0.10 Biology and personality  (Page 8/22)

Religion has been a profound influence throughout the history of the human species. It has been suggested that children naturally seek a divine explanation for the existence of a world they cannot comprehend (Kelemen, 2004). According to sociobiologist E. O. Wilson:

The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature…It is one of the universals of social behavior, taking recognizable form in every society from hunter-gatherer band to socialist republics…At Shanidar, Iraq, sixty thousand years ago, Neanderthal people decorated a grave with seven species of flowers having medicinal and economic value, perhaps to honor a shaman. Since that time, according to the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace, mankind has produced on the order of 100 thousand religions. (pg. 169; Wilson, 1978).

But what evolutionary advantage might religion serve? This question is difficult to answer, in part because religion appears to be unique to the human species. Many of the principles of sociobiology were determined by working with lower animals, especially the social insects. Without other species to use for comparison, it is not easy to understand our own species. According to Wilson, the best avenue for understanding the advantage conferred by religion to inclusive fitness is the ability to conform to the expectations of society. Humans seem to seek indoctrination. As we became more intelligent, more capable of making individual choices, perhaps we evolved the behavioral predispositions necessary to continue remaining within our tribe. As a result, the rules and rituals that developed to codify this behavior enhance the survival of our group, and it is this group-selection that sociobiologists recognize as the evolutionary advantage resulting from religion (Boyd&Richerson, 1985; Wilson, 1975, 1978). This is not unlike the role ascribed to religion by Sigmund Freud, except that sociobiologists propose an underlying genetic basis, whereas Freud proposed an underlying psychodynamic basis.

One of the most common negative reactions to sociobiology is resistance to the idea that we are still animals being driven by our genes and evolution. The simple logic provided by sociobiologists, and the clear parallels between human behavior and the behavior of other animals is not enough to sway the minds of some people. Culture definitely plays a significant role in our lives, gene-culture co-evolution may underlie human cooperation and altruism (Henrich, et al., 2006), and separating genetics from culture on a topic such as mate selection is difficult (Buss, 2003; Miller, Putcha-Bhagavatula,&Pedersen, 2002). But is culture something different than evolution? Richard Dawkins, in his profound book The Selfish Gene (1976), has proposed that the human mind has evolved to a point where it can create self-replicating units of culture, which he called memes . Memes can be transmitted from person to person, and they can evolve faster than genes. Thus, human culture has been able to outpace genetic evolution, creating many of the challenges we face today when we try to separate culture from genetics in order to understand complex human behaviors. As examples, let us consider two potential memes: belief in God, and belief in life after death. As mentioned above, children appear to be inclined to believe in a supernatural creator of the world that they, as children, simply cannot understand. And religion is a cultural universal. Not every religion, however, believes in life after death, and even fewer believe in heaven or hell. So religion appears to be a very successful meme, whereas belief in life after death is somewhat less successful, but successful enough to still be prevalent. One of the most fascinating aspects of memes is that they may actually increase the likelihood that you can have a very long lasting effect on the world. As Dawkins points out, Queen Elizabeth II of England is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror, but the odds are very low that she has even a single gene descended from him. So, immortality cannot really be achieved through reproduction: