Steven Pinker
Harvard University
Presented at the annual meeting of the Freedom fromReligion Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin, October 29, 2004, on receipt of “TheEmperor’s New Clothes Award.”
Do we have a “God gene,” or a “God module”? I'm referring toclaims that a number of you may have noticed. Just last week, a cover story of Timemagazine was called "The God Gene: Does our deity compel us to seek a higher power?" Believe it or not, somescientists say yes. And a number of years earlier, there were claims that thehuman brain is equipped with a “God module,” a subsystem of the brain shaped byevolution to cause us to have a religious belief. "Brain's God module mayaffect religious intensity," according to the headline of the LosAngeles Times. In this evening's talk, Iwant to evaluate those claims.
There certainly is a phenomenon that needs to be explained,namely religious beliefs. According to surveys by ethnographers, religion is ahuman universal. In all human cultures, people believe that the soul lives onafter death, that ritual can change the physical world and divine the truth,and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by a variety ofinvisible person-like entities: spirits, ghosts, saints, evils, demons,cherubim or Jesus, devils and gods.
All cultures, you might ask? Yes, all cultures.<snip/>
To answer the “why is Homo sapiens so prone to religious belief?” you first have to distinguishbetween traits that are adaptations,that is, products of Darwinian natural selection, and traits that are byproductsof adaptations, also called spandrels orexaptations. An example: Why is our blood red? Is there some adaptive advantageto having red blood, maybe as camouflage against autumn leaves? Well, that’sunlikely, and we don't need any other adaptive explanation, either. Theexplanation for why our blood is red is that it is adaptive to have a moleculethat can carry oxygen, mainly hemoglobin. Hemoglobin happens to be red whenit's oxygenated, so the redness of our blood is a byproduct of the chemistry ofcarrying oxygen. The color per se was not selected for. Another non-adaptiveexplanation for a biological trait is genetic drift. Random stuff happens inevolution. Certain traits can become fixed through sheer luck of the draw.</snip>
To sum up. The universal propensity toward religious beliefis a genuine scientific puzzle. But many adaptationist explanations forreligion, such as the one featured in Time lastweek, don't, I think, meet the criteria for adaptations. There is analternative explanation, namely that religious psychology is a by-product of manyparts of the mind that evolved for other purposes. Among those purposes one hasto distinguish the benefits to the producer and the benefits to the consumer.Religion has obvious practical effects for producers. When it comes to theconsumers, there are possible emotional adaptations in our desire for health, love and success, possiblecognitive adaptations in our intuitive psychology, and many aspects of ourexperience that seem to provide evidence for souls. Put these together and youget an appeal to a mysterious world of souls to bring about our fondest wishes.
