Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Symbiont theories: Religions might turn out to be species of cultural symbionts that manage to thrive by leaping from human host to human host. They may be mutualists—enhancing human fitness and even making human life possible just as the bacteria in our gut do. Or commensals—neutral, neither good for us nor bad for us, but along for the ride. Or they might be parasites: deleterious replicators that we would be better off without—at least so far as our genetic interests are concerned—but that are hard to eliminate, since they have evolved so well to counter our defenses and enhance their own propagation. We can expect that cultural parasites, like microbial parasites, exploit whatever preexisting systems come in handy. The sneezing reflex, for instance, is in the first place an adaptation for ridding the nasal passages of foreign irritants, but when a germ provokes sneezing, it is typically not the sneezer but the germ that is the principal beneficiary, getting a high-energy launching into a neighborhood where other potential hosts can take it in. Spreading germs and spreading memes may exploit similar mechanisms, such as irresistible urges to impart stories or other items of information to others, enhanced by traditions that heighten the length, intensity, and frequency of encounters with others who might be likely hosts.

When we look at religion from this perspective, the cui bono? question changes dramatically. Now it is not our fitness (as reproducing members of the species Homo sapiens) that is presumed to be enhanced by religion, but its fitness (as a reproducing—self-replicating—member of the symbiont genus Cultus religiosus). It may thrive as a mutualist because it benefits its hosts quite directly, or it may thrive as a parasite even though it oppresses its hosts with a virulent affliction that leaves them worse off but too weak to combat its spread. And the main point to get clear about at the outset is that we can’t tell which of these is more likely to be true without doing careful, objective research. Your religion probably seems obviously benign to you, and other religions may well seem to you to be just as obviously toxic to those infected by them, but appearances can deceive. Perhaps their religion is providing them with benefits that you just don’t understand yet, and perhaps your religion is poisoning you in ways that you have never suspected. You really can’t tell from the inside. That’s how parasites work: quietly, unobtrusively, without disturbing their hosts any more than is absolutely necessary. If (some) religions are culturally evolved parasites, we can expect them to be insidiously well designed to conceal their true nature from their hosts, since this is an adaptation that would further their own spread.

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These two families of theories, sweet tooth and symbiont, are not exclusive. As we have already seen with the example of the alcohol-excreting yeast, there are symbiotic possibilities that may combine several of these phenomena together. It may be that an initial craving is exploited by cultural symbionts that include both mutualist and parasitical forms. A relatively benign or harmless symbiont may mutate under some conditions into something virulent and even deadly. For millennia, people have imagined that other religions might be a form of disease or sickness, and apostates often look back on their earlier days as a period of affliction which they have somehow survived, but the evolutionary perspective allows us to see that there are just as many positive as negative scenarios once we start looking at religion as possibly a cultural symbiont. Friendly symbionts are everywhere. Your body is composed of perhaps a hundred trillion cells, and nine out of ten of them are not human cells (Hooper et al., 1998)! Most of these trillions of microscopic guests are either harmless or helpful; only a minority are worth worrying about. Many of them, indeed, are valuable helpers that we inherit from our mothers and would be quite defenseless without. These inheritances are not genetic. Some of them may be passed on via the shared bloodstream of mother and fetus, but others are picked up by bodily contact or proximity. (A surrogate mother who makes no genetic contribution to the fetus implanted in her womb nevertheless makes a major contribution to the microflora that the infant will carry with it for the rest of its life.)