The Emergence of Religion & God as an Evolutionary Strategy
By: Zach Wolpe
Tags: Religion, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Complex Systems, Simulation

Evolution of Religion

Now that we have our evolutionary primer, we can apply this logic to the emergence & prosperity of religion. There’s something peculiar about human civilization: we’re just not built for the world we live in. Most of our evolutionary track occurred in a very different world than that which we currently occupy. Any number of the ills of modern society, from undue violence to chronic loneliness can — in one way or another — find origin or explanation in our evolutionary track. We’ll only focus on one element of this:

The Invention of the Stranger

150 & Me

For the majority of human history (hunter-gatherer societies), we lived in pretty small groups. Current estimates are around 150. At first, this might just sound like an arbitrary fact, but it carries a lot of weight. It’s known as Dunbar’s number & research suggests it’s the amount of social connection we can handle, given our brain size. By all evidence it appears, there’s a ratio between brain-sizes & group-sizes in primates (including humans), the number approximately 150.

The ratio of the size of the neocortex — the region of the brain associated with cognition & language — to the size of the body is linked to the size of social groups.

As a consequence 150 estimates how many social interactions we can handle.

150 → 10'000

Around 12'000 years ago, the human race went through a major transition. For exceedingly long periods the human race lived in hunter-gather-societies (80'000 years +), then about 12'000 years ago the Neolithic Revolution began & agriculture was invented. All of a sudden groups could take on specialized roles & survive in much larger numbers.

12 '000 years ago, human settlement groups exploded from around 150 people to anything up to 10'000 people. What else happened about 12'000 years ago? A major shift in religious beliefs & practices, moving towards what we know of modern relgions today.

The Invention of the Stranger

This explosion in numbers undoubtedly brought a whole myriad of contemporary issues. Although societies could become far more efficient through specialization, the human race — nor any other species — had ever lived in groups larger than they could cognitively manage: thus the invention of the stranger.

This breaks our wiring, we’re not built to handle casual strangers. Other people should either be in-tribe (who can be trusted) or out-tribe (who should probably be eliminated).

These ramifications are still omnipresent, some geneticists attribute our innate altruism to be a byproduct of this revolution. Selfish genes receive no benefit from altruistic behaviour. ‘Undue’ altruism could then possibly be a consequence of the ability to connect with arbitrary strangers, classifying them as one-of-us.

Of course, the negative ramifications are equally evident. Ever wonder why we’re able to walk past a homeless person & feel totally detected? Able to objective a person who is clearly suffering greatly? Again, a mechanism for handling strangers (this time, less noble).

Religious Law

When this Neolithic Revolution began, we needed new mechanisms to structure society. Consider the cascade of new challenges:

Who can you trust? When should we cooperate? How do hierarchies emerge & how/why do those of ‘lower rank’ accept their position? Does society have leadership/governance? Do individuals have a commonality in goals & life objectives?

The list is endless.

Though religion greatly predates this revolution, firmer, contemporary religious beliefs emerged as the mechanism to resolve these issues.

From a pragmatic view, consider how religion addresses these issues:

Provide a ground for trust/commonality. Create shared goals & objectives that create community & comradery. Provide a framework for law — religion was inseparable from law for most of its history — that all could appreciate as just. Provide an explanation of hierarchy, serving those in higher positions in society by keeping ‘lower rank’ individuals happy with their place in society, because this is all they should need by God's law. Provide a framework for common goals & working together. Setting a moral obligation. Create meaning in life that supersedes our current suffering — encourage self-sacrifice for the benefit of the group. And so much more.

It’s an endlessly interesting topic, but here are a few small examples of behaviour that highlights the benefits:

Fighting for nation & God are easily cast as noble, one should be happy to lay down their life (the ultimate selfish-gene sabotage) for the greater good. Undoubtedly a prerequisite for a powerful society.

Religion defines trust, which allows small communities to focus on productive outputs, allowing for great specialization & maximum productivity on behalf of the group. We also see this in modern society today: consider how small groups of a particular religion dominate certain sectors (finance/law etc) by giving each other business, lower rates etc.

Provided a greater divide with others: if we are of the same religion, we are ‘brothers’. That makes it so much easier to cast non-believers as inferior/unenlightened — now consider most modern war justifications?

Donations & helping others are often a core doctrine of religion — obviously promoting the prosperity of the group.

‘Serve your god & everything you ever want will return to you’ — chasing utopia, in another life, brings us sanity & peace with our own situations whilst requiring we sacrifice for a greater good — again promoting the collection group selection.

If we have this commonality, all other discrepancies are secondary.

Religion as law greatly serves those in power, increasing societal structure & obedience.

Now, this addresses the practicalities of theology, it doesn’t speak of its origin.

What if Religion & God are an emergent property of the evolutionary track of cognitively complex beings?

Religion as an Evolving Organism

Although providing a great organizational framework & although it may serve those who lead a society, religion was almost certainly not a top-down autocratic system — but rather emergent from the interactions of society.

Religion & God may be despotically gifted from one generation to another, however, it’s highly improbably that a central autority dictate much of it’s policy. Hypocrical as it may appear — as belief in a deity is defined as a top-down centralized system — Religion probably emergent through the interation of individuals in a bottom up fashion: emergent from interaction, convergent to an meta-stable state.

The reason we began with an evolutionary primer, is to apply this thinking to religion. It’s foolish to analyze anything statically, things only make sense in the context under which they originate — as a consequence, everything is only understood in contrast with its history, competitors, era & general environment. Evolutionary thinking is also in thinking about converging to an optimum, survival of the fitness (& broader selection mechanisms) are applicable to so much more than biology: trends, cultures, social norms, ideas, innovations & yes, religion.