Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 20 December 2009
Saturday, 24 April 2010

The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection... nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection.

Charles Darwin

Empathy: Survival of the Kindest

Religious behaviour seems to be at odds with everything biologists cherish. Humans are successful as a species because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits, not, as capitalist social psychological theory makes out by being greedy, acquisitive and selfish, which its proponents consider Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection implies.

Scientists at UC Berkeley, led by Dacher Keltner, author of Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, have noticed that social living implies “survival of the kindest”:

Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others. Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to co-operate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.

Keltner with Laura Saslow and Sarina Rodrigues found that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic. They gave nearly 200 people tests to measure their ability to identify and feel the emotions of others. They also sampled DNA from them. People can have one of three DNA variations of a particular gene that’s the receptor for oxytocin, a natural chemical that is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain, where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love. It is the love hormone.

The three DNA variants are AA, AG, or GG—depending on the genetic information they receive from each parent. People with GG variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are significantly better on the empathy tests compared with those with the AA and AG variants, and therefore at reading the emotional state of others. Moreover they seemed less reactive to stress, which the researchers tested by measuring the participants’ heart rate as they anticipated a loud bang.

So, for some people, empathy is innate, something that’s rooted in the genetic makeup they get from their parents. Says Rodrigues:

The most useful information we can take from this study is that some people are going to be a bit more naturally closed off and unable to really understand what other people are feeling, and this could be in large part due to the fact that they’re so consumed by their own stress—that it’s somehow impairing them from connecting with others and reaching out.

But what about those who have the AA or AG variation—are they doomed to go through life emotionally cut off from others? No. Genes do not determine everything. Our genome may predispose us to certain behaviors, but ultimately, our lives are shaped by the interaction between our genes and our experiences. Genes give us a predisposition to act in a certain way, but through determining to find better ways of socially connecting with people or handling stress, anyone can overcome these obstacles. In the old terms of Nature and Nurture, both count.

Besides oxytocin, Keltner et al are also studying the vagus nerve. Both the vagus nerve, a uniquely mammalian system that connects to all the body’s organs and regulates heart rate and breathing, and oxytocin, play a role in communicating and calming. Two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching one other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety.

From activity in the threat response region of the brain, many women grew anxious as they waited to be touched. However, as soon as they felt a sympathetic touch, the vagus nerve was activated and oxytocin was released, calming them immediately. Keltner said:

Sympathy is indeed wired into our brains and bodies, and it spreads from one person to another through touch.

The same goes for smaller mammals. Rat pups whose mothers licked, groomed and generally nurtured them showed reduced levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, a hormone triggered by stress and anxiety, and had generally more robust immune systems. In another study, the level of cortisol of both white and Latino students dropped as they got to know each over a series of one on one get togethers.

Generosity

While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question is, “How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?”. Robb Willer thinks an answer is that the more generous we are, the more respect we get. In a study, each participant had some cash and were told to use it in games testing sharing, ostensibly for the “public good”. It found more generous people received more gifts, respect and co-operation from the others, and wielded more influence over them:

The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated. But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status. Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous, and more why they are ever selfish.

Robb Willer, UC Berkeley

The assumption that nice guys finish last is shown by all this work to be false. Instead it supports the idea that humans respond to compassion, when adequately nurtured and supported. Keltner said:

This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin’s observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct.

Is Religion or Biology the Source of Morality?

Professor Marc D Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist and biologist, writing at Edge, asks whether religion and moral education are the only, or even the ultimate, source of moral reasoning? Moral education is often motivated by an institutional agenda, to do what is best for those within the moral community, preaching partiality—not plurality—lumping into one category all those who do not accept their particular morality, and failing to practise compassion towards outsiders. Such teaching shows the impartial observer that Nurture—the teaching—not Nature—our gut feeling about any moral issue—as responsible for moral atrocities against humanity.

If religion is not the source of our moral insights, and moral education has the potential to teach partiality and objectively immorally behaviour, then where does our gut feeling for moral right and wrong come from? Studies of the mind offer an answer. All humans—young, old, male, female, conservative, liberal, wherever they live, whatever their religious or moral education, highly educated or with no education—have a natural, biological moral code. With it, we have principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an “impartial, rational and unemotional” ability, which does not prescribe who we should help or who we can harm. It is an intuition guiding us to know when helping another is obligatory and harming another is forbidden.

Evidence for it is a moral sense test run online, which asks for information about gender, age, nationality, education, politics and religion, then sets a series of situations requiring a moral judgement—is it morally forbidden, permissible or obligatory? The moral dilemmas are deliberately unfamiliar. When no one has experienced them before, when neither the law nor religious scripture provides any guidance, people are thrown back on to their instinct or intuition.

Many are situations like the railway signalman faced with a runaway carriage that will kill five workmen on the line, unless he switches the points to send it up a side track where only one workman will be killed. The dilemma is that someone will die, should it be one or five? These are problems that force us to wrestle with the consequences of our actions using our internal moral code. Thousands of people responded to a hundred dilemmas. People could be categorized from their preliminary responses into a wide variety of social groups. All the cultural and moral groupings reacted similarly. There is no social communal effect, and whatever morality was displayed must have been the basic instinct of morality we all have as humans, irrespective of our social affiliations.

We judge actions as worse than failing to act. Pushing a person into the factory vent to stop a poison gas from emerging is worse than allowing the person to fall in. Using someone as a means to some greater good is worse if thereby you do them some harm than if you don’t. It is the difference between an evitable (avoidable) harm and an inevitable (unavoidable) harm. Distinctions such as these are rational, abstract, and unemotional until, at least, we are obliged to act.

Why are there Moral Atrocities?

If this code is universal, then why are there are so many moral atrocities in the world? Clinical studies of psychopaths reveal they lack feelings needed for self control, they feel no remorse, shame, guilt or empathy. Some say they do not understand what is right or wrong. They cannot do what is morally right because they do not know what it is. In fact they do know what is right and wrong, according to recent work, but do not care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged.

So, the answer is to do with emotions, the feelings we have by which we identify with others in our human group. When we fuel “in group” biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the other by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, disgust. We label the other—the members of the “out group”—with a description that makes them subhuman or even inanimate, often parasitic and vile, and thus disgusting. When disgust is recruited, those in the “in group” have only one way out—purge the other.

The psychology of prejudice, of creating distinctive classes of individuals who are in the tribe and outside of it, is flexible and so capable of change. All animals, humans included, have evolved the capacity to create a distinction between members of the “in group” and those in the “out group”. But it is not set in the genome. It is a matter of experience. Studies of child development show that within the first year of life, babies prefer to look at faces from their own race to faces of a different race, they prefer to listen to speakers of their native language over foreigners, and prefer to listen to their own dialect of their native language. But if babies watch someone of another race speaking their native language, they are much more willing to engage with this person than someone of the same race speaking a different language.

It is all experience, but some responses are more important than others. They are plastic, malleable, changeable! Racial prejudice is reduced among children of mixed parentage. Adults who have dated someone of another race are less prejudiced. It follows that by introducing all children, early in life, to all variety of religions, political systems, languages, social organisations and races, they will be more tolerant. Tolerance is improved by more experience of diversity. We are instinctively xenophobic, but we can indeed learn to love the stranger in our midst. We just have to do it!

We have an inbuilt morality, but we also respond to socializing through experience. If our socialization is narrow, our inbuilt morality applies only to the narrow group we know, with all its prejudices. If our socialization is broad, then we realize our morality applies to everyone. So, our evolved capacity to intuitively judge what is right or wrong is not sufficient to live a moral life. These are two reasons why:

1. Our moral instincts evolved for small human groups, often an extended family. Today we live in a large communities, cities and nations, where our small group instincts need to be adjusted by wider experience of the variety intrinsic to large groups. We cannot have a small group temperament when we live in immense cities, and that is why laws have had to substitute for morals. If society were more moral, laws would not need to be so intrusive. Moreover, modern living has faced us with modern moral decisions. Again we cannot make adequate decisions based merely on clan morality.
2. It means we have to look less narrowly, and listen to the universal voice of our species, in relation to the whole of it rather than the local group. Living in an age of WMD and in a global village we have to be sensitive to the larger scale of the consequences of our judgements. At one time we could fight off a challenge from another tribe with little damage, some injuries and a few deaths. Now the damage will be serious and global, millions dead and injured, and no one will escape it.

Modern Theories of Religion

Most people make some effort to check the truth of claims for ourselves. Yet when it comes to religion, they do not. They are most persuaded by stories that contradict the known laws of nature. Miracle tales are popular among believers. Yet they want a God with human feelings and emotions. Why do some humans commit to religious impossible beliefs they can never hope to verify? There are three broad hypotheses. Religion is:

1. individually adaptive
2. maladaptive
3. benefits the group.

1. Richard Klein and Blake Edgar reckon that a genetic mutation occurred around 50,000 years ago, a tiny—two amino acids differ between humans and chimps—mutation in FOXP2 allowed humans to speak, develop culture, make tools, paint, and invent religion. But Homo had our version of FOXP2 1.8 million years ago with Homo habilis (K C Diller and R L Cann in R Botha and C Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language, 2009).

Paul Bloom thinks children are “psychologically primed for religion” because it is evolutionarily advantageous to be gullible when hearing stories told by their parents that serve as warnings about the dangerous world. Fear of imagined spirits keeps obedient children out of trouble and alive.

James McClenon thought those who were more suggestible had a similar evolutionary edge over the less suggestible, so they were more easily persiaded that the Shaman had real magic, and some of it was real advise and proper medicine, helping in childbirth, for examples, and allowing believers to reproduce more efficiently (J McClenon, Shamanic Healing, Human Evolution and the Origins of Religion, 1994).

Scott Atran says humans were naturally selected for their ability to respond quickly and emotionally to the array of dangers they faced:

The evolutionary imperative to rapidly detect and react to rapacious agents encourages the emergence of malevolent deities in every culture, just as the countervailing imperative attached to care givers favours the apparition of benevolent deities.

S Atran, In Gods We Trust, 2004

Religion is seen by Atran as a beneficial by product of biological development—what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, a contingent feature that acquires a value of its own.

2. Richard Dawkins likens religion to a dangerous disease:

Religion is a virus more destructive than smallpox, but more difficult to eradicate.

R Dawkins, The Humanist, 1997

Religion is a cultural meme, jokes, theories, rumours, religious doctrines, etc. Memes for him are the new replicators (The Selfish Gene). Daniel C Dennett accepts folk religion as including primitive practical knowledge, but knowledge that is not corrigible like science (Breaking The Spell, 2007).

Pascal Boyer does not accept religion as maladaptive, but explains it as a meme. Evolution gave us mental tools for adaptive value, but they have been hijacked. Religion used them once it had started, especially our social inclinations and changed people's behavior (P Boyer, Religion Explained, 2001), and so it spreads from one mind to another.

3. Some others also take the human group as the basis of religion. David Sloan Wilson advocates group selection. Followers of Dawkins will not admit it, though partly at least it is individual selection for communal behavior which gives the now social individuals the advantage. United groups are stronger than individuals and divided groups, so sociality is an adaptive trait. Religion began as human bonding practices, and they evolved into religion. Religious systems are passed down culturally (D Sloan-Wilson Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature Of Society, 2003).

Another advantage of religion might be as a display system (Richard Sosis). People display their commitment to the society by professing beliefs held in common, but apparently bizarre and showy, like peacock's tail. There is a pride in undertaking the strange and unfamiliar rituals, often involving pain akin to torture, to prove their commitment to the group. Such participation in the group display separates the insider from the outsider.

For Robin Dunbar too, the group is what is important. The hominins joined in larger groups for which larger brains were an advantage to cope with more interpersonal relationships which require a theory of mind to be effective. It means having an idea that others are like them, and think in the same way. It also requires an understanding of intentionality, and that extends to different dimensions. Higher order intentionality lets us arrive at sophisticated language, culture and religion, the latter again helping group cohesion.

The Evolution of Religion

The first human beings emerged in Africa around 500,000 years ago. Modern people like us arose about 200,000 years ago, complete with a frontal cortex to their brains just like ours. These lobes of the brain are where we get our intelligence, our ability to think and speak about abstract ideas, and our creativity. When did religion first appear? One indication is burial. Some experts believe this also began 200,000 years ago, with the Neanderthals, but the motivation for inhumation need not have been religion, but to get rid of the smell.

Better evidence may be burial with grave goods, Which Robin Dunbar thinks started about 25,000 years ago, but even this need not be because of belief in an afterlife, which is usually assumed. Thus, Dunbar thinks grave goods imply a sophisticated theology, which required time to evolve itself. It could be simply sentiment—people were buried with objects that meant a lot to them just because it was theirs and their friends felt such treasured possessions should not be recycled to others. And it is just as possible that the habit of burying people with treasured possessions led to mothers telling aetiological stories to explain it, and the favoured one became the story that we lived on after death, and needed our goods for this afterlife.

Does religion give an evolutionary or social advantage? If some behavior has evolved, then it has given some advantage to the animals that have it. Organisms with it are better adapted to survive and more likely to pass their genes on to the next generation. Some scientists claim to have located religious belief in our genes and the biological mechanisms of heredity. Dean Hamer, director of the gene structure and regulation unit of the US National Cancer Institute, revealed in his book (The God Gene 2004) the source of religion. Faith is “hardwired into our brains”.

Karl Zimmer explains that Hamer set out to find genes for cigarette addiction. His team studied hundreds of pairs of siblings, comparing how strongly their shared heredity influenced different aspects of their personality. Subjects had to complete psychological questionnaires and give DNA. Hamer then thought the database might let him investigate the genetics of spirituality. He looked at results to questions that measured the personality trait “self transcendence”. So called spiritual people share characteristics like feeling “connected to the world” and gullibility. Hamer confirmed that self transcendence is partly inherited, and found the gene VMAT2, Vesicular Monoamine Transporter 2, seemed common to self transcendent people. It makes membrane covered containers that neurons use to deliver neurotransmitters to one another. The VMAT2 protein passes dopamines around the brain inducing general feelings of pleasure, happiness and harmony. Dopamines are released during trances and other such ecstatic religious experiences, and by psychotropic and hallucinogenic drugs.

VMAT2 comes in two versions differing in a single position. People with one version score 1% higher in self transcendence tests. About half the people in the study had at least one copy of the self transcendence boosting version of VMAT2—the God gene! Hamer thinks his God gene selected by natural selection. Self transcendence makes people happier, and so likely to have more kids. But none of height, weight, metabolic rate, sickness, health, or any other non-trivial organic characteristic can be directly traced back to a single gene, so that religion should be seems unlikely. Nor did he rule out other more probable explanations for it. In 1993, Hamer reported a genetic link to male homosexuality in the X chromosome. No one could replicate it. No one seems to have replicated the God gene. Getting a convincing link between genes and psycholoical behavior is hard.

Religion, though, might simply be cultural, and ought not to be mistaken for something which evolved in a biological sense. Nevertheless, evolutionary biologists have started to think important aspects of religion do seem to have evolutionary benefits.

In prescientific times religion had a function as a protoscience, to give pseudo explanations of cosmological and meteorological events, the seasons, psychological cures for some illnesses, and so on. It sufficed when there were no alternative, better explanations, but most of it is fancy, depending on ignorance and the placebo effect.

In modern times, religion has been touted as valuable, despite its fancies and fables, because it make us feel better about life, or at least resigned to its worst vagaries—Marx’s “opium of the masses. Tests show religion can make people feel better. Actively religious people compared with nonreligious people are often happier, live longer, suffer fewer physical and mental illnesses, and recover faster from medical interventions such as surgery. Of course, it is an error to assume the reason is spiritual, or has anything to do with God. It is possibly more a function of the lifestyle choices devoutly religious people make. They do not smoke and drink, fornicate or generally have live unhealthily. Their lifestyle leads to the benefits, but it is a style that many people today think is hardly worth living—it is so dull!

There are two feasible ways that religion might benefit evolving humans. It might:

1. provide and enforce some kind of moral code, so keeping social order
2. bring a sense of communality, of group membership.

These two options relate to our social nature, and so might have something to do with the way we evolved. We are not social because we like to congregate in church, we congregate in church because we are social beings. Nor are we moral because it feels nice and healthy to be good, but because living socially requires us to live morally. Social animals need a cohesive, supportive group. Immoral animals are evicted from the pack and die alone, unless they can find another pack that will take them in, and they then behave morally, having learnt their lesson.

But modern religions have themselves evolved, over several millennia, into the imperialist religions we now have, state religions acting as part of the imperialist state apparatus to keep us civil, that is, voluntarily orderly and law abiding. Only in the broadest sense can we confirm essential morality from the morals of the world religions. The earliest religions found in traditional small scale tribal societies were not religions as such at all. Religion did not exist until it budded from the culture of the early tribes where it acted as a social glue.

Religion as Social Glue

The idea that religion acts as a kind of glue that holds society together was conceived by Emil Durkheim. Tribal culture required the tribe to gather as a whole periodically in a festival or some sort of celebration set up by a “Big Man”, someone in the tribe with the charisma to get people together to do things. Such endeavors promoted co-operation and mutual bonding, becoming a feature of tribal cultural activity. The rituals which went along with these celebrations, rites of passage, slowly evolved into religion, and modern studies show rituals release endorphins, natural opioids in the brain.

Endorphins cause a mild euphoria, and so have become part of the body’s pain control system, becoming effective when pain is modest but persistent. Endorphins also stimulate the immune system. Plainly wild or persistent dancing, being strenuous, will cause the release of endorphins—some modern young people get addicted to working out, for that reason—but why should rituals that are not at all strenuous? One cannot imaging singing hymns is strenuous, or counting rosary beads, or listening to a sermon. And so why would endorphins be associated with ritual when it is not physically taxing or painful?

Evolution could explain it, if it had involved pain and had gone on for a long enough time, but that seems unlikely in human beings, for whom religion is a recent innovation, as far as we can tell. The fact of the matter as we find it is that rituals stimulate the release of endorphins, and that explains why early humans came together to perform rituals. The euphoria was a reward for taking the trouble to bond together as a group, and was understood as a feeling of fellowship. The same feeling is obtained by modern religious ritual, though it is far from stressful.

We inherit our sociality from our primate predecessors. Monkeys and apes are social and co-operative. Social animals have to forgo some of their personal demands to keep the group together. An animal in a group that is too greedy, selfish and demanding of the others, we saw is soon resented by the others and is driven out of the social group, to suffer and die alone. The ones who remain have less antisocial genes and the strength of sociality is increased. In monkeys and apes, unselfishness is demonstrated by social grooming, an activity that also releases endorphins. It begins to look as if endorphins evolved not only pain relievers, but also as sociability promotors. Again, it is the reward for being sociable. Apes that willingly groom others feel good about it.

Robin Dunbar has suggested that in human groups grooming was replaced by chattering and laughing with each other, rather like monkeys, and, when humans began to talk meaningfully, this evolved into gossiping, especially in the groups of females and children gathering roots and berries. They spent their whole time together, and the gossiping women naturally spread their habit to the children sharing the space with them. Language is an efficient way of “grooming”, allowing several people to be “groomed” at once. Gossiping is a group activity not merely a one to one activity, so it is a better social glue than grooming, and leads on to storytelling, further strengthening bonding. So, language evolved because gossiping was a better way of social bonding than grooming, and tribal celebrations, which became religion, allowed larger groups to bond.

The social rituals which were such an important part of early tribal society were justified to the children during the gathering and gossiping sessions by stories. When children asked, “why this?”, and, “why that?”, the mothers would invent spurious reasons, probably as a joke rather than with any serious intent. It made the mothers chuckle, but became an artform, and led to mythology. Each tribe invented reasons for its celebrations and rituals. Thus mythology became part of the celebrations and then that evolved into theology. To invent a mythology, then a theology, our ancestors had to develop cognitive abilities beyond those of their ancestors.

A Theory of Mind and Intentionality

I suspect you know I realise you find it is hard to understand my explanation of how you can know what I think God wants you to know.

Eighth order intentionality?

In 1988, British psychologists, Dick Byrne and Andrew Whiten, proposed the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. Monkeys and apes can use sophisticated social knowledge about each other to decide how they they are likely to behave in the future. The animals will then prefer relationships based upon their decisions. It amounts to them having a “theory of mind”, which is what it is now called. Theory of mind (ToM) means understanding that other people have a mind of their own, just like our own, understanding what another person is thinking, and realizing their beliefs might not be the same as our own. Using it, we assume everyone behaves like us with conscious purpose, and we try to work out their intentions. Primitive people even extend their ToM to animals and even rocks, trees, mountains and so on.

It allows people to handle orders of intentionality, or beliefs about what another believes. To think “I want something”, then extend it to “I think you want something”, is an extension of thought from intentionality to second order intentionality. Such statements contain two notions of intent, what I think and what you think. Thinking has to reach at least second order intentionality for people to think God thinks something.

Dunbar thinks theory of mind has to reach a sophisticated level before religion, such as we understand it, can arise. The reason is that modern western religion is concerned with doing God’s will, and so the worshiping animal has to understand that God has a will of his own. God, in short, is thought of as a personality.

A simple personal religion is third order intentionality. I think what God thinks I ought to think. But religion was always a social matter, not simply a personal one, and so to be social, fourth order intentionality is necessary. We want you to think that God thinks we ought to think such and such. That is the basis for communal religion, Dunbar says. Dunbar takes it further still—religious morality requires us to agree upon what God wants us to think and do. That is fifth order intentionality! At the fourth order of intentionality, we still do not agree on what we think about what God thinks. Dunbar says the introduction of this mutual agreement extends intentionality to the fifth order—I think you think that we both think that god thinks we ought to think so and so. For Dunbar this gets us to where we are, and religion based on such understanding is proper social religion or communal religion.

Fifth order intentionality is the limit of most people’s capacity. Even so it is what Dunbar calls neurally expensive, because most human thought only requires us to understand to the third level of intentionality. Religion therefore has given us the huge advantage of stretching our level of intentionality to the fifth level, and so it is a big boon to humanity, and why religion evolved.

Neocortex Size and Social Group Size

To see the evolution of religion, Dunbar looks at other animals which he thinks “are locked into first order intentionality”. Great apes can however manage second order intentionality. But mammals as lowly as rats have empathy, so they must know how a distressed rat is feeling. Sounds like second order intentionality. The rat observing the distress of the other rat must sense what the distressed rat wants!

Now Dunbar looks at the fossilized skulls of animals to get a relationship between the volume of their frontal lobes where he says intentionality operates in the brain. The level of intentionality they can achieve scales linearly with the volume of grey matter. There were two main periods of primate brain expansion. Brains grew about 50%, from roughly 450ml about two million years ago to 1000ml by 1.8 million years ago. It was a rapid expansion, yet no noticeable change in in human behaviour can be seen in the archaeological remains—mainly stone flakes knapped from flint and used for butchering animals or chopping plants.

Why then were brains getting larger? Brain tissue is expensive in terms of energy, so any chance increase in brain size seems most unlikely. Possibly it was because people were living in larger, more complex groups, having to keep track of more people, and maintain more social relationships. And interpolating from Dunbar’s graph, Homo erectus, as early as two million years ago, would have achieved third order intentionality, giving them personal beliefs.

The second period of expansion was slower, from roughly 600,000 to 200,000 years ago. By the end of it, our brains were the size we now have. Curiously, the Neanderthals in Europe, already separated from the lineage we came from which was still in Africa, also saw an increase in brain size, but they went extinct 30,000 years ago. Steven Mithen thinks the growth was caused by the evolution of language, but it seems odd that language should have evolved simultaneously in two species several thousand miles apart.

If language is the answer, then both groups of ape men must already have had some sort of proto language—they had both, in other words, already started to develop language long before it noticeably accelerated brain expansion, but both species were evolving in parallel. In both, language was supporting the growth of sociality. From his graph, Dunbar find archaic humans about 500,000 years ago achieved fourth order intentionality, giving them a social religion.

Archaeologists until 1996 favoured a recent date of 50,000 years ago for the advent of language as a human skill. Anatomists saw an asymmetry between the two halves of cranial casts of Homo sapiens from their emergence 250,000 years ago, and so favoured the much earlier date. The language centers of the brain are in the left hemisphere, and they surmise the reason for its larger size was their use of language.

According to Nicholas Humphrey, another factor in brain expansion was to let us live longer. The fossil record suggests it began to happen about 100,000 years ago. It allowed grandparents to provide important cover for the family, while children were learning the intricacies of the growing degree of socialization and language ability needed for successful human groups. Contemporary hunter gatherer societies show that families with involved grandparents have less infant mortality. The old people in that community, the wise old men and old women, not only look after older children while parents are hunting and gathering with the younger ones, but also teach them the practical and social skills of their culture. Dunbar found anatomically modern humans about 200,000 years ago achieved fifth order intentionality, early enough for all living humans to have this trait, but late enough to suggest that other hominins never had it.

The size of the primate brain’s neocortex relates with the size of their social groups. Both are simple numbers, the size of the neocortex being a proxy for mental complexity, and the size of the group for social complexity—the larger the group, the more relationships there are. Dunbar considered the neocortex rather than the total brain capacity because it is the part of the brain where consciousness is seated. It is the grey matter associated with intelligence, and surrounds the white matter deeper in the cerebrum. In small mammals, like rodents, it is smooth, but, in primates and other larger mammals, it has deep grooves (sulci) and wrinkles (gyri) which increase its surface area without changing its volume.

Brain casts also allowed cranial capacity to be measured, and so their typical group sizes to be estimated. The earliest hominins corresponded to the brain sizes of modern apes, but thereafter increased. Large brains were indeed linked to the need to hold large groups together. The same applied in nonprimate mammals. Even 500,000 years ago, group sizes reached 115 with grooming times of over 30% of the day—if grooming had been kept as the social bonding activity. By 250,000 years ago group sizes would have reached 130, with grooming time getting close to 35%.

150 was reached 100,000 years ago, and grooming would have been impractical as a social glue. Language had probably already taken over, as the anatomists suspected. The size of the human neocortex corresponds with a group size of 150—now called Dunbar’s Number, and it seems to have been reflected in society up until modern times. Religious communities like Hutterites and the Mormons lived in groups of 150. Businesses can function informally with less than 150 employees, but bigger ones need managers. A company of soldiers is about 150, and so on.

In hunter gatherer societies, the largest group is a tribe of 1500-2000 people, the maximum number of faces people can put a name to, but tribes are grouped into clans of about 150 kinfolk. Neolithic villages had a population close to 150. People tend to have about 11-12 close friends and relatives, corresponding to a grooming clique in primate societies, suggesting an evolved neurological basis for these numbers. So, around the time our ancestors evolved fifth order intentionality, their groups exceeded about 120 in size. Dunbar concludes that religion evolved to bond increasingly large human groups. It is difficult, though, not to think the argument getting self serving if not circular.

Is God a Person?

Dunbar’s theory of religion based on levels of intentionality require God to be treated as a person. He is a personality with His own will that religious humans have to try to suss. Scientific studies have been done to test how people think of God.

Uffe Schjødt of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, et al, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 20 devout Christians. They were given two tasks:

1. to silently recite the Lord’s Prayer, then a nursery rhyme. The same brain areas, associated with rehearsal and repetition, were activated.
2. to improvise personal prayers, then make requests to Santa Claus. Improvised prayers triggered patterns that match those seen when people communicate with each other, and activated circuitry that is linked with the theory of mind—the awareness that other individuals have their own independent motivations and intentions.

Two of the activated regions are thought to process desire and consider how another individual—in this case God—might react. Also activated were part of the prefrontal cortex—as we saw, important to theory of mind, linked to the consideration of another person’s intentions, and an area thought to help access memories of previous encounters with that person. Previous studies have found that the prefrontal cortex is not activated when people interact with inanimate objects, such as a computer game:

The brain doesn’t activate these areas because they don’t expect reciprocity, nor find it necessary to think about the computer’s intentions.

Uffe Schjødt

This area was not active during the Santa Claus task, “suggesting volunteers viewed Santa as fictitious, but God as a real individual”.

It’s like talking to another human. We found no evidence of anything mystical.

Uffe Schjødt

The results show people believe they are talking to someone when they pray, an outcome that pleased both atheists and Christians:

Atheists said it shows that it’s all an illusion, while Christians said it was evidence that God is real.

Uffe Schjødt

From the theory of intentionality outlined above, Robin Dunbar agrees that religious people treat gods as “having essentially human mental traits, like characters in a novel or play”. The ToM suggests believers think they know God’s brain. Nicholas Epley, et al, shows us they are right. People often reason egocentrically about others’ beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent’s beliefs like God.

Nicholas Epley, Benjamin A Converse, Alexa Delbosc, George A Monteleone, and John T Cacioppo studied people’s beliefs about God’s beliefs. They asked subjects questions about controversial moral issues, such as the death penalty and abortion, and also asked them about what they considered famous people, like Bill Gates, average Americans, and God thought on those issues. In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God, mostly the Christian God.

Subjects’ own beliefs on important social and ethical issues corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God. In both nationally representative and more local samples, people’s own beliefs consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God’s beliefs than with estimates of other people’s beliefs. Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs were more egocentric than their estimates of other people’s beliefs. Subjects’ attributed their own beliefs to God.

Which Person is He?

It may indicate that people attribute to God their own moral beliefs, but it may also reflect that people get their moral belief from their religion. So Epley added a control. He used an already established technique to alter the beliefs of the subjects. We are more malleable than we would like to think. Our beliefs can be manipulated simply by asking leading questions. Epley asked his subjects to write an essay espousing the opposite opinion to that they expressed on initial questioning, or to prepare a speech on say the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. Questioned again, subjects had shifted the beliefs they attributed to God, but not as consistently those attributed to average Joes and famous people. What one thinks God believes can be shifted by the same methods used to shift our own beliefs. The manipulative method, in short, not only changed their own opinions slightly, it changed what they thought was God’s will in just the same way.

Lastly, a neuroimaging study showed the same parts of the brain were neurally active when reasoning about one’s own beliefs and when reasoning about God’s beliefs. When the subjects were thinking about what other people might believe, different regions of the brain were neurally active. In particular, reasoning about God’s beliefs activated areas associated with self referential thinking, more than did reasoning about another person’s beliefs.

Trying to imagine the thoughts of other people causes mental activity in different areas of the brain from those active when imagining God’s thoughts. God is thought of as a person, but is not thought of like any other person. “Hurrah”, the believer cheers, but the areas of the brain active when imaging God’s thoughts are simply those active when one is thinking oneself! Believers are not thinking of God as a personality different from themselves. God is themselves, totally and utterly! It gives a whole new meaning to the notion of God being a personal God.

God and the believer are the same person. Believers map their own beliefs on to God’s, projecting onto God their own moral beliefs. God is an imaginary self. So God did not make man in his own image, but humans make God in their own image. The faithful think of God as a person, but He is not a person separate from themselves. They subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs even on controversial issues. It explains a lot about religion.

The discovery automatically makes every believer as good in God’s eyes as they judge themselves to be. Believers regard God’s beliefs as a moral compass, but the compass is just one’s own existing beliefs:

A compass reliably points north no matter what direction a person is facing, but, unlike an actual compass, their inference about God’s will, God’s compass, point people in whatever direction they are already facing.

It also means that the innate morals they were born with are automatically projected on to God, and so seem to them to emanate from Him! Tribal people see God as a personification of the tribe, and just as each individual is a fraction of the tribe, each will see themselves in the tribe’s personification of it, God.

These findings help explain why supernatural religious agents are often attributed a physical form and issue edicts that resemble the social practices of the culture from which they emerge.

Jordan Grafman

Epley’s work certainly shows that gods have human mental traits because Epley shows us that God is a reflexion of ourselves. We are divinely narcissistic. We have fallen in love with our own image, like budgerigars, and now worship it. No wonder religion is so compelling.

Christianity = Do Nothing!

What religion has not done, though, is combat the corrosive influence of capitalistic social theory on our societies. While capitalist theory says we are in perpetual competition, our nature as revealed by psychology and biological evolutionary analysis says the opposite—we are social, and our nature is to help and nourish each other. Lovingkindness is the supposed basis of Christianity, but all the Christian sects have changed the message to mean lovingkindness to our closest kin and friends. As far as others are concerned we should do our best to exploit them, to get one over on them, because, so the theory goes, they will do it to us. Yet, we are meant to be kind to everyone, even our enemies, the Christian God says. Why then does the most religious developed nation advocate selfishness as its main motivator, and keep on starting foreign wars? Is it because it is also the most capitalist nation, and capitalism is its real religion?

You only have to read some online lists to know the appalling hatred of right wing Christian fundamentalists. They obviously do not read their bibles, or they cannot comprehend some of the best and simplest English published in the last 400 years. The puzzle is why the remaining Christians who are still interested in Christ’s socially uniting messages put up with a load of cracked pots despoiling their God’s teaching. Maybe they are no less budgerigars than the others, but they ought to feel a duty to correct the terrible wrongs being perpetrated in the name of God. By not doing it they are condoning the evil, for evil it is. What, if you are a Christian, could be more evil than teaching the opposite of Christ’s teaching? It is what comes of putting your trust in right wing authoritarian devils!

Further Reading

• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History