Understanding the Evolution of Religion: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

Turner’s paper covers an impressive scope of evidence and builds a complex theory of how both biological evolution and other evolutionary forces could give rise to human religions. Researchers in other areas of the biological and social sciences have explored similar ideas and have developed parallel theories, which in many ways expand upon the ideas presented here. The need for an evolutionary explanation of religion and the necessity of appealing to selection mechanisms beyond biological ones has been well established within the fields of biology, human ecology, anthropology, and psychology. Researchers have appealed to biological evolution, cultural evolution, and cultural group selection in explaining religion (Atran and Henrich 2010; Gervais et al. 2011; Johnson 2015; Norenzayan et al. 2016). These additional cultural evolutionary mechanisms, and the biological evolutionary mechanisms that have given rise to them, have been well established as processes underlying human culture more generally (see Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and McElreath 2003; Richerson and Boyd 2005). Specifically, work in these fields has established theories for the evolution of the human brain; how religion can be explained by a combination of biological and cultural evolution; and that cultural group selection has played an important role in this process and continues to play an important role in dictating which religious groups succeed and spread, and which decline and disappear. We appeal to some of this evidence and explore how it parallels, compliments, and adds to those that Turner outlines in his paper.