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By Root 420 0

with religion? Religion is a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community. That is to say, religion evolved as the social structure that enforced the rules of human interactions before there were such institutions as the state or such concepts as laws and rights. We would do well to remember that the history of the modern nation-state with constitutional rights and protection of basic human freedoms can be measured in mere centuries, whereas humans evolved as social primates over the course of millions of years, and human culture itself dates back at least 35,000 years, if not more. The principal social institution available to facilitate cooperation and goodwill was probably religion. An organized establishment with rules and morals, with a hierarchical structure so necessary for social primates, and with a higher power to enforce the rules and punish their transgressors, religion evolved as the penultimate effort of these pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking animals. How and why did it evolve?

At the most fundamental level, blood is thicker than water, and Richard Dawkins’ famous selfish-gene model accounts for altruism and cooperation among families and extended families. That is, the percentage of genes shared among various degrees of kinship will predict the amount of benefits we receive from a given relative (on average—families will vary, of course). Thus, we do not need religion and gods to enforce the rules in the immediate family where the ties are close. Most parents do just fine. But when we move out from the circle of extended families and into the community and society, we need other mechanisms to ensure that people are kind to one another.

Morality evolved over eons in the paleolithic environment where individuals cooperated and competed with one another to meet their needs. Individuals belonged to families, families to extended families, extended families to communities, and, in the last couple of centuries, communities to societies. This natural progression, which is now in its latest evolutionary stages of perceiving societies as part of the species, and the species as part of the biosphere, is illustrated in the Bio-Cultural Pyramid below.

The lower strata of the Bio-Cultural Pyramid depict the 1.5 million years over which our moral behavior evolved under primarily biogenetic control, and the middle layer the transition about 35,000 years ago when sociocultural factors increasingly assumed control in shaping our ethical precepts. Obviously this was a continuous process. There was no point at which an Upper Paleolithic Moses descended from a glacier-covered mountain to present The Law to his fellow Cro-Magnons.

The Bio-Cultural Pyramid: A model of the origin and development of ethical behavior.

Nevertheless, the semipermeable bio-cultural transitional boundary divides time and dominant source of influence, where the individual, family, extended family, and paleolithic communities were primarily molded by natural selection; whereas neolithic communities and modern societies were and are primarily shaped by cultural selection. Starting at the bottom of the Bio-Cultural Pyramid, the individual’s need for survival and genetic propagation (through food, drink, safety, and sex) is met by way of the family, extended family, and the community. The nuclear family, however, is the foundation. Despite assaults on it in the second half of the twentieth century, the family remains the most common social unit around the world. Even within extremes of cultural deprivation—slavery, prisons, communes—the two-parents-with-children structure emerges: (1) African slave families broken up retained their attachment and structure for generations through the oral tradition; (2) in women’s prisons pseudofamilies self-organize, with a sexually active couple acting as “husband” and “wife” and others playing “brothers