming that the dissolution of self-awareness in trance obliterates the border to the enacted animal. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) are as completely (and, as far as we know, as exclusively) states of the human mind as his own philosophical thinking. The difference between “literary shamanism” and historic shamanism is, to put it bluntly, religion. So-called magical purposes of ritual animal enactments and corresponding trance experiences are not their only, and perhaps not their most spiritual, aspect. There is a primeval human longing for unity with nature, with the strength of the great beasts, with the beauty of trees, with the softness of spring rain, with the fertility of the endless sea. That spiritual longing is an expression, perhaps a very early expression, of the “sense of the transcendent” which is one root of human religiosity. It runs as an undercurrent from “shamanism” to animalism way back to animism, and through all historic religions. That is why their mythologies people forests and plains, water and air with dryads and nymphs, sapient beasts and talking trees. These imagined beings can, though humans cannot, share the strength, grace and vitality of nature. Foster may feel that primeval desire, as all humans do now and then. Nonetheless, he remains insensitive to the longing’s spiritual dimension. He attempts a phenomenal transformation from man to beast which is empirically and theoretically cognizable. As a modern, secular humanist (like the majority of his contemporaries), he cognitively believes in no other unity with nature than a phenotypic unity. He is obliged to perceive the communality of humans and animals as a strictly phenomenal one: Shared senses, motivations, bodily functions and ecological requirements unite him with other mammals. He tries to understand their secrets, as Foster calls them, within the framework of that objectifying naturalism. The shaman knows all that is to know about the shared biology of animals and humans. To him the naturalist perspective is profane everyday reality. But beyond

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this humdrum knowledge he believes in a spiritual communality of all beings which, to him and his co-believers, has a numinous quality. The shaman enacts a spiritual transformation into an animal with which he shares life’s essence, in order to experience this essence. Without the believed essential unity of man, stag and bear, he would not be greatly thrilled by the mere act of running like a stag or feeling grumpy like a bear. Only the modern urban city dweller gets a spiritual kick by realizing that animals see, hear, enjoy life and suffer like humans. The kick results not from the realization as such, which is commonplace enough, but from the forlorn hope that— somehow or another—developing an animal nature might become a pathway out of human nature, or at least out of human nature as it has developed in modern civilization. Alienation from human nature is the background motivation of “literary shamanism”. Foster, a late modern, individualistic, secular intellectual is unhappy with what has become of human relations in the world and in the culture in which he lives. The Siberian shaman is (or was) part of a religious community which is intimately related to the animal world. He represents this vital relationship by rituals, and by entering an altered state of consciousness where he experiences himself as a bear and experiences the essential unity of all beings. He does not try to overcome deficits of his culture. He serves his community. Spiritually he turns into an animal. Phenomenally and socially, he remains entirely human. In fact, nature writers were answered more than 2000 years ago by Aristotle who confirmed that humans are political animals. In their respective cultures, the shaman who merges his consciousness with the bear spirit and the nature writer who proclaims esoteric, animalistic exercises are, and remain, political animals. Foxes are not, even if they happen to live in a human city. A little girl was asked why she liked to munch slices of old dry bread. She replied that her pony does that, too. “When I crunch the bread like a horse, I am a horse.” The child agrees with the philosopher and the shaman that she learns something about both the horse, and herself by acting like a horse. But she is wiser than the philosopher and much closer to the shaman than the former. She knows all the while that she is play-acting and does not yearn, except in play, to be transformed into an animal. Instead, the child ardently pursues the spiritual quest of becoming as fully human as possible. Play-acting, she feels, is the entirely appropriate human way to relate emphatically (and, maybe, spiritually) to horses. The horse, in turn, lacks the mental apparatus to know more about humans or horses by eating human bread. Horses are wise in their own animal way. But role-play is beyond them. Foster’s problem is not that he is too enthusiastic about animals. His zeal may even match that of the little girl, although that is near-impossible for a modern academic. His problem is that he lacks enthusiasm for being human. He could learn that from a shaman, if he had one at hand, for an earnest communication about religion. He could also learn it from little girls by getting to know them better. Nowadays, little girls are much easier to encounter than shamans. Putting it in a way a philosopher might understand: He could learn from other people, but not from animals, by applied hermeneutics. Why not try to become a child, every now and then, instead of trying to become an otter? The chances of success are far better, and the return on

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the investment is far more valuable. Trying to be a shaman without the shaman’s religion can only end in self-deception or in a mere play with words. On the other hand, play-acting (either on the inner stage reserved for fantasies or in real-life) is incidentally the appropriate, human way to relate to nature and to other humans. We will come back to that later by discussing the philosophy of Jean Paul G. Ricœur. But first, let us take another look at the scientific method, its strengths and its limitations. Not even Franz Kafka in his famous novella “The Metamorphosis” succeeded in disclosing the inner affectivity of a large beetle to the fascinated public by literary means. In all honesty, he did not try “literary shamanism”. The artist disclosed (according to a common literary interpretation) in the form of a parable the outcome of a life lived under conditions of deprivation caused by an inhuman environment. The transformation into an inhuman form represents the defeat of any attempt to live a fully human life. Even the ability to communicate with surrounding persons is lost. They finally kill their deformed family member. In the context of this chapter, the Metamorphosis might be taken (with a grain of salt) as a picturesque, very much exaggerated, representation of a scientist who sincerely researches religion without any regard to the fact that religion is a universal human phenomenon and that scientists are themselves human. The scientist has lost perhaps not the ability, but the willingness, to communicate with believing fellow humans. Indeed, some hypotheses concerning the evolution of religion give the impression that scholars move among their subjects clad in an impregnable beetle carapace, or that they, themselves human, observe strange, beetle-like creatures acting strangely. Instead, scholarly students of religions could and should ask for the opinions of all sorts of religious people regarding their ideas regarding all sorts of religions. In addition, they could, and should, ask themselves how this or that description of religion accords with their own life experience. Standing alone, without “communicative” scaffolding, descriptive assemblages of comparative data about a representative sample of historic religions, although these assemblages are not without use, can become misleading. The phenomenology of religion needs to be regarded both from outside and from inside religious experience. The author contends that the pivotal methodological approach to a deeper more holistic understanding by a hermeneutic method should come from an intimate conversance with at least one modern religion as well as some knowledge about different religions and cultures from other times (knowledge of several past religions and cultures is ideal; however knowledge of at least one is critical). In the following parts II to V of this book, numerous examples from various religions will appear: the sacred rain forest of Pygmies, the inexorable fate which governs the deeds of a heathen, Nordic warrior, the Navajo way of seeking harmony with the universe, a Maori creation myth among others. In a sense, these examples are random, in the same manner that an entomologist has to pick out some beetle families for closer study. That does not impede the hermeneutic approach to the subject, but rather facilitates it. Finally, the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes of behavioral features cannot be left aside. An apparent objection against a hermeneutic dimension

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of scientific research is that “understanding by communication” might result in detailed insights concerning proximate causes of religious ideas and practices. Believers can, and hopefully will, tell us why they act as they act, and what their experiences are. But the ultimate causes, which are determined in the long phylogenetic run by the fitness effects of behavioral and mental features, are, of course, completely unknown to the believing community. They cannot be gleaned from them (and not from oneself) by any amount of communicated information. That is indisputably correct but does not render the information about “proximate” causations irrelevant. On the contrary, the question how, in religious evolution, so-called proximate and ultimate causes relate has no easy answer. The following part II will discuss this in the framework of modern evolution theory: The distinction between proximate and ultimate causation has to be regarded as a subordinate aspect of a systemic approach. Key terms will appear to illustrate that result: niche construction, drift barrier, neutral evolution, phenotypic plasticity etc. The reasons will be explained by theoretical principles why detailed knowledge of the evolving system and its “proximate” causal relations (its phenomenology) is indispensable for modeling the evolutionary trajectory towards the system’s features. However, in this methodologically orientated chapter the question will be pursued further as to what a “communicative method”, may practically resemble in the eyes of a biologist. Let us in imagination partake of an excursion which recently brought a handful of theology students into the busy pedestrian area of a German city. They were on the lookout for public symbolizations (again in the sociological sense) of urban secularity and religious plurality. Religious city life is always good for surprises. This time, the student group came across a stall which offered Pentecostal Christian, evangelistic leaflets to the public, among them anti-economic, radical Chick-Tract-­ Comics from the USA in German translation. The students, members of mainstream Protestant churches, reacted critically to the pamphlets; a discussion got under way. The spokesman, a young man with a loud voice, rejected all arguments from the students because they, he stated, adhered to “unbiblical” beliefs. His knock-down argument was that their churches baptize little children, against the biblical commandment which (from his standpoint) demands a conscious confession of faith as a precondition for baptism. A series of derogatory comments supported the young man’s harsh judgment that the visitors were not really Christians. From a psychological perspective, the most interesting feature of the discussion was that there was a second young man in the stall who acted differently. He was obviously not comfortable with his partner’s offensive style of discourse. While he upheld the same theological convictions concerning baptism and the understanding of scripture, he smiled at his dialog partners, who happened to include two pretty female students. He took the trouble to point out that he would try to take their arguments seriously. Indeed, he listened attentively, and managed by his friendly behavior to elicit return smiles from the girls. The conversation took a slightly comic turn because the young man politely, but firmly, explained to the students that, on scriptural grounds, he objected to female pastors. Women, he stated, should neither preach nor teach. At the same time, he made it clear by nonverbal signals that he did not at all object to the two girls lecturing him right there in public. The discourse

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took its predictable course. With the Pentecostal spokesman, a dialogue was impossible. Instead, apodictic statements were exchanged, blank stares followed, and the communication soon broke down. The dialog with the second stall holder went on for quite some time in an agreeable atmosphere. While neither side showed signs of altering their opinions, the conversation partners certainly gained an understanding of each other’s positions. What happens in such a situation can be regarded through the lens of Jean Paul G. Ricœur’s (1913–2005) “philosophy of understanding”. He developed his hermeneutic approach to “the other”, to identities foreign to the self, in his work “Oneself as another” (Ricœur 1992). Ricœur maintains that the core of any hermeneutic method is an understanding of the dialectic interaction between the self, as it is emotionally and mentally present in the cognitive space, and signs or symbols which represent otherness. He emphasizes that the method leads to self-­ understanding. From his point of view this outcome is inseparable from understanding the other. “Self-meaning” and “other-meaning” are two sides of one perception and part of the awareness of overall existence. Encountering another religious position, either as text, as practice or as verbal communication, is tantamount with encountering one’s own religious identity. Any effort to understand other beliefs, however feeble, means reflecting one’s own beliefs. Self-reflection can only be avoided by ignoring (or, worse, maligning) the representation of other beliefs one encounters. Even that, however, defines both the self and the other. Ricœur postulates that the self, the representation of one’s identity, is experienced as narrative, that it is represented as a sequence of experiences which solidify to stories. By interpreting and re-interpreting existential narratives, the self designs identity. Not only the past is thus interpreted, but present and future are integrated into the self. However, it is impossible to design the self without, at the same time, to design the non-self. By telling myself and others what I am, I am also telling what I am not. In a radio interview (DLF 1995) Ricœur stated: “Human identity, as well as the identity of a community, originate from the history jointly experienced, and which the community members tell and retell each other. Therefore, everybody’s identity is closely bound up with everybody else’s and with all other identities. Only because I know that the other one is represented deep in the self, and that I have to define myself through his otherness, am I able to discover and understand myself” (translation by author). It is part of narrative self-interpretation to try out alternative roles and identities in animated dialogue, in play, fantasy and daydreams. The little girl who eats bread like her horse builds her identity in the way all humans do, only in an especially charming manner. Such a creative, even ludic, element of self-design also becomes an important requisite of meeting and understanding other religious identities. Additionally, it is the precondition for personal progression by means of new experiences. Back to the story of the theological debate in the pedestrian zone: By reducing the entire identity of mainstream Protestants to something objectionable, the dogmatic stall holder blocked all mutual understanding from the outset. He labeled the position of the students “unbiblical” and unworthy of consideration. That made

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dialogue impossible. The second Pentecostal Christian managed to implement a productive dialogue because he was willing to consider, at least for the moment, what it would be like to be a mainstream Protestant. He did not want to become one, but he wanted to know how mainstream Protestants perceive themselves. As Ricœur points out, by that openness he developed not only some understanding for another identity, but a better understanding of his own beliefs. By “designing” himself as a true, believing Christian, he designed at the same time a feeble, errant Christianity— which he, although politely, ascribed to mainstream churches. Through the encounter with real-life theology students, his experience of mainstream Protestantism became more differentiated and sympathetic. In turn, his own identity gained complexity and depth. His dogmatic partner, on the other hand learned nothing about the students and nothing about himself. He cannot understand his own belief better than he understands other beliefs. That holds true for the students’ side as well. They learned that, at least in this case, the Pentecostal missionary defines his confessional identity to himself and others by narrating a specific theology of baptism, based upon his understanding of scripture. The students, by replying to him, in turn narrate not only to him, but to themselves, what scripture means to them and how they understand baptism. Their understanding will be somewhat better than before the encounter. The students also learned something else: Pentecostal identities, like other religious identities, are not all alike within the same believing community. What Pentecostalism is, and what it should be, is told divergently by distinct individuals, even while they think along similar theological lines. In the young man who did not like ostracizing statements mainstream Protestants lived (as Ricœur expresses it) as more sympathetic, less objectionable figures than in his partner. Therefore, his identity was not the same, regardless of (perhaps) identical theological convictions. Beliefs stated in dogmatic, cultic or narrative systems (e.g., in mythologies) are only one module of religious identity. Another, in practice crucially important, module is the affective relevance of the others’ otherness. If the rejection of their otherness forms the centre of identity, religious dogmatism and fanaticism are not far off. The rigorist belief, and the belief governed by anxiety, constitute a narration which tells oneself, and others, that we are what we are because we are right, and the others are wrong. What, then, can be learned from the “philosophy of understanding” concerning the hermeneutic dimension of the scientific study of religious evolution? One point seems evident: The wealth of descriptive knowledge available through anthropology, ethnology, religious studies, theology etc. demands, on the one hand, systematization by recognizing different components of religious experience. The knowledge can be compared across several religions to develop expedient generalizations. That is (in a very concise form) the program of the classic phenomenology of religion. It looks at religious experiences from an impersonal distance; otherwise general features are not recognizable. On the other hand, the religious identity of any given community must be understood by consciously encountering the narrations the community’s members use to describe themselves, and by relating the narrations to one’s own religious or secular identity. That means viewing religious

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experiences not from a scrutinizing distance, but close up, as experiences one could imagine having oneself. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that in ancient Persia decisions which were made while drunk, would be considered again when sober. Later historians asserted that decisions made in a sober state were to be reconsidered while drunk. While this method is not unconditionally advisable, it is judicious to collect information both from a distance, and from inside experience. There are limits to cool, scientific distance. There are also limits to a personal intimate experience of religious otherness. The strangeness of a strange religion might overstrain the ability to relate to it by appropriate narrations. There must be a set of congruent features, beside diverging ones, to define both selfness and otherness in a comprehensible manner. Even a fanatic demarcation is impossible if the strange belief cannot be associated with what is already known. The fanatic needs a clear (though distorted) picture of what he does not want to be. In the case of confessional differences within Christianity, that problem does not appear. Pentecostals and Lutherans, for example, share many convictions and experiences, even if they are, at the moment, busy with their underlying differences. Dialogue between Protestants and Theravada Buddhists is not, however, equally convenient. Experience shows that key beliefs on both sides are difficult to comprehend by the other side, e.g., the word “prayer” has different connotations, as used by a Buddhist abbot or by a Lutheran priest. It takes work and detailed information, to relate to the otherness of the other religion. If there is little information available, the religion one encounters “lives” (to use Ricœur’s term) only as a shadow inside, whose contours are largely defined by the way the meager input is fitted into the default framework of the cognitive space. Obviously, that is the case when fragmentary findings presumably related to prehistoric religion are fitted into the mental representation of religions already known. At best they are connected with the wealth of scholarly insights into the world’s religions, although assumed congruences remain speculative. Yet the inner representation of the prehistoric other, of a Magdalénian wise-woman or a Neandertal reindeer hunter, is at risk of developing entirely, or almost entirely, from the mental representation of oneself, and one’s own lifeworld. There is just too little information to qualify the scholarly pondering of Acheulean cave paintings and Gravettian figurines as a communicative encounter, and to start a prolific hermeneutic cycle. Any methodology ought to take this limit into account. That, in short, is the main reason why it is important to reflect on what has been called here the “hermeneutic dimension” of methodology while studying the evolution of religion scientifically. “Descriptive knowledge” in the general scientific sense, and the phenomenology of religion in the classic sense, do not produce the retrospective assumptions which dominate the field by direct inductions and deductions. They inspire reflexive narrations, whether or not researchers are aware of it. The narratives tell the scientific community, and even more the interested public, not mainly what is known, but what scientists are, and what religious believers are, from the researcher’s point of view. Science needs to remain methodologically aware of the process. Not that one ought to discuss methodology at all times, while hypotheses are put forward and tested for inner consistency and explanatory power.

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The hermeneutic dimension can be regarded as an ever-present horizon above and behind the scientific enterprise proper. The horizon is always there, but may appear far-off, while scientists bend low and scrutinize some detail on the ground. Perhaps it is too imprecise to denote the hermeneutic aspect of research as a “dimension” of methodology. It may be more fitting to speak of a hermeneutic, methodological scaffolding into which the scientific results are fitted. The scaffolding determines the overall shape of the building, though not the exact layout of its rooms and what they contain.

References Chesterton, G.  K. (1905). Heretics. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/470/470-­h/470-­h.htm#chap11. Foster, C. (2016). Being a beast. London: Profile Books. Ricœur, J. P. G. (1992). Oneself as another (Soi-même comme un autre). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ronacher, B. (2019). Innate releasing mechanisms and fixed action patterns: Basic ethological concepts as drivers for neuroethological studies on acoustic communication in Orthoptera. Journal of Comparative Physiology A. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-­018-­01311-­3. Sosis, R. (2018). Why cultural evolutionary models of religion need a systemic approach. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 45–61). Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Part II

About Evolutionary Biology and the Evolution of Religion

Evolution: The Modern Synthesis

In principle, a natural history of religion could be written without any causal explanation why any particular step followed any other one, or why a given religious phenomenon came about instead of another conceivable one. But in fact, the “why” is as interesting, or even more so, than the “how”, and the scientific literature abounds with causal explanations. Many of them, though not all, rely on Darwinian concepts by regarding the forces at work as analogous or as identical (homologous) with those driving biological evolution. Norenzayan (2013, 30,10) states that “the iron law of Darwinian evolution” governs the evolution of religion by competition and selection on the level of groups: “These ever-expanding groups with high social solidarity, high fertility rates that ensure demographic expansion, and a stronger capacity to attract converts, grew often at the expense of other groups”. Later (2013, 138) “within-group genetic transmission”, that is selection on the individual level, is supposed to be essential. The author proposes literal Darwinian mechanisms on the one hand by referring to biological fitness (“high fertility rates”). On the other hand, the “capacity to attract converts” is mentioned in the same sentence. Obviously, the evolution of religion, if one wishes to adhere to the “iron law of Darwinian evolution”, has to be modeled by using biological analogies on higher system levels. One is obliged to assume dynamics which are comparable to, but not identical with, evolution on the genetic level. Thus, a synergy is proposed between evolutionary processes literally driven by biological evolution, and others, superimposed upon them, which are Darwinian by some kind of analogy. A synthesis of biological and biology-analogous processes is often supposed to lead to a general theory of macroevolution applicable to cultural, religious, social and technical evolution. At least one hopes to encompass the social sciences within the framework of evolutionary biology. Mesoudi et al. (2006, Fig. 1) argue that a “unified science of cultural evolution” will closely follow evolutionary biology, from sub-discipline to sub-discipline, from method to method. Brewer et al. (2017, 1) propose that “The scientific study of culture is currently undergoing a theoretical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_5

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synthesis comparable to the ongoing synthesis of biological knowledge that began in the twentieth century.” Even Turner et al. (2018, 46–47) who write that four types of non-Darwinian processes were at work in the evolution of religions, state that they were all driven by “natural selection”. They wish “to expand and extend the power of evolutionary theorizing rather than remain confined within the limitations of evolutionary theorizing in biology”, but at the same time to “maintain some continuity with biology”. As a further consequence, this cogent, two-pronged policy of theory building inevitably leads to a theory of gene-culture coevolution (see Chap. 7). Any such theory, however, must be based upon an adequate understanding of “evolutionary theorizing in biology”. So far, biological concepts transferred to the evolution of culture etc. are often fragments, or simplifications, of the present “state of the art”. Although the study of religion from the perspective of the humanities has become receptive for biological inputs, it is not yet a strong interdisciplinary project. For example, the impressive Festschrift in honor of Armin W. Geetz, one of the pioneers of an evolutionary approach to the history of religion, comprises papers by 45 authors (ed. Petersen et al. 2018). Many of them are well known from earlier, influential publications. Twenty-seven contributors have research backgrounds in comparative religion, the study of religion or the history of religion, respectively. Eight authors are anthropologists, five are sociologists or psychologists, four are historians and one is a language specialist. The absence of biological expertise is noteworthy in view of the editors’ statement that “in the most recent development, the study of cultural evolution is taken one step further by being conducted in concert with biological evolution on the basis of the default assumption that the one cannot be thoroughly discussed independent of the other.“(Petersen et al. 2018, preface 34). In order to provide an adequate biological background for this discussion, which is indeed necessary, this part of the book will undertake to chart the biological theory of evolution in a concise form, not as it would be done in a biological textbook, but as a basis for analyzing the homologies and analogies used in single-layered and compound theories of religion’s evolution. The concluding part V will build on this and suggest ways to model the multi-layered evolution of religion accordingly. What then is evolutionary biology? Pigliucci and Mueller (2010) assign version numbers to its successive historic stages1, as one does with software programs: Version 1 was Darwinism, which established natural selection as the driving force of evolution. Version 1.1 was Neo Darwinism according to August Weisman, Hugo de Vries and others who refuted the heritability of acquired traits (Lamarckism) and established the idea of a separate germ line (Fig. 1). Version 2.0 stems from the work of Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane and Sewall Wright, who, beginning in 1920, combined the Mendelian laws with a mathematical or statistical formalism to describe evolutionary processes (population genetics). Among other innovations, they introduced the concept of inclusive fitness. Thus, they started the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology, which was completed

 Authors mentioned in this paragraph are not listed as references: see Pigliucci and Mueller (2010).

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Fig. 1  August Weismann and Julian Huxley: August Weismann and Julian Huxley represent two generations of biologists who created the modern synthesis of evolution theory, a synthesis between Darwinism, Neo Darwinism, population genetics and molecular genetics. This photograph of Weismann was taken in 1915, that of Julian Huxley in 1964. (public domain)

as Version 2.1 by Theodosius Dobshanski, Julian Huxley (who coined the term in 1942 with his book “Evolution: The modern synthesis”), and by Ernst Mayr, George G. Simpson, G. Ledyard Stebbins and others. It was augmented by a System Theory of Evolution (Rupert Riedl and others), and by the Neutral Theory of molecular evolution, which was developed by Motoo Kimura in the 1960s, and was expanded by recent genetic research. Sociobiology (Edward O.  Wilson) completed Version 2.1 by integrating the evolution of social behavior into the framework of 2.1. Starting in 2000, according to Pigliucci & Mueller, evolution theory developed into a Version 3.0, an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), by integrating a number of important new results (see also Drossel 2010, p. 106). It is impossible to distinguish between a literal and an analogous use of biological concepts, if it is not clear what the designation “Darwinian” means in terms of the successive versions of evolutionary biology. For example, the proposed growth of a religious group “at the expense of other groups” may refer to a literal use of the current concept group selection (Version 3.0), or may refer to an analogy, or both on different levels of the process. Kundt (2018) and Wunn and Grojnowski (2016) have good reasons to complain that the traditional study of religion from the perspective of the humanities, has not so far, achieved a synthesis with evolutionary biology. As a consequence, Wunn & Groinowski try to use the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (Version 2.1) more or less literally. But they, too, slip into analogies. Szosic (2019)

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refuses the Darwinian approach to the study of religion with convincing reasons. His arguments refer, however, mainly to the basic concepts of version 1.1. On the other hand, Sosis (2018, 46) does not mention a helpful analogy when he explains that the complexity of a religious system usually prevents one’s ability to predict the effects that a single change will have. Therefore, he advocates systemic models of religious evolution. Similarly, the System Theory of Evolution elucidates that changes (e.g., mutations) on the genetic level have complex, often unpredictable, effects or no effects at all, for the phenotype because they are fed into the intricate processes of ontogeny. The two systemic perspectives could be easily paralleled. But first things first: The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (Version 2.1) can be explained in 11 steps. –– Sexually propagating organisms exist as genotypes (the genetic information expressed in the complete organism) and as phenotypes (the sum of observable features of the organism). The adult organism produces gametes, which combine as zygotes, which contain the genome (the entirety of genetic information) of the next generation. The genome acts as a “logistic centre” which rebuilds the phenotype by directing the development from the totipotent zygote to the complete organism. The cycle demands that during each passage the organism is reduced to an elementary origin (gametes and zygotes of the germ line) and regenerated (soma line). This alternation has no parallel in cultural and religious evolution. The cultural system, with all its components, interactions, relations and transformations, is not periodically dismantled and rebuilt from the information contained in a comprehensive library. Both the organism and culture (or society) change and adapt to outside influences. But the adaptive processes follow different patterns. –– The dynamic system consisting of genotype and phenotype has the properties of a self-replicating automaton (SRA). The genome must be taken for a self-­ assembly code which fulfils two functions. First it is actively decoded to produce a self-similar replicant. Secondly it is passively copied for the replicant, which passes the copy on. To keep the SRA functional, the genome is shielded from change in the germ line. That is achieved by repair mechanisms, and because the gametes lack cell specializations. During meiosis and early ontogenesis, possible DNA modifications are reversed; modifications acquired by the phenotype are usually not passed on to the next generation. In contrast, cultural and religious features, as a whole, are not self-replicating. They depend upon replication by social and cognitive mechanisms from outside (from a subordinate biological system level) which have their own evolutionary trajectory. Acquired religious contents can be freely passed on to the next generation, as well as to contemporaries attracted by them. –– Changes of genetic information in the germ line (mutations etc.) are possible as long as the cycle of genotype and phenotype is not interrupted. The self-­assembly code must remain functional; the phenotype must remain able to reproduce it for the next generation. Hence genetic evolution is possible on one side but is constrained on the other side. The future evolution of the genetic code is “loaded”

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with its past results: that is with the actual organism. The necessity to rebuild the phenotype in each generation by a conservative, ontogenetic mechanism step by step by means of phylogenetically established processes excludes any number of functionally advantageous innovations. Other than during the technical advancement of machines, and other than developments by which cultures and religions gain depth and richness, there is no possibility of removing an important component and replacing it with a better one. “Evolution cannot close for reconstruction” (Günther Osche). –– From a technical point of view, an optimally adapted organism is impossible. Whales cannot return to gill breathing, although it would be advantageous, and although their remote ancestors had gills. The constraints of their ontogenesis (the development from the zygote to the adult organism) allow no deviation from the basic mammalian body plan. Another example is used by Losos (2018): There are no vertebrates with six extremities, although they would be handy for flying species. Dragons with four feet and two wings would probably be ecologically successful and are easily imaginable by humans. But they are inaccessible by evolution. Cultural and religious innovations are far less restricted by conservative features on their own system level. –– Variations of genetic information (called alleles) by mutations, gene duplications, gene transfers etc. often, but not always, produce variations of the phenotype. These variations often, but not always, exhibit different abilities to propagate. Accordingly, alleles will become either more common or rarer, in the gene pool of the next generation of a population. The gauge for the increased, decreased or stable frequency of a variation is its relative or absolute fitness. For fitness can be defined as the positive or negative effects of variations on the propagation success of respective alleles. Or it can also be defined as the ratio with which an allele accumulates in the gene pool, compared to other alleles. Such fitness values can be determined in the laboratory, but seldom in the field. Usually too many factors contribute to fitness effects. In the same way, any genetic fitness effects of religious concepts and behaviors, should they exist, are usually impossible to quantify. –– Mutations originate from physical, chemical, biochemical and other processes unconnected with the organism’s adaptation. (The special case of epigenetics will be approached separately in Chap. 6.) A functional direction of genetic change can only result from the competition of phenotypes with different genotypes, that is from selection, in which case the genetic change becomes adaptive. This process may be called teleonomy, in contrast to teleology. The term indicates a functional adaptation which does not come about intentionally, by means of a prefixed meaning, a target (telos), or by design, but by a selective feedback cycle. Because this process can take many generations, can be highly complex, and because selection factors change, adaptation always lags behind environmental demands. It is obvious that cultural and religious developments, on the other hand, are often purposefully designed by individuals or social agents and are at least partly teleological. Also, they are usually much faster, up to the point

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that the interaction or (as the predominant terminology of religious studies will have it) coevolution of genetic and cultural features is uncoupled. By sexual propagation, the genome of the next generation consists of a new combination of alleles. It is not simply a copy of a parental genome. Also, the fitness of a genetic variation may depend upon the presence, or absence, of other genetic information (pleiotropy, multi-genetic effect). Its fitness thus is established as an average effect on propagation successes through a series of recombinations. Therefore, it may require many generations to establish new, adaptive combinations of genetic traits in the population’s genome. On the other hand, considerable fitness differences result from mere recombination of the existing genetic material. Thus, sexual propagation expands the space of possible evolutionary adaptations; higher organisms usually reproduce sexually. There is no process in cultural and religious evolution which directly corresponds to arbitrary, sexual recombination. But there is something like a “teleological” or goal-oriented process of recombining e.g. religious contents which may be transmitted by horizontal transfer between contemporaries. Religious traditions may be taken up from literary sources etc. These possibilities expand the evolutionary options of a religion in a way (remotely) analogous with sexual recombination. The System Theory of Evolution expands the theoretical concept of natural selection by an aspect called inner selection: Evolutionary change is only possible if the organism’s subsystems maintain the functionality of the organism by co-adapting to each other. Internal co-adaptations and adaptive changes to external selection both condition each other and constrain each other. Innovations, which would enhance the organism’s internal functionality, but which lead to ecological disadvantages, are not selected. On the other hand, changes which would be ecologically advantageous are also not selected, if they disturb the internal, functional equilibrium. Natural selection can only induce adaptive change in the gene pool as far as systemic functionality is preserved. The necessity to keep the control of ontogenesis functional is one, probably the most important, example of the mutual dependence of all adaptations and innovations on both external selection pressures and on co-adaptations of internal subsystems. As a consequence, complex organisms are bound to their basic construction principles. Another consequence is that pre-adaptations play an important role in evolutionary history, because features which evolved in one functional context are often integrated into another context: Feathers which evolved for insulation (and perhaps for display) in some Dinosaur clades became a functional part of bird flight, as soon as wings for gliding (later for active flight) were developed by small, arboreal dinosaurs. Coevolution, the parallel evolution of species with widely different taxonomic status (e.g., the symbiosis between bees and flowers), has to be understood as the evolution of two functional systems which closely adapt to each other. Coevolution requires the interplay of internal innovations and innovations induced by selection pressure from the symbiotic partner. (The topic will be taken up in Chap. 7.) The System Theory of Evolution demonstrates that, in complex organisms, the fitness of genetic variations usually depends upon several, sometimes conflict-

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ing, effects. Costs and benefits may vary with environmental conditions. There may be different strategies to deal with food competition, predators, sexual rivals etc., each with fitness effects influenced by many factors. Resource acquisition and resource management require calculated investments and avoidance of avoidable risks, also by means of alternative strategies. The evolution of the “fittest” strategy in such a complex system of causal interactions is modeled by mathematical methods of evolutionary game theory. The method was originally developed to analyze economic processes. Phenotypic variations with different behavior patterns are regarded as “players” who achieve different rates of success. If the variations are genetically mediated, their success influences the fitness of alternative genetic information. (In principle, game theory can be applied as well to the competition of players who choose strategies intentionally and “learn” not by genetic evolution, but by individual and social result evaluation.) –– There are evolutionary “games” which produce, over many generations, a stable balance between alternative strategies. The alternatives occur in fixed proportions in the population, as long as the environment remains stable. Somehow surprisingly, the evolutionary “game” can also lead into an unstable, cyclic situation: The rates of competing strategies increase and decrease in a generation-­ long rhythm, because their fitness effects depend upon their frequency in the population. For example, a genetic predisposition to cooperate “altruistically” with group members may compete with an alternative disposition to take advantage of them and “cheat”. As long as the latter disposition is rare, its fitness is high, it will increase in the gene pool. This, in turn, causes adverse reactions by the “cooperators,” which increases their relative fitness. It depends upon the exact conditions of the “game” whether it results in a stable ratio of cooperators and cheaters, or in a cyclic change. A consequence for modeling religion’s evolution is, for example, that the fitness advantage of a specific religious form, even if the advantage is obvious, does not necessarily lead to its establishment in a culture. Communal religious rites and shared beliefs strengthen mutual trust and the willingness to cooperate. They also introduce hypocrisy, a behavior which exploits the trust between co-believers at the expense of society. That in turn reduces the “trust enhancement” effect of communal religion and can cause it to reverse to its opposite: Public demonstrations of piety then become something suspicious. The outcome is… well, we all know of several possible outcomes in several religious cultures. –– There are non-selective (and non-teleological) processes which influence the frequency of genetic information in the gene pool. Beside selection, random or stochastic genetic drift has an important role. Sometimes it is caused by the accidental geographic separation of few individuals. This happens, for example, if islands are settled by a small founder population. Initially, their gene pool is mainly determined by chance. Such occurrences are an important cause of species formation. Also, mutations which regularly occur at a certain rate are stochastic events. They may accumulate in the population, if they are not too rare and not too detrimental. Their effect depends upon population size, size of the genome, and mutation rate. The smaller the population, and the higher the muta-

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tion rate, the stronger the effect. Obviously, there are (remotely) analogous random drift effects in cultural and religious evolution. Probably they are historically more important than genetic drift in biological evolution. –– An important consequence is the drift barrier hypothesis. Because the equilibrium between selection and drift depends upon population size, selection dominates in large populations: Even small advantages or disadvantages of alleles are positively selected. In small populations, stochastic effects like mutations might dominate, because a drift barrier keeps minor fitness differences from affecting the gene pool. The hypothesis explains for example, why higher organisms (eukaryotes) accumulate genetic information which has no phenotypic effect, or an effect which is irrelevant for the phenotype. This “neutral” information (introns, junk DNA etc.) is not selected against, because it is not detrimental enough to cross the drift barrier. If one supposes that analogous drift phenomena exist in cultural and religious evolution, then one would also suppose that drift barriers, which selection effects must cross, would exist as well. Depending upon boundary conditions, drift barriers may counteract the “fitness effects” (selective advantages and disadvantages) of cultural change. –– This matter needs further exploration. But one might suspect that, in cultural and religious evolution, drift barriers are often high because of the many non-­selective influences upon developments. It is theoretically (e.g., statistically) quite possible that religious ideas and practices provide certain genetic fitness effects, but that these effects exert no influence on the further development. That drift in a broad sense may make “downward” selective and adaptive effects of culture and religion irrelevant for evolution, is an inherent aspect of evolution theory. This fact may nonetheless come as a surprise to scholars studying religious evolution from the perspective of the humanities. –– Social behavior which increases the reproductive success of family and group members at the expense of individual fitness is a common phenomenon, called altruism in Sociobiology. (Of course, altruism in an ethical or moral sense is something different.) Some examples are group defense, allomothering and sharing of resources. Eusocial insects are an extreme case. The sociobiological concept of inclusive fitness allows for the evolution of so-called altruistic behavior patterns within the framework of selection theory and population genetics. For example, kin selection (distinct from group selection) allows a relative fitness advantage for genes which support social cooperation, and possibly eusociality. Whether this term is meaningful as a description of human social behavior will be discussed later in this chapter. The modern synthesis outlined above describes genetic evolution in a general form. Adaptationist analogies used in models of religious evolution are not consistently supported by the framework of the modern synthesis, even less “just so stories” about this or that fitness advantage brought about by religion. In its general framework, even the genetic evolution of Homo is not exclusively determined by adaptive selection and is not necessarily always driven by environmental change. For example, a species can evolve, sometimes rapidly, in a temporarily stable

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environment because its overall adaptation has not reached its evolutionarily achievable optimum. As long as there is room for optimization, there is room for adaptive evolution. A population of early Homo sapiens somewhere in Africa—given the necessary conditions of isolation and small size—may have rapidly evolved its behavioral repertoire, including proto-religion. Also, genetic drift might have played a major role in human evolution. If a small population “out of Africa” became the ancestors of Homo sapiens worldwide, then their genetic make-up would dominate the species’ gene-pool regardless of its relative fitness. We should not regard the possibilities of non-selective evolutionary change, or the constraints which put fitness-enhancing adaptations beyond reach, as exceptions from selection theory. They are inevitable consequences of the evolving organism’s complexity and its many-faceted relations with the environment. The selection algorithm is not suspended by them. The law of gravity is universal. There are no exceptions to Newton’s formula. Yet birds do not fall down, but fly up, and the moon remains in its orbit around the earth. Other forces act upon these bodies in addition to gravity. The same applies when a mildly detrimental genetic variation spreads in a species because of genetic drift, it is not an exception to the selection algorithm, it is a case of prevailing non-selective factors. It is also not an exception when a human population develops religious ideas by means of cultural change and social learning and most members of the population like these ideas even though they are mildly damaging to the population’s ability to compete genetically with other populations. Imagine the hypothetical “primordial soup” at the beginning of life with the first self-replicating macromolecules. (No matter if this soup ever existed, the soup with its molecular dumplings is only required as an illustration of a simple, evolving system.) Each sequence change (mutation) which influences the replication rate of the molecule under given physical and chemical conditions has fitness consequences, which are easily describable. The consequences depend only upon the presence of absence of competing molecule “species”. If a similar mutation affects the DNA within the sequestered germline of a higher organism, it is fed into the complex processes which make up the development of the phenotype and its ecology. The phenotypic effect, if there is one, will appear within an autopoietic system (The organism can be regarded as such a system.) and will have system-dependent effects. In the end, the fitness consequences of the original mutation depend partly, sometimes exclusively, upon the system’s properties, and are often unpredictable. Therefore, the classic distinction between proximate and ultimate causes of an organism’s features is somewhat artificial. The system’s “proximate” properties are, at the same time, “ultimate’‘factors influencing evolution. Then there is “loaded evolution”. The social behavior pattern called “eusocial” serves to demonstrate the term’s meaning. Eusociality is the most elaborate social system in the animal world and appears rarely outside the phylum Euarthropoda: Most eusocial animals are insects. What does the term signify in behavioral biology? Its characteristics are

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–– Division of labor between specialized types (castes). Members of one caste are able to perform at least one function members of another caste cannot perform or have lost. The division is often accompanied by polymorphism. –– Division between reproductive individuals (usually a few or only one pair) and non-reproductive, sterile members. –– Cooperative care for the offspring, mostly for descendants from other individuals. Usually a large number of sterile “workers” sustain the descendants of the few propagating members. –– Adults represent different age levels, often with respective functional specializations. The generations overlap because adults from subsequent breeding cycles remain in the society. Fully developed eusociality is best known from social insects (ants, bees, wasps and termites). Some authors (E.O. Wilson and others) regard Homo sapiens as eusocial species, although their suggestion has been disputed. If one uses the term, it ought to be considered that the evolution of hominin social behavior is “loaded” with the long phylogeny of primate sociality and is tightly constrained by its established structures. As eusocial mammals, humans would be the only ones besides two species of mole rats (African burrowing rodents), and Homo would be the sole eusocial primate. Obviously, the social system of Homo sapiens does not meet all criteria of eusociality, although there are striking parallels. For one, there are no sterile workers. Propagation is not restricted to a few group members. Yet it has been argued that adults remain active after menopause and contribute to the group’s well-being. Thus, overlapping generations are present, but nothing resembling castes. (The feature is not unique. Post-menopause female group members with important social functions are known, for example, from elephants and orcas.) Also, there is no polymorphism at all in a human group. Division of labor is highly developed, but not on the basis of morphology, genetic differentiation, age or physiological factors (food, pheromones etc.). Instead, there are diverse social roles with different functions, which are individually acquired by time-intensive learning processes. Nonetheless humans achieve a high degree of functional specialization and a very high, perhaps unique, level of social cooperation (Fig. 2). From an ethological perspective somewhat surprisingly, the “super-cooperation” among members of a human society coexists with internal tensions and rivalries on all social levels. It also coexists with close personal relationships which are very important for individuals, and which exclude the majority of the group, often excluding everybody except one other individual: Female-male pair bondings are strong; families remain the nuclei of groups; personal friendships structure the group internally into complicated relational patterns etc. There is no evolutionary tendency to replace this intricate network of individual relationships by anonymous interactions, as in the fully eusocial system of mole rats. Another striking difference: There is no (or very little) evolutionary suppression of intra-group aggression and competitiveness. Humans are at least as aggressive and competitive within their group as mammals that live in permanent, individualized, but definitely non-­eusocial

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Fig. 2  Bronnbach Monastery: Bronnbach monastery in winter (southwestern Germany), a former Cistercian abbey founded in 1151 AD. The Cistercians were called “gods gardeners” because of their efforts to improve agriculture. Many religious systems include celibate orders whose members serve their society altruistically. Eusocial animal societies (e.g. ants, wasps, termites) comprise castes with specific tasks, only a few individuals propagate. An analogy to celibate religious orders seems to suggest itself. However, human eusociality (if one wishes to use the term) is unique because it evolved from the hominin social system, which is based upon individually acquired roles, not castes. Celibacy is one among many cultural options; the decision for it is goal-­ oriented and often reversible. (source: author)

systems. Well researched examples are wolves, elephants, several species of monkeys and apes etc. Some of the above-mentioned examples are seemingly a good deal more peaceful among themselves than we humans are, for example bonobos and dolphins. Human inter-group aggression differs in quality from intra-group competition, but the latter remains as vividly active as the first. Also, if psychoanalysts are right, the ontogenetic interplay between social and sexual development is impossible to unravel. Humans cannot develop into socially competent individuals without developing sexual behavior patterns. (The followers of Sigmund Freud cannot be wrong on all counts.) In view of these peculiarities, one may ask if it is appropriate to use the descriptive term eusocial for the social system of humans. If one does, one should explain that human eusociality evolved “loaded” with the phylogeny of the Hominidae, to which the Hominini and the genus Homo belong. They are bound to the evolutionary history of their societies: a primate history of small groups, with members

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knowing all other members personally, internally structured by a system of individually learned roles and relationships. Thus, socially functional, asexual molerats could evolve and could differentiate into castes, but not their hominin equivalent. Human eusociality could only evolve by integrating hominid pre-­adaptations into a superstructure of higher social skills, which develop by a long and involved process of socialization. Probably a genetic reduction of human intra-­group aggression would have been an evolutionary success (although, perhaps, not as desirable as it might look at first glance). But this reduction is unattainable. The equilibrium—and the tension—between competition and cooperation, between social attachment and distance, between altruism and egotism, is built into the basic mechanism of hominid group behavior. Its social evolution during hominisation must have been an evolution of this pattern. It could not be “closed for reconstruction” and rebuilt according to mole-rat patterns. Many idealists of religious, pedagogical, eugenic, political and technical persuasions have proposed various schemes to reconstruct the unruly social conduct of their fellow humans according to rational, peacemaking and more efficient principles. After all, among several other drawbacks, the constant interplay of internal bickering and personal rivalry with intersubjective agreement and group cooperation causes a terrible waste of time and resources. Since modern humans now wield weapons much more deadly than stone-tipped spears and wooden clubs, the intraand inter-group aggressiveness of Homo sapiens threatens the survival of the entire species, and of the biosphere as a whole. Thus, the moral enhancement of humanity might not only be a noble vision, it might be a necessary one. But until now, the idealists have all failed. They failed—if one prefers to look at the matter in that way—where evolution had failed long before them, including both cultural and religious evolution. We may very well forget the moral enhancement programs of recent transhumanism. They will achieve no more than past idealistic efforts: not nothing, but not enough. If humans should ever develop more peaceful relationships between individuals, groups, societies and nations, it will be a completely unheard­of paradigmatic cultural achievement, superimposed upon the present state of human social behavior, not replacing it according to some alien principles. In all modesty: biology will contribute little to this hypothetical achievement.

References Brewer, J., Gelfand, M., Jackson, J. C., MacDonald, I. F., Peregrine, P. N., Richerson, P. J., Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., & Wilson, D. S. (2017). Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution. Nature, Ecology & Evolution, 1, 0070. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-­017-­0070. Drossel, B. (2010). Die Rolle des Zufalls in der Evolution aus Sicht einer Physikerin. In M.  Rothgangel & U.  Beuttler (Eds.), Jahrbuch “Glaube und Denken” der Karl-Heim-­ Gesellschaft 23 (pp. 105–118). Berlin: Peter Lang. Kundt, R. (2018). Making evolutionary science of religion an integral part of cognitive science of religion. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.),

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Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp.  141–158). Leiden/ Boston: Brill. Losos, J. B. (2018). Improbable destinies. New York: Penguin Random. Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 329–383. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Petersen, Anders K., Ingvild S. Gilhus, Martin H. Luther, Jeppe S. Jensen & Jesper Sørensen (ed.). 2018. Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Pigliucci, M., & Mueller, G.  B. (Eds.). (2010). Evolution—The extended synthesis. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Sosis, R. (2018). Why cultural evolutionary models of religion need a systemic approach. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 45–61). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Szosic, K. (2019). What is right and what is wrong in the Darwinian approach to the study of religion. Social Evolution and History. https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2019.02.11. Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Petersen, A. K., & Geertz, A. W. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York: Routledge. Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2016). Ancestors, territoriality, and gods: A natural history of religion. Berlin: Springer.

Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Epigenetics and the Contingency of Evolution

Version 3.0 of evolutionary biology, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, does not remove the complications of the Modern Synthesis discussed in the previous chapter. Instead, it adds additional complications. The following paragraphs will indicate some of the advances which led to EES: –– A consensus has developed in evolutionary biology to integrate developmental physiology, especially knowledge about the genetic control of ontogenesis, resulting in Evolutionary Developmental Biology (EvoDevo). EvoDevo augments the understanding of evolutionary innovations, because small variations in control genes may cause large, coordinated changes in the organism. EvoDevo made the role of developmental constraints in evolution even clearer than before, as well as raising the possibility of surprising evolutionary innovations. For example, the stunning volume increase of the cerebral cortex of Homo sapiens came about by rather small genetic changes. During the evolution of the Hominini towards Homo, a gene named HARF1F assembled 18 point mutations. HAR1F codes for a RNA molecule which functions as a switch for the brain development program of the human fetus during a crucial period of fetal gestation. The change is astonishing insofar as the gene region HAR1 is highly conservative during the evolution of vertebrates. Between chicken and chimpanzees (whose evolutionary trajectories separated at least 250 ma ago) the entire region differs only in two base pairs. Why the mutation rate soared during hominisation within only 7 ma is, so far, not understood. The stunning phenotypic innovation was produced by no more than a handful of genetic changes, which related to the control of ontogenesis (Pollard et al. 2006). The principal ability to think and act religiously probably was one consequence of this innovation. –– Ontogenetic developments which are not genetically controlled, e.g., attaining religion by social learning, cannot change in that way. As regards mind contents, individual socialization is far less constrained than genetically controlled ontog© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_6

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eny. On the other hand, the overall substance of mind contents cannot be changed as a whole by moving some hypothetical control switches, because there are none. The reason is obvious: Information acquired by socialization is never reduced to an embryonic state and rebuilt again. The evolution of the large neocortex of Homo sapiens is one thing, and the evolution of its mental contents is quite another thing. –– The ecological concept of niche construction was developed to take into account the fact that organisms actively change their own environment, and thus their further evolutionary path. For example, large herbivores keep grasslands open by consuming the saplings of trees and bushes. They preserve their own ecological niche. When common bracken fern withers in late autumn, it covers the ground with dry leaves, which decompose slowly and are still there in spring. Grasses and forbs compete with the bracken for room, light and minerals, and usually germinate or sprout earlier than the fern fronds. Mostly, however, they fail to pierce through the dense leaf covering. In addition, bracken produces allelochemicals which inhibit germination and growth of target plants which usually grow close to the fern. (Allelochemicals are substances which affect the physiology, growth pattern or behavior of other organisms.) Thus, bracken fern, by a substantial alteration of the ecological conditions both for itself and other species, keeps its growing space open. Usually the alterations which cause niche-­ constructive effects benefit the active species. However, it is also possible that a species degrades its own environment, e.g., by overgrazing (Fig. 1). –– Niche construction is no alternative to natural selection, but part of the complex array of feedback circles between the organism and the environment on which selection forces operate. An evolutionary interaction of niche construction and selection is prefixed under the following conditions: A population (a species) responds to the alteration of its environment, either caused by itself or by another population, by means of adaptive change. The alteration or modification of environmental conditions is substantial enough to cause selective effects. If the influence upon the environment is kept up for many generations, the “niche constructing” species passes an ecological heritage on, not only a genetic one. The population inherits two legacies: gene pool and modified environment. If the influence upon the environment amounts to profound structural changes, it is called ecosystem engineering. For models of human evolution, the concept of niche construction is vital. Obviously human societies create an extensive ecological inheritance for their descendants. Culture makes Homo sapiens into the ultimate ecological engineer. As a part of culture, religion was probably from its beginning (perhaps in the form of an early animism), an important influence upon the “engineered” relationship between human societies and their natural environment. –– The non-genetic plasticity of organisms ensures that the phenotype of a population, depending on environmental and developmental factors, varies much more than its genotype. Former terminological usage called expressions of phenotypic plasticity modifications, usually in reference to morphological variations. Generally, the term plasticity means that the physiology, morphology and behav-

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Fig. 1  Bracken: In April, the southern-exposed Black Forest slope is covered with the previous year’s dead fronds of common bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum). The bracken sprouts appear in May, much later than those of forbs and grasses which grow in close proximity. Mostly, however, these are unable to pierce through the layer of bracken fern leaves which decompose slowly. In addition to the mechanical covering, bracken is known to produce allelochemicals which suppress the germination and growth of targeted plants. Thus, bracken reduces competition for sunlight, growing space and minerals in the poor mountain soil. Such a functional alteration of the ecosystem by one species, which strongly affects its own selective conditions and that of other species, is called niche construction. The ecological success of bracken, a nearly cosmopolitan superspecies, depends upon this ability, and upon a number of other adaptations, e.g., an arsenal of chemical deterrents which keep herbivores away. The flowering bush on the left however, a red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) is unaffected by the bracken-covered soil and its adverse chemicals. (source: author)

ior of an organism changes as a response to a unique environment. The change may or may not be permanent throughout the organism’s lifetime. For the theory of evolution, changes which appear during development (ontogenesis) and permanently shape the phenotype are of special interest. Usually the features of a species respond to environment factors by gradual change. Yet there are cases in which different environments produce discrete phenotypes. For example, reptile eggs often develop into male or female individuals depending upon temperature. Eggs of the living fossil Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) from New Zealand develop into male hatchlings in higher temperatures, and into female ones in cooler conditions. The equilibrium is reached at 21  °C with an equal ratio of

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males and females. The temperature sensitivity is genetically mediated. In other words, it constitutes a genetic, evolutionary adaptation whose function, so far, is not understood. Another aspect of non-genetic plasticity is that during ontogenesis, interactive systems develop together without coordinated genetic change. For example, bat wings develop by a genetically induced elongation of the finger bones. The nerve and muscle development follows suit, without further genetic adaptation. External conditions have regulatory effects on the development of the phenotype by various genetic and physiological mechanisms. They direct development into different, but usually well-coordinated trajectories. Epigenetic differentiations of the genome, which will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, are among these environment-driven regulatory processes. Phenotypic variations (modifications) may have different levels of absolute fitness, thus natural selection between them is possible. However, favorable characteristics which are not genetically mediated cannot be directly selected. The different propagation success of phenotypic modifications may affect the genetic basis of the regulatory mechanisms involved. Thus, the adaptive plasticity of phenotypes can operate as a precursor of future genetic evolution. On these grounds, phenotypic plasticity is another aspect of the organismic complexity which causes the (almost) unpredictability of most specific evolutionary paths. But the concept does not suspend the basic selection algorithm of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (Chap. 5). Of course, the plasticity of behavioral systems, as soon as they are modified by learning, is even more pronounced than that of physiologic and morphologic features. Even individual and social learning from culture are formally instances of behavioral plasticity. Yet, to denote differences between cultures and religions, which do not correspond to genetic differences, as instances of biological “plasticity”, would not do justice to the autonomy of the cultural level of behavior regulation. Neutral Evolution, which was established as a concept decades ago, is much better understood today because of the progress of molecular genetics. It plays a more important role in the evolution of higher organisms than had been allowed for previously. Advances in the mathematical models respectively depicting both group and kin selection (nepotism), show that natural selection, and therefore genetic evolution, at the level of social groups is possible under specific conditions. Current models demonstrate how the genetic basis of cooperation and altruism within a sequestered population (group) may have a higher level of fitness than the level of fitness of a different group with a genetic predisposition for competition. Thus, the theoretical constrictions of the concept of inclusive fitness, inherent in the sociobiology of Version 2.1, were removed. Group selection mechanisms are important for modeling the evolution of human social behavior, which in turn provides evolutionary pre-adaptations for religion.

It is doubtful whether the theoretical extensions of evolutionary biology mentioned in this overview constitute a paradigm shift, or a scientific revolution. The core of

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the Modern Synthesis was preserved. Therefore, it seems overstated to proclaim a new paradigm. But leading specialists disagree. For example, the paper by Koonin (2016), titled “Splendor and misery of adaptation”, deals with the theoretical consequences of Neutral Evolution. On these grounds, he understands the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) as a revolutionary novelty. On the other hand, Charlesworth et al. (2017) in their review paper “The sources of adaptive variation”, regard EES as an innovative, but congenial, development of the Modern Synthesis. Considering all the facts, Carl Zimmer (2016) is probably right to call EES an update of evolutionary theory. The outline of the biological theory of evolution sketched so far is anything but complete. For example, the contribution of sociobiology and the current developments of group selection theory were mentioned, but not explained in detail. The dynamic progress of molecular genetics was largely left alone. One reason is that the author of this book is not versed in molecular biology, another reason is that the contribution of molecular biology is not highly relevant to the scientific study of religion. There is one aspect of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, however, which deserves a more detailed consideration, and which cannot be discussed without tentatively delving into molecular genetics. This topic is epigenetics. Epigenetic effects can be subsumed under the many mechanisms which produce phenotypic plasticity, as explained in the above overview. But some epigenetic effects are transgenerational: they cause alterations of gene sequences which persist in the germ line and are transmitted to subsequent generations. In addition to the genome, there is an epi-genome which is mainly produced by environmental factors during development, but which might be at least partially heritable. That opens up the possibility that acquired traits of the phenotype, if they are coded as epigenetic alterations (as epi-alleles in contrast to alleles, which are sequential variants of genetic information) are heritable in their own right. This possibility was extensively exploited by popular books and articles and attracted much attention from outside biology. Some voices proclaimed a fundamental revolution of evolution theory, up to the point of demanding that the ruling Darwinism had to be overthrown, and modified Lamarckian principles reinstalled. From various ideological perspectives, this idea was taken as a sign that the sobering Darwinian narrative is incomplete, even false, as far as it binds our own evolutionary future to the blind forces of mutation and selection. After all, humanity might become the engineer of its own evolution by manipulating the human genome epigenetically. Or a mental escape route may exist, leading back to a teleological philosophy of nature and to the Weltgeist directing the pathway to humanity’s future. In contrast, the preliminary, prosaic scientific conclusion is that transgenerational, epigenetic effects further complicate the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology. It is, however, questionable whether these complications amount to modes of evolutionary change that follow quasi-Lamarckian rules. In the following paragraphs, this point will be discussed, with the proviso that research is still in progress and that some results are difficult to explain without using the terminology of molecular genetics.

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The term epigenetics was coined in 1942 by Conrad H. Waddington. It stood for the specialization of cells during development under environmental influence. According to him, the “epigenetic landscape” determines the differentiation of reproductive and ontogenetic paths by external factors: Epigenetic mechanisms cause phenotypic plasticity by “triggering” different developmental options. Later, Rupert Riedl used the concept epigenetic system in a similar manner for regulatory processes which, by various gene-regulating mechanisms, produce differing systemic conditions for development and evolution. Since then, the term took on several different and sometimes conflicting meanings, while the number of known epigenetic phenomena involving ontogeny steadily increased. Some authors now designate epigenetics not only as a “bridge between genotype and phenotype”, but as a “link between nature and nurture” (Martos et al. 2015). Of special importance to medicine is the interdisciplinary field of environmental epigenomics, which researches the potential for nutritional and other environmental factors to influence fetal, adult, and transgenerational gene regulation, resulting both in beneficial and detrimental consequences. In this general sense, all factors that influence gene expression without modifying the DNA sequence itself are called epigenetic. A more specific meaning predominates in popular accounts: The term epigenetic labels heritable variations of an organism, with the emphasis on heritability, which are not coded by DNA sequences. The term epigenetic effects in this popular sense would indeed constitute a paradigmatic novelty for the theory of evolution given dual assumptions: Firstly that epigenetic effects were able to cause the stable heritability of acquired traits through several generations, and secondly that they could cause that variations of traits could be selected on the basis of fitness differences. Which effects are in line for such a role? –– The best-known epigenetic phenomenon is DNA methylation: reduction of gene activity by the attachment of a methyl group to cytosine after guanine. The methylation patterns—as other epigenetic effects—remain stable through mitosis (propagation by division of somatic cells) to preserve cell specialization but can be altered by internal and external factors during the organism’s lifespan. In the germ line and in the earliest stages of ontogeny, epigenetic patterns are generally deleted. In other words: The genome of the subsequent generation is readied for “reprogramming” in two steps: once during meiosis (cell division to produce gametes), then during early developmental cell divisions. But there are exceptions to this rule. The clearest cases are known from plants, where germline and soma line are less distinct, and the removal of methylation seems to be less dependable than in animals. –– External factors affect how chromatin (DNA packed into the cell nucleus) is folded and attached to the supporting matrix. Histones, proteins which accompany DNA in the cell nucleus, can be structurally and chemically modified. This constitutes epigenetic effects because DNA is fitted into the nucleus by “packages” (nucleosomes) which consist of DNA wrapped around eight histones. The positioning of the nucleosomes in the chromatin is critical for gene expression and many other functions of the nuclear DNA. For example, the position deter-

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mines if, and how, regulatory proteins will access the pertinent DNA segment. So-called covalent modifications of the core histones (subsequent addition of active chemical groups) carry epigenetic information, which might be transferred to the next generation in the germ line. –– There are classes of non-coding RNA molecules (RNA not translated into DNA or protein) which regulate the expressions of genes at certain stages of development, or dependent on specific cell and tissue types. As far as their activity is influenced by environmental factors, they are a vantage point for epigenetic gene regulation. Some alter the structure of chromatin and interfere with the interactions between DNA sequences and proteins. For example, small RNA molecules and so-called micro RNA regulate the transcription of genetic information into proteins. Their presence and activity are principally heritable, as far as there is transmission to subsequent generations in the germ line. It may be safe to assume that many scholars from outside the field of biology are hard put to evaluate the possible relevance of the phenomena listed above for research concerning the evolution of culture and religion. Within the overall human organism, including its behavioral system, molecular genetics and cultural activity patterns seem to be worlds apart. On the basis of solid genetic knowledge, how much is left of the popular hype about epigenetics and their supposed revolutionary impact on our understanding of evolution? Some examples might help to answer the question: One possibility to inherit acquired traits from the previous generation involves regulatory factors transported in the cell plasma (cytosol) of gametes which join to form the germ cell. In the egg cell of Drosophila (fruit fly) a class of small RNA molecules can be present which represses transposons, so-called “jumping genes”. They are transposable elements (TE) of the nuclear DNA sequence that can change their position within the genome. They play an important evolutionary role by causing mutations which offer selective advantages, e.g., by the duplication of genetic information. But usually the “jumping” of transposons generates genomic instability and can cause detrimental mutations. Therefore, it is essential that most transposons are “silenced” in the germ line so that fitness-negative mutations are not passed on to the next generation. The RNA molecules in the cell plasma responsible for TE suppression are an epigenetic defense. They remain present from generation to generation, as long as the transposons they repress are active. In this way, they are heritable. If the TE elements they suppress become inactive or disappear, their production is stopped. This means that the epigenetic mechanism is under genetic control. Such regulatory elements in the cell plasma can, by themselves, hardly be influenced by selection, but through the genes which control their expression. They are a typical example of phenotypic plasticity which may have some transgenerational effects. But they do not constitute a bypass around a Darwinian to a Lamarckian evolution. The primary options for transgenerational transmission of acquired traits are chemical DNA modifications which do not alter its sequence, especially methylation. As mentioned, homologous genes with different epigenetic alterations are called epi-alleles, if they are at least semi-stable. (Variations of the coding sequence

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are alleles.) The epigenetic pattern of a given genome is called epi-genome. As far as we know, paths to a transgenerational inheritance of environment-induced epigenetic differentiations are rarely seen in mammals. Yet, there are at least some instances which suggest that such paths might exist. An extensively researched example is the stimulation of different methylation patterns of the agouti-gene in laboratory mice. The gene regulates the distribution of black and yellow pigmentation either in single hairs, or generally in skin and fur. The yellow pigmentation is produced by the dominant, the black pigmentation by the recessive allele of the locus. Thus, genetic mutations lead to phenotypes with more black pigmentation, which can result in completely black individuals (melanism), or to animals which are completely reddish-yellow. In addition, the activity of the agouti locus can be epigenetically regulated during fetal development. There is a mutation called “viable yellow” which causes not only yellow fur, but obesity, diabetes and a higher rate of carcinoma in homozygous individuals. Heterozygous mice with a “black” allele and a “viable yellow” allele turn out either completely yellow, completely black, or mottled. The reason is that one of the two alleles is “silenced” in each pigment cell by methylation, a process called parental imprinting. Dams with a higher rate of inactive “viable yellow“loci in their epi-­ genome have more black-mottled offspring. They pass down not only agouti alleles, but also their epigenetic activation pattern. The effect is gender specific. The maternal agouti allele remains more often active than the paternal one. If pregnant mice are fed a methyl-supplemented diet, they have more dark-mottled offspring (Wolff et al. 1998): More “yellow” alleles are silenced by methylation. In summary, the agouti locus first of all determines the phenotypic features genetically. In addition, there are stochastic processes and epigenetic patterns which both develop ontogenetically and influence the phenotype of the next generation by transgenerational effects. These effects are complicated enough. But they result from secondary processes, which are superimposed upon the genetic conditions for phenotypic expression. In human ontogeny, one should expect either equally complicated or perhaps even more complicated developments towards the phenotype. On the other hand, alterations of the genetic code can always overrule epigenetic effects. In the long run, despite all epigenetic complications of development, the evolutionary trajectory of a species is genetically determined. The agouti mice model demonstrates that the mammalian lifecycle, much more than that of fruit flies or herbs, makes it difficult to distinguish empirically between genetic (germ line) transmission of parental traits, and transmission by other processes. The next generation’s phenotype always depends not only on the parental genome, but also on parental care, the parental social system, the ecological niche which is inherited from them, as well as other factors. The next example will emphasize this point. The example will lead to the pivotal question: Are there forms of epigenetic inheritance in human populations which have to be taken into account for modeling cultural and religious evolution? Back to the laboratory, this time to the maternal behavior of rats: Their hypothalamus (part of the diencephalon) is responsible for the release of cortisol during stress, as in other mammals and in humans. The receptors in the brain

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(glucocorticoid receptors) which regulate the cortisol output are controlled by a gene which can be active on different levels, resulting in stronger or more moderate vegetative reactions to stress factors. The activity level of this control gene depends upon the degree of methylation in the first 3 weeks of life. The crucial factor is the amount of maternal care (“licking and grooming”) newborn rats experience (Francis and Kuhar 2008). Well cared-for litters will later react to stress in a more balanced and usually (but not always) better adapted manner. Thus, a certain gene activity is again epigenetically regulated during ontogeny. As far as we know, the effect is permanent throughout the rat’s lifespan. However, it is probably not heritable from an evolutionary perspective, because the methylation pattern of the respective gene locus is not directly transmitted to the next generation. On the other hand, stress-prone female rats might be less likely to provide “licking and grooming” to their litter than more relaxed conspecifics. That could cause the social transmission of high stress sensitivity from generation to generation, because the epigenetically established trait causes behavior which reproduces the same epigenetic effect. Evidently, during human ontogeny a multitude of similar, and far more complicated interactions between genome, epigenetic regulations of genes, behavior and environment is to be expected. The human behavioral system develops under the influence of extensive social learning. Therefore, transgenerational effects caused by supposed transmission of epigenetic alterations in the germ line are difficult to distinguish from those determined by “psychosomatic processes” in general. Science has to extract the influence of inherited epigenetic patterns, if they exist, from many other influences which change during the life history of two, three, or more generations. Francis and Kuhar (2008) state that research should proceed from “detailed genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, and metabolic profiling of well-controlled animal models with well-documented pedigrees. Novel cell-based and in  vitro approaches for studying dynamic molecular processes will be needed to identify epigenetic factors involved and rule out possible confounding from non-germline parental and grandparental influences on offspring, such as those introduced by behavioral, metabolic, or microbiotic factors. Regardless of whether transgenerational phenotypes are transmitted via epigenetic or other mechanisms, extrapolating findings to understand the role that environmental perturbations play in human disease susceptibility necessitates a quantitative and integrated understanding of the interactions among the environment and the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and metabolome at different stages of human development.” Their far-reaching research program cannot be explained here in any more detail. An example must suffice: The most famous study which aimed at overcoming the difficulties mentioned by Francis and Kuhar (2008) is the so-called Överkalix survey of an isolated northern Swedish community. The firsthand result was that several environmental conditions affecting grandparents influenced the physiology of the following two generations by epigenetic inheritance (Lalande 1996). The mortality risks for children and grandchildren of Överkalix citizens were compared with the food supply available to the grandparent’s generation. While in most years the supply was stable, there were both exceptionally bountiful and

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exceptionally meager harvests. The respective supply of staple food was determined by historical data. Not quite unexpectedly, the correlations found were gender specific. For example, a grandfather’s good supply of food during his slow growth period before puberty (age 9–12) was correlated with a higher mortality risk of grandsons, but not of granddaughters. Among the risk factors was a higher susceptibility for diabetes; a result often quoted in popular accounts: That grandfathers who overeat in late childhood expose their male grandchildren to diabetes stimulated some fanciful conclusions. A good food supply for grandmothers during their slow growth period (age 8–10) was associated with a doubled mortality risk of granddaughters, indeed a strong effect. Such gender-specific effects can be caused by parental imprinting, if the imprinting process is influenced by external factors. It occurs during the production of sperm and egg cells and at various stages of ontogenesis. Either the maternal or the paternal allele is “silenced”. The genomic imprints can be transferred to the next generation, if the “silencing” affects the germ line. Genome-wide DNA methylation patterns in children, including the germ-line DNA, could be influenced by an abundance of food at a time when a child is about to enter puberty, a stage of development, which demands high levels of energy. These methylation patterns in children may also affect small non-coding RNA in sperm cells as well, either alternatively or simultaneously. An elaborate follow-up study (Uppsala Multigenerational Study) with a much larger data set did not fully reproduce the Överkalix results (Martos et al. 2015). At least, the overall correlation between good access to food for grandfathers and the higher mortality of grandsons was confirmed. But correlations with the risks for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes in grandchildren, which had been reported from Överkalix, were not found by the Uppsala study: A paternal grandfathers’ exposure to an abundant harvest did not predict a higher diabetes risk for grandchildren. Such a correlation existed between father and son: Male offspring of fathers with good access to food were more prone to diabetes. Also, the access of maternal grandmothers to abundant food was correlated with a higher mortality by diabetes in all grandchildren; a result not reported from Överkalix (Fig. 2). Surprisingly, the Uppsala study reported a clear association between paternal grandfathers with good access to food and their grandsons’ mortality from cancer. Among granddaughters, cancer mortality was not elevated. Controlling for family social circumstances, for changes in the use of farming practices, and for the influence of smoking habits, was done as far as allowed by the data set. The finding remained valid that there are indeed some transgenerational effects of childhood nutrition: Access to abundant food during the slow growth period results in negative transgenerational influences on following generations. That result is important in its own right. But, as the authors point out, that does not prove that the pathway is epigenetic, or mainly so. Epigenetic events such as methylation of DNA could be genotype dependent. Thus, the presence of different genotypes in the two studies would explain the different results. Whatever the relevant pathways may turn out to be: Currently, the most natural explanation is that abundant harvests mean good access to grains and vegetables which are rich in folates (also called vitamin B9 and folacin) and which function as sources of methyl groups (Vågerö

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Fig. 2  Gluttony: Oil on canvas painting by Timoléon Marie Lobrichon (1831–1914) titled “gluttony” (French: la gourmandise). The painting shows an overly well-nourished little girl. The abundance of food is symbolized by grapes, pears, apples and candy. The influential Överkalix Study from Northern Sweden, including the results of follow-up research, rather indicate that protein-­ rich food, not sugar-rich fruits etc., might induce transgenerational epigenetic effects on health and mortality of children and grandchildren. (public domain)

et al. 2018). The hypothesis follows “that a molecular signal of abundant nutrition received in this period could be captured by male gametes”. However, the authors are cautious about conclusions concerning the exact mechanisms which produce the gender-specific nutritional effects of the paternal grandfather’s slow growth period. What does all that mean for the theory of biological evolution? The possibility that environment-induced epigenetic changes in humans could be inherited through the germline, and that they could establish an alternative mode of evolutionary change independent of genetic mechanisms, stimulated speculative ideas. While the results for human populations remain somewhat uncertain: There are proven mechanisms for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in many eukaryotic organisms; transgenerational epigenetic silencing of genome loci has been demonstrated by mammalian models. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that similar mechanisms are at work in human development. But even the well-­ documented effects are rather transient; they only affect a few generations. They could accumulate within a population if they had a sufficient fitness advantage, either directly (That, however, would need a high relative fitness advantage.) or by adaptive selection of controlling alleles. Even damaging traits could thus be retained, if they would appear with a high frequency, and were not too unstable and too detrimental. Nonetheless, a true Lamarckian inheritance would demand that acquired DNA modifications etc., independent from variations of the genetic code, are passed down with a stability comparable to genetic inheritance. That, as matters stand, does not happen. Epigenetic modifications are, as far as we know, principally controlled by genetic modules. The evolution of the genome always overrides epigenetic changes. It has

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been demonstrated empirically in many ways that selection has almost no influence on genetically uniform populations, even if phenotypes vary (Charlesworth et al. 2017). Nonetheless, even the reputable journal New Scientist made use of a misleading formulation when it named a paper, with respect to this topic, “Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance” (Young 2008). Critical responses were not lacking in bluntness. Among others, Moran (2008) explained to the journal that “All epigenetic phenomena are unstable and/or reversible”. It seems that nothing happens that can be called biological evolution, if there is no genetic evolution. The popular hype about epigenetics was never really justified by the state of research. However, it offers an instructive lesson concerning the cultural interaction between scientific progress proper and its utilization by extra-­ scientific needs and interests. This topic has been discussed in more detail in Chaps. 1 and 3. (Some readers may think that there were far too many details.) The features of the public discourse mentioned there are all present in media reports, in some scientific papers, and in Op-Ed essays which deal with epigenetics. Most obvious is the instrumentalization of uncertain results and preliminary hypotheses for identity-relevant narratives. Even before they are methodically ascertained by science, epigenetic effects are already viewed as an indication that, after all, humanity might become the engineer of its own evolution. There might actually be a biological backdoor to transhumanism, to the old dream of the enlightenment that humanity, by science, would create its own evolutionary destiny. Or there might be, after all, a scientific basis for a teleological philosophy of nature, perhaps even to a quasi-idealistic view of human evolution. As soon as it comes to irreversible scientific progress by the cumbersome work of “normal science”, little is left of all that narrative froth and bubble. However, the results of research which sorts reproducible data from irreproducible data and discards overconfident conjectures, is usually not reported to the public. The impression remains that science is far less reliable than it actually is and that revolutionary knowledge shifts are common, while in fact they are exceedingly rare. The unfortunate subjectivist attitude which is confident that science can always be used to support positions held in one’s own social bubble is confirmed. Public opinion, in turn, influences scientific reports and textbook contents. Therefore, it is unavoidable that one must take the mutual influence of science on public opinions, and vice versa, into account. The respective insights are indispensable for the analysis of paleontological, archaeological and biological knowledge relating to the evolution of religion in the following part III. One final consideration: There was a certain expectation in philosophy that via epigenetics a teleological view of life’s evolution could be rehabilitated. Teleology, however, will not return as a biological concept, certainly not on the basis of epigenetic phenomena. It could even be argued that EES eliminated residual teleological elements in biology. Biology, so far, usually does not explain the actual evolutionary trajectory of specific organisms nor does it explain the actual evolutionary trajectory of the biosphere as a whole: in short, biology does not explain the tree of life as it is nor as it has become. If there are general rules governing the overall shape into which both organisms and the biosphere evolve, they are so far unknown. (For a valiant effort to delineate such rules, see Morris 2015).

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Fig. 3  Comb Jelly: Ctenophores (comb jellies, sea walnuts etc.) are rather complex marine organisms. They were traditionally classified with cnidarians (true jellyfish) as coelenterata. Unlike cnidarians, however, they are propelled by eight rows of fused cilia which beat synchronously along the sides of the body. Also, they lack the stinging cells which characterize cnidarians. Data from molecular genetics contradict the traditional view of the ctenophores’ phylogenetic position. According to them, they are the sister taxon of all other animalia, including the much simpler organized sponges. The result is counterintuitive, but historic contingencies are to be expected in evolution. (Bruno C.  Vellutini, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comb_jelly_2.jpg, “Comb jelly 2”, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­sa/3.0/legalcode)

Some ideas guiding our view of phylogeny have been shown to be rather aesthetically than empirically justified. They were based upon symmetry- and order expectations which have not been universally confirmed. For example, it was a common view that the morphological complexity of organisms (with the exception of parasites, sessile animals etc.) continuously increased during evolution on a large scale. Indeed, it is evident that ever since the primal phyla of animals have existed, the complexity of those at the peak of the ecological pyramid increased, especially when the nervous system and social organization are considered. Recent (still preliminary) results show that the basal radiation of the Animalia more than 500 my ago did not gratify that expectation: The Ctenophora, rather complex organisms, are a sister group of all other Animalia, including the much simpler Spongi (Jékely et al. 2015). Rokas (2013) comments: “… we can finally dispense with the teleology-imbued notion that early animal evolution resembled a linear march of evolutionary forms from the simple to the complex”. It seems that the history of animals includes numerous diversifications, convergences, unexpected detours, and reductions of complexity. A constantly progressing, linearly structured phylogeny is replaced by a process which runs through contingent, even chaotic, stages. Such features characterize unique, many-faceted and undirected historic sequences. General rules which eventually might lead to a confluence of such sequences, e.g., leading to the evolution of intelligence, through intelligence to culture, and through culture to religion, are not out of court. But it would be premature to base an explanation of the evolution of human culture and religion on such speculations (Fig. 3).

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On the other hand, it has been shown that “the iron law of Darwinian evolution” is precisely not a law governing the evolution of species with an iron rod, even less the evolution of multi-layered behavioral patterns like culture and religion. It is not a universal truth which should be treated reverently and spoken of in a hushed voice. It cannot be used as a master key to life’s mysteries. It is basically a simple algorithm whose applicability to evolution follows from equally simple descriptive knowledge: that organisms vary within a species, that some variations are heritable and some have differing adaptive values, No slander of Charles Darwin’s genius is intended, on the contrary. A genius (or two, because Alfred R. Wallace saw it as well) was needed to discern such a simple mechanism behind the overwhelming multitude of life forms, and its slow march into the future. The intricacies and diversities of evolution are not engendered by this mechanism, but by the immense complexity of the systems which evolve within its broad framework. That insight acutely affects the understanding of cultural and religious evolution: Competition and selection are framework conditions on all system levels. Therefore Turner et al. (2018) are quite right to insist that natural selection (if the term is used in a very broad sense) is a common parameter of biological, social, cultural and religious evolution. But because systemic properties on higher levels differ profoundly from those of lower levels, their evolutionary processes develop different dynamics. Likewise, the law of gravity does not explain the beauty of the night sky and the multitude of celestial bodies, which in all their diversity still form a far simpler pattern than the biosphere.

References Charlesworth, D., Barton, N. H., & Charlesworth, B. (2017). The sources of adaptive variation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences., 284(1855). https://doi.org/10.1098/ rspb.2016.2864. Francis, D.  D., & Kuhar, M.  J. (2008). Frequency of maternal licking and grooming correlates negatively with vulnerability to cocaine and alcohol use in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 90, 497–500. Jékely, Gáspár, Jordi Paps & Claus Nielsen. (2015). The phylogenetic position of ctenophores and the origin(s) of nervous systems. Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC4406211/. Koonin, E.  V. (2016). Splendor and misery of adaptation, or the importance of neutral null for understanding evolution. BMC Biology, 14, 114. Retrieved January 21, 2017, from www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5180405/. Lalande, M. (1996). Parental imprinting and human disease. Annual Review of Genetics, 30, 173–195. Martos, S. N., Tang, W.-y., & Wang, Z. (2015). Elusive inheritance: Transgenerational effects and epigenetic inheritance in human environmental disease. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 118, 44–54. Moran, L. A. (2008). Epigenetics in new scientist. Retrieved February 22, 2020, from https://sandwalk.blogspot.de/2008/07/epigenetics-­in-­new-­scientist.html. Morris, S. C. (2015). The runes of evolution. West Conshohocken: Templeton Press.

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Pollard, K., Salama, S., Lambert, N., Lambot, M.-A., Coppens, S., Pedersen, J. S., Katzman, S., King, B., Onodera, C., Siepel, A., Kern, A. D., Dehay, C., Igel, H., Ares, M., Jr., Vanderhaeghen, P., & Haussler, D. (2006). An RNA gene expressed during cortical development evolved rapidly in humans. Nature, 443, 167–172. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05113. Rokas, A. (2013). My oldest sister is a sea walnut? Science, 342, 1327–1329. Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Petersen, A. K., & Geertz, A. W. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York: Routledge. Vågerö, D., Pinger, P. R., Aronsson, V., & van den Berg, G. J. (2018). Paternal grandfather’s access to food predicts all-cause and cancer mortality in grandsons. Nature Communications, 9, 5124. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-­018-­07617-­9. Wolff, G. L., Kodell, R. L., Moore, S. R., & Cooney, C. A. (1998). Maternal diet, epigenetics, and agouti gene expression in A/a mice. The FASEB Journal, 12, 949–957. Young, Emma. (2008). Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance. New Scientist. Retrieved February 22, 2020, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/ mg19926641-­500-­rewriting-­darwin-­the-­new-­non-­genetic-­inheritance/. Zimmer, Carl. (2016). Scientists seek to update evolution. Quantamagazine November 22. Retrieved February 22, 2020, from https://www.quantamagazine.org/ scientists-­seek-­to-­update-­evolution-­20161122.

Gene-Culture Coevolution

In Chap. 5, which dealt mainly with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, it was mentioned in a prefatory way that the evolution of religion must have been driven by interactions between literally Darwinian, Darwinian-like and non-Darwinian processes. At first glance this rather obvious statement needs no further confirmation. But as usual in evolution theory, which deals with the measureless complexity of the mesocosm (Chap. 1), the devil is in the details. In this case, the innocent term “interaction” offers theoretical difficulties. How, exactly, is one to understand the combined influence of genetic selection processes and cultural innovations on the evolutionary trajectory towards human religion? The widely used concept gene-­ culture coevolution describes their interaction in a general manner. How genetic and cultural developments interact causally, remains an open issue. Coevolution is primarily a theoretical concept coming from biology, although it has been applied not only to the scientific study of culture and religion, but analogically to economics, sociology, computer science and even astronomy. Transferred to models of religious evolution, does the term gene-culture coevolution depict a process that is literally identical with the biological term of that name or is it merely an analogical term? In the latter case, how close is the analogy? Some voices seem to deny that the concept is taken from biology at all when it is used for the scientific study of religious evolution. From their point of view, the framework of biological evolution theory is simply expanded when it includes culture and religion. In any case, one usually meets no theoretical deliberations concerning the term’s use literally, analogically, or even fully biologically when one applies it to the evolution of religion. Kivinen & Piiroinen (2018, 5) state: “Gene–culture coevolution in ecological niches is pretty much an established fact about human evolutionary history.“Taken as a phenomenological designation, the statement is reasonable enough. In addition, they coin the term coevolutionary organism-environment transaction, which is tantamount to accepting as fact that the human species depends extensively on culture to maintain and reconstruct its ecological niche. Deacon (1997) in his important © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_7

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book about human language spoke of the coevolution of language and the brain: another important aspect of the interactions between different levels of the human behavioral system. Petersen et  al. (2018, preface 38) state that the “gene-culture coevolution perspective, or dual inheritance theory as it was formerly called, is increasingly becoming the dominant view among scholars of biology and psychology as well as among many scholars of religion.” They, like many others, are convinced that coevolutionary constructs offer a theoretical framework for the systemic and holistic approach necessary to depict the evolution of complex religious systems, including their organismic, mental, social, cultural, and religious dimension. As a general, descriptive tool, the concept of gene-culture coevolution is a useful starting point for the study of religious evolution. But the development of more detailed theoretical constructs demands a strong interdisciplinary effort, including expertise from evolutionary biology. So far, such an approach is largely  lacking. This is demonstrated by the fact that in biology, and in the study of religion, the term coevolution usually  indicates different processes. This is not a problem as such: Theoretical terms in scientific theories are defined by the actual theory, not by some general, correct or common meaning. For example, the term “species” is differently used in separate biological branches and in paleontology, according to different theoretical contexts. But a problem may arise if the terminological similarity is taken as an indication of theoretical identity. What then, is the respective, particular meaning of “coevolution” in the term “gene-culture coevolution” and in biology? Cultural evolution is multi-layered. It comprises, among other things, an interaction between the technical developments leading towards the use of complex tools, and social evolution leading towards cooperative behavior. Both technical developments and social evolution interact with the evolution of language; together they drive the emergence of Homo sapiens society (Heyes 2012, 367, Barrett et al. 2012, 367, Barrett 2010, 583–621). In this context, gene-culture coevolution designates the interaction of subsystems within one species. A techno-social coevolution incorporates only subsystems of the human behavior repertoire. In biology, however, synergistic adaptations of different traits of one species are mostly  regarded as co-­adaptations. When a species, for example, interchanges its herbivorous lifestyle for a predatory way of living, co-adaptations of behavior and the digestive system etc. are necessary. The System Theory of Evolution (Chap. 5) describes co-adaptation as an integral aspect of all evolutionary innovations: There are always internal selection processes as well as external ones. In contrast, the term coevolution in biology almost always describes a long-term, ecological interaction between species or clades: between genetically isolated and taxonomically distant, reproductive communities. It occurs when the evolution of one population has a decisive selective influence on the evolution of the other one, and vice versa. It enforces corresponding adaptations on both sides. The phenomenon is common, but not a universal aspect of evolutionary innovation comparable to systemic co-adaptation. It is in fact a special case: External selection pressures are to some degree dominated by the influence of other organisms, often by only one species. The generic examples are symbiosis and parasitism. Predator and prey coevolve if the predator relies heavily on one species, and the predation is a major

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Fig. 1  Dead Pines: Pines trees in the Black Forest (Germany) killed by bark beetles. These beetles are a major cause of mortality for the trees; they depend upon only a few pine species. Under these conditions, the defensive mechanisms of the trees co-evolve with the ability of the beetles to overcome them. The result is a dynamic ecological equilibrium. The evolutionary interaction between the two clades is remotely analogical with the joint evolution of genetic and cultural features in the phylogeny of humans. (source: author)

cause of mortality for the prey (Fig. 1). Such a coevolution is antagonistic, as in parasitism, and can be described as an evolutionary arms race. On the other hand, antagonistic co-adaptations of an organism’s behavioral subsystems are, at first sight, a perplexing idea. There are cases of “inner selection” which have certain antagonistic aspects, but their dynamic differs from that of coevolution in the biological sense.

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Evolutionary biology distinguishes mutualistic and competitive coevolution. A striking example of the latter, which has been extensively researched, is the ecological relation between the North American Rough-skinned newt (Tarricha granulosa) and the Common garter snake (Thamanophis sirtalis). The newt is highly toxic, and the snake, a main predator, is highly tolerant of the toxin. The “arms race” between them produces, on the side of the newt, a toxicity which is ten times higher than needed to deter other predators. It has been shown that a large bullfrog, another potential predator, drops dead within seconds after swallowing a small newt. The snake, on the other hand, evolved the ability to test the individual toxicity of newts by “tasting” the skin. It will swallow less toxic specimens and leave more toxic ones alone. That behavior pattern locks the two species in a so-called Red Queen arms race. The term refers to Lewis Carrol’s Red Queen in “Through the Looking Glass” (1871) who tells Alice that she has to run as fast as possible just to remain in the same place. That is exactly the situation that coevolution between snake and newt produces: The predation risk for the newts and the snake’s ability to consume them remain stable. Genetic variants which cause the production of more toxins on the newt’s side are always positively selected for, because the respective phenotype is more often left alone. Changes in the snake’s gene pool which cause more compensatory abilities always have a selection advantage as well, because the resulting phenotype can consume more newts. Outside their coevolutionary interaction, the ecological cost for both species is considerable and may at some point change the conditions of the evolutionary “game” between them. The Rough-skinned newt has apparently no actual, evolutionary option to escape the costly increase of toxicity. But there could be options in reach to avoid predation by some other adaptation. On the other hand, the snake species could no longer be able to sustain the physiological cost of increasing poison tolerance and evolve an avoidance pattern, which then would have the better relative fitness compared with predation. In this case, the newt “wins” the arms race. That happens in evolution: There are potential host species of the Eurasian cuckoo, an obligate brood parasite, which seem to have out-competed it. Eggs occasionally placed in their nests rarely develop, forcing the cuckoo to rely on other species to brood its eggs. But the use of the metaphor “win” is risky. It may obscure the abstract logic of the evolutionary game: Newt and garter snake co-evolve with each other, while different genetic options which, under the conditions of the arms race, have different fitness results, compete in their gene pools. They are selected in the usual “Darwinian” way. In addition, internal selection influences their respective fitness, because co-adaptations are always necessary. For example, the newt’s increased production of toxins causes not only physiologic costs. The high concentration of toxin in the skin requires co-adaptations which protect the own organism. The snake has also to sustain increasing physiologic costs of toxin neutralization. In addition, behavioral co-adaptations are necessary. After swallowing a rough-skinned newt, a garter snake takes an extended rest to facilitate the toxin’s degradation. Such causal interactions of synchronous inter- and intra-species adaptations are difficult to analyze causally, because several variables influence the outcome.

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This applies to mutualistic coevolution in the same way. It is best demonstrated by symbioses. A mutualistic relationship, however, can always turn into a competitive one by innovations on one side. There are numerous examples of interactions which are difficult to pigeon-hole into one or the other category. Bees are important pollinators for many plants, a classic example of mutualism. Sometimes it is easier for a bee with its relatively short proboscis to bite a hole in the flower’s spur to reach nectar, than to creep into the narrow duct which contains the stamen. That turns the mutualistic into a competitive coevolution, because the plant no longer receives a benefit. If the competitive behavior becomes prevalent, the plant will develop antagonistic adaptations. These, in turn, alter the fitness of respective bee strategies. The example demonstrates again that, beside the symbiotic coevolution of bees and flowers and closely influenced by it, alternative features compete with each other as always in the evolution of these partner species—assuming of course that the “biting” behavior of the bees has a genetic background, which is probable. Coevolutionary processes, driven by selective pressures on different genetically mediated phenotypes, can be modeled by evolutionary game theory (see Chap. 5). These models, in turn, reach an almost unmanageable level of complexity if all relevant variables are included which simultaneously influence the evolving system. The details of such processes—as far as they can be modeled at all—are beyond the scope of this book and belong to a highly specialized field of evolution theory. One final example is offered to explain the difference between coevolution and co-adaptation: In animal species which propagate bisexually, the contributions of the two sexes to propagation success are often different in terms of resources. This leads to conflicting selection pressures on the species’ genome. Behavior patterns which increase the propagation success of females, at the same time decrease the propagation success of males, and vice versa. Such an antagonistic, co-adaptive dynamic resembles, up to a point, competitive coevolution between species. But it is not the same dynamic. Because the sexes share one gene-pool, alleles which mediate female and male behavior patterns are present in both genomes, male and female. Selection pressures influence their respective fitness through the propagation success of both sexes. The outcome depends upon the exact conditions of the “game”. Often the result is the gradual disappearance of one genetic variant, and the prevalence of an alternative with higher relative fitness. On the other hand, a dynamic balance, an evolutionary equilibrium, between alternative features may result. In that case the alleles remain present in the gene pool in a stable ratio and are differently expressed in male and female ontogeny. As a consequence, phenotypes apply antagonistic, gender-specific strategies. The cost of maintaining the equilibrium between them has to be ecologically sustainable and has to be sustained by the species as a whole. Male lions practice infanticide: When a coalition of related males takes over a pride of females, the victors attempt to kill all cubs which are younger than 9 months. This radically increases their propagation success, because, without cubs, the lionesses will return to estrous and become receptive again. Because out of eight male lions only one gets a chance to mate at all, the partial fitness advantage of alleles mediating male infanticide is high. On the other hand, they diminish the

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propagation success of females, which is a partial fitness disadvantage of the same alleles. One ought to remember that they are equally present in the female genome as in the male one, although they are not equally expressed. The limited fitness of male infanticide behavior leaves room for the evolution of alleles promoting female behavior to protect cubs sired by former dominant males. Indeed, field research has shown that lionesses apply several strategies to shield their cubs, which are at least partly successful. The result is an evolutionary equilibrium between antagonistic male and female behavior patterns under the given ecological conditions. As has been mentioned, other results are theoretically possible: Instead of a stable balance, one behavior pattern could prevail in the long run. In this case, one could say metaphorically that one sex “wins”. There could be, for example, a genetic alteration which induces lionesses to refuse mating with any male they have witnessed killing cubs. That innovation would reduce the fitness advantage of alleles producing male infanticide dramatically. It is probable that a lion’s learning capability suffices to install such a pattern. But mutations inducing a “refusing strategy” in females would not automatically have a higher fitness than the alternative strategy which is actually observed: trying to protect cubs, if possible, and mating with dominant males as well. The relative fitness of the actual behavior and that of an imagined alternative behavior depend upon causal interactions within the entire behavioral system of lions within a given environment. Probably the balance between male infanticide and female protective reactions is preserved as a result of the evolutionary “game” by the necessity of reliable and stable cooperation between the sexes. Females cannot defend the pride’s territory against competing groups. That is the male’s task. Spotted hyenas, a severe competition for lions on the East African savannah, are always dominated by male lions, but not in all cases by females. On the other hand, males depend upon the higher hunting prowess of females, except in case of prey of exceptional strength like buffaloes. A healthy adult buffalo is usually brought down by male lions, if it is brought down at all. All in all, the female pride cannot afford losing male protection by refusing to mate. The obvious male counter strategy would be to look out for other prides where the females accept them, because they do not carry the “refusal” alleles. That would radically diminish the fitness of these (imagined) alleles. Thus, neither males nor females can actually “win” the arms race between the sexes. The metaphor “win” does not signify the same result than in the case of the newt-snake arms race. Newts can get rid of snakes; female lions cannot get rid of males. The two sexes cannot part ways by entering evolutionary trajectories without further co-adaptation. If changed ecological conditions were to cause the disappearance of infanticide, females would “win” only in the sense that the entirety of the selection pressures would move the available adaptive optimum for the species to another point on the evolutionary landscape, a point which excludes infanticide. The example of the lion sociality demonstrates that the difference between coevolution in biology, and coevolution, as the term is used in religious studies, is not trivial. The complex, inner evolutionary dynamics of the behavioral system always make co-adaptation in the biological sense necessary. Coevolution in the

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biological sense—long-term, fitness-decisive evolutionary competition or cooperation between sequestered populations—is a special case of external adaptation and may not always take place. It is probable that no coevolutionary processes in the strict biological sense took place during the evolution of culture and religion. The term coevolution, as it is used in the study of religious evolution, is just a concise description of the evolution of complex organismic systems, which always comprise co-adaptations. The consequence is that by speaking of coevolutionary processes, which lead towards human religion in this expanded sense of the term coevolution, one necessarily speaks of processes with highly intricate and dynamic features. Otherwise “coevolution” would become a mere metaphor without explanatory value: Cultural solutions to adaptation problems competed with each other both on their own cultural level, and by their specific propagation patterns. At the same time, different genetic patterns competed on the genetic level by natural selection. Complicating the picture further, both individuals and groups, carrying varying cultural and genetic features, competed simultaneously by different means as phenotypes and as collectives, For example, the hypothetical appearance of a religious (or proto-religious) capacity in a Homo population, perhaps an idea of the sacred, may have competed culturally with non-religious mindsets within the population. Perhaps this competition included both synergistic and antagonistic (adaptive and maladaptive) interactions with behavioral, physiological and genetic features. If a group’s culture became proto-religious, it might have competed by group selection with “non-religious” Homo groups, again including adaptive and adverse influences upon inter-group relations. The upward and downward interactions between cultural and genetic adaptive processes in such a system would result in a bewildering criss-cross of mutual influences. Thus, by using gene-culture coevolution as a blueprint for the conditions of religious evolution, one refers to one of the most abstract research subjects of evolutionary biology. From this perspective, some hypothetical explanations of adaptive advantages of religion (or adaptive advantages of cognitive developments backpacking religion) are just too simple and straightforward to be realistic. Part IV of this book will look further into such hypotheses. Although “gene-culture coevolution” in the generalized sense explained above is not misleading, “gene-culture co-adaptation” as a blueprint for cultural and religious evolution would be more precise. All subsystems of the species Homo sapiens must have evolved following a joint evolutionary path, despite conflicting selection pressures on particular elements: Co-adaptation implicates an evolution towards the “fittest” available compromise. As an example, innovations of genetically mediated brain abilities and culturally inherited social skills must have functioned and evolved jointly. This was achieved in some manner or another, because brain development and social evolution continued at high speed. The role religion played for the numerous co-adaptations of the brain and of society in later stages of Homo evolution is open to speculation. Although one may indeed speculate, one must keep the actual complexity of the system in mind in order to avoid the trap of “systemic blindness” (Chap. 4).

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To repeat the pertinent question: How exactly do cultural innovations and genetic evolution interact causally within the Homo line? At this point, one usually mentions that Neolithic herders developed a genetically based lactose tolerance in adulthood, a genetic co-adaptation to a culturally changed economy. But there are hardly any other instances of equal lucidity. Some of the reasons for the intricacies of evolutionary co-adaptations between the genetic and the cultural level of the human behavior system have already been discussed. They are summarized in the following bullet-statements in an admittedly simplified manner: –– Socially learned information is transmitted not only vertically, as genetic information, to the next generation, but also horizontally to contemporaries. The transmission speed of learned contents, especially in a long-lived species with high learning ability and slow succession of generations, can therefore be higher by several orders of magnitude. This might, and usually does, uncouple the selective feedback circles of genetic and cultural, or religious evolution. For example, all verbal formulations of a belief system, from “There is no god” to “Allah akbar” are based on the same genetic information, which is expressed in brain ontogeny. If religions compete culturally with each other, the outcome does not affect the genetic information necessary to acquire language and religious beliefs. In other words: There is, in this case, no “top down” effect of cultural evolution affecting genetic evolution. There is no (or little) gene-culture co-adaptation. –– The rapid feedback circles within a religious or cultural system, and the possibility of equally rapid horizontal information transfer, result in changes which are mostly driven by cultural influences. The Clovis Culture appeared about 12,000 years ago in North America, and is characterized by its beautiful, highly functional projectile points and some typical bone tools. It is hard to imagine that the Paleo Indians preceding the Clovis people, if there were any, developed an advanced stone knapping skill in response to new environmental challenges— except, perhaps, in response to increased competition by fellow humans. The material Clovis culture spread, because it out-competed (so to speak) alternative, and older, techniques in a predominantly cultural competition. The rules of such a competition may, or may not, be adequately described by literally Darwinian, Darwinian-analogous or entirely non-Darwinian processes. In any case, they happened on the cultural level of the behavioral system. –– On the genetic level, only those evolutionary steps are possible which do not disrupt the genetic control of ontogeny. Therefore, in biological evolution there are no “hopeful monsters”, no organisms which turn into something else from one generation to the next. In the history of religion there are “hopeful monsters”, new religions founded by one individual and transported to many people within a few years. Joseph Smith, who founded the Latter Day Saints in the late 1820s, took elements of esotericism, theism, nineteenth century evolutionism and even an arcane temple worship, which he could only have known from literature, and combined them into not exactly a unity, but into a successful amalgam. Such religious developments are far too fast to feed back into genetic evolution.

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They follow rules which apply to their own systemic level, and which will have to be depicted and (if possible) explained at that level. Gene-culture co-­adaptation may be absent, but not complex co-adaptations of social and cultural features. A consequence of the points mentioned above is that the relative cultural “fitness” of socially learned information i.e., the probability that any given socially learned information becomes established rather than some possible alternative versions, is often, perhaps usually, independent from its genetic fitness, at least to a certain degree. Religious information which harms the evolutionary fitness of their respective alleles may be transmitted by individuals and groups, if it is not too detrimental. The complete celibacy of the eighteenth century Shakers lead to their disappearance within a century. But most religious rules which affect the group’s propagation have less drastic fitness consequences. Frequently, they may not surmount the genetic drift barrier (Chap. 5). Genetic information is usually transmitted to the next generation as a “package”, consisting of two recombined, haploid sets of parental information. It is rarely transmitted singularly and cannot be chosen or rejected by the next generation. Socially learned information can be, at least in part, purposefully selected: “The processes that fuel cultural change are goal-driven, intuitive, strategic, and forward-­thinking” (Gabora 2013, 12). That is true not for all, but for very many cultural adaptations (Turner et al. 2018). In such a process there are no “packages” of information comparable with gene assemblies. For example, when Richard Dawkins postulated religious “memes” half a century ago, as a descriptive analogy with genes, it turned out (and is widely accepted by now) that the result was unsatisfactory. The analogy between alternative gene loci (alleles) and competing cultural contents is too far-fetched to be of much theoretical or practical use. The data volume of the (haploid) human genome is approximately 109 bit. An estimate for that of the human brain amounts to at least 1016 bit, an immense quantitative difference. Admittedly, the estimation is based on some guesswork. Also, the data volume is not a direct measure of the information actually processed. According to a comprehensive overview (AI Impacts 2015), the data processing capacity of the human brain equals 1018 to 1028 FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second), a common measurement for computer performances. The actual extent of data processing depends on the activity patterns and functions which are momentarily being performed by the brain. A high activity level comprises the simultaneous working of about 300 m pattern-recognizing modules, each consisting of 100 neurons, supported by a memory capacity of 1010 to 1020 bit. The comparison between genetic and cerebral data processing leads to the unavoidable conclusion that higher brain functions develop on the quantitative side almost exclusively by learning and enculturation. The substantial input by genetic information is quantitatively (not functionally) negligible. Therefore, it is inevitable that the comparatively few genetically mediated emotional, sensory and motor patterns are recruited on superimposed levels of the behavior system by many different functions, even contradictory ones. Basic aggressive reactions, fear, pleasure, sexual arousal etc. are strong motivational

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forces which act on perceptions, actions, and thoughts at various levels throughout the human behavioral system. But what they do might be starkly different from instance to instance, from culture to culture and from individual to individual. For example, religious self-sacrificial behavior probably has a genetic root in human so-called eusociality: in the strong emotions which drive cooperative behavior. The concept has been discussed in Chap. 5. But the eusocial motivation pattern can be recruited (sometimes called “hijacked”) either for hostility against an out-group, as in suicide bombing. Or it can serve as the motivational basis for sacrificing one’s own life to save unrelated persons. Extremely destructive and extremely altruistic religious deeds, although they depend upon a common genetic basis, are deeply opposed actions. No wonder genetically based lactose tolerance in agricultural societies stands out as one lucid example in a field of bewildering complexity. Another, somewhat similar, example is the religious prohibition of pork consumption in Judaism. It is assumed that the prohibition developed from a symbolic, religious connection with the animal world and did not aim for disease prevention. There is no indication that anybody in antiquity saw a connection between the crippling, and sometimes fatal, disease trichinosis and pork consumption, although it was recognized that pig farming causes hygiene problems (Fincher and Thornhill 2012). The association between undercooked meat and trichinosis was only discovered in the nineteenth century. A religious prohibition of pork consumption, if it were actually observed, would have reduced the infection rate to almost zero. (There is a slight risk of infection by wild game.) It is uncertain how the rule was observed in ancient Judaism. But provided it was, it would have had an impact on the group’s health, and therefore on its genetic fitness. There could have been an impact from a higher reproduction rate on the cultural success of Judaism, and therefore an effect analogous to co-adaptation in biology. But it is also obvious that many religious rules and developments have either no “top down” co-adaptive effects, or complicated, perhaps contradictory, effects. In terms of a dimensional model, religions and cultures may evolve along their historic-social dimension with strong, little, no, or adverse changes along the evolutionary-biological dimension (Fig. 2). All in all, to describe religious evolution as principally driven by gene-culture coevolution in an extended sense is irrefutable, although the term gene-culture co-­ adaptation would be more expedient. Either term, without further interpretation, is too general to explain causal interactions between system levels. Any number of examples could be introduced to demonstrate the point: For example, Blume (2014) collected data from contemporary religious groups which show that, under modern conditions, religious people almost always have larger, and more stable, families than secular ones. Kaufmann (2010) offers similar results. So, both cultural and religious evolution, which are unlike biological evolution on their own system level, probably produce some Darwinian effects on a lower system level or (in other words) have co-adaptive, perhaps even genetic, effects. But the complexity of interactions on each system level, and between them, defies any attempt to explain them causally in “literal” biological or biology-analogical terms, even if genetic

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Fig. 2  Domestic Pig: An old Hungarian breed of domestic pigs, small sized and with remnants of hair cover. Pigs kept in the Middle East in antiquity were probably similar. It is uncertain if the religious prohibition against keeping and consuming pigs was observed in ancient Judaism. If it was, it reduced the risk of trichinosis to almost zero. (source: author)

adaptation is somehow involved, or fitness effects are plausible. An evolutionary game model, which could at least approach causal explanations is nowhere in sight; its development would be demanding indeed. Most actual cases are even more intricate. The Amish Communities in North America increase consistently without missionary activity (Blume 2012). Their strong group commitment might conceivably have a basis in a (probably slightly) different emotional and cognitive mindset, which in turn might have a genetic basis. The assumption is speculative, although the twin study of Lewis and Bates (2013) seems at least to indicate such a possibility. The reproductive success of the Amish would increase the prevalence of such hypothetical “social commitment alleles” regionally, but not necessarily over many generations or in the human species as a whole. If they exist at all, we do not know if they are generally advantageous for human reproduction, or only under specific historical conditions, or perhaps only for groups like the Amish, which live as a religious minority among a diverging majority. The latter would mean that selection pressures on these hypothetical genes would, if at all, operate on the level of groups: sequestered breeding populations. Still the relative or absolute fitness value of these hypothetical alleles could not be quantitated. In the Modern Synthesis, the theoretical concept “fitness” is part of a formalism which models genetic evolution. Without reinterpretation, it cannot be transferred to the evolution of a complex, multi-level behavioral system which includes culture and religion. This conclusion can be put to the test: The effective vertical transfer of Amish beliefs from generation to generation increases their relative frequency in the society as a whole. These beliefs contribute to their own propagation both by stabilizing the boundary between minority (Amish) and majority beliefs, and by supporting the reproductive isolation of the Amish. Yet to speak of a higher fitness of Amish beliefs compared with the religious or secular beliefs of their contemporary neighbors, would be confusing. On the one hand, within Amish culture their religion is functional and forms one of its integral parts.

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On the other hand, their religious ideas are unsuitable for horizontal transfer. The Amish attract very few converts, and secular convictions threaten their beliefs much more than vice versa. If one applies the fitness definitions of the Modern Synthesis directly to their convictions, the unsatisfactory outcome is that Amish beliefs are neither fit nor unfit. Their convictions are—as Gabora suggests (2013)—components of an autopoietic system which maintains itself, and which usually changes as a whole by its inner dynamics, and by its interaction with the environment. How then can such evolutionary processes be depicted in scientific explanations? Parts IV and V of this book will attempt an answer.

References AI Impacts. (2015). Brain performance in FLOPS. AI Impacts. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://aiimpacts.org/brain-­performance-­in-­flops. Barrett, L.  S., Henzi, P., & Lusseau, D. (2012). Taking sociality seriously: The structure of multi-dimensional social networks as a source of information for individuals. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0113. Barrett, N. F. (2010). Toward an alternative evolutionary theory of religion: Looking past computational evolutionary psychology to a wider field of possibilities. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 78(3), 583–621. Blume, M. (2012). Die Amish: Ihre Geschichte, ihr Leben und ihr Erfolg. Filderstadt: Sciebooks Verlag. Blume, M. (2014). Religion und Demographie. Filderstadt: Sciebooks Verlag. Deacon, T. W. (1997). The symbolic species: The coevolution of language and the brain. New York/ London: Norton. Fincher, C. L., & Thornhill, R. (2012). Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: The cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(2), 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X11000021. Gabora, L. (2013). An evolutionary framework for culture: Selectionism versus communal exchange. Physics of Life Reviews, 10(2), 117–145. Heyes, C. (2012). New thinking: The evolution of human cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0111. Kaufmann, E. (2010). Shall the religious inherit the earth? Demography and politics in the 21st century. London: Profile Books. Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2018). The evolution of homo discens: Natural selection and human learning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12157. Lewis, G. J., & Bates, T. C. (2013). Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(4), 398–405. Petersen, A. K., Gilhus, I. S., Luther, M. H., Jensen, J. S., & Sørensen, J. (Eds.). (2018). Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Petersen, A. K., & Geertz, A. W. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York: Routledge.

Part III

Phenomenology of Paleolithic Religion

A Story Told Backwards

A story needs a beginning. The history of religion has no beginning we know of, neither temporarily nor causally. Krech (2019) convincingly argues that the numerous narratives which describe how the evolution of Homo sapiens religion initially started (or the religion of Homo erectus, a candidate favored by some) are indeed, as has been proposed in Chap. 3, based upon analogies with much later parts of the story. Yet some, although often contested and indecisive, archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence exists, which might point back to the beginning of human religion. The following list contains examples, sorted by age. The nomenclature which defines the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods applies to Africa, Asia and Europe, with some dating differences. They cannot be applied to Australia, where a late Paleolithic or Mesolithic culture persisted, nor to the Americas, where late Neolithic cultures prospered up to the time of European colonization. –– 430,000 BCE, lower Paleolithic (old stone age): There is disputed evidence from Atapuerca (Spain) for intentional burials by a population of Homo heidelbergensis, a population which could probably also be regarded as early Neanderthals, in a Pit of Bones. –– 370,000 BCE, lower Paleolithic: Homo heidelbergensis at Bilzingsleben might have had a religious or proto-religious world conception, suggested by skeletal remains, by non-figurative decorations and by features of their dwelling place. –– 300,000  BCE, middle Paleolithic  (middle stone age): It is possible, but hotly disputed, that Homo naledi, a species more primitive than Homo erectus and its descendants, placed dead bodies in a remote cave (Rising Star Cave, South Africa). –– 130,000 BCE, middle Paleolithic: The oldest, but questionable, evidence for the intentional interment of the dead by early Neanderthals was found in Krapina (Croatia); one cranium shows signs of (perhaps) ritual handling after death. A

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_8

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somewhat younger burial from 80,000 to 120,000 BCE was found in Tabun Cave (Israel). 100,000  BCE, middle Paleolithic: The oldest burials of anatomically (almost) modern humans were found in Quafzeh Cave (Israel). 100,000  BCE and later, middle Paleolithic: There are increasingly numerous traces of the use of red Ochre from African sites. The pigment might have had ritual uses. 75,000 BCE, middle Paleolithic: An assumed Neanderthal bear cult, based on findings in alpine caves and Le Regourdou Cave (France) is now thought to be improbable or even disproved. 70,000–40,000  BCE, late middle Paleolithic: There is one well documented burial of a “classical” Neanderthal male in Le Regourdou Cave (France) from 70,000 BCE, another one from 60,000 BCE in Kebara Cave (Israel). Other burial sites of similar age are known from Shanidar (Iraq), La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, and Teschik-Tasch cave (Uzbekistan). There, a male Neanderthal child was buried together with ibex horns. 42,000 BCE: Remains of a ritual burial of one Homo sapiens male were found at Lake Mungo, Australia. 40,000 BCE, late middle Paleolithic: A newborn Neanderthal child was buried in Le Moustier, France; the last recorded Neanderthal burial. Afterwards, the “classical” Neanderthals were replaced in Europe by the modern humans of the Proto-Aurignac. 40,000 BCE, late middle Paleolithic: Substantial evidence in Europe documents ritual burials by modern Homo sapiens. 40,000  BCE, late middle Paleolithic: Hand prints (positive images formed by covering the hand with paint and placing it on the surface) and stencils (negative images formed by placing the hand against a surface and blowing paint around it) appear in caves in Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. The oldest ones were found in Indonesia. In Europe, most or all show female hands, in some cases fingers are missing from the picture. They are tentatively interpreted as traces of animist rituals. 40,000 BCE, late middle and upper Paleolithic (younger stone age): The oldest figurative cave paintings are known from southwest Europe and from the Maros Caves (Sulawesi, AKA Celebes in Indonesia). The somewhat younger paintings at Chauvet and Lascaux (France) are seen as representing religious ideas and practices. 35,000  BCE, late middle and upper Paleolithic: There are about 120 known Venus figurines from the Paleolithic, the majority from the Gravettien culture (33,000–22,000 BCE). Most, but not all, exaggerate female characteristics: They are thought to be connected to fertility cults. 35,000 BCE, late middle and upper Paleolithic: The majority of known figurines represent animals; a few statuettes depict hybrids between animals and humans. They are compared to historic artifacts of animalism.

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–– 18,000 to 12,000 BCE, Magdalénien cultures: Engravings of schematic female forms appear in the later Magdalénien cultures, sometimes depicted together with animals, with unknown meaning. –– 12,000–9000  BCE, European upper Paleolithic (Mesolithic): The so-called Shigir Idol, a carved larch pole 5 m long, was found in a bog in Russia. It shows face and hand images and is crowned by a human head. A glacial lake at Stellmoor (Germany) contained the remains of two reindeer, weighted down by stones and sunk. Together with 12 reindeer from a later period, they were initially interpreted as sacrifices. Later research shows the interpretation to be inconclusive. –– About 10,000 BCE, Mesolithic: Addaura cave (Sicily) contains wall engravings which depict bovids, horses and deer. Among them is a group of human figures who, according to one interpretation, are conducting a human sacrifice. However, the two figures seen as sacrifices could have several different meanings. There is no clear indication of human and animal sacrifices before the Neolithic. –– 12,000–5000  BCE, Mesolithic to Neolithic: The transformation of the final hunter-gatherer cultures, and their religion, to early agriculture takes place in Asia, Africa and Europe, in the Americas somewhat later. A wealth of artifacts, paintings etc. with religious meaning appears in the archaeological record. For example, substantial evidence documents secondary burials after the decomposition of the corpse, cremations and prolonged proximity of the living and the buried dead. There are sacrifices to deities or the dead. Female figurines had unknown uses. –– 10,000 BCE, Mesolithic: From this time on, central places of worship exist. A stone temple in southeast Turkey (Göbekli Tepe) was probably used by a nomadic culture and thus predates agriculture. What does archaeological and paleontological evidence reveal about the initial evolutionary processes leading to human religion?1 So far, as Maryanski (2018) explains in detail, all answers are speculative. Wunn (2018) proposes that the natural history of religion commenced with protoreligions of Homo sapiens in the middle Paleolithic about 90,000 BCE. They were focused on continued existence after death and on burial rites. Indeed, burials are among the oldest findings whose features can be interpreted in religious terms. The earliest, undisputed Homo sapiens burials (see the above listing) date back about 100,000 years. Bones stained with red ochre were found in the Skhul cave and the Quafzeh cave in Israel. Three of the individuals found in the Skhul cave are supposed to have been intentionally buried, one of them was buried together with a boar mandible. The Quafzeh Cave (Israel) contained the remains of five individuals interred orderly beneath the cave floor. Two of the skeletons had deer antlers in their hands. One of the individuals is a 10 year old boy, who was buried with his arms folded alongside his body and with his hands on either side of his neck. Like the boar mandible, the antlers are usually  In this book, the archaeological and paleontological record is not verified by a comprehensive list of research literature. Some exemplary citations suffice for the purpose of the argument; literature concerning all finds mentioned is readily available in a digital format. 1

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explained as funerary objects or grave offerings, accompanied by the suggestion that the agents believed in an existence after death, and perhaps in an immortal soul. The explanation relies on an analogy with later ideas of a netherworld, and with the distinction between mortal and immortal aspects of human beings. Without this (or another) historical analogy, the finds allow only the conclusion that the burials went beyond hygienic requirements and had additional purposes. For example, the antlers might have had an apotropaic function as protective magic. Artifacts which could be carried about and may have served as body decorations or “valuable objects”, appear at the same time in the archaeological record as burials with grave offerings. They comprise fragments of ivory and bone, decorated shells etc. and demonstrate that these human populations had developed new art forms, compared with their predecessors. It is no surprise that such artifacts appear in burials as well, but their purpose remains unknown. Burials from the Gravettien culture (33,000–22,000  BCE) indicate ritual handling of the corpses (Schnurbein 2009, 28–32). The oldest grave in Austria was found in 2005 on the Wachtberg (near Krems). It contained two baby skeletons strewn with red pigment and an ivory chaplet (Schnurbein 2009, Fig. 23). The oldest burial in Germany (ca. 20,000  BCE, Solutréen) is situated in the cave Mittlere Klause in Bavaria. One of the first known cremations is from Australia, the remains of a female skeleton named LM1 from about 25,000  BCE.  The body was likely burned. Then the bones were smashed and burned again, then decorated with ochre. The rituals were conducted by anatomically modern and culturally advanced people who left behind sophisticated works of art (Bowler et al. 2003). It seems natural to assume that the rituals grew out of views comparable to historic hunter-gatherer religions. Narr (2008) supposes that the oldest burials, which took place between 50,000 and 30,000 BCE already attest to a belief in life after death at that time and that “the animalistic features encountered in the art of the Upper Paleolithic Period were most likely only part of the religion that existed at that time. Among present-day ‘primitives’ the animalistic realm often occupies only a lower sphere of what can be considered religious, and beyond and above that sphere are still other notions about gods.” However, Wunn (2018) rejects this analogy and proposes that in the late middle Paleolithic period (around 40,000  BCE) religion emphasized territorial claims of hordes, ancestor spirits were thought to safeguard their hunting grounds, and thus placated existential fear. It was not until the Neolithic period that the idea of higher and lower worlds developed, which became the home of ancestors and powerful beings who either supported or threatened the living. If late middle Paleolithic hunter-gatherer clans really placed skulls strategically to mark and guard their territory, and if these skulls were really an evocation of magical help by ancestor spirits: It is still possible, as Narr supposes, that there were more religious convictions regarding the “beyond and above”. The skull placing rituals may have also been pleading for intercessions by divine beings or may have served any conceivable combination of purposes.

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The belief in superhuman entities inhabiting a higher world, may not necessarily have evolved from a belief in the continued existence of ancestor spirits and in some form of afterlife. It could have been the other way round. Again Narr points out that “a study of very simple hunters and gatherers of recent times shows that several religious conceptions generally considered to be especially ‘primitive’ (e.g. fetishism) hardly play an important part in their beliefs, but rather that … the supposedly ‘advanced’ conception of a personal creator and preserver of the world does play an important part.” An analogy with the Dreamtime of Australian aborigines would even suggest that the belief in a higher, timeless, universal reality, beyond the actual lifeworld of clans and individuals, might have come with, or before, the conception of afterlife and soul. The latter belief might have, in turn, led to burial rites which served the dead for the communio with spirits, deities etc. of the netherworld. Obviously the “advanced” religious concepts mentioned by Narr would not show up in the paleoanthropological report; neither would non-material forms of religious ideas and practices: sacred stories, ecstatic experiences, magic performed without material objects etc. If the hunter-gatherers of the late middle Paleolithic period were not only anatomically identical with extant Homo sapiens, but had an identical biological basis for their culture—which is probable—why should their religion have been simpler than those of historic hunter-gatherer societies? Why should their religious experience have been without the varying layers of meaning, without the year-round succession of different practices, without the easy fluctuation between sacred stories scrupulously preserved, half-believed traditions retold according to time and occasion, and entertaining old wives’ tales about the ancestors, the gods and anything else? The late middle and upper Paleolithic hand stencils, hand paintings and figurative paintings, as far as they can be regarded as religious documents, are also open to various interpretations. Clottes (2010) suspects that hand stencils point to a form of shamanism. Putting paint around a hand pressed on the rock face could have established a link between the individual and the power or essence in the rock. The stag-man of Trois Frères has already been mentioned as a possible expression of animalism. Similar questions are posed by a second painting there, called the small sorcerer, who appears to wear a bison mask while playing a nose-flute. We do not know the correct, or even the most probable, answers to these questions. It might be improbable that the paintings came into being as l’art pour l’art without any practical purpose; but even that is not quite impossible. Krech (2019) points out that, whatever idea or ritual the paintings depict, they document a (probably animalistic) connection between their unknown purpose and hunting. Perhaps, he speculates, a hunter-gatherer society had to come to terms by means of religion with the contingent risks and insecurities of the hunt, as well as with its unexpected bounties. The observation is borne out, for example, by the famous hunting scene from La cova dels cavalls (Spain) which dates back to between 20,000 and 15,000  years ago. It shows a deer hunt by men armed with bows. That early Magdalénien (or late Solutrean) hunters were able to conduct coordinated hunts with composite weapons is no surprise. That they were able to depict such a scene with artistic skill is astonishing indeed. Yet even without the superb

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paintings we would have known that the possible religion of a hunter-gatherer culture which depended heavily on large and dangerous prey animals, would somehow have related to hunting. How could it not have? Another connection between the life and death experiences of Paleolithic hunters and their hypothetical religion is sexuality and fecundity, especially female fecundity. The Venus figurines, which are often interpreted as objects of a fertility cult, are approximately as old as cave paintings and late Paleolithic burials. They were found at several sites across Europe and have been dated between 28,000 and 12,000 BCE. The figurines from Hohle Fels cave in southwestern Germany, and the so-called Venus von Galgenberg (Austria), are even 35,000 and 36,000 years old. Most are small, made from ivory, bone, stone or fired clay; they remind modern observers of amulets. Whether these figurines depict living women, or represent an ideal of female beauty, or are indeed fertility symbols, is impossible to decide. Perhaps they represent female ancestors, priestesses or deities within a religious context. Most depict corpulent women with large breasts. Therefore, they might have been symbols not only of reproductive success, but of fecundity in a broad sense, of health, nourishment and longevity (Dixson and Dixson 2011). As in the case of the painted “sorcerers”, each of these backward projections is possible, they are not mutually exclusive. Nothing more can be said without additional information about the religious culture of these people. The so-called lion-man from the Stadel Cave in the Hohlenstein Caves (Southwest Germany) also might have had religious significance. The ivory statuette with a lion head shows some parallels with the “sorcerer” of Trois Frères but is older. Dating from 35,000 to 40,000 BCE, it is one of the oldest clear examples of figurative art worldwide. Also, with its height of 31 cm, it is larger than the Venus figurines. Its possible religious significance is tentatively supported by the fact that bone tools, jewellery etc. accompanied the figurine. A storage room for objects regarded as valuable is equally possible, however. The carved lion-head from the nearby Vogelherd Cave of about the same age is not part of a hybrid figurine, but part of a carving depicting a cave lion. Several other, exquisitely worked animal figurines were found with it. In 2002 an only 2.5 cm high human figurine was discovered about 50 km away in Hohle Fels Cave, which might have a catlike head. That would place it culturally close to the lion-man from Hohlenstein (see e.g. Chase 2005) (Fig. 1). An attractive interpretation of the Paleolithic paintings, hybrid figurines and numerous animal sculptures is that the Aurignacian and Gravettian big-game hunters initially were animists, which is (as explained in Chap. 2) not exactly a religious system, but a spiritual world perception common to various combinations of beliefs, including animalism and totemism  (Fig. 2). Peoples et  al. (2016, 261) propose: “Results indicate that the oldest trait of religion… was animism, in agreement with long-standing beliefs about the fundamental role of this trait. Belief in an afterlife emerged, followed by shamanism and ancestor worship. Ancestor spirits or high gods who are active in human affairs were absent in early humans.” The proposal more or less reverses the evolutionary sequence suggested by Wunn (2018) and disagrees with Narr (2008) as well. The method of Peoples et  al. hinges on the

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Fig. 1  Lion Man: The so-­called lion-man from Stadel Cave in the Lone Valley (South-West Germany) is carved from mammoth ivory and approximately 35,000–40,000 years old. It is much larger (31 cm) than most figurines from the middle Paleolithic. It depicts a hybrid being with a human body, but with the head, arms and feet of a cave lion. The significance of the figurine is unknown. It might be religious and could be connected with an animalistic belief system belonging to the culture of Aurignacian big game hunters. (Dagmar Hollmann, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Loewenmensch1. jpg, “Loewenmensch1”, https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-­sa/3.0/ legalcode)

assumption that the genetic relations of extant hunter-gatherer cultures, determined by linguistic and genomic data, are correlated with the phylogeny of their religious beliefs. However, the distribution of religious traits (e.g., animism and belief in an afterlife) in their sample of hunter-gatherer cultures can only be interpreted cladistically if their transmittance was linked with that of genome and language. Only then the most widespread beliefs could be regarded as synapomorphic (primal), the less common ones as apomorphic (derived). The authors discuss the obvious difficulty that “religious beliefs are regarded as one of those cultural traits that are historically labile and prone to cultural borrowing” but dismiss it as irrelevant. It is highly relevant, however, because if beliefs are readily transferred among cultures, their presence or absence depends not mainly upon “vertical” transmission within the population, but upon “horizontal” transmission, drift effects, selective forces (not necessarily natural selection) and so on. Animism might be the most widespread religious trait in extant hunter-gatherer cultures because it fits their social structure and ecological niche, and thus is historically more often retained than other beliefs. The idea that animism equally fitted the ecological niche of the Aurignacians and came at an early stage of religious evolution is plausible. But the conclusion that other beliefs (which are less common in

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Fig. 2  Shaman: Modernday shaman of the Tuvans, a Turcic ethnic group from southern Siberia and Mongolia. The Tuvans are traditionally nomadic herders and keep to the practice of their historic Turcic animist shamanism. Its beliefs and practices co-exist with an encompassing Vajrayana belief system of Tibetan Buddhism. (Сарыглар Ай-Херел Геннадьевич, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Tuvan_shaman.jpg, https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/ legalcode)

extant hunter-gatherer societies) were absent in the Aurignac cannot be sustained, the less so the more volatile such beliefs are in cultural evolution. The proposed Paleolithic succession of beliefs is largely speculative. Again, without retrospective analogies, there are only two safe conclusions: The people who painted and sculpted superb objects of art were fully able to represent their lifeworld by symbolic communication not only cognitively, but artistically, like modern humans do. Whatever religion they had, it was part of the architecture of culturally available symbols which provided knowledge, meaning, and specific skills to individuals. Whatever function their art had within this architecture, it was somehow connected with the economic basis of their lifestyle, the hunting of large animals. In short, the evidence from the Paleolithic, as well as retrospective reconstructions of a family tree of beliefs, provide only tentative answers to the question how the basic features of human religiosity initially evolved. If one sorts through the material artifacts of prehistoric Homo sapiens, and through the available artistic depictions of their world, almost everything was possibly connected, and almost

References

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nothing was certainly connected, with either spirituality or religion. “Identification” with communal religious concepts and practices, as far as they were present, was certainly a feature of all Paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures. A “religious impulse” of some sort is suggested by ritual burials and art forms which seem to express animalistic beliefs. Yet it is uncertain if, and to what degree, the burials, paintings, statuettes, abstract symbols etc. were connected with a sense of transcendence and a sense of the sacred beyond inner-worldly magic. There are two basic ways of interpreting this result, Narr (2008) demonstrated one example for interpretation of this result and Wunn (2018) another. Narr, who interpreted the result from analogies with extant hunter-gatherer religions, concludes that the paleoanthropological report omits immaterial aspects of the Paleolithic religions, but that they had been present in Homo sapiens cultures at least since the middle Paleolithic period. This culturalistic view relocates the initial steps of religious evolution farther back to the early development of Homo sapiens in Africa, or even to its hominin ancestors. On the other hand, Wunn (2018) concludes that aspects of human religion, which are not demonstrated by paleoanthropological evidence, were indeed absent. Thus, the protoreligions of the middle Paleolithic period were dominated by ideas of surviving ancestor spirits, because the most obviously religious findings are ritual burials. Her biologistic view locates the early, but perhaps not the first, steps of religious evolution within the history of Homo sapiens outside Africa. She proposes that important features of historic religion came into being no earlier than the Neolithic revolution. Both views depend upon specific preconceptions, that of Narr upon an in-depth knowledge of the phenomenology of hunter-gatherer religions, which induces him to expect similar features and complexities in the far past. The view of Wunn depends upon her adaptationist preconception of an evolution which is driven from primitive to advanced forms and functions by straightforward, reconstructible selection pressures. She structures the development of prehistoric religion accordingly. Both views are hypothetical, even speculative. At this chapter’s end, the author might be allowed to risk a speculation of his own: To view the middle and upper Paleolithic cultures of Homo sapiens in the light of analogies with historic hunter-­ gatherer religions seems to fit in better with the present scientific, overall picture of human cognitive, social and cultural evolution than a reductionist Darwinian view. But we do not really know.

References Bowler, J. M., Johnston, H., Olley, J. M., Prescott, J. R., Roberts, R. G., Shawcross, W., & Spooner, N. A. (2003). New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia. Nature, 421(6925), 837–840. Chase, P. G. (2005). The emergence of culture: The evolution of a uniquely human way of life. Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser. Clottes, J. (2010). Cave art. London, New York: Phaidon Press.

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Dixson, A. F., & Dixson, B. J. (2011). Venus figurines of the European paleolithic: Symbols of fertility or attractiveness? Journal of Anthropology, 569120. https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/569120. Krech, V. (2019). Gescheiter scheitern. Interview by Christian Röther. Retrieved November 31, 2019, fromhttps://www.deutschlandfunk.de/evolution-­der-­religion-­gescheiter-­scheitern.886. de.html?dram:article_id=435634. Maryanski, A. (2018). The origin of religion: Recent scientific findings. In A.  K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, H. Martin Luther, H. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 206–224). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Narr, K. J. (2008). Prehistoric religion. Britannica online encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2008-04-09. Accessed 20 February 2020. Peoples, H. C., Duda, P., & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Human Nature, 27(3), 261–282. von Schnurbein, S. (ed). (2009). Atlas der Vorgeschichte: Europa von den ersten Menschen bis Christi Geburt. Stuttgart: 2009. Wunn, I. (2018). Barbaren, Geister, Gotteskrieger: Die Evolution der Religionen—entschlüsselt. Berlin: Springer.

The Beginning and the End: Pre-Human and Neolithic Religion

Towards the beginning of the Neolithic, religious evolution approaches the forms and functions of historic religions. According to Wunn’s “adaptationist” view (2018), a crucial diversification took place: Neolithic religions diverged from the earlier, largely uniform hunter-gatherer religions by adapting to different social, political and economic conditions. The development towards religious types known from history, archaeology, ethnology etc. took about 5000 years. She adds that the emerging, isolated religio-species diverged by natural selection, that is by a “Darwinian” process (Wunn et  al. 2015, 35). Of course, we do not know if, for example, the ancestors of Australian aborigines which may have reached the fifth continent about 60,000 years ago, and their contemporaries, ice age hunters from the Middle East had similar religious cultures. Substantial differences might have existed much earlier than 10,000 BCE. But it is obvious that an important step of religious evolution took place at that time. In the Levant, it seems to have preceded the economic transition to agriculture and livestock farming. Early temples of impressive size were maintained by nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures, which must have been based upon a complex social organization above the level of clans. The Neolithic economy, at least in regions favorable for it, led to the rise of settled, socially stratified communities, which in turn developed into sophisticated urban societies. Whether this transition was connected with a further step in religious evolution, i.e., with the establishment of “moralizing gods” or “big gods” (Norenzayan 2013) is at the moment a question which commands much attention. It will be taken up again in Chap. 14. Regardless whether “big gods” were instrumental in the rise of complex agricultural societies, or whether they were sometimes, or often, a consequence of their rise, the evolution of human religion had by that time already left its beginnings far behind. Archaeological “documents” from this period become much more numerous and are easier to interpret in terms of historic analogies than those of previous eras.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_9

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Findings from Neolithic funeral cultures of the Middle East and Central Europe, dating from 9500 to 5000 BCE (Wunn et al. 2015) bear testimony to these cultures’ funerary practices. Remains of the dead were often interred close to the living, e.g., in Lepinski Vir (Serbia, 6500–5500 BCE) beneath the floor of the living quarters beside the central hearth. Similar burials are known from Jordan (Bohstrom 2016) and Turkey (Göbekli Tepe, layer III 9600–8800 BCE). Sometimes skulls were severed and buried separately, probably after the decomposition of soft tissues. Of religious significance are stone pans found close to the hearth which probably contained offerings to the dead. Later they seem to have been accompanied by figurines with a probable apotropaic function, providing defensive magic against negative influences from the deceased. It has been speculated that the hearth, with its fire, symbolized an entry to the netherworld of the dead (Wunn et al. 2015, 111–114, 178), and that in time ancestors, which were then no longer ritually recalled by the living, turned into gods, which received cultic worship. Thus again, early Neolithic religions are pictured as analogous with much later concepts, for example the (very different) biblical sheol and Egyptian duat. It is impossible to ascertain whether burials, which took place several thousand years before the advent of either Judaism or the Egyptian gods were accompanied by ideas comparable to these historic religions. After all, there are findings which are even harder to connect to historic religions than the Neolithic burials from the Middle East. In Herxheim (Germany) the remains of an impressive necropolis were excavated, belonging to the agricultural Linear Pottery Culture. About 5000 BCE, inhabitants of the area conducted secondary burials by removing corpses or partial corpses from their interment sites (or their sky burial sites) and placing them in grave pits around the necropolis. Bones and skulls were cut up with stone tools and no intact skeletons were reburied. There are signs of ritual cannibalism as well. Which religious conceptions demanded that the remains of the dead should not only be buried, but ritually destroyed at a mortuary center, is unknown. While secondary burials are ethnographically well documented, there is no close analogy with the Herxheim necropolis, or with the burials in later megalithic tombs and tumuli (Fig. 1). Nonetheless, the temporal and factual distance between historic religions and these cultures is much shorter than either the temporal or factual distances between historic religions and early hunter-gatherers. Accordingly, analogies are likelier to apply. But on the other hand, they do little to elucidate how human religion began at least 100,000 years earlier, probably even hundreds of thousands years earlier. For that, we have to look farther back into the natural history of the Hominini. Many authors insist that the evolution of religion did not commence with Homo, but with the Hominids or with primate evolution in general. They point out that extant animals show proto-religious behavior (e.g. Broom 2008, 2019). Maryanski (2018, 216–220) describes apparently proto-religious elements in chimpanzee behavior. In contrast, Oviedo & Feierman (2017) argue that there is little evidence of religion in behavioral performances of animals outside humanity. Obvious religious performances and “forms” are indeed unique features of human culture. Animals do not build altars, have no spiritual initiation rites for subadult group

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Fig. 1  Herxheim: Near Herxheim (Germany) a large village of the Neolithic Linear Pottery Culture was surrounded by burial pits which contained the skeletal remains of at least 1300 individuals, among them a disproportionate number of complete and partial skulls. The depicted skull is complete and may have been removed from the body for ceremonial purposes. The site was used from about 5300 to 5000 BCE by inhabitants of the area. It is uncertain if the rituals included cultic cannibalism. Ceremonial reburial practices are known from many historic cultures. However, a Neolithic necropolis of this size is, so far, unique. (Kuebi = Armin Kübelbeck, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schaedel_Herxheim_01.jpg, “Schaedel Herxheim 01”, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­sa/3.0/legalcode)

members and (as far as we know) do not congregate for ritual prayer sessions. That does not exclude proto-religious impulses expressed in spontaneous forms which are hard to describe scientifically. On the other hand, a sense of transcendence and an idea of the sacred are difficult to imagine without a consciousness of self, and without an inner representation of the world in the individual, cognitive space, in short: without intelligence. One supposes that there must be a subject asking existential questions, before existential answers develop. Authors who advocate proto-religious impulses in animals consequently attribute early forms of self-consciousness and sufficient levels of intelligence to them. It has already been mentioned in Chap. 4, that there is a cultural tendency in late modern, western societies to emphasize the unity of humans and animals. The reason is, very understandably, the fact that urban people, who live in an engineered, man-made world of concrete and digital information, are estranged both from their biological nature, and from nature in general. “Nature writing” is one expression of this civilization-critical, sometimes romantic, movement “back to nature”. Not all of its expressions are reasonable, but as a whole it should be regarded as a corrective

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to the modernist disregard of the “animalistic” side of human nature, and the violation of the natural environment. The urge to find phenomenal points of contact between human and animal life is part of this movement. The philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016) even attests consciousness and subjectivity to the highly developed Cephalopoda: octopus and squid. They are, he ascertains, an issue of the universal evolution of mind which parallels our own evolution. Thus, he once again inscribes biological evolution into the grand, developmentalistic vision of evolution as a slow, heroic march toward the Weltgeist. He does not explicitly mention religious impulses of octopi, but hints at the possibility. Science should be aware of its cultural context, and its reflexive aspect, if animal religiosity is the issue. In this book, the question can remain unanswered whether and in what manner those authors who argue either for or against pre-hominin religiosity are influenced by the urgent public interest in their respective arguments. The extent to which early embryonic elements of religiosity reach back into the animal world, is almost impossible to decide on the basis of current “descriptive knowledge”. Here it is expedient to leave the Cephalopoda alone in their eternal marine world and to concentrate on the Homo clade and on the question how religiosity appeared during hominisation. With regard to this subject, it would be rash to assume that the evolution of proto-religious intuitions was limited to Homo sapiens “out of Africa”. One might suppose by looking at the timetable of apparent religious practices (Chap. 8), that when a small population left Africa about 70,000–100,000 years ago and became the origin of humanity everywhere else on earth (with some genetic contributions of older Homo lines), this population was already religious, although their ideas and practices remain largely inaccessible. But when and where did Homo sapiens in Africa become religious during the (at least) 200,000 years of evolution that took place there prior to the species’ departure from that continent? Genomic evidence points towards a surprising genetic variability of early African populations, perhaps correlated with equally variable social, cognitive, religious or irreligious cultures. Were contemporary, different clades of the genus Homo also religious: Neanderthals, Denisovans and other “ghost populations”? The question is hard to answer because behavioral and mental differences, other than differences of genomes, anatomies and tool techniques, are not directly examinable. It should be taken into account that by an evolutionary species definition, Neanderthals and other, less well-known Homo lines descended from late Homo erectus were not separate species, but a “bush” of subspecies including Homo sapiens. The ancestors of modern humans, on their radiation “out of Africa”, interbred not only with Neanderthals, but with Denisovans and other Eurasian populations, which are so far only known by their genetic heritage. These different lines were not genetically isolated. They are regarded as species according to a typological species definition, which simply demands morphological and genetic differences between fossils, which are sufficient to group them around holotypes. Perhaps all these populations had language. They all had a sophisticated tool technology at their command. They all were ecologically highly flexible apex predators and big game hunters. Perhaps they all had religion as well.

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What are we to think about the common ancestors of these groups, which lived between 500,000 and 1.8 ma ago? Examples of these common ancestors include, for example: both earlier and later populations of the chronospecies Homo erectus, including the fossil forms called Homo antecessor (up to 900,000  years ago in Spain) and Homo heidelbergensis (600,000–200,000  BCE in Europe)? Petersen (2018, 36) are convinced that “religion has been a crucial driver in hominin evolution presumably as early as from Homo heidelbergensis (by their account 600,000–400,000 years ago) and onwards, and, possibly, even earlier dating as far back as to Homo erectus (1.8–0.2 mya)”. Some information about their culture exists, coming from several prehistoric archaeological locations and a few details might relate to religious behavior, which is distinct from the hominin fossils preceding them: the Australopithecines and early Homo. The paleontological sites of Homo habilis and similar species, including Homo erectus georgicus from Dmanisi (1.8 ma) and Homo ergaster (Africa, 1.9–1.4 ma) yield nothing which could be related to proto-religious behavior. 500,000 years later in Europe, Homo antecessor left human bones in the cave Gran Dolina in Spain. They were found mixed up with animal bones, and like those show traces of cutting and hacking by stone tools. Researchers conclude that these hominins practiced cannibalism. But there is no evidence that the bones received any special treatment or were used in rituals. Again 500,000 years later a group of Homo heidelbergensis maintained a base camp at Bilzingsleben (Germany) which has been dated to 370,000 BCE. The diversity and complexity of tools made from stone, bone, antler and even wood found there is amazing. 60% of the prey remnants found belong to large, dangerous animals, among them elephants, rhinos, bears, wild bovines etc. To hunt them required effective weapons, like those found nearby in Schöningen: four wooden spears used as missiles, together with a long, hand-held lance, and a throw stick, about 330,000 years old. They were accompanied by the remains of at least 20 horses, which were probably killed and butchered on the spot. Twelve wooden artifacts are interpreted as shafts for stone blades. If this is correct, they, together with the finds from Bilzingsleben, represent the oldest composite tools known. Both sites suggest remarkable toolmaking and hunting skills of the residents, including complex strategies and the ability to protect prey against scavenging predators. All that could only be done by several well-armed hunters working together. Some authors express doubt that their achievements would have been possible without communication by means of language. Also, there are human bone fragments from three or more individuals; the skulls seem to have been smashed post-mortem. That could have been part of a burial rite, but no other indications for that were found (Fig. 2). Beside the remains of three tent-like dwellings, there is a circular space 9 m in diameter which was carefully paved with stones and bones. In one corner an aurochs skull was found beside a hearth and a block of travertine which served as an anvil, probably used to smash bones. Again, the arrangement could have had a ritual significance. But other explanations are possible. A fragment of an elephant shinbone was found decorated by parallel lines, which were intentionally made by a stone tool. There are other pieces of decorated bone which suggest that the lines might symbolize cognitive concepts. Whether these people had a religious or

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Fig. 2  Bilzingsleben: 370,000  year old fragment of a Wood Elephant tibia from Bilzingsleben (Germany), decorated by groups of deliberately incised, parallel lines. Skeletal remains found with the fragment and many other stone and bone implements belong to the typological species Homo heidelbergensis. The group at Bilzingsleben used hard splinters from long bones of big mammals to fabricate their larger tools. Small tools were usually made from flint. True hand axes have not been found. The decorations on the bone fragment probably have some symbolic meaning and could be interpreted as an early example of pre-human art. (public domain)

proto-­religious conception of their world is unknown, but possible, and it would not even be surprising in the context of an obviously complex, technical and social pre-­ human culture. So far, however, the only undisputed traces of religious practice outside the typological species Homo sapiens are burials known from the much later “classical” Neanderthals between 90,000 and 40,000 BCE. The first and probably best example is a 50,000 year old skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints (France), which seems to have been buried in an intentionally prepared earth depression, and covered up to protect the remains. There are other sites which suggest that Neanderthals at least sometimes buried their dead in shallow graves, together with animal bones and stone implements. Examples were mentioned in the previous chapter. Even if an intentional interment is demonstrated, however, it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the bodies were disposed of with a non-religious purpose. Some archaeologists propose that late Middle Paleolithic societies, especially that of the Neanderthals, had already practiced a precursory form of totemism or animal worship. Bächler (1923) concluded that Neanderthals practiced a bear cult based on the evidence of cave bear skulls of the Middle Paleolithic found in caves. This speculation is now widely rejected (Wunn & Grojnowski 2016). But the evidence shows more clearly than for Homo heidelbergensis that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought and developed rich material cultures. For example, they likely decorated themselves using pigments and wore jewellery made of eagle claws, feathers and colored shells. It might be permissible to speculate that proto-­ religious conceptions were already part of the culture of the common ancestors of (from an evolutionary point of view) both subspecies, of modern humans and Neanderthals. That would have been a population of late Homo erectus, and the evolution of human religion thus would have commenced at least 500,000, maybe 1 ma ago. The transition from a primitive (apelike) structure of the neocortex to an advanced (humanlike) structure apparently took place in East Africa 1,5 to 1,7 ma ago (Ponce de Leon et al. 2021). This might have been the first step towards proto-­ religion.  The assumption is speculative even on the phenomenological side,

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however, and it tells us nothing about the evolutionary forces initially driving the evolution of hominin religion (if there was such an evolution). The fragmentary and inconclusive knowledge relating to the phenomenology of prehistoric religion is taken in stride by hypotheses which rely upon functional assumptions to explain the evolutionary origin of religion. In particular, the evolution towards behavioral modernity (distinct from morphological modernity) is utilized as background. Religion is either regarded as a functional part, or as a nonfunctional epiphenomenon, of modernization. Behavioral modernity is characterized by the system of innovations which, in its entirety, conditions the cultural achievements of Homo sapiens: the ability to use symbols, including the vocal symbols of language the ability to plan beforehand, based upon an inner representation of outside reality with its causal, temporal and spatial and social interconnections the ability to think abstractly and logically, to reach valid inferences mentally the ability to represent oneself as a feeling, wanting and knowing entity in one’s cognitive space, and to think about the state of the own mind including its knowledge (reflexive consciousness) the ability to represent other selves as feeling, wanting and knowing entities in one’s cognitive space, and to reflect upon their mind (Theory of Mind) the ability to implement social, technical and economic innovations intentionally and with goal-orientation Heyes (2018, 12, 29) speaks of “cognitive gadgets” which characterize the modern human mind: “These distinctively human cognitive mechanisms include causal understanding, episodic memory, imitation, mindreading, normative thinking, and many more. They are ‘gadgets’, rather than ‘instincts’ … because, like many physical devices, they are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution. New cognitive mechanisms—different ways of thinking—have emerged, not by genetic mutation, but by innovations in cognitive development. These novelties have been passed on to subsequent generations, not via genes, but through social learning; people with a new cognitive mechanism passed it on to others through social interaction.” Heyes broad statement might go too far. Contraposing instinct and culture, genetic and cultural evolution in a schematic manner overlooks the fact that many pre-cultural behavior patterns of animals depend heavily on learning, often on social learning. They are not products of culture (except in a very broad sense) but of sociality. Genetically mediated features of the human brain, inherited behavior patterns (instincts), social learning in general, and culturally developed cognitive mechanisms evolved by means of an intricate interplay. They co-adapted by the unavoidable, complex criss-cross of causal interactions (Chap. 7). Modernization was an emergent, overall adaptation of the behavioral system both to internal developments of its subsystems, and to environmental demands. Nonetheless, the cognitive gadgets theory is an important counterweight to biologistic and reductionist sketches of cultural evolution. Heyes is right when she states that “at the heart of the cognitive gadgets theory, of cultural evolutionary psychology, is the idea that social

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interaction in infancy and childhood produces new cognitive mechanisms; it changes the way we think.” From a cladistic perspective, the properties of behavioral modernity are synapomorphic attributes of hominin behavior, although the hominids show preliminary forms of such attributes. In ecological terms, modernization shifts the equilibrium between niche adaptation and niche construction towards the latter to a degree unparalleled in the animal kingdom: Environmental engineering becomes the basis of human ecology. Religiosity is an intrinsic, co-adaptive element (or, as some authors from the cognitive science of religion will have it, epiphenomenon) of the evolutionary trajectory towards behavioral modernity. Thus, the assumption that the evolution of religion is conditioned by modernization as a whole comes naturally: Religiosity resulted from several, or even from all possible, processes leading toward modernization. It could have been a ubiquitous expression of modernity with varying, even contrasting, adaptive effects. Oviedo (2019, 11–12) states that the evolution of religion probably followed a dialectic pattern. Omnipresent religious forms and functions were adaptive under some circumstances, neutral or maladaptive under other circumstances. They enhanced selfish and pro-social trends, advocated rational and irrational ways of thinking, had both socially engaged and socially disengaged, mystical sides. The evolution of religion, he continues, moved by the interplay of opposites. Tensions between them arose and gave way to new syntheses. Specific “adaptationist” explanations for the initial prehistoric appearance of religion are thus fragmentary at best. For example, the hominin evolution toward the ecological role as apex predator might have made religious ways of coping with the risks and rewards of hunting advantageous. But the evolution of spirituality was the precondition of such coping strategies. The cognitive evolution leading to a consciousness of finality and death might have evoked an existential fear which promoted religious compensation. But this function, in turn, depended upon the presence of religiosity in general. Sosis (2018, 46) argues that religious features were adaptive “by fostering cooperation and social coordination  …  increased resources, and consequently fitness”. Similarly, Rappaport (1999) proposes that religious rituals helped to avoid cheating and lying and played a key role in the emergence of social norms. Indeed, it has been amply demonstrated in extant societies that visible, public religious practices (the observance of sacrifices, dress codes, dietary laws, time-structuring rituals etc.) serve as “credibility enhancing displays” between believers. Insiders of religious groups or traditions are more willing to cooperate with each other. That the first religious or proto-religious practices functioned in the same way is probable. But it is less probable that the function of enhancing credibility, in isolation, drove the early evolution of religion in all its complexity. Equally reasonable and equally fragmentary, is Bellah’s proposition (2011, 268) that religion became a cultural tool that enabled people to criticize and change the society they live in. Gamble et  al. (2014) propose that the evolution of religion started well before the Neolithic revolution, in hordes of hunter-gatherers large enough to turn the maintenance of positive, personal relations into a problem

References

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seeking a solution. Religion would have been one of the adaptations to this problem. Turner (2018, 190) summarizes: “My assumption … is that the basic great-ape brain of early hominins was rewired over millions of years to make hominins more social and group-oriented; and from this rewiring of the brain to enhance sociality and to forge more stable and permanent groups, the basic wiring for religion was also installed as a side effect of natural selection.” From Turner’s point of view, religion emerged (by natural selection or not) from one aspect of behavioral modernization: from the evolution of the social mind towards human eusociality. (In Chap. 5 it has been discussed whether this concept can be applied to the social behavior of humans.) This aspect, however, is inseparable from cognitive evolution in general, which opened up more and more complex spheres of action and thought. In other words: Social evolution is inseparable from overall behavioral modernization. If religiosity was initially its by-­product, or had from the beginning, on some stages of evolution, the one or the other co-adaptive function, is of secondary importance. Probably, as Oviedo (2019) proposes, it sometimes had this co-adaptive function and sometimes not. All hypotheses of this “functional” design (The most influential ones are proposed by CSR authors, see Chap. 11.) should take into account that behavioral modernization was an overarching adaptation not to this or that selective pressure, but to (almost) any selective pressure, which had to be faced by our ancestors, either social or environmental. Cultural evolution converted humans into the ultimate generalists of the animal kingdom, able to cope with almost any environment on the globe and to provide an answer to almost any ecological challenge. If religion evolved as an integral result of modernization, its evolution was not driven by one, or even by a few, adaptive functions, but by its co-adaptive role in modernization in general.

References Bächler, E. (1923). Die Forschungsergebnisse im Drachenloch ob Vättis im Taminatale. Jahrbuch St. Gallischen Naturwiss. Ges., 59, 79–118. Bellah, R. N. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the axial age. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Bohstrom, P. (2016). Prehistoric skeletons with a strange history found in Jordan. Haaretz February 2 (Archeology). Broom, D. M. (2008). The biological foundations and value of religion. In K. Müller & N. Sachser (Eds.), Theology meets biology (pp. 37–46). Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet. Broom, D. (2019). The biological basis for religion and Religion’s evolutionary origins. In J. R. Feierman & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 70–83). Abington, New York: Routledge. Gamble, C., Gowlett, J. A. J., & Dunbar, R. (2014). Thinking big: How the evolution of social life shaped the human mind. New York, London: Thames and Hudson. Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive gadgets. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

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Maryanski, A. (2018). The origin of religion: Recent scientific findings. In A.  K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, H. Martin Luther, H. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 206–224). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Oviedo, L. (2019). Die rätselhafte Entstehung von Religion in der menschlichen Kultur: einleitende Bemerkungen. In U. Beuttler, H. Hemminger, M. Mühling, & M. Rothgangel (Eds.), Ist Religion ein Produkt der Evolution? (pp. 11–12). Berlin: Lang. Oviedo, L., & Feierman, J. (2017). Does religious behavior render humans special? In M. Fuller, D. Evers, A. Runehov, & K. W. Sæther (Eds.), Are we special? Human uniqueness in science and theology (pp. 107–116). Dordrecht: Springer. Petersen, A.  K. (2018). Preface: A call for a new synthesis. In A.  K. Petersen, I.  S. Gilhus, H. M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Ponce de Leon, M. S. et al. (2021). The primitive brain of early Homo. Science, 372, 165–171. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz0032. Rappaport, R.  A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sosis, R. (2018). Why cultural evolutionary models of religion need a systemic approach. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 45–61). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Turner, J. H. (2018). Religion as an artefact of selection pressures to make hominins more social. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 190–205). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Wunn, I. (2018). Barbaren, Geister, Gotteskrieger: Die Evolution der Religionen—entschlüsselt. Berlin: Springer. Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2016). Ancestors, territoriality, and gods: A natural history of religion. Berlin: Springer. Wunn, I., Urban, P., & Klein, K. (2015). Götter, Gene, Genesis: Die Biologie der Religionsentstehung. Berlin: Springer.

Hominin Pre-Adaptations: Background to the Evolution of Religion

The first behavioral adaptation on the way to Homo was the erect posture of the early hominins, which allowed effective upright walking. It complemented, and by further adaptations to an extent replaced, the ability to move in the tree canopy. It demanded not only adaptations of bone structures and muscles, but of motoric coordination, and the effective regulation of body temperature in warm and dry conditions which characterizes humans. That specialization had to be accompanied by loss of body fur, although the fossil record does not show when and how that happened. The long, sharp-crowned canines, which serve extant great apes as weapons and are distinct male features, had already been reduced in Ardipithecus, one of the earliest known Hominins. They became further reduced on the way to Australopithecus and Homo. It has been speculated that these reductions of the sharp-crowned canines point to a possible early use of objects (sticks, stones) as weapons. That might be the case, but other explanations are conceivable. A social structure which reduces the need of hierarchic encounters, especially for males, could favor the evolution of small, less pointed canines. Later the hominin hand lost its adaptation for hand-over-hand climbing and became capable of the strong precision grip between thumb and forefinger which distinguishes the human hand from that of the great apes. Hand skeletons from Homo naledi, which experts suppose to be only around 300,000 years old, still show a certain adaptation to climbing (e.g. curved fingers). On the other hand, the much older Homo erectus had already developed the hand skeleton of modern humans. An influential, but now partly discredited, ecological explanation of these pre-­ adaptations is the savannah hypothesis: Early Hominins evolved in Africa because the retreat of widespread forests, which were replaced by grassland bordered by riparian forest, made terrestrial movement advantageous. The upright posture allowed a continuous surveillance of the surroundings. It facilitated the carrying of objects (food, tools) over some distance. Standing and walking upright became tantamount with being human; while the animals which threatened and fed humanity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_10

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walked on all fours. Speaking face to face in an upright position became a form signaling equality and dignity. Cowering, kneeling and prostration accordingly became gestures of submission and supplication (Feierman 2019). They play an important role in religious rituals (Fig. 1). (Many mammals show social submission by throwing themselves upon their back. That gesture is absent in humans.) Before proceeding with social and cultural pre-adaptations related to the evolution of religion, an old, but occasionally still operative, misconception should be put out of the way. It can be traced to the philosopher Arnold Gehlen. In his anthropology, humans are characterized by bodily and behavioral shortcomings. Most notably they lack the instincts which organize animal behavior. Instincts were reduced to make room for learning and culture, which compensate for the biological deficits supposed by Gehlen. Thus, humans are from a biological point of view essentially Maengelwesen (deficient beings). Long ago, the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz contradicted Gehlen categorically. He pointed out that this view represents a misunderstanding of the ecological adaptation of the Hominini and distorts the trajectory of hominin evolution. Lorenz argued that in hypothetical competitions against specialized mammals of comparable size, humans would lose in many behavioral disciplines, such as: hunting, fishing, climbing, swimming, digging, sprinting etc. However, when pitted against these same mammals, they would easily win almost every imaginable multi-event. In short, according to Lorenz, humans are behavioral generalists, bodily specialized for doing many things moderately well. If simple tools, which have been used by Homo for Millions of years, were permitted during

Fig. 1  Supplication: The stained-glass church window from Siauliai (Lithuania) shows four kneeling men supplicating to a priest, who in turn blesses them from a pronounced upright posture. In a species which, like Homo, depends upon hand-held weapons to fight and defend oneself, the lifted and outstretched, empty hands of both priest and worshippers symbolize peaceful intentions. (Dieter Schütz/pixelio.de)

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these hypothetical competitions, all animal competitors would have to drop out of the combined event. Some human skills are even better than those of any other large mammal, for example the ability to throw an object and hit something with it. Humans throwing stones are a real danger to any predator and to other humans. Chimpanzees throw stones and other objects as well, but seldom hit what they aim for. For them throwing objects is a threatening display, not an effective weapon. Another point: To beat a fit human hunter, who carries a gourd with water in a long-distance race in the midday heat of the African savannah, one would have to depend upon a dromedary. No large cat or canine could keep up. Even horses and most antelopes would have to give up the race because of overheating. Human anatomy, physiology and basic behavior patterns (including the use of simple cases and tools) are as well adapted to their original, natural environment as those of any other large mammal. Culture did not develop to compensate for biological shortcomings. Its evolution followed a superordinate dynamic. By the way, instincts (meaning genetically fixed, hard-­ wired behavioral patterns) do not have to be reduced to make room for learning. In most cases, learned patterns are simply superimposed. Cultural evolution probably began with the use and fabrication of tools. It is a fact that chimpanzees use tools as well, so do some monkeys and a number of other animals. Chimpanzees also fabricate tools. But neither they, nor other Hominids, really depend upon them. They are able to survive without fishing for termites with brush-like stalks or mop up water from tree holes with sponges made from leaves. They use branches, stones, and even empty oil drums to intimidate opponents. But if it comes to serious fighting, they depend on their natural weapons. The genus Homo is almost completely dependent on tools to feed, to guard against predators and competing humans, and, in colder climates, for protection against the weather. It is unknown when, and in what stages, this tool dependency (and with it material culture) developed. Cutting tools from stone might already have been indispensable for Australopithecines; they were for the earliest representatives of the genus Homo. Very little is known about wooden tools, and tools made of bone, from before 500,000 BCE. But as both materials are universally available, and can readily be made into handy implements, it is reasonable to suppose that they go back to early Homo as well. Hand axes, and other stone tools from a type called Acheulean, were first produced by Homo erectus. The chronospecies, split into a number of types, endured for at least a million years; and developed into Homo heidelbergensis, a suspect for the initial evolution of religion, as explained in the previous chapter. The use of fire was an achievement of either the late Homo erectus, or the early Homo heidelbergensis, probably between 1 ma and 500,000 BCE, in unknown stages (Gamble et al. 2014). Perhaps with the help of controlled fires, Homo erectus switched to an increasingly meat-based diet. During its long history it developed from hunting small prey and scavenging the remains of the larger prey of apex predators, to become an apex predator itself. The hypothesis that the dangers and contingencies of big game hunting might have influenced the evolution of religion has been mentioned.

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Perhaps magic practices came about at the same time, as a coherent extension of tool use, as soon as invisible agents or hidden universal laws became concepts that could be conceived of by members of the genus Homo. It would have been an obvious step to seek out ways to manipulate the invisible world as well as the visible one. Also, the dependence upon tool use for fighting explains that humans in all cultures demonstrate their peaceful intentions by showing empty hands with outstretched arms. The uniquely human gesture symbolizes that the partner neither holds a weapon, nor intends to grasp one. The gesture is used in religious supplication as well as in ritual blessing and is universally understood. Large mammals show peaceful intentions in a similar way by hiding their natural weapons, for example by turning head and teeth away from the opponent. Chimpanzees greet each other with a friendly smile while their dentation, including the large canines, remains hidden behind the lips. They understand a human smile, with exposed teeth, instinctively as a sign of aggression. However, the intelligent apes are able to learn how to interpret human mimics correctly. Fecundity and sexuality are other parts of life which might have been involved with religious evolution. Cohen (2019) argues that the neurophysiological and emotional mechanisms of human sexuality provided a basis for spiritual peak experiences, and thus for the evolution of the capacity to experience transcendence. Sexual ecstasy, he argues, tends to induce the sensation of a loss of self, and of unity with nature. Religious intuitions could have evolved as an exaptation of the primary function of sexual desire, which is to lead toward mating. The argument runs somewhat parallel to that of neurotheologists (Newberg 2010) which proposes a similar role to altered states of consciousness. More cautiously, Marsh (2019) advocates an accessory function for near-death and out-of-body experiences. Certainly, sexual arousals and ASCs provide extraordinary sensual and emotional experiences which solicit a spiritual interpretation. Historically, both are integrated into a wide array of religious performances, from temple prostitution to Tantrism, from the use of psychedelic drugs to the mystic experience of all-­ encompassing unity induced by meditation. It is improbable, however, that a spiritual conception of existence originated initially from such experiences. What little is known about basal religious forms, e.g., about the possible primal position of animism and the concept of a spiritual other-world, rather suggests that some culture-­specified erotic and mystic practices became ways to access the believed spiritual horizon of life. On the other hand, celibacy as a religious attitude and the cult of virginity are also part of religious history. Both holy sex and holy abstinence occur in many religious systems. Yet the meditative performances known from history which produce ASCs, and the performances which include erotic rapture in worship, belong to culturally sophisticated religions. Nonetheless, it is possible that primary, unknown combinations of spiritual rites with ASCs or sexual practices appeared early in prehistory. Respective speculations are obstructed by the almost total ignorance about (certainly already culturally preformed) sexual relations in early Homo sapiens societies, this ignorance is even more pronounced with regard to other clades of the genus Homo. Next to nothing is known about the sexual behavior of pre-human Hominini. The extant great apes

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either live in a polygamous harem system (genus Gorilla) or else they live in a somewhat promiscuous manner (genus Pan) or they do not live in permanent individualized groups at all (genus Pongo). The nature of the natural sexual behavior of early Homo, millions of years ago (when the term natural opposed to cultural still had some meaning), is a matter of debate. Evidently, there are monogamous, polygamous, and promiscuous tendencies in our own species, embedded in a variety of cultural patterns. The Australopithecines seem to have shown a certain sexual dimorphism, with males larger than females. That might indicate a harem system, while a solitary life (which also could lead to dimorphism) is improbable. Both the very late Homo naledi, and Homo erectus georgicus (1.8 ma), as well as Homo antecessor (900,000 BCE) show only the slight dimorphism of our own species. Gamble et al. (2014) present data which are supposed to demonstrate polygamy in early Hominins (Ardipithecus), then (surprisingly) a monogamous tendency in Australopithecines, and again a more polygamous lifestyle in Homo neanderthalensis. The basis is the so-called digit ratio, the ratio between the length of index finger and ring finger. It is influenced by the testosterone level during ontogenesis and is thought to relate to hominid mating strategies. The reasoning in their “benchmark papers” (Dunbar et al. 2014) is unconvincing, however, both because of insufficient data, and due to doubtful statistical methods.1 We might assume that the sexual behavior patterns of prehistoric Homo sapiens already were similar to our own. But that assumption, as usual, merely leads to retrospective hypotheses about the role of sexuality in a human proto-religion which draw upon analogies from the dazzling array of historic examples. As has been mentioned, the most important pre-adaptations on the way to human religion may have been innovative social structures and social skills, which lead to the unique eusociality (if one wishes to use the term) of Homo sapiens. The hypothesis of the social brain proposes that the increase in brain size during hominin evolution was correlated with the extension of the social system. Gamble et al. (2014) go as far as to allege that the group size of a primate species is a linear function of its neocortical volume. Consequently, they attempt to calculate the group size of Homo erectus (2014, Fig. 3.5) from its brain size. It hardly needs proof, however, that a transference of the weak statistical correlation between the neocortex size of extant primates and their group size to an allegedly similar correlation applied to fossil Hominins must be based upon speculation. Nonetheless there must have been a close (though certainly not a linear and uniform) interplay between social and cognitive evolution. The starting point was probably the group size of 12–20 individuals already known from chimpanzees. Today, the number of people with whom we maintain personal contact (albeit often  There is no room to follow up this argument in more detail. To mention examples: The digit ratio of Ardipithecus is calculated from one single fossil, without information about its distribution in a statistically sufficient sample. The Australopithecus sample is not significantly different from that of Homo sapiens, an indication that the digit ratio is of little use for conclusions concerning the sexual behavior of extinct Hominins. The ratio differs a good deal between modern human populations, without a correlation to differences in sexual behavior or sexual morals. 1

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a loose contact), is estimated to be about 150. This is Dunbar’s number, which was introduced by him (Gamble et al. 2014, Fig. 1.1) as the theoretically possible number with whom one can maintain relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. The author’s claim that it is confirmed by ethnographic data and by the social interactions between modern people.2 It is probably a top estimate, not a bottom one. But the exact maximum our social intelligence allows is a quantity, which can remain open. In any case, the increasing complexity of the hominin social system produced a relational hierarchy from the family (about 5) to a small number of direct supporters (about 15), to bands (30–50), and to cultural lineage groups (100–200). Tribal membership (from 500 members upwards) and membership in proto-nations were at least partly anonymous and would have had to be affirmed by symbols. The settlement at Bilzingsleben (see Chap. 9) was inhabited by about 60 people. Both basic social levels of human hunter-gatherers seem to have been present there: the family and the band. But nothing is known about possible higher levels of social organization. If there had been a tribe containing several co-located bands at Bilzingleben, it is unknown how they managed to maintain connections between them. In fact, we do not know very much for certain about the social organization of prehistoric Homo sapiens. It is reasonable to assume that the people who created the cave art of southwestern Europe were organized in regional tribes above the level of the band, connected by language, by marriage bonds etc., as is the case with historic hunter-gatherers. The assumption is supported by the fact that materials (stone, beads etc.) were traded over long distances. But strictly speaking, we do not know for sure. The hypothesis of the social brain corresponds with the assumption that the evolutionary expansion of social structures went hand in hand with the mentalization of social behavior. The term signifies the capacity to perceive and interpret the acts of social partners in terms of their mental states. A large neocortex enabled the Hominins to include the intentionality of others, as well as their own, in an increasingly complex manner into the mental processes controlling their social behavior. A Theory of mind (ToM) developed, beginning with the Hominids, but much enhanced on the way to Homo sapiens. Haidle (2008, 149–159) describes the internal model of the social environment as part of a cognitive space. It comprises all significant features of a species’ environment which are represented in the organism. The cognitive space consists of all patterns and instructions originating from the genome, including both individual and social learning etc. (The term “cognitive” is used in a wider sense than usual.) Human culture, she argues, demands specific features of the cognitive space like ToM, the ability to indicate to others the ways and means for following their perceived motives, making their own motives known etc. The hypothesis is supported by the results of comparative developmental psychology, e.g., from the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. By

 For a scientific appraisal of the project ‘From Lucy to language’ one has to consult the “benchmark papers” (Dunbar et al. 2014). 2

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Fig. 2  Little Child: In the digital era, the urge of little children “to help others by providing them with the information they need” (Tomasello 2008) prompts them to snatch up the telephone handset and answer questions of callers as well as they can. Curiosity, a behavioral feature all young Hominids share, plays a motivational role as well. But the undisguised pleasure in giving information is a unique human trait. It appears in toddlers before they are 2 years old. (source: author)

means of a primate cognition test battery, the Max Planck Institute discovered astonishing differences between apes and humans with regard to the ontogenesis of social behavior, even on the pre-lingual and pre-cultural level of little children (Tomasello 2006); see also Gaerdenfors (2003, 2010, 10–11). According to Tomasello (2008, 191) the unique form of eusociality which is typically human, is based upon a communication system that relies on sharing and has as its basic motivation “the desire to help others by providing them with the information they need.” Obviously, that is only possible by a representation of the social partner’s needs in the cognitive space. Apes never point out to other group members where they can find food, nor do they point out an object for which they are searching. Actions such as these are a permanent aspect of human interactions, even toddler interactions (Fig. 2). From their third year on, the social intelligence of humans reaches an even higher level of complexity. The entire social framework of a group becomes cognitively represented, including personalities, behavior characteristics, roles and ranks of members. Communicative and organizational, social competence increases up to the onset of puberty. The overarching capacity which results from these developments is intersubjectivity: the ability to experience empathy with partners on the emotional level, to reach a joint frame of references on the cognitive level, and to work out a blueprint for joint action upon which partners more or less agree. Also, morality, social agreement about desirable and undesirable attitudes and actions, depends upon intersubjectivity. It makes Homo sapiens the “super cooperator” unique among mammals; but it also allows for the intricate cheating, lying and manipulating of which humans are capable. The evolution of human eusociality,

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including the mentalization of social behavior and the intersubjectivity of emotions, ideas and actions, was an all-important pre-adaptation for religion. (The impact of the results of comparative developmental psychology on models of cultural evolution cannot be described further in the limited space of this chapter. A summary has been attempted by Heyes 2018, in her Chaps. 3 and 4.) Language, the human ability to symbolize “things” vocally, including actions, processes and abstract ideas, is an integral part of human sociality and must appear in a discussion of pre-adaptations for religiosity. The information interchanged to reach the substantial intersubjective content of the cognitive space is mainly transported from mind to mind by language. Nonverbal signals have an important role; but their data volume is far too small for the task. Thus, religious performances without language are almost impossible to imagine. How did that key feature of behavioral modernization evolve, and at which stage of hominisation? Answers are as difficult to provide as to the question how and when religion evolved. In both cases, scientific studies are pre-structured by the disproportion between the lack of descriptive knowledge from prehistory, and the copious knowledge about recent and historic language and religion. Accordingly, explanations concerning the origin of language consist of the retrospective hypotheses we know only too well from religious studies and are by sheer necessity restricted to models which depict the gradual appearance of functional elements which make up extant human language abilities. These models are not phylogenetic theories in a strict sense but transfer the supposed ontogenetic trajectory of language acquisition (with some modifications) into the species’ past. In this book, they will be left aside (for an overview, see Deacon 1997, Lieberman 2006, Heyes 2018, 170–196). However, the fact that there are gene loci connected with the ability to speak, and that there are anatomical prerequisites for speaking, provides some information which is lacking for the evolution of religion. It has been mentioned (Chap. 3) that a Homo sapiens gene locus which is necessary for speech was present in the genome of Homo neanderthalensis. That their vocal tract was similar to that of Homo sapiens and thus able to produce spoken language, is probable, but not yet established. Little is known about the vocal tract of Homo heidelbergensis, his ancestor, and nothing about the heidelbergensis genome. His outer and middle ear seems to have been adequate to discern language sound patterns. One fact, however, should be kept in mind: There are comparative studies of human and non-human emotionality, tool use, sociality, cognitive and social development etc. There are no comparative studies of human and non-human religion and language, because there are no non-human systems to study. Some authors see traces of proto-religious impulses in animals. But even if they exist, they do not combine to form anything remotely comparable to human religiosity. Animals communicate by sound, sometimes in a rather complicated manner. But as Deacon (1997) points out, there is nothing comparable to the rapidity with which human language transports information, nor with the complicated rules by which sentences are constructed and deciphered, nor even with the ability not only to provide information, but to ask questions and answer them. In fact, Deacon states that nothing

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compares with the logical structure of human language and its fixed elements such as: words, parts of speech, etc. Apes with their less potent neocortex have no simpler religion, they have none. And they do not speak a simpler, less potent language. They do not speak at all, except when taught the use of symbols by humans. Why are there no extant antecedents of religion and language among our evolutionary relatives, as there are precursors of the social system of Homo sapiens, of his emotional makeup, his cognitive abilities, his material culture etc.? The biosemiotic approach to language and religion provides a possible answer. Biosemiotics proceed from the fact that the production of signs and codes and the ability to interpret them, is a basic feature of living systems. The term semiosis indicates processes in which signs (indexes, symbols) are used and have effects in the communication between cells, organs, plants and animals. The semiotic evolution during hominisation, which was based upon the evolution of the brain, led from a certain stage onward to the appearance of elaborate symbol systems. They no longer served only specific adaptive purposes but allowed a more and more detailed representation of knowledge in general. A super-structure of generalizations and abstractions evolved, probably in several steps, which allowed understanding of the timeline from past to present, of individual life and the life of the community as entities in space and time, of the visible world as a unit, of real and unreal, and of existence and non-existence. In terms of Haidle (2008) the cognitive space of Homo came to represent qualities of causality, space and time, as well as forms and functions of things, in a uniquely human way (see in contrast Povinelli 2000). For example, in spite of all efforts of primatologists, great apes never produced even the simplest figurative image, despite their ability to work with brush and paint, pencil and paper. The naked ape’s (Desmond Morris) interest in the visual art of the hairy apes, which culminated about 40 years ago, has largely abated. Most enthusiasts were obliged to accept that it has little meaning to talk of abstract art if the artist has nothing from which to abstract. In other words, the cognitive space of a chimpanzee does not represent outside objects in a way which allows their depiction as images. Compared to humans, the cognitive space of apes is still selectively constructed according to hard-wired (genetically mediated) and learned requirements of survival. There is no all-encompassing inner representation of reality including the self, although some partial functions (e.g., self-recognition, a simpler ToM) are already there. No need to explain again in detail that the uniquely human, many-layered representation of knowledge, which can be communicated by language and other cultural means, has an immeasurably higher adaptive value than any system of specific adaptations. It provides for many possible challenges and many possible innovations, not just for demands already encountered. Language was not the only, but the central component and driving force of this expansion. (By the way, the difference between signs in general, indexes and symbols is, that the latter need no similarity with the thing they symbolize, nor are they situatively connected with it. Their meaning is defined by a rule one has to know.) Symbols do not stand alone but belong to a set of signs which refer back to the world in an “arbitrary”, but conventionally determined way (Fig. 3). In other words: Symbols are referential, they are

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Fig. 3  Bull Sacrifice: The bas-relief from the second or third century, found near Rome (Italy), depicts Mithras killing a bull (tauroctony), a scene typical for the enigmatic Roman Mithras cult. The scene is symbolic; no such rite was performed by believers. Probably the symbolism refers to a sacred story which comprises astrological elements: Sun, moon, and stars often accompany the scene. But the sacred story (cult myth) was only told to cult initiates and is now lost. It is the nature of true symbolism that the meaning of symbols cannot be reconstructed from their elements. Their references are mostly arbitrary and have to be known. The relief is on display in the Louvre (Paris). (public domain)

used within an architecture of signs which represents things, ideas, relations, abstractions etc. Most verbal communication consists of such referential symbols which are assembled in complicated linguistic patterns. Thus, in the evolutionary process of modernization, language generated a meta-level of behavior control which made new forms of thought, communication and acting possible, if not inevitable. Examples include: play for play’s sake, fantasy and invention, art and a perception of transcendence. Once it existed, the architecture of symbols evolved further by its inner dynamics, resulting in the complex cultural knowledge architecture of Homo sapiens. For example, an abstract idea of the visible world as a unit generates the possibility to think of invisible worlds. A general concept of what it means to be human or animal makes other classes of beings possible: nature spirits, hybrid creatures, gods, demi-­ gods etc. (Barrett 2004, 31–44, Visala 2008, 117, Visala 2011). By implication, without the elaborate human semiotic system, without language, there is no religion. The two are equally unique human characteristics, because they are intricately connected core elements of the culture of Homo sapiens, perhaps language and religion were already characteristics of late Homo. Consequently, religious and non-­ religious rituals, religious art and “pure” art forms, religious beliefs and a purpose-­ free playing with ideas, are all similar and often hard to distinguish. The biosemiotic

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perspective helps to understand why there are no clearly separated religious and non-religious compartments of culture. Instead there is a possible religious dimension of almost all cultural forms and functions. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), on the other hand, advocates a different approach. Its premises and results are discussed in the following part IV of this book.

References Barrett, J. (2004). Why would anyone believe in god? Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Cohen, D. (2019). Sex and the evolution of spirituality. In J.  R. Feierman & L.  Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 46–69). Abington, New York: Routledge. Deacon, T. W. (1997). The symbolic species: The coevolution of language and the brain. New York/ London: Norton. Dunbar, R., Gamble, C., & Gowlett, J. A. J. (2014). Lucy to language: The benchmark papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feierman, J. (2019). The evolutionary biology of religion specific beliefs and inter-religious conflict. In J.  R. Feierman & L.  Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 37–45). Abington, New York: Routledge. Gaerdenfors, P. (2010). The role of understanding in human nature. In D. Evers, A. Jackelén, & T. A. Smedes (Eds.), How do we know? (pp. 3–22). London/New York: Bloomsbury Publ. Gaerdenfors, P. (2003). How homo became sapiens: On the evolution of thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamble, C., Gowlett, J. A. J., & Dunbar, R. (2014). Thinking big: How the evolution of social life shaped the human mind. New York, London: Thames and Hudson. Haidle, M. N. (2008). Kognitive und kulturelle Evolution. Erwägen-Wissen-Ethik, 19, 149–159. Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive gadgets. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Lieberman, P. (2006). Toward an evolutionary biology of language. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Marsh, M. N. (2019). Near-death and out-of-body experiences in sensing the divine. In J. R. Feierman & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Evolution of religion, religiosity and theology (pp. 120–137). Abington, New York: Routledge. Newberg, A. B. (2010). Principles of neurotheology. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Povinelli, D. J. (2000). Folk physics for apes, the chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomasello, M. (2006). Die kulturelle Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens, zur Evolution der Kognition. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/M.. Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Visala, A. (2011). Naturalism, theism and the cognitive study of religion. Farnham-Burlington: Ashgate. Visala, A. (2008). Religion and the human mind: Philosophical perspectives on the cognitive science of religion. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 50, 109–130.

Part IV

CSR: The Cognitive Science of Religion

Evolutionary Psychology and Religion

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is, on the whole,  based on the assumption that religious beliefs owe their cultural influence, their mental stability and their intellectual plausibility to cognitive mechanisms which evolved as adaptations to the natural and social environment of the Hominini. In its most comprehensive form, CSR should be understood as the application of evolutionary psychology (EP) to the study of religion, see Cosmides and Tooby (1997). One usually quotes Lawson and McCauley (1990) as a starting point. From their point of view, human cognition (including both the results of basic and elaborate learning abilities, and the results of socialization) are both adjusted and constrained by evolutionary adaptations to survival requirements. Cognitive processes, and through them thought and behavior patterns, are basically directed and at least partially controlled by genetically mediated pre-structures or modules. However, a distinction should be made—and is made by a number of authors— between narrow or “uppercase” EP and broad or “lowercase” EP. The latter is not committed to a narrow set of fixed assumptions, but includes research programs with varying methods and aims, which have in common that they adopt an evolutionary perspective on human psychology. Such a perspective is necessary and potentially fertile, both with regard to religion and with regard to behavior in general. Since the emergence of CSR a generation ago, research programs have increasingly moved into a “lowercase” direction. Regarding human cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended  (4E cognition) is a relatively new, promising approach to the understanding of the “cognitive space”. It is to expect that EP will integrate the 4E approach and will increasingly take into account that human cognition develops by dynamic interactions between brain structure, body physiology, the material environment, and social surroundings. In that way, evolutionary biology and EP will hopefully become mutually more compatible.  In contrast, “traditional”, narrow EP presupposes doctrinaire conditions for the evolution of cognition, especially the idea of the modularity of the mind in a rigid form: the so-called © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_11

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massive modularity hypothesis. Heyes (2018, 20, 26) describes this narrow EP as “High Church evolutionary psychology” and strongly disagrees with it. It presupposes that the human mind is made up of genetically mediated computational modules, which are designed to provide adaptive answers to past selective pressures. Such modules are also supposed to dominate the central information processing in the neocortex, its inference systems, which support reasoning. According to “High Church EP”, these modules might be still adaptive for modern humans, or they might not. If the latter, they persist because the selection processes which drive genetic evolution are not fast enough to react to the radical social and environmental changes brought about by human culture. Smith (2020, 47) states: “Evolutionary Psychology rests on three pillars: the massive modularity hypothesis, the claim that modular structures evolved as adaptations to recurrent challenges in the EEA,1 and the tacit assumption that mental structures can be individuated and so license claims about strong vertical homologies. These three components, taken together, are inconsistent with the competing hypothesis that evolution fashioned the human mind as a domain-general or modestly modular learning system.” What are cognitive modules in the framework of such a “narrow” version of EP? They are—to put it as concisely as possible—characterized by information encapsulation, meaning that information processing in the module, and thus the result they produce, is not influenced by information processed by other modules in other brain regions. Secondly, modules function domain-specifically. They process a definite class of information and may include inherited pre-knowledge about the class being processed. The modularity of the brain has been discussed ever since about 1980 among adherents of several disciplines. Evolutionary psychology is only one player (though an important one) in the discourse. It is impossible to unfurl the major aspects of this discussion here. However, one reliable result is that “lower” levels of cognition are at least partly organized in a modular manner, but that “high level” cognitive processes are not modular and cannot be modular to function as they do. Distinct modules are found in peripheral brain processes, which usually deal with sensory inputs and utilize them to recognize relevant things, events, opportunities and dangers. They provide immediate, preliminary orientation and evoke fast motivational responses. In contrast, central processes which utilize the “inner representation of the world” in the cognitive space, and the symbolically encoded knowledge it provides, are not modular. They are much slower to react to sensory inputs, but they are the basis for conscious thought and reflected actions. Therefore Smith (2020) is right when she states that “evolution fashioned the human mind as a domain-general or modestly modular learning system.” Brown & Strawn (2016, 130) explain in more detail that “during fetal and infant development, cells of the brain and spinal cord are forming into neurons, finding their place in the vast complexity of brain space, hooking up with neighboring neurons, and sending axons out to distant regions of the brain. During this process, the outcome is only

 Environment of evolutionary adaptedness.

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very roughly preordained by the genome. Emerging neural structure and interconnectivity is maximally open to functional organization as the physiology of the developing human responds to its internal milieu and to interactions with the external environment. The chaotic physical fumbling and amorphous interactions of a newborn infant ultimately result in progressive adaptation to the physical, social, and cultural world that the child inhabits.” The quote describes the brain structure presupposed by the 4E approach: A structure which evolved during the behavioral modernization of Homo. In other words: Inherited cognitive modules, which are by definition phylogenetically ancient elements of the brain, are incorporated into the hierarchy of cognitive functions which underlies central processes. The same is true for other elementary functions: operant conditioning, habituation, hard-wired and conditioned reflexes, “instinctive” stimulus-reaction sequences etc. In addition, there are many low-level general brain processes as well as modular ones. Of course, all of these are far from functionally marginal. They direct attention, alert to action, provide motivation and basic reaction patterns which cannot be replaced by the cumbersome process of conscious planning and reasoning. Even more importantly, they are starting blocks for the ontogeny which produces the immensely complex cognitive and behavioral repertoire of humans. For example, the development of social intelligence and behavior (socialization) does not start from a tabula rasa, but from elementary stimulus-reaction patterns which are there at birth. Even the syntax (not the semantics) of human language might be pre-structured by heritable features. (Momentarily, the subject is controversial.) The massive modularity hypothesis regards brain functions as if they were strictly analogical with gene functions, although most scholars  researching CSR concepts  are probably not aware of the “biologist” parallel. During ontogenesis, gene effects are usually closely circumscribed to specific cell types or regions of the developing organism. They are in this sense domain-specific, and their information is mostly expressed in an encapsulated way. Modularity of gene functions is therefore the rule. Domain-general effects are the exception. The importance of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo) for the modern theory of evolution was explained in Chap. 6. The discovery that the genetic control of ontogenesis is largely modular was one of the cornerstones of EvoDevo. Mutations of regulatory genes often alter only one feature of the organism, without disturbing its entire development. Useful phenotypic innovations are thus much more likely to appear. The legless body plan of snakes, an evolutionary successful innovation, is due to a few alterations of a gene which controls the expression of vertebrate limbs. The equally successful expansion of the hominin brain was driven by a small number of mutations which affected the way regulatory genes control the growth of the neural system. Brain functions do not develop in this modular way. Brown and Strawn (2016) correctly point out that the ontogenesis of the neural system “is maximally open to functional organization”, that is, to domain-general interactions with the environment and between subsystems. Especially the social behavior system and spoken language are results of a long, elaborate learning history, which starts with an

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inherited toolkit, but ends with an amount of information and instructions well beyond anything genes could transport. In short, modular cognitive functions are indispensable elements of cognition and they can be regarded as sequestered units on their own basic level. On the superimposed meta-levels which produce conscious thoughts and actions they are present with their bottom-up effects, but not as distinct modules. (This insight will be needed again in part V, where causal interactions within complex, multi-layered systems are discussed.) The perception of the world as an entity and the relation between the world’s parts to its whole do not allow domain-specific and encapsulated cognitive functions. The latter would be a contradiction in terms. In general, basic cognitive modules might stimulate and even initiate individual and cultural, cognitive contents. They certainly play a role in forming these contents as socially shared information. But they do not predetermine them. Nonetheless, taken literally Cosmides and Tooby (1997) are probably right when they insist that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind” (Principle 5). But the Stone Age mind, the mind of our Aurignacian and Magdalénian ancestors, was nothing like they imagine it to have been (Fig. 1). The pioneers of CSR concepts depended upon the three principles mentioned by Smith, especially upon the massive modularity hypothesis. A generation later, all three have little to commend them for scientific purposes. In light of the arguments discussed above against a “narrow” EP view of human cognition, how expedient are these “traditional” CSR explanations of the evolutionary origin of religiosity? The majority of CSR proponents suppose that the relevant cognitive modules were not positively selected for because they produced religious intuitions. At least initially, they propose, religious impulses were incidental, fitness-neutral or even somewhat maladaptive side effects of cognitive evolution. However, the single-line idea that religion was never adaptive throughout prehistory, but was always entrained by cognitive mechanisms, is not seriously advocated. Norenzayan (2013, 8) states that “Religious beliefs and rituals arose as an evolutionary by-product of ordinary cognitive functions that preceded religion.” But later he points to some subsequent fitness advantages. Geertz (2013, summary) states: “In cognitive theories of the origins of religion, it is held that religious thought and behaviour are by-products of or even parasitic on more basic cognitive processes. Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation, genetic or cultural, even though it may occasionally help individuals and groups.” He argues convincingly against this position. One often meets the off-hand assumption that religion might have been occasionally adaptive from the middle Paleolithic up to the axial age (800 to 200 BCE), but became maladaptive in more advanced societies. On the other hand, Blume’s research (Blume 2014) suggests that religion, from its very beginnings, might have often supported confident actions and future-­ oriented, far-sighted decisions by providing an encompassing interpretation of everyday life. The intertwinement of behavioral modernization and religious evolution supports his view. Principally it is equally consistent with CSR principles to regard religion in this sense as exaptation of cognitive evolution (Exaptation as defined by Steven Jay Gould in evolutionary theory.) with several positive fitness

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Fig. 1  Bone Flute: Fragment of a flute made from the hollow radius bone of a Griffon vulture, shown from four sides. The fragment is 21.8 cm long and was found in the oldest Aurignacian layer of Hohlefels Cave (Germany). It is at least 35,000, perhaps 42,000 years old. At nearby sites, 10 other flutes and flute fragments were found, some of them more than 40,000 years old, belonging to a culture of Aurignacian big game hunters from the middle and early upper Paleolithic. One of them, made from the radius bone of a whooper swan, had three pitch holes. Their use is unknown, but separate notes and simple tunes could be played. A symbolic meaning of note sequences is probable, as well as cultic, ritualistic uses. Supposedly the “stone age mind” of the Aurignacians, at least in aesthetic and practical terms, was remarkably similar to our own minds. (Museopedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:39_69_73_1_001_bearbeitet.jpg, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­sa/4.0/legalcode)

effects. However, phylogenetic hypotheses are not the explanatory focus of the CSR approach. For some CSR advocates they have no importance, as Visala (2011, 40) points out in accordance with Kundt (2018, 142). The latter states that “CSR ended up with something dubbed Standard CSR model” and that “this model is heavily based on … a by-productivist stance and … a … conviction that CSR should be about proximate, not ultimate, explanations.” In other words, according to Kundt CSR mainly explains how cognitive modules actually support religious beliefs and practices in individual and group psychology. Adaptive functions of religious systems in phylogeny and evolutionary trajectories are for them of only secondary interest. Among the most influential CSR pioneers are Boyer (2001, 2003) and Barrett (2004). Probably the best-known example of a CSR explanation of religious ideas is the suggestion that belief in supernatural agents (in gods, ancestral spirits, power

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animals etc.) results from a cognitive module which functions as an agent detector. A related module sorts things (in an ontological sense) into the four categories: object, plant, animal and persons, and divides them into two subcategories: agents (persons and animals) and non-agents (plants and inanimate objects). The behavior of agents is automatically explained teleologically, by motives and purposes. No such inner impetus is ascribed to non-agents (Boyer 2004, 60f, 95f). His argument is seconded by Barrett (2004, 12) who proposes that the human brain comprises a HADD, a hyperactive agency detection device or a HAD (hyper agency detector). The module produces a tendency to ascribe sensory inputs (haptic sensations, sounds, smells etc.) with momentarily unknown causes primarily to agents rather than to non-agents. HAD provides a fitness advantage because regarding unexplained perceptions as indications that agents with possible adverse intentions are present is a reasonable precaution. Indeed, there is a strong—probably genetically mediated—urge to explain whatever new or surprising perceptions meet the eye, the ear and the other senses. Animals with a high learning ability are curious and humans are the most curious creatures. It is also plausible to assume that teleological explanations involving agents have emotional priority compared with “technical” explanations, because they usually (but not always) have more motivational relevance. The presence of an animal, as yet unknown to the viewer, an animal which may be eaten or indeed may intend to eat the viewer, is far more relevant to human needs and fears than a twig moved by the wind or the murmur of a hidden brook. This holds equally true when the presence of an unknown fellow human is confronted, a fellow human whose intentions toward you may be either good or bad. Of course, this entire dynamic changes when the listener is thirsty or if the wind is strong enough to bring branches down upon his head. Perhaps hyper agency detection results simply from the well-­ known relevance filter of the sensory input, which connects sensations with motivations, emotions, reflexes and physiological reaction patterns, and directs attention accordingly. Embedded in this encompassing relevance filter, there are probably specific modules at work; for example, a “social partner detector”. It produces a tendency to perceive characteristically human traits in animals and even in material objects, for example in mountains, clouds and sand dunes. A few lines, a simple pattern of dots and curves are enough to remind us of a human face. The perception is immediate and almost unavoidable, thus pointing to a domain-specific module. Guthrie’s famous statement might be an overinterpretation: “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarily acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious” (Guthrie 1995, 69). Anyhow, the perception is wholly consistent with the “higher” knowledge that, in fact, the toad does not grin and is not having fun when one polks it with a stick, or that a cloud does not really look down upon us with a bearded face. Social relations are of immense importance to humans and the crucial development of social intelligence is probably supported from birth onward by stimulus-­ reaction patterns which focus the attention upon social signs. If evolution supplied Homo with such pre-structured behavioral patterns, they might have supported

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animism emotionally and intuitively. But the animistic perception of the world (as any other world view) needs to function on higher cognitive levels as well. It doesn’t take little children long to learn that the perceived faces and emotions of clouds and sand dunes are funny, but mainly an occasion for play-acting. With animals, anthropomorphic perceptions are more persistent, but experience also leads to realistic differentiations. Why should the detection of social signals in plants, rocks, clouds and mountains cause adults to suspect invisible agents, when even little children show no tendency to fall for such a conclusion? If they believe in a universally present life essence, or in supernatural agents, they do so because they have been told. Thus, the old CSR credo (Barrett 2004) nowadays appears unconvincing: “Most of what we believe comes from mental tools working below our conscious awareness. And what we believe consciously is in large part driven by these unconscious beliefs.” One should note that the statement obscures the complex interaction between unconscious mental tools (which certainly exist) and conscious beliefs by introducing the term “unconscious belief”, which is an unintentional oxymoron. Automatic pre-perceptions are not beliefs in a religious sense. The latter depend both upon the creative capacity which models the abundant, intricate contents of our cognitive space and upon extensive social input. Henrich (2016, 35) explains: “Culture and cultural evolution are then a consequence of genetically evolved psychological adaptations for learning from other people”. That hits the bullseye, as long as one remembers that “evidence suggests that the distinctively human cognitive mechanisms involved in social learning are not only processes but also products of cultural evolution” (Heyes 2018, 26). Indeed, learning from other people is not only strongly supported by hard-wired cognitive functions, but also by the self-­ enhancing evolution of social and cultural learning. What is learned is another matter entirely. For example, the main fitness advantage of a hypothetical HAD might have been gained during remote eras of primate evolution, for the avoidance of predators and malicious conspecifics. In the evolution of the genus Homo, it was far more important that HAD and other inherited reaction patterns directed attention towards important learning objectives and stimulated the high-level learning strategies which culture provides. An example: It has been shown by ethological research that humans emotionally prefer landscapes with a variety of open spaces, bushes and groups of trees. In fact, humans prefer this type of mixed landscape both to a plain steppe and to unbroken forest. Research also shows that humans like hilly country better than flatlands. Furthermore, it seems that humans preferably move along ridgelines, which allow them a good view of their surroundings. These are supposedly inherited, once adaptive preferences (Fig. 2). Artistic renderings of paradise or of the garden of the gods, comply with these preferences and show bucolic landscapes. But it would be a deplorable example of argumentative short-circuitry to conclude that religious ideas of paradise, or of an ideal home of the gods, result from the instinctive habitat preferences of pre-humans. It is the other way around: Inherited aesthetic preferences are incorporated into the visualization of the invisible world, once it has been conceived of by the human mind. Unfortunately, some old CSR proposals, and some not so old ones, fall into the trap of this kind of argumentative short-circuitry.

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Fig. 2  Bucolic Landscape: Humans emotionally and aesthetically favor green, hilly landscapes with a mixture of open country and tree shelters. Traveling, they prefer to move along open ridges, where they can keep an eye upon the surroundings. Resting, they like to have their backs guarded by rocks, bushes etc., and an open view before them. These preferences probably have deep evolutionary roots and were adaptive for hominin ancestors which developed an upright gait and populated open savannah habitats. (source: author)

Boyer (1994) states that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) are both easily remembered and easy to assent to: MCIs are ideas which fit preconceptions and expectations but deviate from them at one or two points in a striking manner. They are somewhat, but not excessively, counterintuitive, and therefore interesting and easily remembered. Upal (2010) expands the MCI concept by sorting effects into two types: context-based and content-based counterintuitiveness. In the first case, the context makes the idea counterintuitive. Examples are hero stories of near-­ impossible feats by gods and demi-gods. In the second case, the context is unimportant and the idea itself is counterintuitive, like talking trees and spirits which act without being corporeal. Boyer (1994) argues that religious entities and stories about them show MCI features, and are thus firmly established in the mind as concepts of religious or proto-religious worldviews. The impromptu reaction of anybody with any knowledge of religious performances is predictable: Of course, holy stories and their characters show such features. All good stories which are enjoyed by human listeners show features such as these. The mythopoetic genius of storytelling plays with the tension between the commonplace and the unexpected, between riddle and solution. Stories make use of counterpoints by imagining man-eating maenads and wild woodland satyrs. They evoke startling contrasts by telling of dwarfs and giants, of deep misery and great

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joy. That applies as much to sacred stories as to any others. Poetry rules the universe of literature from sacred myths down to the risqué jokes, scientists share during coffee break. All good stories of all kinds stick in the mind, and all transport some meaning. Thus, the MCI effect is just a simplified aspect of the innate urge to play with ideas, to integrate the unusual and unexpected into the architecture of knowledge, and to integrate the particular into the universal. Maoris tell how sky father and earth mother, locked in a loving embrace, are forcibly pushed apart by their children, thus creating the lifeworld of humans (Fig. 3). The world we all live in is, from its beginning, overshadowed by grief and by a longing for lost unity. How could a story be more moving than this exquisite myth of origins? Many old religious myths express the apprehension of a primeval evil, of a darkness which overshadows life. Sacred stories—or, to give them their proper name, myths and mythologies—have more than poetic functions, but they are also poetry. Mythological tales are not created as l’art pour l’art. But they are works of art, even if they are folk art. Religious beliefs are always artistically expressed: by sculptures, paintings, music, buildings and poetry. Not to understand this fact, is to understand nothing.

Fig. 3  Rangi and Papa: Sky father and earth mother, Rangi and Papa (or Ranginui and Papatūānuku,) are the primordial couple in the Maori creation myth which explains the world’s origin. Here, they are shown in a modern artistic rendition. They lie locked together in a tight embrace, and their many male children have to live in the dark, cramped space between them. Some of them want to kill their parents. But one brother, Tāne, suggests that they should push their parents apart. After many failed attempts, Tāne succeeds. Sky and earth, to their grief, are separated and the lifeworld of humans appears. (public domain)

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As soon as one recognizes the (more than obvious) artistic aspect of mythology, it becomes equally obvious that the fascination of MCI (if one insists upon the term) has nothing to do with belief in the truth of stories. Five year old children distinguish easily between story characters which are made up in a playful manner (Peter Rabbit) and living creatures (the rabbit in the backyard). They ask “Is it real?” and file the information accordingly. Likewise, the vivid interest in “minimally incongruous” (interesting and satisfactory) religious ideas and figures does not make them believable. It is again the other way around: Religious concepts which are believed and provide meaning are shaped imaginatively and artistically to fit human tastes. All people at all times (as far as we know) told ghost stories, within and without a religious context. Probably nobody believes all stories he or she hears, but many believe in the existence of ghosts. Some people are afraid of ghosts although they, according to their own testimony, have never met one. Some claim to have met a ghost, but do not believe in ghosts. They have another explanation for their experience. Whatever they believe, they enjoy ghost stories, and the stories confer some sort of meaning to them. The capacity of the cognitive space to harbor such a substantive complexity had to evolve, as any other cognitive capacity. It evolved from simpler (but equally holistic) to more intricate patterns, certainly not driven by a few basic brain functions. The MCI concept is one of far too many hypotheses which regard prehistoric humans as beings which are not recognizable as people. The moment we remember that such hypotheses are reflexive-phenomena and try an alternative, hermeneutic approach to sacred stories, the concept falls apart. How do we react to mystery stories? How do believing people of indigenous cultures react to their own sacred stories? They can be asked, they can answer. How do we react to unexpected perceptions which somehow contradict our world view? How do so-called primitives deal with these perceptions? Ask students of literature, ask ethnologists and anthropologists, ask psychologists and sociologists. After asking them, ask what reasons we have to suppose that Aurignacian hunters were different from extant pygmies or historic Gauls? They were culturally different, but their cognitive capacities were probably not. Only if one faces the fact that prehistoric Homo sapiens was indeed sapient, one may ask how a simpler, less evolved version of human “sapience” might have looked like e.g., in the Homo erectus clade. To repeat the obvious: Behavioral modernization was not an adaptation to specific ecological pressures, but immensely increased the hominin ability of niche construction and environmental engineering in general. Populations farther along toward modernity outcompeted those farther behind. And religion evolved as an integral part of this modernization process. Also, one ought to remain mindful of the fact that the original CSR concepts were supposed to explain first of all our own religious thinking, not that of bygone hunter-­ gatherers. The fragmentary substantiations which can be invoked will be discussed in the following chapter. In addition to the principal objections already mentioned, some well-known CSR explanations conflict with actual descriptive knowledge of historic religions. Barrett

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(2004, preface) states “that beliefs in gods match up well with these automatic assumptions; beliefs in an all-knowing, all-powerful God match up even better.” The latter belief is widespread, but usually not central, in tribal religions, and is largely absent in universal religions, except in the Abrahamic ones. In view of this knowledge, it is hard to see how the author fits his statement together with his position that “automatic assumptions” are caused by primal evolutionary adaptations, which still govern our religious thoughts. In a like manner Boyer (2001, 11) sees no necessity to define religion in general but proposes that the belief in supernatural agents constitutes the core of religious systems. They satisfy the urge to identify agents and non-agents everywhere in the cognitively represented reality and are thus (adaptive or not) a basically unrealistic spin-off from modular thought processes. It can be left open whether the categorical distinction between agents and non-­ agents is genetically hardwired, or a result of elementary learning. In any case, the hypothesis is inconsistent with the widely held and rather plausible conviction that animism is a primal feature of human religiosity. It perceives not only humans and animals, but plants, rocks, rivers and mountains as spiritual agents, and does not strictly separate the spiritual from the material, everyday dimension of the world. Thus, a spiritual worldview apparently does not follow from Barret’s categories, or from HAD, but from a surmounting of such low-level, general and modular impulses onto a higher level of symbolic thought. It is plausible that, as soon as the concept of an invisible world arose in the cognitive space, it would be modeled alongside the visible one. Thus, agents would people the spiritual realm. But spirits, gods, demi-­ gods, sacred ancestors etc. are not necessarily central to the horizon of meaning provided by religion, or to the sense of transcendence and the perception of the numinous. In quite a number of historic religions supernatural agents are marginal or absent. Usually Theravada Buddhism is mentioned as an example. The Buddha did not deny the existence of gods but regarded their existence or non-existence as irrelevant. The belief in a dreamtime in Australian aboriginal culture—one of the oldest extant religious systems—has a comparable dimension. It depicts a super-­ reality which engenders the reality of everyday life. It is inhabited by spirits or gods, but those do not interact with the fate of humans. The all-important relation between invisible and visible world is that between archetype and copy, between solidity and shadow. In eighth century Europe, when the Christian author of Beowulf looked back upon the beliefs of his Germanic ancestors, he saw heroes who “conceive of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity” (Heaney 1999, xiv). Their destiny is determined by a fate (old English wyrd) they do not know, but which is unchangeable. To win glory before death and thus fame among the living, and to leave an heir to continue the clan history, is far more important than the afterlife with the gods. They vow offerings to the gods for aid and they inspect omens to assess their fortune. But in the end, supernatural interventions evoke little fear or hope. The gods must deal with their own wyrd. As another example from a completely different culture, note how Gale (Encyclopedia of Religion 2005) depicts the religion of the Mbuti, African Pygmies:

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“According to Paul Schebesta, the Mbuti believe that God created the universe (that is, the forest) and all its creatures and forces. God then retired into the sky, ending his participation in earthly affairs. The first human, a culture hero named Tore, became god of the forest; he gave the Mbuti both fire and death and is seen as the source of game, honey, and protection. Essentially a benevolent god, Tore is thought to be particularly offended by evil. According to this version of the story, both humans and animals are endowed with vital forces (megbe). Furthermore, it is believed that the shadow of a deceased human becomes a forest spirit, part of an invisible people who mediate between humans and the forest god Tore. Colin Turnbull … disagrees with this account of Mbuti cosmology. According to him, there is no creator god; instead, the Mbuti worship God as a living benevolent being personified by the forest. To them, God is the forest. Turnbull also diverges from Schebesta’s account of the mediating forest spirits, for he views the Mbuti as a practical people who have a direct relationship with the forest as a sacred being. The Mbuti Pygmies lack both ritual specialists and divination practices. Communication with the forest is achieved through fire and smoke, offerings, whistles, wooden trumpets, and polyphonic songs.”

By both accounts, while they disagree about important aspects, the Mbuti are animists and the core of their religious system is the apotheosized forest they live in. The dead live on in a spirit world. They contribute something to the well-being of the living, or they contribute nothing of importance. Either way, the belief in ancestor spirits is not central to Mbuti spirituality. Neither is belief in supernatural actors central to religion as such. It is, as Sosis (2018) remarks, one element among others in religious systems. This points back to the statement already quoted (Narr 2008): “The study of very simple hunters and gatherers of recent times shows that several religious conceptions generally considered to be especially ‘primitive’  …  hardly play an important part.” The pantheons of the ancient Greeks and Romans, cultures far more complex than those of hunters and gatherers, are peopled by gods who act occasionally in the human lifeworld, but are like humans subject to a larger, all-encompassing fate. The idea of a cosmic order, an inexorable, profound way of the world, is as prevalent in religious systems as the idea of supernatural agents interfering with human affairs. The hermetic principle as above, so below2 has predecessors at the beginnings of the documented history of religion. Thus, one could use the blueprint of  basic CSR reasoning to suggest another starting point for religiosity: There is a—probably hard-wired—expectation that events correlated in time are causally connected. That implies a fixed order of causes and effects which can be experienced. The religious idea of an all-encompassing cosmic harmony, or of the world moving through an endless circle of ages, might from this point of view be supported by a module (let us call it HCD: hyper causality detector) which presupposes a detectable order of interlocked events. However, to call a hypothetical HCD an “unconscious belief” would be as narrowing as ascribing that role to HADs and MCIs. To believe (consciously and socially) in a universal cosmic order and in an unalterable fate is one possibility to construct a consistent existential interpretation of life experiences, perhaps starting from a sense of transcendence or, perhaps, from an

 “Quod est inferius, est sicut (id) quod est superius, et quod est superius, est sicut (id) quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius” from the emerald table. 2

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animistic idea of the unity of all beings. Otherworldly agents interfering with the world represent another possibility. The belief in an all-encompassing, creative will of a peerless god behind all things is a third one. Religious systems encompass various combinations of these and other basic beliefs, all satisfying the urge to create a worldview which qualifies the whole by particular experiences, and vice versa. Views which thus provide meaning become encoded within the culturally available system of symbols. However, at the end of this chapter a possible misunderstanding has to be prevented: The conclusion that some well-known CSR explanations of the origin of religiosity are unconvincing does not support a rationalistic explanation of religious beliefs. It rather points out that religious beliefs develop neither from basic cognitive modules, nor (usually) from conscious reasoning and logical inferences, but from what is learned during socialization. People think about religion in the same way they think about anything else, with the same cognitive instruments, the same linguistic and nonlinguistic system of symbols, with the same realism and unrealism. Religious belief systems develop ontologically in as complicated a manner as other capacities and performances, from tool use to social skills. How could it be otherwise?

References Barrett, J. (2004). Why would anyone believe in god? Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Blume, M. (2014). Religion und Demographie. Filderstadt: Sciebooks Verlag. Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of religious ideas. Oakland: University of California Press. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors. London: Heinemann. Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 119–124. Brown, W., & Strawn, B. D. (2016). Complex emergent developmental linguistic relational neurophysiologicalism. In A. Fuentes & A. Visala (Eds.), Verbs, bones and brains (pp. 123–139). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: A primer. Santa Barbara: Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/ primer.html. Gale, Thomas. (2005). Pygmy religions. In the encyclopedia of religion. Retrieved September 21, 2019, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopediasalmanacs-­transcripts-­and-­maps/pygmy-­religions. Geertz, A. (2013). Whence religion? How the brain constructs the world and what this might tell us about the origins of religion, cognition and culture. In A. W. Geertz (Ed.), Origins of religion, cognition and culture (pp. 17–70). Durham: Acumen Publishing. Guthrie, S. E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heaney, S. (1999). Beowulf: A new verse translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive gadgets. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Kundt, R. (2018). Making evolutionary science of religion an integral part of cognitive science of religion. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.),

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Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp.  141–158). Leiden/ Boston: Brill. Lawson, E. T., & McCauley, R. (1990). Rethinking religion: Connecting cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Narr, Karl J. (2008). Prehistoric religion. Britannica online encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2008-04-09. Accessed 20 February 2020. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Smith, S. (2020). Is evolutionary psychology possible? Biological Theory, 15, 39–49. https://doi. org/10.1007/s13752-­019-­00336-­4. Sosis, R. (2018). Why cultural evolutionary models of religion need a systemic approach. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp. 45–61). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Upal, M. A. (2010). An alternative account of the minimal counterintuitiveness effect. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 194–203. Visala, A. (2011). Naturalism, theism and the cognitive study of religion: Religion explained? Guildford: Aldershot Press.

Religious Fanaticism

In January 2017, an address by the pope concerned with the European refugee problem got extensive media coverage. Protestant fundamentalists posted messages on Facebook and other social media which ignored the pope’s topic and took the reports as occasion to attack Roman Catholicism. An example: “I completely renounce the unbiblical Catholic teaching. I demand that the pope, including the Vatican, be abolished and that the Roman Catholic Church revert to pure biblical teaching. The Catholic Church woefully distorts biblical teachings. The pope has even ordered that Catholics are not allowed to believe the biblical creation report. They must believe in evolution. Therefore, I proclaim: Down with the Vatican state! Down with the unbiblical teachings which scorn God and men! Down with the idolatry which adores Mary and the so-called saints! Jesus told us: In heaven, there are no Catholics and no popes. And he is right!” (translation by the author). The post’s radicalism is a verbal one. Nobody knows if the writer would approve actual violence against Roman Catholics. On the other hand, religious fanatics who seek justification for violent tendencies are served well by such posts. We all know from history how quickly political and social conflicts turn verbal into practical cruelty. By the way, similar examples from zealous right-wing Catholics who denounce Protestantism are as easily found and as numerous. At first sight, such a fanatic performance seems light years removed from the (only tentatively known) early forms of religion which first appeared as part of the behavioral modernization of Homo sapiens. Neither the late-modern medium of communication used, nor the individualism and dogmatism revealed by the post, seem to have anything to do with the religious system of a hunter-gatherer community. Primeval mythologies and rationalistic dogmas reside at opposite poles of the religious spectrum. On the other hand, the way of thinking behind such attacks upon religious competition has an uncanny similarity with the modularly constricted perspective which “high church” evolutionary psychology regards as the mental basis © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_12

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of religious belief in general. Not surprisingly, there are publications which exploit this approach to the limits of common sense, and maybe beyond, by constructing direct causal connections between basic evolutionary mechanisms, “for example principles of sexual selection and parental investment”, and religiously motivated violence (Sela and Barbaro 2017). It has been extensively discussed in parts II and III of this book, that such an approach leads into “systemic blindness”, and disregards the complex, cultural and social functions of religion. Here, a different avenue will be followed. From a psychological perspective, the zealous worldview comprises both obsessive and paranoid elements. The obsessive elements may be related to an inherited, basic tendency to perceive direct causal connections where there are none. The paranoid elements are perhaps supported by the tendency to see identifiable agents behind events which are in fact the unintentional results of complex processes. Both thought patterns fail to utilize the abundance of knowledge offered by the entire culture. Zealous views are upheld by cognitive blinders, by an immunization against incongruent information. The hermeneutic circle between the universal explanation of everything and the many explanations of particular things has to be blocked out to protect religious fanaticism or a given conspiracy theory. Supposedly for zealots, the need to stabilize the individual mental system (or a socially shared, radical world view) against dysfunctional anxiety and unsettling doubts overrules functional information processing. Thus, not only individuals can turn into fanatics, whose thoughts are dominated by enemy stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Social and cultural worldviews can turn obsessive or paranoid as well. In the latter case, it is “normal” for an individual to partake in the warped attitude, without exhibiting an individual, fanatic psychodynamic. However  fragmentary some CSR explanations of religious evolution might appear, in this chapter a possible inference will be discussed. Namely the possible inference that religious fanaticism reveals after all a modular pattern of religious belief systems and that this modular pattern may perhaps be cognitively primary. Indeed, some belief systems, under modern conditions, show features which at first sight corroborate a direct causal relation between basic cognitive modules and worldviews. The most impressive examples are, as mentioned, conspiracy theories and religious fanaticism. (Another possible example is the influence of severe bodily or psychic traumatization upon thought patterns. However, the topic of traumatization would lead the argument too far away from religiosity.) The phenomena have the appearance of both cultural and cognitive regression, one might suppose of a regression into primordial mental states which came at the beginning of religious evolution. Consequently, influential authors inside and outside the scholarly study of religion, propagate the opinion that the emotional and motivational basis of religiosity is per se zealotic. Alternatively, some writers state that the monotheistic religions of the West are zealotic, while the polytheistic systems of the East, along with indigenous religions, are comparatively tolerant. The idea is commonly accepted in our late modern secular culture, especially in academically educated circles. Religious people and organizations, on the other hand, have little patience with this approach to religion and see their spiritual motives profoundly

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misrepresented. The discourse pattern indicates that the main motivation for many participants on both sides is not the search for scientific truth and mutual understanding. Instead, as has been discussed in part I of this book, conflicting narratives about the nature of religion compete for cultural and political authority. Researchers have to be aware that, in this field of discourse, science is often not exercised, but instrumentalized. Therefore, an effort will be made to analyze religious fanaticism scientifically, first as a present phenomenon of our own culture, then from an evolutionary perspective. The book of Steffen (2007) “Holy war, just war” will serve as an introduction to the topic. It corrects an overly simplistic view of the relation between religion and fanaticism by its differentiated approach: On the one hand, the author tends towards the allegation that religion in general is a possible source of fanaticism. He mentions the spiritual longing for understanding and meaning, which is only fulfilled by a relationship with an ultimate, unsurpassable counterpart. Therefore, a vision of ultimacy forms the center of each religious system. It has been amply discussed in previous chapters that a vision of the world’s whole, of the entirety of existence, and its interaction with particular life experiences, indeed constitutes the core of any religious world view. Steffen continues with the contention that, if the spiritual vision of ultimacy turns into practical absolutism, it not only satisfies the need for meaning and belonging, but also justifies the believer’s supremacy vis a vis non-­ believers, and finally may become a justification for overpowering them. Steffen does not denounce religion in general. In ethical terms, he states that religious functions and performances can be either good or bad, and either life-affirming or life-­ threatening. The all-important question for him is whether or not a believer or a religious community turn their vision of the ultimate into absolutist norms, rules and doctrines: “Violence emerges from religion only when Ultimacy is transformed and becomes equated with the idea of the Absolute” (Steffen 2007, 23). Consequently, religious fanaticism can be regarded as a radical implementation of religious absolutism (see also Selengut 2008). The conclusion does not justify the idea that in order to infuse civility and tolerance into a religious system, it ought to be domesticated by scientific reason and universal, non-religious morality. Most religious systems have their internal resources to resist absolutism. Contrary to what Richard Dawkins believes, humanity and religious tolerance are usually not the result of pressure by secular moralization: In several publications, Dawkins described exponents of non-fundamentalist religion as being members of the „Neville Chamberlain School“. The label refers to the appeasement policy of British Premier Minister Chamberlain, who in 1938 tried to avoid conflict with Nazi Germany by several ill-considered concessions, and who instead strengthened the aggressiveness of Adolf Hitler. The comparison, however, is based on a misapprehension. Non-fundamentalist religious positions in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. are, for the most part, not concessions to enlightened or scientific criticism. They are majority positions, usually even traditional ones which decay into fanaticism when driven by specific social conditions. If such conditions prevail, fanaticism is not restricted to religion, but can be produced (in modern history often in especially terrible manifestations) by secular

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absolutism. For example, in Europe Anti-Semitism sometimes, or even regularly, flared up in all societies dominated by Christian churches from the early Middle Ages into the nineteenth century. Expulsions, progroms and social marginalization were consequences of this base expression of religious fanaticism. However, the horrific results of Anti-Semitism driven by the secular, racist ideology of Adolf Hitler in Germany went beyond anything known from pre-modern history. The murderous effectiveness of the secular, anti-Christian Nazi State surpassed every horror and every other state terror to such a degree that comparisons with cases of earlier, religiously motivated Anti-Semitism are discomfiting and should be omitted. Let us turn back to the comparatively tiny examples of everyday, secular fanaticism. Some secular attacks upon religion are quite as bigoted as the religious absolutism they denounce. Schmidt-Salomon, a German representative of the New Atheist movement, wrote (Schmidt-Salomon 2012, 42–43): “Religious idiocy is a rarely diagnosed, but nonetheless widespread, type of mental disability. It is caused by intensive belief-indoctrination usually during childhood. Symptoms are an insufficient cognitive performance and inappropriate emotional responses as soon as belief-relevant topics are involved…. In matters of world view, people affected with religious idiocy are too disabled to perceive the obvious absurdity of their belief. In technical and strategic matters, they can nonetheless act highly intelligently (see Osama bin Laden.” (translation by the author). This ugly example demonstrates that, at least in western modernity, fanaticism is not restricted to religion, and not even to absolutist ideological systems. In the case of Schmidt-Salomon, a so-called hyperquantivalent idea suffices to produce at least verbal fanaticism. (Typical expressions of individual fanaticism will be discussed later in this chapter.) Or, to express it in another manner, secular worldviews can adopt religious features and are thus turned into immanent forms of a quasi-religion. The ultimate counterpart of human existence which can become absolutistic is not necessarily a belief in a “transcendent other”. A knowledge system which is seen as “absolutely true” can assume the role. Many aspects of the human condition suffice for the formation of an absolutistic worldview, examples include: the perceived absolute righteousness of one’s social milieu, one’s nation, or one’s skin color. That fact pattern does not contradict, but rather strengthens the above analysis: Neither religiosity as such, nor other worldviews, depend upon an absolutistic interpretation of beliefs. However, it can be argued that all seriously held worldviews, both secular ones and religious ones, comprise a vision of some ultimate framework for existence. A tendency toward absolutistic belief systems may be inherent in all of them. The task to resist this tendency is probably a universal one. So far, Steffen’s analysis is convincing and useful. It is questionable, however, whether the key concepts ultimacy and absoluteness can be applied to indigenous religions, or even to traditional religions outside the post axial, universal religions of Asia and Europe. For the Mbuti (see Chap. 11) the eternal forest is the ultimate counterpart of their existence. It is hard to see how it could be turned into a concept of absoluteness comparable with the absolutist claims which are made in the name of universal religions. In indigenous culture, religion is an integral part of the overall ethnic identity. It is unimaginable that an individual, or a small group, would be

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able to replace their common religion by another one, while at the same time claim to remain part of the community as before. Nor can two ethnic groups, even groups with existing cultural contacts, be expected to replace their separate and individual spiritual ideas and performances with those of the other group simply because members of one of the groups find the spiritual ideas and sacred rites of the other to be more attractive. In modern terms, indigenous religions are neither tolerant nor intolerant. Likewise, the question whether their beliefs have an absolutistic quality or not has no real meaning. If an indigenous ethnic group is successfully converted by religious missionaries, if it is forcefully subdued or conquered, its religious system is often converted and conquered as well: It is often the case that the priests and invokers, the ancestor spirits, or the gods of the refuted and the defeated have been proven to be weaker than those of the victors. If they remain in office at all, they usually become subordinate to the stronger priesthood, to the supernatural actors or forces of the superior religion. They disappear or they remain with their ideas and practices on a lower, subservient level of the religious system. In this way, Buddhist mission in Asia usually turned older shamanistic religions into folk religions for lay people. Examples are the Bon religion of Tibet, the spirit belief in Thailand, and shamanic practices in Korea. On the other hand, large, religiously multifaceted, anonymous societies with complex structures of domination and with a great social distance between authoritative decision makers and the populace seem to allow, perhaps they even encourage, religious fanaticism. Such societies gradually appeared after the Neolithic revolution less than 10,000 years ago. Far-flung empires came into being only about 5000 years ago. Their multi-layered, religiously plural and anonymous societies are the negative foil against which a fanatic sub-group asserts its religious identity. The concepts which are applied to construct a fanatic belief system appear in the so-­ called axial age (800 to 200 BCE), and cannot be traced back into prehistory. For example, (as the initially quoted Facebook post demonstrates), zealots regard another religious system as a potential alternative or competitor to their own, often simply as an enemy. They fight against it because it threatens them and their community. Only universal religions from the axial age onwards adhere to their factual substance, regardless of the political or social fate of their believers. Only they are true missionary religions. By the way, all of the universal religions practice missionary activity except Judaism and traditional Hinduism. The latter strongly competes with other religions, but traditionally only within the cultural space of India and among its traditional ethnic and cultural groups. The prevalent idea that the western, Abrahamic religions do proselytize, while the Asiatic universal religions do not, is historically false. All post-axial, universal religions have a strong tendency to seek proselytes outside their own communities and territories, and all develop occasional fanatic expressions. According to Habermas (quoted in Huizing 2020) the axial age was characterized by three major philosophical developments:

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–– objectification of world views –– moralizing of the sacred –– redemptive righteousness The progressive accumulation of “world knowledge”, Habermas states, made it impossible any longer to interpret the whole of the world in mythological terms and by means of sacred narrations. Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism as well as Greek philosophy (by influencing Judaism and later Christianity) converted traditional beliefs into religious world views with a universal, intercultural and even interreligious legitimacy. Because any religious idea of the whole, of the world and of existence, comprises a vision of goodness and of life-supporting forces, the idea of the sacred was identified with a conception of universal goodness and of universal ethical norms. Thus, the vision of the sacred became a vision of redemption by righteousness: The world views of all axial-age, universal religions link the believer’s salvation to an ethically demanding path which must be followed through life. What constitutes salvation, however, is a question with markedly different answers, except that they all envision an overcoming of immanent suffering and fragmentation. Salvation puts an end to the existential imprisonment of human life by evil forces. In shorthand, the developments described by Habermas could be regarded as the merging of religion and philosophy, when philosophy was culturally established. The older, narrative identity of cultures and religions was taken to a philosophic level of thought, without eradicating its mythological substance. In fact, the mythological layer of religion, the rituals, feasts and cults remained in place; religion became as socially stratified as the urban societies and the empires it belonged to. The merging occurred almost simultaneously from the Mediterranean to China, although in different ways. The great prophets of Israel, the Persian dualist sages, the Lord Buddha, Laozi the mystic, and Confucius, philosopher of order, are dissimilar religious figures A phylogeny of religions would be obliged to describe their disparity; here the similarities determined by Habermas suffice. Absolutism of beliefs and moral rules (in Steffen’s sense) does not necessarily follow from them but become possible. Without the universalism of axial religions, there is nothing to turn into absolutistic norms and rules. The vision of “redemption by righteousness” especially preconditions religious fanaticism, because without this vision in the background, principally “unrighteous” enemies are not in sight. Ultimacy and (as a possibility) absoluteness of religious beliefs and practices are thus connected with axial-age religiosity. Both features could not evolve without it. If key aspects terms of the above analysis are not applicable to extant indigenous religions, and to pre-axial historic religions, they are even less applicable to prehistoric human religiosity. To summarize the preliminary conclusions reached so far in a concise form: Religious fanaticism as it is known today, both as a threatening socio-political movement and as an individual psychological disturbance, is mainly conditioned by the circumstances of life in the modern world and cannot be understood simply as regression to earlier phylogenetic forms of religiosity. How, then, can the analysis of modern-day fanaticism tell us anything about basic, evolutionary

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primal elements of religion? Perhaps it can, because basic elements of individual religious behavior and experience become visible by the deterioration of life-­ assuring religious beliefs and practices into fanatic expressions and performances. In other words: Fanaticism is not an evolutionary regressive form of religiosity. As an inner-psychic feature, it can be understood as a dilapidated, even pathological, expression of the general human capacity for religion under modern conditions. Its symptoms allow insights into basic elements and processes which belong to the fabric of religiosity and spirituality, but which are difficult to discern, while they are embedded into a complex, well-balanced religious culture. The idea advocated by Evolutionary Psychology (not by its “narrow”, but by its “broad” version) has some plausibility that modern-day religious fanaticism might point back to basic, perhaps phylogenetically primal, elements of human religiosity. What, from a psychological perspective, is a fanatic? The Latin adjective fanaticus means “enthusiastic” or “zealous”. In a religious context it describes a person seized by divine power, a person awe-struck, frenzied and losing self-control. In contrast, the modern usage of the adjective fanatic, when associated with religion and ideology, signifies an intolerant, sometimes violent, fight for a religious, social, juridical or political concern, an inability to reach accommodations with differing positions, and a tendency to uphold overly simple explanations of the world. It is significant that in antique Rome, the term depended upon a transcendent anthropological concept and referred to a genuinely spiritual, though perhaps undesirable, relation to otherworldly powers. Today, the meaning of the term fanatic is secularized and individualized. It refers to a mental or social attitude which may be, but does not have to be, supported by religious beliefs. The term describes the inner-psychic aspect of the drive toward absoluteness of beliefs which has been described according to Steffen (2007). It is not caused by any form of transcendent influence, but by immanent social or mental dynamics. In accordance with the latter meaning, in a subject-specific manner the concept fanaticism is usually found in depth psychology (mostly in psychoanalysis), less so in empirical psychology and in the social sciences. There, the concept is commonly replaced by dogmatism and rigorism (see the following chapter). It will be discussed in more detail that the conceptual change from a religious to a psychological term corresponds to a phenomenological change: Modern–day fanaticism, even if it is based on religious ideas, is characterized by an attribute, which one may call loss of transcendence. In fact, “loss of transcendence” is what happens to religion on a psychodynamic level, while absolutistic interpretations develop on the social and cognitive level. In depth psychology, the term fanaticism describes an inner psychic dynamic which induces a person to accept extreme ideas as true and to resort to extreme behavior to put them in practice. Hole (1995) designates a fanatic as motivated by an overwhelming need for cognitive orientation, which must be simple, clear-cut and unambiguous. Right and wrong, good and evil need to have absolute values without shades of importance or levels of probability. A polyphony of ideas, positions and morals causes the fanatic psyche to have so much fear and anger that this ambiguity becomes unacceptable and will be fought. In the cognitive space, that

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means the repression or denial of information incompatible with the absolute truth of one’s ideas accompanied by a brushing aside of internal contradictions. The fanatic must keep persons whose convictions are at odds with their own at a distance or those whose convictions conflict with their own beliefs must be belittled and eliminated. In a religious context, the fanatic orientation engenders an overarching ideal of purity which demands purity of beliefs and an approved, pure way of life. At least in theory the fanatic is a religious perfectionist. The adherence to purity has to be socially and individually verifiable. The fanatic demands the use of predetermined formulas to express faith cognitively and external behavioral signs of faithfulness which can be verified. A fanatic community tolerates no creativity in the expression of spiritual experiences and does not treasure ethic qualities which cannot be evaluated by external tokens. Because spiritual intuitions and an inner devotion to the divine are principally beyond conformity control, they are disdained. Instead, devotion to religious leaders is in demand. Therefore, the inner dynamic of fanaticism gives rise to the phenomenon referred to as loss of transcendence. Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Brooklyn-based, international community with Protestant roots, are characterized by their religious exclusivism. Their belief states that the righteousness which leads to redemption is absolutely connected to their own community. It cannot be practiced outside Jehovah’s Witnesses. Insiders are saved. Outsiders are lost and will be eternally annihilated in the soon-to-be expected Last Judgment. The moralization of the sacred (Habermas) is carried to extremes. The authoritarian leadership prescribes moral rules, which are distributed worldwide to all members in written form. They are supposed to study the pamphlets regularly. In weekly gatherings, learning success is tested by classroom-like methods. (As an example of the vast literature on the topic, see Franz 2007.) Insofar, the community is a prototypical example of religious absolutism. That does not mean that all members are, as individuals, fanatic personalities. On the contrary, many partake in fanatic teachings and practices as far as social acceptance requires it, but no further. Nonetheless, beliefs, rituals and rules are identified with Jehovah’s will. In the eyes of dedicated members, there is no distance whatsoever between the divine and the communal. Their religious identity is absolutistic, even while they have no personal, mental and emotional gain from expressions of fanaticism. Within the community, the divine is left with nothing which could be experienced exempt from the group’s authority. Individual religious perceptions are expected to comprise nothing unexplained or enigmatic: Religion is ardently pursued, but transcendence is lost. On the cognitive level, religious fanaticism develops principally between three poles, which one may label idealization of self, demonization of others, and loss of transcendence. God, the ultimate, the transcendent ground of existence, moves close to the empirical self, or (in extreme cases) merges with it. Then the ultimate is no longer transcendent, and no longer spiritual. It might seem almost like a contradiction in terms: Religious fanaticism, an apparently especially vigorous expression of religious belief, is thus antagonistic to the individual and social need for spiritual experience, to the truly religious, aesthetic and sensual longing that everyday existence should be illuminated or encompassed by a wider and brighter reality.

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Absoluteness of beliefs divests the mysterium tremendum of its mysterious elements. Fear and a need for social assertion take their place. Also, the mysterium fascinosum remains mysterious only in name. In fact, religious authorities own and administer access to (moderately) fascinating experiences for believers. They command the means to share out the possibility of partaking in the spiritual abundance of their religion in measured doses. The deeply moving “sense of transcendence”, the exhilaration of meeting the numinous, turns into satisfaction by power and social approval. The language of religious fanaticism reveals this fatal loss. The beauty beyond all earthly beauty is verbally reduced to humdrum snugness: From us, you learn the right attitude. With us, you are in the right place. To stand with us means to stand with the gods. Do not move away from us. Of course, we do not talk about a holy pilgrimage to an unimaginable, divine country. Here and now, with us, is the only holy country there is. We are not interested in a radical transformation of all that is perishable into eternal existence. Instead, we emphasize that your everyday services to deliver are holy, especially if the services are for us. Remember, the “light brighter than the sun” is too dazzling. You will misunderstand it without our guidance. Dim it down so that it is serviceable as a reading lamp to illuminate the correct doctrines and duties that we teach you. The loss of the spiritual is always accompanied by the loss of ritual and artistic expressions of beliefs. Fanatic religious communities are adverse to colorful rituals, to feasts and exuberance, to music and embellishments, to laughter and fun. A vital religious culture does not shy away from the grotesque and ugly side of life. They are necessary artistic topics, and therefore necessary elements of religious art. If vibrant religiosity is always expressed artistically, the reverse conclusion that art often expresses religious beliefs gains probability: The spontaneous impression that the painted buffaloes of Lascaux and the Lion Man from Stadel Cave are connected to religion is hermeneutically justified, although it is not subject to empirical proof. Art encompasses per se a transcendental aspect. It points beyond its immediate meaning to hidden, mysterious dimensions of the world. It touches vague intuitions and longings. By turning away from art and ritual, from spontaneity and enthusiasm, any modern religious system, any form of socially and culturally “organized spirituality”, can become profoundly unspiritual, and yet serve important (though not necessarily agreeable) psychological and social purposes. This paradoxical issue gives rise to some conclusions—better call them imaginative surmises—concerning the early evolution of religion. The human capacity for religiosity, the “sense of transcendence”, the idea of the other- and outer-worldly sacred, might have evolved in a different, and separable, way from that of religious systems embedded in human culture. Socially implemented religious forms and performances probably evolved according to rules similar with those of cultural evolution in general. Therefore, a model of the causal factors which might have driven the evolution of religiosity is unlikely to apply to the later, cultural evolution of “organized religion”. Vice versa, the functional (adaptationist) theories which supply the majority of causal explanations for the evolution of religion, from the facilitation of social grooming to the strengthening of social

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trust and cooperation, may have some application to the cultural evolution of religious systems. They almost certainly are insufficient to explain the appearance and the subsequent development (if there is one) of the spiritual capacity. From a functional perspective, the “by-productivist stance” (Kundt 2018, 142) which from his point of view dominates CSR theorizing has the advantage that the appearance of “religious intuitions” during hominisation needs no causal explanation at all. They were pre-set by cognitive evolution and taken up as selection-neutral or mildly detrimental epiphenomena into culture. Thus, causal hypotheses concerning religious evolution are justified in concentrating upon the evolution of religions in the plural, of culturally implemented religiosity. Antithetically, it has been repeatedly pointed out in this book that, although the cultural and the spiritual elements of religion certainly did not evolve independently, the prevalent “by-productivist” stance of CSR does not do justice to the systemic relevance of the religious capacity in history and, we have to suppose, in prehistory. Spirituality was no mere epiphenomenon of cognitive evolution, but an integral element of behavioral modernization including, but not restricted to, cognitive innovations. A sense of transcendence and an idea of the sacred emerged in context with the rapid development towards modernity which was immensely adaptive in its entirety. Selective advantages of specific elements (culturally provided existential meaning, ritually strengthened social cohesion etc.) may have been present or not, and certainly varied with the changing social and environmental challenges the evolving culture had to deal with. Behind these dialectic advantages and disadvantages of specific religious systems, the spiritual capacity was always a motive force both toward social stability and cultural innovation. Religiosity and religion evolved together, but in dialectic tension. A religious system can become antithetic to religiosity. In turn religiosity, the spiritual impulse, can become antithetic to certain religious forms. In the long run, however, religion as a system of cultural convictions and practices is always held together and “informed” by the human sense of transcendence and by spiritual experiences. Culturally implemented religion cannot last for long without eventual, repeated invigoration by vivid, dynamic expressions of religiosity. Without them it turns (contingent upon the characteristics of the respective culture) into moralism, philosophy, politics, business, estheticism, ideology and so on. On the other hand, it is unimaginable that spiritual experiences of prehistoric people, far removed from the individualism of modern times, were not social experiences. They were always communicated, and thus always culturally implemented. In the following paragraphs, the further analysis of individual types of religious fanaticism, of their affective and cognitive features, will lead to more relevant surmises. For this purpose, we will turn back to the psychological phenomenology of fanaticism. The behavioral, empirical and spiritual constrictions of fanaticism go hand in hand with an individual affective poverty which, however, does not necessarily take the form of a pathological disorder: Hole (1995) points out that commonplace, complex and varied emotions which usually accompany human relations are reduced. In everyday life, the fanatic is unemotional. On the other hand, situations and topics

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which are related to the fanatic orientation are to a high degree affect laden. All in all, he describes fanaticism as “religious compulsion towards extremes”. Montag (1997) writes that a fanatic is “a person very much occupied with his or her faith, ready to make sacrifices, but also adhering to radical positions which distort the overall beliefs of his or her religion, and who appears to fellow believers oppressive, threatening, manipulative, spurious or even ridiculous” (translations by the author). Despite the marked differences between individual psychodynamic features, which may all be connected to fanaticism, both Hole and Montag attempt to describe specific types. The following list presents the author’s synthesis of their respective typologies: –– idea-driven, aggressive and expansive fanaticism: The core of this type’s fanaticism is a religious absolutism in form of a so-called hyperquantivalent idea, an idea which has to be distributed and put into practice at all costs. The idea allows no doubts and no relativization, it incorporates absolute truth. It can be simple but can as well subsist as a complex religious ideology or as a fixed salvation plan. Persons and groups who do not agree are enemies per se. Also, the hyperquantivalent idea is not subject to change, while organizations for its implementation, or coalitions with similarly engaged groups, can shift. Within religious groups, such an idea-driven, religious fanaticism leads to social rigorism. Regarding its external relations, the fanatic group cuts itself off from the unbelieving world if there is no chance to convert or subdue the unbelievers. If possible, however, intense missionary activity and an active fight against unbelievers are sacred duties. According to whether the group strives for political power, and according to its resources, it resorts to violence. Thus, this type of fanatic is characterized by aggressiveness, activism and (if possible) expansivity. For example, terrorists motivated by jihadist beliefs are idea-driven, expansive, and highly aggressive. –– interest-driven, aggressive fanaticism: The affective structure of this type corresponds to that of the idea-driven fanatic, except that activism and aggressiveness aim not primarily at implementing a religious system. They target the gratification of personal interests, which subjectively have an overwhelming importance. In this case, religion usually becomes the vehicle for a personal vendetta or for reaching a personal triumph. The beliefs embraced by the fanatic have an arbitrary appearance and may change. Their substantial absolutism must serve the absolutely important interests of the fanatic. Often this type’s fanaticism is motivated by a (sometimes imaginary) grievance or by an excessive egotism. He strives not only for compensation (which would be a common behavior pattern) but for an over-compensation which can be grotesquely out of proportion with the wrong actually or supposedly inflicted. Thus, the basis of this type’s fanaticism is not the absolute truth of beliefs, but the absolutely and indisputably positive role of the fanatic. He is the good one who fights for god, for justice or for salvation. Those who do not follow him are evil ones, without any shades of right and wrong. Therefore, the aggressiveness and the tendency to violence can become as dangerous as that of the former type. Indeed,

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jihadism often claims, as a justification of terroristic acts, former and actual injustices inflicted by their enemies. Some fanatics of this type, however, avoid external confrontations and pursue their over-compensatory personal interests mainly within their loyal following. There are cult leaders who are deeply understanding for every criticism they may meet and are full of sad compassion for those outsiders who do not agree with them. But internally they allow not the slightest challenge to their absolute authority (Fig. 1). Usually, the first two types of religious fanaticism are designated as strong and offensive. The following three types, in contrast, are regarded as faint, inexpressive and defensive. –– introverted, conviction-driven fanaticism: Fanatics of this type unconditionally adhere to a fixed set of ideas and ward off all doubts. Within their immediate social environment, they act and speak inconspicuously. Often, they are loners or move at the margins of religious organizations. They are cognitively self-­

Fig. 1  Cain: According to primeval biblical history, Cain murdered his brother Abel and was marked by God to prevent revenge. The woodcut from 1860 depicts the murder. Scattered minority opinions in Christian theology identified the “mark of Cain” with a black face (not with a dark skin). After the slave trade commenced in the US, Protestant communities in the south turned this tradition into a racist teaching. The “mark of Cain”, in their eyes, became the African’s dark skin. It justified slavery and banned Africans from the Protestant clergy. Outside Protestantism, no Christian denomination supported the teaching. It was zealously defended, however, e.g. causing a split between Southern and Northern Baptist denominations. The teaching is an example of interest-­driven, religious fanaticism. The Bible exegesis as such has no absolute quality. It serves to defend political and economic interests which are non-negotiable to the communities upholding the teaching. (Schnorr von Carolsfeld: Bibel in Bildern). (public domain)

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absorbed and not interested in a leadership role or in public appearances. Therefore, they are the “faint” counterpart of the idea-driven, aggressive and expansive fanatic. They are probably far more numerous than their “strong” equivalent; they may represent the most widespread type of fanaticism in highly individualized, modern western societies. (In other cultures, that is probably not the case.) Sometimes they adhere to a single idea and are thus motivated by a “one-issue” conviction. Generally, they are characterized by passivity, reactivity and introversion. –– Introverted, conviction-driven fanatics usually avoid personal conflicts, except when they meet adverse regulations and conditions, they are unable to evade. For example, a young Protestant reacted furiously when he learned that in spite of his ardent wish, his church would not send him as a missionary to Asia because he refused vaccination. It was impossible to convince him that the Bible, in fact, does not prohibit vaccination by any direct or indirect statement. Because his community had never before regarded him as a fanatic, the church authorities were very much surprised by his behavior. After they screened his Youtube activities, however, they were no longer surprised. Indeed, “faint” conviction-driven fanatics are eager to proclaim their ideas from a safe social distance. Decades ago, fanatics of this type were the authors of innumerable readers’ letters which were usually not published. Others habitually filed querulous charges against anybody whom they resented, as long as they did not have to confront the culprits directly. Now, the social media, including Youtube channels, are full of their warnings, explanations, attacks upon their enemies etc. Facebook and Co. have created a golden media age for this type of fanaticism and increased its influence upon public discourse considerably. –– authority-oriented fanaticism: Fanatics of this type depend upon the absolute reliability of positions and directions obtained from an external, religious authority. The religious identity of the fanatic is inseparable from his conformity with the authoritative reference person or group. Neither the content of beliefs nor personal interests are basic motives. Instead, the need for security and belonging is satisfied by the closeness to a trustworthy authority which is seen as absolutely “good and true”. This type is the “faint” equivalent of the interest-driven, aggressive fanatic. Usually, they supply most of the followers for the “strong” religious fanatics. In modern western societies, but presumably not in other cultures, they are not too numerous. Yet adherents of fundamentalist Protestant communities, as well as followers of right-wing Roman Catholic movements, are often of this type. Superficially, Protestant biblicists invoke the Bible to justify their convictions. In fact, however, they depend upon leaders who, in their eyes, have the absolute authority to interpret scripture according to the will of God. The leaders, in turn, are usually “strong” fanatics who follow hyperquantivalent ideas or, with their follower’s support, wage over-compensatory warfare against non-believers. –– Collective-oriented fanaticism: The type is characterized by over-identification with an extremist religious group and its beliefs. The absolute value of the group

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means that it is regarded as the intrinsic expression of everything good for which the respective religion stands. That status of absolute value cannot be questioned and entails viewing all other expressions of belief as evil, insofar as they differ from those of the revered collective. So far, the psychodynamic corresponds to that of the authority-orientated fanatic. The difference is that personal adherence to authoritative group representatives and their teaching, is not central for this type. The basis of collective-orientated fanaticism is the community experience as such. Closeness to leader figures is not sought and is often actively avoided. A related difference is that the fanatic is partly, sometimes almost completely, unable to explain the group’s beliefs autonomously and consistently to outsiders. The fanatically pursued objectives need no cognitive justification beside the fact that they are the collective’s objectives. Simple catchwords, even externally carried symbols, suffice to symbolize the communal identity. The collective-­ orientated fanatic within his group is an activist and may revert to uncontrolled aggressiveness. Singly, the same person often shows passivity and insecurity. Many “rank and file” members of extremist religious organizations display fanaticism of this type. The types of fanaticism listed so far are, like every typology, neither phenomenologically complete nor entirely realistic. All psychological typologies simplify the complex reality of human personalities and behavior patterns. They are utilitarian at best and should be taken as a sketchy roadmap for research. Of course, overlapping characteristics of the five types described here are common. Fanatic features change biographically. They enhance or they dissolve. For example, collective-orientated fanatics are often young. Many leave the fanatic collective if they succeed in gaining more personal autonomy and self-assuredness. Strong, idea-driven fanatics habitually develop features of interest-orientated fanaticism as soon as they reach a leading position in their extremist religious community. Sometimes they leave their former religious fanaticism entirely behind and revert to methods of cynical power policy. Despite the restrictions of the typology presented, and despite the methodological handicaps of all typologies, a constitutive pattern common to all sorts of religious fanaticism strikes the eye: All zealots exhibit an unbalanced, dysfunctional relation between their own identity, and that of others. The distortion is caused by an effort to contain existential fear by identifying life-threatening, evil forces with the presence and activity of outsiders and their belief systems. Not only are they turned into opponents, which historically they often were, they are actually turned into harbingers of perversion, danger and destruction. In an oblique way, fanatic religion addresses an all-encompassing aspect of human life, to which all religions are basically devoted: Life is at risk by forces beyond control, death is certain, longings are frustrated. Peace and rest are denied, and time is always short. Times of happiness are even shorter. Therefore, all religions are deeply concerned with the origin of evil. They tell us that life must be lived in the shadow of some primeval catastrophe. Living beings were brought forth by murder among the eldest gods; divine blood drenched

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the barren earth and turned into men and animals. The Titans, first children of earth and heaven, ruled the golden age of the world. But they were deprived of power by their younger siblings and driven underground. Floods forced the first people to leave their affluent, peaceful home-world and ascend through the earth to another, flawed one. The slow march of the eons through the cosmic circle of ages has brought us from the long-lost golden eon, through times of conflict and decay, to the present black eon, which is ruled by hatred, greed and ignorance. That life is beset with evils is a recurring theme in all religions, treated mythologically and (in post-­ axial religions) philosophically. The explanations given and the ways to salvation differ profoundly, but there are always prospects of hope. Religious fanaticism narrows the answers of its respective religion down to a simplified recipe: The abomination of unbelief and immorality is the source of evil. The way to salvation is the purification of humanity according to beliefs and rules which are absolutely true. Thus religion, as an idea system or as a cultural prompt, is taken up into the tense and destructive, social relationships which characterize fanaticism. The process is inevitable if religion is part of, or even the major element of, the fanatic’s identity. (By the way, the difficult term identity in this context simply means “what earns acceptance”: from self-approval to the approval of the reference group.) In other words: Fanaticism results from the failure to relate self and non-self realistically, to give a constructive answer to the question how to understand one’s own religion, its truth and its practices, in the presence of other religions with their different truths and practices. Of course, the world-knowledge of individuals and societies, going far back into prehistory, always included the knowledge that there are people who are “non-self”: outsiders who do not belong. There must be some concept to distinguish “us” and “them” substantially. But the concept does not have to rely on a comparison of different identities in the modern sense. It may simply represent outsiders as beings which are not quite human. The true humans are all insiders, they are the people. Many indigenous cultures name their own people and humanity with the same word. The conclusion leads back to the insight that, before concepts of self and non-­ self evolved within a cultural system of universal world-knowledge, there was no fanaticism in the modern sense. There was also no tolerance in the modern sense. Truth was an aspect of belonging. With an animist, religious worldview the difference between “us” and “them” is relativized by the conviction that all living beings, including human strangers, koala bears and dryads, share the same sort of life, which is neither material nor spiritual, but both. The member of a foreign tribe is only to a degree more similar in quality to a member of one’s own tribe than a wolf, a deer or a kangaroo are similar - if at all. The wolf as a totem is probably closer in quality to “us” than the stranger with his queer tattoos, clothes and incomprehensible language. Again, the idea gains plausibility that animism fills the role of an evolutionary primary, religious state very well. But the biological theory of evolution, by analogy, advises caution. It may seem odd to propose that the evolution of the ctenophora teaches scholars of religion a lesson. All the same, in Chap. 5 it was reported that, against all biologists’ expectations of order, the humble sea walnuts

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have a contingent, hard to explain phylogeny which did not take the expected course. Intuitively, animism looks like a basic root of human religion. But let us take the mysteriousness of every true history seriously, and refrain from overly facile conclusions. A last, but related observation: All in all, the collective-oriented fanatic (the last of the five types described) has the appearance of a regression to prehistoric conditions of culture and religion. The distinction between “us” and “them” merges with the distinction between truth and error, good and bad. But it should be kept in mind that individual regression, from the perspective of clinical psychology, does not turn an adult into a child. It turns him, for example, into a psychologically impaired adult with the low frustration tolerance of a little child. For him, unlike for the Kindergarten child, that level of frustration tolerance is dysfunctional. Equally, the collective-­ oriented understanding of religious validity is appropriate for prehistoric (and for many indigenous) tribal societies. But a modern-day religious community cannot return to that primeval state of religious evolution and remain functional. Universal truths and ethics have evolved. The self has to deal with them or has to move the complete, balanced forms of religion towards dysfunctional forms. However, even these forms have a cultural, social and individual function. In the following chapter, these functions will be further analyzed.

References Franz, R. (2007). In search of Christian freedom. Atlanta, GA: Commentary Press. Hole, G. (1995). Fanatismus. Freiburg, Germany: Herder Spektrum. Huizing, K. (2020). Philosophischer Gipfelsturm: Das neue Werk von Jürgen Habermas ist Stachel im Fleisch der Theologie. Zeitzeichen, 5, 21–23. Kundt, R. (2018). Making evolutionary science of religion an integral part of cognitive science of religion. In A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, M. H. Luther, J. S. Jensen, & J. Sørensen (Eds.), Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion: A new synthesis (pp.  141–158). Leiden/ Boston: Brill. Montag, G. (1997). Persönlichkeitsstörungen und religiöser Fanatismus. Idea Dokumentation, 8, 3. Schmidt-Salomon, M. (2012). Keine Macht den Doofen. München/Zürich: Piper. Sela, Y., & Barbaro, N. (2017). Selected to kill in his name: Evolutionary perspectives on religiously motivated violence. In J. R. Liddle & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and religion. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online. Selengut, C. (2008). Sacred fury: Understanding religious violence. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Steffen, L. (2007). Holy war, just war: Exploring the moral meaning of religious violence. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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In the preceding chapter, the analysis of religious fanaticism from an evolutionary perspective yielded some possible surmises related to the phylogeny of religiosity and religion. Like all retrospective constructions in the field, methodically these surmises lack direct empirical confirmation. But at least they serve as a basis for further considerations. –– Religiosity, the human religious capacity, including a sense of transcendence and a perception of the numinous, evolved by a trajectory separate from the subsequent evolution of culturally implemented, religious systems. –– Religiosity engendered, vitalized and informed religious systems throughout evolution. Their mutual interaction can be understood from a biological perspective as co-adaptation. –– The phylogenetic appearance of religiosity was probably expedited by its general role in the behavioral modernization of the genus Homo, not mainly by adaptive advantages in specific ecological constellations. –– And yet specific systems of religion had, at particular evolutionary stages in particular situations, adaptive functions which could induce developments (from a biological point of view: specializations) that for a time, led away from the general pattern of interlocked, co-adaptive, social, cultural and religious evolution. –– As soon as the cognitive space represents life as an entity in time and space, lived by a self-conscious person, the besetting perishability and grievousness of life is also perceived. The perception of existence in its entirety produces existential fear. All religions are therefore concerned with the origin of evil, the containment of wicked forces and the evocation of good forces. –– Many religions, especially pre-axial ones, comprise no clear concept of individual salvation. Nonetheless all are invigorated by a vision of another, purer and

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happier world; by the existence of an unshakable holy order behind the disarray of immanent existence; or by the vision of an ultimate, cosmic harmony. Based on the above exposition, one function of (almost) all religious systems in (almost) all human cultures was, and is, coping with existential fear. Religions in the plural are, among many other features, social and mental coping systems. That pivotal function is not restricted to cultures with a quasi-modern concept of individuality. Existential fear is more than fear for one’s personal life and happiness; evil is more than individual misfortune. Religiously motivated resistance against evil is more than an exaltation of basic “flight and fight” reactions. The resistance might be supported by “magical” means, by ancestoral spirits or tribal gods. But fighting evils is not necessarily seen as good in itself, even less as holy. Nonetheless, religions usually support the evasion of threats which can be evaded either by practical means, or by means moderns call “magical”. (We will come back to that difficult term in Chap. 14.) From a secular point of view, that support is seen as a coping strategy, basically as a traditional system of self-manipulation. But spiritually, there is more to religious coping strategies, for example to the traditional Navajo way. “The purpose of Navajo life is to maintain balance between the individual and the universe and to live in harmony with nature and the Creator. In order to achieve this goal, Navajos must perform their religious practices on the specific, time honored areas which they inhabit” (Metareligion 2019).

Traditionally, evils of existence are regarded as part of everyday life, including pain and death. But they are encompassed by a deeper and wider, cosmic harmony which can be achieved, or entered, by individuals and by society. Religious beliefs and practices refer to this sacred order for solace, healing and restoring peace. An impressive example is the elaborate song ceremonial complex called Enemy Way. The ritual protects against harmful influences of ghosts, which are left behind by death, and in general against the detrimental consequences of warfare, fighting and killing. The ceremony was performed in modern times for Navajo soldiers returning from active service in war zones. It lasts for days and is conducted by religious professionals. It includes singing, dancing, sandpainting, the reenactment of battle, and the recounting of narratives involving Monster Slayer, one of the mythical holy people. Usually relatives and friends take part in prayers, songs, and certain elements of the ceremony. In the end, the ritual will enable the afflicted warrior to leave evil experiences behind and relate to the universe again in a harmonious, balanced and beautiful way (Laubin and Laubin 1989, 423). In a somewhat daring thought experiment, we will contrast the traditional Navajo view, expressed in the ceremonial complex sketched above, with another religious strategy for coping with a supposed existential threat by enemies. The example is culturally worlds apart from the tribal ritual preserved by the Diné, the People. Geographically it is adjacent. In a sense, it is also an “enemy way” although of a very different kind: In 1922, Protestant evangelist T.T. Martin (1862–1939) from Mississippi (USA) published a book with the title “Hell and the High Schools”. The book was popular. Martin became one of the organizers of the politically influential Anti-Evolution

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League of America founded in 1924. During the infamous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee (1925) he was one of the main activists fighting for legislation against the teaching of biological evolution in schools. An excerpt from his book (p. 156): “What can be done? Where is our hope? The pussyfooting apologies for the Evolutionists will say ‘Don’t do anything drastic. Educate the people, and the thing will right itself.’ Educate the people? How can we, when Evolutionists have us by the throat? When they have, while we were asleep, captured our tax-supported schools from primary to University, and many of our denominational colleges? ‘The Philistines be upon thee Samson!’ But alas! We have been asleep upon the lap of this Delilah and have been shorn of our strength—they have captured our schools. But ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, strengthen me only this once, O God.’ ‘And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up.’ So could we …. And the strength of God who ‘created man in his own image’ will come into us, and we will slay these Philistines, the greatest curse that has come upon man since God created him in His own image. What is a war, what is an epidemic that sweeps people away by the hundred thousand, compared to this scourge that under the guise of ‘science,’ when it is not science, at all, is sweeping our sons and daughters away from God, away from God’s word, taking from them their Redeemer and Saviour, to spend eternity in hell?”

The voluble author does not fear evil ghosts, he evokes them verbally and practically. He is not interested in a balanced view of the cultural situation, certainly not in internal and external harmony. He incites his followers to turn into radicals. He equates secularists and evolutionists with satanic fiends. In the context of US politics during the first half of the twentieth century, Martin’s position nonetheless must be regarded as a religious one. And yet, seen before the wider horizon of human religiosity, the ravings of the anti-evolutionist hardly qualify as religious at all. Not a spark remains of the transcendent light which shows religious believers from all cultures and creeds that violence is per se an evil and defiles mankind, although fighting can be necessary, and enemies are always about. Defending the people is virtuous, and courage to do so is a good thing. But the harbingers of evil: ghosts and demons, wicked deeds and blatant lies, should be avoided if possible. In the Creationist pamphlet, evil stratagems are used to instigate hatred and fear. The polemics orbit around a solid lie: Martin’s Protestant fundamentalist understanding of scripture is proposed as the only safekeeping of faith. In fact, his twentieth century form of Biblicism is a modernist, not at all traditional, exegetic dogma which no other Christian denomination upholds. Martin knew that very well. He also knew, or could have known, of multiple examples to the contrary: from his nineteenth century compatriot and Presbyterian believer, Asa Gray, who was Charles Darwin’s friend, to the mediating teachings of many Protestant denominations. But realism was not intended. Superficially, the Anti-Evolution League fanatically fought for the salvation of souls. In fact, the objective was the safekeeping of an idealized way of life, of an established social order, which its advocates called “living by the Bible”. The core of this order is the social dominance of the white, Protestant and mainly rural middle class, which at Martin’s time was rapidly disintegrating due to urbanization and industrialization. A hundred years later, it has become apparent that the effects of the anti-­evolution stance of Protestant fundamentalists are catastrophic on the religious side. The

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spiritual attractiveness and religious credibility of the fundamentalist movement in the US has reached an historic low. On the other hand, the political and social impact has been, and still is, of high importance for US culture. The stirring book “Evolving in Monkey Town: How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask the questions” (Evans 2011) describes the religious life in Dayton, Tennessee, 80 years after the Scopes Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to the town. The main impression left behind by the book is that, at least partly, the Protestant culture in these milieus constitutes a fossilized remnant of the glorious time of war from three generations back. Museums and exhibitions which try to educate children and adults against the temptation of science are public manifestations of historic continuity. In fact, present-day Young Earth Creationism is even more hostile toward science than the anti-evolutionism from 100 years ago. Even today, the movement receives strong support from a large segment of the populace. If a mainly secular, zealous and unspiritual religious system loses its religious attraction in this way, how does it manage to keep socially and politically alive for a hundred years and more? A closer look at its social and inner-psychic functions may provide an answer and may throw a tentative light on possible evolutionary processes. The preliminary hypothesis is that, at least in modern religions, fanaticism reduces the complex religious performances dealing with existential fear to the primordial “flight and fight” pattern which underlies all basic coping strategies. What coping with danger, fear and hate can be like in a genuinely religious way is exemplified by the Navajo tradition discussed above. Innumerable, related examples could be added. The coping system’s transformation from such a religious to a basically unreligious (or better sub-religious) answer to danger and fear has been extensively studied by scholars from religious and social psychology, although not from this point of view. The following paragraphs will refer to some aspects of their work. To that purpose terminological clarifications become necessary. The typology described in the preceding chapter was developed from sources in Depth psychology and Psychoanalysis. Both disciplines are no longer important players in the social sciences. To avoid terminological misunderstandings, the concepts now mainly used as characterizations of zealous religious expressions will be correlated with the typology already presented: –– The technical term rigorism is related to the Latin word rigor, which means inflexibility, steeliness, harshness. In the social sciences, the term signifies that, in a group or community, an inflexible mode of thinking and acting is positively sanctioned. Rigorist norms require that community members adhere to fixed principles without considering other possible solutions and special situations. The pressure toward conformity is high, individual interpretations of religious norms get little room. For example, Wahabism (a strict version of Sunnite Islam) is usually regarded as a religious system which engenders rigorist social conditions. Individually, a rigorist group may cause fanaticism, or it may not. The adjective rigorous, however, is often used in a positive sense: It depicts the adher-

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ence to central values and goals, against distractions and against the softening of attitudes. The term dogmatism derives from the ancient Greek word dogma. It signifies an obligatory conclusion, a fixed result of thought, a tenet or an ordinance. In this general sense, all modern world views and all systems of thought develop dogmas, not only religious ones. For example, Einstein’s dogma denotes the physical theory that no particle can move faster than light. Intersubjective, universal truths which are turned into dogmas are a key feature of post-axial religions (see the preceding chapter). In social psychology, the word has a narrower meaning. There, dogmatism signifies a fixed and final system of assertions describing reality, which is normative for the community, and which cannot be questioned without risking exclusion. In this narrow sense, neither religious groups nor believing individuals need to develop dogmatism. The many-faceted term fundamentalism came into being by a theological monograph series which appeared in the USA from 1910 to 1915: The fundamentals— a testimony to the truth. The series became the intellectual basis for a movement with religious and political goals. Anti-evolutionism, which has been briefly addressed above, was one aspect of Protestant fundamentalism. Since about 1970, in the social sciences the concept has been expanded to include social or cultural movements which justify their political objectives by demanding that society returns to the alleged “fundament” of an authoritative religion or ideology. Usually it is a written fundament which can be used to develop rules for an approved way of life. Thus, fundamentalists fight against the supposed decline of their society’s religious basis which, in their view, constitutes the core of the respective religion. In colloquial language the term fundamentalism has become almost synonymous with fanaticism. In this broadened sense one can speak not only of Muslim fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism etc., but even of fundamentalist animal rights activists and so on. Consequently, the concept has become problematic for scientific purposes. It can no longer be used without explanations of what it, in the pertinent context, is supposed to signify, and what it does not signify. The term extremism derives from the Latin word extremus which corresponds to the expression “the outermost”. In the social sciences, the concept presupposes the existence of an array of political or religious positions which consists of a moderate center and radical wings. Positions which are far apart from the center are regarded as extremist, and usually are supposed to threaten the religious or political system. Extremism in this sense is not necessarily accompanied by individual fanaticism. There are other possible reasons a person or a group holds an extreme religious position. The term terrorism originally had a definite meaning in the social sciences. That meaning is now almost entirely lost by an inflationary use (and often misuse) in the service of political power interests. The term is derived from the Latin word terror, meaning fear and dread. Originally, terrorism signified attempts to force a religious or political message upon adversaries by arbitrary acts of violence. The personal positions or the involvement of the victims with the issues in ques-

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tion are immaterial to terrorists. They aim at maximal public attention, and at a maximal, destructive effect upon the adverse religious or political system. For terrorists (if the term still had a precise meaning) the acts of violence are symbols, they propagate a message. In this precise sense, terrorists who perform violent acts, and often sacrifice their own lives, are fanatics. The strategists of terrorism, however, are not necessarily motivated by a personal, fanatic attitude. According to the classical theory by Milton Rokeach from the 1960th period, dogmatism is characterized by what he calls a “closed” system of convictions, instead of an open one. A closed system resists new information and better insights. It incorporates them, if at all, singularly and with long delays. It also distorts and suppresses experiences which do not fit into the fixed set of convictions. Grom (1992) took up Rokeach’s theory of religious dogmatism and expanded it. He describes it as an attitude which comprises both a pattern of ideas (cognitive structure) and a pattern of specific emotions (affective structure). The dogmatist attitude is caused by an interaction of several personality traits which vary from person to person. Thus, dogmatism is an ideal-typical description of a diverse array of religious and sub-religious performances (Grom 1992, 383). Dogmatist believers habitually (and compulsively) overlook common features of their own convictions and those of differing creeds. Beliefs rejected by them are not perceived realistically, they are oversimplified and distorted. Advocates of such beliefs are treated with intolerant contempt. Disputes with dissidents pass off in a predictable manner and end without any convergence because the dogmatic side never diversifies its position. Evidently the 1960th were a productive period in religious psychology. Another classical theory was published by Lofland & Lofland and Stark (1965) concerning the causes of conversion to an extreme, deviant, religious position. Their analysis of a radical, millenarian group led them to propose a value-added model of conversion: Preconditions are “acutely felt tensions” which the person seeks to dissolve by religious means. By personal attachment to group members who advocate their deviant beliefs, and by subsequent neutralization of bonds outside the group, intensive interaction within the community follows. The result is an integration into the group and identification with its objectives. However, later research demonstrated that acute pressure to address personal problems is not an essential condition of conversion. Several reasons which cause emotional bonding with group representatives and intense participation in their activities may result in conversion. On the psychodynamic level, Milton Rokeach had already postulated a connection between inner-psychic anxiety and religious dogmatism. Subsequent research projects confirmed the correlation in principle. However, Grom (1992) explains by analyzing individual case histories that the exact nature of insecurity and anxiety which co-exist with dogmatism varies considerably. There is no single, identifiable personality constellation which produces dogmatism. Also, Rokeach’s conjecture that strength and sincerity of religious convictions are positively correlated with dogmatism could not be confirmed. For example, among active members of Pentecostal churches with similar theological and ethical convictions, the

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distribution of dogmatic and non-dogmatic attitudes was almost identical with the distribution in a random sample from the populace at large. The levels of anxiety detectable in both samples were also identical. (That is, of course, not the case for members of rigorist or extremist, Christian groups.) Several other research projects confirmed that the correlation between dogmatism (scaled according to Rokeach) and the strength of religious commitment is either weak or insignificant (Huber and Huber 2010, 139–140). The overall result of decades of research is that “values” added by entering a radical religious group are rather diverse. What could be called “spiritual values” are hardly ever mentioned, even less systematically considered. The benefits researchers detect—if there are any—are psychic stability, social security, orientation, material gains etc. The disregard for spiritual aspects is no doubt partly due to preconceptions of empirical psychological research. But it is also rooted in the phenomenology of dogmatic, deviant religion. It has been discussed in the previous chapter that “loss of transcendence” accompanies fanaticism. The results reported here verify again that religiosity as capacity, at least in our own time, is something distinct from religious systems with their various social and mental functions. If dogmatism, rigorism and extremism develop or not, depends upon the weight and necessity of these immanent religious functions, not upon the space religiosity and spirituality have in an individual or in a community. Thus, fundamentalist and rigorist communities can be socially vital. At the same time, they have at least the tendency to be decrepit forms of religiosity. The social and mental benefits of these communities immediately catch one’s eye: Like all forms of siege mentality, they stabilize an insecure, threatened personal or communal identity. They compensate for an excessive fear that their own beliefs and with them their own identity, could be devalued by internal laxness and external attacks. A sound identity, which is not threatened by unwarranted anxiety is not necessarily, as late-modern anthropologies seem to suggest, an identity developed towards maximal autonomy and emancipation. Other cultures, especially indigenous ones and so-called mythological cultures advocate less individualistic ways toward social acceptance and self-esteem. A similar point was already stressed in the previous chapter, so it may irritate critical readers that it has been taken up again. Why should the disregard for spiritual experiences and their loss qualify the results of empirical psychology as one-­ sided? Why should a fundamentalist religious system, like that of Protestant Creationism, be regarded as deficient because it appears comparatively unspiritual? Spiritual or not, it is an autopoietic, religious system with considerable historic stability. The insistence upon the spiritual perspective is due, from the standpoint of this book’s author, to the conviction that religion, certainly its evolution, cannot be understood if it is regarded solely, or mainly, as a social and mental coping system with immanent functions. In Chap. 4 it was argued that a hermeneutic approach to the phenomenology of religion is an indispensable dimension of the appendant methodology: Spiritual longings and experiences should be regarded as ever-­ present, dynamic aspects of religious evolution. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, in his unorthodox defense of orthodoxy, proposed more than a century ago that the best proof of health and practical vigor in a

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religious community is that it is orientated towards far-flung, fantastic ideals (Chesterton 1905). The desire to stand firm when the day of final divine judgment arrives, the desire to reach the Heavenly Jerusalem at the end of life’s pilgrimage, the desire to fight at the side of the gods in the last, losing battle against chaos, he contends, is a sign of religious health and strength. The desire to guard effectively against laxity, heresy and disorder is a sign of weakness, even of disease. In the exuberance of youth, he states, we try to get the stars down from the sky. We do not care if the daring enterprise is safe and effective or not. Religious health is obsessed with goodness and holiness. Moralism, on the other hand, has a fixation about evils to contain and dangers to avoid. Indeed, rigorism and dogmatism are the religious expressions of modern-day, pessimistic moralism. The central certitude of dogmatic, extreme groups is the certain (and obligatory) perception of evils, not the perception of ideals. Chesterton continues: “Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns… But the monk meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may contemplate it to the neglect or exclusion of essential things… He may even go mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of insanity… I am not at this moment claiming for the devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that has no end” (Chesterton 1905, Chap. II). Chesterton overreaches. He is in the entertaining habit of doing so. Nonetheless, he observes religiosity through a sorely needed corrective lens which shows aspects many “psychologizing” and “sociologizing” views miss. Religion is immensely practical, but only while it is not intended, at least not intended mainly, as a practical coping system to deal with imminent threats and evils. If the latter is made its essential objective, it may be still practical, but in a costly and often oppressive form. Grom (1992) describes religious dogmatism as a frequent, but not necessary, element of religious communities, which he calls intensive groups. They are characterized by a commitment to religious observances and duties beyond what is regarded as sufficient and wholesome by the main tradition of the respective religion. An intensive group establishes stricter rules for everyday life, and aims at mediating more intensive spiritual experiences, than are usual policy. Intensive groups of this sort have established themselves, for example in Roman Catholicism as it is practiced world-wide and in Theravada Buddhism as it is practiced in Thai culture. By an analysis of respective cases, he concludes that many members of intensive religious groups, before they joined, had a history of social or mental problems, and had sought therapeutic and religious help (Grom 1992, 55ff.). He proposes a correlation between the radicalism of the group and its attractiveness for mentally and socially troubled persons, although that does not apply to all individual biographies.

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The intensive group is not necessarily dangerous for mentally unstable and socially marginalized persons. It can stabilize them and often does so. In fact, the consequences of rigorism and dogmatism are ambivalent. For example, chronic anxiety makes a dogmatist community attractive as a supposed safeguard. Yet the community may project an enemy stereotype which, in the long run, enhances anxiety. On the other hand, dogmatism can help to suppress symptoms of excessive anxiety by offering a mental and social refuge. The effects of a rigid, closed system of convictions are not all negative, they are often so for outsiders, but this is less often the case for insiders. Determined by situation and personality, the short- and long-term effects are highly diverse. Nonetheless, rigorism brought about by closed convictions can become costly. Pfeiffer (2000) calls it “ossified enthusiasm”: As soon as the enthusiasm of the founders fades away, which is inevitable, the intensive group tries to conserve its religious intensity (the group’s inspirational experiences, moral purity or special task) by rigid rules. Loss of charisma (Max Weber) is part of the history of every religious movement. Each intensive group, in time, must choose between a routinization of creed and practice, or pressure upon its members to replace religious enthusiasm by intense commitment. In the former case, experiences and tasks can be preserved in a less intensive form which is better adapted to everyday life. The spectrum of approved performances is widened. If the group rejects the principles of routinization, the remaining possibilities are schisms, dissolution, or a rigorism which replaces the enthusiasm which cannot be perpetuated by increased demands. Usually the result is a momentum towards dogmatism and fanaticism. Sometimes the development ends as a closed, fanatic religious system which outsiders call a cult. An important, perhaps the decisive, condition for such a course is that a leader with a strong personality succeeds in implementing his or her fanatic belief system in the community. The community may commence as a committed, egalitarian group of enthusiasts. When years go by, certainly when the founder generation grows old, rigorist tendencies prevail, if they are not consciously contained. The history of the Plymouth Brethren (Darbyite movement) in the US exemplifies that a series of inner conflicts can be perpetuated for several generations, if a community is unwilling or unable to go without rigorism (Fig. 1). The so-called exclusive brethren (already the result of the movement’s first major segregation) demand a high degree of theological and ethical unity within their (usually small) communities. The internal conformity pressure is accordingly high. On the other hand, there are no formal procedures to discuss and settle differences. There are no decision-making channels, no authority structures and no culture of conflict and debate. Instead, the exclusive brethren adhere to the initially enthusiastic, but later rigorist, fiction that all brethren (not the sisters) have equal rights. The Holy Spirit, they believe, will lead their decisions in the right direction. The foreseeable result is an endless succession of conflicts which are only resolvable by segregation. Often, the defeated faction joins the Open Brethren, an alternative branch of the Darbyite movement which gains much of the membership that the exclusive branch loses (Coad 2001; Hemminger 2003; Introvigne 2018).

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Foundation in Dublin, Plymouth, Bristol 1848 Open brethren

Exclusive brethren

1866 Kelly

Anti-Kelly 1881 Stuart

Lowe

1909

Grant 1884 - 1885

1890

Raven

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Fig. 1  Plymouth brethren: The diagram shows the first-generation segregations of the Darbyite movement (Plymouth brethren). The first three, major schisms occurred while the founder of the movement, John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was still alive. The fourth and fifth schisms occurred soon after his death. Since then the movement has experienced several additional segregations. (source: author)

Historically established traditions develop corrective features to integrate and (sometimes) domesticate enthusiastic groups. In these traditions, there is a religious office which claims an authority independent of spiritual experiences, even intensive ones. A religious movement may commit itself to serve the tribe, the state, the people, the culture or aggrieved, needy persons. In this case, the religious system remains embedded into wider social connections and cannot achieve the separation from society necessary for strict rigorism. What additional knowledge relating to the evolution of religion can possibly be acquired from the phenomenology of religious dogmatism and rigorism? For one thing, it is obvious that a community which develops from initial enthusiasm to either routinization or rigorism is only possible before the background of an

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“ordinary”, everyday religious system embedded in a complex, stratified, anonymous culture. “Intensive” religion needs moderate religion as a contrasting stereotype. Rigorism needs the negative foil of (from its perspective) deficient and decaying religion. Both are hardly imaginable as specific features of sub-groups within a tribal hunter-gatherer society, whose believers are connected by family and personal relations. A religious faction which claims to be more “intensive” than the rest of the tribe would fatally disrupt the social system. That does not exclude individual enthusiasm and religious intensity. In pre-modern cultures both are usually not connected with segregated groups, but with special roles and with certain periods of life. Often initiation rites which end childhood include isolation, meditation and a search for mystic experiences. There is no intention to repeat them later in life, except, perhaps as elements of rituals connected with subsequent biographical stages. Or the rituals accompany the cycle of the seasons and reappear in due course with the spiritual experiences they mediate. Altered states of consciousness may be part of “intense” religious episodes but are not sought outside their biographical and seasonal order. An elderly Hindu, after performing the duties culturally expected from him, after raising a family and taking care of their material well-being, may decide to retire into an ashram and spend his final years in poverty, meditation and prayer. He hopes to even out the way to an incarnation closer to moksa (mukti), to the final release of the spirit-soul (atman) from the endless cycle of death and rebirth, and from all suffering. In a complex culture like Hinduism, there are also religious professionals who dedicate their entire life to specific religious functions: priests, sadhus and many others. In a restricted form, tribal societies also know religious professionalism: Masters of rituals, shamans, medicine women etc. are specialists, although they form no distinct social class as in complex societies. So-called human eusociality is characterized by a high degree of intersubjectivity, which allows complex cooperation for planning and executing communal ventures. From the beginning, specializations increased the effectiveness of social enterprises considerably. They are neither biologically pre-ordained nor permanent but are acquired by a differentiation of individual learning histories and by traditional, biographical and seasonal structures and sequences of life. This social structure leads with a certain necessity to religious professionalism: Not all members of the tribe memorize the same stories and learn to perform the same rites. Some become specialists for healing, blessing, evoking and safeguarding, beside specialized flint knapping experts, arrow makers and basket weavers. A seasonal and biographical scaffolding for spiritual experiences and religious observances naturally emerges from the intersubjective arrangement and rearrangement of life which goes on all the time. People cannot agree about their religious system without the establishment of communicable ideas and practices. They do not have to disdain individual ways and perceptions. But intersubjective agreements provide a framework for their pursuit within a stable social system, which then follows its own evolutionary trajectory. One final consideration: The discussion of religious fanaticism, dogmatism, rigorism and “intensive groups”—all phenomena connected to extant, universal

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religions—poses a danger: Indigenous and, by inference, prehistoric religions appear in contrast human, relaxed and unfanatical. The specter evoked by enlightenment philosophy, the noble savage, rises only too easily from its shallow grave and haunts the scientific study of religion. A hermeneutic dimension of research offers one ready possibility to exorcise the specter: Prehistoric believers, at least back to their migration “out of Africa”, were people cognitively and emotionally much like us, presumably neither morally better nor worse within their intimate circle of connected and related persons. They were certainly culturally different. Religious means which dealt with existential fear, misfortunes and intra-group conflicts were part of their culture and therefore also different. Their coping strategies were probably far from noble, as the value systems of universal religions define the term. There are numerous rituals known from extant religions which seek out individuals (usually unpopular and somehow deviant persons) to blame for calamities. Even children become victims of witch hunts and are abandoned or killed. The realistic awareness that inside the clan, even inside the extended family, ill will is always at work is compensated by “magically” seeking out evildoers and dealing with them cruelly. Many rituals direct harmful magic against internal enemies, to take revenge, to remove obstacles from the path to success etc. Usually the outcome has little to do with justice, as post-axial religions understand the concept. Religiously motivated infanticide is a common phenomenon in traditional cultures. Not only somehow anomalous or deformed infants become victims; in many cases the victims are healthy, new-born girls. The birth of twins is regarded by many cultures as an evil omen: One twin (often the female with fraternal twins) is killed. There are also cultures which receive a twin birth as spiritual blessing. These religiously (or magically) motivated, often contradictory, customs have practical aspects. For example, the ability of mothers to breast-feed infants is limited. But many features are inexplicable from a utilitarian perspective. They result from a symbolic relationship to life’s occurrences. Some African cultures regard it as a sign that a child is a witch baby if the upper teeth appear first, not (as usual) the lower ones. The history of human sacrifice for the sake of religion is an endless one; it does not have to be discussed in detail. It suffices to point out that sacrifices were not always outsiders and enemies. Often insiders, children and grown-ups who belonged to the group, were regarded as especially potent offerings. These practices had a social function, perhaps even an adaptive value for the group under specific circumstances. But they also came with high costs to the community, and with much distress and suffering. In part I of this book it was argued from a methodological perspective that life-­ threatening, socially disruptive forms of extant religions almost certainly have as deep evolutionary roots as beneficial forms. Most retrospective, functional explanations of religious evolution stress the adaptive effects of the latter ones. But the cost of religious performances which served to contain internal fear and aggression cannot be left out of the picture, just as fanaticism cannot be subtracted from the phenomenology of modern religions. In the subsequent Chap. 14, this topic will be further pursued.

References

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References Chesterton, G. K. (1905). Heretics. London: John Lane/The Bodley Head. Oline. Retrieved May 23, 2020, from http://www.online-­literature.com/chesterton/heretics/. Coad, F. R. (2001). A history of the brethren movement: Its origins, its worldwide development and its significance for the present day. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing. Evans, R. H. (2011). Evolving in monkey town: How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask the questions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Grom, B. (1992). Religionspsychologie. München: Kösel. Hemminger, H. (2003). Grundwissen Religionspsychologie. Freiburg/Br.: Herder. Huber, S., & Huber, O. (2010). Psychology of religion. In A. Anderson, M. Begunder, A. Droogers, & C. van der Loon (Eds.), Studying global pentecostalism: Theories and methods (pp. 133–155). Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Introvigne, M. (2018). The Plymouth brethren. New York: Oxford University Press. Laubin, R., & Laubin, G. (1989). Indian dances of North America: Their importance to Indian life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Lofland, J., & Stark, R. (1965). Becoming a world-saver—A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective. American Sociological Review, 30, 862–875. Metareligion. (2019). Navajo religion. Retrieved November 11, 2019, from https://www.meta-­ religion.com/World_Religions/Ancient_religions/North_america/navajo_religion.htm. Pfeiffer, C. (2000). Quoted in Reinhard Gaede. Das religionskritische Erbe des religiösen Sozialismus. Christ und Sozialismus (CuS) 1/2000.

Magic, Religion and Evolutionary Ethics

The concluding discussion of the contributions of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) and  the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) will start from three basic insights already mentioned, and will take the surmises into account which follow from the analysis of fanatic, deviant forms of religion: –– The direct adaptive value, if there is one, of basic, hard-wired, genetically mediated modules is (for humans) vastly inferior to the adaptive value of the entire “modernized” behavioral system, including its higher cognitive levels. Knowledge available to individuals and groups through the architecture of symbols which represents reality in the cognitive space is an immensely potent instrument of adaptation via niche construction and environmental engineering. The positive and negative fitness effects of specific religious forms are thus “drowned out” by the overall adaptivity of behavioral modernity. Dialectic processes of religious evolution can be regarded insofar as internal systemic adaptations, as co-­adaptations with other elements, or as results of drift processes which are partly caused by goal-oriented and interest-driven decisions. –– The immense variability and richness of religious forms in history is probably an inevitable result of these complex, internal interactions. If the evolution of religion would have been driven by stringent fitness effects of specific religious performances, or if religion were a mere by-product of cognitive evolution, much less variability would have ensued. –– Genetically mediated, basic functions do not have to be dissolved in evolution to make room for higher cognitive processes. (As mentioned in Chap. 10, Arnold Gehlen was mistaken with regard to this matter.) As with the genome, the brain-­ controlled behavior system cannot be “closed for reconstruction” in evolution. There is nothing comparable to an occasional “software cleanup” in brain phylogeny. An evolutionary “system reset” is equally impossible. The brain evolves

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by entraining its entire history, is constrained by it, but also gains many developmental possibilities by internal adaptations and selections. –– A simple example, which is used by Cosmides & Tooby (1997): Primates have a hard-wired fear of snakes. It is evoked by plain stimuli like the legless body, the meandering movement, the hissing. The resulting avoidance behavior was certainly adaptive throughout primate evolution. The (in Gehlen’s words) instinct is still there in modern humans and has some effects. One is not at all adaptive: Snake phobia appears if something in the emotional development of a child between 2 and 3 years old goes wrong. But even while snakes are “instinctively” perceived as dangerous, on higher levels the cognitive space has room for the idea that there are harmless ones as well, and that snakes might be useful. Hunter-­ gatherers hunt all of them, some with impunity, other ones with prudence. Neolithic farmers learn which species can be held as pets to keep mice away from their grain depots etc. Both the avoidance and the use of snakes as resources become much more effective by means of cultural knowledge. Therefore even hard-wired reactions which have a high emotional relevance such as the reaction to snakes, the reaction to spiders and scorpions, the reaction to wolf-like dogs and the reaction to large cats, create at best a tendency of perception and a higher attention for emotionally “loaded” stimuli. –– Within the inner representation of the world by symbols, the presence of one category (either abstract or concrete) creates the perception of alternatives. There are poisonous and edible berries; there might be poisonous and harmless snakes. All of them might be edible (in fact they are). As soon as the concept of visibility is grasped, invisibility is thought of. Persons are (perhaps) intuitively regarded as active, but there might be impassive ones. By whatever means modules once inherited from the Hominidae are able to pre-structure perception on a basic cognitive level in modern Humans, they create alternatives on superordinate levels. It is probably an evolutionary adaptive pre-structure of cognition to think of correlated events as causally related (hyper causality detector, HCD). But that is not an automatism: Little children repeat actions endlessly just to distinguish between causal and arbitrary correlations. On higher levels, the concept of cause and effect implies the alternative concept of chance. The urge to order the world causally engenders religious concepts on higher levels of cognition which deal with the experience that this urge to order the world is never fully satisfied and that contingencies always remain. The development of unspiritual, partly dysfunctional forms of religion is possible, because cognitive functions can be constricted and disrupted by either inner-psychical or social needs. In which case, primeval modules of behavior control may become dominant, e.g. basic flight-­ and-­fight patterns. These three insights (or surmises) lead to the conclusion that an evolutionary perspective serves to explain, within or without the CSR framework, one significant fact pattern: The universal post axial religions discussed in Chap. 12 are characterized by the objectification of world views, by the moralizing of the sacred, and by the idea of a redemptive righteousness. At the same time, they always retain a folk

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religious and magical “underbelly”, which is in a strict sense inconsistent with their “higher” substance. The merging of philosophy and religion in the axial age left the mythological and magic layer of belief largely in place. Thus, the dogmatic teachings and philosophically deliberated beliefs of universal religions coexist with ideas and practices which are regarded by religious authorities as unenlightened or as superstitious. They are intimately interwoven with the religious system, although they are criticized and surmounted by its beliefs and rituals. The following argument will bypass the convoluted (and probably unanswerable) question if magical and religious forms and functions can be distinguished by diacritical definitions or not, and if the term superstition can be defined outside of the modern western world view. In any case, the transition between genuine religious rituals and “merely” magical ones, as well as the transition between religious and superstitious ideas, is so multifaceted and gradual that it is awkward to sort concrete examples into the two categories. To speak of an omnipresent magical aspect or dimension of religious systems and their performances is more appropriate. The aspect of religious systems moderns describe as magical subsists in the belief that a certain performance causes reliable, practical, immanent effects, although their mode of operation cannot be analyzed outside the framework of religious convictions. If these convictions are those of a folk religion, magical practices take them up and so-called superstitious ideas accompany them. But approved, pivotal cults of universal religions are not free from magical aspects. In general, the magical element of specific cultic acts and rituals is usually neither reduced to zero, nor dominates their performance. “Modular” cognitive functions may play at least an indirect role in this persistence of magical aspects within universal, postaxial religion: For to assume invisible agents behind inexplicable occurrences and calamities leads by a very natural conclusion to the further assumption that these agents might be acted upon, that something might be done to influence the otherworldly influencers. The assumption that there are eternal laws which rule the invisible world leads to the equally natural consequence that one has only to know these laws to exploit them and to manipulate supernatural forces. The high-brow philosophy of religion might say otherwise, approved rituals might interpret existence otherwise; but magic folk customs persist, nonetheless. Both relational and technical forms of magic are thus inherent in all traditional postaxial religions and are often hard to separate from “higher” religious performances. Seen in this light, CSR explanations might be able to make a contribution to the understanding of present-day, religious practices by indicating the role basic anxieties and needs retain in religion, as anywhere else in life (Fig. 1). There are magical systems inside and outside universal religions which claim a quasi-religious authority. Often, however, the belief in the efficiency of rituals performed to avoid evils, heal illness or bring good fortune is not of the kind claiming quasi-religious authority. “Magical” practices often transport little existential meaning. Folk superstition resides even further from belief in a full, religious sense. Most Thais are Theravada Buddhists. The noble eightfold path to enlightenment taught by the Buddha is inconsistent with fear of evil forces in the world or with the longing for earthly goods. Even the gods, if they exist, have nothing to do with the

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Fig. 1  Superstition: Hollowed-out stones on top of a Black forest mountain ridge are, according to a superstitious tale, connected with the malicious spirit of a long-dead ranger. In life, he kept the poor village people from supporting themselves by collecting wood, berries and pine resin in the forest. The tale says that foragers can avoid mishaps and increase their success by placing a few berries in the hollows as sacrifice to placate the restless, evil spirit. Belief or half-belief in such rituals coexists with “high” religious beliefs. Despite the fact that both attitudes are called “beliefs”, they differ psychologically and cognitively. (source: author)

crucial hope to leave the constantly turning wheel of existence (samsara) behind. Nonetheless, spirit houses with the function of protecting property or a public place have a long tradition in Thailand. Food and drink offerings are placed in the shrines. By means of free food and drink, friendly spirits are induced to congregate. Their presence keeps malign spirits at bay. Potentially troublesome entities are propitiated. Yet most Thais do not believe in the effectiveness of spirit protection in the same way they believe in the noble eightfold path. Magical or (in the eyes of a Theravada philosopher) ignorant practice has a place in the religious system to placate existential fear and lessen insecurity and anxiety for those believers who have not yet achieved the knowledge to deal otherwise with such afflictions. That achievement must perhaps wait for a future incarnation. An important aspect of magic in this sense is the satisfaction of being able to act even where no practical action of the usual kind is possible. Evolutionary ancient, cognitive modules have a part in producing, or coloring, these insecurities and fears. They motivate “magical” action, but they do not explain the evolution or persistence of religious beliefs proper. Often

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people participate in such rituals in the spirit of: Maybe it won’t really help. But it won’t do any harm either. The (from the perspective of universal religions) cruel and harmful superstitious religious ideas and practices discussed in the previous chapter are often depicted as a former, bygone stage of religious evolution. Indeed, modern-day religious fanaticism, although it may be more dangerous and destructive than cultic human sacrifices and witch hunts, is a different, entirely modern phenomenon. The hermeneutic approach, however, results in a more nuanced view: Magic in the practical sense explained above is as much an element of our own secular culture, as of earlier religious cultures. Confronted with difficulties and dangers, a secular, modern society reacts on two levels in the same way pre-modern, religious societies reacted: On the one hand, practical questions are asked and practical means are suggested on the basis of solid knowledge. Causes of a specific problem are identified, tried and tested contra-measures are implemented. But if the problem is frightening, longstanding and difficult to challenge, practicability is never enough. In addition, rituals are performed, which are meaningless outside the framework of widely approved public truths, of secular belief systems with quasi-religious features. While this passage is being written, there is much (wholly justified) concern about latent, and sometimes open, racism in developed western societies. Political and educational remedies are discussed, and many proposals are both reasonable and convincing. At the same time, the urge to act beyond the limits of what is practically possible creates something suspiciously like secular magic: The Op-Eds are full of suggestions regarding how best to introduce information about past racism into history courses and full of demands to look back on and reappraise, for example, the colonial history of Germany. While these demands are not outright irrational, the question regarding whether we know such enterprises really serve to dry up the deep, dark sources of racism in western culture is never posed. Furthermore, even if we did know that looking back at colonial history etc. would help to solve the problem of modern racism: the question of how we know this is also never asked. This is but one example of what has been called secular magic. Racism is a universal human phenomenon. The demands to mitigate its impact by education make immediate sense within the framework of a late modern, progressive world-­ view which includes the conviction that undeceiving on the cognitive level produces better behavior on the moral level, and that better education produces, step by step, better humans. However, at a basic level this conviction makes sense to modern western thinkers in the same way that human sacrifices made immediate sense within the framework of a late Neolithic, polytheistic worldview. The modern, secular view is less cruel, but hardly less magical. At the same time, mass media publish interview after interview with experts who point out that this or that phrasing in colloquial language or in literature, supports latent racism and should be erased. Well-loved children books of former generations must be re-edited to conform to the “clean language” norms of these experts. Again, not everything suggested in that way is useless. But the experts are modern, professional language architects. They believe in the power of the right wording as firmly as any hunter-gatherer shaman believes in the magical power of traditional

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incantations. In fact, much of what the experts utter are traditional incantations. On the other hand, we all know for certain that racism (and social invidiousness in general) is almost completely resistant to mere language clean-ups, were it even possible to purify language in the way the experts advise. As long as the belief systems which support racism are not changed—and they change usually by personal experience, not by more education and by correct word use—the evil will remain under new names. Many journalists who report pundit opinions to the public, and many readers who nod their heads, do so in a spirit not far removed from the common: Maybe it won’t really help. But it won’t do any harm either. The public is assured that something can be done, and that a majority wants something to be done. (To pursue that argument further would lead to the topic civil religion, a topic far removed from the purpose of this chapter.) All in all, religious and secular belief systems alike produce quasi-magical (one could even say superstitious) ideas and practices, which accompany rational actions based on the best available knowledge. As in the case of “high” religion and magic, the transition is gradual, useful factual knowledge and encompassing belief systems are closely intertwined. It is safe to suppose that in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society religion interacted with everyday life by providing meaning and practical support, as in our own culture. At the same time, religious ideas and practices went beyond empirical knowledge and practical effects. They “closed” the open horizon of existence against experiences beyond human command, against the contingencies of life and inexorable fate. If practical and rational action suffices, contingency is resolved. That is never completely possible, although in our own culture, educated people with high social status firmly belief the opposite. Early religions related to their culture basically in the same way modern religion and its secular substitutes now relate to our secular culture. Confident actions and established coping behavior, either of individuals or of groups, were in prehistory presumably as two-sided as they still are: They solve practical problems and stabilize the mental and social system, to different degrees and with different success. There is an important difference, however, between universal religions (including secular belief systems of modern, western societies) and indigenous religion: The latter cannot be separated in the same way as the former into “high” beliefs on the one hand, and magical or superstitious performances on the other hand, which are not positively sanctioned by religious dogmas and approved cultic acts. Evolutionary psychology, Theravada Buddhism and Anglicanism all have High Church fractions, because their societies comprise sub-groups or milieus with competing interests, and with different access to knowledge, social status and resources. The traditional Maori religion, the religious systems of Australian Aborigines and of Mbuti pygmies are not part of similarly stratified and diverse societies. In a traditional Navajo healing ritual, the healers rely on visions and personal powers. By their own immersion in the spirit world and in that of the patient, they facilitate the transfer of good power from the Holy People to the patient. Thus, the ritual restores balance and harmony, regardless of whether the illness disappears by medical standards or not. The label “magical” is useless for characterizing such a traditional healing ritual; equally useless is the denotation that the ritual is

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non-­magical. To call the ritual superstitious would be downright willful. Such distinctions just do not apply. They appear, if at all, on the final stages of religious evolution towards the post-axial, universal religions of anonymous, complex Neolithic societies. Religions which have not gone through that stage of evolution profess no universal abstract truths. Accordingly, they develop no contrasting religious forms to cope with contingency on the popular level of culture, although prehistoric religion almost certainly was equally enmeshed in the hunter-gatherer culture of Homo sapiens, or of earlier Homo clades. Straightforward effects of cognitive modules, if there were any, were practical elements of the religious system, but did not drive its evolution. The conclusion so far does not support “traditional” or “narrow” CSR explanations of religious evolution. It underlines the surmise that religion, and all hypothetical proto-religions, were always an integral part of the culturally upheld symbol system which provided both existential meaning and practical support for the people and society: magical (from a modern point of view), mythological, narrative etc. Early evolutionary stages of the religious system probably had a simpler structure on all its levels, But the system was always holistic or, as Gabora (2013) states: autopoietic. That argument points to an important consequence: The evolution of religion must have been co-adaptive not only with social and cognitive evolution, but with the evolution of human ethics. As has been discussed in Chap. 5, on the evolutionary path from the Hominidae to Homo sapiens the latter became a peculiar, eusocial primate, a super-cooperator, as Nowak & Highfield (2011) call him. Most great apes, and probably all hominin ancestors of Homo sapiens, live in social groups and cooperate. But only Homo sapiens is able (though not impelled as other eusocial animals) to act deliberately for the benefit of its community and to recruit others for the task. Much of the social behavior of Homo sapiens consists of intersubjective ideas and activities which rely upon deep-rooted emotional relations on the basic levels of behavior control, and upon ethical principles on the cultural level. It can be left open whether the cognitive and the social evolution of the Hominini were as closely aligned as the hypothesis of the social brain supposes. In any case, there must have been constant co-adaptation between evolving social and cognitive traits (see Chap. 10). Social evolution produced hard-wired behavior patterns (modules), which in turn supported the cultural evolution of an ethical value system. In this restricted sense one could say, as e.g., Mohr (2014) proposes, that moral universals are preset as inherited parameters in the genotype. Almost all human cultures agree broadly about moral universals, but not about practical details, nor about the cognitive justification of morals. Even within a culture, the difference between good and bad actions is not as clear as, for example, between the right and wrong use of language. Moral insecurity and moral dilemmas are omnipresent. Moral rules are not as quickly learned as language, and there seems to be no specific sensible phase for their acquisition. Ethical norms are transferred to the next generation by a longish process of culturally determined socialization. The universality of ethical intuitions is no contradiction, neither is the existence of heritable moral deficiencies (psychopathy, sociopathy). These are probably caused by psychological malfunctions obstructing basic relationship building. Thus,

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the intuitive, emotional motivation of altruism is lacking, and—a fact which should be carefully noted—care for others, mutual responsibility and trust become almost impossible. Basic modules do not turn insignificant on the level of conscious, intentional moral and religious acts. The latter are fueled by them and, without them, turn into superficial imitations. Ethical norms of human cultures are always connected with their religion, but in different ways. The forest god of the Mbuti is offended by evil deeds. The deities of the Navajo cosmos, on the other hand, are more impassive: “The traditional Navajo way contains no concept for religion as an activity which is separate from daily life … All living things—people, plants, animals, mountains, and the Earth itself— are relatives. Each being is infused with its own spirit, or ‘inner form’, which gives it life and purpose within an orderly and interconnected universe … The purpose of Navajo life is to maintain balance between the individual and the universe and to live in harmony with nature and the Creator. In order to achieve this goal, Navajos must perform their religious practices on the specific, time honored areas which they inhabit … Native Americans … assume the souls of the dead go to another part of the universe where they have a new existence carrying on everyday activities like they were still alive.” (Metareligion 2019). The Navajo gods can be ritually evoked to avoid and heal evil. But they do not actively support traditional ethics by punishing individual transgressions in this life or in the afterlife. According to Navajo beliefs, disharmonious deeds punish the transgressor and his or her relatives by their inevitable consequences. One may ask whether these consequences, from the point of view of the Mbuti or the Navajo, are naturally or supernaturally caused? To pose the question is to realize that it is meaningless outside the framework of secular western modernity. The distinction between natural and supernatural retribution depends upon a worldview which imagines that there is a natural reality where things “normally” interact according to so-called laws of nature, and a separate, supernatural reality (if it is admitted) with its own agents and forces. The two realities might interact, e.g., moderns might believe that the biblical God suspends the laws of nature to deal out supernatural punishment. But this interventionist concept is alien to almost all historic religions, including that of the biblical authors. Consequently, as soon as one steps outside the preconceptions of a secular, modern western worldview, affronts to the gods are inseparable from affronts to other humans. Not only the traditional Navajos, but all pre-modern cultures have “no concept for religion as an activity which is separate from daily life”. When “each being is infused with its own spirit… which gives it life and purpose within an orderly and interconnected universe”, to offend the gods or the eternal cosmic order is just another aspect of an offence against society. In this sense, every religion is concerned with morals, everyone stabilizes (and sometimes criticizes) society. The observation is relevant for the ongoing discussion of the role of “moralizing gods” or “big gods” (Norenzayan 2013) in the evolution of Neolithic religions. As Purzycki et al. (2016, 1) put it: “Cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards

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co-religionist strangers.” To function in this way, the sanctions must be calculably directed against the personal violator or the offending group. The meta-analysis of Hartberg, Cox & Villamayor-Tomas (2014) indeed suggests that belief in supernatural enforcement contributes (at least in some societies) to the maintenance of social peace and cooperation. (By the way: The so-called free-rider problem of sociobiology, the problem of how genetic dispositions supporting altruistic behavior could have a selective advantage, has been resolved by evolutionary biology. The solution has little relevance on the cultural level—see part II.) Whitehouse et al. (2019, 1) propose that “complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history” and that “the belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies”. (Recently, the paper from 2019 has been retracted and replaced by: Turchin, Whitehouse et  al. 2021).  To test their hypothesis, they quantitated the social complexity of extant and past cultures. The authors explain their respective method in some detail. For the purpose of the following argument, its validity will be presupposed. Then, their method depends upon a statistically suitable distinction between religions with moralizing gods who sanction transgressions against social norms by so-called supernatural punishment, and religions without such beliefs. During the evolution of Neolithic religions, the latter should have been regularly replaced by the former after social complexity increased. The authors do not propose that such beliefs emerged from cognitive evolution, they argue outside the CSR framework. The first example quoted by Whitehouse et  al. is Egypt around 2800 BCE. Obviously, if inherited moral dispositions are among the cognitive modules directing socialization towards an intersubjective (later towards a universal) ethic, they evolved long before the late Neolithic.  In the meantime, a significant dispute concerning the distinction between belief systems with and without “big gods” is going on between researchers affiliated to the Seshat database (Turchin, Whitehouse et al. 2021) and those affiliated to the Database of Religious History in Vancouver (DRH), who contest their results (Slingerland et al. 2021). At this pecarious state of the debate, it may be somewhat audacious to argue (at that, as a biologist) that a statistically usable distinction between the two categories becomes blurred, the more one sifts through concrete examples. Thus, even the biologist outside his habitual territory develops misgivings which move him towards a tentative agreement with the critics.  For once, Turchin, Whitehouse et al. (2021) mention no diacritic features or traits of historic religions which would allow one to apply the modern, secular distinction between supernatural and natural causes to cultures which have no such concepts. Is the tragic end of Oedipus, which he brought upon himself by killing his father and marrying his mother, a natural or a supernatural consequence of his actions? The question is unanswerable. The fate (wyrd) which directs the Nordic hero’s way is also part of a world order whose effects cannot be sorted into natural and supernatural ones. One could try to avoid the awkward, modernist categories by reformulating the crucial distinction: There are supposedly religions which comprise a) more and less pronounced beliefs in “morally concerned” spiritual agents or forces which threaten

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personalized retribution for individual and social transgressions and b) beliefs in morally impervious agents and forces, which do not (or rarely) punish individual and social transgressions. It turns out, however, that the reformulation does not really remove the problem. Affronts to the gods are supposed to cause retribution in all religions; at least the author of this book knows of no exception. That turns into a methodical problem because affronts to the gods and to fellow humans, affronts to nature spirits, to ancestor spirits etc., are inseparable outside the preconceptions of a secular, modern western worldview. Everywhere else religion is—as discussed in some length—part of the overall architecture of culture. Not only moral norms, but all its aspects are supported (and sometimes contested) by religious convictions: The stratification of society corresponds to the will of the gods, the power of the ruler is imparted by heaven, professional skills and social positions are owed to spiritual blessings. To offend the gods or the eternal order of heaven is just another aspect of an offence against “interpersonal social norms”, and vice versa. Does the oath-breaker sin against the gods or against his people? Most believers could not understand the distinction. Obligations to the gods and to fellow humans are two sides of one issue, at least outside the constitutional secularism and individualism of western modernity. As related to gods which are “knowledgeable and punitive,” one gains the impression that extant and historic religions, across a wide range of social organizations, believe in a diversity of relationships between evil and good human deeds, evil and good transcendent beings, cosmic law and eternal order. The earthly fortune and the afterlife may or may not depend upon individual acts; fate may ensnare gods and men without means of escape. Gods interact with human deeds in various ways, some more proactive, some more impassive, some eternally, some only temporally. There are the Roman hearth gods and the sun gods of northern nomads. There are Apollo, Athena and Zeus with their Erinyes, all different from the Zoroastrian judges of the netherworld, the Old Testament law giver, the eternal judge of Islam or from Hindu karma. There are numerous tribal religions with a sufficient complexity of beliefs to evolve without substantial revolution into the religion of a large, anonymous society. For them, “to foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers” might have become a more central, but not principally new, function of organized religion. To stabilize this pro-­social function by developing appropriate rituals and teachings may have been one among several driving forces which influenced the evolution of religions in the late Neolithic. Some examples: The post-axial religions from East Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism), Zoroastrianism and the Abrahamic religions, are all religions of complex societies. They state an ultimate, or transcendent, link between individual and collective transgressions (whether against the gods, the eternal light, the order of heaven or against social norms) and evil consequences. To comprise both into the category “religions with morally concerned supernatural agents”, Turchin, Whitehouse et al. (2021) differentiate between “broad supernatural punishment”, not dealt out by personal beings, and punishment by divine agents. An example of the first kind is karmic retribution in the next incarnation, a popular

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belief in Hinduism. Personal deities deal out punishment in Zoroastrianism. The best known “morally concerned” god is the unpaired god and creator of the Abrahamic religions. Yet somehow, every religion is concerned with morals, everyone stabilizes (and sometimes criticizes) society. It is plausible that complex Neolithic societies sometimes, or often, gave proportionally more weight to personalized divine retributions than simpler societies. Yet there are numerous tribal cultures beside the Mbuti which expect spirits or gods to punish individual evil deeds. The Myths Encyclopedia (2020) reports: “The struggle between good and evil colors Siberian mythology. The devil or chief evil spirit was named Erlik. He was sometimes said to have been a human who helped in the creation of the earth but then turned against Ulgen, the creator god. Erlik ruled the dead, and his evil spirits brought him the souls of sinners.” If this account is reliable, Siberian reindeer herders believed that sins against fellow humans (indistinguishable from sins against the creator) were punished in the afterlife. According to the Routledge dictionary of gods and goddesses, devils and demons (Lurker 2004), Pugu is the sun god of the Yukaghir (Northeast Siberia); the most important of their deities and those of related tribes. Like other solar gods, he watches over law and justice, is concerned with moral behavior and punishes evil deeds. Thus “moralizing gods” were in place in these tribal societies. Apparently, their role could have been extended to personally unknown society members by a simple generalization, and by rituals and teachings affirming it. In terms of “moralizing”, the step from such tribal beliefs towards the post-axial religions seems not too great. “The struggle between good and evil” appears as a basic, perhaps even as an evolutionary early feature of spiritual worldviews. On the other hand, there are examples of complex societies with rather impassive gods. The North Germanic mythology narrates that the evil deeds of men, in aggregation, will initiate the end of the world. But its gods are usually indifferent to individual morals, except perhaps to the keeping of a warrior code of bravery and trust, and to the adherence to sacred customs. The afterlife of those fallen in battle depends upon their warrior prowess, not on pro-social merits. Norsemen, major players in the world policy of their time and accomplished state founders, certainly had a complex society. It would be difficult to maintain however, that their religion, contrary to all appearances, emphasized the role of “moralizing gods”. That the Greek Olympian gods were (according to Greek mythology) anything but moral paragons, is widely known. Lesser divine beings were in various ways concerned with human morality; the Erinyes (later the Eumenides) revenged evil deeds, especially murder of close kin, false oaths and disregard of holy customs. Nemesis punished human hybris, and the Titan goddess Themis watched over the sacred laws. These personifications of the eternal cosmic order had considerable significance in Greek mythology. But dealing out “personalized” retributions for violations of “interpersonal social norms“in general seems not to have been their main concern. There was (in the original Greek mythology) no retribution or reward in an afterlife. Spirits in the realm of Hades were no longer truly alive, they were mere shadows. Later a belief in divine verdicts developed, by which most souls would become shadows without further needs, pains and joys, while some enjoyed

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eternal bliss in Elysion, and some (the worst sinners against the gods) would suffer in Tartaros. Even this later belief hardly threatens ordinary people with “personalized” consequences. Its prosocial effect might have been important, but indirect. Whitehouse et  al. state: “The standardization of beliefs and practices  …  and enforcement by religious authorities enabled the unification of large populations … establishing common identities across states and empires”. They continue that “doctrinal rituals standardized by routinization … or institutionalized policing significantly predate moralizing gods” (2019, 3). The second statement does not concur with the “descriptive knowledge” available to the author. However, the first assertion does not depend upon it. Religions, because they are interwoven with the cultural fabric, are organized according to the frames of reference of their respective societies and serve to maintain this frame. “The struggle between good and evil”, the primeval theme of religion, was inscribed into the cultures of complex societies, as into all other religious cultures. Religious beliefs, ethical norms and social means to sanction them co-adapted while culture evolved. Religion creates meaning because individual and collective existential experiences are integrated into a transcendent framework, and because the particular is thus connecting with the universal. From this perspective, all gods are moralizing. Harmony with the cosmic order always demands harmonious conduct and all offenses have dire consequences. This is especially the case in the Navajo cosmos perhaps even more so than in a religion which allows ritual compensation for antisocial behavior (especially for those in power). If the experience of transcendence really predated organized religion, the transcendent or spiritual interpretation of good and evil, of forces friendly and adverse to life, predated doctrinal moral rules. Therefore one might regard “moralizing gods” differently from Whitehouse et al., Norenzayan (2013) and others, without contradicting their empirical results: In the late Neolithic some religions, especially in complex societies and large-scale polities, developed towards individualization and universalization of beliefs. That development peaked in axial and post-axial religions by a merging of religion and philosophy. Combined with other elements, with the spiritual perception of good and evil, with social obligations connected to it, ethical norms became individual and universal. They were inherent in human religiosity from the beginning, as they are inherent in extant indigenous religions. But they became connected to individual and group identity in a different manner, and of course they were differently “organized”. That may have provided a competitive advantage to the respective polity, but the general development towards religious modernity was not driven by it. Whether this construct or perhaps another one fits with the facts will be shown by further research. Altogether the issue is not settled (Oviedo 2016). To delve further into the ongoing discussion, a detailed analysis of the published methods of categorizing social complexity, as well as  moralizing and non-moralizing gods would be needed. It is questionable if the results would promote an answer to the central question of this book: How did religiosity as a feature of Homo behavior evolve in the first place? We should go back to biology.

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References Cosmides, Leda & John Tooby. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: A primer. Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Santa Barbara. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://www.cep. ucsb.edu/primer.html. Gabora, L. (2013). An evolutionary framework for culture: Selectionism versus communal exchange. Physics of Life Reviews, 10(2), 117–145. Hartberg, Y., Cox, M., & Villamayor-Tomas, S. (2014). Supernatural monitoring and sanctioning in community-based resource management. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 6(2), 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2014.959547. Retrieved February 20, 2020. Lurker, M. (2004). The Routledge dictionary of gods and goddesses, devils and demons. New York: Routledge. Metareligion. (2019). Navajo religion. Retrieved November 11, 2019, from https://www.meta-­ religion.com/World_Religions/Ancient_religions/North_america/navajo_religion.htm. Mohr, H. (2014). Evolutionäre Ethik. Wiesbaden: Springer Spektrum. Myths Encyclopedia. (2020). Siberian mythology. Retrieved June 20, 2020, from http://www. mythencyclopedia.com/Sa-­Sp/Siberian-­Mythology.html. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.. Nowak, M., & Highfield, R. (2011). SuperCooperators: Altruism, evolution, and why we need each other to succeed. New York: Simon & Schuster. Oviedo, L. (2016). Religious attitudes and prosocial behavior: A systematic review of published research. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 6, 169–184. Purzycki, B., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., McNamara, R., AiyanaWillard, D.  X., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2016). Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16980. Advance Online Publication. Retrieved February 20, 2020. Slingerland, E., Monroe, W., Sullivan, B., Walsh, R. F., Veidlinger, D., Noseworthy, W., Herriott, C., Raffield, B., Peterson, J. L., Rodríguez, G., Sonik, K., Green, W., Tappenden, F. S., Ashtari, A., Muthukrishna, M., Spicer, R. (2021). Historians respond to Whitehouse et  al. (2019): “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history”. Accepted 2021 for publication (un-edited preprint), Journal of Cognitive Historiography. https://eslingerland. sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/09/Historians-Respond-JCH.pdf. (retrieved May 15, 2021). Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., et  al. (2020). An introduction to Seshat: Global history databank. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 5(1–2), 115–123. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.39395. Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., Larson J., Hoyer, D., Nugent, S. E., Covey, R.A., Baines, J. Altaweel, M., Anderson, E., Bol, P. K., Brandl, E., Carballo, D., Feinman, G., Korotayev, A., Kradin, N., Levine, J., Nugent, S., Peregrine, P., Squitieri, A., Wallace, V., François, P. (2021). Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat databank. SocArXiv. doi:10.31235/osf.io/2v59j. (retrieved June 4, 2021). Whitehouse, H., François, P., Savage, P. E., Currie, T. E., Feeney, K. C., Cioni, E., Purcell, R., Ross, R. M., Larson, J., Baines, J., ter Haar, B., Covey, A., & Turchin, P. (2019). Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Research Letter. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41586-­019-­1043-­4. Retrieved November 19, 2019, from www.nature.com/nature.

Part V

Modeling the Evolutionary Path to Culture and Religion

Multi-Level Models of Religious Evolution

From a scientific perspective, the evolution of religion is an integral part of the overall evolution of the complex, multi-level behavioral system of Homo sapiens. It includes physiological features, neurobiological and cognitive features, individual affective and social behavior patterns, the social structure of the species and a unique cultural superstructure. Needless to say, the system is reshaped not only by evolutionary adaptations of the genome, but by a feedback circle with the surrounding ecology (niche construction), and by extensive social learning. Therefore, the propagation of purpose-directed, goal-oriented changes plays a major role in its history. In addition, internal selection and co-adaptations of sub-systems are part of the system’s evolution. There are multitudes of upward and downward interactions between the system’s levels. As has been shown (Chap. 7) any evolutionary adaptation on any level might influence other levels strongly, moderately, adversely or not at all. Concepts of evolutionary biology like coevolution or co-adaptation are applicable as analogies to aspects of such interactions. But they are too general and too unspecific to have much descriptive and expository use. It is equally problematic to replace Darwinian analogies by Lamarckian ones (Wunn & Grojnowski 2016, 31–32, Gabora 2013, Table 2, Acerbi & Mesoudi 2015). Indeed, there are analogies to Lamarckism as well as to Darwinism in religious evolution; but they are neither closer ones, nor are they more suitable ones. Lamarckian heritability basically means the heritability of environmental modifications. Purpose-directed social innovations are therefore Lamarckian in a loose analogous sense. Turner et al. (2018) argue convincingly that any theory of religious evolution has to incorporate sociology. That means “to extend the conceptualization of selection to take account of teleological actors and systems that can create variants of sociocultural phenotypes and that, in turn, can engage in new forms of competition …” The selection pressures they describe prompt innovative and adaptive processes in religions which are goal orientated. The successful ones are purposefully installed by the social “super-organisms” (Turner et al. 2018, 12, Tables 2.3, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_15

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2.4). Such an extended concept of selection has little in common with the non-­ teleological, natural selection of evolutionary biology. It is not a Lamarckian process either. It is (in Charles Darwin’s terms) not even artificial selection. It is something different (Sterrett 2002). Hence the project of a unified science of cultural evolution which closely follows evolutionary biology should be abandoned. A theoretical synthesis between the biological perspective and that of the social sciences, including the humanities, will not parallel “the ongoing synthesis of biological knowledge that began in the twentieth century” (Brewer et al. 2017). It will not succeed by reconstructing the processes which adapt, change and expand the complex, multi-layered human behavioral system in biological terms, not even by allowing any number of Darwinian or Lamarckian analogies. New concepts are needed to model the processes which “emerge” from the system’s properties both within and from the competition between different systems. Or perhaps established concepts from the social sciences and humanities should be applied to these processes from an interdisciplinary perspective. In addition, there is a principal point to consider: Such complex systems, within each layer, develop characteristics which cannot be completely reduced to the characteristic of their parts. The principle is one of strong emergence. The principle is not self-evident, reductionist views abound in science. Here, space does not allow them to be criticized adequately. That is left to Drossel (2016), Deacon (2011), Gu et  al. (2009), Clayton (2005), Laughlin & Pines (2000). The principle of strong emergence predefines that phenomena and order principles on the upper levels of the system are as fundamental as those on the lower levels, they are irreducible. Therefore, Brown & Strawn (2016) argue for a nonreductive physicalism. From their point of view the term signifies “a minimalist philosophical statement about the fundamental physical nature of humankind but with the strong qualifier of having properties that are emergent and therefore not reducible to the properties of the elemental constituent parts.” Any attempt to explain religious evolution scientifically must assume that a reductionist model is impossible. Let us put that notion to the test by leaving for the moment the—immensely complex—processes aside which emerge from the system’s properties, including the multitude of internal interactions on all system levels. For a basic thought experiment, we will use a rough sketch of competing populations with different or equal cultures, and with different or equal genotypes. Is it possible, at least under these limiting conditions, to provide a reductionist model of evolutionary interactions between such populations? –– Two populations A and B exchange genetic information by out-breeding and religious ideas by mutual horizontal learning. The result is a genetic and cultural merging, with the long-term outcome depending upon a number of variables: the rates of genetic and cultural exchange, the relative fitness of competing genetic information, the relative “attractiveness” of competing religious traits, the influence of contingent drifts etc. It is obvious even on this level of simplified modeling that no single driving force will determine the evolutionary result. Except under very unrealistic conditions, neither “Darwinian” driving forces, nor

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straightforward teleological, or chaotic driving forces will dominate the outcome. Such multidimensional, dynamic interactions between differing populations probably formed the rule rather than the exception in religious evolution. Populations A and B are isolated genetically, but not culturally. That is not unrealistic, because genetic information is often transmitted at a much slower rate than cultural information. And there might be religious prohibitions against out-­ breeding, but not against learning something from the other group. Then A and B do not evolve genetically by the interaction, but one or both evolve regarding their religions. An example might be the conversion of Tibet by Buddhist missionaries about 800 AD, with a second wave around 1000 AD. The conversion was affected with little internal violence and with only a slight influx of north Indian people. A cultural example is the acquisition of European technology by Japan in the nineteenth century. The genetic separation was maintained by the Japanese and the intake of cultural information was carefully controlled. Japan changed dramatically on the cultural level, without a corresponding change of the Japanese gene pool. Such processes which led to cultural and individual, but not to biological, change must have played an important role in religious evolution. Populations A and B are isolated culturally, but not genetically. The condition is unrealistic, but the hypothetical result would be a genetic evolution of one or both populations without cultural or religious evolution. One partial example might be the augmentation of population losses by taking in captives from other tribes, as reported from the Iroquois in the eighteenth century. But the captives probably brought some religious information with them, although in general they were assimilated. A famous example was Mary Jemison, who was captured by the Iroquois when she was 12 years old. She did assimilate completely; however still remembered some things about her Christian up-bringing, including the Lord’s Prayer. She eventually (in old age) returned to Christianity, but otherwise remained an Iroquois, acting as a translator during the negotiations between the Iroquois and the Americans after the War of Independence. Two genetically indistinguishable populations may become separated by historical contingencies and develop different religions. If they compete again, and A reproduces more successfully than B, there is religious evolution, even to the extreme that the religion of A replaces that of B. But there is no genetic evolution. The case is also unrealistic. If A and B are genetically separated for some generations, at least slight genetic differences will arise. And religious competition without any exchange of beliefs is almost impossible. The gene-pools of A and B are different, but the cultural differences which give A the competitive edge over B are not genetically mediated. Because the selective feedback on the cultural level is much faster than on the genetic level, the feedback circles of genetic and cultural evolution are uncoupled. The genetic traits of A “drift” along with its cultural traits, to the extreme that they replace those of B, regardless of their biological fitness. (Instead of drift, one could speak of co-selection or linkage.) An example was the replacement of Australian Aborigines by Europeans because of their advanced technology and their differ-

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ent social organization, including their religion. These cultural differences, as far as we know, express no genetic differences. Native Australians are genetically as able to make and use European weapons as the Europeans themselves and they are able to adopt European social structures and religions. The genetic traits which underlie their specific phenotypic traits (hair, skin, metabolism etc.) supposedly had some fitness advantage in their native environment. Nonetheless, they “drifted” into near oblivion. (There was an important genetic advantage on the European side: the higher resistance against the diseases they brought with them. That complicates the picture.) Even such highly simplified examples illustrate that a number of causally and temporally quite different processes, operating on different levels of the behavioral and social system and interacting in various ways, must have been at work during the evolution of religion. To model such an evolutionary history, one has to resort to multi-dimensional and multi-level constructs. An attractive phenomenological attempt is the so-called EECC model by Haidle et al. (2015) which traces the evolution and expansion of human cultural capacities. It has been discussed in chapter one that they discriminate between cultural capacities and performances. An example of the first is the theoretical concept of the social mind, an example for the second is the existence of stable, complex societies with anonymous membership. The authors propose a comprehensive three-dimensional description of cultural evolution which includes an evolutionary-biological dimension as well as a historic-­ social dimension and an ontogenetic-individual dimension of change. According to the authors, it encompasses dual-inheritance theories as well as the idea of gene-­ culture coevolution (see Chap. 7). It also encompasses theories which emphasize the role of neurobiological capacities and adaptive cognitive mechanisms in cultural evolution, as well as the complex population dynamics of cultural systems. Epigenetic processes, if they influence long-term evolution at all, would be part of the ontogenetic-individual evolutionary dimension. Last but not least, the “interaction of environmental factors and cultural performances in the construction of niches/specific functional environments” (2015, 60) can be depicted in the three-­ dimensional space of the model: –– “The evolutionary-biological dimension affects the basic course of life history, the physiological-cognitive potential to perceive, create, learn and remember cultural traits, and the ways in which they can be expressed” (2015, 47). Adaptive evolution along this dimension means adaptation of the species, or at least of a sequestered breeding population. –– “The ontogenetic-individual dimension refers to individual agency and pertains to the potential and constraints of an individual…” (2015, 47). Adaptive evolution along this dimension means, depending on both cultural and biological developments, the adaptation of individuals. –– “Cultural performances … involve a historical-social dimension that represents historical and social cues opening potential scenarios or raising constraints”. “The characteristics of the historical-social dimension are influenced by factors that themselves are under the impact of historic-social variables like population

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density, communication systems, child-raising habits, teaching systems and systems of religious and political participation. This means that the historical-social dimension is self-enhancing…” (2015, 48). Adaptive evolution along this dimension means adaptation of societies to their environment and to their own characteristics. According to the authors, all three dimensions of the EECC model are multifactorial. Its axes provide no quantitative measurement of evolutionary progress but lead to more and more qualitative factors or potentials of biological, ontological and social evolution which open new possibilities for cultural performances. “They interact with one another directly or indirectly … in the context of a specific functional environment… or resource space, ecological niche…” (2015, 49). The model is designed as a descriptive theoretical construct, including a number of refinements which are well worth considering, but which are not discussed here for the sake of brevity. How the multiple factors represented by the three axes of the model interact causally is left open. Yet comprehensive, reductionist or biologistic explanations of evolutionary trajectories are excluded from the outset by the sheer complexity of theoretically possible, dynamic interdependencies between the three dimensions, and by the self-enhancing quality of the historic-social dimension, which has been amply discussed in parts III and IV of this book. On the basis of their three-dimensional description of cultural evolution, the authors suggest an eight-grade scheme of the expansion of cultural capacities (Fig.3; Tables 1 and 2). Each grade is characterized by the amount and type of socially transmitted information and by each grade’s possible expressions or performances. Great apes reach grade 4: For them, transgenerational transmission of goal-oriented behavioral units is possible, and simple tools emerge. Early Homo species show grade 5, late Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens demonstrate grade 6 capacities and performances. The grades 7 and 8 describe unique capacities of later Homo sapiens cultures. The authors use material expressions of cultural capacities as examples for the products on each level, from the simple tools of apes to our own complementary and notional tools (e.g., symbols, figurative art). Language as a non-material performance is not used to exemplify the eight-grade scheme; neither is religion. That may be the reason why the EECC model has been mostly ignored by scientists researching the evolution of religion. Nonetheless one might speculate how and where evolutionary processes toward human religiosity could be inscribed into its three-dimensional framework, and which grade of cultural expansion might be connected with the appearance of spirituality and religious intuitions. The EECC model, as it is exemplified in the paper, does not lend itself for such a use, because of the concentration upon material performances. The authors explain that “the problem-­ solution capacities identified in tool behavior represent a minimum cultural capacity available to perform different types of cultural behavior” (2015, 52). Somewhere along the historical-social axis of cultural expansion (interacting with individual and biological innovations) the semiotic system which encodes socially transmitted information reached the capacity needed to produce and understand language, and

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thus enhanced the minimum cultural capacity enormously. Perhaps the spiritual capacity for religion appeared at the same time. There are almost no paleontological, and only scarce paleogenetic, clues to correlate these and other non-material cultural expansions with the development of tool making. Comparative studies of humans and great apes yield little data. Thus the preliminary conclusion presented in Chaps. 8–10 cannot be refined at the moment: Language appeared at some time while behavioral modernity was on its way for at least 300,000  years from the late Homo erectus (Homo heidelbergensis) to early Homo sapiens, and perhaps to the classical Neanderthals. That would connect language at the earliest with grade 6 of cultural expansion in the EECC model: with the use of composite tools and the ability to socially transmit information about modules which can be differently combined for various functions. Probable candidates for language possession are grade 7 cultures which generate tools from complementary parts: bow and arrow, thread and needle. Supposedly “formal information about the comprehensive system is needed to understand how the different components can be used together” (2015, 58). That would be easily done by verbal information, even on a simpler semiotic level than extant human languages obtain. Whether complementary concepts were already accompanied by proto-religious intuitions and spiritual experiences or not, is impossible to decide. Grade 8 describes capacities close to, or identical with, our own. The EECC model calls them notional cultural capacities. According to the authors, notional concepts are mentally constructed and socially shared entities and relationships which are represented by symbols, by systems of ideas from religious beliefs to community regulations, by normative definitions (e.g., measurement of distance and time), and by virtual entities and functions (e.g., otherworldly beings). The socially transmitted information increases enormously in scope and function. Material and immaterial concepts can be manipulated within the inner, symbolic representation of the world, including the social world. They can be developed empirically by adapting to socially shared experience, and imaginatively by creating new patterns of ideas and actions without direct links to the physical world. It is significant that the authors use a number of examples from religion (2015, 59) to explain the nature of notional concepts; examples which appear nowhere else. The conclusion that religion appeared, at the latest, with notional cultural capacities seems attractive. There is no direct evidence for a notional culture before about 40,000 BCE, when figurative art appears. Deliberate decorations of material objects and of one’s own body do not prove symbolic thought, let alone religiosity, neither does the interment of the dead with grave goods. On the other hand, it is equally difficult to detect the absence of notional cultural capacities from the archaeological record, because of their virtual nature, and because their main initial impact was probably upon the inter-subjective “social mind”. Examples of this inter-­subjectivity include both the organization of the group and the ability of individuals to synchronize their ideas, to cooperate and to plan ahead. In the long run, this expansion of the social mind and—via the accumulation of symbolically encoded world knowledge—of the niche-construction effects of human behavior left clear paleontological traces, but perhaps not for tens of thousands of years. The question whether

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Homo sapiens was religious from the beginning in Africa (back 200,000 years and more) or became religious on the way to the hunter-gatherers of the Proto-­ Aurignacian cultures, cannot be answered with any resemblance of certitude. Hopefully further research will produce more detailed hypotheses describing the phylogenetic emergence of language and religion in the Homo line, starting from the EECC model or from a synthesis with other holistic and complex constructs of cultural evolution. We will have a look at some possibilities in the following and final chapter.

References Acerbi, A., & Mesoudi, A. (2015). If we are all cultural Darwinians—what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution. Biology and Philosophy, 30, 481–503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-­015-­9490-­2. Brewer, J., Gelfand, M., Jackson, J. C., MacDonald, I. F., Peregrine, P. N., Richerson, P. J., Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., & Wilson, D. S. (2017). Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution. Nature, Ecology & Evolution, 1, 0070. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-­017-­0070. Brown, W., & Strawn, B. D. (2016). Complex emergent developmental linguistic relational neurophysiologicalism. In A. Fuentes & A. Visala (Eds.), Verbs, bones and brains (pp. 123–139). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Clayton, P. (2005). Mind and emergence: From quantum to consciousness. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Deacon, T. (2011). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: Norton. Drossel, B. (2016). Komplexe Systeme, Emergenz und die Grenzen des Physikalismus. In U. Beuttler, M. Mühling, & M. Rothgangel (Eds.), Seelenphänomene (pp. 13–34). Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. Gabora, L. (2013). An evolutionary framework for culture: Selectionism versus communal exchange. Physics of Life Reviews, 10(2), 117–145. Gu, M., Weedbrook, C., Perales, A., & Nielsen, M. A. (2009). More really is different. Physica D, 238, 835–839. Haidle, M.  N., Bolus, M., Collard, M., Conard, N.  J., Garofoli, D., Lombard, M., Nowell, A., Tennie, C., & Whiten, A. (2015). The nature of culture: An eight-grade model for the evolution and expansion of cultural capacities in hominins and other animals. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 93, 43–70. https://doi.org/10.4436/jass.93011. Laughlin, R.  B., & Pines, D. (2000). The theory of everything. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(1), 28–31. Sterrett, S. (2002). Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection: How does it go? Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33, 1.151168. Turner, J. H., Maryanski, A., Petersen, A. K., & Geertz, A. W. (2018). The emergence and evolution of religion: By means of natural selection. New York: Routledge. Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2016). Ancestors, territoriality, and gods: A natural history of religion. Berlin: Springer.

Conclusion and Outlook

In the scientific study of religion, theoretical progress is not only possible, it is close at hand. The natural history of religion is only one aspect of the study, but an important one in light of the fact that science has to study religion as a “natural thing”, as part of the res naturalia. In this final chapter, the theoretical framework necessary for further studies will be considered. Within the CSR framework discussed in Chap. 11, Barrett (2004) commences his explanation of the prehistoric origin of religion with the question: “Why would anyone believe in god?” More than 2000 years before him, in Alexandria (Egypt), the unknown Jewish-Greek author (or authors) of the Book of Wisdom asked the same question in a somewhat different form: Why would anyone believe in the gods of polytheist religions and pray to idols? The book answers with a psychological and sociological surmise: “Once there was a father who was overwhelmed with grief at the untimely death of his child, so he made an image of that child who had been suddenly taken from him. He then honored a dead human being as a god and handed on secret rituals and ceremonies to those who were under his authority. Finally, it became law, and idols were being worshiped at the command of powerful rulers. When people lived too far away to honor a ruler in his presence but were eager to pay honor to this absent king, they would imagine what he must look like, and would then make a likeness of him… An artist might want to please some ruler, and so he would use his skill to make the likeness better looking than the actual person. Then people would be so attracted by the work of art that the one whom they had earlier honored now became the object of their worship” (Book of Wisdom 14, 15–21). It is hard to resist the temptation (The author of this book did not succeed.) to point out that this ancient “just so story” explains the origin of religion as adequately or inadequately as quite a number of modern counterparts. The main difference is that the antique scribe presupposed a static culture as the cradle of religion, with initial conditions similar to those he knew from his own time. He put his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Hemminger, Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion, New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion 10, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_16

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imaginative recount of the beginning of idolatry into this framework. Nowadays we correctly presuppose an evolutionary scenario, where religion originated within a developing cultural environment, and evolved with it. Consequently, we should not regress to quasi-static models which suppose a continuity of conditions and processes throughout cultural and religious evolution. Models which proceed from a continuity of simple, adaptive mental mechanisms which have been conserved since the Pleistocene, or from the continuity of simple causal interactions along biological lines, are clearly insufficient. However, science does not have to study the origin of religion within a reductionist methodological framework. There are possibilities for modeling complex, dynamic systems including their emergent high-level features. Without implementation of such models, there will be no real progress. The EECC model of cultural evolution discussed in the preceding chapter is, so far, a descriptive one. To model causal interactions within its three-dimensional space would demand a further—and highly challenging—step in theory construction, which so far has not been taken. For the time being, one can only hint at the type of research which might lead to an adequate causal construct. As mentioned in Chap. 2, the term culture (like religion and life) signifies a theoretical term which serves to comprehensively categorize a wide variety of behavioral performances. These behavioral performances encompass both forms of social behavior and the cultural norms which regulate them. The store of collective knowledge available in a society, including skills of all sorts, the beliefs and world views, art forms, laws and a joint language are elements of culture. Cultural contents are acquired by socialization, leading to an enculturation of individuals into their society. A clear boundary between cultural and non-cultural behavior patterns in the animal world is cumbersome to define. A cheetah cub has to learn hunting skills from its mother, or it will remain rather inept. Do cheetahs have a hunting culture? It is of little use to try a discriminative answer. The transition between social learning in general and enculturation is a gradual one (see Heyes 2020). Therefore, we will leave these terminological difficulties aside. Let us return to the first example from the preceding chapter of merging, genetically and culturally different populations: A and B merge by the exchange of genetic and cultural information. The result depends (at least) upon the prevalence of genetic and cultural alternatives, upon exchange rates, the relative fitness of alternative genetic information, and upon the relative “attractiveness” of cultural traits including “goal-oriented” decisions of social agents etc. Because the latter will not act in unison, the societies form a multi-agent-system. In addition, there are possible contingent drift effects and the influence of feedback from the environment (niche construction), which will almost certainly change the motives and decisions of the relevant agents several times. Thus, even this highly simplified sketch shows that religious evolution is an evolution of a multi-level complex adaptive system. Its elements are separately adaptive, although with widely different dynamics: Genetic information adapts usually (but not only) by Darwinian mechanisms. Individual and social behavior, the content of the cognitive space etc., adapt by means of a multitude of internal and external interactions. As a consequence of their synergy, the system as a whole constantly adapts and reproduces itself. Brown and

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Strawn (2016) point out that to model such a development one must refer to the theory of complex dynamic systems. They apply this conclusion to the highly interactive and functionally plastic nature of the human nervous system, but add that there is a wider usage: “When an aggregate of interactive agents (e.g., neurons, ants, groups of people) gets pushed far from equilibrium by environmental pressures, a complex dynamic system will often emerge as the aggregate organizes itself into patterns of interactivity. Such patterns are constituted by relational facilitation and constraint between elements such that they come to work together in a coherent or coordinated manner to create a larger-scale functional system that can adapt to the demands of the physical, social, or cultural environment in complex and subtle ways… when the probability of each element doing one thing or another is altered, constrained, and entrained by interactions with other elements, and the new properties emerge based on system organization.” The necessity of a theory of, more or less, that type to model cultural and religious evolution is obvious. It is equally obvious that the development of an appropriate model is a herculean, multidisciplinary task, far beyond the scope of this book, and of the capabilities of its author. Also, any future model must be testable: Some sort of critical evidence must be available to assess whether the model depicts actual evolutionary processes realistically. Often that is done by hindcasting, by applying the model to well documented, past processes. For historic religions and cultures, that might be feasible. However, the lack of empirical data from the archaeological and paleogenetic record will probably not be offset in the foreseeable future. Modeling the causal dynamics driving prehistoric cultural and religious evolution will remain speculative, even on an appropriate theoretical basis. But speculation based on sound theoretical grounds might be worthwhile. There is not much more that can be said at this point. Turning back to the course of arguments developed so far in this book, it is striking that the necessity of modeling the evolution of religion as the development of a complex, dynamic, adaptive system appears self-evident, once it is expressed at all. The many guesses and glimpses one meets in the scientific literature which hint at this or that aspect of religious evolution are not useless. They are, however, at best snapshots taken from a singular perspective, at a specific time and place, depicting a more or less isolated contiguity within a cataract of interwoven developments. What is presently known about them can be summarized in a few sentences: –– The evolution of human religiosity, as a possibility or capacity, depended upon the process of behavioral modernization on the way from the early hominins to Homo sapiens. Language and a reflective consciousness were imperative pre-­ adaptations. The mentalization of sociality allowed intersubjective understanding and cooperation and led to the uniquely human type of eusociality and to the ethical aspects of religion. The symbolic representation of general knowledge in the cognitive space was completed by a creative perception, or an imaginative vision, of the world as an entity, and of human existence as a meaningful voyage through life. Particular things and events were connected with universal laws and truths, illuminating each other through a heuristic circle. The meaning provided

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by universal truths was spiritual and religious throughout history and prehistory, barring the last few hundred years of our own western culture. –– The evolutionary dynamics from which behavioral modernity—and thus religiosity—emerged can be descriptively modeled as an array of multidimensional and multifactorial processes. The causal interactions governing the evolution of one dimension (biological, individual or historic) and of one factor (for example brain function, sociality or knowledge) do not as such explain the evolution of culture, and of religion, because a complex, dynamic system adapts as a whole by emerging, holistic properties. Because the evolution of religiosity was bound up with the overall adaptivity of this system, and with the cultural capacity it comprises, religion was from the beginning a multifaceted aspect of culture, not a separate behavioral phenomenon. The natural history of religion was an important strand in the rope of evolving culture. Its presence is empirically discernable in the traces of notional cultures left behind by Homo sapiens “out of Africa” and there are some hints that the strand reaches much farther back into human and hominin history. But its beginning is unknown. –– The sequence of innovations leading from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and to historic religions can only be sketched in a speculative manner. We do not know why, once the capacity was there, religion became a feature of every human culture. The question is awkward, because scientists are part of the believing human race, and every answer they attempt refers back to their own belief or unbelief. From a biological perspective, the religious human mind is also the scientific mind, as far back as the Neolithic farmers who performed funeral rites in their neareastern houses, or the nomadic tribes which maintained the temple of Göbekli Tepe, and probably (although we cannot be quite certain) even going back to the big-game hunters who created the exquisite Paleolithic figurines and paintings. Nothing innovative happened to the human brain along the genetic evolutionary dimension within the last 20k years, probably not even within the last 70k years. Possibly Homo heidelbergensis was already well along the way towards behavioral modernity, although without having arrived at the state of full behavioral modernity. A personal remark might be allowable at this point: While working through (part of) the copious scientific literature dealing with the evolution of religion, it was a frequent source of astonishment to me that some—by no means all—sources refer to Paleolithic nomads and Neolithic city dwellers as if they were a species wholly different from the scientific authors. According to some authors, the worldview of the Paleolithic nomads and Neolithic city dwellers was restricted by the effects of natural selection, which forced the “fittest” option into their simple minds. They were sophisticated artists and craftsmen, but completely uncreative regarding their worldviews. Their quest for existential meaning was governed by primal cognitive modules, while the modern scientist’s mind is free from such deplorable restrictions and is able to find truth. That picture is completely unrealistic. Science used to treat extant “primitives” in the same way, but that has changed. We should grant our ancestors the same

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courtesy. Of course, the disparity between the traditional knowledge of Mesolithic nomads and western science makes a big difference. But it is probably not greater than that between the traditions of indigenous hunter-gatherers and the concepts of the ethnologists interviewing them. However, nagging questions remain: 40,000 years ago, artists created superb animal figurines from ivory in ice-age Europe and made music with bone flutes. Rock art in Southwestern Europe and Sulawesi appeared at the same time. Even earlier, rain forest dwellers in South Asia used sophisticated tool kits to make clothes and nets. They hunted with bow and arrow: a difficult to fabricate and to handle, composite weapon (Langley et  al. 2020). The oldest known arrowheads from South Africa date back at least 60,000 years. Then, 30,000 years ago in Southern Europe, cave walls were decorated with marvelous paintings of animals in a style, modern artists would be proud of. Body decorations and jewellery were as important to these people than they are today. All available data indicate that they were indeed much like us. Why, then, did it take much more than 30,000 years, 6–10 times longer than the entire span of written history, until the temple of Göbekli Tepe was erected in the Middle East, and agriculture replaced the age-old hunter-gatherer economy? What kept these ingenious people from material and social progress? There is indeed some progress of material culture from the Aurignac to the Mesolithic, but nothing comparable to the explosion of technical innovations during and after the Neolithic revolution. Bow and arrow replaced the atlatl and fishing gear became more sophisticated. In the Gravettian (30,000–25,000 years ago), pit-­ fired ceramic objects appear in the archeological record, pottery was invented. Another 20,000 years went by, however, until the potter’s wheel, a revolutionary innovation, was introduced by an already complex, Neolithic culture in Mesopotamia. In America, the Clovis culture fabricated beautiful spearheads similar to those of Solutrean Hunters in Europe. They were more elegant than those of their paleo Indian ancestors and demanded supreme stone knapping skill. But there is no indication at all that the social system of hunter-gatherers worldwide evolved during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. Why did the culture of Homo sapiens remain almost static for at least 80% of its history outside Africa and much longer in Africa itself? Which factors finally set the development towards settled, agricultural, polities in motion? Why (as far as we know) did this development occur independently in the Middle East, East Asia, Africa and, somewhat later, in the Americas? Must science look for initiating constellations of external, environmental factors? Or have we missed, perhaps, some crucial step of behavioral modernization which happened between 60,000 and 10,000 years ago, which moved the culture of Paleolithic artists, painters, hunters, weavers and fishers to a new level? If the latter were to be true, the evolution of religion would also have moved to a new level. But a what-if statement such as this leads nowhere, except perhaps to more retrospective hypotheses and more evolution stories. Instead, let us take a closer, but fictional look back into prehistory. A Magdalénian tribal elder explains the meaning of life to some youngsters. He tells them that the world in which they live is a mixture of order and chance, of predictable and unpredictable events. He emphasizes that it is the task of the mature

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hunter to find his path through a thicket of possibilities and difficulties. For that, the hunter has to learn as much as he can about the order of the world and how to deal with the unexpected. The task is similar, he explains, to choosing the toughest sapling for a good spear shaft, only that the tool is not made by hand, but by thought. One of the boys asks why the world is like that. The elder answers that the question “why” only applies to visible, knowable events and things, not to unknowable dreams, and not to the whole world. Idle delusions have no “why”, the world has no “why”. It simply is. It is open to the mind of the hunter, but also a mystery. “The spear is for killing”, asks another boy. “What is the purpose of thinking?” The question pleases the elder. “Look at the animals, our brothers and sisters. They fight to remain alive. They guard and feed their young that their clan continues living. The purpose of thinking is life. The purpose of living is life.” Then the elder explains the significance of the symbols the tribe’s men use to relate to their tasks. In another longhouse, a matriarch of the tribe explains to a group of girls that men know much about the ways of animals, rivers, clouds and winds, but little about the inner meaning of life. Being alive, she explains, means striving for warmth, comfort and safety, for the children, the adults and the old ones. “Our path through life is a circle”, she points out. “A mother eats and drinks and brings forth a child. We eat and drink and work, and in the end, we become food again.” The girls understand that this is why the dead are exposed to beasts and birds on hilltops. The matriarch tells them that, while a woman treads the circular path, she guards the fire, feeds the people and cares for the sick and the little ones. Within the circle, she says, there is warmth and comfort. “We go outside to maintain both warmth and comfort, but outside also lurks danger. Look at the animals, our brothers and sisters. They fight and feed their young. But when they can, they rest in the sun, they enjoy peace and beauty. The purpose of life is satisfaction, contentment, beauty and joy.” Then she explains the significance of the symbols, women use to express their obligations. The girls ask no questions like the headstrong boys. They memorize the words of the matriarch and will repeat them to their future daughters. The fantasy is easily spun out, and at first sight seems to be as probable as most stories from prehistory. At second sight, the scene is all but impossible. No indigenous hunter-gatherers we know of are naturalists. They are not hedonists either and have no agnostic attitude towards existential “why” questions. Probably there were no prehistoric agnostics, hedonists and naturalists, despite the almost unavoidable premise that the Magdalénian mind could have grasped these notions as easily as the well-to-do Greek citizens who (as far as we know) first entertained them in the axial age. We even intuit that we, living within a tribal society of big-game hunters instead in a secular, multi-religious culture, would never dismiss existential “why” questions. We would answer them with sacred stories. Somehow, a non-religious worldview never fitted the existential experience of our ancestors. A sense of transcendence dominated their interpretation of life and the world. The perception of the whole evoked a numinous experience of mixed fear and longing. Why? To go on, we have to disregard the background noise of single-­ line explanations, which have been discussed in this book in some length. They explain this or that feature of religious systems, but are unsuitable as answers to the large question: Why were there never any cultural alternatives to a religious world

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view, despite the obvious fact that the meaning of existence can, with the intellectual capacity of Homo sapiens, be explained otherwise? There is no clear answer, but there are possible approaches. To sketch them, the metaphysical abstinence advocated throughout this book will be dismissed for once. –– The naturalistic approach: Religion was the imaginatively and emotionally most satisfying answer to questions of meaning, not because of this or that functional advantage, and not because it was supported by basic cognitive structures, but because it corresponded best to the hopes and needs of our ancestors. Thus, it became universally embodied in prehistoric cultures, and evolved according to the conditions with which they had to deal. By adhering to knowledge beyond the everyday world, religion finally, in the age of science, became the framework for its own substitution by universal, empirical knowledge. Reason and experience based the answer to questions of meaning on solid scientific ground. –– The agnostic approach: Religion provided meaning for existence in a confusing, threatening and finally deadly world which no other metaphysical option could provide: by evoking an eternal order, by telling about a life beyond death and chaos, by consoling visions. Religions evolved together with the societies and cultures which held to their specific religious narratives. Finally, in the age of enlightenment and science, religion revealed its nature as a veil before the unknowable mystery of existence. It became impossible to overlook the fact, that with and without science, there are many thinkable and no provable meanings. Because no metaphysical answer is certain, all are futile. –– The spiritual approach: Religion provided meaning for existence, because it answered basic human needs and hopes. The answers were supported throughout prehistory and history by individual and collective experiences which enriched and expanded the spiritual perception of the world. At the same time, these individual and collective experiences provided the driving force behind the evolution of religions, while providing a framework for understanding the specific conditions the believing societies and cultures were obliged to deal with. Finally, in the axial age and in the age of science, religion was understood as one, but not the only, possibility to explain spiritual experiences and to interpret the world. Whatever approach one may prefer: There is no need for the naturalistic and the agnostic scientist to demean religiosity as a primitive or naïve existential vision, and our religious ancestors as incapable of creative, reasonable thought. We should regard them as people, not as subhumans with a roughcast mental hardware awaiting the emergence of enlightenment and science. And the believing scientist, in turn, has no need to demean those who embrace naturalism or agnosticism (or, even worse, another religion than his own) as stupid and obdurate. Naturalism is not more scientific than agnosticism and religiosity. Agnosticism is not more intellectually honest than naturalism and religion. Belief is not more profound than unbelief. Then, how does one choose between these approaches? It is doubtful if systematic thinking and rational inferences play much of a role in that choice. Unbelief and belief usually emerge from individual and collective history, from what one became, and what one is. As far as one can speak of a choice at all, it grows out of the will rather than out of reason and science. But that is the topic of a different book.

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References Barrett, J. (2004). Why would anyone believe in god? Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Brown, W., & Strawn, B. D. (2016). Complex emergent developmental linguistic relational neurophysiologicalism. In A. Fuentes & A. Visala (Eds.), Verbs, bones and brains (pp. 123–139). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Heyes, C. (2020). Culture. Current Biology Magazine, 30, R1246–R1250. Langley, M. C., Amano, N., Wedage, O., Deraniyagala, S., Pathmalal, M. M., Perera, N., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M. D., & Roberts, P. (2020). Bows and arrows and complex symbolic displays 48,000 years ago in the South Asian tropics. Science Advances, 6(24), eaba3831. https://doi. org/10.1126/sciadv.aba3831.