Religions thrived to protect against disease

From The Telegraph:

Prof Richard Dawkins the atheist and sceptic, has condemned religion as a "virus of the mind" but it seems that people became religious for good reason - actually to avoid infection by viruses and other diseases - according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences. Dr Corey Fincher and Prof Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas. "Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.

The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests. Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus. Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.

More here.

Comments

[Felix E F Larocca MD]

There have been "big bangs" accross the world in the emergence simultaneously of certain cultural phenomena, religion and art among many.

Some religious groups are proselitist while others are not.

Religion as such can acquire many guises in the form of the rabid nationalism of football teams as an example.

If the authors of this study ran out of things to "clarify" for us. In my mind they have produced just another piece of bunk science.

[Carlos]

In earlier work, the team linked the rise in the numbers of women who worked with left wing and liberal politics.

Obviously not ones to rest on their laurels.

[Jared]

This makes no sense. People develop immunity by being exposed to different diseases, not by being isolated from them. Isolation would make a population weaker.

[Nick Smyth]

This is daft.

"why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15?"

Canada didn't have 15 religions until white people gained access to it. The spectacular diversity of pre-colonial north american native cultures is well known.

Political explanations make far more sense, here. Northern countries are occupied by people who were, until very recently, aggressively nationalistic and imperialistic... traits that do not tend to produce religious diversity within a population.

[Chris Schoen]

It would be easy (and fun) to list the many and varied ways in which this hypothesis makes no sense as Jared, Felix and Nick have begun to do (I would add, if a social shibboleth is needed to divide populations, wouldn't the clan suffice, without the need for such elaborate and highly articulated beliefs and practices as comprised by religions?)

But I'm also interested in why people would want to believe anything so stupid. One clue, I think, is offered by one of Professor Thornhill's earlier books, on the adaptationist explanation of rape, a classic in the Ideology As Science genre.

Sharon Begley's Newsweek column on this research from earlier this year substantiates my suspicion that this is more of the same:

Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation.

"Conformity helps maintain these buffers against disease," says Corey Fincher of the University of New Mexico; mavericks are dangerous. In places with a high prevalence of pathogens, such cultural traits—which happen to be the hallmarks of societies that value the group over the individual—would be adaptive. Put another way, societies that arose in pathogen-rife regions and did not have such traits would be wiped out by disease. Societies that did have them would survive.

"In places that have historically had a lot of diseases, people generally score lower on measures of extraversion and 'openness,' which is jargon for curiosity and related traits," Schaller says. "Our history of living with infectious diseases may have shaped, in ways we're not even aware of, human cognition, behavior and culture."

Sweet! Brown and black people are just naturally (ahem, genetically) less curious and exploratory than whites. But it's not their fault. They were too distracted fighting off infections to apply themselves to building great civilizations and opera and stuff.

[Steven Augustine]

What's the evolutionary mechanism behind generating laughably ugly junk science like this, I wonder?

[Vicki Baker]

Speaking of shibboleths, wouldn't the number of religions correlate almost perfectly with the number of languages spoken? About 180 languages (according to a quick Google) are spoken in Brazil, and most of those speakers probably have their own religious beliefs, most likely tied to a particular landscape. I just don't see that it's useful to speculate about the origins of religious diversity w/o considering linguistic diversity, and I think there's quite a considerable body of research on that.
As Nick points out, religious (& linguistic) diversity in the Southern Hemisphere is an artifact of the colonizers' failure to completely wipeout or assimilate indigenous populations. In most cases (St. Columba and Emperor Asoka's emissaries notwithstanding) the map of religious and linguistic diversity reflects which languages and religions had the best armies.
So, why are these guys tenured professors and I'm just a commenter on a blog? It's so unfair!

[Dave Ranning]

Vicki--
Well stated (although there are feedbacks that make this a bit simplistic).
At least we know Buddha existed with Asoka and his historians, unlike Jesus Christ who is completely absent from the historical record (and the Roman's were good historians).
But it is generally force--
Blacks were enslaved by European Christians and Muslims for trade.
Their minds were then enslaved and colonized by the religious memes of their enslavers.

[Carlos]

unlike Jesus Christ who is completely absent from the historical record

LOL. Absent, of course, the Eye. Witness. Testimonies. (verified and validated by the witnesses' willing martyrdom). You seem well read; you may have even run across a copy.

[Nick Smyth]

Oh Christ, another derailment looms.

[MattInOz]

"...Eye. Witness. Testimonies."

Met some dudes from Hyderabad once that said they'd seen a guy do psychic surgery without anaesthesia and cure a guy of cancer. And they SWORE it was true with such conviction that I'm simply not prepared to doubt them. You know, I mean, these were NICE guys.

I don't see any reason why adding a two thousand year time lag, a human propensity for myth-morphing and a multiplicity of largely borrowed seed-stories and subtracting five hundred years worth of Enlightened thinking would in any way give me pause for thought.

Sheez!, who needs to start doing some reading?....

[Vicki Baker]

Oh god, can we just pretend that didn't happen?
The point is that this study looks like nonsense from a variety of angles.

[Carlos]

Well, sorry, I guess, but I do have a reputation to uphold, after all.

As per the study, I think we do have a consensus. My personal opinion is that societal fragmentation is much easier in a warm, humid, lush environment, analogous to the vastly richer varieties of flora and fauna in those climatic conditions.

[Dave Ranning]

Vicki-
I agree religious conversion is usually by force.
However, the thesis the authors of this article put forth is not totally without merit.
Dennett, in his book Beyond Belief (a view of religion as a a natural Phenomena), makes a good argument that religion did act as a health care policy for tribal societies, and provided evolutionary fitness.
If you are interested, I suggest read the book.
The book unfortunately ended up as a battlefield in the never ending conflict between Dawkins/Dennett/Pinker VS Gould/Lewontin/Rose. Orr, who is the GLR's go to guy for literary combat (has inside contacts with liberal media in the North East, and can get a review of his published when needed for defending ideological interests.
All this is another story---

[MattInOz]

Carlos,

Agreed, I think there is consensus on the study. And for what it's worth, I would agree wholeheartedly with your observations on societal fragmentation tropics style - there is much to back up what you say.

[Kary]

How do hot sauce and spicey foods fit in? I think chili peppers cause religion. We have to blame it on something besides good sense.

[Ruchira]

Kary is on to something here. All those mirages in the desert and hot sauces of the tropics should not be discounted. Some chili peppers can be downright hallucinatory.

Vicki: I swear I had decided to stay out of this one.

[Doug]

Carlos: As a New Testament historian, I will note for you that there are no "Eye. Witness. Testamonies". Everything is third-hand at best, the gospels are anonymous, with names not assigned until the end of the second century, and the "martyr" stories are fictional.

I teach my classes that religions are: (1) methods of explanation in a prescientific world, and (2) 'technologies' of control. Even the most sophisticated modern religion, all tricked up with complex theology and doctrine, is at its heart, a way to try to explain shit you can't explain and get the god to be nice to you.

[TTT]

Fincher and Thornhill's reasoning fails the "Phantom Tollbooth Rule", in that it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards.

I.E.: Tropical countries have more parasites and diseases, thus more chances for people to die sudden horrible inexplicable deaths, thus more need for supernatural explanation and comfort rituals.

[Vicki Baker]

There is no god but Habañero, and Pickapeppa is his prophet! I lift up mine eyes to the bartender, from whence cometh my mojito?

[DirkVA]

Nonsense. In Europe the northern countries have religions that multiply, via schism, almost by the day, ever since the Reformation.

As Voltaire said:

The French have one religion and a thousand sauces, while the English have a thousand religions and one sauce.

[Carlos]

As a New Testament historian... Everything is third-hand at best

Uh huh, you came to the right thread. You charge money for these classes? Good for you. At a bare minimum, Paul's letters are second hand, confirmed by Peter, a first hand witness.

Fleas gain great benefits from dogs, without contributing to the understanding of dogs at all, although they would beg to differ.

But I derail.

[Jared]

Religion is the disease.

[Carlos]

(and the Roman's were good historians)
Well maybe, but most histories, written by the dominant power, do tend to support the orthodox view, and give short shrift to counter-authorities. Nevertheless:

Good Roman historian, who "must have said something about Jesus"

Otherwise (even excepting the Testimonium Flavianum as an overzealous insertion), why would he mention James' martyrdom?

[missvolare]

Thanks Jared! I always though LIVING was the disease!

[Jared]

Living is the disease with the cure that nobody wants. We prefer the disease to the cure because it is more interesting than the cure. So interesting, that we imagine the disease will go on even after the cure.