Robin Dunbar sets out to offer nothing less than “an overarching theory for why and how humans are religious.” Unlike most writers on such themes, he is largely uninterested in the truth or otherwise of religious claims and has little to say about the damage caused by religions, although he does touch on their “militant violence” and the predatory promiscuity we find among the charismatic leaders of small cults.
But he is intrigued by the “seeming universality” of religions and their constant tendency to fragment. His stimulating and hugely ambitious book, therefore, uses a variety of different approaches to throw light on three really big questions: “the functions that religion has served,” “the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that make this possible” and “the timing of the origins of religion.”
At the emotional heart of religion, as Dunbar sees it, is something he calls “the mystical stance,” which includes “a susceptibility to enter trance-like states,” “belief in a transcendental (or spirit) world” and “a belief that we can call on hidden power(s) to help us.”
Though sophisticated systems of theology have obviously been built on these foundations, “beneath the surface veneer of doctrinal rectitude lurks an ancient foundation of pagan mystical religion.”
One of the key questions is how the original immersive or shamanic forms of religion develop into elaborate doctrinal religions.
Since Dunbar is emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, his book is “firmly grounded in our current understanding of evolutionary theory.” Those who sign up to religions, he points out, “can incur serious costs in terms of self-imposed pain, celibacy and even self-sacrifice.”
This raises obvious moral issues, but it also makes little evolutionary sense for creatures struggling to survive and reproduce. So do religions offer some countervailing benefits to individuals or communities? Or are they “the maladaptive byproduct of traits or cognitive processes that evolved for other perfectly respectable biological purposes,” like the lower back pain we have to put up with in return for the advantages of walking upright?
Here, Dunbar surveys the key evolutionary explanations for religions, the evidence that they make people healthier and happier and their role in building a sense of cohesion (which apparently means that religious communities tend to be larger and longer-lasting than their secular equivalents). He also makes use of “nearly two decades of research… on the nature of sociality and the mechanisms of community bonding in primates and humans.”
One of the strange things Dunbar is famous for is the number 150. He has argued in several earlier books – such as How Many Friends Does One Person Need? — that this is a “natural” size for human groups, as large as possible while still allowing us to organize our social interactions by keeping track of all the individual members. Evidence for this claim, he suggests here, comes from research on “wedding guest lists,” Facebook friends and “egocentric social networks” (the number of friends and family we make a conscious effort to keep in touch with) and, more particularly, from “the typical size of hunter-gatherer communities, the form of society in which we have spent more than 95 percent of our existence as a species.”
While other primates resolve conflicts and maintain cohesion in much smaller groups largely by grooming each other, humans rely on laughing, singing, dancing and feasting — and the rituals of religion — to release endorphins and overcome the inevitable tensions. Yet as societies get bigger, we keep hitting a series of glass ceilings that require more and more elaborate and law-like forms of religion to prevent breakdown.
How Religion Evolved offers insights into why “all the great world religions emerged within the very narrow latitudinal band of the northern subtropical zone that lies immediately above the tropics.”
It also sketches in a four-phase model, taking us all the way from “informal, immersive… ancestral religions,” which were “designed to bond very small hunter-gatherer communities of 100-200 individuals living in dispersed camps of 35-50,” through to the much more formal styles of religion, incorporating temples, professional priests and complex rituals, which emerged about 4,000 years ago alongside “a dramatic rise in the size of settlements and the polities within which these are embedded.”
The result is a compelling intellectual workout. Dunbar offers a powerful central argument, an excellent survey of alternative theories and a wide range of vivid and illuminating examples. These take in extreme and painful rituals, wishing wells and malicious witches, experiments exploring the impact of synchrony in rowers and the common fears among those visiting spirit worlds while in a trance that they will never be able to find their way back to the real world. Many people today are, of course, indifferent, if not actively hostile, to religion. Yet it would be a pity if that led them to miss this book. If Dunbar is right that religion is “unlikely to have evolved before the appearance of anatomically modern humans around 200,000 years ago,” that also makes it “something that sets humans apart.” The story he tells is important to us all.
Taiwan can often feel woefully behind on global trends, from fashion to food, and influences can sometimes feel like the last on the metaphorical bandwagon. In the West, suddenly every burger is being smashed and honey has become “hot” and we’re all drinking orange wine. But it took a good while for a smash burger in Taipei to come across my radar. For the uninitiated, a smash burger is, well, a normal burger patty but smashed flat. Originally, I didn’t understand. Surely the best part of a burger is the thick patty with all the juiciness of the beef, the
The ultimate goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the total and overwhelming domination of everything within the sphere of what it considers China and deems as theirs. All decision-making by the CCP must be understood through that lens. Any decision made is to entrench — or ideally expand that power. They are fiercely hostile to anything that weakens or compromises their control of “China.” By design, they will stop at nothing to ensure that there is no distinction between the CCP and the Chinese nation, people, culture, civilization, religion, economy, property, military or government — they are all subsidiary
This year’s Miss Universe in Thailand has been marred by ugly drama, with allegations of an insult to a beauty queen’s intellect, a walkout by pageant contestants and a tearful tantrum by the host. More than 120 women from across the world have gathered in Thailand, vying to be crowned Miss Universe in a contest considered one of the “big four” of global beauty pageants. But the runup has been dominated by the off-stage antics of the coiffed contestants and their Thai hosts, escalating into a feminist firestorm drawing the attention of Mexico’s president. On Tuesday, Mexican delegate Fatima Bosch staged a
Would you eat lab-grown chocolate? I requested a sample from California Cultured, a Sacramento-based company. Its chocolate, not yet commercially available, is made with techniques that have previously been used to synthesize other bioactive products like certain plant-derived pharmaceuticals for commercial sale. A few days later, it arrives. The morsel, barely bigger than a coffee bean, is supposed to be the flavor equivalent of a 70 percent to 80 percent dark chocolate. I tear open its sealed packet and a chocolatey aroma escapes — so far, so good. I pop it in my mouth. Slightly waxy and distinctly bitter, it boasts those bright,
RSS