Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society

... I learned something extremely important and I'd like others to know about it.If it is the case that mutually beneficial cooperation amongst group members will tend to defeat the survival strategy of competing groups who cannot get their cooperative act together, then we need to know about it. Those of us who feel overwhelmed by greed and dominance can take a great deal of solace from the fact that research is finding simple, good-natured cooperation amongst group members... self-selected by whatever criteria are mutually acceptable... create within their group a strategic competitive advantage.In some cases the group in question is a religious group and in other cases the group is military or polical or economic. The specific purpose of the group matters less than the fact of orchestrated activity by rational means. Religion is not the only issue, nor the most important issue. Dr. Wilson makes it clear early in the book that what's at stake here is the ultimate fate of the species. Can we learn this lesson of cooperation that natural selection teaches us in time to preserve the species as a whole, or not?I have spent much of my adult life with the most pessimistic of conclusions on this question. For the first time I believe that the process of natural selection may itself be a model that can be learned from and turned to survival advantage for our species. Sure, the odds remain against our ultimate conquest of the obstacles before us, but David Sloan Wilson has given us good reason to hope... and to struggle ever more vigorously against the forces of deterioration that challenge us.I read this book after coming away from "Do Unto Others" which Dr. Wilson co-wrote with philosopher of biology, Elliott Sober. The philosophical credentials Dr. Wilson brings to "Darwin's Cathedral" are impeccable. The two volumes together have transformed my conclusion about the future of the human species, and may well transform yours...

This book is a well-written, highly entertaining conjecture on the possibility that group selection has played an important role in the emergence of religion in human societies. As an evolutionary biologist, I must dispute those who have suggested that group selection is fallacious and has been generally discarded by biologists. In fact I give a lecture on the subject in an undergraduate class on evolution. Evolutionary biologists as eminent as Stephen Jay Gould have supported the view that group selection has played an important role in evolution. Predictions based on mathematical models for group selection have been made and confirmed. Many biologists accept it as a given. In the words of University of Vermont geneticist Charles J. Goodnight, its "proven. A done deal. We know it works." Many biologists who came of age in the sixties were widely influenced by the excellent book, Adaptation and Natural Selection by George Williams, and are unable to give up their biases. But even Dr. William's views on group selection are more nuanced these days. Richard Dawkins is a brilliant man but he hardly speaks for all of those who study evolutionary biology. This book, and Dr. Wilson's previous book, Unto others, are excellent primers for those with open-minds who are iinterested in the possibility that there is more to life than the selfish gene.

If you have an opinion about religion, or belong to a religion, most people disagree with you; there is not a majority religion in the world. And surely not all religions can be factually correct, since there are fundamental disagreements between them. So, how is it that all those other, incorrect religions exist and seem to help their members and their societies? There must be something they offer beyond a factual representation of gods and the cosmos (and when it comes down to it, if you belong to a religion, yours must be offering something more as well). If religions do help their members and societies, then perhaps they are beneficial in a long term and evolutionary way, and maybe such evolutionary influences should be acknowledged and studied. This is what David Sloan Wilson convincingly declares he has done in _Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society_ (University of Chicago Press): "I will attempt to study religious groups the way I and other evolutionary biologists routinely study guppies, trees, bacteria, and the rest of life on earth, with the intention of making progress that even a reasonable skeptic must acknowledge." To Wilson's credit, he has written carefully about both scientific and religious issues, and readers with an interest in either field will find that he has covered both fairly. His coverage of the science involved begins with an interesting history of "the wrong turn" evolutionary theory took fifty years ago, when it deliberately ignored the influence of group selection. Especially if one accepts that there is for our species not only an inheritance of genes, but also an inheritance of culture, evolutionary influence by and upon religious groups, especially in light of the examples Wilson discusses, now seems obvious. For instance, evolution often studies population changes due to gains and losses from births, deaths, and in the case of religion, conversion and apostasy. The early Christian church is shown to have made gains compared to Judaism and Roman mythology because of its promotion of proselytization, fertility, a welfare state, and women's participation. There is a temple system in Bali dedicated to the water goddess essential for the prosperity of the rice crops; "those who do not follow her laws may not possess her rice terraces." The religious system encompasses eminently practical procedures for promoting fair water use and even for pest control. Religious morality is shown to build upon the principles of the famously successful computer strategy Tit-for-Tat. There is a significant problem, of course, in religions' dealing with other groups; it is not at all uncommon for a religion to teach that murdering those who believe in other religions is different from murdering those inside one's own religion. There is a degree of amorality shown in such competition, no different from the amorality that governs the strivings of ferns, sparrows, and lions. Wilson's many exampl

I found this to be an extraordinary book....Dr. Wilson combines impeccable science in his own field with a widespread interest and respect for scientific fields other than his own and has the unique ability to synthesise their offerings into his own understanding and ongoing inquiries. The author has an obvious and contagious relish for ideas, and unlike many authors has not attempted to write "gospel" but has hoped to start, and even explicitly invited dialoque. What makes Dr. Wilsons book additionally unique, is not only the depth and breadth of his ideas and research but his unique style of writting. Rarely is immaculate and lucid scientific discourse, great humor, and poetic expression found in one volume, as is the case here. The book from conception to execution is a thought provoking delight, whatever preconceptions regarding evolution or religion you bring to it's pages. You do not have to be a scientist to enjoy this book, only a person who enjoys the challanges of good ideas masterfully presented

It has become inescapable to see ourselves as having evolved for group living. In "Origins of Virtue," Matt Ridley described the overall situation admirably well, and concluded that selfish organisms can evolve mechanisms that exploit the advantages of living together in groups, so long as those mechanisms don't sacrifice too much for the individual. The great fountain of selfish gene imagery, Richard Dawkins, once wrote that Ridley's book could well serve as a followup to "The Selfish Gene" as applied to human beings. So there is little doubt that even a theory based on "selfish genes" can be seen as explaining behavior that takes advantage of living in groups. David Sloane Wilson first acknowledges that traits which promote us to sacrifice ourselves "for the good of the group" are unlikely to spread in a population. He find great value in fields like evolutionary psychology for finding innate human psychological traits that promote individual reproduction and survival. However, he also takes a thought provoking look at important transitions in evolutionary history and finds that under certain special conditions, individuals become united and begin to function in a very real sense as a larger organism. Genes become united into chromosomes, cells become organisms, organisms become hives. None of this is new so far of course. What is unique is the claim that some of these transitions cannot be explained without having some form of competition between groups whose traits are widely divergent. The basic problem is that behavior that allows one group to fare better than another must also allow the individuals to survive and reproduce within their own group. So self-sacrificing behavior that makes a group of berzerkers unbeatable in battle against other groups has a hard time taking root _within_ the group of berzerkers unless it also serves them there. Wilson claims that the bias against seeing selection occurrring at multiple levels, especially by the way genetic fitness calculations are averaged, prevents most biologists from seeing "group selection" when it does occur. He then proposes that the missing piece is human moral systems themselves, which provide mechanisms that lower the cost of behavior "for the group" in terms of individual fitness. For example, social controls such as rewards and punishments are known to strongly foster cooperation even though cooperation is very fragile otherwise. We have tended to see this either in terms of individual self-determination or entirely in terms of social pressure. Wilson's view allows a middle ground, of innate traits which social controls can leverage powerfully to produce cooperation. Wilson's main point is that such traits probably require a multi-level selection theory to explain. Wilson uses scholarly study of religion from a variety of fields to illustrate how human behavior shows evidence of forming groups as adaptive units in the evolutionary sense. This was an idea that w