Diamondback Online - The University of Maryland's Independent Daily Student Newspaper

Issue date: 4/10/08 Section: Opinion

Tim Hiller

Religion is one of the most culturally ubiquitous institutions one could imagine. A 2006 Baylor University study found that 92 percent of respondents believed in God or a higher power. When a belief is so universal, it drives evolutionary biologists to find a Darwinian link. From a glimpse, it's hard to see what link that could possibly be. Why would our ancestors who sacrificed edible meat to some god they believed in have an adaptive advantage over the ones who kept all the meat for themselves? Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists are beginning to provide the answers.

These researchers classify traits as either adaptive or as byproducts of adaptive traits. The late Stephen J. Gould, biologist and writer, once said "Natural selection made the human brain big, but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels - that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity."

It's hard to see how religious behavior could be an adaptive behavior, so does our belief amount to nothing more than the byproduct of Darwinian natural selection?

Imagine two ancestral individuals walking the African savannah. The first individual sees something in the distance he thinks could be a large predatory cat so he flees into some nearby foliage. The other individual sees something off in the distance but instead shrugs it off as his eyes playing tricks on him or as a plant blowing in the wind. If there is, in fact, no predator, this situation is quite trivial. However, if there is a predator, the second individual is putting himself in unnecessary danger by not taking cover, by not ascribing agency to the unknown. Sometimes, of course, there will be no predator, but it's in the individual's best interest in either case to recognize any and all potential patterns or agents, whether valid or not, and respond appropriately as if they were valid. So in a sense, our minds are hardwired through millions of years of natural selection to ascribe agency to the unknown. From there it's only a small step to ascribing agency to the all aspects of life. Enter gods - sea gods, sun gods, rain gods. Primitive humans attributed agency to processes they depended on (i.e., the tides, the rising and falling of the sun, a good rainy season) for the same reason they would ascribe agency to the possible predator off in the distance.

Recognition of our tendency to ascribe agency to the unknown does a great deal in explaining how religious behavior could have arisen as it, like any behavior, must have some sort of Darwinian origin. Evolutionary biologists have begun to build a non-adaptive byproduct theory that seems to indicate religion started off as something of a misfiring caused by our evolutionary hardwiring. I have always marveled in the simplicity and beauty of natural selection. To me, religious behavior is perhaps one of the most striking examples of how fascinating, how amazing the world truly is when observed through a Darwinian lens. There is something truly startling about the idea that, in guiding the evolution of humans from single-celled organisms through billions of years, natural selection could have inadvertently led mankind to ponder an all-powerful supernatural god. The thought that our most intimate emotions, beliefs and aspirations could be a byproduct of natural selection, a process that has shaped every living creature on the planet, makes one feel small in a way that religion could never accomplish.

Tim Hiller is a senior microbiology major. He can be reached at thriller@umd.edu.

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