Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

How might something like the runaway sexual selection process shape the extravagances of religion? In several ways. First, there might have been straightforward sexual selection by human females for religion-enhancing psychological traits. Perhaps they preferred males who demonstrated a sensitivity to music and ceremony, which could then have snowballed into a proclivity for elaborate rapture. The females who had this preference wouldn’t have had to understand why they had it; it could just have been a whim, a blind personal taste that prompted them to choose, but if the mates they chose just happened to be better providers, more faithful family men, these mothers and fathers would tend to raise more children and grandchildren than others, and both the sensitivity to ceremony and the taste for those who loved ceremony would spread. Or the same whim could have had a selective advantage only because more females shared that whim, so that sons who lacked the fashionable sensitivity to ceremony were passed over by the choosy females. (And if an influential sample of our female ancestors had happened, for no good reason, to have a taste for males who jumped up and down in the rain, we guys would now find ourselves unable to sit still whenever it rained. Girls might or might not share our tendency to jump under these conditions, but they would definitely go for guys who did—that is the implication of the classic sexual-selection hypothesis.) The idea that musical talent is the royal road to the embrace of a woman is certainly familiar; it probably sells a million guitars a year. And there may well be something to it. This could be a genetically transmitted proclivity, with significant variation in the population, but we should also consider cultural analogues of sexual selection. The potlatch ceremonies found among the Native Americans of the Northwest are striking: ceremonial demonstrations of conspicuous generosity, in which individuals compete with one another to see who can give away the most, sometimes to the point of ruin. These customs bear the marks of having been created by a positive-feedback escalator like those that establish peacock tails and giant Irish-elk antlers. Other social phenomena also exhibit inflationary spirals of expensive and essentially arbitrary competition: tail fins on cars of the 1950s, teen-agers’ fashions, and outdoor lighting displays at Christmas are among those most often discussed, but there are others as well.

For more than a million years, our ancestors made beautiful “Acheulean handaxes,” pear-shaped stone implements of varying size, lovingly finished and seldom showing any sign of wear and tear. Clearly our ancestors spent a lot of time and energy making these, and the design hardly changed over the eons. Large caches of hundreds and even thousands of these have been found (Mithen, 1996). The archeologist Thomas Wynne (1995) has opined that “it would be difficult to over-emphasize just how strange the handaxe is when compared to the products of modern culture.” “They’re biofacts,” said one archeologist, coining a new term, and inspiring the science writer Marek Kohn (1999) to come up with a striking hypothesis. Geofacts are what archeologists call stones that look like artifacts but aren’t—they are just the unintended product of some geological process. Kohn proposes that these handaxes may not be artifacts so much as biofacts, more like a bowerbird’s bower than a hunter’s bow and arrow, conspicuously expensive advertisements of male superiority, a ploy that was transmitted culturally, not genetically, in a tradition that dominated the battle of the sexes for a million years. The hominoids who worked so hard to participate in this competition no more needed to understand the rationale of the enterprise than do the male spiders who catch an insect and wrap it neatly in silk to present as a “nuptial gift” to females during courtship. This is a highly speculative and controversial claim, but it is not yet disproven, and it usefully alerts us to the possibilities that might otherwise elude us. Whatever the reasons for it, our ancestors lavished time and effort on apparently unused artifacts whenever they could, a precedent worth remembering when we marvel at the expense of tombs, temples, and sacrifices.