Is religion good for you or bad for you, in an evolutionary sense? I’ve certainly seen plenty of evidence in my own life for both positive and negative emotional effects of religious beliefs, and there are arguments on either side for whether it helps or hurts humans to survive and reproduce. A few months ago I read Robert Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral, which examines the idea of religion as an adaptation. Now I see that there’s another book out on the nature of religion, The Story of God by Robert Winston. Here are some excerpts published in The Guardian that discuss the possible genetic basis for religious belief, possible survival and reproductive benefits, and religion’s costs. Winston draws a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity: extrinsic is when you go to church or synagogue for the advantages it confers or because it’s part of the expectations of your group—basically because it helps you thrive as part of the group. Intrinsic religiosity, on the other hand, is what it sounds like—your spirituality is an integral part of who you are and how you find meaning in your life. In a study of various religious groups, including snake-handlers in the southern US, the people whose religious beliefs were extrinsic (mostly mainstream churchgoers, not the snake-handlers) had a higher rate of mental illness.
I’ve seen in my own life how the Church can offer a great deal of comfort, but often in situations where adherence to the Church’s rules is what was causing misery in the first place. On a less personal level, what struck me when I heard Robert Sloan Wilson give a talk here at IU was the problems with religion as a means for cohesion within a social group. For all it does to help members of a community thrive, the down side is that the community is struggling for survival against not just the forces of nature but also against other groups of people. What it seems like religion does is raise the level of the struggle from being man against man to church against church, or more accurately belief system against belief system. And look what that’s done for the world.
(Added 10/22/05) I ought to clarify that Wilson in general spoke positively on the effects of religion on social groups; the downside that I noted seemed obvious to me from what he was saying, but it wasn’t something he emphasized.
An interesting side note is that when Winston talked in the Guardian piece about genes that might influence personality and affect how strongly religious a person is, he mentioned the dopamine receptor gene DRD4. Coincidentally, I read a press release from the University of Michigan yesterday that talked about a link betwen a variant of this gene and a tendency toward hypertension, due to the gene’s influence on how the kidneys process sodium. (I was interested in this because I have evidently inherited hypertension from my parents.) The results the UMich researchers got was unexpected because the gene was being studied for its role in personality and behavior, and the hypertension discovery was something of a bonus. It will be very interesting to see if other collaborations between behavioral geneticists and medical researchers will reveal other unexpected connections like this.
