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Introduction

When Darwin founded evolutionary biology by publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859, biology and even human behavior were already topics for the natural sciences. Dealing with religion, some authors tried to reformulate naturalistic approaches polemically against the clergy (Rádl 1909). Darwin, known for his agnostic attitude (although he studied theology in Cambridge), was fully aware of the tremendous consequences of his theory; widely known is his famous note to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker that admitting it was like “confessing a murder” in 1844 (see http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/): To claim that species are not immutable was the first step against a prevailing theological doctrine – the idea of man, so far depending on creation, was free to fall too. From the starting point “crown of creation,” as being on top of all creatures with an ontological foundation in metaphysical dimensions, man fell down to “a gipsy at the edge of the universe” (Jacques Lucien Monod, 1910–1976).

The new option and challenge was to describe mankind in a perspective of development (process) instead of creation (status). As Darwin assumed that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (Darwin 1859) by applying his theory of natural selection on man, even human behavior came out of the shade. In his 1871 work The Descent of Man, the first approach to a naturalistic view on religion, dealing with the question of the origin of faith, can be found. It contains two aspects: (i) it describes religious behavior as a human universal that depends on a natural and cultural development and (ii) the question whether religion – a belief in god – can be explained by natural evolution has nothing to do with the “higher question” whether god exists or not. The barking of “Braubach’s dog,” Darwin’s famous example in this case, is the key to understanding or misunderstanding the concern: The sunshade, moved by the wind, is the target of the dogs barking. Darwin estimates him thinking of some unseen agents moving the cloth. The misunderstanding is the comparison of the dog’s attitude to the unseen agent to the human approach to god. The quest is to formulate a theory offering the possibility to deduce the origin of the specific human behavior from a common ancestral behavior, shown in the dog’s behavior as well. The third component, the hypothesis about the phylogenetic roots of the behavior formulated within the methodic approach, is open to modification, discussion, and falsification. Darwin’s fear about “committing a murder” was already mentioned in his letter to Hooker, showing his awareness about late effects of his theory – a methodological self-reflection. Furthermore, he was sensitive to the fragility of religious belief system. He acknowledged the religious practice of believers, as treating their world outlook with respect he refrained from attacking religion. In a letter to Karl Marx (1818–1883), he confessed in October 1880: “Incidentally, it is possible that the thought has influenced me here over charge to the pain I would cause some members of my family when I would start to support direct attacks on religion one way or another.”

As a milestone towards the theoretical and empirical work of the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, William James focused on The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). While nineteenth-century philosophy was dealing with religion in terms of an anthropological need (projection of an idealized being as god, Feuerbach) or social construction (Marx, Durkheim), the focus was on the psychological phenomenon of religiousness. As an individual experience, they are as well part of our biological bias, depending on our social organization. In this view, even the evolution of religious behavior must have a story of a successful evolutionary development, keeping Dobzhansky’s formula “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” in mind (Dobzhansky 1973). Whether this process is adaptive or was adaptive may for now be an irrelevant one (some biologists tried to develop pantheistic theories of the evolution of religious behavior in man, introducing Homo sapiens as the praying animal, putting him on the top of a teleological evolution with a gnosis-enabled species on top (Hardy 1979)), more important was the foundation of a new background theory for discussing religion: the shift from religion (in a theological and institutional/sociological sense) to religious behavior. The belief and practice in orientation to supernatural beings and powers were open to scientific exploration, independently from the ongoing discussion about their existence. The proof of god’s existence became irrelevant – no wonder the integration of an evolutionary history of religious experience into epistemological and theological approaches of religion is sometimes misunderstood as a challenging provocation. Nevertheless, the history of natural sciences, especially human biology, reminds of the need for responsibility. Naturalistic approaches have to be clear in their declaration of intention. When Baudy is offering a paleoanthropological theory of religion, talking about a “paleophysical space consciousness” and the developed feature of a “scenic amendment” as adaptation to Pleistocene environments (Baudy 1997) that are still vitalized today, he is offering a theory of psychological components as candidates for the theory of the evolution of religion. When Trinkaus is interpreting archaeological reports of burials, grave goods, or even early temple sites (Trinkaus 1985), he is reconstructing the visible but highly fragmented path from our ancestors towards nowadays religious routines. Nevertheless, both aspects are under the retention of being a “just so story,” meaning paleo-poetry with a highly narrative component. On the one hand, theoretical assumptions tend to develop “easy to tell”-Panglossian arguments, and on the other hand, interpretations are addicted to their theoretical background and the zeitgeist – both are far from being constant. Compared to other topics in naturalistic explanations (evolutionary ethics, evolutionary epistemology, and evolutionary aesthetics), religion as issue holds a human self-understanding that goes far beyond “topics.” Is a description of a “religious nature” – irrespective of being an adaption or not, increasing fitness or not – a substitution of a non-scientific self-understanding by just another story?

Aspects of Religion

Behavior and Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology seeks for human psychological traits that are evolved adaptations – therefore, it can be seen as a long-term consequence of Darwin’s approach to human nature as part of a natural history by means of natural selection. Human psychology is described as a functional product of natural or sexual selection, like in other approaches of adaptation (in mechanistic perspective on body parts like heart, brain, and blood circuit), the body is modularized, some evolutionary psychologists are arguing that the mind has a modular structure as well: modular adaptations are “invented” for different functions, offering the background for the Spandrel Theory: much of human behavior is the outcome of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve problems in human ancestral environments long time ago. The so-called adapted mind (Barkow et al. 1995: The Adapted Mind. Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture) pairs fragmented brain functions with estimated environmental needs and challenges of our ancestors (see Table 1 for an overview).

Table 1 Problems and explanatory components of religious behavior
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More astonishing is the observation that religious commitment often leads to a costly behavior: The participation in rituals takes time and is sometimes risky; a lot of religious systems define certain rules for their members and specialists like celibacy, leading to a poor reproductive success. Even practical costs for displaying a commitment come into count, reaching from sitting in silence to suicide bombing. One major task for evolutionary explanations is clear: The benefits of religious behavior must somehow outweigh the harms mentioned above. Even if the candidates seem to be clear (social bonding, explaining our origin, moral systems, etc.), the problem is still related to the cost problem, one component of the explanatory level. The evolution of religion in a perspective of evolutionary biology and psychology therefore deals with several sets of problems, connected to aspects of the religious behavior of human beings, populations, and institutions. They are confronted with a set of theories and theoretical frameworks aiming to provide a scientific background for the explanation of their development and functionality.

Empirical and Practical Aspects

Testing theories about religion is nothing new: The effect of prayer to the sick was the concern of Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. In 1872, he is – first of all – confronting presumptions about theology and religion with empirical (or rather statistical) facts, offering verifiable theories: “An unscientific reasoner will be guided by a confused recollection of crude experience. A scientific reasoner will scrutinize each separate experience before he admits it as evidence, and will compare all the cases he has selected on a methodical system” (Galton 1872, p. 125). His conclusion is that “It seems to me clear that all belief in the efficacy of prayer, in the sense in which I have been considering it, must be yielded also.” Galton issues two caveats to the physical efficacy of prayer: (i) prayer can provide emotional catharsis through the act of self-expression and (ii) his study does not disparage the possibility of communing in one’s heart with god. Assertion (ii) is presented with several constraints around the interference of imagination and personality, but Galton concedes that calm contemplation on the ideals of fellowship, responsibility, and the creative heritage of humanity have “much in common with the effort of communing with a God.” In recent works, the alliance between religion and healing became a major topic; the ethnological report shows a large variety of techniques to seek for healing: Meditation, ecstasy, hypnosis, and trance stimulate neurophysiological processes with traceable effects on subjective well-being and health. As some techniques require the assistance or good will of higher-order powers, experts are released from other topics in order to focus on their magic business. It is an open question; if shamanism is the origin of medicine or religion, perhaps both are intrinsically tied together. All recent discussions about the placebo effect still show perplexing results about the magic of a cross-scored tablet; the belief in the substance is the key to the success of the therapy – no matter what the pharmacist tells us about the “true” impact of the substance. On a larger scale, some authors describe a positive correlation between the coping and handling of diseases and the creation of a “positive meaning” based on principles of faith. Coping with contingency is an easier task for the believer; the assumptions of their confession protect them from using a “psycho-hygienic function” (Voland 2010). Demographic studies show doubtless the reproductive success of denominations; they provide a shared rationalization and an intriguing motivation to engage in future projects and producing offspring (Blume 2009). On the other side of the coin, religions do not only disengage fear from the believer, but under certain circumstances (and dispositions), they might endow it. Not only in brute communities like Colonia Dignidad but even in psychotherapeutic facilities a rising amount of patients seek release from fear, disillusion, or suffering from long-term consequences of brain wash they had to experience in their communities. The development of a religious psychosis is as well possible without any despot forcing members of a group to perform certain actions declared as god’s wish or ecclesiastical need. A rather new phenomenon is the “market of possibilities” of religious expertise and components, leading to a modal system of religion. Therefore, religious practice becomes an eclectical combination – of incompatible constituents? Many western European believers “on the edge” of established confessions seek inspiration and techniques of spiritual self-awareness in “eastern” meditation techniques. A lot of them simply do not come back, as therapists indicate a growing number of candidates lose their self-awareness in certain meditation techniques that plumb the “how far can you go” without a net. What might be an easy task for a Buddhist novice – losing the thought of a certain self in meditation – can destroy a callow self-consciousness orientated on other ideals and figures from an incommensurable cultural background. Psychiatrists discuss the work field between the keywords “god-intoxication” and “religious-medicine”; on the one hand is the Freudian perspective on religious beliefs as pathology outdated (Navratil 1992), while on the other hand is as well much work to do with questioning the options of integrating religious aspects in therapeutic treatment.

Evolutionary Anthropology and Primatology

The nature versus nurture debate may be the major underlying conflict between natural and social sciences. A change in the scientific approach through changing methodological axioms led towards a renewed understanding of anthropological sciences. It was in the 1950s when Sherwood Washburn (1911–2000) and Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) arranged the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium. It was a switch in the fixation of anthropologist from ideally race standards and characters (ancestors of idealistic morphology and race theory) to the observation of living populations, published in the epochal anthology Anthropology Today (Kroeber 1953). In his contribution “The Strategy of Physical Anthropology,” Washburn outlines his theory of a new research approach by a theory-based comparative biology, including living relatives out of our pedigree: primates. The exploration of phylogenetic traits of human behavior became a major topic ever since the approaches of primatology, evolutionary ecology, and behavioral biology brought innovative impulses to anthropology. Especially recent works in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) contributed remarkable findings regarding the origin of social behavior, speech, social cognition, and, reaching deep in the humanities, the “theory of mind” (Tomasello 1999). The subject matter can be roughly named by referring to the term human universals, as from a different viewpoint, ethnologist Donald Brown calls the outcomes of his cultural-comparative screening of populations. Besides all cultural variations, our species can be described by a certain set of universals we all share (Brown 1991). Universals are nontrivial patterns of behavior that can be observed in all known populations; sexuality, for example, is trivial, as a reproductive need and a basic definition of life, but a code of conduct regulating sexual issues is a human universal. In a phylogenetic perspective, research programs trace the roots of these habits in comprehensive studies of our ancestors, living and extinct. This linking can be pursued to basic religious questions in primatology research. In recent works, primatologists observed the handling of deceased members of primate societies, especially newborn, establishing a vague sketch of primate thanatology in the genus Pan (Anderson et al. 2010).

In Wilson’s Sociobiology, we find that “the enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies. Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said, than be void of purpose” (Wilson 1975, p. 561). The falsehood of the “substance” religion is an open question, as in the theoretical view of sociobiology, only the outcome counts: Religious behavior is open to empirical questions, estimating the impact on fitness of any observable behavior. In this approach, we can further on investigate whether religion can be seen as an adaptation (increasing fitness) or not (decreasing fitness).

Cognition and Metaphysics

Studies in the developmental and cognitive psychology offer some interesting aspect of childhood. Up to the fifth year, cognitive strategies can be described that offer religious convictions: All things have a function: birds fly, trees grow, and the sun heats. Kids estimate a knowledge of everything in every being simultaneously with their own perception: You cannot see me when I cover my eyes with my hands. This phenomenon of an imaginary shared perception will slightly fade away, partly substituted by the theory of mind (mind reading) in later child development (Tomasello 1999). This can be linked to a main issue of religious metaphysics: the existence of an all-knowing and ubiquitous observer. In this view, kids are intuitive theists, therefore carrying moral dimensions. (This changes the perspective about “learning” a religion, there is no need to adopt this ontological setting, and it is rather to scrutinize as a rationalist.)

Other problems of the cognitive competences are easy to handle by estimating their adaptive value: The “agent detection device” (ADD) leads us to imagine an agent behind natural events – the branch of this bush is moving; there must be a (unmoved) mover, a prima causa. It may be an advantage to take precautions than to ignore it (agnostic ignorance); like the threshold of a smoke detector, it has to be calibrated low enough. This may sound like early stages of animism; the relevant news in here is the fact that we talk about a synthesizing performance of an adapted brain, generating a world view based and calibrated to the environment. The discussion of the theomorphism of man or the anthropomorphism of god is the intellectual field of work, introduced by Feuerbach’s projection thesis. They can be linked to the relevant aspects in cognitive sciences – like many other aspects represented in the so-called cognitive sciences of religion (CSR). Some authors expand ADD to a “hyperactive agent detection device,” when the benefits of agent detection establish over phylogenetic time, leading to theories explaining why we see “faces in the cloud” (Guthrie 1995) and pass the Rorschach test, opening the approach to empirical testing as well.

Approaches to Religion

Defining Religion

There is a dialectical tension between the scientific and humanistic contents of anthropology. The natural scientist is aiming to give it all a mandatory twist, searching for structures, systems, and principles of all living things. It is an ongoing debate in the theory of sciences, whether biology (recently called “a science of specific solutions”) is still a natural science. The challenge of evolution lies in a high degree of complexity as the only changeless component is variation itself. Evolution is a fundamental process of life; the theory holds an expansive force of integration to other scientific disciplines outside the channels of natural sciences. In technical, social, and cultural sciences, the theory of evolution has a late effect. “Darwin’s dangerous idea” became a “universal acid” (Dennett 1995).

This aspect – working on specific questions and tasks in detail – is rather ignored in the clean environment of a laboratory. As many reductionists develop mandatory thesis, for example, claiming spin-off products of brain functions, the focus leads to an isolation of doubtless functional parts from environmental needs and conditions. This may satisfy the wishful thinking of the one reason that must be – but thinking some steps further shows that it cannot hold position against the complexity of the problem on all scales: The humanist aspect of anthropology simply cannot live with an under-complex explanation of our “human nature,” starting from our self-understanding as cultural beings to the need for a free will to fulfill ethical issues. The problem of defining religion takes place in this minefield: It is not a physical object we can lean over; it is not only the human “on its own” like in the problem of philosophical anthropology; when the explanans is coincidental to the explanandum, the subject of explanation is equal to the object of explanation. Religion is unquestionable observable in its behavioral outcome – but this is a tip of the iceberg, still holding a lot under holy water. The horizontal line in this picture is a metaphysical metaphor, a spell that has to be broken (Dennett 2007) to have a closer, a scientific look at the underwater part of religion. Therefore, theories estimate the ways religion is and works, not as a separate entity but as “culture- and time-bound discursive properties” (as Stausberg puts it in Stausberg 2009).

In his 1921 published study The Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future, James Leuba (1867–1946) offered 48 different definitions of religion – it may be helpful for scientific history to continue collecting and detecting shifts in methodological and epistemological approaches. A brief and more or less classic definition that fits our needs is from William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902:31):

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

Feelings, acts, and experiences are the candidates to analyze for religious commitment. As religion thereby is bound to a subjective and substantiate expression in cognitive, social, and emotional processes, it is in reach for behavioral studies. It would be heresy to assume that natural sciences aim to “biologize” religion, but it would be obscurantism to deny advancement in natural and social sciences searching for an evolutionary explanation of human behavior. To avert further damage, a theoretically framed and therefore falsifiable description has nothing to do with “explaining religion away.” Unquestionable, a lot of authors expanded the framework of naturalism in the realms of reductionisms – a methodological fallacy.

Origin of Religion

The nature of things is often seen as being determined in an ontological and metaphysical sense. This must be understood without any historical index. As mentioned in the essentialist’s perspective, this is not the approach of an evolutionary perspective of religion, offering a specific theoretical account. Religion is understood as an emerging quality; the theory aims to provide the components necessary to generate religious behavior under certain conditions. This is provided by the archaeological record, discussing and interpreting early proofs of religious behavior by reconstructing burials, frequent use of cult sites, or other outcomes of human activities that somehow leave traces (Lewis-Williams 2010; Burkert 1996). Therefore, the origin of religion must be seen in its difference to the beginning in terms of evolutionary appearance. This dualism is a variation ever since the option of questioning religion was enriched by opening it to psychological aspects. When William James described the “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (James 1902), he clearly distinguished two questions: “What is the nature of religion?” and “What is the meaning of religion?” The nature of religion became a psychological problem, dealing with a large variety of the possible forms and attributes of higher forces, seen as an intrinsic factor of human psychology. No need to look for the nature of gods and supernatural actors if there is evidence for its origin in the human mind. But interpreting a cromlech as a religious site or cave art as a meaningful painting in terms of a religious fact demands a theoretical presumption, enabling us to name it. Therefore, we take it easy to classify things as religious in a historical perspective, leaving the question of its origin open. In other words, we define the facts widely sporty, but spare their formation condition.

Components of Religion

The idea of components of religion is fully dissolving the long-lasting perspective on religion as a unit sui generis. The religionist argument aims to keep theology prior to anthropology; the dissolution of religion into anthropology is the worst case scenario. Wrecking religion into functional components is wrong in Eliade’s view, because “a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other is false” (Eliade 1963, p. xiii); the “big picture” would be missing.

On the other end of the scale, the components as such may be accepted as separate units appearing in the human mind, but the existence of the one thing called religion is seen as an illusion. Religion needs construction! Boyer argues for the continuation of the Aufklärung, when Kant showed that religious ideas are creations of the mind. Religious studies need to go further on; with “the use of better science” they have to “show that the very existence of something called ‘religion’ is largely an illusion […,] the package does not really exist as such. Notions of supernatural agents, of morality, of ethnic identity, of ritual requirements and other experiences, all appears in human mind independently” (Boyer 2010, p. 1). In this case, religion is not subject to methodological fragmentation prior to theoretical needs – it is denied ontologically; it is an “airy nothing.” Such programmatic perspectives on continuing the Aufklärung are worthy of discussion; moreover, they lay open the omnipresent caveat that science sometimes carries the intention of dissolving religion. Still they provide new spheres of action: The cognitive sciences of religion offer a set of a cross-culturally recurrent universal cognitive mechanisms, a “cognitive gear” of religiousness (afterlife, beings with special powers, signs and portents, creationism, spirit possession, rituals, ritual exegesis, the sacred, deference, moral obligation, punishment and reward, and revelation) (see Whitehouse 2008).

Domains of Religion

The modular structure of cognitive skills can be described as a network of brain, body, language, and culture (Mithen 2007). They discuss the human instincts as a biological universal feature of human behavior and wit. Their developmental history offers the explanation theory of evolutionary psychology: The environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) leads to Darwinian algorithms, allowing predictions about processes of adaptation, hence to reconstruct past adaptations by formulation hypothesis (an architecture underlying the human capacity for religion). The evolutionary approach to religion supposes that human phylogeny provided a cognitive integration of the four domains: mysticism, ethics, myths, and ritual (see Table 2 for an overview). In this combination, religiosity emerges as an evolutionary adaptation providing reproductive advantages (see Voland and Söling 2004). Religiosity proves to solve the problems underlying the domains in individual and collective perspective: Individually experienced contingency is answered by commonly shared mysticism. Social interaction is regulated and to a certain degree predictable, enabling human societies to invest in long-term and large-scale projects. The myth provides patterns and externalized powers or agents as templates for commitments, enabling the identification of group members and the detection of free riders. The ritual is the hurdle that has to be taken to fulfill expectations regarding a trustworthy confession to a group, paid back in the offered earthly or heavenly benefit. It may be expected that the selection pressure on religiosity potentially played a major role in human evolution when the population count exceeded family sizes and the competition between groups were judged by its efficiency, competences, and – “naturally” – fitness.

Table 2 Domains of religiosity (see Voland and Söling 2004)
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Mysticism

The underlying Darwinian algorithm of mysticism is the competition of intuitive ontologies. They evolved as a coping strategy with unknown components of the surrounding environment – the human mind dependently needs “facts” for judging situations and making decisions. We need to know why the branch of that scrub is moving – the ontology that offers the wind as the one and only explanation will not take the predator into account, proving as a bad explanation. As Tomasello showed in comparative studies, it is most likely that intuitive ontologies are based on social experiences and developed for the need of judging and categorizing social interaction partners. Social detection categories, hence social ontologies based on human agents, are transferred into the natural environment. Our theory of mind (ToM) is on the one hand a feature of human evolution; in comparative studies with primate infants, specific human features of detecting intentions are shown (Bullinger et al. 2011). Infants do not only recognize intentions of social partners clearly, showing that the anticipation is based on mind reading as part of our evolved features of our mind. They even tend to assist and therefore invest in the action of the social partner, as long as the execution of the action is hampered by anything only the infant can bring in order. Ontogenetically, the ToM will be calibrated to cultural patterns and social conditions – but we are born as dualists, animists, and “intuitive theists” (see Knight et al. 2004) and think teleologically. On the other hand, the ToM proved as a high-capacity mechanism of the human brain that in general can prove as helpful even in nonsocial conditions; treating nonhuman components as actors can offer ontological concepts that may be incorrect from a distant perspective. But the Darwinian algorithm is not selected for truth, it is selected for effectiveness; as long as the intuitive ontology generates a helpful representation of the environment, their outcome will determine our world view.

Ethics

The question concerning the evolution of altruistic behavior and the establishment of morals is probably the eldest topic in evolutionary biology. As Mayr points out in his philosophy of biology (Mayr 1998), it was already clear to Darwin that altruistic behavior cannot be explained by survival of the fittest alone. Studies about the pattern of cooperation in groups, mathematical models, and investment theories concerning grades of blood relationship (Alexander 1987; Hamilton 1964) showed that patterns based on kinship soon become inappropriate. Stepping over a threshold in respect of group sizes blasting family boundaries, new challenges and behavior patterns arise: Homo confidens meets Homo mendax. As gene altruism will not handle this encounter, socially established rules regulate interaction. The observance of ethical rules and the punishment of deviant behavior are facilitated by assuming a higher power observing even unseen behavior. A hypothesis claims the belief in god as a program of internalizing moral rules. The external judge becomes irrelevant as long as the sanction of deviant behavior, or even thoughts, is happening in the head. Voland assumes that religion donates morals, not understood in a theological sense that refers to metaphysical values shown in revelation. It is rather a social technique, because fear from punishment makes “good behavior” more probable.

Myth

The function of myth as a social-bonding technique is a double-edged sword: The enhancement of group solidarity and identity must pay a price (the dissociation of out-groups). Members of any unknown collective are screened; as long as they do not match with the standards provided by the own myth or mythical tradition, xenophobia will be a relevant variable. Judging whether someone believes in the same god, therefore is a trustworthy social partner, becomes a feature-depending friend- or foe-decision-making system. The decision is not based on features relevant to cooperation or factual investments, like treated in tit-for-tat systems or other models in game theory (Luce and Raiffa 1989). In a new cultural niche – a niche that is not occupied, but constructed (see section “(Cognitive) Niche Construction”) – specific displays and commitments are the key to social acceptance in an idealized group of believers.

Many social scientists showed in early critiques that religion can be described as a highly functional social phenomenon – regardless of any theological aspects (see Durkheim 1981 [1912] for a functional approach and Luhmann (2002) for the orientation function of religion in system theory). Basic social patterns of behavior, social order, and “naturally” language depend on speech; thence, the part of the relevant sacral components in the appearance of these features must be evaluated.

Ritual

Rituals improve the cohesiveness in groups. When special occasions in biographic situations (birth, marriage, rites de passage, funeral), social events with political functions (coronations, elections, executions), or festivities in the circle of the year happen, certain patterns of behavior are expected. The repeatability of these events, observable in all known cultures, leads to precise expectations for all participants. The more complex the rituals become, the more the staging will lead to a stratification of its members. In case of magic rituals, aiming to quest or pray for support from higher powers, special castes may arise (shamans, priests, etc.). Besides the memorable and frequently repeated pattern with a clear purpose, rituals are creating sense. They are not only a component in utilitarian structures, they generate and play a key role in social communication, providing conventions. The participation in rituals is associated with the handicap principle. Rituals require investment; only who can afford and is willing to pay the price proves to be a member (see Zahavi 1975; Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Rituals offer solutions for common problems of social interaction like free riders and cheaters (see Table 3 Cooperation Problems and Solutions).

Table 3 Cooperation problems and solutions
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Recent Theories of Religion

In a first overview, we can structure the landscape of evolutionary explanations of religion in two groups with explorative subdivisions and exemplary authors/contributions.

Nonadaptive Theories

Nonadaptive theories describe religion as a useless or even dysfunctional product or by-product of specific mental processes. These processes might be adaptive in other circumstance, but they are not used as intended. Praying for rain will not let it rain, but praying in a group for rain will intensify the social cohesion. Nonadaptive theories may see religion as a neutral feature, developing independently from cultural evolution. The worst case scenario argues for a cultural parasitism: Cultural features spread as cultural parasites (memes) without any selective advantages for individuals or groups. (See Table 4 for an overview and scientific representatives.)

Table 4 Systematic overview: evolutionary approaches to religion
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Alexander suggested that religion is a legacy of our phylogenetic heritage (Alexander 1987). As our behavioral fixture has been developed in specific needs and circumstance, it is related to Paleolithic group sizes and social structures, incommensurable with nowadays social systems and therefore adapted to the wrong thing. This is supplemented with arguments from population genetics, as the genetic variation in huge social systems leads to genetic distances within groups, undermining altruistic investment in the same lineage – the currency of fitness.

Religion as epiphenomenon describes religious behavior as based on functional criteria different to religious purposes. Like the spandrel in architecture, the “beautiful” ornament has nothing to do with structural analysis. The conception of the spandrel became a hot selling item, depending on the corner it is decorating. This argument is also known as the Panglossian argument, recommitting on the so-called figure in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and was first brought into discussion by Steven J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin (Gould and Lewontin 1979: The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme).

In Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust, many distinctive research programs in social, cognitive, and historical sciences, all linked to their evolutionary character, are woven together and tested on empirical studies as well. In combining cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, his focus is on the cost aspect of religious behavior; many seemingly do not pay out. Hardly surprising, his starting point is a denial of religion as a dedicated “religious faculty” in human cognition; therefore, no religiosity can be supposed as disposition: “Religions are not adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such” (Atran 2002, p. 12). Our hands did not evolve for holding a computer mouse; they are adaptive to these purposes but are not adaptations for them. Same with religion, “Religion may be adaptive in some contexts without being an adaptation in an evolutionary sense”; his thought experiment introducing religion as a river flowing through a varied landscape is a good attorney in fact for nonadaptive theories: “the class of humanly plausible religions is one set of paths in the landscape’s drainage basin” (Atran 2002, p. 11). The topography of the land is made out of calibrated human brain/mind functions as speech, vision, theory of mind, folk biology, folk psychology, and many others representing peaks. The river, a flow of conceptual information, rushes through the human intelligence; the topography (the peaks as mentioned above plus other factors like weather, the place holder for any inputs in this big picture) causes the river to flow certain ways. If it flows long enough, we might even expect a river bed. A main quest concerns development and consolidation of religious concepts. On the one hand, the development of these concepts (like gods, agents, and spirits) has to be explained, and on the other hand, it must be linked to the costs as far as these beliefs lead to certain behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, the genesis of these beliefs is not sufficient; selection’s tolerance for the real costs must be brought to the table as well. The minimally counterintuitive concept (MCI) is offering a theory about our abilities to understand and memorize religious concepts. Ordinary concepts receive a slight modification, thereby compel attention; in a perfectly condensed phrase by Bulbulia, “Religion is the familiar, made strange” (Bulbulia 2009, p. 160), leading to absurd commitments. As soon as these concepts are alive and become a salient feature in a specific group, the evolutionary fate depends on the survivability of the concept. Results of early empirical studies suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures (Boyer and Ramble 2001). This links the evolutionary conditions of emerging to the explanation of religious behavior as well as the features of religious beliefs as a human universal. Known ontological categories, imbedded in folk mechanics, folk biology, and folk psychology, have to be violated in order to be counterintuitive. Depending on the class of objects (persons, animals, plants, artifacts, and natural objects), (i) the estimated psychological qualities, (ii) the biological features, or (iii) the physical properties have to be violated. A growing plant will not make a deal, but an all-knowing, flying, and invisible tree will be a better candidate to be memorized.

Adaptive Theories

On the level of individual selection, religious behavior evolved for the benefit of the individual in comparison to competitors. On the level of kin selection, religious behavior gives advantage to genetically related individuals in comparison to genetically more distant group members. On the level of group selection, religion is selected for the evolutionary success of groups, favoring tools to improve willingness and toughness. (See Table 4 for an overview and scientific representatives.)

In social sciences, Durkheim and his trendsetting functional definition in his work Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Durkheim 1981/1912) became the framework for theories of religion as an adaptation. For Durkheim, a religious group is “a society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices.” The “translation” starts with cognitive processes and ends with practices; the collective consciousness is the consciousness of all individuals. This allows common practices and combined powers and affords for higher goals. Following this pattern will easily lead to advantages of groups compared to other less organized groups or even individuals compared to ones with lower involvement in religious practices. Nowadays, we can state that the critique of religion based on a historical coupling of religion and power misses the core of an obviously evolutionary disposition of religiousness.

Campbell sees religion as the solution for the “Darwinian paradox”: The only way to restrain human selfishness lies within religion, promoting prosocial behavior and defeating egoism (Campbell 1975: On the conflicts between biological and social evolution and between psychology and moral tradition). In this perspective, the welfare of the individual is prior to the welfare of the group. Examples of elite privileges like priests running on the back of the laity show that this is not an endless game. Leaving the rudiment of individual egoism and changing the scale to a comparative analysis of groups – their bonding components, social cohesion techniques, and competition with other groups and their struggle for existence – we come to a major aspect of the functional aspect of religious behavior in an evolutionary outlook. The bottleneck of social evolution , long before sedentism, came along the natural selection among small units of groups in rivalry for ecological benefits. The existential competition between the groups promoted those with the best defensiveness and probably biggest group size. Evolutionary mechanisms to assure these features by restraining human selfishness and establishing investment in collective attitudes and strategies became the ones that paid out. Especially rituals can be observed in their functional role for group bonding; furthermore, this is not only in the field of expertise of anthropologists and ethnologists, as rituals in military actions, sports, and pop culture show the defining on motivational power of these elements. In this moment, groups are alive in their commitment and are defined by the emotionality of the social experience of being a part in something way bigger – as long as you are “in.” The self-understanding of a group therefore needs criteria for who is “in” and who is “out”; different authors place the myth on this place; sharing stories from a common ground explaining your existence and offering the metaphysical background of it makes you a member (see Voland’s four domains of religiosity, myths, mysticism, ethics, and rituals, in Voland and Söling (2004)). The myth is providing the truth as a strategic construction; in Voland’s approach, the aphorism of Karl Jaspers (German philosopher, 1883–1969) “truth is, what we have in common” has to be inverted: “what we have in common, is the truth,” a hypothesis why religions have to be dogmatic in order to conserve their group-defining myths. Others leave the solution of this topic to a more profane aspect, in commitment theories and behavioral strategies, providing cooperation enhancement by the development of credibility displays (Schloss and Murray 2011). Belief in supernatural agents is adaptive because these agents are all-knowing punishers. Belief in supernatural punishment can enhance within group cooperation , called “cooperation enhancement” (CE). Moreover, it can reduce cheating or free riding, called “punishment avoidance” (PA). In this approach, we can show that standard problems of interaction in groups request special methods of resolution, implemented in certain rituals (see Schloss 2008).

Superorganisms and Realism

A controversial contribution to evolutionary theories of religion may be David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral, bringing back in models of group selection and explaining religion in terms of a “superorganism.” In his valuation, the term “organism” in the group context is synonymous with “adaptive at the group level.” After years of favoring the individual selection as leading paradigm in sociobiology, the “selfish gene” is getting some competition. Starting with George Williams’ “Adaptation and Natural Selection” (Williams 1996/1966) and the epoch-making “Selfish Gene” from Richard Dawkins in 1976 (Dawkins 2006b), phenotypes were seen as vehicles of benefit for DNA; selection’s targets were condensed to the genetic substrate. When “rethinking the foundations of sociobiology” in 2007, David S. Wilson and Edward O. Wilson put the finger on the 1960s, claiming pivotal events leading to a more or less intransigent rejection of group selection. In their view, multilevel selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). This is a major impulse for David S. Wilson’s attempt to develop an organismic concept of religious groups, bringing life in the new “gold standard” of sociobiology: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary” (Wilson and Wilson 2007, p. 345). His afford as well bears in mind that the functionalist perspective of evolutionary approaches leads to a methodological reductionism, even if evolutionary theories provide testable hypothesis about religion they might not hit the nail on the head. Hence, paraphrasing Kant, religious studies are blind without biological theory, and biological speculation is empty without scholarly data.

The standard perspectives of cognitive models are based on individualism, whether religion is generated by individual brains emerging religion in a group of individuals or even if the brain is infected by a Congo virus, a technique of memes to occupy human brains. In Darwin’s cathedral, the first step, recalling the renaissance of group selection theories, is to claim an averaging fallacy, ruling out group selection by definition. But if a considered trait is a social behavior, “the fitness of an individual is determined by its own trait and the traits of the individual with whom it interacts. These individuals constitute the group, which must be identified accurately to calculate the fitness that determine[s] the outcome of evolution” (Wilson 2002, p. 15), showing clearly the concept of the enemy: a theory of evolution restricted to genetic evolution that sticks to the individual and restricted perspective on a pure gene carrier. His approach aims to reactivate the standard patterns of Darwinian evolutionary development and apply them for group-level adaptations by means of differential survival and reproduction of groups. From the perspective of the selfish gene, there was only one possibility for altruism to evolve: when average returns exceed average costs (see Hamilton 1964). The natural selection of groups will not play a role in comparing groups of altruistic and non-altruistic members, but in comparing altruistic groups, we can handle special patterns of human behavior and test hypothesis on religion as a group-level adaptation to enhance in-group cooperation (see Wilson 2005). The approach proposes that religious traits evolve to functionally integrate the behavior of all persons within a (we might then call it religious) group who share them. This is the underlying process that makes a “superorganism” out of it, offering another theoretical framework (like organismic biology describing units as systems) to solve problems of cooperation and coordination. Group selection therefore predicts culturally evolved patterns of behavior to prohibit selfish individualism within groups. It is a shift from a perspective of altruism-based social life to a certain mode of social behavior induced by social control: Monitoring, censure, punishment, and exile are the bricks that automatically request corresponding patterns of behavior like signaling (e.g., the theory of credibility enhancement displays in Henrich (2009)), playing a key role in understanding the evolutionary development and function of rituals. Wilson sees religious groups as rapidly evolving entities adapted to their current environments; therefore, religion is a solidarity technology, and therefore, religious variation will be limited by the purposes as targets of selection: the demand of building and ensuring a community. The question is still open whether the restricted diversity of religions (scholar evidence shows that religions are not set in stone, rather entities on a timescale in constant change) is better explained by the specific needs of optimizing human interaction or by mental habits of the adapted mind. “If the individual is no longer a privileged unit of selection, it is no longer a privileged unit of cognition. We are free to imagine individuals in a social group connected in a circuitry that gives the group the status of the brain and the individual the status of the neuron” (Wilson 2002, p. 33).

Evolutionary theories of religion offer a heuristic tool: The theory builds on the distinction between ultimate and proximate causes. Religion plays a key role in coping with reality; dealing with the world leads to a certain knowledge that can be called facts – and a certain set of features that derive or build the domains of mysticism and myth. Following this dichotomy set, two kinds of realism are introduced, a factual realism that accurately describes the world (irrespective of its functionality) and a practical realism showing useful beliefs , regardless of their validity to the “hard facts” they claim. In the perspective of selection, the factual realism is selected for accuracy, while the practical realism is selected as a biological utility for the effect of the belief. It has to be greater than the cost of holding the belief. This theoretical approach leads to a new framework for working with religious issues without explaining religion away. Even if evolutionary sciences have to be selective and therefore offer a reductionistic perspective, proximate behavior can be explained in a way that leads to the idea of being religious as a natural phenomenon. Compared to other critiques of religion that rather look like weapons against religions, this is a new standard in handling religion. Dawkins, for instance, describes the phenomenon as pathology: Infected brains, run by bad memes invoking religious behavior, take over the human being; therefore, religious behavior as well as the outcome of this “illness” (churches as institutions, castes, priests, mythology, and spirituality) must be treated (Dawkins 2006a). Dennett introduces religions as a carrier of “bad spells” and “toxic mutations.” Only healthy people (better to be an atheist than an agnostic) do not show the symptoms (Dennett 2007). In the approach based on practical realism as instrument of social group organization, all of a sudden, the concept of an enemy loses ground. The claim of god becomes irrelevant; whatever the container of practical realism carries is selected for its positive effect of the belief. There is no pathology to defame beliefs and automatically favoring the disbeliever, rather the opposite: As the practical realism provides useful beliefs leading to fitness maximizing behavior on the group level, the outside disbeliever is under suspicion. The theory must handle the phenomenon of deviant behavior within a group or offer bypass theories to reach the goal of the intended behavior. Religions do not evolve for their accuracy, but they evolve to secure harmony. In this sense, we have an evolutionary foundation of moral systems and ethics, as well a theory to cope with the Darwinian paradox (the aporia of social behavior in a world of the survival of the fittest):

We might therefore expect moral systems to be designed to trigger powerful emotional impulses, linking joy with right, fear with wrong, anger with transgression. We might expect stories, music and rituals to be at last as important as logical arguments in orchestration the behaviour of groups. Supernatural agents and events that never happened can provide blueprints for action that far surpass factual accounts of the natural world in clarity and motivation powers. (Wilson 2002, p. 42)

This deals with religion as a part of human culture, as stories and music can be read as representatives of aesthetical articulation and symbolical representation. Cassirer identified mythological thinking and perception as the fundamental symbolical form. The mythical explanation of the world, to continue his valuation, leads to emotions (cf. Wilson) that generate the phenomenon that myths will not come in objects but in physiognomic features. Hence, we can link the phenomenon of practical beliefs as a key feature of religious behavior to the larger frame of symbolical representation that enables the cultural development of man – and not vice versa. “Myth is filled with the most violent emotions and the most frightful visions. But in myth man begins to learn a new and strange art: the art of expressing, and that means of organizing his most deeply rooted instincts, his hopes and fears” (Cassirer 1946, p. 45). Cassirer denies that fear leads to religion as a mere product. There is more than fear as an “outcome” like myth and religion. “But what is most essential in man’s religious life is not the fact of fear, but the metamorphosis of fear. Fear is a universal biological instinct. It can never be completely overcome or suppressed, but it can change its form” (Cassirer 1946, p. 45).

(Cognitive) Niche Construction

The coevolution of nature and culture is a debate about leaving the boundaries of a discussion focused on the gene as the driving force. The approach of Richerson and Boyd, claiming a cultural evolution “not by genes alone” (Richerson and Boyd 2005), brought a fruitful impulse beside other authors on the topic (Sperber 1996) in preparation for an extension of the niche conception. The concept of the niche was introduced to address key adaptation, enabling an organism to occupy ecological niches by applying organismic licenses. The picture of the niche has been extended to cognitive niches, therefore offering a mental construction of cognitive niches as a theoretical entry to handle cultural development in an evolutionary approach.

Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, and build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless actions within self-erected boundaries. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 91)

Proposed is a conceptual model that maps the causal pathways relating biological evolution to cultural change. It builds on evolutionary theory by placing emphasis on the capacity of organisms to modify sources of natural selection in their environment. Niche construction means influences on more than the ecological surrounding, even social and cultural parameters are changed; therefore, a feedback in form of changing selective aspects of selection plays a role in the process of cultural evolution. The evolutionary dynamics are broadened, allowing to incorporate ontogenetic and cultural processes. Individuals or phenotypes have a more active role, as laying hand on relevant elevating screws, compared to the standard assumption of a passive phenotype determined by genetic dispositions and environmental impact (see Laland et al. 2000; Laland and Sterelny 2006; Kendal et al. 2011). In this new level, not only the question concerning the positive effect of belief is formulated, but the question concerning the positive effect of the belief on the belief has a theoretical ground. Advocates of this approach argue for taking (cognitive) niche construction seriously: “there is both accuracy and utility in treating niche construction as an evolutionary process in its own right, rather than as merely a product of evolution. Niche construction may be influenced by genetic, ontogenetic and cultural information and feeds back to influence selective processes at each of these levels” (Laland 2009, p. 35). For the formulation of hypotheses on adaptive processes in human evolution, the organism-environment match can be addressed as a reciprocal interaction between various levels of natural selection and aspects of (cultural) niche construction. The phenotype, formerly seen as a passive taker of evolutionary processes, shines in a new light: “Now phenotypes play two roles in evolution, they survive and reproduce but they also construct and modify environments, modifying selection pressures” (Laland 2009, p. 37). Note that on the one hand, all arguments referring to an adapted mind – unfortunately to the requirements of our stone age ancestors – experience contrary wind and on the other hand, the phenotype as an environment modifier will play a certain role in telling “just so stories”: The unsatisfying situation of judging adaptations as outcomes of adaptive processes ex post facto only, leading to a Panglossian circular argument, may be altered as the niche construction allows to deal with the process in the beginning. “Human evolution may be unique in that our culture and niche construction have become self-reinforcing, with transgenerational culture modifying the environment in a manner that favours ever-more culture, and niche construction informed by cultural knowledge becoming ever-more powerful” (Laland 2009, p. 39). This perspective may explain religious behavior as unique, because the cognitive construction of its components is self-reinforcing, with transcultural domains of religiosity modifying the social environment in a manner that favors religion in the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens.

Perspectives: On eReligion and iReligion

“The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature” (Wilson 1979, p. 169). Undoubtedly, there is no question: Religiosity can be seen as a human universal (see Brown 1991). But religion as a subject matter to science runs into a variety of approaches, each of them considering certain aspects of religiosity depending on the methodological background. Ever since psychology joined the disciplines working on this issue, the dictum of William James showed that different heuristics aim for different aspects. In his Varieties of Religious Experience from 1902, he made a distinction between two questions: “What is the nature of religion?” and “What is the meaning of religion?” It can be claimed that the search for the nature caused a vivid field of psychological research, following the assumption that the brain is the location and therefore the place religion “happens.”

A recent nomenclature (developed by Joseph Bulbulia) addresses eReligion (the external aspects of religion, the behavioral and cultural outcome) and iReligion (innate religion). Rethinking the relationship of these matters shows the twist that the evolutionary perspective brought into the scientific discussion about religion. The long-lasting deduction of iReligion from the “sacred” eReligion justified an almost metaphysical standing of man as a religious-cultural being. The “big picture” was already in place – this is inverted in cognitive theories, when the fragmented inputs of iReligion reconstitute a religious culture. eReligion is the big picture at last, not set in stone from the beginning. But even if the twist brought new approaches, ideas of religious dimensions, and therefore new theoretical perspectives, an underlying dualism seems to be alive: the individual versus social realm of religion(s). For future perspectives on evolutionary aspects of religion, there is much work to do in reframing this problem in the challenging entanglement of nature and culture. Focusing on the recent works, introduced as des CSR, the new aspect of the relation between cognition and culture can be described as dialectic, but not as an antagonism. Referring to the prospects of a cognitive niche construction, the brain is no longer a hardware that is genetically determined to generate a culture by running a heritage program; it becomes a cultural and social artifact. There may be – a tribute to some more or less reductionist naturalists – a lot of biological and even cognitive processes out of reach of our consciousness. They provide the theoretical framework to formulate hypothesis regarding the time and ecological aspects of their development in the biological evolution of Homo sapiens. These models of hominization are the starting basis for mental options leaving the area of natural sciences. When symbolical representations take the lead, the click of the ratchet becomes a relevant one – not to be understood as a single event but as the progression from hominitas to humanitas, when upon biological features, the cultural articulation occurs. This leads as well to religious conceptualizations that clearly operate as symbols, and symbolization is a promising starting point to connect cognition and culture.

A question is whether we have to deal with an encapsulation of religious cognition as a methodological narrowness. As Lawson and McCauley already showed in the 1990s, a proclaimed cognitive turn in “Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture” introduced the fundament for the so-called cognitive sciences of religion (CSR; see Barrett and Burdett (2011) for an overview). If this leads to the indication of a narrow-angle glaucoma, all depends on the self-conception and level of methodological self-reflection of the participating disciplines. There is no antidote against the atheistically apodictic – but the increasing discussions and projects on theories of evolution, especially considering evolutionary approaches, speak for themselves. A lot of work ahead, there is no metatheory in sight, capable of combining the contemporary approaches. Not only scientific work has to be done, both scientists and believers (not to be misunderstood as dichotomy) have to learn from recent findings. There are new terms in circulation that may be unsettling, talking about sacred things that may sound defaming. Followers of religion must learn to accept that the progress in sciences creates a new vocabulary and theoretical framework. It may sound crude when Boyer calls religion an “airy nothing” – this will be misunderstood when interpreted as an attack on religion but reveals its true meaning when interpreted with the theoretical background of the coevolution of nature and culture. “Airy nothing” is a phrase out of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 5, Scene1), when Theseus, the Duke of Athens, claims: “And as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.” The unknown obtains a name: In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). Besides new terms, religious representatives must accept that religious belief and behavior has not fallen from the sky, but is a natural phenomenon with a natural history that offers benefits to users that can be described within biological purposes. The relation between scientific explanations and religious belief changes as well as the foundations for a false peace. Obstacles like the NOMA proposition (the theory of science and religion as Nonoverlapping Magisteria; see Gould 1997; 1999) proved to be incorrect – rather a spell from the inside that has to be broken, there is no need to take evolutionary biology on a leash. Atheists and some other Brights must acknowledge that religiousness as a natural phenomenon shows certain features and abilities in social systems and might be requested from believers, even in modified form from disbelievers, because its functionality is based on the intrinsic motivation of the human mind generating religious life, practice, and perspective. “It is no obligation to belief; but to act as if you belief.” [„Es ist nicht Pflicht, zu glauben, […] sondern es ist bloß und allein dies Pflicht, zu handeln, als ob man es glaubte“Friedrich Karl Forberg (1798, p. 38).

Conclusion

The evolutionary perspective on religion combines research findings and theoretical approaches to test the hypothesis that human religiousness may arise from a vast variety of adaptations in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, observable both in recent cultures and in the cultural products of our ancestors. Theoretical approaches offer ‘positive’ positions that describe religion as an adaption to certain human needs and conditions during the evolution of social behavior, providing solutions for cooperation problems in complex communities. They include improving the ability to cope with crises and to overcome the attraction of personal gain by exploiting others; avoidance of harming the common good; improving cooperation and moral solidarity within groups; and improving competitiveness with other groups. So-called domains of religiosity (mysticism, ethics, myth and ritual) describe a modular structure of cognitive skills in a network of brain, body, language and culture, providing an architecture underlying the human capacity for religion. ‘Negative’ positions develop a non-adaptive stance when they give rise to side-product theories, epiphenomenalism or simply to talking religion down. The vastness of bio-cultural complexity must be the key aspect in any theory of the evolution of religion. Concepts like cognitive niche construction offer new perspectives in gene-culture-coevolution for developing further approaches to the study of religion.

Cross-References

Charles Darwin, Paleoanthropology, and the Modern Synthesis

Cultural Evolution During the Middle and Late Pleistocene in Africa and Eurasia

Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus

Historical Overview of Paleoanthropological Research

Modeling the Past: Archaeology

Paleoanthropology and the Foundation of Ethics: Methodological Remarks on the Problem of Criteriology