Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [62]
When bands and tribes gave way to chiefdoms and states, religion developed as a principal social institution to accentuate amity and attenuate enmity. It did so by encouraging altruism and selflessness, discouraging excessive greed and selfishness, and especially by revealing the level of commitment to the group through social events and religious rituals. If I see you every week participating in our religion’s activities and following the prescribed rituals, this is an indication that you can be trusted. As organizations with codified moral rules and the power to enforce the rules and punish their transgressors, religion and government responded to a need.
Consider the biblical command to “love thy neighbor.” In the Paleolithic social environment in which our moral sentiments evolved, one’s neighbors were family, extended family, and community members who were well known to everyone. To help others was to help oneself. In chiefdoms, states, and empires, the decree meant one’s immediate in-group. Out-groups were not included. This explains the seemingly paradoxical nature of Old Testament morality, where on one page high moral principles of peace, justice, and respect for people and property are promulgated, and on the next page raping, killing, and pillaging people who are not one’s “neighbors” are endorsed. Deuteronomy 5:17, for example, admonishes, “Thou shalt not kill,” yet in Deuteronomy 20:10–18, the Israelites are commanded to lay siege to an enemy city, steal the cattle, enslave those men who surrender, and kill those who do not.
The cultural expression of this in-group morality is not restricted to any one religion, nation, or people. It is a universal human trait common throughout history, from the earliest bands and tribes to modern nations and empires. Christian morality, like that of many other religions, was designed to help us overcome these natural tendencies.
Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and sexual fidelity, because the violation of these causes a severe breakdown in trust, and once trust is gone there is no foundation on which to build a family or a community. Evolution explains why. We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy is the norm (or, at least, serial monogamy—a sequence of monogamous relationships). Adultery is a violation of a monogamous bond, and there are copious scientific data showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. (In fact, one of the reasons that “serial monogamy” best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new.) This is why most religions are unequivocal on the subject. Consider Deuteronomy 22:22: “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel.”
Most religions decree adultery to be immoral, but this is because evolution made it immoral. According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, sexual betrayals are primarily a biologically driven phenomenon encoded over eons of Paleolithic cuckolding. Buss argues that there are differences between men and women in this tendency, and that these differences hold across different cultures; thus, they are primarily driven by our genes. In one study by psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, an attractive member of the opposite sex posed one of three questions to fellow single college students:
1. “Would you go out on a date with me tonight?”
2. “Would you go back to my apartment with me tonight?”
3. “Would you sleep with me tonight?”
The results were revealing. For women, 50 percent agreed to the date, 6 percent