gottfried-- social theories of religion final paper

5/18/14Emile Durkheim: Social Theories of Religion

An Evolutionary Biology Critique of the Sociology of Religion

By Jeremy Gottfried

In The Adapted mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture,

Cosmides, Barkow, and Tooby propose that along with any content-independent mechanisms our

psychological architecture may contain, it also contains content-specific mechanisms, some of

which are responsible for cultural and social phenomena in humans. Both content-independent

and content-specific mechanisms are adaptations which evolved to solve specific long-enduring

problems characteristic of our hunter-gatherer history. Therefore, in order to truly understand

human nature, we must understand the principles that govern evolution. The complex designs of

these evolved mechanisms are the main causal channels through which the natural sciences

connect with and shape the social sciences.

This way of thinking, which Cosmides, Barkow, and Tooby call the Integrated Causal

Model (ICM), differs significantly from the Standard Social Sciences Model (SSSM) for

studying human culture (See chapter 1 for full explanation of ICM). Traditionally, the

presumption has been that any content-rich social behavior in humans is determined exclusively

by preexisting social systems. According to Cosmides, Barkow, and Tooby, SSSM claims the

following about culture:

What is organized and contentful in the minds of individuals comes from culture and is

socially constructed. The evolved mechanisms of the human mind are themselves content

independent and content-free and, therefore whatever content exists in human minds

originally derives from the social or (sometimes) nonsocial environment (pg 32)

and


Evolved, “biological,” or “innate” aspects of of human behavior or psychological

organization are negligible, having been superseded by the capacity for culture. The

evolution of the capacity for culture has led to a flexibility in human behavior that belies

any significant “instinctual” or innate component (e.g., Geertz, 1973,; Montagu, 1968,

p.11; Sahlins, 1976a & b), which if it existed, would have to reveal itself as robotlike

rigid behavioral universals. To the extent that there may be any complex biological

textures to individual psychology, these are nevertheless organized and given form and

direction by culture and, hence, do not impart any substantial character or content to

culture. (pg. 32)

Under SSSM, culture is imprinted onto people by society, rather than the other way around.

Cosmides, Barkow, and Tooby believe that this way of thinking can mislead social scientists into

coming to faulty conclusions about the mechanisms behind human behavior. They hypothesize

that some regions of the brain evolved to carry out specific tasks in our hunter-gatherer past, and

the operation of these regions imparts evolutionarily patterned content onto modern human life

(pg. 49-50). The integration of the modern day environment and our evolutionary history leads to

the emergence of the cultures we see today.

For sociologists and biologists alike, religion, more than any social phenomenon,

separates humans from animals. The argument is that when it comes to religion, there is nothing

of the likes seen in animals, so we must look at humans alone to explain it, and often, this leads

to an SSSM type of explanation, i.e. any meaningful content in religion has been determined

exclusively by pre-existing social structures.


An SSSM explanation of religion might argue that because babies do not exhibit religious

behavior of any kind, it is safe to assume that the preexisting society imprints religion onto

people as they age. However, that explanation draws its concepts from an outmoded theory of

development. Nowadays, we know that “the fact that some aspect of adult mental organization is

absent at birth has no bearing on whether it is a part of our “evolved architecture,” and evolved

psychological mechanisms or modules could develop at any point in the life cycle” (pg. 33).

Furthermore, SSSM rests on a faulty analysis of nature-nurture issues. Phenotypes cannot be

partitioned dichotomously into genetically determined and environmentally determined traits.

Rather, content-rich behavior emerges from a complex integration process, where evolutionary

processes organize genes, developmental processes, and recurring features of developmental

environments into an evolved cognitive architecture. The cognitive architecture may respond to

different environments in unique ways, but each response has been guided by evolution.

The greatest fault in the argument that content in human minds originally derives from

the social or (sometimes) nonsocial environments is that it employs circular logic, i.e. it argues

that culture causes culture. Or, for the influence of nonsocial environments, the circular argument

would be that environment causes behavior, which then becomes a social environment, which

then causes behavior. This goes counter to all we know about evolutionary biology. Evolution

tells us that environments guide evolution, but evolution is ultimately random. The most

successful genotype in a pool of random variation will evolve. Which genotype is successful will

only be significantly affected by environmental conditions if those conditions stay consistent

over millions of years. From the evolutionary point of view, our cultural history is quite short

compared to our pre-culture hunter gatherer past. Evolution has not had enough time to respond

to the drastic changes in environment that have occurred over the last few thousand years.


Therefore, many of the behavioral patterns we see in humans today were probably originally

adaptations to hunter-gatherer conditions.

The SSSM claim that religion is distinctly human is particularly problematic. Even if

religion is distinctly human, its elements may not be. Once we break down religion into its

elements, it is clear that each element could have served a function sometime in our evolutionary

past. For example, what Durkheim calls religious effervescence could easily have functioned as a

social glue leading to greater cooperation in hunting groups. We also see parallels in other

animals. One example is with the totems that one sees in most religions. One function of totems

is to help humans distinguish between sacred and profane. Likewise, Chimpanzees distinguish

between social queues on the basis of differing signaling behavior. The mechanism for

Chimpanzee social queue distinction is for all intents and purposes dependent on symbols, much

in the same way that human totemic distinctions are dependent on symbols. Parr et al (2004)

found that Chimpanzee communication is highly contextual and often expresses internal

motivation rather than expressing features of the external environment.

For Durkheim, the father of the sociology of religion, the basic elements of religion could

be revealed to us by the most primitive religion, much like a needle in a haystack of complex

religion. Durkheim claimed that these basic elements of religion were totemism and the

distinction between the sacred and the profane (Chapter 4 and pg. 44). He tied these phenomena

together into one grand thesis— religion serves a social function, i.e. religion is an inherently

social phenomenon (pg. 9). The revelation that religion is inherently social represented a great

turning point in the sociological study of religion. For the first time, we knew that all religion

shares some basic elements, and that sociality is a defining factor when it comes to religion.


Today, it is generally agreed upon by sociologists that Durkheim was correct about his central

thesis. That is, all religion is inherently social.

At the same time, Durkheim’s adherence to SSSM logic in his explanation of the origin

of religion was flawed. He assumed that religious behavior resulted exclusively from the

influence of preexisting social structures. That basic premise led him to search for the most

primitive religion, since that religion, he assumed, would be closest to the original religion. In

the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where Durkheim presented his grand theory of religion,

he focused on Australian Aborigines, because he believed that Aborigines practiced the most

primitive religion at that time. However, he had no proof that the religion of the Aborigines came

anywhere close to resembling the original human religion. In fact, the first religious behavior

may have barely resembled the behavior of Aborigines.

One alternative scenario is that as one travels further and further back in time, religious

behavior gets gradually less complex over time, (rather than discretely less complex over time)

all the way down to the first ape ancestors of humans. Theoretically, our ape ancestors exhibited

basic symbol recognition and social foraging skills, which gradually evolved to the complex

religion we see today. With the same logic, we could even go down to the ancestor of all

mammals, vertebrates, and so on, and pinpoint behaviors that resemble religion.

The point of the matter is that we can speculate on what those more primitive forms of

religion were, but it is impossible to know for sure. Furthermore, religions may not always

progress from simple to complex over time. They could progress from complex to simple. So the

simplest religion today does not necessarily represent the most well-preserved. For example,


early religions in which many gods and idols were worshipped, were more complex in some

ways than the major monotheistic religions of today.

To truly understand how religions work, we should approach religion from the

perspective of the ICM. That is, we should incorporate into our explanation the fact that some

religious behavior is caused by content-specific psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve

specific issues frequently faced in our hunter-gatherer past. An ICM explanation can, in theory,

lead to the exact same conclusions that Durkheim arrived at, but with the important difference

that the logic leading to those conclusions would be grounded in scientific reasoning rather than

circular logic.

When Emile Durkheim wrote The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the biological

sciences and social sciences were considered to be separate sciences that explained separate

phenomena. In the century since then, many social scientists have incorporated the biological

sciences into their explanation of human social behavior, but most sociologists continue to

explain the origins of social behavior as a social phenomenon, rather than a biological

phenomenon. Even if they recognize Darwin’s theory of natural selection, they often conclude

that evolution separates animals from humans, rather than unites the two (See Wilson, 2002 or

Richerson and Boyd, 2006 for sociobiological theories that use SSSM logic).

For many sociologists, human society itself is the greatest indicator that the origins of

human and animal behavior should be studied separately. Even the simplest human societies are

far more complex than the most complex animal societies, which means that human society can

not possibly be explained by biology alone. For them, the complexity of human society arose out

of humans’ ability to generate culture and complex language. Both culture and language can


change over time, which means that human society progresses while animal societies continue to

act the same. Even Durkheim probably agreed that human culture evolves, in the sense that the

progression of culture over time results in more complex culture. From Durkheim’s point of

view, Christianity was probably more complex than Aboriginal religion because Christianity

emerged later on in human cultural history.

However, appeals to complexity do not help us explain human sociality. At some point,

to explain society, we need to reduce it down to its bare elements, and when we do that, we get

phenomena that can more easily be explained by evolutionary biology than cultural evolution.

That is, most elements of modern sociality probably evolved to solve an issue commonly faced

in our hunter gatherer past, or emerged as a byproduct of one of those evolved mechanisms. The

“cultural evolution” explanation perpetrated by Richerson and Boyd in their book Not By Genes

Alone fails to fully acknowledge biological evolution’s role in the generation of cultural content.

Additionally, the “cultural evolution” explanation represents a split in the sociobiology

community, between group selectionist and individual selectionist explanations of social

systems. For example, Richard Dawkins (1976) looked at bird alarm calls, which initially seem

to be altruistic behavior, and hypothesized that the behavior is, in fact, selfish (pg. 6). Alarm

calls give birds a personal advantage, because they either allow the bird to notify the predator

that they have spotted them and will be difficult to catch, they make other birds vulnerable by

drawing them out into the open, or they intimidate the predator by drawing a flock of angry

birds. The emergent behavior is a group behavior, but it is benefiting individuals. One could

interpret human totemism similarly. It is advantageous for each individual to have other

individuals invest resources and cooperation into the group, since any invested resources or

cooperative behavior could help improve any individual’s success. Individuals that had the


innate ability to encourage cooperative behavior through the use of totems were more successful

over time, so the brain developed a content-specific totem generating mechanism. The

mechanism causes individuals to associate group membership with a totemic symbol, and to use

that symbol to encourage the cooperation of other members. One example is the association of

the cross symbol to membership in the Christian church. Christians wear the cross to show other

members that they are committed Christians, and the cross unites Christians under the symbol of

Jesus Christ’s suffering.

On the other side of the argument, there are group selectionists, such as David Sloan

Wilson. In his book, Darwin’s Cathedral, Wilson argues that the evolution of religion has been

driven by competition between groups, and that the most successful religions were those that

generated the most successful groups. There was also competition between pre-religious human

groups, and the groups that evolved religious behavior survived more successfully than the

groups that did not evolve religious behavior. As religious behavior became more complex,

certain religions out-competed others depending on how successful the groups were.

In many ways, group selectionism is the equivalent of SSSM in evolutionary biology.

First and foremost, it follows a similar circular logic to SSSM, i.e. it argues that the existence of

groups causes the existence of groups. Competition between groups cannot explain where the

original group came from. Just like SSSM fails to explain the origins of culture, group

selectionism fails to explain the origins of groups. And both perspectives cannot explain the

origins of sociality. Since religion is an inherently social phenomenon, a perspective that cannot

explain sociality also cannot explain religion. An explanation of the evolution of sociality and

religion must be able to explain how a once solitary species developed into a social species. In

my opinion, individual selection, and perhaps, gene selection theories, are the only perspectives


currently available that can explain how a solitary species developed into a social species.

Durkheim and Wilson’s confusion is understandable because on the surface it appears that

culture is an entity independent of biology, as if groups are competing, but at an evolutionary

level, the individuals are benefiting, not the groups.

Thus, the origin of religion must be explained from an individual selectionist point of

view. Pre-existing religion may contain content, but that content has been shaped and limited by

our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers. The change in perspective I propose—for us to

explain religion using the principles of evolutionary biology-- represents a paradigm shift in the

sociological study of religion as we know it. Once we change to the Integrated Causal Model and

leave behind the Standard Social Science Model, we can finally be confident that Durkheim’s

thesis—religion is an eminently social thing—or any explanations of religious phenomena, are

based in reality. It is fundamentally important that we understand the substance of religion,

because once we do, we will reach a deeper understanding of our human selves.

References

Barkow, Jerome H., Cosmides, Leda.,Tooby, John. (1995). The adapted mind: evolutionary

psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, Richard. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, Emile. (1995). The elementary forms of the religious life. Transl. Karen E.

Fields. New York: Free Press. (originally published:1912).

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Montagu, Ashley. (1968). Man and aggression. New York: Oxford University Press.


Parr, L. A., Cohen, M., & de Waal, F. (2005). Influence of social context on the use of blended

and graded facial displays in chimpanzees. International Journal of Primatology, 26(1), 73-

103. doi:10.1007/s10764-005-0724-z

Richerson, Peter J.,Boyd, Robert. (2005). Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human

evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sahlins, M. (1982). The use and abuse of biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology.

London: Travistok.

Sahlins, M. (1976). Culture and practical reason. Chicago: Universtiy of Chicago Press.

Wilson, D. S.,. (2002). Darwin's cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I hereby affirm I have adhered to the honor code on this assignment

Signed: Jeremy Gottfried

gottfried-- social theories of religion final paper

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