Language, religion, cognition and brain...

[Langoogler]

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous
phenomenon--arguably one of the species markers of HOMO SAPIENS--but a
puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker
of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of
resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent
disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in
understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in
the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to
put religion under the microscope as well.

WHERE ANGELS NO LONGER FEAR TO TREAD
Mar 19th 2008


Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has
decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of
the latter

BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, EURO2m ($3.1m)
is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will
challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions
being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at
Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron
Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for
the Higgs boson--an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount
of hyperbole, the God particle. The EURO2m, by contrast, will be spent
on the search for God Himself--or, rather, for the biological reasons
why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

"Explaining Religion", as the project is known, is the largest-ever
scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for
three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of
disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest
manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into
the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous
phenomenon--arguably one of the species markers of HOMO SAPIENS--but a
puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker
of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of
resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent
disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in
understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in
the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to
put religion under the microscope as well.

I HAVE NO NEED OF THAT HYPOTHESIS
Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments
it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to
represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a
"surveillance-camera" God might improve reproductive success to an
individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a
person's reputation--for instance, do people think that those who
believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The
researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions
foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether
such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious
community and to those outside it.

It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have
blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the
Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of
Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease.
This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called
dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr
McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of
religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to
correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link
with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some
patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are
not.

Such neurochemical work, though preliminary, may tie in with scanning
studies conducted to try to find out which parts of the brain are
involved in religious experience. Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the
University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has
looked at the brains of religious people. She used positron emission
tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist
Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The
Christians all said that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm
helped them enter a religious state of mind, so both groups were
scanned in six different sets of circumstances: while reading the first
verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a
happy story (a well-known German children's rhyme), while reciting that
story out loud, while reading a neutral text (how to use a calling
card) and while at rest.

Dr Azari was expecting to see activity in the limbic systems of the
Christians when they recited the psalm. Previous research had suggested
that this part of the brain (which regulates emotion) is an important
centre of religious activity. In fact what happened was increased
activity in three areas of the frontal and parietal cortex, some of
which are better known for their involvement in rational thought. The
control group did not show activity in these parts of their brains when
listening to the psalm. And, intriguingly, the only thing that
triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the happy story.

Dr Azari's PET study, together with one by Andrew Newberg of the
University of Pennsylvania, which used single-photon emission computed
tomography done on Buddhist monks, and another by Mario Beauregard of
the University of Montreal, which put Carmelite nuns in a
magnetic-resonance-imaging machine, all suggest that religious activity
is spread across many parts of the brain. That conflicts not only with
the limbic-system theory but also with earlier reports of a so-called
God Spot that derived partly from work conducted on epileptics. These
reports suggested that religiosity originates specifically in the
brain's temporal lobe, and that religious visions are the result of
epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain.

Though there is clearly still a long way to go, this sort of imaging
should eventually tie down the circuitry of religious experience and
that, combined with work on messenger molecules of the sort that Dr
McNamara is doing, will illuminate how the brain generates and
processes religious experiences. Dr Azari, however, is sceptical that
such work will say much about religion's evolution and function. For
this, other methods are needed.

Dr McNamara, for example, plans to analyse a database called the
Ethnographic Atlas to see if he can find any correlations between the
amount of cultural co-operation found in a society and the intensity of
its religious rituals. And Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the
University of Connecticut, has already done some research which
suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh
the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a
day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on.

LEVITICUS'S CHILDREN
On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should
persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection.
The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really
do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose.
Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide
a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging
in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would
not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group
co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for
free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American
communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr
Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112
were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's
existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular
were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any
given year.

A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric
Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these
communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they
survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed
on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things
like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about
communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual
relationships.

As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious
commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still
going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of
secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes
that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain
co-operation in a community--what is needed in addition is a belief
that those constraints are sanctified.

Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in
Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group
co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of
religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to
pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not.
It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do
improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.

To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at
Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by
two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to
economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two
people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the
other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and
Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with
100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income).
Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of
their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If,
however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not
only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50%
and split between them.

Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because
the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar
dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The
researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be
better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in
secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was
exactly what happened.

BIG FATHER IS WATCHING YOU
Dr Sosis is not the only researcher to employ economic games to
investigate the nature and possible advantages of religion. Ara
Norenzayan, an experimental psychologist at the University of British
Columbia, in Vancouver, has conducted experiments using what is known
as the dictator game. This, too, is a well-established test used to
gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money--Dr
Norenzayan set it at $10--and are asked if they would like to share it
with another player. The dictator game thus differs from another
familiar economic game in which one person divides the money and the
other decides whether to accept or reject that division.

As might be expected, in the simple version of the dictator game most
people take most or all of the money. However, Dr Norenzayan and his
graduate student Azim Shariff tried to tweak the game by introducing
the idea of God. They did this by priming half of their volunteers to
think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing
religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those
thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.

Exactly what Dr Norenzayan has discovered here is not clear. A
follow-up experiment which primed people with secular words that might,
nevertheless, have prompted them to behave in an altruistic manner
(civic, jury, court, police and contract) had similar effects, so it
may be that he has touched on a general question of morality, rather
than a specific one of religion. However, an experiment carried out by
Jesse Bering, of Queen's University in Belfast, showed quite
specifically that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can
affect a person's behaviour--although in this case the being was not
God, but the ghost of a dead person.

Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by
promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be
to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing
things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for
cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of
being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus
proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called
"dangerous risk miscalculations" that would lead to social deviance and
reduced fitness.

One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch
of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best
performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told
that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it,
which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the
question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar
immediately if the word "Answer" appeared on the screen. That would
remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by
reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate
student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note,
one was told by the experimenter that the student's ghost had sometimes
been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering
measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each
occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and
then averaged the other four. He found that those who had been told the
ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had
not. They did so in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3
seconds for those who had only read the note about the student's death
and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the
dead student. In short, awareness of a ghost--a supernatural
agent--made people less likely to cheat.

WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?
It all sounds very Darwinian. But there is a catch. The American
communes, the kibbutzim, the students of the University of British
Columbia and even the supernatural self-censorship observed by Dr
Bering all seem to involve behaviour that promotes the group over the
individual. That is the opposite of Darwinism as conventionally
understood. But it might be explained by an idea that most Darwinians
dropped in the 1960s--group selection.

The idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire
groups of organisms, rather than just of individuals, was rejected
because it is mathematically implausible. But it has been revived
recently, in particular by David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University,
in New York, as a way of explaining the evolution of human morality in
the context of inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous
that groups whose members fail to collaborate in an individually
self-sacrificial way may be wiped out entirely. This negates the
benefits of selfish behaviour within a group. Morality and religion are
often closely connected, of course (as Dr Norenzayan's work confirms),
so what holds for the one might be expected to hold for the other, too.

Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social
insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of
the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to
be most fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules
is a condition for the security which comes from membership of a group.
He is also interested in what some religions hold out as the ultimate
reward for good behaviour--life after death. That can promote any
amount of self-sacrifice in a believer, up to and including suicidal
behaviour--as recent events in the Islamic world have emphasised.
However, belief in an afterlife is not equally well developed in all
religions, and he suspects the differences may be illuminating.

That does not mean there are no explanations for religion that are
based on individual selection. For example, Jason Slone, a professor of
religious studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people
who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to
help in parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as
mates. He plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether
this is so. And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that
"secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at
best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't
smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health
benefits."

That quip, though, makes an intriguing point. Evolutionary biologists
tend to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific
investigation of religion did not end up supporting their point of
view. But if a propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved
trait, then they have talked themselves into a position where they
cannot benefit from it, much as a sceptic cannot benefit from the
placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe, therefore, it is God who will have
the last laugh after all--whether He actually exists or not.



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