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By Root 531 0

and treacherous parents of the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.”4 On the other hand, although Darwin was a strident proponent of restricting the range and power of natural selection to operate strictly at the level of the individual organism, he conceded that selection might also operate at the group level when it came to religion and between-group competition: “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection [of the group].”5

Picking up where Darwin left off, in my book How We Believe I developed an evolutionary model of belief in God as one of a suite of mechanisms used by religion, which I define as a social institution to create and promote myths, to encourage conformity and altruism, and to signal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a community. Around five thousand to seven thousand years ago, as bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, government and religion co-evolved as social institutions to codify moral behaviors into ethical principles and legal rules, and God became the ultimate enforcer of the rules.6 In the small populations of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes with a few dozen to a couple of hundred members, informal means of behavior control and social cohesion could be employed by capitalizing on the moral emotions, such as shaming someone through guilt for violating a social norm, or even excommunicating violators from the group. But when populations grew into the tens and hundreds of thousands, and eventually into millions of people, such informal means of enforcing the rules of society broke down because free riders and norm violators could more readily get away with cheating in large groups; something more formal was needed. This is one vital role that religion plays, such that even if violators think that they got away with a violation, believing that there is an invisible intentional agent who sees all and knows all and judges all can be a powerful deterrent of sin.

One line of evidence for this theory of religion can be found in human universals, or traits that are shared by all peoples. There are general universals, such as tool use, myths, sex roles, social groups, aggression, gestures, emotions, grammar, and phonemes, and there are specific universals, such as kinship classifications and specific facial expressions such as the smile, frown, or eyebrow flash. There are also specific universals directly related to religion and belief in God, including anthropomorphizing animals and objects, general belief in the supernatural, specific supernatural beliefs and rituals about death, supernatural beliefs about fortune and misfortune, and especially divination, folklore, magic, myths, and rituals.7 Although such universals are not totally controlled by genes alone (almost nothing is), we can presume that there is a genetic predisposition for these traits to be expressed within their respective cultures, and that these cultures, despite their considerable diversity and variance, nurture these genetically predisposed natures in a consistent fashion.

A second line of evidence for the evolutionary origins of religion and belief in God can be found in anthropological studies of meat sharing practiced by all modern hunter-gatherer societies around the world. It turns out that these small communities—which can cautiously be used as a model for our own Paleolithic ancestors—are remarkably egalitarian. Using portable scales to measure precisely how much meat each family within the group received after a successful hunt, researchers found that the immediate families of successful hunters got no more meat than the rest of the families in the