Mick Hartley

Here’s the Economist, on the Explaining Religion project:

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual’s Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person’s reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.

Is it true that religion “cries out for a biological explanation”? Certainly it cries out for an explanation of some sort, but the assumption that it has to be a biological one is just the kind of reductionist thinking that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name.

The main line of research pursued by the psychologists in the article is the extent to which religious belief gives advantage to a group. There seems to be some evidence for this, though it’s hardly definitive. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that religion developed for that reason. Since they talk about group selection, the argument would presumably be that religious groups would out-survive non-religious groups because of the greater commitment to the group that religion gives them, so the genotypes of those inviduals more prone to religious belief would come to push out the genotypes of those less prone to religious belief.

Well….firstly, religious belief is, in evolutionary terms, a very recent addition to human culture, developed as far as we know after modern Homo Sapiens had already appeared, and is therefore unlikely to have had much effect on that evolution. But more basically, why should we assume a genetic difference between a religious group and a non-religious group anyway? They could perfectly well be genetically indistinguishable, with any difference purely a cultural matter. Religion is, after all, a cultural development. Isn’t culture where we should be looking for answers? Otherwise we’ll end up, ludicrously, comparing the brains of religious and non-religious people to look for differences…

Oh wait:

Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the brains of religious people. She used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls.

Yes, it’s as crude as that. While they’ve got their hands on all this expensive PET equipment, maybe they could try doing brain scans of people who like football and people who don’t like football, and come up with a biological explanation for that. Even better, Man U vs. Liverpool fans. Do Man U fans show greater levels of limbic system activity when watching Match of the Day? Would Liverpool fans nick the PET scanner? (Sorry, just been reading scouser jokes, via Chris Dillow.)

And what about this?

[A]n experiment carried out by Jesse Bering, of Queen’s University in Belfast, showed quite specifically that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can affect a person’s behaviour—although in this case the being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person.

Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called “dangerous risk miscalculations” that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.

One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student’s ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. He found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not. They did so in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student’s death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student. In short, awareness of a ghost—a supernatural agent—made people less likely to cheat.

Full marks for ingenuity, but just what is being demonstrated here, apart from the lengths that psychologists will go to in setting up bizarre experiments? To accept that awareness of a supernatural agent makes people less likely to cheat requires that we assume those people actually believe in ghosts. And really, even if we accept that the effect is genuine, so what? People behave better when they think they’re being watched? It’s not a shock, to be honest, even if the thing that’s supposedly doing the watching is a ghost. Yes, it’s easy to see how all this might work to increase social cohesion, but it says nothing at all about whether this is a biological, evolved, mechanism, or something entirely cultural. Just because something’s measured in a laboratory, with reaction times of 4.2 or 6.3 or whatever seconds, doesn’t mean you’ve somehow bypassed all cultural factors and gone straight to the biological bedrock. All that Dr Bering’s found, despite the baroque contrivance of the experiment, is that religion – or supernatural factors – can influence moral decisions. Didn’t we know that already?

Which is not to say that there are no interesting questions about what it is in human psychology that allows religion to exert such a powerful hold on people. A couple of likely explanations suggest themselves. First, the length of our dependency as infants requires a readiness to submit to authority – necessary for our survival as children but clearly capable of exploitation if we don’t grow out of it. Second, we have from a very early age a marked propensity to see minds behind events: to perceive things as the product of will rather than of sheer chance. See two dots moving across a screen and we think one’s chasing the other. See someone struck by lightning and we tend to think it was intended, that there was a reason for it. Given that these are psychological universals, it’s not too hard to see how religion might develop. But that’s different from what they seem to be after here, in assuming that religion itself has a direct biological explanation.

Still, as long as the funding keeps coming, the experiments will follow right along.