Factually! with Adam Conover - How Religion Evolved with Robin Dunbar

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Instead of debunking religious beliefs, what if we investigated where religion comes from, and why it’s virtually universal across human cultures? Anthropologist and “How Religion Evolved And Why It Endures” author Robin Dunbar joins Adam to discuss the origins of religion. He describes how touch, laughter, and song bonded people together, and the social role of religious rituals such as sin-eating. You can purchase Robin’s book here: http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. Before we jump into it, I have a huge announcement to make. After three years of work, my new show, The G Word, is finally coming out this month on Netflix. It premieres on May 19th, and the trailer just dropped. So if you head to any of my social media accounts, at Adam Conover, wherever you follow me, you can watch the brand new trailer for my brand new show.

It's a comedy documentary series about the federal government and all the crazy ways it affects our lives, both good and bad. I've been working on it for almost three years, and I am so excited for you to finally see it for the first time. And once again, it premieres May 19th on Netflix. So look for it there. And of course, I want to thank everyone who supports this show on Patreon. If you want to join our community and get access to bonus podcast episodes, our live community book club and exclusive standup that I do not post anywhere else, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. That's patreon.com slash Adam Conover. But let's talk about this

week's episode. You know, when I hosted Adam Ruins Everything, people would come to me all the time with things that they wanted me to ruin. And over and over again, one of the most popular requests was that people wanted me to ruin religion. As though with one 24-minute blast of basic cable info comedy, I could dismantle a foundational element of human society and existence. Now look, we never did an episode called Adam Ruins Religion, and the reason for that is that I never felt that religion is debunkable in the way that other claims are. Like, okay, I think what people wanted me to do was to make the argument that there is no God, or at least that, you know, the phenomena that we see happening in the world around us are not causally connected to an old white man with a beard sitting up in a cloud somewhere.

And I never wanted to make that episode for a couple of reasons. Reason number one is there were a lot of people making it already. In the last few decades, plenty of scientists, philosophers, and general smug assholes have written books, made documentaries, and put out podcasts trying to prove that there is no God and say that science is a much better way to understand the world around us. And even though I do call myself an atheist and I do love science, I didn't really want to reproduce all those other people's work. But more importantly, I also think that that is a reductive ass way to look at religion.

See, I don't think religion is actually in competition with science in that direct way. It's not people asking, why do things happen? And then deducing that, oh, some God made it. So religion isn't just a set of beliefs. In fact, I'd argue it's not even primarily a set of beliefs. More importantly, religion is something that people do. It's a set of rituals, practices, traditions. And all of these are things that we do with other people. Religion isn't a form of science. It's part of our social lives. And it has been since pre-recorded history.

The oldest known temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey was built 11 or 12 thousand years ago. It predates agriculture. These prehistoric people who spent their time picking ticks off of each other and throwing rocks at gazelles were still dragging their families to church to the extent that they devoted an immense amount of effort to building those churches. So if we look at it that way, if we look at religion as a social phenomenon, well, then we have to start to admit that it seems like religion must play some social purpose in our lives for us to devote so much time to it, even before what we understand as civilization even started. Religion appears to be so important to

human society that it causes us to chant, sing, compose music, to perform rituals marking the year and events in our lives, to produce monumental architecture, to literally die in order to build a monument. And then add to all that the fact that even though religions differ around the world, religion is present in practically every human society. Every human society devotes immense amounts of time and effort to it. So look, I say this as an atheist, as a person who considers myself to be non-religious, but maybe instead of trying to debunk religion, we should be trying to understand it. We should be asking, why is this so important to human societies that we devote so much resources

to it? What purpose does religion serve that makes it seemingly indispensable in human life? Well, to answer that question, we have an incredible guest on the show today. I am so thrilled to have him here. His name is Robin Dunbar, and he is a living legend in anthropology and evolutionary psychology, which he teaches at Oxford. He's published hundreds of scientific articles and written or edited 20-something books. He's famous for pioneering a concept known as Dunbar's number, which says that humans have a hardwired limit on the number of relationships we can maintain. And you'll see in this interview how that concept plays a fascinating role

in his explanation of religion. And he has a new book on that topic called How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. Without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Robin Dunbar. Robin Dunbar, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm thrilled to have you. It's a great pleasure. So you've written a book about religion and where it came from. I'd love to start by asking you what I think should be an easy question, just so we have our bases covered. What is religion?

Oh, I think at the end of the day, and I suppose this is kind of the pitch of the book, I think at the end of the day, and I suppose this is kind of the pitch of the book, is it's not all a kind of highfalutin theology and that kind of stuff. What it really is about is a kind of intense emotional feeling that you have that you're kind of entering into the transcendent world. You're somehow connecting with the spirit world. entering into the transcendent world. You're somehow connecting with the spirit world. So, it's not a kind of mystical, deep down, we can't quite put words to it because we don't have the words to express it kind of feeling that you're engaging with, if you like, another mind, let's say. Well, so that's really interesting that you center it around an experience that one has rather than so many people would talk about, well, it's an organization, it's an institution, there's doctrines and there's that sort of thing. Why do you center it

that way? Because I could imagine having experience like that, I could drop acid and have that experience, right? And have that feeling. And a lot of people would say that's not religion. didn't have that experience, right? And have that feeling. And a lot of people would say that's not religion. I kind of would disagree with them claiming it's not religion. It's probably not religion as you as an individual might experience it embedded in your own particular religion, whatever that may be. But it does build on those kind of, dare I say it, you know, 60s hippie acid trips. They do kind of build on that same mystical element, that same sense of appeared in the course of human evolution, was like, and it's never gone away. That mystical component is there at the base of all world religions as we have them now. what's happened in, if you like, historically over the last eight or 10,000 years only is that we've kind of layered theological structures on top of these basic underpinnings. And those

theological structures have got more and more complex because initially, that's starting about eight, 10,000 years ago, the beginning of the Neolithic, you have what we might call doctrinal religions appearing. So you've got a sort of doctrinal component layered on top of this mystical underpinning. But it's a doctrinal component with gods that tend not to be interested in what humans do. They're very interested in you sacrificing to them, but that's about it.

And they're happy to punish you, or very keen to punish you if you don't do the sacrifice right or generously enough. Yeah. And, you know, that phase lasted, you know, probably about four or 5,000 years. And then during the first millennium BC, so roughly two to 3,000 years ago, you just have this sudden explosion of what are sometimes referred to as the Axial Age religions or the world religions as we have them now. These are religions that have primarily a single high god. It's a moral high god who's genuinely interested in us here on Earth, as it were, and not just in that kind of punishing sense. I'm, you know, God is going to wag his finger at you if you don't behave, that's for sure. But

also, on the other hand, it's a much more benevolent sort of God who's interested in your well-being and happiness. So, you can see these phases sort of gradually building through historical time. There is that shift between the Greek gods who are mainly concerned with fucking and killing each other versus the Christian god who's like, really, is like, what's Adam up to? Like, is he living right?

Like, let me keep an eye on this guy. And oh, he's had a little bit of trouble. Let me send a blessing, Adam. Like Like Zeus never really did that kind of thing. He just had sex with people and murdered. That's right. Yeah. Whereas the sort of later gods are inclined to send messengers to wag their fingers at you in the form of prophets, biblical prophets, if you like, or various kinds of religious figures who might sort of wag their finger at you from the pulpit. But you feel that those doctrines, you know, all of the body of theology of the Catholic Church or Martin Luther's precepts hammered on the church

door or, you know, the, I don't know, the Buddhist polycanon or whatever you want to say, any kind of scripture. Those are all just sort of what later inventions that we've attached onto this root experience of mysticism that you feel underlies all religion? Essentially, yes. But this is really seems to be related to the growing need to manage the frictions of living together in very large communities. So these further phases seem to live in settlements and villages and then, you know, small towns of the kind you find scattered all over, you know, the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean and other places too. Where the stresses of living together, obviously in California,

you know, there are no such things as stresses, but if you live in London… We've got a few, but sure. Stick to London. My grandmother is from California. Don't knock it. If you're a commuter in London or somewhere like that, you have to call Tokyo or whatever. You have to contend with the subway every morning. Probably, you know, sort of the subway in New York at the moment, you know, is just, you know, full of stresses that you could do without.

And it sets you up bad for the day and the rest of the day is rubbish. And, you know, you probably behave badly as a consequence of that just to sort of, you know, sort of offload some of the grief that's driving you crazy. So, you know, what these doctrinal religions seem to do is to come in to try and manage that and just hold the lid down on it. So it doesn't explode and kind of destroy the community and drive everybody away by people behaving unusually badly. And they do that, what, by leveling some form of social control by saying, well, well, one must not covet thy neighbor's wife because there's too much wife coveting going on?

Yeah, I think those tend to, although, you know, those kind of prescriptions, as in the Ten Commandments and so on, seem to come in much more with the axial age religions a bit further down the road. But I think what initially happens is you've got a phase of having a kind of God who seriously wags his or her finger at the miscreants down below and tries to keep them in order, in effect. It's just a way of trying to sort of prevent them flying off the handle the moment somebody, you know, stresses them out or dumps on them, as they were. But certainly, you know, we're talking at that stage, we're talking about, you know, villages of maybe 1, people, you know, by modern standards, quite small, but still, you know, they're stressful places to live.

Later on, once you get the axiom of religion, sort of beginning about 3000 years ago, then now you're into kind of political units, nation, well, they're not nation states at that point, but city states and that kind of thing of a million people. And that seems to be the threshold. At that point, two things come in. One is moral high gods who are seriously interested in your good behavior. But also, you know, a much stronger sense of theology. And even at the doctrinal stage, what the theology is doing is kind of giving you a reason to turn up every week or whatever to go through the rituals, if you like, the church services, to take part in the religion services to get the kind of inoculation that the rituals

of religions actually give you. Yeah. It's a kind of bottom up and a top down because it's kind of saying, no, no, no, just keep turning up, you know, and you'll feel better. It's like going and, you know, having a weekly session at a stand-up comedy show. You come out just feeling the world is better. And if you keep going,

the world looks really good from week to week. But if you stop going, boy, does it look shit. Oh my God. That is perhaps the best pitch for why people should go to standup comedy shows I've ever heard. Thank you for that.

It is true. It's a form of, it's a form of religion. It makes things a little bit lighter for you. Please go out and It's a form of, it's a form of religion. It, uh, uh, makes things a little bit lighter for you. Please go out and support your local comedy clubs, everybody, especially as we come back from all those closures because of COVID. Um, but okay. A lot of this makes sense to me. Um, but something I'm very curious about though, is, uh, I just read as part of our community book club that we do with this podcast for our Patreon subscribers, just read a book called Four Lost Cities by Annalie Newitz, a previous guest on the show.

And they write about how a lot of very early, probably post-Neolithic, but a lot of very early human cities were almost built around religion. That the only way to explain the way that people gathered in a certain area and the way they built their homes were because of religious reasons that, you know, we might not know that much about the religion, but we can tell that. And what that made me think about is what benefit does religion have that early in human civilization? saying, hey, let's build a giant earthwork. Let's, you know, devote thousands and thousands of person hours to moving earth and stone around for an immaterial reason, because someone ate a mushroom and had a vision, right? That would seem to be suboptimal if you're looking at it from a very, you know, neo-Darwinian kind of lens. So what is your view on that? Okay, so I think, you know, if you go a step back to the previous period, which probably goes right back to the appearance of archaic humans, so people like the Neanderthals somewhere around 500,000 years ago, right through in effect to the Neolithic.

You have this period of kind of mystical type religions that are very much based around trance and kind of, as you might say, kind of weird experiences in deep caves where you become disoriented and kind of the mind, you know, sort of goes into freewheeling and into, you know, trance. And, you know, you enter the spirit world and you can travel around the spirit world and have these kind of experiences. What that seems to arise in terms of is simply bonding the communities

that they were living in. But these are small scale communities, and those kinds of religions still exist. They're basically characteristic of orphaned gatherers. They don't have a moral code that's justified by God or theology. They have a moral code, but it's just a social one. This is what we do because it's always how we've done it. There's no argument. But that's completely separate from their religious experiences. There are no gods. There are kind of demons and good spirits and stuff in the sky or in wells or in springs and in trees and all these kind of things.

There are no priests as such. It's a kind of immersive religion. Everybody takes part in it, and they're almost always centred around trance and the entering of trance states either through dance or singing or music or what have you. And that seems to be very good at bonding small-scale societies where you're dealing with really quite small groups. And the reason I think is, well, the reason we've come to the conclusion

that it does this is that trance is triggered by the endorphin system in the brain. Now, the endorphin system is actually part and parcel of the social bonding mechanism for all monkeys and apes and humans. So monkeys and apes trigger it by social grooming, you know, leafing through the fur. The action of leafing through the fur triggers the endorphin system in the brain via a very specialized neural system. And we still do that. You know, that's why physical touch is so important in our closer relationships. You know, it's not the sort of

thing you do with strangers heaven for then uh but you know with our closer family and friends perhaps maybe 50 people in total only you know we do a lot of casual touching you know hugs and caresses and and and you know strokes on the arm and an arm around a shoulder. That kind of thing goes on all the time, and it's triggering the endorphin system. But what happened is once we got to the sort of archaic human stage half a million years ago, there was a push to increase group sizes to deal with kind of external threats in the environment, which went beyond or pushed groups beyond the size that

could be bonded just by grooming alone. What we did was find a whole lot of things that triggered the endorphin system without having to involve physical touch, because the problem with physical touch, as we well know, both for monkeys and ourselves, is the intimacy of it means you can only do it with one person at a time and you don't have infinite time so you can't do it with large numbers of people and in fact it seems groups of about 50 is the limit you can bond in this way so when we want to push our group sizes beyond that we had to find these other mechanisms and what came into play successively were laughter singing and dancing singing probably without words then the evolution of language kicked in and we had feasting um eating together drinking alcohol together in particular turns out to be a very good trigger

of the endorphin system and uh telling very sad stories um and the rituals of religion. And we've shown that all of these trigger the endorphin system and make you feel very bonded to the people you're engaged in it with, so without necessarily having to physically touch them. So it's kind of like grooming at a distance. So religion's in that mix very early on, as I said, from perhaps archaic humans of 500 000 years ago and and that kind of worked pretty well i think that you know it's once you get them living in in groups and in in settled groups that are larger than the kind of standard groups of hunter

gatherers that you kind of hit the next problem and the next problem and that's just created by the stresses of living in large groups and what that demanded was something was a bit more tough and religion seems to be particularly good at handling that problem so of keeping the lid on these kind of kind of stresses by trick well it's the rituals of religion you engage in, and particularly the synchronized rituals. You think, you know, what do we do? We sing hymns or chant bits of the Pali canon or whatever it may be in all the big religions. You know, that's a thing that's going on in unison, if you like,

in very close synchrony. Lots of religions dance, you know, they dance. The Coptic Christians in Ethiopia the deacons dance before the tabernacle the altar in memory of King David dancing before the tabernacle and it's a what's interesting about that it's a very slow swaying kind of movement it's not a frenetic dance it's very slow and that seems to be particularly good, that slow movement in triggering the endorphin system. But, you know, it always seems to come back to the endorphin system that raises your pain threshold. It lightens your mood. You just feel so much better. And it makes you feel very trusting and bonded with the people you do these things with.

And in addition, turns out endorphins also trigger the immune system. And they trigger the release of natural killer cells in the white blood cell system. And those particular cells, their targets are viruses and particular interests for the moment, and certain cancers in particular. So it actually has a direct health benefit, it seems. Wow. So in your view, religion is actually adaptive to the problem of living in settlements, allowed us to live in larger groups.

And what I find really fascinating about your account. Well, let me just give you an example of that, actually. Please. And it's an example close to home. So we looked at, as is some work I did with Rich Sosis, who's over on the other side of the US, but we looked at a big database of 19th century American millennial communes. So the place was full of these kind of things. These are people trying to escape the wickedness of the East Coast, clearly, and the wickedness

of Europe and other places. And they would go off into the desert or the mountains or whatever and set themselves up as a little commune. Now, you had two kinds of communes, basically. A bunch of them had religious frameworks and religious… Sometimes they were led by charismatic leaders and they were placed… I suppose the Mormons would be an example of that, starting out as a little bunch and then sort of building and building and building. Others were purely secular. A lot of these were Owenite in their views. They were very socially minded.

And in fact, to the harmony community that Owen himself, Richard Owen, set up, to that we owe public libraries in the US because they founded the first one. They founded girls' education in the US for the first time. All sorts of social benefits came out of it. But the problem was, there was something missing from these secular things. So, A, their foundation sizes were much smaller than the foundation size for religious communes, and B, they didn't last anything like as long. So, the average size of the foundation of secular communes was 50 people, and the average duration before they fell apart because the leader ran off with the savings or something like that. That was only 10 years, whereas the religious ones had an average size of foundation of 150 people, so three times bigger.

And the average duration was 70 years. And some of them, of course, are still going. You know, the Hutterites, the Mormons, so on and so forth. still going, you know, the Hutterites, the Mormons, so on and so forth. Many people will be familiar with a lot of these, the Shakers, you know, the Anita community up in upstate New York. Whereas, you know, you will never have heard of most of the secular ones because they just didn't last. And I think that's because there's this commitment to the community that comes through, you know, the religious sense of belonging and the paraphernalia and so on. It's attached to in the bottom up sense. It's not necessarily that, you know, you've got sort of high priests wagging their finger over you on Sunday.

Of course, they did that. But, you know, in addition, you've got this sense of commitment and belonging, which allowed you just to behave a little bit better. Well, and you've got, as you say, these rituals that just feel good and connect you to people and improve social bonds within a community. What's really fascinating to me about this account is that we've been talking about religion for 20 minutes. And, i asked you what is it where does it come from and you've given your answer so far and not once have you said the traditional explanation which is well humans were trying to explain why such and such happened why did the rain fall why did the rain

not fall the gods must be angry the gods must be angry. The gods must be, you know, not angry. And that story that I've heard my whole life always posits religion as being an alternative or an early form of science, almost, that it's a way of humans understanding the world. And that actually, you know, if you look back at the sort of atheism movement of the, you know, late 2000s, you know, Richard Dawkins's books and that sort of thing. The objection is mostly this is pseudoscience. It's false science. It's a bad way to learn about the world. But in your account that you've been giving for a bit now, you haven't mentioned that piece of religion at all as being, you know, an account of the creation of the universe or why do things fall down or, you know, why does the sun move through the sky? universe or why do things fall down or you know why does the sun move through the sky um does do those sorts of questions have any um you know efficacy in your uh in your account or do you

feel that's besides the point because uh yeah yeah no i there's nothing wrong with that account i think i mean it's very clear that lots of religions do that you know the particularly the kind of well you see it even in the shamanic type religions of all over the world that's the hunter-gatherer type religions and you see it right the way through you know the big religions uh as as we commonly think of them the world religions as i haven't now this sense of being able to control and predict and control the future, being able to cure diseases, you know, sort of being able to improve your chances in love. All these kind of many, many sort of wishes and wants and fears, you know, are clearly all there. And I think they come in probably quite early on because the thing about the shamanic, trance-based type religions is they take you off into another world. And in that other world, I mean, to you, it seems very real. Presumably, it's just going on in your head once you go into

trance. And once you're there, you're experiencing a different kind of world. And if that, in some sense, makes you wonder, you know, well, how does this relate to the world we normally live in? You know, is there another world beyond the ordinary physical world that we're familiar with? How is it that things actually happen in the physical world? It is a step towards science. I mean, I don't think anybody would want to claim it was sophisticated modern science. Good heavens, you know, that's been a lot of hard work to develop

and a lot of education to get there, you know, building on the shoulders of giants before us, as it were. So, you know, why would you expect, let's say, hunter-gatherer folks, tribes to have figured out relativity before Einstein got there? You know, you wouldn't. I mean, it's just, you know, the wrong way to view it, I think. But it's, you know, it's kind of how we attempt to explain the world and

have some kind of control over it. And of course, if you look at the modern religion, look at Catholicism, let's say, in sort of the right at its base, as it were, sort of ordinary person in the street, you know, these same kinds of, call them superstitions, if you like, are there, you know, the evil eye, you know, was kicking around for a long time. We were still wishing wells, well, still are wishing wells. We go throwing money in them for goodness sakes. I do it. I mean, yeah.

Yeah. You know, we tie, you know, there are trees, you know, that have special significance and people go and tie messages on there, you know, bring me luck in my exams, bring me luck in love, all these kind of things in the hope that it will be done. You know, and there's sometimes weird and wonderful things. The most extraordinary version of this I, is something called sin eaters. So sin eaters were very active, certainly through the 19th century and probably have a long history before that.

I mean, this is not Catholicism. This is sort of good, upright Protestant sort of Methodism or something of those kinds. This was the village sin eater who would come and sort of deal with your sins, in effect, after you died. And the way this worked is when you laid the, you know, whoever it was died, you laid the body out in the front parlour, usually in a a coffin and you put a a plate of um salt and bread on their chest and then you know that they would be there for a few days before the funeral but just before the sort of funeral cortege set off to go to the church

for burial the local sunita would come in and eat the bread um usually helped by a glass of something, shall we say, warming. The bread's a little dry at this point, as we're having sat on a corpse for a couple of days. Not super appetizing. And of course, it's worse because the theory is that what happens is the salt helps the dead person's sins be transferred into the bread. The sin eater then absorbs the sins, and you go off to the next world, as it were, completely free of sin.

And these kind of little rituals are very widespread in Europe. So the Dutch have a version of that where they make dead cakes, as they call them. And these are sort of eaten by, I think in that particular case, the family around the corpse. And, you know, it's still actually practiced. I mean, it's become much more of a just a ceremony now, but it clearly was the same kind of thing. And you can see all over europe and i guess probably those kind of things go to the states but it is just a one one of those kind of weird and extraordinary things and they they um is a kind of interesting tale here because when they

were building or doing the the excavations for the big new railway station in birmingham for the big new high-speed railway system they're putting in. They had to dig up an entire cemetery and move it. It's a 19th-century cemetery. Wow. And they moved the whole lot out of the way and reburied them elsewhere. And what they were astonished by was finding, I don't know, 15 or 20 corpses with plates on their chests, porcelain plates.

And everybody went, what is going on here? You know, and then somebody remembered, oh, actually, this is the Sin Eaters. And the Sin Eaters were very common on the Welsh borders, which is not very far away. And the last Sin Eater died in 1906 or 1908, sometime around then. And you can go and see his grave in the Little Country Church now to this day. In fact, they've done it up. The local village has become a bit of a celebrity and done his grave up because actually they were viewed with deep suspicion and were often ostracized because they were taking everyone else's sins onto themselves.

I mean, did this last scene, are we to believe this man is in hell because he had so many sins? It seems like a high price to pay. Indeed. But I mean, most of them were in fact old, poor people. They could be men or it could be women. And most of them were just sort of destitute. And this was a good way of getting a free meal and a free drink. And usually they'd be given a shilling or something like that.

Hey, all the corpse bread you can eat if you're a sinner. Absolutely. I mean, so that's an incredible example of religion, people actually feeling that it has efficacy, you know, a supernatural efficacy in their lives. But I just want to return again to the criticism that I heard growing up with a scientific background, loving to read, you know, things by rationalist writers, you know, the criticism of religion is that, well, this is false. We can't test its hypotheses and, you know, it doesn't come out. But you seem to be making the case that religion

has many other benefits to us apart from that in terms of our social organization, our connections with each other on a biological level, you're saying. Endorphins, like it's having a physical effect on us. Is that the case? Yes, absolutely so. And there's an important issue here because I think the reason why people who've looked at religion from this kind of evolutionary point of view in particular have said, you know, it must be just an aberration. and behaving oddly has been because they're looking for evolutionary benefits in terms of the individual. So, they're looking at, you know, does religion increase the number of offspring you produce? And the answer is probably not in best cases. And it's obviously very bad for you if you become a martyr, for example, to your beliefs and die before reproducing. Conversely, I think at that stage, the evidence that religion actually

or religious people, actively religious people tend to be healthier and happier hadn't really come to the fore. The evidence is really quite recent. But it's very clear. And, you know, their conclusion in terms of the way they were looking at it was probably absolutely right, although it turns out, as I said, to be, you know, these health benefits, which probably are quite good for you. But what they had forgotten or perhaps weren't really familiar with

is the fact that the more social species, and therefore particularly the family to which we belong, the monkeys and apes, what's really critical for their success, evolutionary success, is being able to create these bonded, stable social groups. And that's the problem that they have to solve. If they can solve that problem, they kind of get high personal fitness coming through for free.

But that's kind of an overriding feature. And it's consequence of what happens when you get a big brain. You start to be able to produce these effective groups, or at least you can perform certain kinds of things like hunting I suppose more efficiently if there are several of you cooperating than if you try and do it on your own you know it's still very much a Darwinian approach here so so the cost accounting that you do is still at the level of the individual but but you've got this added stream coming in. And, of course, that was kind of where Bill Hamilton was pointing us with his ideas of kin selection that kind of revolutionised thinking

in the evolutionary sciences back in the 1970s. So once you realise that these social species are not, I don't know, that these social species are not, I don't know, solitary in the way you might sort of think of most species, but it's the capacity to maintain these stable groups that's really important to them, then it puts a different picture on it. I think you can then see that anything that helps you bind the group together dramatically improves the member's ability to survive and reproduce successfully. And that's the key to it, I think, at the end of the day. But it doesn't mean to say there aren't kind of other side benefits.

In most cases in evolution, you know, things evolve for one particular functional purpose. They're driven by one cause. But once they're in place, they open up other opportunities. And that kind of thing happens all the time. If you think about the history of computers, it's a nice example of that. Computers were invented to crunch numbers, essentially, to count. Yeah. And now we're using it to have this conversation.

Indeed so. And now we're using it to have this conversation. And indeed so. And word processing, you know, and heaven for a fan, they build our cars for us and paint them even. So there are all these spin-off applications

that once you have the basic technology there, you know, it opens up new opportunities. It's exactly the same with the brain. Once you've got a sort of brain that was capable

of doing some fairly sophisticated computations, you know, and moving into this sort of bonding of groups, well, then all sorts of spinoffs emerge from it, which reinforced the value of it, of course. And I think that's where the health bits come in. They're not the direct drivers. They're just a sort of spin-off benefit. But the centering of religion as something inherent to not just human societies, but humans almost biologically, once our brains grew to a certain size,

is like very revelatory to me. That's not something I had considered before. I'm finding this so fascinating, but we have to take a really quick break or my producer will be mad that we went too long without reading the ads. So we'll be right back with Robin Dunbar. Okay, we are back with Robin Dunbar having this incredibly fascinating conversation about religion.

I'd love to talk about, you know, in the introduction to your book, you write about how our discussion of religion, our understanding of religion has really become dominated by just a few major world religions, you know, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism. I suppose we might add a couple more to that list, but it's a pretty short list. You probably counted on your two hands. But hearing you talk about it, it sounds like that's a very impoverished way of looking at the different varieties of religious experience, to quote William James. So I'd love to, I mean, it sounds like religion is something that maybe takes a lot more forms, even in modern human society, than we might normally give credit. Is that the case? I think the answer is yes. And this really arises out of its origins, and its origins in this kind of mystical trance-based experiences that people have.

If you look at any of these big religions, what's very characteristic of them is, you know, okay, so think of Catholicism as the sort of extreme example of this, where you have, you know, a very strict hierarchical structure with, you know, the man at the top, the Pope in Rome, sort of being the arbiter of what's right and what's wrong, you know, what's proper correct theology and what's heresy, as it were, and dictating how everybody underneath behaves and what they should believe and think. Despite that, if you look at the history

of Catholicism, you have this constant welling up over the last 2,000 years underneath of little sects and cults, usually built around a charismatic leader, usually very small, maybe 50, maybe 100 people, something of that order. Sometimes with very weird theologies. And of course, the hierarchy get absolutely panic struck by this because one of the problems with mysticism, it's uncontrollable. Once people get going, they get carried away

and they're in a different plane of this. And it's very difficult to control them. So none of the world religions, or at least none of the Abrahamic religions, and remember there are five Abrahamic religions, two of which are, well, one is extinct, one is pretty nearly extinct. And then the three big ones, as we're familiar with, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity,

all of them have the same nervousness and dislike of these mystical sects. They think of the attitude of both the Sunnis and the Shias towards the Sufi sects, the mystical branch of Islam, and they really do not like it. And if you look at the history of, sorry, Catholicism in particular, you know, you can see the papacy in Rome and its functionaries

and the bishops more locally, really trying to push down on these sort of people. Think of the Cathars in France, whom they raised an entire crusade against and literally slaughtered them, you know, because they had these weird theology. I mean, it's a very successful religion. It's very far out of its time.

They had women priests and they didn't eat meat and they believed in transubstantiation ideas that had come through from India, really, into Europe. The Catholic sort of religion, a version of Christianity, was in many ways much more pleasant. I don't know if that's the right word, but, you know, congenial. Yeah, by our standards today. And certainly by our standards today.

But boy, they have, you know, I mean, they were literally hundreds of thousands of them were just slaughtered and they disappeared. and they disappeared. But, of course, other similar sects, Mr Luther up in Germany, you know, his little charismatic group starting in the same way took off and survived. And, of course, all the Protestant, if you look at a lot of the Protestant current basket of Protestant denominations, a lot of them started off as very weird and wonderful, exotic, charismatic sects of this kind. And, you know, it is not for nothing that the Shakers were

called the Shakers. The Shakers were very upright. By the time they arrived in the US, on the whole, they were very upright, you know, little farming communities, doing very well, thank you you and generally very well behaved but they started you know sort of as a charismatic set with heavy trance components and that was the shaking but uh the quakers are the same you know you can't get anything more law-abiding and upright socially engaged and what have you, the modern Quakers. But their name comes from their very early days when that was reflected in these kind of heavily activity-based, dance-based trance states they were going into.

I mean, Quakers do go into trance now, but it's done in a very much more sophisticated and quiet, rather a Buddhist sort of way, if you like, a yogic sort of way. And, you know, sort of if you look at Wesley, the founder of Methodism, you know, he was tearing his hair out at the exotic behaviors, views of some of the churches that he, chapels that he, you know, had been planted in his fame. So that period when those kind of modern Protestant denominations

were springing up, nearly all of them came out as these very kind of trance, wild, and sometimes seriously wild. I mean, you know, they would have made the hippies of the 1960s look like kids' parties. The ranters in England during the Civil War period, 1640s, they had a terrible reputation for getting up to all sorts of, well, goodness me, let's not go down that route. I mean, this sounds like the original, the origin of religion, Well, goodness me, let's credit that he did,

that he had that experience, you know, and created a whole movement that came along with him. But then Mormonism's problem is that part of the theme is that God can speak to anyone. It spoke to Joseph Smith, it spoke to Brigham Young, so it can speak to you. And so Mormons are constantly going, oh, God spoke to me, and the current church is, you know, sucks. And I'm starting the real church right now. And that happens once a week in, you know, Utah. And so this is a feature of all religions in your view, that this is constantly happening. So it's burbling up through the floor. back to this fact that religion, you know, seems to be this very personal kind of transcendental

kind of experience that you have. And because of that, it tends to create these, work best in these very small groups. So if you look at all of them, you know, when they start, they are literally, you know, sort of 50, 100 people around one charismatic leader who's got some new message to say. But also this then relates to the interesting question of whether there's an optimal congregation size. And I think the experience of all, certainly the main Christian denominations, is that there is an optimal congregation size,

which is actually only about 150 people. Don't tell the megachurches here in California that. We can discuss them in a minute if you like. That's a completely different thing. But in terms of the way congregations seem to work, if they're too small, it becomes a burden on everybody for maintaining, you know, the church or whatever it is and the parish activities. If there are too many, go the other side of 150, certainly the other side of 200. Then what seems to happen is people lose a sense of belonging. They kind of start to feel alienated that there are too many factional interests pushing the parish's activities in directions they don't want to go. They start not to come so often.

They don't contribute so much to the funds raised by the church and so on. And, you know, this has been kind of widely discussed in the church planting literature for some time, which I kind of discovered by accident. I didn't know about it. And they came up with these numbers as well. This is the movement of folks trying to start new churches. New churches. New churches, yes, and they start new churches because, at one level, because the home church, as it were, the parent church, just becomes too big. So, the classic case of this, actually,

is the Hutterites, who deliberately split their communities once they get above 150. The average size at which they split is 165-ish, something like that. And that's because they say, you know, remember these are kind of communalistic, fundamentalist religious communities, farming communities. The Pennsylvania folks are very similar in that respect, but the Dakota Hutterites are very clear that they, you know, if you let the community go much above 150 in size, it becomes unmanageable, at least unmanageable in the sense

that it can be dealt with by face-to-face discussion among the community members. At that point, they say you have to have a police force and laws and, you know, judges and sheriffs and what have you. And that is completely against their whole ethos that Christian life is communal. They're trying to kind of replicate that biblical communal sense of life and worship in one, as it were. And so they split it. And I remember going to a big meeting at one of the Vatican, the Vatican has two universities, and this was the Jesuits on the Gregorian University, and they'd done a big meeting for

one of the Darwin Centennials, which was why has theology ignored Darwin for so long was the thing of it. And I remember I gave my talk, which was a precursor of this some years ago, sort of an early version. And when I sat back in my seat, there was a tap on my shoulder and there was a row of young men in dog collars and black suits. dog collars and black suits. And they leaned over and said, well, this is very interesting because we are the entire clergy from a particular parish in the middle of England and our parish is 500 people and we have three Sunday Masses and they attract completely different groups of people who never talk to each other. And of course, the different priests would take the different masses, you know, there'd be a seven o'clock mass, an eight o'clock mass, a ten o'clock mass,

something like that. And the different priests would do each one, but they also had their own little flock. And it's about the amount of time you have as the pastor, the minister of that church, to really know your flock and know them well enough to be able to understand what their problems are and provide the necessary comforts and things that, you know, it is the pastor's job to provide. And that limit is what seems to set that figure. You know, your ability to know more than 150 people personally is just very limited. That's the number that's known as Dunbar's number.

Your famous number. Yes. So it really looks, it seems to be, you know, the case that that number is, well, that size of religious grouping, congregation, if you want to call it that, you know, seems to be kind of absolutely deeply built into the whole structure of religion. It is also then the source of problems for the big world religions in that it allows sort of charismatic leaders as the parish priest or minister or whatever you want to call him of a particular church to develop their own theology and carry

their parishioners away with them. And you see you see the same thing in islam islam is fractionated into more sex probably than than christianity is even yeah um and that's because you know in their case there isn't a sort of uh top top guy that that uh runs it all i mean to some extent you know places like um iran and so on, you have the kind of upper mullahs, but most of Islam is mosque-based. The mosques are sort of a bit like Presbyterian parishes, you know, the elders run the show and the minister, you know, has a considerable amount of freedom of religion. So, by the same token, you know, in Islam, the mosque elders run the mosque, but the main imams, you know, have enormous theological freedom, really.

And because it kind of allows them to kind of drift off of peace, if you like, come up with some, you know know pretty weird and wonderful stuff which which may appeal to to to their particular uh congregation and get carry them along with it i mean it's a very beautiful view of religion because we so often again especially growing up in the united states think of religion as being very top-down, controlled by the pope on down, etc. But this is a vision in which, well, we have these large groupings, but in between those groupings or within those groupings, these sects are constantly splitting off, growing new sprouts, new prophets arise all the time.

Yeah. Let me just go back a step to your earlier comment, actually, because you raised a kind of interesting point, which was pitching out, you know, are these things, you know, religion is just in the context of, you know, science and religion don't mix. context of, you know, science and religion don't mix. And there's part of that big schism between and standoff between religion on one hand and science on the other. And I think, you know, there is a sense in which that, you know, remains the case. So we can explain, and this is all I'm trying to do, I guess, we can explain a lot of the things that happen in the context of religion,

but that doesn't really affect whether or not you believe the beliefs and experiences you have are meaningful and true. And that's partly why religions can fractionate in the way they do. And we end up with you know all these well tens of thousands probably very small scale sects and cults but you know and this handful of major religions when you might expect there to be just a single religion but you know that is you know the weak know, if you believe that there is a God in heaven running the show and looking after our interests, you know, that pretty much is untestable because it's, you know, it's your belief in your mind and we can't really get in there.

mind and and we can't really get in there um uh and and kind of that's also your i suppose you might say your interpretation so we don't know what it's reflecting if anything outside but the rest of the universe which is the physical universe you know we can do stuff with that um and we can therefore do stuff with the kind of rituals and all those kind of things say, yeah, they have an effect or they don't have an effect. But not with the belief component. In the end, you either believe it or you don't, I think. And that's entirely in your choice. But, you know, if you like, I can tell you stuff about why it works and why it works in particular in your case. And it's actually interesting because a lot of the kind of shamanic type healing practices that go on and which, you know, really attract people.

And I guess this goes back to, you know, the mega churches and the big sort of Pentecostal type churches where they have healing things is very often those kind of treatments meted out by native healers, if you like, actually do work. And the reason they work is they're about the mind. You know, very, you know, okay, you know, sort sort of famously you know the the big mega churches and pentecostalists want to try and get people who've uh you know been in a wheelchair for life to stand up and walk or um yeah uh you know sort of cure their cancers whatever it might be

but most of the sort of everyday healers steer clear of that kind of stuff by and large because they can't do anything about it. But what they really can do something about is psychological conditions because, you know, that is still how we treat them with this kind of, you know, sort of more personalized and help you along the way and kind of social kind of engagement rather than. I've talked about in my own work on my show, you know, the incredible power of the placebo effect and how it's much more powerful than anyone believes in that. And that the belief that something will cure you can really cause a mental change that then activates, you know, some, some features of your body's own disease fighting or reparative systems that you maybe hadn't accessed before.

And real doctors or medical trained doctors make use of that when they treat you caringly and they tell you this treatment will work. They're tying into that. And a religious healer can do the same thing. It won't probably be as effective as that great diet, but it works for many people. Yes. I was actually watching a program the other night on television,

on mega churches, in fact. And I was struck there because these guys were, you know, trying to get people who had physical disabilities, you know, to get up and walk. People who'd been in a wheelchair for 20 years, you know you know, to get up and walk, people who'd been in a wheelchair for 20 years, you know, and they did get up and walk and you kind of go, wow, this is amazing. But if you think about what's going on,

they have been in the middle, I might always almost say this, in the sense of, you know, they're right in the middle of a comedy performance, you know, it's really fun, you know, you're right in the middle of a comedy performance, you know. It's really fun. You know, you're laughing a lot. The endorphins are flying because they're doing it by, you know, sort of ramping you up in a cheerleading sort of way. There's hymns being sung and all that kind of thing. Everybody's really hyped up.

You can see it on their faces. You know, they're all standing with their arms up. And the one thing that's going to have done is given you a massive endorphin kick. Well, endorphins have raised your pain threshold enormously. Things you would never have been able to do because of the pain, suddenly you can do. But of course, it doesn't last. Next day, you're back down where you were. I want to make sure we get to this.

I believe you write in the book about how so many of the world religions all began in a very similar geographical area or a relatively small geographical area compared to the many, many places that folks have lived across the world. And why is that? Yeah, so these are the Axial Age religions, as it were, which we've known about for a hundred years, probably, or maybe a bit more. If you look at the origin of all the major world religions we have now, and also all the monotheistic religions, of tribal monotheistic religions, many of which are associated with herders, pastoralists. They all seem to originate in a very narrow band across essentially the top of Africa.

This is the subtropical zone. So it's the sort of a narrow band climatically between the tropics themselves and the kind of northern whole Arctic climates that we live in. So these are the kind of rather nice Mediterranean sort of climates. And, you know, that band goes all the way around the world, all the religions, these major religions start in that band in sort of top end of Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, and then across through Persia into India, the Hindu Valley, and running through as far as the Yellow and Yangtze River Basin, the Great Basin in China. They all started about the same time in that period,

2,000 to 3,000 years ago. And what strikes me as interesting about that, and which I don't think anybody has ever noticed before, I mean, they will say, well, the axial age, you know, that comes at a particular time period. What they haven't really noticed is actually it occurs in this extremely narrow, it's only 12 degrees of latitude in that narrow band. And what's characteristic of that band is that it's the area that minimizes disease load, pathogen load. So pathogens are very high at the equator and then die away quickly once you're outside the tropics. But at the same time, they are not into the kind of northern and the same kind of goes at the south end, those kind of Arctic, more northern hemisphere winters when nothing grows. So you're in a band which is really quite unique

in which population growth is maximised because what tends to happen in the tropics is this disease load that holds the population down, not food production, because food production is very good at the tropics. It's hot, sweet and sloppy, as they used to say about cocoa growing areas in West Africa. You know, the growing conditions are exceptionally good. Stuff just, you know, you can't keep it down.

It keeps growing. Whereas above the subtropical zone, it's higher latitudes in Europe and obviously in North America and so on. Things get very cold in winter. You've got no pathogens because the winter kills them off, but you can't grow anything either. And it's just this narrow zone which seems to have allowed populations to explode sometime starting around 10,000 years ago. And that seems to be what kicked the and that seems to be what kicked the increasing population size, kicked in the rise of the doctrinal religions. The problem then happens around about 4,200 years ago.

This is what's known as the 4.2 thousand climate event, which is a crash right the way across that band, across the whole of Africa, Asia, and China in climate. Basically, it stops raining. Things really go from very good to very bad within a couple of hundred years. It sounds like you're describing California right now. to very bad within a couple of hundred years. It sounds like you're describing California right now. Yes, yes.

It's all those vines. I remember, you know, sort of they were growing vines, grape vines in the Sahara pretty much until then. I mean, it was so well watered, the Sahara, up until then. They had hippos and baboons and crocodiles, all sorts of stuff, which you now have to go 8,000 miles to the south to see as a result of this, the expansion of the Sahara. And so what that produced was massive population movements. And what's very characteristic of that period is a group of people

known as the Sea People. We kind of don't know who these people are, but they appear out of nowhere, mainly from Greece. So we'll try not to blame the Greeks. But that's where they seem to come from. And they seem to have been moved by, you know, this population, climatic induced population crisis, looking for new places to settle. They lay waste, basically, to most of the eastern Mediterranean. And this is sort of, you know, if you look at the archaeological sites for that period,

you know, there's sort of like half, a couple of feet of solid charcoal where they burnt all these city-state cities around the coastal plains of the Levant and Turkey and modern-day Egypt. And exactly the same thing happens in India. The Harappan culture, as a sort of big state, as it were, in its own right, just collapses. The same thing happens in China. And I think in the crisis that that produced is what kicked in the rise of the Axial Age religions, this kind of new sense of a sort of moral high god, as they're called, a single god who kind of really is going to look after our interests.

The result of that population growth, meaning that there has to be an adaptation to account for it. So you have the growth of these religions and then, well, widespread disaster. Yes. Yes. Yes. So I'm forecasting, you know,

I mean, I think that's also, I mean, it's kind of, I don't think anybody's ever really looked at it closely, but I, you know, I'm kind of get the sense generally that when you have those kinds of disasters, you get an upwelling of religion, you know, whatever the local religion is. Well, man, it's really fascinating. Cause you also talked quite a bit,

you know, we talked about the, the Mormons and, and all these other late 19th century, you know, American new religious movements, which was a period late 19th century, you know, American new religious movements, which was a period of huge, you know, efflorescence of all these different groups. And that was also a period of wide population growth in the United States, that that was the boom of the United States in many ways, or at least one of the many boom times. But the sociological explanation of religion is so fascinating. I want to touch on one other question, which is, you know, you talked about

that mystical experience, being at the root of religion. And that reminds me of, you know, when I was studying for my bachelor's in philosophy, reading William James and the varieties of religious experience. And he writes about how all these religions have at their root that, you know, someone will have a religious experience where they're commuting directly with God or with a larger presence and consciousness. They tend to experience that all things are one, and they also tend to have a certainty of truth about it, that there's these common features. We've seen this again and again. And then a few years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. And he points out, this is also true of psychedelic experiences that, you know, often psychedelic drugs will cause this sort of experience, which is why I made that joke about someone eating a

mushroom earlier in the podcast. I'm just curious how psychedelics as a something you know something that interacted with uh religious experiences very early is that play a part in the story that you tell or is that a little bit of an overhyped uh element that people talk about no i think i think uh well there's two different things there maybe one. One is, it clearly is, these trance states and being able to go into trance states seem to be so important a feature of religious experience and early religious experience and the kind of bottom end of the wellings up, as it were, that occur under the big modern religions, that, you know, the desire to go into trance states, you know, clearly becomes the driving force. The problem is how you do it. And, you know, I suspect that what probably happened was, you know, people going into deep caves and the kind of disorientating environment

that they're in kind of blows your mind, literally, as they say. But, you know, how else do you do it? And what seems to have happened is we found various kind of tough ways of doing it, which are essentially, you know, sort of cranking the handle big time, you know, dance. I think of some of the ceremonies of, sweat house ceremonies of the Plains Indians in North America, for example, which were designed to take off. They're associated with physical punishment, you know, sort of not necessarily hanging from straps on your chest, but, you know, sort of going for big long runs in the cold and diving into you know ice cold water and uh these kind of physical um uh pain inducing things and then

going into the sweat house uh you know it ramps up the endorphin output and then that triggers um going in well you know this is very hard work, you know, and then clearly what's happened is somebody's discovered stuff out there that does the job for you much quicker. And there are loads of them, you know, shed loads of them. These plants, you know, most of them sort of semi-poisonous. But if you don't overdo it, give you these highs. And, you know, one of those was opium, hash, all these things,

belladonna, all these kind of famous sort of medieval and into the 19th century even medical treatments all had their origins, it seems, as aids to entering trance and they occur all around the world wherever you look you find them so so there is kind of that sense to it I mean it's clear that you can also induce trance in other ways so if you think of the kind of buddhist tradition of the yogic tradition of inducing it by calmness and what it is about breathing control principally and breathing control triggers the endorphin system so that's how they're doing it

you know so there are different ways of of of doing it um you know but but there's the cheap and cheerful way if you like and then there's the sophisticated but hard to learn way now you know, but there's the cheap and cheerful way, if you like, and then there's the sophisticated but hard to learn way. Now, you know, along come the hippies in the 60s, and obviously having grown up in the 60s as a student, and I, you know, famously can't remember it because I wasn't there. I was there, rather, though. Let's get this right. Right?

If you can remember the 60s, you definitely weren't there. You know, they latched on to a lot of this stuff. And of course, there'd been a lot of people going out to India, you know, traveling and stuff and getting into ashrams and all these kind of things and being exposed to these kind of Hindu, particularly Hindu-based religious practices and coming back to the States and going off and living in their communes. And, you know, they had the characteristic then of kind of sects and cults. And a lot of them spawned eventually, you know, the sort of more weird and wonderful kind of things like the Heaven's Gate cult that, you know,

survived until, you know, the 2000s, you know, who tied all their stuff into, you know, sort of spaceships coming from other parts of the universe with superior beings, you know, and that kind of, you know, it's almost a theology, if you like, in the sense that, you know, it's a belief in somewhere in the universe there are superior beings that are going to come and rescue us and lift us up. And you can see this sense of being raised up onto a higher plane

of consciousness, which is exactly where the kind of hippie stuff all started. If you go back to Huxley and the doors of perception and health, his original experiences in California playing with or trying out mescaline and so on, and that spawned this kind of movement out there, you know, that, you know, you could, these kind of substances, as it were, could lift you onto a higher plane of consciousness. And those kind of views, you know, they go back to the theosophists in the late 19th century, having the same views, you know, there are the elite who've arrived at, you know, sort of these new different planes of consciousness, they will live forever, they've mastered, you know, sort of eternal life, and all these kind of things, which is sort of this mismatch of kind of Eastern philosophies make in the book, that actually the root of all this stuff is in these trance experiences, these experiences of the transcendental that you have when the mind kicks into these trance states and you know sometimes they can be experienced as completely secular

and sometimes they clearly seem to be experienced as sort of sinking into the you know the mind of god if you like and all the major religions you know sikhism hinduism islam all have expressions that essentially say that. You know, you raise yourself into trance state. You enter into the Godhead. You subside into the Godhead and your mind is unified with God. Now, you know, that probably, my view would be that that probably reflects just a combination of both your experiences and the culture you come from, which is feeding into it, you know, and how you view it.

Whether it's true or not, well, that's a very different question. But those, well, it's interesting that you raise that, because here's what I'd like to talk about for the end, is that, you know, I've identified myself as an atheist for many, many years, I've identified myself as an atheist for many, many years. And that's because, again, I don't, you know, the religious claims about the world that I was brought up around, I didn't agree with that there's a God who created the universe. And I don't, you know, I have a more scientific worldview. I don't agree with those truth statements. And therefore, you know, I'll call myself an atheist. But the things that you're describing, the, you know, an experience of transcendence, a trance state, and also the social connections that you're talking about, the, you know, the social endorphins and those sorts of things, those all sound wonderful.

And those sound to me like, A, well, those are not things I really experienced during the time of my life when I did go to a Christian church. I never entered trance states. We sang songs and the songs were nice to sing. I liked the singing and I liked the food, but there weren't a lot of trance states and there weren't a lot of, it didn't feel like reciprocal grooming in a very nourishing way. But when you describe those things, I'm like, God, those sound so wonderful. I wish I could experience them in my own life. And so I'm curious if A, these are experiences that you encourage people to try to have. And yeah, are those things that we should seek because they are good for us, either personally or socially? because they are good for us, either personally or socially?

Yeah, I think on balance, I have to say it's probably good for you. I mean, even going to very staid, you know, dare I say, Episcopalian services, maybe Presbyterian services more so, are probably not going to get you into trance states. But it does raise the endorphin levels, quite demonstrably so, and you do feel more bonded even so. You know, if you really want to experience trance, then I think you'd probably best go with the Pentecostalists and do the job properly.

It requires a bit more effort. All this dancing and stuff in the aisles, that's the way to do it. But, you know, however you do it, it probably does do you some good. That's very clear, I think. It makes you kind of happier and it makes you healthier, most likely, it seems. So seems so you know there are decided benefits that are worth it and and it does create a sense of community the problem with it the downside is when it starts to get very large and then and then because all our bonding mechanisms the secular

everyday friendship type bonding mechanisms, as well as the religious ones, are all built on an us versus them principle. That's how, at the sort of cognitive level, that's what sort of creates the sense that, you know, we are a community. We are a community because we know the secret of life. And therefore, you know, we're different. That's why we're different to the guys in the next valley who do all this kind of weird stuff. And that clearly leads to these, you know, awfulia-Sunni split in Islam, you know, which happened within a decade of the death of Muhammad. Wow, yeah.

It didn't hang around. The same, you know, much the same in Christianity, of course, you know, a thousand years later with the Reformation. years later with the Reformation. And of course, there'd been all sorts of attempts to launch alternative versions, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, right the way through from within the first century AD. Well, I mean, many people would say, you know, when we describe, call it Christianity, we're calling it by the wrong name. It has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. It was St. Paul that created Christianity off the back of this little sect in Judea, you know, and it was really

he that gave it its modern characteristic. And so we ought to call it Paulinity if we were doing the job properly. Wow. Yeah, just like you call Calvinism after Calvin and all that. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I mean, who cares really what names you give these things? You know, there's a sort of development there, What names do you give these things?

You know, there's a sort of development there, but it's reflecting the fact that there were constant attempts to reinvent it in kind of very different ways, most of which were heavily suppressed. All the early church councils in the first 500 years, and there were a lot, were attempts to suppress potential schisms by various charismatic leaders coming in with new ideas. So, it's those kind of, I suppose you might say, you know, resurgence in this between Islam and Christianity now at one level. I mean, you know, it's not to blame

Islam as a whole, which is, you know, as decent a religion as Christianity is, but, you know, it's the power of religion to whip up mobs, if you like, and persuade people to literally go into battle on behalf of your particular beliefs is second to none, you know. There's something odd about this transcendent faith. In fact, I talk a bit right at the end about is it possible to have a secular religion, you know, that would have the same effect? And, I mean, you could have them, and people are trying, but they don't seem to have the carrying power. There's something magical about the kind of transcendent component

of conventional religions that gives them enormous power over people. And that's when you hit, you know, the train comes off the rails completely at that point, unfortunately. So my view is keep it small and it does a wonderful job. And it kind of helps create better communities and we'd probably all be better for it. Besides, the music is wonderful. Oh, the music is incredible.

It's the best part. And honestly, just last night I went to a concert by, I don't know if you know, the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, the wife of John Coltrane. And she became, after his death, she became very involved in Hindu mysticism. And she started an ashram, a religious community. And the religious community was based so much around music. And she passed away a number of years ago, but it was a concert by the remaining members of her religious community. And first of all, the mixture of, you know, the Black American music, blues, jazz style

with Hindu chanting is like, was out of this world, but also the religious ecstasy, you know, that of chanting and, and dancing. And it was, you know, such an incredibly powerful performance that, you know, I've, I've always had that paradox within myself of I'm not a religious person, but religious music is the music that I love the most. That more than a love song, I love a song about, you know, about God for some reason. I'm with you all the way on this one. Talking to you has really made me reevaluate the way I position religion in my own life.

Has studying this changed your own view of your own religious practice? Not to make that too personal a question, but, you know, have you reconsidered or changed any of your own practices as a result? Not really. I mean, I kind of grew up in an interesting religious environment, because my family were all kind of Presbyterians in various forms. Indeed, my grandparents were missionaries. Heaven for a fan. But I went to a Catholic boarding school as a child. I grew up in Africa. And so I was sort of given both ends of the Christian spectrum.

And at the same time, because of where we lived in East Africa, because my father grew up in India, was born and grew up in India, he spoke Hindi, bilingually as it were, we mixed a lot with the Indian communities there. So I knew about all these other religions, Sikhism and Hinduism and Islam, the Indian end of Islam, because course, this was coastal East Africa, so I knew about Islam through, you know, this sort of household servants that I grew up with and their children and that kind of thing.

And, you know, I was immersed in this very complex, multiplex religious environment. And, you know, that's where I learned to like Gregorian chant. It was probably the finest music ever written. And so I had this deep immersion in it. So I can kind of see where it's all coming from, if you like. But I think by the time I was certainly later a teenager, I decided this, you know, I had become an atheist effectively. There's no underlying truth to these belief systems. But because of that background, I think it made me kind of both sensitive to being able to look at it and see it from the inside, but also look at it from the outside as a scientist at the same time and say, okay, this is really amazing and weird stuff going on. Can we actually explain

how it works and why it's there and when it evolved? Do you ever find those sorts of – and I swear this will be the last question, but I just find it so fascinating to talk to you. This is, this is, interview is going long for us, but I'm having trouble stopping. Do you find yourself, though you, you are an atheist, you know, seeking out any elements of the religious experience, you know, whether that is, you know, a trance state or, you know, that sort of community experience because you, you understand those benefits? Because that's often, I mean, I was doing that a little bit of myself at that concert the other night, right? I was seeking a little bit of that, I think.

Right, yeah, yeah. Not directly. I mean, I think I sort of get close to it if I go and listen to a sort of Palestrina mass in a church, in a nice dark, candleless context as yourina mass in a church, in a nice dark candleless context, as you might have in the winter, and you've got a very good choir singing in Latin. So there's this mystical,

there's a bit of mysticism attached already to the language because although I know a fair amount of Latin, a lot of it just flows over you. You don't hear the words and you can absorb it. It's very relaxing and very pleasant. But I wouldn't say I'm going to the point of trance on any of this stuff, probably because I'm kind of holding back. Well, look, if you ever want to come to LA and do some mushrooms or something,

and maybe we can get ourselves into a trance state sometime, let me know. It's been absolutely fascinating talking to you, Robin. The book sounds incredible. Folks, if you want to pick, what is the name of the book again, Robin? It's How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. If you want to pick that up, you can head to our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books or your public library or wherever you get your books. Robin, thank you so much for coming on the show. A great pleasure. Well, thank you once again to Robin Dunbar for coming on the show.

I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you did, you can check out his book once again at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. As always, I want to thank our $15 a month Patreon subscribers, Adam Simon, Adrian, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle, Antonio LB, Aurelio Jimenez, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Courtney Henderson, David Conover, my dad, thank you, dad, Drill Bill, Em, Hillary Wolkin, Julia Russell, Kelly Casey, Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Miles Gillingsrud, Nicholas Morris, Paul Mauck, Rachel Nieto,

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