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Darwinian selection and religion: emic and etic contrasts

With The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection, Turner, Maryanski, Petersen, and Geertz collectively author a brilliant and compelling narrative of religious transformation historically ranging from our great ape and hominoid ancestors into the modern era through a framework of evolutionary theory. They argue that in order to understand the origins and transformations of an institution like religion, the evolutionary model itself must be expanded to include not just the evolving biology of our human and great ape ancestors, but also to include a wider range of evolutionary models—particularly, models that map corollary evolution among human social institutions. “Superorganisms” the nomenclature of these human social institutions, religion especially— these also evolve in step with human biology, and given the capacities for cognitive choices, courtesy of the expanded human neocortex in full swing with the advent of homo sapiens, these human institutions follow somewhat different evolutionary models than standard Darwinian natural selection. Thus, if we want to understand how religion came about and indeed how it transformed up through today, applying the additional four adapted evolutionary models they give us—namely Spencerian Type 1 and Type 2 models, a Durkheimian Evolutionary model, and a Marxian Evolutionary model – applying these alongside principles of Darwinian natural selection can produce a fuller, more satisfying picture of just how it is that humans came to develop religion. This is a big picture book, as was Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, to whom they dedicate the book. As such, it is a project to offer a more interdisciplinary, comprehensive account, one that they acknowledge will likely get pushback from biologists, and others, in part because of the audacity of interdisciplinary mixing. They offer some effort towards justifying the expansion to sociology; to counter the criticism that thesemodels diverge from the principles of biological evolution, they astutely note that some of the frameworks of evolution in Darwin rides on the heels of Herbert Spencer’s conceptualization of evolution, in which he incorporates society and Spencer, in fact, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” a full eight years before Darwin’s monumental On the Origin of the Species. A big argument of this book is that religion is not something that Darwinian natural selection selected for in order to make humans more fit to survive. That is, we are not hardwired to be religious. Rather, Darwinian natural selection operated to select for group bonding among early hominins who needed greater social orientation than their great ape ancestors, as the early precursors of humans left the forests for the more precarious open plains. As natural selection expanded the brain size of humans, it also operated to develop in humans a heightened emotional capacity, to facilitate the needed permanency for human bonding in the social structure of the nuclear family (p. 134). They point out (pp. 82–84) that the use of subcortical areas of the brain made humans more emotional and able to bond emotionally, to survive in the new environment outside the forest canopy and with this not just the neocortex develops, but the amygdala as well becomes twice as big in size and the size in the lateral nucleus demonstrates more neurons. The shorthand for this, as many will know, is that the amygdala is associated with fear and threats, and also for affiliation and social