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The Biology of Religious Behavior The Biology of Religious Behavior The Biology of Religious Behavior The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion Edited by Jay R. Feierman PRAEGER An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC Copyright © 2009 by Jay R. Feierman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The biology of religious behavior : the evolutionary origins of faith and religion / edited by Jay R. Feierman. p. cm. Proceedings of a symposium held in July 2008 at the University of Bologna, Italy. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–36430–3 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–36431–0 (ebook) 1. Psychology, Religious—Congresses. 2. Human evolution—Religious aspects—Congresses. I. Feierman, Jay R. BL53.B4655 2009 200.1’9—dc22 2009010608 131211109 12345 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America To all whose lives have been affected by religion. Contents Preface xi Introduction xv PART ONE: DESCRIPTION OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR 1 Chapter 1: The Evolution of Religious Behavior in Its 3 Socioecological Contexts Stephen K. Sanderson Chapter 2: Toward a Testable Definition of Religious Behavior 20 Lyle B. Steadman, Craig T. Palmer, and Ryan M. Ellsworth Chapter 3: Natural Gazes, Non-Natural Agents: The Biology 36 of Religion’s Ocular Behaviors Thomas B. Ellis Chapter 4: Religion and Hidden Patterns in Behavior: 52 Religion as a Biological Phenomenon Magnus S. Magnusson PART TWO: THE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF 69 RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR Chapter 5: The Evolutionary History of Religious Behavior 71 Jay R. Feierman viii Contents PART THREE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS 87 BEHAVIOR IN THE INDIVIDUAL Chapter 6: Religious Behavior as a Reflection of Childhood 89 Corporal Punishment Benjamin J. Abelow Chapter 7: Religious Behavior and the Adolescent Brain 106 Candace S. Alcorta PART FOUR: CAUSES OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR 123 Chapter 8: The Brain and Religious Adaptations 125 Michael T. McGuire and Lionel Tiger Chapter 9: Is Religious Behavior ‘‘Internally Guided’’ by 141 Religious Feelings and Needs? Lluis Oviedo Chapter 10: Mirror Neurons, Culture, and Spirit: 157 Causes of Religious Behavior Burgess C. Wilson PART FIVE: THE ADAPTIVENESS OF RELIGIOUS 173 BEHAVIOR Chapter 11: The Adaptiveness of Changing Religious 175 Belief Systems John S. Price Chapter 12: The Adaptiveness of Fasting and 190 Feasting Rituals: Costly Adaptive Signals? Rick Goldberg Chapter 13: Cooperative Punishment and Religion’s Role in 204 the Evolution of Prosocial Altruism Klaus Jaffe and Luis Zaballa Chapter 14: Religious Behavior and Cooperation 219 Maria Emı´lia Yamamoto, Monique Leita˜o, Rochele Castelo-Branco, and Fı´via de Arau´jo Lopes Contents ix PART SIX: CONCLUSION 241 Chapter 15: Conclusion 243 Jay R. Feierman About the Editor and Contributors 265 Index 271 Preface The firstborn child of two young parents is born prematurely. The pediatrician tells her parents that she has a 50:50 chance of surviving. Her father, who previously had not considered himself a religious man, looks upward with tears in his eyes and says, ‘‘Please God. Don’t let her die.’’ A middle-aged man dressed in a dark business suit sits in the first row at the funeral parlor staring ahead at the mahogany casket containing the remains of his mother. His wife sits next to him with her arm around his shoulder trying to comfort him. His sorrow is con- soled by the minister saying that his mother is now in heaven with her maker. An old orthodox Jewish rabbi, who as a young man was liberated from Mauthausen concentration camp, explains that during that ter- rible time in his life when everything else in the world had been taken from him, all he had was God. A thirty-some–year-old Navajo Indian woman, who outwardly seems quite acculturated, is told by the Indian Health Service doctor that she has cervical cancer and needs surgery. She asks if the surgery could be postponed for a week so that she can have a traditional Navajo healing ceremony first. A young Balinese Hindu man walks toward the grave of his father who, six months earlier, was buried in a temporary-grave area near the cremation grounds because the family did not have enough money for a cremation ceremony. On the way he buys a cup of hot coffee at a small roadside stand. He takes the Styrofoam cup with the hot coffee to his father’s grave, carefully stirring in the milk and sugar as he walks. He stops and lights a cigarette. He kneels and then places the steaming hot coffee and the lit cigarette on the ground at the head of his father’s grave. He bows his head and softly says something in the xii Preface ancient Balinese language. A short silence follows. When asked what he just said, he responds in English, ‘‘For you papa.’’ All of these vignettes1 show just how good, helpful, and comforting religion can be to human beings. Yet, there is another less uplifting aspect of religion that also has to be addressed. It is that ‘‘the identification with values of a community, be they religious, party-political or ethno-nationalistic ...have led to the most atrocious bloodshed in our history.’’ 2 During the ten years since these words were written, the three types of community values referred to in the quote—religious, party-political, and ethno- nationalistic—seem to have undergone a change in relative impor- tance. Party-political and ethno-nationalistic community values, which had been the main forces dividing the world in the twentieth century—as evidenced by two world wars plus the Cold War— have been partly overshadowed by community values associated with religion. Religious communities, like all communities, have shared systems of beliefs, values, and behaviors that act as ‘‘in-group markers.’’ Like most in-group markers familiar to anthropologists, they separate humanity into ‘‘we and others.’’ If that is correct, then the often- quoted statement of John Cardinal Newman (1801–1890), ‘‘Oh, how we hate one another for the love of God,’’ 3 is somewhat of a misno- mer. ‘‘We’’ do not hate ourselves! It is ‘‘other’’ in ‘‘an-other’’ to whom that famous statement really refers. The out-group ‘‘other’’ has the potential to become the object of the in-group’s hate. ‘‘Oh, how we hate others for the love of God’’ has much more historical resonance. We will show in this book how religion binds together and creates the ‘‘we’’ of a single religious community. It is the inevitable religious differences that create the ‘‘others,’’ which are different religious com- munities. These differences have in the twenty-first century become associated with the number one national security concern for all of us, irrespective of what nation we call our home. But we must take first things first. To understand religious differences, we first must better understand religion, which is the primary objective of this book. All of the book’s contributors share the belief that the world is dan- gerously divided on the basis of religious differences and that neither religion nor science is going to bridge this divide alone. The contrib- utors hope that the collaborative effort between the biobehavioral sci- ences and religion in this book will make at least a small contribution toward bridging the religious divide. Preface xiii At the broad level of the biobehavioral sciences, what divides the major religions of the world is far smaller than what unites them. However, this similarity is a ‘‘double edged sword’’ because it also fos- ters competition. In many parts of the world people of the same reli- gion who pray together tend to lay together. They then have children together. They become an in-group ‘‘breeding population,’’ which then competes with other in-group breeding populations for the same limited resources. An awareness of some of these issues hav- ing to do with in-group/out-group and cooperation/competition, which we cover in the book, may be at least one small step toward understanding some of the religious-based differences dividing us.4 The realization of the need to better understand religion for all of our lives is what led most of the contributors of this book to come together for a symposium on the biology of religious behavior at the University of Bologna, Italy, in July 2008, as part of a larger international conference on human behavioral biology. That sympo- sium provided the inspiration for this book. We wish to thank a number of people whose work and help made this book possible: the organizers5 and scientific and program com- mittee6 of the human behavioral biology conference7 at the University of Bologna; numerous reviewers of earlier drafts of the book; Irena¨us Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the ‘‘father of human ethology,’’ who pioneered the application of behavioral biology to humans and whose eightieth birthday we celebrated in Bologna.8 We especially want to thank Praeger Senior Acquisitions Editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva, who believed in the value of our project, and Kathy Breit, who helped to turn it into this book. NOTES 1. None of these vignettes are fictional. They have all been experienced by the editor; one was experienced personally and the others were experi- enced as an observer.
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