How and why did religion evolve?

By Brandon Ambrosino
19 April 2019
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190418-how-and-why-did-religion-evolve

Muslim worshippers perform the evening (Isha) prayers at the Kaaba. Emotions such as awe, loyalty, and love are central to many
religious celebrations (Credit: Getty)
This can be true for many behaviours – including music – but religion presents a particular puzzle, since it often involves extremely
costly behaviours, such as altruism and, at times, even self-sacrifice.
For this reason, some theorists such as Dunbar argue that we should also look beyond the individual to the survival of the group.
This is known as multilevel selection, which “recognises that fitness benefits can sometimes accrue to individuals through group-level
effects, rather than always being the direct product of the individual’s own actions”, as Dunbar defines it.
All societies have some kind of religion; in this there are no exceptions. "If all societies have a (religion), then it must have an
evolutionary purpose.Religion is not an objective of evolution, but arose while evolution pointed to other objectives. "If we want to
understand the role of religion in evolution we have to look beyond the individual, towards the survival of the group and recognize
those benefits that increase as a result of group actions: an example is cooperative hunting, which enables groups to catch bigger
prey than any members could catch as individuals. Bigger prey means more for me, even if I have to share the meat (since the animal
being shared is already larger than anything I could catch alone). Such group-level processes “require the individual to be sensitive to
the needs of other members of the group”, says Dunbar. There is no history of the religion of an individual creature. Our story is about
us.
Feeling first
If we are to understand religion, then, we first need to look back into your deep history to understand how human ancestors evolved
to live in groups in the first place.
We are, after all, descended from a long line of ancestral hominoids with “weak social ties and no permanent group structures”, says
Jonathan Turner, author of The Emergence and Evolution of Religion. That leads Turner to what he considers the million-dollar
question: “How did Darwinian selection work on the neuroanatomy of hominins to make them more social so they could generate
cohesive social bonds to form primary groups?” “That’s not a natural thing for apes.”
Our ape line evolved from our last common ancestor around 19 million years ago. Orangutans broke away about 13-16 million years
ago, while the gorilla line branched away about 8-9 million years ago. The hominin line then branched into two about 5-7 million years
ago, with one line leading to the chimpanzees and bonobos, and the other leading to us. We modern humans share 99% of our genes
with living chimpanzees – which means we’re the two most closely related apes in the whole line.
Human religion emerges out of our increased capacity for sociality
The similarities between humans and chimps are well known, but one important difference has to do with group size. Chimpanzees,
on average, can maintain a group size of about 45, says Dunbar. “This appears to be the largest group size that can be maintained
through grooming alone,” he says. In contrast, the average human group is about 150, known as Dunbar’s Number. The reason for
this, says Dunbar, is that humans have the capacity to reach three times as many social contacts as chimps for a given amount of social
effort. Human religion emerges out of this increased capacity for sociality.
How come? As our ape ancestors moved from receding forest habitats to more open environments, like the savannahs of eastern and
southern Africa, Darwinian pressures acted on them to make them more social for increased protection from predators and better
access to food; it also made it easier to find a mate. Without the ability to maintain new structures – like small groups of five or six so-
called nuclear families, says Turner – these apes wouldn’t have been able to survive.
So how did nature achieve this socialisation process? Turner says the key isn’t with what we typically think of as intelligence, but rather
with the emotions, which was accompanied by some important changes to our brain structure. Although the neocortex figures
prominently in many theories of the evolution of religion, Turner says the more important alterations concerned the subcortical parts
of the brain, which gave hominins the capacity to experience a broader range of emotions. These enhanced emotions promoted
bonding, a crucial achievement for the development of religion.

Complex religious feelings are often the combination of many emotions. Awe, for instance, is a heady mix of fear and happiness (Credit:
Getty)
The process of subcortical enhancement Turner refers to dates to about 4.5 million years ago, when the first Australopithecine
emerged. Initially, says Turner, selection increased the size of their brains about 100 cubic centimetres (cc) beyond that of
chimpanzees, to about 450 cc (in Australopithecus afarensis). For the sake of comparison, this is smaller than later hominins – Homo
habilis had a cranial capacity of 775 cc, while Homo erectus was slightly larger at 800-850. Modern humans, in contrast, boast a brain
size much bigger than any of these, with a cranial capacity of up to 1,400 cc.
It is in the story of how these [subcortical] mechanisms evolved that, ultimately, the origins of religion are to be discovered – Jonathan
Turner
But the comparably smaller brain size doesn’t mean that nothing was happening to the hominin brain. Brain size is measured by an
endocast, but Turner says these do not reflect the subcortical enhancement that was occurring between the emergence of
Australopiths (around 4 million years ago) and Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago). “It is in the story of how these [subcortical]
mechanisms evolved that, ultimately, the origins of religion are to be discovered.”
Although the neocortex of humans is three times the size of apes’, the subcortex is only twice as big – which leads Turner to believe
that the enhancement of hominin emotion was well underway before the neocortex began to grow to its current human size.
Here’s how nature pulled it off. You’ve probably heard talk of the so-called four primary emotions: aggression, fear, sadness, and
happiness. Notice anything about that list? Three of the emotions are negative. But the promotion of solidarity requires positive
emotions – so natural selection had to find a way to mute the negative emotions and enhance the positive ones, Turner says. The
emotional capacities of great apes (particularly chimpanzees) were already more elaborate than many other mammals, so selection
had something to work with.
At this point in his argument, Turner introduces the concept of first- and second-order elaborations, which are emotions that are the
result of a combinations of two or more primary emotions. So, for example, the combination of happiness and anger generates
vengeance, while jealousy is the result of combining anger and fear. Awe, which figures majorly in religion, is the combination of fear
and happiness. Second-order elaborations are even more complex, and occurred in the evolution from Homo erectus (1.8 million years
ago) to Homo sapiens (about 200,000 years ago). Guilt and shame, for example, two crucial emotions for the development of religion,
are the combination of sadness, fear, and anger.

Kashmiri Muslims celebrate Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi, the anniversary of the Prophet's birth (Credit: Getty)
It’s difficult to imagine religion without the capacity to experience these emotional elaborations for the same reason it’s difficult to
imagine close social groups without them: such an emotional palette binds us to one another at a visceral level. “Human solidarities
are only possible by emotional arousal revolving around positive emotions – love, happiness, satisfaction, caring, loyalty – and the
mitigation of the power of negative emotions, or at least some negative emotions,” says Turner. “And once these new valences of
positive emotions are neurologically possible, they can become entwined with rituals and other emotion-arousing behaviours to
enhance solidarities and, eventually, produce notions of supernatural goodness and power.”
Not to jump ahead too far, but it’s important to understand how pivotal feeling is in the evolution of religion. As far as Da rwin was
convinced, there wasn’t any difference between religious feeling and any other feeling. “It is an argument for materialism,” he wrote
in a journal entry, “that cold water brings on suddenly in head, a frame of mind, analogous to those feelings, which may be considered
as truly spiritual.” If this is true, then that means the causes of religious feelings can be pinpointed and studied just like any other
feeling.
Ritual
As selection worked on existing brain structures, enhancing emotional and interpersonal capacities, certain behavioural propensities
of apes began to evolve. Some of the propensities that Turner lists as already present in apes include: the ability to read eyes and faces
and to imitate facial gestures; various capacities for empathy; the ability to become emotionally aroused in social settings; the capacity
to perform rituals; a sense of reciprocity and justice; and the ability to see the self as an object in an environment. An increase in the
emotional palette available to apes would, according to Turner, result in an increase in all of these behavioural capacities.
Though many if not all of these behaviours have been documented in apes, I want to concentrate on two of them – ritual and empathy
– without which human religion would be unthinkable.
In archival footage, primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall describes the well-known waterfall dance which has been widely
observed in chimpanzees. Her comments are worth quoting at length:
When the chimpanzees approach, they hear this roaring sound, and you see their hair stands a little on end and then they move a bit
quicker. When they get here, they’ll rhythmically sway, often upright, picking up big rocks and throwing them for maybe 10 minutes.
Sometimes climbing up the vines at the side and swinging out into the spray, and they’re right down in the water which normally they
avoid. Afterwards you’ll see them sitting on a rock, actually in the stream, looking up, watching the water with their eyes a s it falls
down, and then watching it going away. I can’t help feeling that this waterfall display or dance is perhaps triggered by feelings awe,
wonder that we feel.
The chimpanzee’s brain is so like ours: they have emotions that are clearly similar to or the same as those that we call happiness, sad,
fear, despair, and so forth – the incredible intellectual abilities that we used to think unique to us. So why wouldn’t they also have
feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself?
Goodall has observed a similar phenomenon happen during a heavy rain. These observations have led her to conclude that
chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are. “They can’t analyse it, they don’t talk about it, they can’t describe what they feel. But you get
the feeling that it’s all locked up inside them and the only way they can express it is through this fantastic rhythmic dance.” In addition
to the displays that Goodall describes, others have observed various carnivalesque displays, drumming sessions, and various hooting
rituals.
The roots of ritual are in what Bellah calls “serious play” – activities done for their own sake, which may not serve an immediate
survival capacity, but which have “a very large potentiality of developing more capacities”. This view fits with various theories in
developmental science, showing that playful activities are often crucial for developing important abilities like theory of mind and
counterfactual thinking.
Play, in this evolutionary sense, has many unique characteristics: it must be performed “in a relaxed field” – when the animal is fed
and healthy and stress-free (which is why it is most common in species with extended parental care). Play also occurs in bouts: it has
a clear beginning and ending. In dogs, for example, play is initiated with a “bow”. Play involves a sense of justice, or at least equanimity:
big animals need to self-handicap in order to not hurt smaller animals. And it might go without saying, but play is embodied.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men take part in the Tashlich ritual, during which sins are cast into the water to the fish (Credit: Getty)
Now compare that to ritual, which is enacted, which is embodied. Rituals begin and end. They require both shared intention and
shared attention. There are norms involved. They take place in a time within time – beyond the time of the everyday. (Think, for
example, of a football game in which balls can be caught “out of bounds” and time can be paused. We regularly participate in modes
of reality in which we willingly bracket out “the real world”. Play allows us to do this.) Most important of all, says Bellah, play is a
practice in itself, and “not something with an external end”.
Bellah calls ritual “the primordial form of serious play in human evolutionary history”, which means that ritual is an enhancement of
the capacities that make play first possible in the mammalian line. There is a continuity between the two. And while Turner
acknowledges it might be pushing it to refer to a chimpanzee waterfall dance or carnival as Ritual with a capital R, it is possible to
affirm that “these ritual-like behavioural propensities suggest that some of what is needed for religious behaviour is part of the
genome of chimpanzees, and hence, hominins”.
Empathy
The second trait we must consider is empathy. Empathy is not primarily in the head. It’s in the body – at least that’s how it started. It
began, writes de Waal, “with the synchronisation of bodies, running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others
cry, or yawning when others yawn”.

Buddhist monks launch a sky lantern during the Yee Peng Festival in Chiang Mai. The ritual symbolises the release of kindness and
goodwill (Credit: Getty)
Empathy is absolutely central to what we call morality, says de Waal. “Without empathy, you can’t get human morality. It makes us
interested in others. It makes us have an emotional stake in them.” If religion, according to our definition, is a way of being together,
then morality, which instructs us as to the best ways to be together, is an inextricable part of that called religion.
“We see animals want to share food even though it costs them. We do experiments on them and the general conclusion is that many
animals’ first tendency is to be altruistic and cooperative. Altruistic tendencies come very naturally to many mammals.”
Is this just self-preservation? Are the animals just acting in their own best interests? Are they just preparing (so to speak) for a time
when they will need help? “Of course these pro-social tendencies have benefits. There are pleasurable sensations associated with
the action of giving to others. Evolution has produced pleasurable sensations for behaviours we need to perform, like sex and eating
and female-nursing. The same is true for altruism, says de Waal.
Such a hard and fast line between altruism and selfishness, then, is naive at best and deceptive at worst. And we can see the same
with discussions of social norms. The simplest example is a spider web or nest. If you disturb it, the animal’s going to repair that right
away because they have a norm for how it should look and function. They either abandon it, or start over and repair it. Anima ls are
capable of having goals and striving towards them. In the social world, if they have a fight, they come together and try to repair
damage. They try to get back to an ought state. They have norm of how this distribution should be. The idea that normativity is
[restricted to] humans is not correct. De Waal argues that animals seem to possess a mechanism for social repair. “About 30 different
primate species reconcile after fights, and that reconciliation is not limited to the primates. There is evidence for this mechanism in
hyenas, dolphins, wolves, domestic goats.”
Women prepare food for the homeless during a charity Christmas dinner (Credit: Getty)
He also finds evidence that animals “actively try to preserve harmony within their social network … by reconciling after conflict,
protesting against unequal divisions, and breaking up fights among others. They behave normatively in the sense of correcting, or
trying to correct, deviations from an ideal state. They also show emotional self-control and anticipatory conflict resolution in order to
prevent such deviations. This makes moving from primate behaviour to human moral norms less of a leap than commonly thought.”
There’s obviously a gap between primate social repair and the institutionalisation of moral codes that lie at the heart of modern human
societies. Still, says de Waal, all of these “human moral systems make use of primate tendencies”.
How far back to these tendencies go? Probably, like those capacities that allowed for play (and ultimately ritual), to the advent of
parental care. “During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring out-reproduced those who were
cold and distant,” says de Waal. Of course, nurturing is arguably seen in species of fish, crocodiles, and snakes, but the nurturing
capabilities of mammals is really a giant leap forward in the evolutionary story.
The early dawn of religion
Our religious services of today may seem worlds away from the mammalian play and empathy that emerged in our deep past, and
indeed institutionalised religion is much more advanced than a so-called waterfall dance. But evolution teaches us that complex,
advanced phenomena develop from simple beginnings. As Bellah reminds us, we don’t come from nowhere. “We are embedded in a
deep biological and cosmological history.”
Our religious services of today seem worlds away from their ancient origins, but like all human behaviours, they are deeply embedded
in evolutionary history (Credit: Getty)
As the ape line evolved from our last common ancestor in more open environments, it was necessary to pressure apes, who prefer to
go it alone, to form more lasting social structures. Natural selection was able to accomplish this astonishing feat by enhancing the
emotional palettes available that had long been available to our ancestors. With a broader set of emotions, the hominin brain was
then able to enhance some of its capabilities, some of which quite naturally lent themselves a religious way of being. As these
capacities got more acutely enhanced with the growth of the Homo brain and the development of the neocortex, behaviours such as
play and ritual entered a new phase in hominin development, becoming the raw materials out of which cultural evolution would begin
to institutionalise religion.
Religious beliefs and rituals help unite individuals and groups. Emotions such as admiration, fear, loyalty and love are at the center
of many religious celebrations. The evolution of religion is inseparable from the growing sociability of hominids. Religion is a way
of being, of feeling, of feeling together and working together to survive.
And though this history doesn’t determine us – for with each new phase in life’s story comes greater power of agency – this bio-
cosmological history influences everything we do and are. Even the most seemingly autonomous human decision is made from within
history. That’s the big picture here. That’s what we’ve been keeping in mind as we made our way back in time to the evolutionary
seeds that would eventually – and quite slowly – blossom into human religion.

--
Brandon Ambrosino has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Politico, Economist, and other publications. He
lives in Delaware. This is the first of a two-part special examining the evolutionary roots of religion.