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Book Review:
Darwin's Cathedral:
Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
by David Sloan Wilson
(ISBN-13: 978-0-226-90135-0, paperback, 2002)
Reviewed by Peter A. Taylor
July 12, 2021
Update: Sam Adams has a nice interview with D. S. Wilson here.
Group Selection
Darwin's Cathedral argues that religion is largely an adaptation for group selection. Group selection is a controversial topic within biology, so before I get into religion, I need to explain my understanding of group selection. This is going to be messy. I'm going to start out talking about genes ("hardware"), but my real interest is in culture ("software"). They "evolve" in analogous ways, but the mechanisms of genetic and cultural transmission are different, and they interact with one another.
The basic question is whether "altruistic" behavior, such as one animal risking its life to help another, unrelated member of the same group, can be so beneficial to the group that it helps spread the altruistic animal's genes throughout the general population even though the immediate effect of that risk-taking tends to be to reduce the frequency of those genes within the group. If yes, we can have "group selection". If no, we only have either "individual selection" or "kin selection". In the latter two cases, the "altruistic" gene can only spread if it isn't really "altruistic" after all. Instead, there is some mechanism that directly compensates the "altruistic" animal for the risk it takes, and causes the frequency to increase within the group. By "directly", I mean that we can understand the mechanism by which this gene propagates itself without having to talk about multiple groups.
Suppose you have two groups of some species of birds. Let's call them flock 1 and flock 2. This species of birds has a particular gene that comes in two alleles that cause the birds to behave differently when they see predators: there is an "altruistic" allele (A) that causes birds to squawk and try to fly away, and a "selfish" allele (S) that causes birds to stay silent and hide. (DSW calls them "callers" and "noncallers".) Squawking warns all the other birds in the flock, but draws the attention of the predator, and trying to fly away is a slightly less effective defense than hiding. So the flock that has more squawkers tends to do better overall than the other flock, but the squawkers themselves tend to get eaten more often than the hiders in the same flock. What happens? The conventional wisdom in biology for the last several decades has been that, regardless of which flock they are in, the squawkers tend to get eaten more often, and so allele A tends to be eliminated from both flocks. In order for this not to happen, several conditions have to be met.
One condition is that the "group" has to be defined in a way that makes sense in terms of the trait that is going to be favored. This is the "trait-group", and will be different for different traits. The "flock" in this bird example has to correspond to birds that are within earshot of the squawker, and they have to be somewhat isolated from the other flock, but not too isolated. If they are too isolated, the squawkers will be eliminated in both groups independently, but if they are not isolated enough, neither flock will benefit in relative terms from having more squawkers than the other.
Another condition for the squawkers to be able to maintain their relative numbers is that there has to be a mechanism by which the hiders tend to leave the more successful flock faster than the squawkers get eliminated by differential predation. Obviously, the squawkers in the more successful flock have to reproduce faster than they are eaten, and the hiders are stipulated to be more successful than the squawkers in the same flock; otherwise, we have individual selection for allele A rather than group selection. One way for birds to leave flock 1 is for flock 2 to be wiped out in some catastrophe, and for flock 1 to split off a new group to take over flock 2's territory. (In the case of primates, this catastrophe may be a war between two tribes, and the trait involved may be bravery in combat.) Another way for birds to leave the more successful group is for them to emigrate to the less successful flock in order to get away from overpopulation. But either way, wipeout or emigration, there has to be a tendency for the squawkers and hiders to segregate themselves. Again, if the two flocks end up with the same proportion of squawkers, neither flock will benefit in relative terms from having more squawkers than the other. (In the case of a subgroup of primates splitting off, it seems plausible to me that immediate families will stay together during the split, and a particular allele will tend to run in families. In the emigrating bird case, I can't think of a good reason for expecting the willingness of individuals to emmigrate to correlate with how they behave around predators.)
A crude simulation
I wrote a little Octave (Matlab clone) script, group_sel.m, to simulate a group selection toy example. There are two flocks of birds, imaginatively named "1" and "2", each with "altruistic" and "selfish" subpopulations, "A" and "S". The two flocks both started out with 100 birds each. Flock 1 had 10% inital squawkers, flock 2 0%. Each bird has a 0.3 chance of passing its allele on to a child per turn (I'm ignoring sex differences). I imposed an integer constraint on all of the populations (1A, 1S, 2A, and 2S), and relied on a random number generator to deal with fractional birds. I modeled the probability of death per turn for an entirely selfish population as c3*fp/(c4+fp), where fp is the flock population, c3 is 3.0 times the reproduction rate, and c4 was chosen to make the equilibrium come out to 100 birds. This keeps the population within sane bounds, despite the benefits of the "altruistic" allele. I modeled the "altruistic" effect of squawking on reducing flock deaths by applying a knock-down factor of 1/(1+ar) on the death rate, where ar is the fraction of the flock with the altruistic gene. This is based on the assumptions that (1) half the time, a predator sneaks up on a bird without being seen, and (2) squawking ends a predator's sortie, but hiding just gives him a chance to start over. I modeled the increased risk of death suffered by the squawkers by bumping up the death rate of the squawkers by a factor of 1+c1, where c1 was a parameter that I wanted to play with. We can call "c1" the "altruistic death parameter". I modeled migration per turn for the "selfish" birds as occurring only from the larger flock to the smaller, at a rate of 0.5*c5*(pr-1), where pr is the population ratio of the larger flock to the smaller flock, and c5 is another parameter I was thinking about playing with, but I ended up just leaving it at c5 = 0.5. Migration of the "altruistic" birds is similar, except that I imposed a knock-down factor of 1-c6, where c6 was another parameter I wanted to play with. We can call "c6" the "migration knock-down factor".
Coming up with death and migration formulas that produced the results I was looking for proved surprisingly difficult. In particular, I wanted a model in which a small initial population of altruists (a rare mutation) would grow. I didn't want flock 1 to need to be 50% altruists in order for the altruistic allele to flourish. Also, the effects of the small amount of randomness that I used to maintain integer population numbers proved surprisingly important, and required me to run each simulation many times. My baseline values of c1 (altruistic death parameter) and c6 (migration knock-down factor) were 0.01 and 0.9, respectively. In other words, my baseline "altruistic" birds were 1% more likely to be eaten by predators, but 90% less likely to emigrate. These values typically resulted in flock 1 rising to a population of nearly 300 birds, all of them altruistic, and flock 2 having a mixture of about 240 altruistic and 35 selfish birds. Basically, flock 2 is where selfish genes go to die. I generally ran the simulation for 1000 turns to make sure I was near equilibrium. I tried raising c1 (altruistic death parameter), and found that the results became erratic at around c1 = 0.03. Sometimes the altruists die out, but sometimes they still take over flock 1. At c1 = 0.05, the altruists usually die out. With the baseline c1, I tried lowering c6 (migration knock-down factor), and found that things started to get a little erratic at about c6 = 0.7. Sometimes the altruists would die out, and sometimes the groups would switch places. At c6 = 0.5, the altruists would often die out, and the selfish would survive in both groups. At c6 = 0.3, things became very erratic, and the altruists would usually die out.
One objection to this line of reasoning is what DSW calls "the averaging fallacy" (p. 13). The "altruistic" allele spreads through the overall bird population because the squawkers initially have a higher average survival rate than the hiders, so it looks like individual selection. If I understand it correctly, the mistake is that this line of reasoning fails to distinguish between within-group variance and between-group variance. If between-group variance makes the difference between an allele spreading or not, then you have group selection.
One might also object that I am cheating by combining my "altruistic" gene with mechanism that causes birds with different alleles to tend to segregate. My defense is that this tendency to segregate is a natural result of kin selection, and I am taking some level of kin selection for granted. But if group selection depends on kin selection in order for it to work, are they still distinct? My answer is yes. Group selection in this model builds on top of kin selection. Other models may work differently, but even where group selection depends on kin selection, it still works differently and produces otherwise unobtainable results.
One thing I found confusing was the discussion of "kin selection" vs. "group selection" vs. "multi-level selection". DSW writes (p. 139), "In chapter 1, I explained that kin selection is a kind of group selection and that moral systems enable another kind of group selection that can take place among unrelated individuals." At first, I wondered if there was some degree of relatedness beyond which organisms were considered not to be "kin". But no, that's not what he means. There are several things going on in parallel. In the case of the bird simulation above, we have group selection that is also kin selection; squawking benefits the group, independently of kin relationships, but the tendency of the groups to segregate (through splitting off or through emmigration) in ways that correlate with which allele they carry means that within-group kin relationships tend to be closer than between-group kin relationships. There is also individual kin selection going on simultaneously involving other genes (e.g. do the females like males with flashy plumage?). But when we start talking about culture, we get something that depends on the biological capabilities of the creatures in question, but that can be copied without biological reproduction, and that takes on a semi-independent existence. Now we have multi-level selection, where individual (genetic) kin selection, group (genetic) kin selection, and group (non-genetic) cultural selection are all going on simultaneously, interacting with one another, and possibly pulling in different directions. DSW is serious about group selection possibly taking place among unrelated individuals. We can have cultural transmission taking place in a Star Trek civilization composed of humans, Bigfoot, space aliens, and robots.
DSW writes (p. 223), "However, phenotypic variation within and among human groups is radically different than genetic variation and makes group selection a very strong force indeed." Genes (hardware) enable culture (software) and culture counts as part of the phenotype, if I understand correctly. (I have been meaning to read Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype....) "Perhaps more than any other species, we live in an environment of our own making." "...human evolution has been a feedback process between traits that alter the parameters of multilevel selection and traits that evolve as a result of the alteration." "...morality emerges as a central phenomenon...." "...in the past, morality and evolution have tended to occupy opposite corners of human thought. Now it appears that they must be studied together, and that even from a purely biological standpoint morality is part of the essence of what it means to be human."
Another thing I found confusing was the discussion of "altruism" on p. 191. This was in the context of the iterated prisoners' dilemma, which will be familiar to readers of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (chapter 12, I believe). The winning strategies tend to be variations on "tit-for-tat" (TFT), possibly with some improved error tolerance ("contrite" and "generous" TFT). DSW's point (following Rapoport, the game theoretician who proposed TFT) is that TFT is "altruistic". But why? The players who use the TFT strategy keep winning. How is that "altruistic" as opposed to "selfish"? The confusion is over what counts as "winning". The games are played in groups of two players. Does "winning" mean (1) that I accumulate more points than I would if I used a different strategy, (2) that I get more points than many other players, averaged over many groups, or does it mean (3) that I get more points than my counterparty in this particular group? A financial investor cares about having more money than he otherwise would, presumably with less regard for how his neighbor is doing. But in biological terms, a lion might be willing to accept being injured or risk being killed in order to eliminate a competitor (a hyena or perhaps another lion). In a wargame, I win despite high casualties on my side if I succeed in annihilating my enemy. The argument is that TFT is a group strategy. The objective is to do well relative to other players averaged over many groups, and it is worth being "contrite" or "generous" to my counterparty in order to achieve this. In Monty Python terms, if I'm in the People's Front of Judea, the objective is to beat the Romans, not the Judean People's Front.
In order to strengthen his argument that group selection is a thing (and an important thing, and not freakishly rare), DSW gives examples where he thinks it has been crucial in the past. On p. 17 he writes that evolution takes place not just through mutation, but also "by social groups becoming so functionally integrated that they become higher-order organisms in their own right." Lynn Margulis "claimed that eukaryotic cells—the nucleated cells of all organisms other than bacteria—are actually symbiotic communities of bacteria whose members led a more autonomous existence in the distant past. Now it appears likely that similar transitions, from groups of organisms to groups as organisms, have occurred throughout the history of life, right down to the origin of life itself as social groups of cooperating molecular reactions.... Moreover, each transition requires group-level selection, exactly as Darwin proposed." On p. 33, he describes experiments with honeybees that illustrate "group minds", in which cognition is distributed over many organisms: the individual is to the group as the neuron is to the brain.
Sometimes an evolved organism uses an internal evolutionary process. Plotkin (p. 31) called these processes "Darwin machines". The immune system is an example of this managed evolution, and like the brain, it allows adaptation not just to ancient environments, but also to highly variable recent, local ones.
On p. 19, DSW writes of "altruistic punishment", or as he calls it, "the amplification of altruism". Suppose that the birds in the toy example above are subject to social norms that require them to squawk when they see a predator. If a bird hides instead of squawking when a predator comes near, it is likely to be pecked to death by its peers. Now, instead of choosing between risking death by squawking vs. safety by hiding, the bird has to choose between a small risk of death from the predator vs. a large one from its peers. In this situation, squawking is no longer an altruistic act. The bad news is that this requires several other birds to punish (i.e. attack) a bird who hides, risking injury themselves. This is "altruistic punishment". An altruistic punisher (p. 22) is "a second-order public good provider." The good news is that the risks that the enforcers bear can be much less than the risk borne by a bird who squawks without being forced. Once the genetic and social mechanisms evolve that enable altruistic punishment, group selection becomes a much more powerful force.
This brings up a sore point. In "The Saad Truth #1179", Gad Saad reports abuse from DSW, which DSW tried to justify as altruistic punishment for Saad's expression of displeasure with one of Saad's political bete noirs. My sympathies here are entirely on the side of Dr. Saad. Saad observes that by expressing unpopular views, it was he (Saad) who was bearing a cost for expressing his opinion (dare I say, "squawking about a political predator"?). Wilson, by expressing opinions that are popular within academia, was not bearing a cost, and was instead being a sanctimonious jerk. Dr. Wilson, I blow my nose in your general direction, and wave my private parts at your aunties. As Bridget Phetasy puts it, "You're not woke, you're annoying."
It's easy to take the cooperation that allows for group selection in humans for granted, but we shouldn't. On p. 27, DSW writes that "working together as a group comes naturally in our species, just as celestial navigation comes naturally to migratory birds and dead reckoning to desert ants." (That statement would go down smoother if autism problems didn't run in my family.) He goes on to say that "the phrase 'comes naturally' does not imply that the underlying mechanisms are simple." Vision is complicated, but it is "automated and takes place beneath our conscious awareness. Similarly, our ability to function as groups may require sophisticated cognitive mechanisms that appear effortless only because they are automated." It took decades to understand vision.
I note that Bret Weinstein was talking to Jordan Peterson recently (Dark Horse Podcast, 3-8-2021), and talked about "lineage selection" as being a better theory than "group selection", but I didn't really understand him.
Update: Here is a video by P. F. Jung in which several biologists, including Weinstein, try to explain this. "Lineage selection" sounds like exactly what I was trying to model in group_sel.m, which is in practice what I understand DSW to be arguing for. The short snippet of Robert Sapolsky discussing "group selection" as taking place at the species level sounds like mostly a straw man to me (but perhaps this was taken out of context). The only difference I see between DSW and Weinstein is that DSW's "group selection" could take place in a Star Trek scenario, with unrelated individuals, provided some non-genetic mechanism can be found to separate the ingroup from the outgroup.
I also note a comment by Geoffrey Miller on p. 40 of Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics & Free Speech (paperback, ISBN 0-226-90134-3), where he is reviewing the book, The Handicap Principle, by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. The Zahavis propose that altruism is a sexually-selected handicap. Miller writes, "Most intriguingly, the Zahavis extend the handicap principle to offer the only group selection argument for altruism I have ever read that stands up to game-theoretic scrutiny."
Weinstein's and Miller's criticisms would bother me more if I were confident that everyone was using the same definitions for "group selection" and "altruism".
Update, 3-25-2023: Regarding lineage selection, it occurs to me that if I have two children, I have the same genetic interests in both children. In so far as I can influence my children's behavior, I would normally want child 1 to behave "altruistically" towards child 2 as long as the benefit to child 2 is greater than the cost to child 1. But if the children only share half of their genes with one another, it is only in child 1's genetic interests to be altruistic towards child 2 if the benefit to child 2 is greater than twice the cost to child 1. Altruistic punishment (and the appearance of group selection) could be a reflection of the conflict of interest between me and child 1. That would make sense, but I didn't get that from the P. F. Jung video.
Theories about Religion
There is no generally agreed upon definition of "religion", but there are a number of competing operational definitions. DSW credits Eric Dietrich for one (p. 3): "Spirituality is in part a feeling of being connected to something larger than oneself. Religion is in part a collection of beliefs and practices that honor spirituality." There is another definition from Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge (p. 222): "Religion consists of very general explanations that justify and specify the terms of exchange with a god or gods." A third definition comes from Emile Durkheim (p. 54): "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." For Durkheim (p. 216), an institution is "religious" if it obtains its power from a sense of sacredness. DSW writes (p. 227), "To regard something as sacred is to subordinate oneself to it, to obey its demands."
I will throw in a few more of my favorites. James Lindsay says, "Religion is that which you do in order to be a good person." John Vervaeke describes religion as "an ecology of psychotechnologies" for enhancing wisdom. Jonathan Haidt describes religion as "a moral exoskeleton".
DSW favors Durkheim's definition over Stark's because Durkheim's expresses the function of religion (uniting people into a moral community). But note that Stark's definition implies belief in a god or gods, supernatural beliefs which the other definitions don't require. This is a sore point when the subject of separation of church and state comes up. DSW returns to the problem of defining religion in his last chapter. He finds Durkheim's definition too broad (p. 220), but Stark's too narrow and shallow (p. 221). He mentions (p. 222) Bart Kosko's book, Fuzzy Thinking. DSW says that fuzziness (ambiguity) is interesting in its own right, and the definition of religion should embrace this. And what do we do differently if we decide that something is religion-like, but not technically "religion"? DSW defines a broader category of "unifying systems", of which religion is a fuzzy subset, along with political systems, and says it is a mistake to try to isolate them from one another. Even if gods were essential to "religion", we still want to know what other unifying systems substitute for them. Social insects have unifying systems, too. In an endnote to chapter 7, he writes, "Our tendency to think of religion as a distinct kind of social organization may be influenced by the separation of church and state during very recent times. Needless to say, this is a poor foundation for thinking about religion at a fundamental level." (Mencius Moldbug has similarly argued that it is a poor foundation for thinking about politics. If Hitler had claimed to be Thor's prophet on Earth, what would you do differently? There was also a Research on Religion podcast with Jared Rubin that talked about Middle Eastern governments making a big show of promoting Islam in order to prop up their legitimacy.)
Assuming we can agree on whether something is or is not religion, the next question from a biologist's perspective is what theories are available to explain how it evolved. DSW lays this out on p. 45 in Table 1.1:
| 1. | Religion as an Adaptation | |
| 1.1 | Religion as a group-level adaptation | |
| 1.2 | Religion as an individual-level adaptation | |
| 1.3 | Religion as a cultural "parasite" that often evolves at the expense of human individuals and groups | |
| 2. | Religion as Nonadaptive | |
| 2.1 | Religion as an adaptation to past environments, such as ancestral kin groups, that is maladaptive in modern environments, such as large groups of unrelated individuals | |
| 2.2 | Religion as a byproduct (or "spandrel") of genetic or cultural evolution | |
Wilson writes, "Throughout this chapter I have stressed the need to achieve a middle ground in which groups can and do evolve into adaptive units, but only if special conditions are met.... I think that group selection can explain much about religion, but by no means all. Evolution is a notoriously messy process.... All of the hypotheses listed in table 1.1 have at least some merit..." (emphasis mine).
I have tried elsewhere to explain how religions can pull in different directions and work at different levels simultaneously, and nothing here really comes as a surprise, but I really admire how organized and articulate DSW is.
I also note that DSW's group selection thesis unequivocally answers my question (in Designing the Church of Glaucon) of whether religion is a private good or a club good. As long as we're operating under theory 1.1, religion is clearly a club good.
Several of the theories in Table 1.1 suppose that religion is, or at least was at one time, adaptive. But how can religions be adaptive when they are often unrealistic? Religions often conflict with modern science, they generally conflict with one another, and, for example with the four canonical Christian gospels, they sometimes contradict themselves. DSW's answer is to distinguish between factual realism and practical realism. This is similar to the distinction Bryan Caplan makes in The Myth of the Rational Voter between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality means getting the right answer on a logic test. Instrumental rationality means getting an outcome you want, which in many cases means not wasting your time worrying about something that you can't control, sometimes self-deception, and sometimes outright lying. DSW makes a similar distinction between factual realism (getting the science right), and practical realism, which requires getting the motivation for behavior right. This is a conflict that the book returns to repeatedly.
Explanations can be divided in "causal" vs. "functional" categories. This means the same thing as "proximate" vs. "ultimate". The former explains how some mechanism works. The latter explains how it evolved. There is another scholar named Elster who tries to distinguish between functional and "intentional" explanations, but DSW regards this as semantic confusion. DSW divides functional explanations into four subsets: conscious, individual subconscious, group-level unconscious, and cultural evolution. The "intentional" explanations are the first subset of functional ones.
DSW often depends on other scholars' research in this book, and is often lavish in his praise of their information gathering. But he is also lavish in his criticism of theoretical incoherence. This leads to him having a love-hate relationship with several of these scholars, most notably Rodney Stark and his "rational choice" school, and this relationship is a continual source of entertainment for the reader. For example (p. 149), "Although Stark's formal theory is strongly committed to a byproduct view of religion, the larger corpus of his work is not." Also (p. 157), "The only mystery is how Stark can be so lucid about the secular utility of the early church while advancing a formal theory that for all the world makes religion appear as a functionless byproduct of the urge to explain and relegates functionalism to the rubbish heap of history." Also (p. 187), "The real problem with rational choice theory is not that it has committed itself irrevocably to a byproduct theory of religion, but that it wanders so aimlessly from one major conception of religion to another, from religion as a feel-good fetter to religion as required for survival and reproduction, as if these differences are not worth commenting upon." Specifically, Larry Iannaccone's paper, Voodoo Economics, gets a dishonorable mention (p. 81). I read that one. It seems like a fair cop. All I can say on Iannaccone's behalf is that maybe there is some semantics disagreement about what "functional" means, combined with rejection or lack of interest in group selection.
DSW also refers in several places to Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer, which I also read. DSW says (p.239), "Boyer (2001) treats religion primarily as a byproduct of psychological adaptations that are beneficial in nonreligious contexts." I think that's fair. On p. 44, he places Boyer (same book, plus another) in both the "cultural parasite" and "byproduct" camps. That's fair as far as it goes, but Boyer spends a significant amount of ink in Religion Explained explaining how believing in gods with certain kinds of supernatural knowledge is beneficial for keeping people honest. That sounds like a group-level functional explanation to me. I don't know why Boyer escapes the sort of criticism that rational choice receives for wandering without comment. Maybe the problem with rational choice is theoretical pretentiousness: firing a shotgun while pretending to fire a rifle. As DSW says, "All of the hypotheses listed in table 1.1 have at least some merit." Boyer is definitely firing a shotgun.
Case Studies
There are four case studies included in Darwin's Cathedral. Chapter 3 is devoted to (1) John Calvin's influence on Geneva. Chapter 4 has studies on (2) the Bali water temple system, (3) Judaism, and (4) early Christianity.
Calvinism
Geneva, where Calvinism was created, was a fractious city-state trying to maintain independence from the neighboring Duchy of Savoy. This chapter is of particular interest to me because Calvinism appears to have been the result of conscious design by Calvin, and seems to have been a spectacular success. If Calvin could do it, maybe there's hope for John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, or me. A number of points in this chapter stand out:
DSW says that Calvin changed the meaning of "faith". Scientific beliefs (and ordinary beliefs) are provisional, falsifiable things, vulnerable to being disproven by new evidence. In that context, "faith" means coping with uncertainty, being able to act in the face of uncertainty. But for Calvin, "faith" becomes a "fortress" to protect belief from falsification. We are back to the distinction between factual vs. practical realism, where the latter is more about motivating good behavior than doing good science.
The changing meaning of "faith" is one of the points John Vervaeke talks about in explaining the evolution of Christianity. One of my recurring thoughts when listening to Vervaeke was, "If the old version of Christianity made better sense that the new version, why did people embrace the new version?" Vervaeke's history of Christianity seemed to involve a lot of "unforced errors". DSW gives me a plausible explanation: the new version may not have made as much theoretical sense, but it was better at generating social cohesion.
Balinese Water Temples
The Balinese agricultural system involves a complicated system of water rights and other inter-community obligations adjudicated by a hierarchal system of gods and temples that are closely tied to the watersheds. Agricultural pest control requires careful, coordinated timing of planting, crop rotation, burning fields, and fallow periods.
When the Dutch conquered Bali in the nineteenth century, their initial conclusion was that they couldn't improve on the local system. Later on, the "green revolution" was imposed on Bali, and it was a disaster, mainly because of ignoring the timing issues involved in pest control. Computer models eventually showed that the pre-existing system was nearly optimal in trading off between water usage and pest control.
What do gods have to do with water rights and pest control? DSW writes (p. 130), "Religious belief gives an authority to the system that it would not have as a purely secular institution (Rappaport 1979)."
DSW also mentions (p. 131) that the Bali case study contradicts one of Rodney Stark's propositions, that having more gods lead to lower prices. This isn't true in Bali because the gods provide separate services. Rational choice theory goes wrong by ignoring group-level functionalism.
Judaism
DSW's discussion of Judaism is focused on the modern (post Roman) diaspora, especially in Eastern Europe. The key feature of diaspora communities is that they were living among host societies that were often only marginally tolerant, and often hostile. He writes (p. 139) of "countless" instances of "murder, forced assimilation, and displacement", and adds, "I hope it is obvious that these acts are morally reprehensible, although dismayingly typical of between-group interactions in general."
Reform Judaism is similar to Christianity in trying to separate ethnicity from theology, but the other types are confusing from a Christian-centric perspective, because it is not clear where ethnicity stops and religion starts. What is the trait-group, ethnicity or religion? In any case, these communities succeeded in isolating themselves from their hosts and maintaining high-functioning internal order. DSW writes (p. 136), "The degree to which Jewish communities were isolated from their host cultures is even reflected at the level of gene frequencies." That sounds like kin selection. He says that a cell wall allows complicated ordered processes to work, with chaos outside. Judaism is very good at providing such a cultural membrane.
But since Jews and Christians typically looked at one another as the outgroup, they tended to use one another "instrumentally" rather than ethically. Christians were usually in more powerful positions, so this tended to be one-sided—except that Christian societies were usually internally divided enough that it was more complicated than that. When Christians were screwing other Christians, Jews were often caught in the middle. A typical pattern according to DSW is that Jews would ally with gentile elites against gentile peasants (not that they necessarily had much choice in what roles they were permitted to play). There is no love lost anywhere here. This religious outgrouping is a general principle, not a criticism of either Judaism or Christianity. If DSW is right, religion is a creature of inter-group competition, and that can only happen when there are multiple, competing groups. Hence the two flocks of birds in the toy example. There will always be at least one outgroup, unless you're talking about a Jonathan Haidt asteroid impact scenario.
I note a Research on Religion podcast that talked about why the Jews were expelled from England in 1290: King Edward I liked having Jewish moneylenders around because they were the easiest people in the world to collect taxes from, but the lesser nobility were getting shafted as a side effect of his tax policies. The Jews got caught in the middle. In the end, the king changed his tax system, but the nobles wanted assurance that he wouldn't change it back. The expulsion was thus a side effect of a tax deal between the king and the nobles.
DSW illustrates both the high-functioning internal order of Jewish communities and a vast amount of unethical behavior on all sides with long quotations from Isaac Bashevis Singer's historical novel set in seventeenth century Poland, The Slave, which DSW says (p. 144) "parallels the academic literature I have reviewed in uncanny detail." To my surprise, he also (p. 142) quotes approvingly from Kevin MacDonald's A people that shall dwell alone: Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, regarding the legend of Joseph in Egypt. (It sounds especially odd to me for DSW to strain at what I perceive as Gad Saad's politically incorrect gnat after swallowing Kevin MacDonald's reputational camel. Now I'm going to have to rethink my attitude toward MacDonald.)
This case study raises a number of questions in my mind. Is "Reform Judaism" really Jewish? (Again, is Judaism a religion or an ethnicity?) Is "Christianity" really a single religion? Catholics and Protestants certainly outgrouped one another during the 30 Years War. Is "the Judaeo-Christian tradition" really a thing, as opposed to being several incompatible things?
Someone used the word, "clubable", to describe other religions that he thought were compatible enough to come together in a political or ecumenical coalition. What has to happen for an ethnic or religious group to be "clubable"? Surely this is context-sensitive. Is there a currently active external enemy whom we dislike more than we dislike one another? There is a Bedouin proverb, "I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers."
Jews and Christians were, for the most part, in one another's outgroups for a long time. The next case study talks about context-dependent outgrouping of Jews in very early Christianity. Does acknowledging this turbulent history (mutual tendency to outgroup) make someone an "antisemite"? And is this history over? Are Jews and Christians now mutually "clubable"? Joseph Bottum and Peter Boghossian would probably say "Yes." Bottum, paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, describes cross-religious sympathy as "Mere Religion".
[T]he horizontal unity of Mere Religion cuts across denominations. Serious, believing Presbyterians, for example, now typically feel that they have more in common with serious, believing Catholics and Evangelicals—with serious, believing Jews, for that matter—than they do, vertically, with the unserious, unorthodox members of their own denomination.
— Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (my review here)
Boghossian takes this sympathy across belief systems even further.
As a point of contact, I am a non-intersectional, liberal atheist. If a conservative Christian believes Jesus walked on water—and believes this either is or is not true for everyone regardless of race or gender—and if she values discourse and adheres to basic rules of engagement, then she is closer to my worldview than an atheist who believes race and gender play a role in determining objective truth and that her opponents should not be allowed to air what she considers harmful views.
— Peter Boghossian, Welcome to Culture War 2.0: The Great Realignment
On the other hand, there's still plenty of outgrouping of Jews by commenters at Vox Day's blog. Vox Day is very Christian. But if this is a side effect of conflict between gentile elites and "peasants", with Jews tending to ally with elites, are they being outgrouped for being Jewish or for being allied with the elites? It's probably some of both. In chapter 6, DSW argues that some antisemitism was baked into Christianity at the outset, under circumstances where it was adaptive, but that it is now an anachronism, and is maladaptive (p. 216).
The outgrouping need not be symmetrical. American elites tend not to be very Christian. Joseph Bottum writes, "The sociologist Peter L. Berger once joked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes." Christian "peasants" wanting to ingroup Jews are "marrying up", so to speak, where Jews deciding to ingroup Christian "peasants" would be "marrying down".
"Peer effects" are also a thing. If I am a member of a minority of 1% of the population, I am likely to behave differently than I would if I were in a minority of 40%.
Widespread expectations about relations between groups also tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. As a friend of mine put it, "If you gaze long into what you think is the abyss, it becomes the abyss."
The deciding factor in whether modern American Christians and Jews regard one another as clubable may come down to whether or not they perceive there to be a mutual enemy. This may in turn depend on whom the Jews are afraid of. Are they more afraid of Christians or Muslims? Of Christianity or of irreligion? Of Jesus (per Heinrich Heine) or Odin (per Friedrich Hielscher)?
Early Christianity
The last case study, in chapter 4, covers early Christianity. Early Christianity also comes up a lot in chapter 6, Forgiveness as a Complex Adaptation.
Early Christianity, like Judaism, was a cultural membrane that allowed internal order in a chaotic environment, filled with violence and ethnic strife, but Christianity did so without ethnic restrictions.
One problem with Roman culture was that it was hostile to reproduction (p. 151). "Part of the problem was extreme male domination and a form of status-striving that made marriage and families unattractive prospects for males. Female infanticide was so common that Russell (1958) estimated a sex ratio of 131 males per 100 females in Rome and 140 males per 100 females in Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa." Female infanticide was partly motivated by patriarchal lineage.
Consequently (p. 152), Rome "required a constant influx of 'barbarian' settlers to maintain itself." Christianity was much more attractive to women than Roman society: fidelity was demanded of both sexes, with no abortion, infanticide, or nonreproductive sex. Women could also achieve status and power within the Church.
Differential plague survival (suspected smallpox and measles) also helped Christianity grow. Christians were more willing than Pagans to risk their own lives to help the sick. Simple nursing practices (e.g. making sure that a sick person at least had food and water) could often make the difference between life and death. In contrast, the Roman physician, Galen, responded to the plague by skipping town.
Charity in general was an advantage for the Christians. Julian the Apostate complained (p. 154), "The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us." Julian tried to fix this, but couldn't get any traction.
Chapter 6 also discusses the early Christian church, and draws from Elaine Pagels' book, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics. Early Christianity had to deal with (1) the Jewish establishment, (2) the Roman establishment, (3) potential Jewish converts, and (4) potential gentile converts. Pagels thinks the four gospels differ because they were intended to support different behavioral adaptations for different social environments. In Mark, the Jewish establishment was the principal villain. A disasterous uprising against Rome, and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem took place around this time, along with the old Jewish establishment. In Matthew, which is believed to have been written 10-20 years later, the Pharisees were the main villains. These were the leaders of the post-temple new rabbinical establishment. Luke seems to have been written by a gentile, for other gentiles. (Luke is especially concilliatory to Romans, but none of the canonical gospels are especially hostile to Rome.) John seems to have been written by or for a Jewish sect that was unusually bitterly opposed to the establishment. DSW views the canonical gospels as different blueprints for setting up Christian communities in different environments. Christians never seemed terribly disturbed by the discrepancies among them. The Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, is about individualistic navel-gazing, and was rejected as canon.
Incidentally, chapter 3 of The Origin of Satan discusses Thomas quite a bit. Thomas presents Jesus as like Buddha, a human pathfinder rather than a divine savior. Thomas also reminds me of Martin Luther, trying to eliminate any human authorities between the individual and God (and inadvertently abolishing the wisdom tradition he rests on). Is the Kingdom of God something we have to wait for and assist collectively, requiring divine intervention, or a state of mind that we can acheive individually right now? Or, per Bret Weinstein, is "Heaven" something that we build for our children gradually over generations? The differences between Thomas and the canonical gospels do seem to illustrate the conflicts between religion as a group adaptation vs. religion as an individual adaptation.
Balance and Nuance
One of the recurring themes in Darwin's Cathedral is that what constitutes adaptive behavior is complicated and context-dependent. In the context of early Christianity, DSW notes (p. 156) that Christian altruism is not indiscriminate. There are levels of good standing:
Furthermore (p. 100), being an apostate is worse than simply being an outsider and never entering the faith. Also, intermarriage policies are important. Just because I'm willing to give you food and water, and nurse you when you're sick, doesn't mean I'm going to let you marry someone from my church without converting. This was important in early church history.
He also notes (p 138), in the context of Jews tending not to proselytize, "In addition, Jewish law sometimes accorded inferior status to converts." (E.g. there were complicated rules about seniority in paying debts.) I also remember Michael McBride on the Research on Religion podcast talking about different levels of standing within Mormonism. (E.g. not all LDS members are eligible for temple services.)
Punishments also require balance and nuance (p. 212): under John Calvin, "...transgressions were punished in an escalating fashion resulting ultimately in exclusion." Grievious sins could be forgiven, but the church had to make judgments about contrition. Forgiveness must not be extended in a way that allowed exploitation. "This kind of conditional forgiveness is required for any human group to function as an adaptive unit."
The opening paragraph from chapter 6, "Forgiveness as a Complex Adaptation", is worth quoting in its entirety (p. 189):
Thinking of religious groups as organisms encourages us to look for adaptive complexity. The behavior of a well-adapted organism seldom takes the form of 'Do x.' More often it consists of a large number of if-then rules: Do x in situation a, do y in situation b, do j in response to individual c but not individual d, and so on. In this chapter I will examine a single religious concept—forgiveness—as a complex adaptation. To be sure, forgiveness is not an exclusively religious concept, but it is said to be the hallmark of the Christian religion. Christian forgiveness is often described by the single phrase, 'turn the other cheek,' but this may be too simple, like 'Do x.' What is the true nature of Christian forgiveness, and can it be understood from an evolutionary perspective?
He goes on to say, in the context of the tit-for-tat (TFT) strategy in the iterated prisoners' dilemma (p 191), "...forgiveness succeeds only because it is tightly linked to retaliation. The two concepts are joined at the hip. A rule that instructs the individual to turn the other cheek all the time does not survive the Darwinian struggle, at least in the context of our tinker-toy model as it currently stands." He goes further (p. 194): "To retaliate can be divine." However (p. 192), if we modify the assumptions that go into our iterated prisoners' dilemma game, "Saintly unconditional altruism" and "a vengeful nature" can also evolve in some circumstances. Generally, multi-player games (such as the bird population toy problem discussed earlier) are more complicated.
As discussed earlier, TFT is a group strategy. DSW concludes (p. 193), "...the most fit rules for social behavior are primarily altruistic. They succeed by doing well as groups (pairs) rather than by exploiting their partners within groups." He also notes that this logic is not unique to humans. The differences between humans and other animals are quantitative, not qualitative. We play the same game, just better.
Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Universal Brotherhood
One conclusion that is pretty much inherent in DSW's view of religion is that, to be adaptive at the group level, there has to be an outgroup. He writes (p. 180), "As we have seen, group selection often does not eliminate conflict but merely elevates it to the level of between-group interactions." Also (p. 217), "Christianity and virtually all other religions fall short when judged by the loftiest standard of universal brotherhood. They merely adapt groups to their local environments.... For me, the failure of religion to achieve universal brotherhood is like the failure of birds to break the sound barrier."
But in the section on Judaism (p. 135) he writes, "...a perspective that envisions all people within the same moral circle ... is laudable, important to work toward in the future, and possible at least in principle to implement. However, it provides a poor theoretical foundation...." I think he is saying that a religion that emerges through group competition will not produce universal brotherhood, but that a consciously designed religion might, if it can somehow bypass the original sin of group selection. But I don't see how you can reconcile the idea of everyone being in the same moral circle with the idea of multi-level selection, unless you interpret "moral circle" in a trivial way. I find it easier to believe that DSW was engaging in some happytalk here in order to deflect possible accusations of antisemitism. If your religion treats non-members the same way it treats members, why would I want to be a member?
In a way, DSW's discussion of multi-level selection opens up a window for me, but looking out this window, I realize that I'm gazing into an abyss. Multi-level selection means that you and I are likely to find ourselves in situations where we may be enemies on levels 1, 2, and 4, and friends on levels 3, 5, and 6. Like nations, we may have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Galatians 3:28 doesn't mean that there will never be ethnic strife within Christianity, only that when such conflicts occur within the church, they should be adjudicated at a higher level within the church rather than using ethnic "self-help mechanisms".
Falsifiability
Another conclusion is that science and religion are not reconcilable. One reason for this is that they have opposite needs regarding falsifiability (p. 24). "Immunity from disproof might seem like a weakness from a narrow scientific perspective, but it can be a strength for a social system designed to regulate human behavior." Getting people to follow rules is necessary for a religion to be adaptive at the group level, and a church's doctrines are, in part, justifications for its rules. You don't want smart people to be able to come up with rationalizations for why "The doctrines aren't really true in this particular case, therefore I should be exempt from following the rules today" (my words).
Factual Realism
But sometimes, religious doctrines simply fly in the face of science or even common sense. DSW asks (p. 40), "Why can't people just talk about right and wrong in practical terms without appealing to supernatural agents and other beliefs that to a nonbeliever seem detached from reality?" His answer is that truth can be less efficient than myth. "...it can be adaptive to distort reality. Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world" (p. 41). "Supernatural agents and events that never happened can provide blueprints for action that far surpass factual accounts of the natural world in clarity and motivating power" (p. 42). He gives (p. 98) five reasons why a "factual and straightforward" justification for moral demands ("Do this because it is good for you") is "unlikely to succeed":
DSW said there were probably other reasons. My explanation for false beliefs, following Larry Iannaccone, is to exclude people through stigma, using beliefs as shibboleths. Religious groups need this in order to distinguish friends and enemies. As Yuri Bezmonov reportedly said, "No one ever sacrificed themselves for the fact that '1+1=2'." This is presumably because everyone is on the same side of the issue.
"Factual realism" may be a slight oversimplification. The four canonical gospels are not even internally consistent, let alone factually accurate. Also, I became an apostate in part because my beliefs about Hell were implausible in terms of justice or any other recognizable motive, rather than being demonstrable false. (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno had a lot to do with forcing me to confront this.) But I will continue to use lack of "factual realism" as a shorthand for implausibility and inconsistency as well as factual incorrectness.
A lot of the problem with factual vs. practical realism has to do with motivation. Imagine a general addressing his troops before a battle. An honest assessment of the conflict might claim, "We have a slight preponderance of evidence on our side." A better motivational speech might be, "Deus vult!" DSW notes (p. 176), "Loving and serving a perfect God is vastly more motivating than loving and serving one's imperfect neighbor." It also helps motivate people if your religion is a drama queen (p. 208). "Fighting the final cosmic battle of good against evil is more motivating than fighting for your life." That's how religions produce martyrs.
I note that DSW's explanation of the conflict between God and Satan, the necessity to motivate people for collective action, contrasts with John Vervaeke's explanations that involve personal psychology and the inner conflicts of Paul and Augustine. I tentatively interpret this as an example of the difference between a functional (ultimate) and a causal (proximate) explanation. But maybe I'm missing something. DSW writes (p. 171), "A properly working inner world is assuredly important because individuals would not behave adaptively without it." A religion has to work on the level of personal psychology as well as motivating people to act at the group level. There may be trade-offs in which the need to do one of these tasks tolerably well interferes with doing the other extremely well.
Another limitation on factual realism is what John McCarthy called "institutional hysteresis". DSW writes (p. 215), "...in some respects the early Christian Church has a decidedly Rube Goldberg feel to it...." Gospel writers freely adapted their stories to local needs. The stories provide useful sacred symbols, and no one seems to mind the logical inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies. "This miracle of cultural adaptation is accomplished largely through powerful stories thinly disguised as historical narratives" (p. 217). But once the stories were canonized, a lot of historical baggage got locked in. Antisemitism has thus continued in Christianity long after it stopped being adaptive.
One way of looking at the factual realism problem is in terms of the provenance for a set of moral rules. If I see that some behaviors are working, it makes sense for me to imitate those behaviors even if I don't think the explanations offered for why those behaviors work are convincing (see Pascal's wager). But that only gets me so far. Religion is said to have "three Bs": belief, belonging, and behavior. These three things are linked by trust. In order for me to belong to a group, the group has to trust in my "good" behavior even though this-worldly enforcement isn't always practical. Behavior has to be internally motivated (p. 104) or the religion will have no power. If I lack sincere religious belief, I will need a commitment strategy that is convincing to the other members of the group. In order to get around this problem in an environment like John Calvin's Geneva, I would have to present the people there with an acceptable substitute provenance for their most important rules and an acceptable substitute commitment strategy. Maybe that's what it means for members of one belief system to be "clubable" to members of another.
Apostasy
Alas, my proposal for Yet Another Space Alien Cult to make apostasy a sacrament is doomed, at least if the cult is conceived as being internally cohesive. DSW writes (p. 208), "Before there can be a strongly committed group, there must be perceived dire consequences for leaving the group."
Non-conformity
There are also narrow limits on how much non-conformity is tolerable. Group selection depends on morality, which DSW defines (p. 223) as "conforming to the rules of right conduct."
I think Edward Dutton would say that there is a trade-off between individualism and group loyalty, and that this trade-off is driven by how harsh and unpredictable the environment is. Dutton talks about "genius strategy", in which society tolerates (and the gene pool produces) a small number of idiosyncratic, disagreeable people with outlier high IQ who produce radical, useful innovations, but these can only be exceptional people. You can't build an effective army if it's full of soldiers who won't obey orders. Only measured amounts of non-conformity are tolerable.
A corollary of the need for social conformity is that the simplifying assumptions that economists like to make should not be taken very seriously, or economics becomes quasi-religious. He says (p. 224) that homo economicus is a distortion like the distorted history in the gospels, that supports certain kinds of academic behavior.
Denominational life cycles
One warning DSW makes is that a church, having stumbled upon or invented a winning strategy, can't simply keep following that strategy without running into problems. The demographics within churches tend to change over time, producing internal conflict. Consequently, success in religious denominations tends to be transient.
DSW describes religious denominations as having a life cycle (p. 182), starting as "cults" or "sects", and ending as "churches". (He is in conflict with Larry Iannaccone over whether the word, "cult", is a useful term. I favor Iannaccone's view, that "cult" has little meaning other than "anything that journalists dislike". Iannaccone describes a "strict" vs. "lenient" spectrum.) DSW offers three hypotheses to explain this life cycle, corresponding to three of the five theories in Table 1.1:
There is a long quotation at the bottom of p. 186 from Stark and Bainbridge, to the effect that no one church can satisfy the entire spectrum of needs and desires people have for worldly vs. otherworldly psychological support.
There is also a long quote (p. 205) from Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan describing the internal conflict within Judaism that led to the Maccabean revolt. Jewish elites tended to want to join the Hellenized world, like modern Western "cosmopolitans". This paleo-globalization was opposed by "those who felt exploited by their own upper class", like modern British supporters of Brexit and American supporters of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. This supports hypothesis 2 about the denominational life cycle: certain individuals benefit, but this creates conflict between rich and poor. Satan evolved from being a sort of district attorney who works for God, to being an enemy of God whose actions explain what is perceived by the lower classes as bad behavior on the part of the elites.
Alternatives to "religion"
Chapter 7 is on "Unifying Systems", which include religions, but also include other belief systems that bind people together without requiring beliefs in anything supernatural, and are typically not called "religion".
Gods and false history make religion seem otherworldly, i.e. detached from reality (p. 227, "Factual and Practical Realism"). DSW's defense of religion is
Science isn't really a substitute for religion. As David Hume put it, you can't derive "ought" from "is". Science is about what is, and morality is about how things ought to be. My favorite critique of "moral scientism" (the claim that you can derive "ought" from "is") is Arthur Leff's "Memorandum from the Devil".
Nationalism can be and has been used as a substitute for religion, but it isn't an improvement. John Vervaeke talks about this is his "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" lecture series, especially Episode 25, The Clash, climaxing at the Battle of Kursk. "What was supposed to take the place of God has drenched the world in blood."
DSW (p. 230) goes into the philosophy of science: It is science, not religion, that is weird, because (ideally) of an unbalanced commitment to factual realism. This is not a substitute for practical realism. (This is apart from any argument that science depends on an underlying religious prohibition against lying.)
Motivation vs. nuance
DSW doesn't mention this, but in addition to there being a conflict between factual and practical realism, there is also a conflict between different aspects of practical realism. The "adaptive complexity" (if-then rules) that he looks for on p. 189 tends to conflict with the simplicity and moral clarity that he requires on p. 98 to make moral rules easy to learn and apply, and to be highly motivating (numbered points 3 and 4). Much of my problem with Christianity may be too much emphasis on motivational power at the expense of both adaptive complexity and factual realism (including plausibility and consistency). DSW writes (p. 208), "The Gospels pull out all the stops in their motivation of behavior, as only a religious belief system can."
Part of the "motivation vs. adaptive complexity" issue within Christianity has to do with taking as a moral exemplar someone who deliberately got himself killed for unrelated people. There may be circumstances when this level of self-sacrifice is appropriate, but it shouldn't be regarded as normal.
A few years ago I complained, "The Christian approach (at least the one I grew up with) seems to be to set the bar 1000 times higher than is reasonable, and hope people do 0.1% of what you ask of them." How much self-sacrifice is it in my interest (or the group's interest, or my lineage's interest) to engage in for the benefit of other members of my group (setting aside the question of who is in my group)? Christianity seems long on exhortation, and short on balance and clarification.
I want some of the adaptive complexity spelled out for me. I have a recurring daydream about a moral philosophy "fantasy football" panel discussion featuring:
Regulation of envy
Part of the conflict between different levels of multilevel selection involves envy. This was brought to my attention by a review of Helmut Schoeck's book, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour. DSW seldom uses the word, "envy", and it doesn't seem to play a major role in any of the four cases studies he presents, but scattered throughout the rest of the book are passages about hunter-gatherers and other nonindustrialized societies, where he writes a lot about "selfishness" and sometimes "resentment". These societies are fiercely egalitarian. DSW mentions the Nuer (pp. 21, 57, 199), the Chewong (pp. 22-25), the Mbuti (pp. 42-43), Gabon (p. 62), the Dagara (p. 63), and Alcoholics Anonymous (p. 180). Hunter-gatherers in general (p. 21) usually share 100% of the meat they hunt, and approximately 50% of gathered items. Quoting Evans-Pritchard, among the Nuer, "A man with many cattle is envied, but not treated differently from a man with few cattle." They have ceremonies for confessing resentment, for fear of silent curses. The Chewong go to great lengths to avoid putting someone in danger of feeling envious. There is a corresponding stigma against asking for things (risking resentment on the part of the supplier). Bamboo is treated differently depending on how far it has to be brought back from. The Mbuti make a point of consensus decision-making. New kings in Gabon are humiliated before being put in office to emphasize egalitarianism. Rituals are used to regulate status and to help avoid alienation. The Dagara believe that bad luck follows displays of wealth, and ostentation is likely to insult the tribe (p. 64).
According to Schoeck, one of the functions of religion is to regulate envy. The object isn't to eliminate envy, because moderate amounts of envy are useful for helping enforce social norms. Envy is a major component of altruistic punishment. Fear of arousing other people's envy forces me to take the interests of other people in the group more seriously than I otherwise would. We need enough envy "to power the social controls necessary to the polity". Fear of others' envy regulates selfishness. Schoeck writes,
No motive that we have been able to discover, however, ensures conformity more certainly than fear of arousing envy in others and the sanctions this entails.
and
A society in which no one need fear any one else's envy would not have those social controls necessary to its existence as a society.
But too much envy, and you get a crab-pot situation where any crab that tries to climb out of the pot is pulled back down by other crabs, which I think is the sort of thing that Ayn Rand probably had nightmares about, and rightly so. We want to force some altruistic behavior, but we don't want to destroy too much of the incentive to produce wealth.
"Envy" is closely related to "altruistic punishment", but it's a bit indiscriminate. Being a bit indiscriminate is inherent because a man often doesn't really understand to what extent another person's success is at his expense. Besides, people are often playing zero-sum games over things like mate selection.
When and how much are we allowed to compete on an individual level, and when are we obliged to sacrifice for the group? Envy is individually adaptive any time something is produced jointly or comes from unowned resources. How much is my share? Some amount of envy is beneficial to the individual as it motivates him to look for and punish cheaters, and it has the side effect of promoting group cohesion. But people also need to be allowed and motivated to use their unequally distributed talents to some degree or there will be stagnation and poverty. F. A. Hayek discusses this in general in The Use of Knowledge in Society and Mike Munger goes into detail about what happens when cultures are too egalitarian in his Econtalk discussion on microfinance.
DSW writes (p. 199), "The fierce egalitarianism that holds hunter-gatherer societies together also provides the foundation for the Nuer society. And egalitarianism is enforced with violence." He goes on to write (p. 224) in terms of "structure" vs. "communitas", following Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and anti-structure. All societies require "a strong moral sentiment that society must work for all of its members from the highest to the lowest." He writes, "I interpret this spirit of communitas as the mind of the hunter-gatherer, willing to work for the common good but ever-vigilant against exploitation." Small societies tend to be egalitarian. Larger ones need to be more differentiated, and require more structure. He writes (p. 216), "The larger human societies become, the more culture is required to adaptively regulate and coordinate human behavior." A healthy large society needs bi-directional controls to prevent exploitation. When these controls fail, it can result in passive resistance, sabotage, and fragging of military officers. (Officers have to share risks, and "lead" rather than "herd" their men.)
Miscellaneous
On p. 148, DSW writes that Rodney Stark "shows that" Gnosticism is an offshoot of Christianity (as opposed to Judaism). I note that John Vervaeke (Episode 17)and Robert Price (Deconstructing Jesus) put Gnosticism's origin earlier than that of Christianity.
On p. 155, he wonders why belief in an attractive afterlife isn't more common outside Christianity. It seems to be adaptive.
There are some interesting one-liners on p. 176:
Humans may be unique in symbolic thought capability (p. 226, per Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species). This is because of culture, not physical capability (chimpanzees and bonobos can be taught). Symbolic thought is necessary for Durkheimian "religion", with its emphasis on sacred symbols.
In the discussion of factual vs. practical realism (p. 229), DSW writes, "Constructing a symbolic system designed to motivate action is a substantially different cognitive task than gaining accurate factual knowledge of one's physical and social environment. Somehow the human mind must do both, despite the fact that they partially interfere with each other." There are several possible ways that this could work:
DSW also tries (p. 231) to address the same issue Richard Dawkins does in Unweaving the Rainbow, that it seems to many to take the enchantment out of life when scientists explain how things work, in this case by replacing "a cosmic battle between good and evil" with a functional explanation of social behavior. He suggests trying to look at social cohesion itself as a thing of beauty.
The current state of play in the US
The current state of "unifying systems" in the US appears to me to be that they are highly dysfunctional. John Vervaeke has a nice discussion of the history of Christianity in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Joseph Bottum describes some more recent history in An Anxious Age. Mainline Protestantism has collaped both in membership and in the ability to resist pressure to embrace the doctrines of the politicized "successor religion" that is replacing it (AKA Progressive Liberationism, or Wokeness).
In parallel to Christianity, the US had a "civic religion" with a patriotic version of American history. It taught that the US government, and American institutions in general, were generally trustworthy. This trust has also collapsed.
Progressive Liberationism appears to me to be dominated by political opportunists (i.e. charlatans) who are at best indifferent towards the possibility that their identity politics (i.e. race hustling) is going to lead to a civil war. The charlatans are leading (or perhaps being swept along by) an army of Joseph Bottum's "anxious" Post-Protestants, for whom politics is now "that which you do in order to be a good person".
The current American transition from Christianity to Progressive Liberationism (PL) is analogous in some ways to the transition in ancient Rome (circa Julian the Apostate) from Paganism to Christianity. But Christianity was an improvement in many ways to Roman Paganism, as the Early Christianity case study describes. (Christianity and Paganism also didn't bleed into one another the way PL bleeds into Christianity as "Churchianity". To further complicate matters, the "Deplorables" whom Progressive Liberationists despise are not necessarily Christian.)
Recall Table 1.1, and DSW's comment, "All of the hypotheses listed in table 1.1 have at least some merit...." Early Christianity seems like mainly a type 1.1 religion, a group-level adaptation. It may also have been adaptive at the individual level (type 1.2), as John Vervaeke emphasizes, but intra-group conflict was kept tightly in check.
Progressive Liberationism also has some type 1.1 elements. Progressive Liberationists in academia and other culturally important institutions over time have purged Deplorables. But the type 1.2 and 1.3 elements seem much more out of control. "Secular" people (not religious in the Rodney Stark sense) are notorious for not having as many children as traditionally "religious" people. The events of 2020, e.g. in Portland and Minneapolis, consist largely of the people Bottum described as "the Elect" cheering the burning down of their own cities by their own allies. American economic and military concerns have been subordinated to special interests, internal politics, grift, and virtue-signaling (NAFTA, open borders, off-shoring, de-industrialization; Critical Race Theory training over combat preparedness, purging the officer corps). Leaders are seldom disciplined for hypocrisy, malfeasance, or corruption (e.g. Patrisse Cullors, Gavin Newsom, Ted Wheeler, Ralph Northam, the Clintons). Individual not-so-well connected Progressives are often punished for good behavior or trivial departures from political correctness, reminiscent of Jacobins guillotining other Jacobins during the French Revolution (Bret Weinstein, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss). To some extent, many of these behaviors could be interpreted as the Elect acting collectively against the Deplorables (see the two-tiered justice system described at the Viva Frei vlawg). But the vast majority of the Elect would regard the collapse of the middle class or a major military defeat as disasterous.
To further muddy the waters, Jordan Hall refers to oligarch-controlled commmunications channels (print and broadcast media, and increasingly social media), and the people who are aligned with them, as "the Blue Church". This is roughly the same thing as Progressive Liberationism. (He also identifies an embryonic "Red religion", conceived in reaction to the Blue Church, but this "religion" seems to me to consist of little more than a bad attitude.)
In this context, I would like to see a reboot of Christianity. Part of my motive is that I am looking for a religious home, a cure for what John Vervaeke calls "domicide". I am homesick for the sort of religious community I had growing up, but I don't believe the theology that conventional Christianity demands. Unconventional churches like Unitarian Universalism, without strong theology, seem incapable of resisting being co-opted by political con men. Part of what I want in a religious home is an ideological fallout shelter. An effective "Red Church" would also need a coherent philosophical core, but I want that shelter whether the Red Church exists or not. Judging by the attention that Jordan Peterson gets, a lot of other people feel the same way.
Many features of an attractive reboot of Christianity have already been mentioned here. There needs to be a mechanism for suppressing virtue signaling arms races (AKA supererogation). The Catholic Church has this, at least in principle: the Pope can tell Catholics to shut up. I would like the reboot to be less of a drama queen, with more emphasis on factual realism and adaptive complexity, and less emphasis on motivational power. I would like to replace traditional Christian theology with evolutionary psychology as provenance for moral rules. Ideally, the church's core teachings should be agnostic on the existance of gods and an afterlife. I would like to see more emphasis on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ("To every thing there is a season...."). A religion can't be all "Turn the other cheek." At some point it needs to be able to outgroup non-cooperators and sometimes go "Old Testament" on them.
But without the motivational power of the canonical Gospels, how do we stand upright against the wind that blows out of Washington, New York, Boston, and Hollywood? Without belief in divine justice, what do we use as a commitment strategy? Without a belief in an afterlife, how do we motivate people to be like Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
Early Christianity produced martyrs. Modern "Churchianity" produces cuckolds. It's looking like we are going to need martyrs.
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