A few years ago, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson came upon an intriguing passage. It was from a Christian sect known as the Hutterites:
"True love means true growth for the whole organism, whose members are all interdependent and serve each other," it said. "That is the outward form of the inner working of the Spirit, the organism of the Body governed by Christ. We see the same thing among the bees, who all work with equal zeal gathering honey."
Wilson was startled by these claims. He wondered: Could religious groups exhibit the sort of "organismic" standards that evolutionary scientists measure? Do they have the adaptive complexity that nature rewards?
He decided to explore.
In an interview, Wilson, 52, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Upstate New York, said he's not a religious believer but had done research into the "functionality" of altruism, which frequently took him to religion's door.
He said he had grown frustrated with the prevailing scholarly belief that selfishness rules social conduct, and that groups are unimportant to human evolution. Even Charles Darwin thought otherwise, Wilson pointed out, so he decided that the current "age of individualism in evolutionary biology" was due for a challenge.
"Darwin's Cathedral"
The result, three years later, is Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society, released this month by the University of Chicago Press ($25).
The book evaluates a sampling of religious communities, from early Christians to the Calvinists in Geneva, Switzerland, to medieval Jews to Balinese animists. Wilson assesses their "secular utility," that is, whether they developed "design features, including belief systems, no matter how otherworldly, [that] have the effect of motivating adaptive behaviors in this world."
He was looking at both a group's structure and its communitas, or its function as "an egalitarian unit in which all members, from highest to lowest, have a moral claim." He said he found communitas in spades, in the way religious groups sanctified such things as "nursing the sick, lending money without interest, sharing irrigation water with your downstream neighbor, or contributing money to buy your brethren back from slavery."
Wilson said Darwin felt "cooperation is a fragile flower as far as within-group interactions are concerned, but cooperative groups robustly outcompete less cooperative groups." Time and again, Wilson found, religious groups "have harnessed the power of cooperation to succeed."
A key measure of any group's success, he said, is its ability to adapt rapidly to changing or local circumstances. The 16th-century Calvinists demonstrated this ability with the catechism - Wilson calls religious catechisms "cultural genomes" - that they imposed on turbulent Geneva, along with carefully tailored rules of conduct and accountability that applied to the laity and clergy alike.
The city thrived, Wilson noted, and "reform-minded people from all over Europe flocked to Geneva to learn and export the secrets of its success."
A competitive edge
Lionel Tiger, a Rutgers University anthropologist, read Darwin's Cathedral and found it "graceful enough but serpentine."
Wilson's extolling of religion's adaptive complexity is a "Pollyanna argument," Tiger said. "Islamic Jihad shows adaptive complexity... . [Wilson] doesn't pay sufficient attention to the ghastly things being done in the name of religion."
Those things, for good or ill, are simply examples of religion's competitive edge, Wilson argues.
Darwin's Cathedral thus provides a tart irony. Religion, where foes of evolutionary theory have flourished, may be a model of human group evolution.
Wilson puts it this way in his book:
"People who stand outside of religion often regard its seemingly irrational nature as more interesting and important to explain than its communal nature. Rational thought is treated as the gold standard against which religious belief is found so wanting that it becomes well-nigh inexplicable.
"Evolution causes us to think about the subject in a completely different way. Adaptation becomes the gold standard against which rational thought must be measured alongside other modes of thought... and the so-called irrational features of religion can be studied respectfully as potential adaptations in their own right rather than as idiot relatives of rational thought."