I'm professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and I specialize in the study of
human mating strategies.
How does evolutionary psychology
inform the science-religion dialogue?
I think it's a really interesting question.
From my point of view, all we have is our evolved psychology.
There's no such thing as a such thing as a non-evolved psychology,
so understanding religion requires understanding the underlying
evolved psychological mechanisms on which religion is based.
Now some hypotheses are that there are adaptations
specifically for religions for religious belief.
The dominant view is that religious belief
and religions are byproducts of evolved psychological mechanisms for
other things, and I'm inclined to this latter belief,
if I had to put my money on one horse or another.
I think that there are several
important evolved psychological mechanisms that play into our
understanding of religion from a scientific perspective.
One has to do with our coalitional psychology.
Humans are intensely coalitional,
and we evolved in small groups
and these groups were in conflict with other groups.
And so group membership,
displaying signals that you are
good coalitional members was absolutely critical,
and I think religion is partly involved in that,
in coalitional psychology.
A second thing has to do with my area of expertise,
which is human mating strategies.
One of the most important things that groups contain
are reproductively relevant resources
and particular potential mates, as well as
allies that can lead to elevated status within the group,
which then gives access to mates.
And so individual mating opportunities are
readily abundant in groups.
Groups contain concentrations of reproductively valuable resources.
I don't think you can divorce
religion from human mating strategies.
Of course the links are more intricate and they
involve whether you are a religious leader or a religious follower,
your position within the social hierarchy within the religious group, etc.
A third thing I would mention
is something that I haven't seen talked about,
but which i think is an important idea,
and it stems from some of my work, a theory that I developed with Martie Haselton,
and it's called error management theory. And basically,
what error management theory says is that
when there's uncertainty in your environment
and you can make a mistake, there are basically two ways to go wrong.
You can think that something exists when it doesn't exist,
or you can fail to perceive that something exists
when it in fact does exist.
So the logic is when there's a cost asymmetry
between these errors of inference,
then selection -- evolution by selection -- will favor a
cognitive bias to err in the direction of avoiding
the more costly error. In the case of religious belief,
and this is an unexplored hypothesis I guess, I think some people
view the belief in a higher deity
as possibly an error management bias
in the sense of, well, we don't know. There's a great uncertainty,
and so maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.
And so some people might err on the side of believing rather than not believing
for that purpose.
So of course that genuine true belief has to be distinguished from
pretending to believe as a signal to the group.
So I think those three things are critical --
coalitional psychology, sexual strategies,
and error management theory.