Adaptation and Control

I've been very impressed with David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society that I was reading on my D.C. trip. It helped me especially when I missed my flight in Dallas and had to spend the night sleeping in a chair in the C wing of DFW.

D.S. Wilson is noteworthy for his work on group selection theories of religion and morality, and for his combined efforts with Eliot Sober on the topics of altruism and society. Now, group selection is a highly controversial idea in evolutionary theory that claims that groups are subject to natural selection rather than only genes as selected through their individual carriers (organisms). The problem with group selection is that it often requires sacrificial behavior on the part of one individual that exposes that individual to greater risk, and mathematically that results in suicide for a germline because the genes disappear over time. There are some famous solutions to this dilemma like "kin selection" that is used to explain why bees and ants have castes of non-reproducing organisms who are essentially sacrificial. In kin selection, the sacrifice of the workers supports the continuation of their genes through their kin. Similar arguments have been applied to some mammals like naked mole rats, where individuals serve as lookouts for the rest of the group, helping their kin survive.

Wilson's argument, it should be noted, is theoretically opposed by a number of other researchers. Richard Dawkins, for instance, argues that religion is a side-effect of mechanisms that help with learning. Faith and belief arise from what Dan Dennett refers to as an "intentional stance" or the association of intentionality with observed events; dualism and animism are inherently part of our brain, evolved to help us avoid threats, and ultimately take on symbolic status as religious beliefs about the continuity of souls.

Despite the controversy, I have to agree with Wilson's basic critique that there does appear to be adaptive significance for religious beliefs in terms of in-group and out-group relations, significance that is hard to ignore when looking at the flow of history. Religion and related behaviors like nationalistic fervor contain an irrational and emotional series of conceptual patterns that ultimately result in greater benefits for the religious group while countering and combating foreign ideas. Explaining this using memes a la Dawkins doesn't answer the "ultimate" question of the adaptive significance of religious thought.

Most interesting to me is that Wilson's theory supports a cybernetic conceptualization of social control. This has long been my own personal approach to the question of why and religion. Religion provides predictability for the behaviors of others within the group while suppressing transgressions against those expectations. Wilson describes Calvinism's hold on Geneva, Judaism's proscriptions on outbreeding and internal usury, and early Christianity's countering of pagan reactions to plagues as examples of how predicting and helping the in group leads to greater success of the religious tradition compared with the out group. Likewise, the Old Testament call to the extermination of one's (male) enemies and enslavement of their women and children shows how out groups are treated insofar as they do not comport with the will of the in group.

The group is adaptive, whether that adaption arises from group selection mechanism or individual selection mechanism that percolate to the level of the group while preserving traditional genetic arguments operating at the level of ideation about society. And the book is a gem.