The Birth of High Gods How the Cultural Evolution of Supernatural Policing Influenced the Emergence of Complex, Cooperative Human Societies, Paving the Way for Civilization
Azim F. Shariff , Ara Norenzayan , and Joseph Henrich
Voltaire’s well-tread quote, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” was written with direct reference to the effectiveness of God as a supernatural policing agent (Voltaire & Redman, 1977). We argue that indeed supernatural policing was a driving force for the invention of God, but this invention—like so many other cultural products—was not the product of a brilliant religious mind or a committee of Machiavellian priests. Instead, omniscient, moralizing supernatural agents derived from a suite of religious beliefs that were culturally selected for their ability to galvanize cooperation in larger groups, promote in-group cohesion, and foster competition with other social groups. The emergence of religions, and modern world religions in particular, has been a cumulative process involving myriad interacting individuals that stretched over hundreds of generations of interacting individuals within the context of intergroup competition.
Humans are not just social, group-living animals but also highly cultural animals (Henrich, in press; Norenzayan, Schaller, & Heine, 2006). The cognitive and behavioral capacities that make human culture possible—complex communication skills, social learning mechanisms, and biased information processing that favors common traits and prestigious individuals—evolved because they allow individuals to readily adapt their behavior to the novel and changing environments at rates much faster than genetic evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1998; Henrich & Boyd, 1998; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993).
Natural selection has equipped many species with both individual and social learning capacities. As individuals of these species confront the challenges of survival and reproduction, they use their naturally evolved learning capacities to locally adapt. When encountering an evolutionarily novel food, crows and chimpanzees (just to name two) can individually figure out how to use tools for extracting the food (Hunt, 1996; McGrew, 1974). Chimps and dolphins can learn about these tools from conspecifics, who have already figured out the problems individually (Boesch & Tomasello, 1998; Rendell & Whiten, 2001). This means that evolutionary problems are often tackled first, in many species, by learning. Cultural evolution in humans has solved a vast range of evolutionary challenges, as the insights and accidents of generations accumulate and populations become increasingly better adapted (Boyd & Richerson, 1995). Clothing is a cultural adaptation to cold weather. Fire is an energy-saving and nutrient-releasing cultural adaptation to acquiring high-quality food that was shaped the subsequent evolution of our digestive system (Wrangham, Conkin-Brittain, 2003). The use of different spices across human societies shows that spicing, including tastes and recipes, is a cultural adaptation to meat-borne pathogens that are particularly dangerous in hot climates (Sherman & Billing, 1999). Inuit kayaks are culturally evolved engineering marvels that adapt this tropical primate to arctic hunting. These are true adaptations in the evolutionary psychological sense, because they are complex, functionally integrated solutions to recurrent ecological problems. But they are not directly the product of natural selection acting on genes (Richerson & Boyd, 2005) or evoked from domain-specific modules.
On the one hand, genetically evolved aspects of our minds and bodies can constrain cultural developments. And certainly genetic evolution laid the groundwork for the emergence of cultural learning and cultural evolution. On the other hand, however, cultural traits can arise and spread to address environment social problems, which in other species could be dealt with only by genetic evolution. For example, the omnivore’s dilemma (Rozin, 1987) suggests that the human capacity to eat a wide range of plant and animal products dramatically increased calorie intake and hence survival but also gave rise to selective pressures to avoid harmful substances (such as rotten meat, poisonous plants) that could have been lethal. Along with evolved psychological adaptations (e.g., the emotion of disgust), an interlocking set of culturally evolved beliefs, practices, and institutions (food taboos, hygiene rules, eating rituals) has shaped human diets in adaptive ways. Careful mathematical modeling of the interaction between cultural and genetic evolutionary processes shows that culture need not be on a tight “genetic leash.” Sometimes the cultural tail wags the genetic dog (Rogers, 1988), meaning that cultural evolution can drive genetic evolution by altering the selective environment faced by genes.