Instant Genius - The origins of religion, with Robin Dunbar

Episode Date: April 24, 2022

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology, explains why spirituality and religion took root in early humans. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC, Science Focus, This is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today we're talking about the evolution of religion, its origins and its future. I'm joined by Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. His new book, How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, pulls together a decade of research

between dozens of scientists to build a picture of why humans are drawn to spirituality and religion. To kick things off, I asked Robin whether spirituality was just a side effect of early humans trying to make sense of things that go bump in the night? I think the answer is yes and no, actually, because my view would be that

the kind of old perception of how things got going, one sense, is actually right. It was sort of going into deep caves and having, you know, distorted psychological, stroke psychic experiences, remalted mind states, possibly even helped along by some obscure substances from time to time, which appear to have been discovered very early in the cause of our

evolution as a species, kind of provided the basis for thinking about the possibility that there was another world out there. But that said, I suppose the pitch of the book really is that the underpinnings to religion are essentially mysticism. It's trans-based capacity that we have to enter into what appears to be a spirit world, another parallel world to ours. And so, you know, the bumps in the night become important in that context because they provide you as something that you need to explain. But in the absence of being able to enter into trans states and go on what is always referred to as spirit travels in the spirit world, you kind of wouldn't have any kind of basis for explaining the bumps in the night

other than everyday physical explanations. So you kind of wouldn't go beyond, you know, there's a lion creeping up and causing the twig to snap in the forest storm. Maybe worse. Still actually, the people from the next door valley. So you take it from there and you build a, you know, very convincing. that we actually, we needed religion in a sense, or at least religion was instrumental in our evolution and our capacity to grow to the point we're at today. Is that right? Yes. I mean,

the essence of the problem, I think that our deeper ancestors faced was the need to increase the size of groups that they lived in in order to protect themselves from external threats, threats out there. Now, normally in primates in general, those external threats for which they live in groups as the defense against them is predators. The simplest and easiest way to reduce your predation risk as you're wandering around the forests and the savannah, so simply to do so in groups. So what you're finding primates, monkeys and apes, and indeed probably most other mammals and to some extent birds as well is the more predator risky the habitat is, the more exposed it is, the bigger the groups the species wanders around in.

That's the kind of passive form of defence. You're not actually sort of chasing predators away. Occasionally that does actually happen, but most of the time you're just relying on the fact the predators aren't willing to attack large numbers of animals. It's just not worth their while. They prefer to look for weak and feet. evil ones on their own. It's much less hard work for them to get dinner. With humans, maybe with the chimpanzees or some of the great apes at least, those predators seem to have been

generalized into members of your own species, your neighbors who have the disconcerting habit of constantly attacking you. And so this has seemed to have created an extra pressure to live in bigger and bigger groups. So while they were in small monkey ape size groups, the kinds of classic mechanisms for creating social cohesion within the group, that's say social grooming, leafing through the fur, and sort of removing bits of vegetation, so on, worked perfectly fine.

But once they exceeded the size that monkeys and apes normally live in, pushing up towards the kind of size, of groups that we live in today, then they had to find other mechanisms for adding to that grooming mechanism that actually triggered the same mechanism in the brain, but allowed them to, if you like, groom at a distance virtually with more people simultaneously, because grooming is very limited. It's a one-on-one activity, and that's what sets this upper limit. And what came in as a series of behaviors, which are still all part of our sort of social toolkit, actually. Things like laughter as a form of chorusing, singing, singing without words, dancing,

eventually things like feasting together, telling emotional sub-stories and religion. And those last three, I think, particularly the storytelling and the religion component, had to wait for fully modern language, human language, to evolve, which clearly can in with our own species rather than earlier than that. Because, you know, well, storytelling, it's obvious. But religion depends on being able to explain to somebody else what your experiences are, these kind of transcendental experiences. It's fine for you to have them.

And I'm sure you do a lot of good for yourself. But it's kind of like going and pumping iron in the gym on your own. if you really want to get a good hit from this effect, then you need to do it with other people, which means you've got to explain to them what's going on and got to explain to them, you know, we've got to do it together. Don't go out to the gym on your own.

Let's go jogging as a group, effectively, is the storyline, if you like. Because when these activities are done in synchrony, as most of them are, you know, we laugh in synchrony, we sing in synchrony, we dance in synchrony, we eat in synchrony, we lift our glasses and say cheers in synchrony, all these social things are done in synchrony, including the rituals of religion. Then it seems to ramp up the effect of this bonding mechanism in the brain quite dramatically. And it appears to be principally the rituals of religion that do that.

They're the key thing that triggers this endorphin system in the brain. And the rituals are often part and parcel of the things we do anyway, you know, singing, dancing. You know, think of Coptic priests in Ethiopia, or the deacons rather than the priests. It services they dance before the altar or technically before the Ark of the Covenant, which they claim to have, having lifted it from Jerusalem in King Solomon's time. but every altar in every church has in its altar a sort of if you like a version of the Ark of the Covenant. So they dance before the Ark of the Covenant as King David dance before the Ark of the Covenant in the Bible. So, you know, for all those, and indeed I suppose there are sort of the occasional sex and cults that even engage in laughter as a religious ritual famously.

So all these things, you know, telling big emotional stories in the form of sermons or readings from the various good books appropriate to the particular religion, eating together, having meals after a service, as many religions do, as Sikhs, and so say Islam, especially this point, you know, after Ramadan, communal meals. all these things are very powerful mechanisms of bonding that we use outside the religious context in normal everyday life. So religion is kind of latched onto those and exploited them, if you like, but then wrap this what amounts to a theological framework round it, which provides an explanation for why it should work, if you like, and indeed, perhaps more importantly, why you should keep turning up every week to get your hit, as it were. But these are late. So I have to say that kind of theological component appears to arrive very late in the course of history for most of our evolutionary history as a species.

And remember, we're only about 200, 250,000 years old as a species. But most of that period, there wasn't a theology. You have these kind of shamanic type, animist type, religions that you still see in hunter-gatherers. You know, they're trans-based, they're immersive. in the sense that everybody is involved, and very often they're based around dancing and singing, but they don't have any sense of gods usually, and certainly not a god that hands down a moral code.

So their moral codes are purely social. This is how we've always done it. They don't ask questions, just do it. Whereas when you have the doctrinal religions coming in, they seem to sort of appear all around about 8,000 years ago in the beginning of the Neolithic, then you have a kind of theological superstructure imposed on this sort of ancient, trans-based animist-type religions, which essentially provide the justification for it in many ways.

But also they kind of add something actually in the sense of they add some form of gods in another world who are inclined to punish humans if they don't behave. right and sometimes it's just providing the right kinds of sacrifices so you know so long as you keep providing the sacrifices to the god things will be okay and that kind of pulls the community together and in quite an important way i think that hunter gatherers well it allows them to live basically to live in much much bigger groups and you can see that in the early neolithic and they start living in villages and then the villages grow into towns and city, states and so on. And that's when you first see evidence of priesthoods and temples,

specifically religious spaces, which are reserved for those kind of functions only, and perhaps evidence of hierarchies within the society, particularly in relation to religious hierarchies. There are religious specialists, is what, happens, who know how to do things, know how to do the rituals properly, and become the guardians then of those traditions and make sure they're done properly hand them on to the next generation, those kind of things. Effectively, I'm going to steal your words here and feed them back to you and sound smart, but essentially it's our, it's our nature, it's our brains sort of predisposition

and aptitude for being social that also, um, made it right for religion. Yes. In our early development. Yes. I don't think religion would have appeared in the human lineage had we not been so social. But we are social or we are as social as we are because that is a key characteristic of all the monkeys and apes. And especially the kind of larger brain ones, so the old world monkeys in particular and the great apes.

you know, the whole key to their success, evolutionary success, and they have been one of the most successful zoological families of all, certainly among the mammals and the birds. They've been exceedingly, you know, primates were around before the dinosaurs, swept extinct, and they're still here, and they've hardly changed, except their brains have got bigger, basically. You know, their body shape and the way they work, as it were. is still pretty much as it was 60 million years ago,

whereas most other groups of animals have changed dramatically. They've acquired hooves, they've acquired fins, think of dolphins and all these kind of things. But anyway, the essence of primates social life is that it's a kind of implicit social contract. So basically they're clubbing together to solve the problems of successful survival and reproduction cooperatively,

by forming these very stable groups, which are a primate speciality, very much a primate speciality. And we're part of that syndrome, if you like, it's just that we do it bigger and better because we've got a bigger and better brain allows us to do it. But it spun off the back of this,

you know, long, long history of using sociality as a way of, as an evolutionary solution to the coping with the, of vicissitudes of life on earth and the uncertainties. But what really has made the difference between us and other primates, that's to say, why we have religion and they don't, has been essentially the size of groups we're trying to bond together, but also in addition to that, this capacity for mentalizing,

which they sort of share, but their capacities in these terms are quite low level. They're probably no better than a five-year-old child can do. But what a human adult can do is kind of like three times better than a five-year-old child in terms of the extent of the mentalizing. So mentalizing is about understanding what's going on in your mind and therefore why you're behaving the way you do. What are your intentions when you're. say something or do something.

And that's a much more sophisticated way of working with the environment out there. What it does, of course, is causes us to be so immersed in this mentalizing way of looking at the world out there that we attribute mentalizing capacities to absolutely everything, whether it's animate or inanimate. So we speak of, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, this sky being angry when there's a storm coming up or the sea being angry. Clouds are lowering at us as though they had eyebrows and a hard stare. And we kind of do it all the time.

We attribute life forces, let's call it, to things like springs or trees or particular mountains because we have this sense that, you know, just as we walk around on the surface, so, you know, other spirit forms of life inhabit these physical features in the environment. And that's a consequence of what you mentioned right at the outside, is this tendency to try and explain and therefore control the world. And that comes directly from this mentalizing capacity, because if we couldn't mentalize in the way we do, we would never be able to ask the key question,

namely, why does it work like that? Why does the natural world work like that? Is it possible for the natural world to be different from what we see in front of us? Once you can do that, and no monkey or ape or anybody else on the planet can lift themselves to that level of cognition, if you like, and ask that question.

But as you can ask it, you can start to imagine that there are fictional worlds, right? So I'm going to tell you a story about what happened to Jim and Penelope last week, you know, as a straight piece of fiction, you know, a novel. Or, you know, I can tell you about places you can't see, sort of my travels wandering around Never, Neverland, down the road, in the next valley, which you've never visited, but I can kind of tell you about it.

That's kind of a real bit. From there it's a very, very short step to sort of saying, there's another world within which we all sit in our physical world, which is a kind of spirit world, if you like. There are, I don't know, goblins, goblins in springs or in caves, and you can go and hear them. Go and stick your head into a cave, and you can hear the rumblings of the trolls at the base.

And famously, of course, that's why what the Vikings, when they were sort of wandering around the coast of Britain thought with Max Sheaerwaters who nest underground and sort of grumble at each other, and as they were sort of wandering around the coastal hills up in the northwest of Scotland, you know, they could hear these rumblings underground. The trolls are busy tonight. Yeah, when they visited, Norway, I was struck by how they've still got a very rich sense of how there's a troll for almost

every strange, or not even strange, just everything that goes on in the mountains, there's sort of a troll for it, isn't there? There's a troll for that. Yes, yeah. Yeah, indeed these beliefs are incredibly widespread. I mean, we kind of think they're, you know, buried in the deep past, but actually they're still kind of with us. You know, they're reflected in, you know, all these things like making, wishing, you know, that some springs have sacred properties that if you make a wish at them or throw some money in or whatever, good luck will befall you. You know, you have all over the world and banyan trees in India, for example, which have this sacred property very often of, you know,

if you tie a message on it, you know, with some coloured ribbon or something like that, you know, good fortune will befall you. And, and there's this part and parcel of really. realizing that the world out there, in contrast to the way animals, I always describe animals, including monkeys and apes, of encountering the world we live in with their noses against the grindstone of it. So they just take it as it is. They can't step back from it far enough to kind of go, oh, why does they have to be this way? It's painful, having my nose ground to pieces by the world out there. Maybe I could change it. Maybe we can do things that we can do things that we stop the bad things happen or make it more likely the good things will happen.

And, you know, those ideas are still deeply, deeply relevant in our psyche even today. And, you know, people still throw money into fountains. I'm not sure if they always make wishes that they do it. but, you know, they also go that one step further and they tie, you know, requests to whoever, you know, for good, good luck in their exams or finding love or, you know, curing their dreaded diseases or what have you. And we're very susceptible to that. And you think, you know, the evil eye, for example, this concept that at certain people who I suppose you would consider, to be kind of witches or wizardy type folk with special powers, that if they catch your eye, you know, can harm you in all sorts of ways.

And indeed that witchery as such, you know, is a major force that affects you. That, you know, and that's still very prevalent in many parts of Africa, let's say, for example, you know, that there are people if a death occurs, you know, you don't know why it happened, well, you know, the local witch or the wizard put a spell on them. But, you know, you think of evil eye in southern Europe, but it was widely, widely. That kind of is still there. People still worry about it, not as much as they did maybe a hundred years ago, but, you know, it's something that still bothers them.

We count some of these as superstitions, but, you know, they are. deeply ground into our psyche. So the books called How Religion Evolved. So to me, that begs the question. So how do you get across the idea? So do you mean by that that there was a sort of, you know, Darwinian selection for those of us who were more predisposed to believe? Or that the groups that kind of had religion within them

or had a greater propensity for it. They proliferated more. In a sense, it's a bit of both, because it's operating in both directions. I mean, I think one of the problems when people think about natural selection, Darwinian evolution, they're really thinking in terms of what Darwin

and the early evolutionary people wrote, you know, 150-odd years ago, which was really thinking in terms of individual benefits. So the motor in the end to evolution is the success with which you propagate your genes, the technically known as the fitness of the genes. It's the property of the genes,

the individuals, as Richard Dawkins famously said, are merely the vehicles, that the genes temporarily occupy on their way to eternity, if you like, promoting their, their survival. What has kind of been lost sight of, or perhaps isn't so widely appreciated, it really ought to be, is the fact that these very intensely social species, notably the primates in general, but also some of the species like elephants and the horse family, the zebras, the asses, the horses, and so on are their principal adaptation to coping with the vicissitudes

of survival and successful reproduction is group living. And it's the success with which the group as a whole solves that problem that affects their personal fitness. So this is a kind of more complex interplay between these group level effects and how these are costed out at the level of the individual and the individual's genes. So this is what's sometimes called now group augmentations selection or group level selection as opposed to group selection, which is really doesn't work. I mean, that's selection for the survival of groups, and that's the end of it. The whole motor of the evolutionary processes is the survival and successful reproduction of individuals, not of species or groups or anything like that.

that these group level effects whereby individuals can do better by cooperating, that gives you this kind of multi-level selection process is somewhat more complicated, not necessarily. It's kind of a derivative of W.D. Hamilton's concept of inclusive fitness, which was very close to that. He was thinking in terms of essentially kinship groups cooperating, which clearly they do. this is just extending that a little further.

But that motor is very, very important. It means that there's a two-step process here. So the animal has to be, or the individual has to be able to sort of negotiate the successful existence and stability of social groups. Otherwise, it's back down to a lower level of fitness, if you like. It doesn't mean to say it's going to go extinct tomorrow. is just not going to be as successful as it might otherwise have been if the individuals cooperate together. So in that sense, what the religion component does is provide a mechanism for solving the coordination problem

that be devils all group living species. So if you look at antelope or deer or cattle, you know, they have sort of groups, but they're very temporary. think of them as herds really. Animals come and go when they get bored or when one wants to feed when everybody else goes to rest. And the group sort of breaks up and dissipates. And what primates have done is to solve that problem of preventing everybody else drifting off. So the group stays together and is always there when you need it. And that's actually a very taxing problem.

why they have big brains essentially, but also in addition, they need these kind of deep pharmacological mechanisms based on these bonding behaviors, grooming in the case of primates, but augmented for us. I mean, we don't groom because we don't have much fur left except on the top of the head. But what we've done is sort of adapted to grooming patterns and the hand movements of grooming, if you like, in things like caressing and touching and hugging and, and patting and the like, which we do all the time. We kind of don't think about it because we're concentrating so much on the conversation, the intellectual conversation we're having, that we kind of forget that, you know,

you're sitting around the table in the pub, you're reaching out and patting somebody on the back, you know, or giving them a rub on the shoulder and all these kind of things. Or if they burst into tears, giving them a hug, all these kind of things that we do. and we do it all the time. I hear some to say not usually with strangers. It's very, very geared to how much of that physical touch we engage in is very geared to the emotional quality of the relationship, how close the relationship is to us. But it's there and it's going on constantly and it's triggering the same mechanism in the brain as grooming does in monkeys and apes. But what we've done is add to that to increase the kind of number of people we can groom with simultaneously,

these other things like laughter and singing and dancing and the like. And religion comes into that mix as what seems like my impression is a really very powerful addition to it. So the individual is the one who's benefiting now because, you know, they're getting all the benefits of living in a group. and that's coming, you know, through being able to solve the problem of keeping the group together, which is what wanting religion does. I mean, it's a nice example, I think, of how well religion works in this context from 19th century American millinarian cults and communes, of which there are, you know, many thousands through the 19th century, you know, from the well-known ones like, you know, the more,

and the shakers and so on to some very, very of skill ones, which you've never heard of. You know, they would go out and do sort of the desert somewhere or far away and set up a commune and live by their principles. Well, if you look at the secular communes, many of which there are, and most of them were influenced by Richard Owen, who, founded the new Lanark factory community up in Lanarkshire in Scotland, and then went off to America because he got fed up with the bureaucracy in the early 19th century. You know, these secular communes, so there were kind of socialist, communalistic, you know,

sort of live life together, as it were, in a small community. their average size of foundation was 50 people and their survival time on average was around 10 years, 7 to 10 years. And they usually fell apart because, you know, the leader ran off with the savings of the, that everybody put their savings into the common pot and eventually the leader either behaved very badly or just ran off with their savings. In contrast, the religious communes had an average foundation size.

of about 150, and they survived on average for about 70 years. So lots of them are still with us, you know, the Mormons, the Hutterites. Everybody knows about, you know, people like, or many people know about the Anita community in upstate New York, which survived on into the beginning of the 20th century. I think the shakers, very famously, because everybody was this fad for shaker furniture in your kitchen, all these sort of things a few years ago. they were all had deep religious foundations basically. And I think it was the religious foundations that kept them going for so long

because what religion did is keep the lid on, the stresses that otherwise bubble up whenever you're living with other people, don't we know it? And, you know, sooner or later, other people just become so annoying, you know, you either leave or you probably clobber than one, you know, which has the same effect because it's not very very conducive to a peaceful social life if there's lots of fights breaking up and that kind of thing. So what, you know, that seems to be what's happening. You know, that's the sort of feature of primate social life. It's a feature of our social life.

But what religion then allowed us to do is just keep the lid on that enough by two ways, I think, particularly in the modern doctrinal phase, where you have these bigger communes, as it were, that were set up, is you've got a combination of a policeman in the sky situation where you've got, you know, the God in your religion, because most of them were, in that particular case, obviously, were Christian, in some form, you know, and God was wagging his finger. You know, this is a kind of more benevolent God than the kind of earlier gods who required sacrifices to these, these, these, mostly the gods who take an interest in human affairs and, you know, sort of punish the backsliders and, you know, praise the ones who stick to the

stick to the rules. So you've got that combined with the kind of, if you like, that's top-down discipline being imposed by the religious hierarchy. But that's combined with this bottom-up, very, very old, shamanic animist-type, trans-based, rich, highly ritualized form of religion, which is, you know, providing, you know, It's committing you to the principles, the religion, and therefore to the other people you're living with.

So it's allowing you to both behave better, but also be more tolerant, I think, is what it's doing of other people's because of your commitment to the community as a whole. If you'd like to hear Robin and I dig deeper into how spirituality weaves its magic on our brains, check out instant genius extra. a bonus podcast available via subscription on Apple's podcast app. Alternatively, do check out how religion evolved and why it endures, which is on sale now and published by Pelican, an imprint of Penguin Books. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents,

as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can find us online at sciencefocus.com. See you next time. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship.

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