Saturday, November 14, 2015

The fellowship instinct



Grace Fellowship Assembly of God, Bloomington, Indiana – Fellowship is what primarily draws people to religion (Wikicommons - Vmenkov).

 

Religiosity is moderately heritable—25 to 45% according to twin studies (Bouchard, 2004; Lewis and Bates, 2013). These figures are of course underestimates, since any noise in the data gets classified as ‘non-genetic’ variability. So the estimates would be higher if we could measure religiosity better.

But what does it mean to be religious? Does it mean adhering to a single organized religion with a clergy, a place of worship, and a standardized creed? This definition works fairly well in the Christian and Muslim worlds, but not so well farther afield. In East Asia, people often have more than one faith tradition: “If one religion is good, two are better.” Moreover, 'religion' has never controlled East Asian societies to the extent that Christianity and Islam have controlled theirs, as Francis Fukuyama notes in The Origins of Political Order. This word becomes even more problematic in simple societies. Did hunter-gatherers have religion? If we take the example of the Inuit, they believed in spirits of various kinds, but those spirits were indifferent to humans and their concerns, being not at all like the fellow in the Christmas jingle: 

He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!

Simple hunter-gatherers had no idea that a moral God exists. Nor did they see morality as being absolute or universal. A human action could be good or bad, depending on who was doing what to whom. Morality could not be separated from kinship. Your first moral obligation was to yourself, then to your family, then to your close kin. Beyond, who cares?

So what exactly is the heritable component of religiosity? Or should we say components? These questions were addressed by a recent twin study, which concluded that "religiosity is a biologically complex construct, with distinct heritable components" (Lewis and Bates, 2013). The most important one seems to be 'community integration,' which is the desire to be among people who befriend each other and help each other on a regular basis. Much research shows that religious people have stronger social needs than the rest of us, and they tend to lose interest in religion when such needs are no longer met. When former Methodist church members were asked why they left their church, the most common response was their failure to feel accepted, loved, or wanted by others in the congregation (Lewis and Bates, 2013).

The second most important component seems to be 'existential certainty'—belief in a controlling God who will ultimately take care of everything. Belief in divine control reduces anxiety and actually increases one's sense of personal control. As such, it provides "an epistemic buffer from a range of factors such as unpredictability, instability, and concerns over mortality that exist in this world."

In sum, this study found that community integration accounts for 45% of innate religiosity and existential certainty for 11%. These two components represent most of the genetic variability.

Just one thing. The study was done with a sample of Americans who were 85.1% Christian, the rest being mostly atheist, agnostic, or ''no religious preference." Would the results have been similar with participants from the Middle East, Africa, or East Asia?

I don’t think so. Religiosity, by its very nature, should be very sensitive to gene-culture coevolution. It's moderately heritable and serves different purposes in different cultural environments. Any one religion will favor its own ways of being and acting, and people who conform will do better than those who don’t. Thus, over successive generations, the gene pool of believers will become characterized by certain predispositions, personality traits, and other heritable aspects of mental makeup. These characteristics will tend to persist even if the believers cease to believe and become secularized.

This point is made by the authors, albeit indirectly. On the one hand, a community of believers will modify their religion to suit their social and existential needs:

[...] religion per-sé may not be the sole organization or system able to fill the niche created by human needs for community and existential meaning. The succession, displacement, and evolution of religions can be viewed in this light as the shaping of religious systems by their adherents to maximize the extent to which their needs are met.

On the other hand, a religion will modify its community of believers by favoring the survival of those with the "right" mindset and by removing those with the “wrong” mindset:

[...] this ''exchangeable goods'' notion of religion may fail to acknowledge the tight fit between religious belief and human psychology: ''religious practices and rituals co-evolved with religiously inclined minds, so that they now fit together extremely well."

In short, Man has made religion in his own image, but religion has returned the favor. In a very real sense, it has made us who we are.

References 

Bouchard, T. J. Jr., (2004). Genetic influence on human psychological traits: A survey. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 148-151.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Bouchard2/publication/241644869_Genetic_Influence_on_Human_Psychological_TraitsA_Survey/links/00b7d524a1ab5b5f9d000000.pdf 

Lewis, G.J. and T.C. Bates. (2013). Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty, Journal of Research in Personality, 47, 398-405.
http://www.aging.wisc.edu/midus/findings/pdfs/1268.pdf

4 comments:

  1. We inherit a set of long term behavioral probabilities (which are relatively homogeneous one each other, specially, seems, for non-neurotic people). None born ''religious'' because alegorical religions are not like feelings or thinking styles, religions are essentially social constructions (indeed). Most of human beings born with natural disposition to use/engage sofisticated/alegorical anthropomorphism as addendum or even a main piece for their lifestyle.

    Religion (social) is like a clothing in the (biological) body. Their origins happen firstly because ''rudimentar'' observations about phenomenology (and the birth of very logical idea of God) and collectivistic ''modern'' religions as christianism and islamism are political tools used by ''elites'' to legitimates their exploitation and hierarchy and to domesticate people.

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  2. I disagree with your analogy. Society is not simply an external constraint on our biological self. Our biological self requires society to survive, and not simply because society provides us with the wherewithal of existence (food, water, shelter). Society provides visual, verbal, and other inputs that are no less essential. Religion supplies many of these inputs, and without them we will "starve" in a very real sense.

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  3. Even the irreligious recognize that there is such a thing as a "religious experience", which is more than just an intellectual assent to certain beliefs. We should therefore accept that there is a specific religious attitude, but what else? Some things influencing a person's religious outlook would be the tendency to accept authority, or peer pressure, or a need for community cohesion. Note that one's authority figures or peers could be either religious or irreligious. This explains the phenomenon that religiosity tends to vary over periods of generations, but much faster than can be explained by genetic change. Thus, religion was at a low point in Western Europe in the 18th century, but towards the end of that century there began a series of religious revivals in both the Protestant and Roman Catholic worlds which has petered out only in the last 50 years. Added to this is the frequent comment that many secular political movements possess characteristics of religion, such as providing a meaning for life and a higher cause to devote oneself to. What about openness, or attraction to, ideas outside of the community paradigm? Is openness to belief in UFOs similar to openness to belief in a new, or foreign, religion? The aspects of personality which could possible go into "religiosity" are innumerable.

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  4. '' disagree with your analogy. Society is not simply an external constraint on our biological self. Our biological self requires society to survive, and not simply because society provides us with the wherewithal of existence (food, water, shelter). Society provides visual, verbal, and other inputs that are no less essential. Religion supplies many of these inputs, and without them we will "starve" in a very real sense.''


    I talked about religion and not society. Society seems to be indispensable for social creatures. Religion appears as addendum, nailling the coffin. But complex cultures or better massified cultures become dangerous for humans because instead of promoting and select self-care ability, promotes / selects docility.

    And i'm not said that ''society is just'', ''is like'' is not the same than ''is just''.

    Human cultures/religions ''become' straight jacket (if not always was like that).

    ''Society is not simply an external constraint on our biological self. Our biological self requires society to survive''

    External constraint don't correlates with survive in social contexts* Seems both to be very complementary.


    '' Our biological self requires society to survive''


    Our self, we are all the same**

    Human societies are heritage come from primates. Neoteny seems increase the social dependence or vulnerability that already exist among primates and other social species because greater period of brain mature. The idea of nurture is very chrystalized among humans exactly because long time of nurture (care, in better words) that parents provide to their progeny.


    ''Society provides visual, verbal, and other inputs that are no less essential. Religion supplies many of these inputs, and without them we will "starve" in a very real sense''

    Yes i know. I don't said the otherwise.

    Of course, human babies are very likely to die alone in the forest.

    Self awareness and individuality sense, caused by individual phenotypical (mindset) diversification create the very necessity to relate/connect us with other and specially in terms of love. And people who are very realist about this existencial stuff like me feel great necessity to find love in other people. Humans in general looking like emotionally needy.

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