Ok. But there does seem to be a possibility of choice regarding religious belief and practice that any theory of religion will have to address. So whatever is driving religiosity in the human species is more of a propensity, a statistical tendency, than an innate necessity in all individuals in the same way that adenosine triphosphate cellular energy metabolism is.
Innate or instinctual doesn't mean all or nothing. Like language, I believe religion has genetic underpinnings, but we all learn the specific language or religion based on the culture we grow up in. It requires both genetically-controlled brain modules/wiring and learning. Yes, it's a propensity that has a genetic basis.
So I'm going to pitch a couple of ideas I have about humans and religion, and we'll see if it gets any traction.
I wasn't trying to distinguish human beings from other animals. Social animals obviously have social instincts, but that needn't always mean that they have the ability to model each other's psychological states.
Agreed.
My view is that sociality evolved for obvious reasons, since human beings are far more effective in groups than individually. Humans with heritable psychological adaptations for group life would have a selective advantage. And that results in selection for social instincts.
These social instincts originally evolved 100s of millions of years ago, and we've inherited them. So the fact that humans are social is not unique or special. They already were social during the transition from Ramapithecus to Australopithecus to Habilis to Erectus and everything in between. The selective advantage was already there long before humans arrived. We didn't evolve our special cognition
because humans were social beings. The real question is what changed? My original question here was
Why would humans need religion to improve their social relationships when there are already abundant mechanisms and successful social species? This is where ToM comes in and a bunch of other cognitive features.
Both ToM and symbolic language function to improve social interaction. One challenge is to determine what was the evolutionary impetus for language and ToM? If we're already social during early human evolution, can there be selection pressure to be
more social? I can't really say, but it seems counterintuitive to me. At least I don't see any evidence to support the idea. My guess is that the real change and real advantage for these cognitive changes had to do with our ability to (somewhat) uncouple from the restrictions of instinct. Our evolving brain gave us far more flexibility. Humans are capable of learning/processing contingent or conditional information and can adapt to different environments. We can deal with temporary inputs compared to other animals whose range of behavior is much more limited by their inherited behavioral repertoire. This flexibility allows us to use information that might only be valid locally or temporarily. The upshot is we can alter our culture and environment within our own lifetime unlike other animals who, in general, have to undergo slow biological evolution when their environments change. The enormous power of this ability is evident today in civilization; in the way humans have changed the earth. Language and ToM co-evolved as part of this overall evolutionary strategy, which have particularly social consequences.
The other idea I want to propose has to do with what religion is. Most people think of religion in terms of belief in gods and mythologies. No doubt, but as you noted, I'm biologyofreligion, so how would we approach religion biologically? Beliefs are not so much scientifically studied; only the fact that humans have beliefs can perhaps be scientifically studied, but people have beliefs about everything: social, political, even scientific beliefs. So belief is a characteristic of people but not specific to religion. True that beliefs are particularly important to religion, but I still want a more biological approach.
Ethologists are the scientists who study animal behavior and analyze animal moods and intentions based on their overt actions, Jane Goodall being the most famous example. Animals display various forms of communication including vocalizations and what is termed body language, which provides a rich dialect for scrutinizing meaning. You mentioned the way dogs see the world. As you know canine dispositions are assessed by body position such as a wagging or lowered tail, bared teeth, ears flattened or up, and other indicators. Can we apply the same approach to humans? Can we understand human behavior based on what people do rather than what they say or think? When we assess people ethologically, we don't ask them overtly for belief or intention. People have body language just like other animals as revealed, for instance, by
Paul Ekman's facial emotion studies. Can we apply the same or similar approach to religious behavior?
If you haven't bailed on me yet, what might be religious behaviors? I could point out sacrifices, rites of passage, ceremonies and festivals, prayer. These are, indeed, connected to religion, but they describe a wide range of rituals. Instead, are there specific ritual activities that are behaviors, actions that people actually do? In
Religion: An Anthropological View, Anthony Wallace lists 13 "minimal categories of religious behavior." For him, they are prayer, music, physiological exercise, exhortation, reciting the code, simulation, mana, taboo, feasts, sacrifice, congregation, inspiration, and symbolism. That's fine, but he's not concerned with biology, so I slice and dice it a different way, not that mine is the final word at all, but I focus on what I think is ethologically observable. For me, the pertinent ritual behaviors are: music, dance, art, mythology, and prayer. I choose these because I think they are amenable to a more scientific approach...not necessarily an
easy scientific approach. That's plenty for now. I'll leave it up to you if you want more diatribe, but at least you know a bit more where I'm coming from.