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3
The Origin of Religion as a Small-Scale
Phenomenon
R. I. M. Dunbar
INTRODUCTION
Religion has continued to remain one of the more difficult phenomena to explain
in evolutionary terms, mainly because its ubiquitous association with conformism,
altruism and self-sacrifice make it look suspiciously like a candidate for
group selection. Since group selection (in the formal sense) is generally considered
anathema within evolutionary biology (for generally correct reasons1
),
most evolutionary scientists have preferred to leave the topic to social scientists
and instead assumed that its apparently maladapted features are by-products of
the proximate mechanisms that underpin other evolutionary processes.
However, the recent revival of interest in multilevel selection opens up
novel opportunities for understanding the evolutionary origins of religion
within the standard Darwinian framework. Multilevel selection (or grouplevel
selection, as opposed to group selection) recognizes that fitness benefits
can sometimes accrue to individuals through group-level effects, rather than
always being the direct product of the individual’s own actions. Most of these
cases involve cooperation in some form, with cooperative hunting perhaps
representing the best-studied case. In cooperative hunting, individuals can
bring down very much larger prey (e.g. buffalo) by acting together than any
one individual can manage when acting alone (where an animal the size of a
gazelle may be the effective limit) (Schaller 1968). As a result, each individual
benefits by a much larger per capita share of meat from the kill.
Evolutionary analyses of cooperation have invariably focussed on dyadic
relationships, and used a strictly economic perspective: individuals decide to
cooperate with those who consistently reciprocate and do not defect. Such
analyses presume that the benefits of cooperation derive directly from the two
individuals interacting with each other (e.g. by trading resources). In some
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cases, however, the benefit of cooperation may derive from the existence of the
group itself rather than the actions of any particular dyad within the group. An
obvious example is the use of group size as a defence against predators, as is
the case among primates (Dunbar 1988; Shultz et al. 2004; Dunbar and Shultz,
2007). This introduces a group-level process that requires the individual to
be sensitive to the needs of the other members of the group. In effect, the
relationships among the individuals involved amount to an implicit social
contract, and social contracts of this kind require individuals to bear costs in
terms of their immediate self-interest in order to gain disproportionately in
the long term through cooperation: I have to allow my collaborators a fair
share of the profits, otherwise they won’t cooperate with me. Social contracts
of this kind are particularly susceptible to freeriders who take the benefits of
the contract but avoid paying all the costs. Freeriders destabilize social contracts
and cause their breakdown (Enquist and Leimar 1993; Nettle and
Dunbar 1997; Dunbar 1999).
Primates represent a specific case of these group-level effects because they
form social groups that are essentially cooperative solutions to the problem of
predation. To maintain cohesion in such groups, primates seem to have
evolved an all but unique form of bonded sociality that allows groups to
maintain cohesion and co-action through time (Shultz and Dunbar, 2007,
2010; Dunbar and Shultz, 2010). It seems that, during the course of primate
evolution, there has been increasing pressure favoring the evolution of progressively
larger groups within certain lineages. This has inevitably introduced
strains that threaten to undermine social cohesion, and these thus require
neutralizing if each individual is to benefit from the advantages of group-level
cooperation (Dunbar 2010a). The evolution of unusually large communities
(by primate standards) during the course of later human evolution exacerbated
these effects. Exactly what the benefits of such large communities might
have been for our lineage remains unclear. However, competition between
(and raiding by) rival human groups and/or the opportunity to trade with
other communities are obvious possibilities (Alexander 1989; Dunbar 1996).
The substantive issue facing species in this respect is how to manage freeriders
who take the benefits of sociality but do not pay all the costs. Living in
groups incurs ecological costs that increase with the size of the group: these
include competition for food sources, harassment, increased day journey
lengths, and additional time budgeting costs (Dunbar et al. 2009). Freeriding
is disruptive because it loads the costs of the social contract onto some
individuals while others get away with paying significantly less. As a result,
those who have been exploited become less willing to support the social
contract. In the absence of sufficient benefit to outweigh these costs, individuals
will leave in order to be in smaller groups that incur fewer costs.
One way of ameliorating these costs is to detect and punish freeriders. There
has been considerable interest in cognitive mechanisms both for monitoring
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social contract infringements (e.g. Cosmides 1989; Cosmides and Tooby 1992;
Bateson et al. 2006) and for punishing offenders (Fehr and Gächter 2002; Fehr
and Rockenbach 2003), especially in humans. At one level, these provide
important mechanisms for discouraging freeriding. However, they inevitably
work most effectively when community size is small: the time and cognitive
costs of monitoring the behavior of very large numbers of individuals inevitably
becomes prohibitive, and the advantages of doing so rapidly cease to be
worthwhile (Sutcliffe et al. 2011). Enquist and Leimar (1993) used a modeling
approach to show that freeriders are more successful (and easily eliminate cooperators)
in large, dispersed populations where it is difficult to monitor the
behavior of freeriders.
A second problem is that everyday experience suggests that the threat of
punishment is most effective when the offender is a member of the punisher’s
immediate community: only if the punisher’s action is backed up by the
implicit threat of communal action does it pay the offender to accept being
sanctioned. Communities will typically only back up the punisher when they
know them personally (as has become painfully apparent in contemporary
urbanized society). When this is not the case, it always pays the offender to
challenge or ignore the punisher.2
This is one reason why legal restrictions on
behavior (e.g. prohibitions against poaching or breaking the speed limit) are so
often flouted. Even when the sanction for breaking the law is draconian, the
incentive to break the law will be high if the risk of being caught is low and the
benefit sufficiently worthwhile (the problem known in conservation biology
as the “Poacher’s Dilemma” (Milner-Gulland and Leader-Williams 1992;
Milner-Gulland 1993).
In fact, punishment is an inefficient mechanism for bonding large social
groups, because there will always be an incentive to circumvent the costs
imposed by the social contract. Psychologically, a more efficient mechanism
would be to persuade everyone to sign up voluntarily to the communal project:
individuals who are personally committed to the grand project will be more
likely to adhere to the rules that underpin it, and the need for punishment will
thus be redundant. This much is evidenced by the fact that, in an analysis of
nineteenth-century American utopian religious (but not secular) communes,
commune survival correlated with the number of things that individuals had
to give up in order to be part of the commune: the more costly the commitment,
the more willing aspirants were to stick with it (Sosis and Bressler 2003;
Sosis and Alcorta 2003).
In this chapter, I shall suggest that religion arose as a mechanism to
facilitate social cohesion in large communities in order to ensure that these
communities provided the ecological benefits they were intended to provide.
I shall argue that, precisely because religion evolved to bond very small scale
communities, therein lie some of the tensions that we find in contemporary
world religions.
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THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM
Primates bond their social groups through social grooming. Social grooming
triggers the release of endorphins (Keverne et al. 1989), one of whose consequences
is to create a psychopharmacological environment of trust that allows
individuals to form alliances (Dunbar 2010a). Neuroscientists often interpret
the function of endorphins as being reward (we keep grooming because we
enjoy it), and it is undoubtedly true that endorphin activation is rewarding
(they activate known reward centres in the brain such as the orbitofrontal
cortex). However, this is to miss the real function of endorphins as part of the
pain control system. It also fails to explain how we get from endorphins to
reliable alliances: pleasurable reward per se is not sufficient to make us behave
cooperatively—it is simply a recipe for encouraging us to seek out more
grooming. Instead, the role of endorphins in social bonding seems to derive
from the sense of relaxation and contentedness that their analgesic effects
produce, and this in turn seems to facilitate the development of a relationship
of trust between the groomer and the groomee (Dunbar 2010b; Machin and
Dunbar 2011). Because grooming is reciprocated on a relatively rapid cycle
(the typical duration of grooming bouts in monkeys is around five to six
minutes, after which groomer and groomee switch roles, sometimes repeatedly),
both parties experience a mutually reinforcing opiate effect.
The coalitions created by grooming buffer the individuals who engage in
these exchanges against the principal costs of group-living (notably the harassment
and small-scale disruptions to one’s routine that arise in crowded situations)
(Dunbar 2010a). By reducing the costs of group-living in this way, it is
possible for primates to maintain the cohesion of large social groups and defuse
forces that would otherwise inevitably result in the break-up and dispersal of
social groups. However, the effectiveness with which grooming works to bond
coalitions of this kind is ultimately limited both by the time available to invest
in such relationships and by the fact that grooming is a one-on-one activity. For
a relationship to work effectively, a minimum amount of time has to be devoted
to it (Seyfarth 1978; Sutcliffe et al. 2011). Since, in primates, the amount of time
spent grooming is a linear function of group size (Dunbar 1991; Lehmann et al.
2007), this ultimately imposes a limit on the size of groups that can be bonded
in this way. Data from wild primates suggest that there is an upper limit of
around 20 percent of total day time that can be devoted to social grooming in
the face of other pressing ecological demands on animals’ time (Dunbar 1991),
and this places an upper limit on group size at about fifty to seventy animals.
Given that modern humans have a natural social group size of 150
(Dunbar 1992; Hill and Dunbar 2003; Zhou et al. 2005), the problem for
hominins was the need to break through the grooming glass ceiling so as to
be able to increase community size beyond the limit that it set. Part of the
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reason for social grooming’s limitations in this respect is the fact that it is (and
still remains even for us) a one-on-one activity. Data on activity budgets from
a cross-cultural sample of contemporary human populations reveals that the
average amount of time devoted to social activity each day is almost exactly
20 per cent (Dunbar 1998), the upper limit observed in other primates. It
seems that we have not created additional social time, but instead have
somehow managed to use the available time more efficiently.
There are a number of behavioral mechanisms that seem to have allowed us
to break through this constraint on grooming time so as to allow social
community size to increase beyond the limit imposed by grooming. Among
the most important are laughter and music (Dunbar 2008). It turns out that
these have the same endorphin-producing effects as social grooming (Dunbar
et al. 2011, submitted). The key difference is that they can achieve this on a scale
larger than the dyad. Laughter is, in effect, a form of social chorusing which has
a very deep origin, reflecting the fact that it is a behavior we share with great
apes, especially chimpanzees (Provine 1996; Davilla Ross et al. 2009). In prelanguage
hominins, laughter probably had more the form of social chorusing,
perhaps similar to the kinds of chorusing seen in gelada baboons, a species of
monkey that lives in unusually large social groups (Dunbar in press).
Nonetheless, laughter is probably a relatively small-scale phenomenon—
much as chorusing is among the gelada. The contagiousness of relaxed social
laughter is dependent on close physical proximity between the stimulus (i.e.
the initiator of a bout of laughing) and the audience. Music allows a more
extended audience effect, enabling a one/many contagion through timed
synchrony among dancers (or singers) following a leader who sets the timing
of moves (either in dance itself or through instrumental music). This seems to
allow a radical widening of the social circle, enabling community cohesion to
be effected on a wider scale. However, even in this case the scale remains
modest, in that the dancers, singers, or musicians have to be able to see or hear
the leader who is setting the pace. Notoriously, very large orchestras are
difficult to coordinate, suggesting that there may be limits on the size of
group that even this form of bonding mechanism can be used for.
Both of these mechanisms exploit the fact that physical activity imposes
stress on the muscles, and this in turn triggers an endorphin response. In
effect, we have learned how to trigger endorphin activation by exploiting
behaviors that do not require direct physical contact. Removing the constraint
of physical proximity means that we can increase the size of the effective
broadcast group from the one–one of social grooming to a one–many scale. In
effect, by “grooming” with several individuals simultaneously, we increase the
amount of time spent grooming in a way that is directly proportional to the
number of individuals involved in the broadcast group. While it seems
intuitively obvious that both mechanisms have an upper limit on the size of
group they can bond, we have little idea where these limits actually lie.
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However, it seems plausible that this limit lies at groups in the tens rather than
hundreds (Dunbar in press). My claim here that religion—and, especially, the
rituals of religion—evolved because they allowed more individuals to take part
in activities that were effective at triggering endorphin activation. Many of the
rituals of religion (dancing, singing, adopting awkward postures for long
periods during prayer, the explicit infliction of pain through flagellation and
other practices) are extremely good activators of the endorphin system precisely
because they impose stress or pain on the body (Dunbar 2004).
ORIGINS OF RELIGION
The earliest forms of religion were shamanistic (Kellett 1962; Eliade 1964,
1978). These are small-scale, personalized forms of religion that are directly
experiential in nature (i.e. they typically involve “doing” something that is
experienced, usually associated with trance states triggered by dancing and
journeys in a spirit world), lack any formal theology (especially beliefs in gods
that have absolute power over the fate of men), and are mainly associated
with hunter-gatherer societies. Doctrinal, or world, religions are believed to
have emerged later. These typically involve the existence of one or more gods,
something more like a theology, formal ritual spaces (e.g. temples), ritual
specialists (e.g. priests), and an emphasis on ritual practices (Eliade 1978).
The role of shamanistic religions is well illustrated by the function of trancedance
in !Kung San hunter-gatherer society. Here, intensely rhythmic music
(chanting, clapping, drumming) is used to drive the dance, which normally
has its culmination in the dancers entering trance states. Trance states of this
kind form a regular part of religious practice in almost all small-scale societies
(Bourguignon 2004). In the trance state, the adept enters the spirit world
(typically through a narrow aperture or gateway, sometimes guarded by a
dangerous gatekeeper whose clutches have to be avoided) and undertakes a
journey through the spirit world, often accompanied by a guide (typically an
ancestor or a therianthropic animal guardian), one of whose responsibilities is
to ensure that the traveller can find the opening back to the physical world
again (Eliade 1964; Vitebsky 1995). Entry into the spirit world through trance
is generally considered risky, and is often associated with anxieties about not
being able to find the way back. Concerns about returning are probably
justified, since trance states can be so physiologically intense that there is a
real risk of collapse and death. These dangers, and the fact that one’s experiences
in the trance state can be very frightening, invariably require that
novices are trained and guided by an expert practitioner (a shaman).
However, the real issue is the functional consequences that trance dances
have for community cohesion. In San communities, trance dances are typically
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held at times when it is felt that community cohesion is deteriorating (Marshall
1999; Alan Barnard, personal communication). Similar observations
have been reported for the Aranta in Australia (Spencer and Gillen 1904).
The effect of holding a trance dance seems to be to restore social equilibrium.
With time, of course, the stresses and strains of social living inexorably lead
once more to a decline in cohesion, triggering the need for another trance
dance. The cycle length is commonly in the order of a month or more.
We know little about the physiological processes involved, although LewisWilliams
(2002) has discussed at some length the hallucinogenic-like aspects
of trance states. While these effects are undoubtedly real and important, the
substantive effect probably arises from the endorphin activation triggered by
the physical exertion of the dancing. In effect, it produces the same kind of
psychopharmacological state that grooming produces at the dyadic level, but it
does this on a larger scale that can involve many individuals. As a result, it has
the effect of generating in many individuals at the same time an enhanced
sense of bondedness and commitment to the larger community. In some
sense, this is a crude psychopharmacological fix and it seems to rely heavily
on the physicality of dancing and musical performance to produce the trance
effect (Rouget 1985). While the trance effect may simply be a secondary
consequence of the physical exertion of the dancing, it is possible that, like
epileptic fits, trance has the effect of “cleansing” the mind (by wiping the
memory banks) of the toxic memories of those social events (insults, petty
thefts, failures to adhere to social mores) that were originally responsible for
the deterioration in relationships within the community.
What seems to be crucial here is the ritualized activity involved in the dance.
The issue is not so much that you perform the actions, but that you perform
them together in time and in step. Using sweep-oar rowing crews, we have
been able to show that rowing on erg rowing machines in close coordination
in a virtual boat doubles the endorphin surge compared to performing the
same action alone, even when the power output was held constant (Cohen
et al. 2010). Furthermore, there is evidence that even simple synchronized
action (e.g. singing together or waving an arm in time) significantly enhances
prosocial behavior in groups (Wiltermuth and Heath 2009). It seems that
there is something about synchrony that ramps up endorphin activation,
producing the sense of uplift and social engagement that Durkheim (1915)
referred to as effervescence and Turner (1966) as communitas (see also Ehrenreich,
2006)—though we have no idea why this should be the case.
THE NEOLITHIC AND THE INVENTION OF RITUAL
The transition marked by the Neolithic is important in two key respects
besides the rise of agriculture. One is that it involves the first appearance of
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permanent settlements, and the second is the appearance of what seem to be
ritual spaces. This is not to say that hunter-gatherer societies do not have ritual
sites (obvious examples include Australian Aboriginal sacred sites), but these
sites tend to be natural places and do not normally involve built structures.
The Neolithic settlement, which begins from around 12,000 BP, is marked by a
rapid shift into permanent settlements. The earliest settlements, associated
with the short-lived Natufian culture in the Levant, were quite modest in size
(anything from half a dozen huts to villages of around 100–150 individuals).
That these settlements were permanent (or, at least, long lasting) is attested to
by the remains of stone mortars for grinding that are far too heavy to move.
While there is no evidence of formal ritual sites (sensu temples) at any of
these early sites, at later Anatolian sites such as Göbekli, Çayönü and Aşikh
Höyük (dating from around 9500–7700 BP) there are spaces that are thought to
have had ritual functions (Schmidt 2001; Hodder 2006). The presence of pit
burials (often under the living floors of dwellings) in many of these sites clearly
attests to a belief in an afterlife. Particularly poignant evidence of this is
provided by cases where human adults were buried with dogs (at Ain Mallaha
and Hayonim Terrace). These later sites are often significantly larger in size:
Çatalhöyük, for example, has been estimated to have had a population in the
order of 3000–8000 individuals over most of its 1,400-year history (Hodder
2006). Explicit evidence for just such a sequence has been documented in the
correlated rise of ritual, religion, and statehood in the Zapotec empire of the
Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico: this impressive 7,000-year archaeological
sequence begins with what appear to be dance floors at the campsites of huntergatherers
and ends with major temple structures designed on calendrical lines
that form the centerpiece for a substantial state (Marcus and Flannery 2004).
If this correlation between settlement, more doctrinal-like religions, religious
spaces and religious specialists (priests) holds, then it raises the question
as to why this apparent phase shift in mind-set and behavior came about. One
explanation identifies the associated agricultural revolution as the driver:
organized religion provided the calendrical coordination needed to manage
the annual planting and harvesting cycle (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003;
Garfinkel 2003). However, there is no plausible biological reason why people
have to coordinate their agricultural practices. Agriculture undoubtedly made
the growth of settlements possible, but it is a constraint rather than a cause of
settlement. More importantly, this view overlooks the substantial social
stresses that living in close proximity to others in large communities entails.
A more plausible view is thus that doctrinal religions (in effect, the world
religions as we currently have them) arose through the use of religion as a
mechanism for enforcing the social contract when population units greatly
exceeded those typical of hunter-gatherer societies (where more than fifty
people rarely live together for more than a few weeks)—in a context where
mutual defence/protection was the functional concern.
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Irrespective of why settlement first occurred, the fact of settlement would
have significantly increased the levels of social stress that Neolithic populations
experienced. In their prior state as hunter-gatherers living in classic fissionfusion
societies, they could alleviate the worst stresses of living together by
dispersing into smaller groupings. These stresses are already present (and their
fitness consequences well understood) in primate societies, and are largely a
function of group size (Bowman et al. 1978; Dunbar 1980). Hunter-gatherer
communities (which typically number around 150 in size) are commonly
divided into 3–4 overnight camp groups, each of around 30–50 individuals
and between which individuals and families move when minded to do so (e.g.
to avoid squabbles or difficult social situations). Once a community has moved
into a settlement and established permanent dwellings, this strategy is no
longer available. Instead, the stresses of group-living will inexorably build up.
Something is needed to make the population as a whole behave sufficiently
prosocially towards each other so as to avoid social breakdown, and religion is
probably by far the best candidate.
Since Neolithic farming communities invariably incurred significant costs
(their bones bear evidence of more nutritional stress than those of huntergatherers
in the same area in the period immediately preceding settlement:
Ulijaszek 1991), the most likely explanation for settlement was threat of violence
and raiding from neighbours (Keeley 1996; see also Johnson and Earle 2001;
Bowles 2009). Humans are relatively immune from the threat of conventional
predation by virtue of their body size (Dunbar et al. 2009), making protection
against rival communities oneof the fewbenefits to be gained by large community
size. This would explain the rather striking fact that many of the later Neolithic
settlements in the Levant, including Çatalhöyük, are often formed into selfcontained
compounds that do not have windows (or even, in many cases,
doors) on their exterior walls (Hodder 2006), a feature that might be considered
odd if its purpose is not defensive. Indeed, religious ritual plays an important role
in coordinating warfare in small-scale societies (Sosis et al. 2007; Johnson 2008).
More importantly, perhaps, it seems likely that the period preceding the
Neolithic was associated with a significant rise in population densities, at least
in the north-east corner of Africa. There is evidence from genetics that
population size for the mitochondrial DNA lineage that gave rise to the
modern Eurasian populations (the L3 haplogroup) underwent rapid and
steady population expansion from about 70,000 BP (Atkinson et al. 2009).
The L3 haplotype is thought to have arisen in Eastern Africa (where it is still
particularly common today), and led to widespread migrations into other
parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to Eurasia. Haplogroup L2 (the most
common sub-Saharan haplotype) is the only other African mtDNA haplotype
group to exhibit any evidence of population explosion, but it did not do so
until around 12–20,000 years ago, immediately prior to the first settlements.
These data suggest that there may have been population pressures during this
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period of just the kind required to trigger the need for defensive strategies.
Since the Levant is a bottleneck for any expansion out of Africa, this might
explain why settlements first appeared in this area.
If this scenario is correct, there would have been significant selection
pressure to maintain community size and coherence at its maximum, despite
the ecological and social costs incurred from living in close proximity. My
suggestion is that organized, doctrinal forms of religion arose as a mechanism
to reduce the social costs of freeriding by reducing individuals’ willingness to
behave selfishly, and that they did this by exploiting the endorphin-based
mechanism that, in conventional primate social grooming, creates a sense of
bondedness (and hence commitment) between grooming partners. While
grooming is an essentially dyadic activity, the rituals of religion allow many
individuals to take part at the same time. Indeed, potentially, the numbers of
individuals that can take part may be very large indeed (witness the Kaaba
ceremonies in Islam or papal masses in St Peter’s Square, Rome), providing
the activity is highly ritualized (and hence involves a great deal of synchronized
behavior). I return to this point below. First, let me comment on two
peculiarities of the doctrinal religions, both of which can be understood as a
consequence of settlement size. These are the appearance of a theology and the
relatively short ritual cycle that characterizes them.
The archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic settlements very quickly
expanded to include several thousand individuals. Hunter-gatherer trance
dances tend to be somewhat infrequent (once a month would probably be the
typical frequency) and rather irregular in temporal patterning, in part because
they are a response to the momentary level of social friction within the community.
If things are working well and everyone is getting along fine, then dances are
less necessary and less likely to be held; but if there is a lot of bickering and
relationships are repeatedly fractious, then dances may be held more often. In
contrast, doctrinal religions tend to have rituals that occur on a more regimented
and regular cycle, with something closer to a weekly cycle probably being typical
(e.g. the special weekly day of worship that characterizes the Abrahamic religions).
Increasing the frequency of rituals would be a natural response to the
greater stresses that large communities inevitably generate. In effect, the inoculation
against moral backsliding needs to be done more regularly because the
stresses build up faster and cannot be so easily dissipated by community fission.
There is some evidence suggesting a negative relationship between the frequency
and psychological intensity (especially dysphoric emotional arousal) of religious
rituals in traditional societies, and a negative relationship between dysphoria and
community size, agricultural intensity (itself probably correlated with community
size), and the presence of “high gods” (Atkinson and Whitehouse 2011).
More importantly, the association between ritual frequency and dysphoric
arousal is strongly dichotomized, suggesting a phase shift between two opposing
states (high arousal with low frequency vs low arousal with high frequency).
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The second issue arises from the fact that more regular ritual practice
demands discipline from the individuals involved. In other words, some
mechanism is needed to persuade people to turn up on a regular basis. This
is precisely the function of a formal theology: it provides a reason why
individuals should believe what they do and why they should take part in the
regular cycle of worship and ritual as laid down by these beliefs. The theology
itself is likely to reflect a combination of local cultural practices and those
aspects of the mind’s design that naturally predispose us to see the world in a
particular way. The most important of these last will be those predispositions
we have to believe in a spirit world (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002). These predispositions
are derivative of our mentalizing capacities and, in particular, the
higher order theory of mind competences (Kinderman et al. 1998; Stiller and
Dunbar 2007) that allow us to step back from the world as we experience it and
ask about the unseen world that might or might not lie behind it (Dunbar 2004,
2008). We can imagine that there is a spirit world that can influence our
physical world because our mentalizing competences allow us to step outside
ourselves to wonder whether and how the world could be different from the
way we directly experience it (Dunbar 2004). Our natural instinct to interpret
behavior intentionally sets us up to suppose that every physical event in the
world (the wind blowing, volcanoes erupting) reflects volitional behavior
(Dunbar 1996). In effect, these aspects of religion merely capitalize on natural
psychological predispositions: they do not in any sense require that the world
has to be this way, or tell us anything about the function(s) of religion as such.
This phase shift into doctrinal religions is associated with the appearance of
“high gods”. Roes and Raymond (2003) explicitly linked the appearance of
high gods (or as they termed them, “moralizing gods”) to society complexity,
in particular with the historical appearance of larger chiefdoms. In addition,
they were able to demonstrate a correlation between the frequency of internal
conflict and society complexity. In other words, high gods play an especially
important role in controlling freeriding through the threat of future punishment,
either in this life or the next. Known as the “fear of supernatural
punishment hypothesis” (or FSPH) (Johnson 2005), this suggestion has received
considerable support from a number of cross-cultural studies (Johnson
2005; Atkinson and Bourrat 2011; Bourrat et al. in press). Although such a
ploy ought to fall foul of the Poacher’s Dilemma (how seriously should you
take the uncertain threat of future punishment?), there is clearly something
about the spirit world that adds an extra layer of threat that we seem predisposed
to accept—either because this particular future is difficult to check
empirically or because omniscience is commonly assumed to be a trait of
members of the spirit world (Boyer 2001). However, we can only contemplate
this as a possibility because we can work with high orders of intentionality.
Without being able to aspire to fifth order intentionality (the typical limit
for most adult humans: Kinderman et al., 1998; Stiller and Dunbar 2007), we
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would not be able to conceive of a high god capable of making such demands
on us (Dunbar 2008).
WHY DO RELIGIONS FRAGMENT SO EASILY?
I have argued that the original function of religion is to bond large social
communities, and in some respects religions still retain that function. Yet,
religions seem to have an extraordinary capacity to fractionate into cults and
sects, which seems odd if their purpose is to bond large communities. There is
no world religion that has not undergone a continuous process of fragmentation
into cults since its founding. Indeed, in many cases the first split typically occurs
quite soon after the founder’s death (famously so, of course, in the case of both
the Shia/Sunni split in Islam and the Theraveda/Mahayana split in Buddhism).
Even though the Coptic and Nestorian schisms in Christianity took four
centuries to come about and the Catholic/Orthodox schism took something
closer to 1,000 years, these major divisions in fact merely represent particularly
dramatic instances of sectarianism within mainstream Christianity. Indeed,
most major world religions began life as sects of another religion—Christianity
famously as a sect of Judaism and, according to some recent suggestions (Wade
2009), Islam as a sect of Nestorian (i.e. monophysite) Christianity. Even within
these grand divisions, there has been a constant succession of cults and sects
with every passing decade, almost all of them centred around charismatic
leaders (e.g. the many cults that emerged within Christianity during the early
Middle Ages: Cohn 1970). In this respect, religions parallel language, which
similarly fractionate into dialects (some of which eventually become separate
languages) on a scale of centuries rather than millennia.
In both cases, this seems rather odd. Language and religion share with each
other the fact that they are meant to coordinate behavior within a community.
Yet both exhibit the same tendency to fragment into mutually antagonistic
communities (or dialects). In effect, they exacerbate in-group/out-group effects,
reinforcing community boundaries and exaggerating xenophobia. I suggest that
both language (in the form of dialect) and religion (in the form of sects
subscribing to different worldviews and different ritual practices) are mechanisms
explicitly designed to reinforce in-group cohesion in the face of external
threats. As such, they evolved specifically to weld groups of 100–200 individuals
into tightly bonded, mutually supportive communities in the face of the threat of
attack by neighbors.
Interestingly, the threat need not be physical: there is now good evidence that
the problem may, in some cases at least, be the risk of acquiring dangerous
pathogens for which the community lacks natural immunity. Fincher and
Thornhill (2008a, b; Fincher et al. 2008; Thornhill et al. 2009) have shown,
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on a country by country basis, that the number of religions, the degree of
communalism versus individualism, the level of democritization, and the size
of language communities all correlate with the pathogen load experienced
(where parasite load was typically indexed by the summed prevalence levels
for seven major infectious diseases). They interpret this as reflecting the need to
create semi-isolated, self-contained communities that minimize inter-breeding
when parasite loads are high (as they are in the tropics compared to high
latitudes). These analyses suggest that communities are more inward-looking
and more xenophobic when the threat is highest. When the pressure is taken
off, as it is in the healthier climates at high latitudes, communities become less
self-protective, and so they begin to open up and become more liberal.
The issue here is the role of religion in creating a sense of belonging on a
very small scale, of membership of a mutual alliance against the world “out
there”. My contention is that, precisely because religion (or more correctly,
perhaps, religiosity) evolved to bond very small communities and to do this
through a more mystical, experiential form of religion (i.e. shamanic religions
that involve collective practice rather than theological reasoning), there is a
natural tendency for religions to fragment and recreate these small communities.
This much is evident even in the language of the Abrahamic religions
in particular, which tend to emphasize the close kinship of their members
through the use of terms like brother and sister, father and mother. This may
be why the major religions are so antagonistic towards mystical sects (Christians
against the Gnostics, Islam against the Sufis, mainstream Judaism against
the Kabbalah): mysticism threatens to undermine the authority of the hierarchy
and destabilize the rather fragile coherence of super-large communities
by encouraging a focus on individual charismatic leaders in small, mutually
antagonistic communities (Lewis 2003).
This perpetual tension between the need to ensure large-scale social cohesion
and our natural psychological predisposition to prefer small, intimate
religious settings creates a problem that, in many ways, has dogged the history
of most world religions. Most religious traditions seek to suppress this fragmentation.
Others, however, deliberately exploit it: the Hutterites and Amish,
for example, deliberately manage community (or parish) size to ensure that it
remains within the upper limit of 150 (Dunbar 2008). Hutterites are quite
explicit in this: they traditionally split their communities when they exceed
150 in size in order to obviate any need for hierarchies and laws, since these
are anathema to their more communalistic Anabaptist form of Christianity
(Mange and Mange 1980). Indeed, even within some mainstream branches of
Christianity, efforts have been made to tailor parishes to this same size in
order to facilitate a better sense of community: the Urban Church Project
(1974), for example, recommended a maximum size of around 200 for Anglican
parishes. Some additional evidence is offered by the fact that the nineteenth-century
American utopian communes discussed above typically have
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very small sizes at foundation, with a very obvious bimodal distribution that
has maxima at 50 and 150 individuals for secular vs religious communes,
respectively (Dunbar 2011).
CONCLUSIONS
I have argued that religion has its origins in a small-scale phenomenon, the
bonding of the very small communities typical of hunter-gatherer societies.
Although the psychological features that underpin religion in this form have
the capacity to be exploited so as to create much larger social groupings (i.e.
well beyond the 150), nonetheless these are by no means perfect exaptations
and there remains a tension between the natural small-scale processes and the
large-scale contexts to which they have historically been adapted. This endogenous
tendency to fractionate means that the larger (usually “doctrinal”)
religions are always fighting against themselves, creating a perpetual tussle
between theological discipline imposed from above and more mystical, charismatic
grass-roots movements that perpetually seek a more idiosyncratic
independence.
The origin of religion as a small-scale phenomenon may explain why
religions often become pathologically aggressive towards each other. Religiosity
involves a psychology that was designed to maximize in-group cohesion
at the expense of out-group relationships. In doing so, it created a powerful
xenophobic psychology that was well adapted for exploitation in large-scale
contexts. Religion in small-scale communities is based on face-to-face interaction
and personal knowledge, and these no doubt act as a natural break on
any tendencies to over-react towards others. In very large communities,
however, this break does not exist: we find ourselves among strangers. Religion
becomes one of the ethnic markers of community-membership, and especially
when local community size exceeds the 150 or so with which we have been
designed by evolution to cope.
NOTES
1. Although there continues to be considerable interest in the possibility of group
selection (e.g. Okasha 2003; Wilson and Wilson 2007), Maynard Smith’s (1964)
plea that we should not confuse matters by using the term “group selection” to refer
to something that can already be explained by standard Darwinian individual-level
selection remains vital, but is, regrettably, just as invariably ignored. Group selection
should properly be used to refer to an evolutionary process in which the unit of
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inheritance (and hence the level at which fitness is costed out) is the group, and not
the individual. Most discussions of “group selection” invariably either muddy the
waters on this or in reality refer to “group-level [i.e. multilevel] selection” (where
selective advantage arises at the level of the group, but the unit of inheritance at
which fitness is costed out remains the individual or gene as in the standard
Darwinian model) but fail to make this clear.
2. This is not necessarily the case in conventional economic experiments, where
strangers typically play against each other. However, these usually take place in
the somewhat artificial context of a laboratory where players are protected against
outright aggression by those they seek to punish.
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