The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures - Hardcover

Wade, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594202281 ISBN 13: 9781594202285

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2009

Synopsis

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Wade received a BA in natural sciences from King’s College, Cambridge. He was the deputy editor of Nature magazine in London and then became that journal’s Washington correspondent. He joined Science magazine in Washington as a reporter and later moved to The New York Times, where he has been an editorial writer, concentrating on issues of defense, space, science, medicine, technology, genetics, molecular biology, the environment, and public policy, a science reporter, and a science editor.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Carolyn See Nicholas Wade, who has worked as an editor and reporter for the New York Times, Nature magazine and the journal Science, is part scholar and part journalist, but he's also 1,000 percent red-blooded contrarian. You can tell he loves to rile up his readers -- perhaps in order to make them think -- and in my case he certainly succeeded. "The Faith Instinct" is not what its title claims it to be, and the book doesn't do what the jacket copy says it will do: "Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for existence that an instinct for faith became hardwired into human nature." If Wade had actually done that here, people of faith might be justifiably annoyed, but he didn't, so they don't have to be. Instead, the book is devoted to quotations from anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, psychologists, commentators and pundits. Quotations from geneticists are as scarce here as the proverbial hens' teeth. Safely tucked away in a footnote comes this throw-away caveat: "Because most genetically based human behaviors are flexible, not deterministic, it is probably unrealistic to require that a behavior be exhibited by every known society in order to be accepted as having a genetic basis." Elsewhere, Wade suggests that evolutionary or genetic evidence of the religious instinct is hard to pin down precisely because it is ubiquitous -- does the fish identify the water in which it swims? In other words, all this promised "new evidence" about religion being part and parcel of the evolutionary process and genetically hard-wired into our brains is something the author certainly wishes were true, and indeed may be true, but he cites no convincing data or proof; he just keeps repeating his opinions, perhaps in the hope that they may become true somewhere down the line. (I'm not against his premise; I'd just like to see more scientific proof!) What "The Faith Instinct" actually seems to be is a set of loosely constructed essays that maintain that religion is, indeed, ubiquitous or universal and, from the human point of view, timeless: "For the last 50,000 years, and probably for much longer, people have practiced religion. With dance and chants and sacred words, they have ritually marked the cycles of seasons and the passages of life, from birth to adolescence, to marriage and to death." This certainly seems to be true enough, but it isn't exactly world-shaking news. Anthropologists have been pondering this since the first great ethnographers went intrepidly out to find what they called "savage" tribes and tried to figure out what those people were actually doing and believing. Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas and many more of those Golden Oldies are copiously quoted here, but just in case you might get really interested in this narrative, there's also plenty of dull Émile Durkheim, who, if he were a comic book character, would manifest as Novocain Man. Religion's main function, the author suggests, is to make society cohere. And, again, in what is not exactly new information, he maintains that what we know now as religion stemmed from all-night dance marathons staged by hunter-gatherer societies back in prehistoric times in an attempt to make contact with the gods. To substantiate this claim -- hunter-gatherers being few and far between these days -- the author extrapolates from the behavior of people who were studied by the first wave of anthropologists: Australian aborigines observed by Darwin himself, the population of the Andaman Islands and the !Kung tribe of the Kalahari desert. In other words, if I read correctly, these tribes danced and sang, and in a dizzying flash forward, there came the Presbyterians! They had to appear, even though they loathe dancing, because it was genetically programmed, literally in their blood. Although Wade never precisely says this, his work turns out to be part of a couple of new disciplines that are polarizing anthropology departments across the country the way Deconstruction split English departments in days of yore. "Sociobiology," or "evolutionary psychology," while still forced to hark back to the old cultural anthropologists, focuses on what biology may have been trying to tell us all along. Our behavior is genetically based. This insistence on genetics continues another argument that's plagued us for years: Is it culture or heredity that actually forms who we are? This material has the potential to make people on either side livid, although, to be honest, I don't exactly know why. The author won't make many friends from his three short chapters on our monotheistic religions. I don't think Jews will be terribly happy to learn that "there was no conquest of Canaan, there was no exodus from Egypt. . . . The Israelites as a people did not escape from captivity in Egypt." Well, there goes Passover. And Muslims might best stay away from these pages to avoid a hike in their collective blood pressure. Of course, just because these questions vex anthropologists doesn't mean we have to take sides. The best thing to do is apply some good old-fashioned Christian charity: forgive Charles Darwin for placing the aborigines "among the lowest barbarians" and dismissing their music as "hideous harmonies," and refrain from snickering at Geoffrey Miller, the fashionable evolutionary psychologist, for his dorkish evaluation of Jimi Hendrix. These social scientists, with or without the distraction of genetics, are only human after all. And the search for knowledge often requires argument and intellectual dead ends, no matter how unseemly they appear. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Taking up where he left off in Before the Dawn (2006), an engaging examination of human evolution in light of explorations in the human genome, longtime New York Times science reporter Wade deftly explores the evolutionary basis of religion. He draws on archeology, social science and natural science as he vigorously shows that the instinct for religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature because, like other human social traits that have evolved over many thousands of years, the practice of religion conferred a decided survival advantage to those who practiced it. Natural selection operates according to principles of survival and reproduction of offspring with heritable traits. Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages—such as internal cohesion—that lead to a society's members having more surviving children. More importantly, since religions have evolved as their societies have developed, is it possible, Wade asks, for religions to be reworked so that as many people as possible can exercise their innate religious instincts to their own and society's benefits? Sure to be controversial for its reduction of religion to a product of natural selection, Wade's study compels us to reconsider the role of evolution in shaping even our most sacred human creations. (Nov. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Evolutionary studies have accumulated enough convincing explanations based on enough factual discovery for it to be indisputable that religion is biologically rooted. Wade, a science journalist whose vita includes stints with the revered journals Nature and Science before he joined the New York Times science section, draws on the most famous and influential researchers to synthesize the story of religion through the ages. While religion has utility for the individual, it is overwhelmingly important for group cohesion and loyalty, as evidenced by the mass dancing, chanting, and trance-seeking of hunter-gatherer cultures, in which what much later Christian idealists called the priesthood of all believers genuinely obtained. When stationary communities arose, hierarchies followed in all enterprises, including religion, and if anything, religion’s community-binding function became more crucial as populations and then technology burgeoned. By now, it should be obvious that religion not only won’t but can’t be expunged. There is so much more in this compact account, including cultural-evolutionary explanations of the three great monotheisms—enough, in fact, to make it a cornerstone of popular religion-and-science studies. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1594202281
• ISBN 13: 9781594202285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320