Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative To TH e Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis

METHOD
&THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107 www.brill.nl/mtsr
Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction?

An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural
Maladaptationist Hypothesis
Joseph Bulbulia
Victoria University of Wellington, P O Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
joseph.bulbulia@gmail.com
Abstract
This paper develops an alternative to Dennett’s meme-theoretic explanation for religious com-
mitment. First I build an argument in defense of Dennett’s position, drawing on a cultural evolu-
tion literature that he mentions but does not develop (Dennett 2006). Then I describe data that
even this enhanced account leaves poorly explained. Next I draw on commitment signaling
theory to produce an account that explains these puzzling data. I show how religious culture
provides a pervasive example of human epistemic niche construction. An adaptationist analysis
of religious culture exposes how the propagation of costly misunderstandings massively reduce
the cognitive burdens of Machiavellian social complexity.
Keywords
cognition, commitment, costly-signaling, cultural evolution, God, handicap principal, meme,
metarepresentation, religion, social complexity
Introduction
Dennett argues that religious ideas endure because they are adapted for their
own survival, not ours (Dennett 2006). Our minds are superbly adapted for
promoting the biological success of the gene lineages that build them, but they
are also prone to error. In particular, they are attracted to reproductively dam-
aging ideas and practices configured to infest them. For Dennett, religion
endures because religious culture is adapted for replication. This promotion
can harm us. We are used to thinking of selection as operating on genes but
“Mother Nature is not gene centrist!” (Dennett 2006: 127). We should not
look to genetic evolution alone when naturalizing religion (.
Measured by our own biological interests, religion does appear strikingly
maladaptive. It seems unwise to spend time worshiping carvings or fearing
demons. Moreover, it appears straightforwardly harmful to walk fires, incise
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260241
68 J. Bulbulia / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107
one’s genitalia, play with snakes, and become celibate for life. Why otherwise
sensible agents so afflict themselves certainly needs to be explained. In addi-
tion, religious ideas have cultural staying power. The religions of ancient herd-
ing peoples remain our religions and even religious persons may consider the
religious beliefs of others to be wild, impairing superstitions. We feel lucky to
have escaped whatever influence that brought the Branch Davidians to Waco,
or led tens of thousands to embrace Scientology.
I think Dennett’s proposal that these ideas endure because they are good
replicators has convincing intuitive appeal. For religions appear to persist
because of their perceived rather than actual benefits. (Naturalists do not sup-
pose there is a pie in the sky waiting to benefit us.) But Dennett’s case can be
made more compelling. In what follows, I first connect Dennett’s claims about
religion to a wider range of empirical and theoretical materials on cultural
evolution. I call this enhanced thesis “the cultural maladaptationist hypothe-
sis” (CMH). In Parts I, II, III, I advance what I take to be the strongest version
of this hypothesis.
My second aim is to show that CMH does not adequately explain the data
on religion. Religion endures because it is attractive. But it is attractive, in
part, because it fosters the success of religious agents. What looks to be mal-
adaptive in religion is exquisitely functional, not merely from the vantage
point of religious cultures, but also from the position of the faithful who sus-
tain them. Beginning in Part IV, I sketch an alternative to cultural maladapta-
tionism, which I call “the religious niche hypothesis.” This conjecture explains
how the maladaptive aspects of religious cognition and culture are (in most
contexts) only apparent. Obviously religion is sometimes maladaptive, but I
urge that it is so precisely because religiosity pre-commits us to a social order,
even when doing so opposes our immediate interests. Effective social policing
requires investment and vigilance, and the costs of religion, I urge, are well
accounted for as policing costs. Moreover, I argue that religion endures because
we possess a layer of specialized cognitive adaptations designed to support and
respond to religious culture. The data suggest that we are predisposed to pro-
duce, learn, and modify a religious niche. This niche, in turn, modifies us, and
subsequent generations who inherit and further modify religious culture. Reli-
gion and religious minds elaborate each other. We are adapted to learn and
transform our religious situation. Religion should not be contrasted with
functional technology; it rather exemplifies it.
J. Bulbulia / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107 69
I. The Standard Picture of Evolutionary Psychology
I begin by motivating a partial rejection of what might be called the “standard

picture in evolutionary psychology.” This rejection is fundamental to under-
standing Dennett’s cultural maladaptivism, and it is also critical to under-
standing the alternative I propose. For I agree with aspects of this rejection.1
Although specialized cognitive adaptations are required to support the reli-
gious niche, our understanding of this design need not be linked to some of
the more controversial commitments of traditional evolutionary psychology.
According to the standard picture, biological complexity is best explained as
an outcome of blind natural selection. The differential success of the traits that
variants of genes reliably build eventually produces spectacular biological
designs. Given genetic variation, competition, reliable inheritance, and reli-
able phenotypic construction, selection will target those gene-variants that
best advance the reproductive interests of their carriers. These natural pro-
cesses are blind, but over time they produce intricately functional effects.2 We
call these effects adaptations, specialized design features that equip organisms
for survival and reproduction. Adaptations are “fuels for success”. They power
functional solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction that organ-
isms face in a hostile world.
On the standard picture, selection has designed our bodies, hence it has
also designed minds in that our minds are emergent properties of our brains.
Consider:
a) The mind/brain manifests functional organic design.
b) Natural selection operating on gene lineages explains functional organic
design.
c) Thus, natural selection explains mind/brain design.
Moreover:
d) Natural selection favors proximate designs that ultimately foster reproduc-
tive success in the typical environment for which the designs have been
selected.
1
So too do many current evolutionary psychologists including Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby, on whose work I draw below.
2
Organisms are not perfect. Selection can only work with the variation that is supplied to it.
Moreover benefiting enhancements may never come, or may never establish (the keen-sighted
bird gets eaten or fails to mate). Environments change: the asteroid strikes and combusts, or the
ice descends. Nevertheless, given variation in genetic resources, selection on the phenotypes these
resources reliably build, and retention of successful gene-variants through reproduction, inte-
grated functional designs eventually follow.
e) Thus, the proximate functions of the mind/brain are ultimately designed to

foster reproductive success.
Increasingly elaborate cognitive systems equip agents to solve increasingly

tougher problems. Migratory birds are outfitted with the cognitive wears to
navigate great distances by registering the relative positions of celestial objects.
These stargazers know where they are relative to where they need to be. With-
out such capacities, the birds would fall exhausted into the oceans. The abili-
ties of bats to echolocate representations of distal affairs precise enough to
strike the necks of ungulates, and to fly at speed through the cramped interiors
of caves are likewise astounding, but they are not unique. Innumerably many
lineages have evolved sophisticated powers to track and respond to environ-
mental complexity and such capacities give witness to selection’s power to
build immensely intricate and functional cognitive designs. Given enough
time, a steady supply of variation and stable inheritance, almost-miraculous
minds will follow.
While selection forges adaptive minds, it does not build god-like intelli-
gence. Like any adaptation, a psychological design is subject to the vagaries of
evolutionary histories and to chance. Importantly, minds are also constrained
by the mathematics of computation. Formal constraints on the computability
of information strongly limit the universe of what brains can do. According to
the standard picture, we can use these constraints to formulate hypotheses
about how cognitive systems meet adaptive challenges.
For thought to be effective, raw data must be rapidly segmented, decom-
posed, analyzed, and integrated with various control systems. These demands
present significant engineering challenges. Take vision. How does a system
interpret a scattering of light falling on perceptual sensors? The visual appara-
tus must rapidly build a distal representational structure from unstructured
data (of varying degrees of quality). Surfaces and edges are inferred from the
distribution of photons striking retinal sensors. Fast and furiously, the visual
system exploits assumptions about external environments to construct a three
dimensional representation (built quickly from a 2 and 2 1/2 dimensional
proto-representations). The algorithms the system exploits are massively intri-
cate and tough problems are solved almost instantaneously. But achieving a
reliable 3-d representation is only one problem. Discerning colors through a
range of lighting conditions is also significant. In dim lighting, chalk reflects
at the frequency that black slugs do in daylight, but we still see the chalk as
white. Our eyes compute lighting intensities, and adjust for the difference.
And beyond the image, there is the question of object recognition and response.
Structured visual representations are thus fed and integrated to other compu-
tational devices—face or object recognition, automated predator heuristics,
mating profiles. Here the image will be processed further. Along the way, a
modified representational structure—say of “Peter”—is assembled, parsed by
memory systems, and exported to motivational and affective centers. This may
eventually set off a cascading series of behaviors: a smile sequence; an evasion
protocol; body reorientation to improve data quality (“Let me see, is it really
Peter?”); or perhaps no behavior at all. In seeing and registering a world we
accomplish heroic computational feats. We do so without effort and we do so
in innumerably many other domains as well.
Any cognitive system possessing rich and diverse information processing
power faces the “frame problem.” A universe of possibilities cannot be visited
each time a problem is addressed. Search spaces must narrow to specific—
often very specific—problem domains. Cognition must be framed by assump-
tions about how to solve a problem. This constraint gives rise to the modular
mind hypothesis. General-purpose information processors are too weak to
compute solutions to adaptive problems in finite time. The systems that con-
trol vision would face computational paralysis if asked to simultaneously con-
trol, say, locomotion, memory, and language. In place of a general-purpose
computing device, evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that to a first
approximation, something like a modular framework embeds all human cog-
nition. In such a system each module has its own narrow domain for problem
solving. Large incomputable problems are decomposed to smaller and solvable
component problems. Each design element is integrated to a broader func-
tional design, yielding new integration problems, presumably solved by other
modular elements , though see. But a module resolves problems in its own
narrow domain of functionality. Baldwin effects lead to entrenchments in par-
ticular design elements, for small enhancements in efficiency, accuracy, and
speed will be targeted and elaborated (for an overview see Dennett 1995).
Advocates of the standard picture urge that only a massively modular architec-
ture will satisfy such harsh computational constraints.3
3
There is further evidence for modularity as well. Selective cognitive impairments provide
prima facie evidence for existence and the independence of modular sub components. Brain
injury and disease can lead to what seem to be peculiar dissociative impairments. Patients can
recognize objects but not faces (prosopagnosia). Or visual experience is given as a series of por-
traits, without any apparent motion (parietal lesions). Or persons are recognized but without any
emotional association, leading to accusations that familiar persons are impostures (Capgras dis-
orders). Evidence supporting cognitive entrenchment comes from developmental psychology.
For children appear to know more about the world than they ever acquire from others. They
resolve problems—for example grammatical generalizations, or understanding gravity, or ele-
ments of a theory of other minds—without ever learning the rules by which they resolve these
problems.
A massively modular architecture empowers an organism to functionally

interact with its world in subtle, intricate, and spectacular ways. What was
once only achievable through slow deliberate learning, or trial and error exper-
imentation, becomes rapidly solvable as natural selection identifies, solves, and
internalizes structural features of a problem. Over immense geological time
spans, selection compares alternative designs, and gradually compiles improve-
ments. Real world information processing problems become more tractable, as
lineages slowly ascend the fitness peaks of their adaptive landscapes.
Evolutionary psychologists combine the modular picture of mind with
Darwinian scruples about the causes of design. Because cognition reflects
adaptive design, we can use data about the problems organisms reliably faced
throughout their evolutionary histories to refine and test predictions for how
they think now. We are also able to formulate promising hypotheses about
known cognitive functions whose purposes seem obscure. On the Darwinian
view of cognitive evolution, the modular mind is engineered to foster repro-
ductive flourishing. Its ultimate problems are those of sex and survival. For-
mulating optimality models for given capacity—say, of the tradeoffs a mother
bird faces in when deciding how much food to carry, balancing the weight of
the load, distance to a nest, and the number of its fledglings—can help us
understand how precisely calibrated an organism’s cognitive systems are to the
biological problems it faces.
Moreover, the approach deepens our explanations for widespread but
baffling psychological features, like morning sickness, differential spatial rea-
soning among the sexes, mate preference, depression, cheater detection, self-
deception, and a range of other psychological dispositions and strategies. For
such features may well appear less baffling when placed in an evolutionary
frame. Bizarre, costly, and universal features of mind often manifest subtle
designs. And some of these designs are no longer relevant outside the contexts
for which they evolved. We can therefore throw light on these subtle designs
by reverse-engineering the functional ancestral problems for which they
provided solution. This reverse-engineering stance may well disclose further
subtlety.
Thus, the standard picture of evolutionary psychology draws inspiration
from two sources. From cognitive psychology, researchers view the mind as an
information-processing device, assembled from various sub-processors, each
with a dedicated purpose and packed with internally structured information.
The picture portrays these adaptations as integrated into a larger functional
architecture adjusted to regulating an organism’s internal states, and to medi-
ating its involvement with its world. From evolutionary biology, researchers
describe modular elements as adaptations, arrayed for solving the long endur-
ing problems that faced ancestral populations. Cognitive designs are function-
ally organized to produce accurate, rapid solutions to the standard problems
of reproduction and survival.
Dennett shares the basic commitments of this picture of mind. He believes
that cognition must be framed, and that selection will tend to build elaborate
cognitive functional designs over time. But he also doubts that natural selec-
tion can adequately explain all mental design: “[. . .] the process of natural
selection itself doesn’t require that all valuable information move ‘through the
germ line’ (via the genes). On the contrary, if the burden can be reliably taken
over by continuities in the external world, that is fine with Mother Nature—it
takes a load off the genome” : 128). Much of our mental design is structured
externally by cultural innovations that arise and spread in historical, not evo-
lutionary, time. And on Dennett’s view, this offloading of information to the
environment leaves our minds exposed to informational infection. We become
breeding grounds for “memes.”
II. Reservations with the Standard Picture
In the standard picture, selection affects genes by acting on the traits that they
build. This is problematic, for genes do not build traits. Gene/environment
interactions do. Under varying conditions, identical alleles will have different
phenotypic effects (and sometimes, identical traits will emerge from different
alleles). Much of this variation is adaptive. A gene that promotes hair loss in
warmer temperatures helps the balding creature cope with heat. Besides sensi-
tivity to environmental features, there are countless examples of epigenetic
systems for adaptive informational transfer. A mother rat transmits food pref-
erences through her milk, not her genes. Chimp groups have different meth-
ods for harvesting resources—some “fish” termites with sticks; others break
nuts with rock hammers—and they transmit these techniques through social
learning. Thus, the details of trait construction matter for an evolutionary
account of why a trait is common. Dennett has such examples in mind when
he observes that selection doesn’t specify all functionally useful knowledge by
writing it into a genome.
The causal details of mental trait construction are especially important
when considering our lineage. The capacity to build fire is a cultural universal.
No society lacks this technology. It has been a general feature of hominid life
for over 500,000 thousand years. But there is no fire-combustion gene. The
relevant knowledge is transmitted through social resources. And many other
properties of cognitive phenotypes emerge through very specific, structured
social interactions. Pete Richerson and Bob Boyd observe that non-genetic
information flows vertically from parents to children through the ideas that
parents impart. Moreover there is a flow of non-genetic information obliquely
from non-parental sources to children—from other relatives, neighbors and
teachers with local expertise. Information flows horizontally within a genera-
tion as well, through peer-to-peer interactions, and often this information is
salient. From infancy, we swim in a sea of information and none of this infor-
mation springs from our genes.
The capacity to retrieve and store socially acquired information dramati-
cally widens the scope for hominid behavioral plasticity. We sometimes do as
we are told, not as we feel and the knowledge we import from others adapts
our minds. Though disgusting, we take the bitter medicine, and are healed.
We do so against our creature feelings because we are told to do so. Moreover,
we observe norms and customs, and these greatly enhance the co-coordinating
power of culture. Culture also enhances developmental plasticity: childhood
and a long adolescence enable us to import a massive amount of data about
our local natural and social ecology. A wide developmental window enables us
to build intricate skills, which in turn become stable features of adult pheno-
types. We are plastic by design, for in our culture-soaked lineage, plasticity
strongly affects survival. Knowing how to make a fire, an arrow, or a sled, how
to cook, and what to do when the wells dry up will matter to survival in the
wild. In urban contexts, knowledge of how to read and write, how to accumu-
late money, how to negotiate complicated transport and information net-
works, proves more important than bush-craft. We now kill with our wallets,
not our hands. And the skills for accumulating money are learned, often
through years of specialized training.
Moreover, we do not just evolve tight fits to predetermined environments, we
also change our environments. The ability to make a spear makes it easier to
catch large game, and so extends the foraging opportunities of those equipped
with this technology. Children inherit worlds modified by their parents, which
they use as a platform for further modification and transmission. So the inno-
vations of one generation affect the conditions of life downstream. An Inuit
forager lives in an extreme environment with few obvious resources. Life there
would be impossible without mastery of much specialized, locally adaptive
knowledge: how to build kayaks and shelters from bone, wood, and hide; how
to extract food from frozen seas and how to prepare, store and cook it; how to
keep warm in extreme cold; techniques for clothing manufacture and repair;
how to build sleds; how to make oil lamps, and much else. A similarly com-
plex but different body of knowledge is necessary to survive the harsh interior
deserts of central Australia, or the dense Amazonian jungle, or the mild but
predator infested savannah. Our marvelous capacities for local improvisation

have resulted in a spectacular array of subsistence and extraction technologies;
they also have generated a tremendous range of varying social organizations
and arrangements. These, too, must be considered adaptations. For these
innovations accommodate humans to their local worlds and to each other
with tight adaptive fits. But they are not adaptations that are assembled from
genetic resources. Placing a child on the ice will not initiate the Inuit survival
module.
Thus, many functional elements in cognitive design come from resources
held outside our genes—namely, through the intergenerational flow of infor-
mation that cultural groups supply. The ability to acquire and improve cultur-
ally structured information has enabled our lineage to rapidly penetrate
virtually every terrestrial habitat on the planet. For better or worse, culture has
transformed us into an uberspecies (for an application of this point in religion
see Day 2004). Capacities to learn socially transmitted information are power-
fully adaptive, and enable a very rapid accumulation of complex mental design.
But how does a mind strongly constrained by the frame problem become
plastic? How can we accommodate cultural information we cannot anticipate?
For contemporary critics of the standard picture one important capacity is
imitative learning. Chimpanzees are able to learn rudimentary tool use by
observing others, but they do not learn much. They learn that a tool produces
effects on the environment—for example, that a rake can be used to obtain a
ball. But they do not learn how to copy other behavioral strategies. They do
not learn specific techniques for rake-ball manipulation. They do not interpret
tools as the means by which others achieve goals, and they are unable to repro-
duce another’s actual behavioral strategies towards a goal. Informational trans-
fer in non-human lineages does not facilitate the hi-fidelity reproduction that
characterizes hominid cultural transfer. Rudimentary techniques are invented,
and passed on, but they are resistant to improvement. Presumably innovations
arise among tool using apes. But if an innovation cannot be understood as
better, or cannot be imitated precisely, it will die with its inventor. By contrast,
human cultural evolution is cumulative. Knowledge is transferred relatively
faithfully. The capacity to precisely imitate behavior, and to accurately repre-
sent these behaviors as means to achieving specific and varying goals, estab-
lishes complex cultural design over time. Relatively precise learning-capacities
act as what Michael Tomassello calls “a ratchet.” We maintain successful cul-
tural variants as a platform for further downstream modification and enhance-
ment. For Tomassello “each human child [. . .] grows up in the context of
something like the accumulated wisdom of its entire social group, past and
present” : 38).
There are important psychological adaptations that promote our capacity

for imitative and social learning. Joint-attention—tuning into others and
holding their interest—appears in infants at around 9 months, and sets the
stage for sharp increase in the imitative learning of tools, artifacts, and sym-
bolic representations that occurs from about two years onward. The emer-
gence of Theory of Mind processing, which occurs somewhat later (beginning
at about the age of 3 or 4) powerfully enhances a child’s capacity to under-
stand purposeful behavior. This is a prerequisite to acquiring robust, evolvable
cultural platforms as advanced theory of mind capacities enable children to
conceive of other agents as the bearers of knowledge that children do not
themselves possess.
Clearly, linguistic capacities—which may have evolved through imitative
capacities—greatly enhance the faithfulness of cultural transmission, as well as
its scope. With language, knowledge can be explicitly and precisely repre-
sented, and stored through various external means. Before the era of writing,
knowledge was likely stored through songs, chants, poems, narratives, artifacts
and visual representations. More recently, such transfer has been facilitated
through writing conventions and record keeping technology. Social networks
establish and maintain hi-fidelity information gradients along which ideas
migrate rapidly and faithfully through social groups. Moreover these networks
store and transform information externally, without needing to program
information into our genes.
Language also makes possible the explicit instruction required to transmit
intricate knowledge and complicated skills, to effectively minimize and cor-
rect error. Adults teach children, but children can also seek out adults as
potential guides to the specific information they require. Joint-attention
means that difficult techniques can be broken down into more manageable
components, which educators may slowly and deliberately walk through.
Tasks can be simplified and risky elements can be removed (“Imagine this cord
is a snake . . .”). Through language, the function of tools and artifacts can be
demonstrated as well as explained, humans use artifacts and tools to alter
the ways in which agents and their social groups interact with local ecologies.
The invention and accumulation of tools and artifacts early in hominid evolu-
tion selected for agents who could rapidly and precisely acquire the skills to
learn them.
Consider this matter more fully. Clearly, cultural instruments and tech-
nologies remove or mitigate various dangers, but they also select for agents
able manage novel skills and expertise. With language, children are born vir-
tuosos: much of the faculty that enables children to acquire natural languages
is biologically entrenched. Grammars and meanings can be standardized with
only pronunciations and a few grammatical settings left to vary. Thus, rapid
language acquisition can form the target of natural selection, as it falls under
Baldwin-effects: faster, more efficient and articulate linguists leave more
offspring. But such is not true of the skills and knowledge that underwrites a
massive body of locally adaptive mental organization. Selection cannot fit
organisms to environments their ancestors have never seen, indeed could never
have imagined. When compared with other primates, juvenile dependence in
the hominid lineage is very long and costly. This life history effect gives further
evidence that the accumulation of a dense body of culturally supplied infor-
mation was extremely important in our evolutionary history. To give time for
the cultural download, selection invented the teenager. The 20 or so years that
a forager requires before she can generate positive nutritional returns exacts an
enormous resource debt; and this debt must be repaid. The costs of cultural
learning are high—so high that it appears to have evolved robustly in only one
lineage—but the benefits are likewise enormous.
Cultural transmission is further accommodated by success and conformist
biases. Richerson and Boyd see these as particularly important to the transmis-
sion of religious information. A child is born to soak up culture. How shall she
organize her search? Global skepticism would be disastrous for to question
everything would be to learn nothing. An optimal design will bias its judg-
ment to accepting the practices and understandings of the generation that has
preceded it. It should be conformist biased for the live bodies around us are,
for the most part, case studies in success. They have, minimally, survived as
models for imitation. This fact alone is impressive. For what they have believed
and done has, at the very least, not killed them. Yet, Richerson and Boyd note
that biases that are too strictly conformist are maladaptive; they do not allow
the flexibility required to acquire good ideas. Culture would stagnate were we
not able to learn from the successful. Indeed for culture to evolve, innovations
must become common from instances where they are few. If we always gravi-
tated to the largest mass, innovation would be stifled. Thus, success biases also
foster cultural evolution. We not only conform; we also identify and imitate
success. These simple heuristics working with Tomassello’s ratchet help to
build increasingly sophisticated cultural animals.
Kim Sterelny observes that such biases may explain a discernable pattern to
the cultural maladaptations that beset groups. And in doing so, I think Sterelny
expresses the theoretical core of Dennett’s position. Success in some problem
domains is fairly straightforward. It is readily apparent when a forager fails to
detoxify seeds, or invents an improved warfare technology—the forager dies
or his enemy dies. It is therefore not surprising that improvements steadily
accumulate in resource extraction and weaponry. In other domains what
counts as success is less apparent. It is difficult to know how the world began,
what happens after death, what medicines to use, how to raise children. We
rely on the explanations supplied by those who have come before us, and by
those we take to be exemplars of success. This cultural information is good
at sustaining itself, but not necessarily good at sustaining us. For it is not easy
to know whether our biases have latched on to genuinely benefiting informa-
tion. Some problems are empirically inscrutable, and for these there is wide
scope for attractive but harmful ideas to breed answers. As Sterelny puts it:
“In some aspects, the people of a particular culture will respond to their
world in an extraordinarily nuanced, subtle and informed way [. . .]. In other
respects these very same people will seem barking mad: prisoners, for example,
of vastly disabling beliefs about the polluting power of female menstruation
[. . .]” : 165).
Summing it up, evolutionary psychologists correctly notice that our minds
are adapted for biological success. But evolutionary psychologists have under-
rated the extent to which distinctive features of hominid cultural histories
have mattered to cognitive evolution. The cognitive capacities that power cul-
tural acquisition and high-fidelity transmission unleash dramatic behavioral
plasticity. With these “fuels for success” we are able to adjust to contingent,
variable circumstances, and culture itself forms part of that variability. A child’s
mind needs to be flexible enough to exploit information whose characteristics
it cannot anticipate. Children are unable to forecast their learning and selec-
tive environments; they cannot forecast the technologies, norms, and practices
their social groups will use to negotiate the world and each other. Cultural
variability selects for developmental plasticity—capacities to usefully interact
with variable cultural resources and to build functional, behavioral disposi-
tions from these local, varying resources.
III. Cultural Maladaptations
We have seen that cultural information endures through hi-fidelity transmis-

sion. It is also subject to a kind of struggle: not all cultural information will
endure with the same degree of success. Thus, gene-lineages are not the only
information bearing units subject to evolutionary dynamics.4 Given variation,
4
Richerson and Boyd emphasize that cultural evolutionary processes are analogous to genetic
evolution, but not identical. Whereas genetic information flows only vertically, cultural informa-
tion flows obliquely and horizontally as well. Moreover genes are discrete units for selection, but
it is not obvious that such units exist in culture information transfer, where there is much blend-
ing of information. There are no clear cultural parallels to mitosis and meiosis, and so on (Rich-
erson and Boyd 2005, ch.3).
differential success, and hi-fidelity transmission, cultures also adapt and evolve.
Yet because culture evolves, cultural variants may be common for no other
reason than that they are good at replicating. The art of working a sexton for
navigation is a lost art in a world of navigational gizmos, and so it all but dis-
appears. On the other side, commercials that enflame desire will become com-
mon, and they are arrayed to detach our desires from our needs—for their sole
purpose is to leave us out of pocket. Our various addictions may well reflect
design features of informational packages that leave us hooked. Anti-natalist
fads illustrate this prospect well. From a gene’s eye-view, birth control is as
lethal as a viper, but birth control’s disastrous effect on our genes does not save
its enormous popularity. Indeed such effects provide the reasons for its popu-
larity. The cultural niche is saturated with genetic poisons. Religious practice
resembles drug addiction and scholarship for its deleterious effects on human
germ lines. Such practices “pick the locks” of the pleasure circuits that safe-
guard human biological interest.5 Cultural transmission enables humans to
produce ever more adaptive fits to local circumstances. But much in culture is
biologically maladaptive. That which makes cultural useful—high fidelity
transmission—also makes it dangerous. The special biases and capacities that
enable us to inhabit our cognitive niche, also allow for the transmission of
false and inefficient beliefs and practices that are themselves artful replicators.
Dennett observes that religion provides a spectacular example of where genetic
and epigenetic interests come apart.
Let’s develop this point through a thought experiment. It is easy to know it
is raining, but it is hard to know why. Learning biases give credibility to the
views of others, especially successful others. If the tribe claims that rain comes
from ZORG, then given learning biases, we will likely believe it so. Moreover,
it is hard to know how to respond to a supernatural agent. If others bow and
beg before the heavens, then given these same biases, we will likely adopt the
ZORG-fearing behavior. It is hard to disconfirm ZORG; and facing the
unknown, our best lights are to follow others. Biases to accept the word of
others free us from reinventing all wisdom for ourselves. Thus, by imitative
biases, ZORG religion is propagated—and so it is with many other culturally
maladaptive beliefs and behaviors. Of course, we are not always tempted by
the religions of yore. Supernaturalisms are sometimes suppressed, rejected, or
forgotten. But learning biases appear to give religion its inertia.
Notice, Dennett does not have difficulty explaining cultural maladapta-
tions. The theory of high-fidelity cultural transmission predicts them! For if
culture evolves in a quasi-Darwinian fashion, then the cultural information
common to any generation tells an evolutionary success story. The information
5
This adapts Pinker’s apt phrase : 524-525).
that makes up generation N was attractive enough to endure a selection at

generation N-1. Much cultural information succeeds because it fosters suc-
cess. Good tricks spread for their utility, but false and harmful information
may be more transmissible than what is true and helpful. The same biases that
protect our interests lead to maladaptive seepage. Rules of thumb do not speak
ex-cathedra. On the other side, evolutionary psychologists typically describe
maladaptive cognition as resulting from a disjunction between the demands of
Pleistocene life-ways and those of our more contemporary worlds.
Here the evidence is critical. Evolutionary psychology predicts that cultural
maladaptations will be less common during the Pleistocene. Modern social and
technological worlds dramatically differ from ancestral conditions, resulting
in maladaptive fits when adapted modular minds take to the streets of McWorld.
Cultural evolutionists, on the other side, predict overall enhanced functional
intelligence as cultural wisdom accumulates adaptive sophistication, and it
also predicts continued susceptibility to maladaptive misinformation.
There is evidence from population expansion over recent hominid history
that we are becoming better at survival. Richerson and Boyd note that human
population explosion coincided with the emergence of agricultural societies,
ch. 4). This rate steepened with the social and technological innovations of the
industrial revolution, with more massive and highly differentiated division of
labor, new economies of scale, and the proliferation of mass markets. We seem
to be getting better at exploiting and distributing resources, though perhaps
only over the short term.6 The data suggest that our recent population explo-
sion was made possible by social and technological inventions for life that
cumulative cultural adaptation perfected, bringing lower mortality and an
increased population capacity to human co-operative groups. This is not the
sort of data we would expect from a mind adapted for a Pleistocene life way,
but maladaptive after the transition to modernity. But it is the data we would
expect from somewhat plastic minds outfitted to adopt, modify, and exploit
novel, locally adaptive information.
Cultural maladaptivism has a further advantage; it is theoretically parsimo-
nious. It minimizes the attribution of complexity and design to the cognitive
systems that underlie supernatural commitment. It requires no fancy story
explaining hidden functions. Religion appears maladaptive because it is, and
it is maladaptive because cultural cognition is imperfect.
Finally, I think the theory is intuitively persuasive. It is puzzling how social
others, so good at making a living in the world, could fall prey to supernatural
6
Looking to the longer horizon our fate may well coincide with those late inhabitants of
Easter Island, who perhaps cursed the ingenuity of their forbearers before they vanished.
errors. But it is intuitively correct that our best lights are generally those of
others around us, especially the successful. Where maladaptive belief is com-
mon, it seems plausible to think that in the absence of obviously better alter-
natives it will tend to remain so. Moreover, it is true that sometimes religion
really is catastrophically maladaptive (consider Jonestown).
Thus selection has accommodated us to the cognitive niche. Without this
accommodation, the benefits of cumulative social learning remain forever out
of reach. So, part of the complexity of our elaborate mental design is locally
imported. Our knowledge of how to make the technological world is locally
imported but so, too, is much of our mythological knowledge, and the prac-
tices that surround it. This knowledge is false, attractive, and eminently trans-
missible. It endures because it is configured to endure. We need not explain
the success of religion by appealing to a story-of-Eden or Hajj gene. Religious
information comes to us, but not, it seems, because our parents had sex.
IV. The Limits of Cultural Maladaptationism
Having used the literature on cultural evolution to enrich Dennett’s meme-

theoretic account of religion, let’s consider what it doesn’t explain. At the
outset, it is important to acknowledge that the niche constructionist alterna-
tive I propose faces a significant obstacle. It attributes more complexity to the
cognitive and cultural designs that support religious life than does CMH. All
things equal we should prefer the more parsimonious explanation. Neverthe-
less, there are many facts about religious thinking that CMH leaves poorly
explained.
First, there is the poverty of stimulus to keep in mind. Religious commitment
targets the non-natural, but there is only nature.7 Given the absence of reli-
gious reality, it is puzzling why any person would come to believe in it. CMH
places a heavy theoretical burden on the claim that reality is vague, and that
it is hard to test religious ideas.8 But with spirit worlds, there should be no
7
We discount the non-natural in science because in the past doing so has advanced scientific
knowledge. It may be that eventually we decide that we cannot explain why otherwise intelligent
organisms come to believe in the gods without appealing to the reality of the gods. Given the
pragmatic benefits of methodological naturalism, however, no sensible researcher would assume
that stance at the outset. Nor would they cede to it without overwhelmingly significant evidence.
For that assumption has made science possible; without it, it seems, anything goes.
8
Shock and wonder explanations also remain insufficient (cf. Whitehouse 2004). Given
secular nature, it remains mysterious why we do not respond to the wondrous with skepticism
and blank stares in the way we might respond to an authority suggesting that because the inner
moon is cheese fill, we must tithe.
vagueness; the elephant-headed deity doesn’t exist, and can give no evidence.
It should take great cognitive effort for a creature adapted to terrestrial reality
to commit to the existence of such a being. All things equal, we would predict
an extreme poverty of stimulus for supernatural reality, but it is not difficult
for agents to believe in deities. Indeed, we shall see that it is difficult to per-
suade people not to believe. Supernaturalism is a cognitive default.
Furthermore, there is the cost problem. We have seen that religious commit-
ment brings epistemic and practical costs. We get the world wrong, and we
pay for it. Such costs only enhance the strangeness of religion. Given these
costs, it appears that we should have evolved skeptical biases. Given the recur-
rence of expensive of religious thinking over generations, it seems selection
should have implanted a bias for intolerance of any religious concept. We all
should have evolved to naturally dislike and reject religion as much as Dennett
does. Yet, supernatural commitment arises easily and everywhere.
Additionally, there is threat of manipulation. Religious commitment exposes
agents to exploitation. Cultural evolutionists tend to underestimate the prob-
lem of co-operation in their discussion of maladaptive transmission. Society is
composed of agents whose interests imperfectly overlap, and so religious agents
remain exposed to information arrayed to deceive, defraud, and manipulate
them. Such agents run the risk of dispossession at the hands of religious elites.
Acceptance of supernatural realities, when combined with trusting disposi-
tions towards their earthly prophets, is an invitation to mistreatment. Clearly
not all priests rob the coffers and attack children. But we should be very mis-
trusting of them, for they wield much power. More subtly, conformist biases
leave individuals open to exploitation by their groups. What might form part
of the collective’s interest may well form no part of our own—for example, a
call to missionary work among cannibals, but there are such missions. It
remains puzzling that we did not evolve the bias: “Religion, but not when it
hurts” or “Tar and feather any religious authority.” Also, religious authorities
and groups should be more damaging to individual interests than they are.
Yet another factor is the presence of intricate social learning. CMH underes-
timates the cultural practices, conventions, and resources that structure reli-
gious experience. That is, it underestimates the importance of stable religious
niche construction. From an early age, parents instruct their children about
the supernatural. Parents rehearse religious prayers and incantations, and help
their children to remember them. They may kneel by their children. Parents
break down important rituals into their component sequences, simplifying,
repeating or exaggerating elements—as they do when teaching children about
practical skills. Sometimes a child’s hands will be directed through a motion
such as, “this is how you make the sign of the cross.” Such practices continue
into adolescence, and in some religious traditions, are supported through a

long period of adult religious training. Agents characterize some experience as
religious, in part, because they are taught techniques for cultivation super-
natural consciousness and feelings. Through religious education, people learn
specific prayers, body postures, breathing techniques, chants and mantras,
dance, techniques for meditation—all of which strongly affect their natural
and social understandings, their patterns of valuing, and their emotional ori-
entations and expressions. Emotion-saturated religious practices are frequently
repeated, and are used to support the epistemic basis of religious conviction.
Habitual religious performance produces intrinsic motivations to participate,
for the feeling associated with them are overwhelmingly positive. Religious
persons learn many religious and moral norms: when to show one’s conviction
and to what degree; what is expected of them; and what to know. The care and
seriousness with which educators and students approach the transmission of
religious knowledge gives the impression that religious education is esteemed
to be every bit as important as the transmission of essential subsistence and
extraction technologies. It is hard to see how conformity or success biases
can be made to carry the very substantial explanatory load for why and how
individuals learn, maintain, and teach their religion. We need an account of
social learning that helps to elucidate the transmission and cultivation of reli-
gious technologies. Catching a richly articulated religion is harder than catch-
ing a cold.
Consider also how religion is affected by encapsulation and self-deception.
Religious commitment is often expressed as a belief, but if religious proposi-
tions were believed in the same way that ordinary, unrestricted empirical prop-
ositions are, they would be deadly. Indeed, religiosity would not merely
resemble schizophrenia—the two would be indistinguishable. For motivating
beliefs and experience of supernatural powers that do not exist leads to very
unwelcome inferences. If caring, all-powerful deities really existed, it may
seem natural to suppose that we should not worry over our lives for the gods
will provide. But such a lack of concern is not generally advantageous to den-
izens of hostile nature. Worry is adaptive. Religious persons who express beliefs
in happy afterlives will nevertheless struggle, kicking and screaming, to the
gallows. Religious agents believe the gods will provide, but they till fields
and chase game. They believe in cosmic justice, but still protect their resources
and punish cheats. This suggests design specification beyond those we would
expect from merely socially biased transmission. There is no evidence that
children are explicitly taught to make these inferences. Each child is not
explicitly taught that it would be wrong to ask whether in communion some
of us are unlucky enough to consume Jesus’ hindquarter.
Finally, there are moral attitudes and functional integration to confront. Reli-
giosity is not just accepted as technology; religious matters are expressed with
moral passion. We do not come to blows when we disagree over the utilities
we assign to artifacts—we don’t hate our neighbor for paying too much for a
shoddy lawn mower. Yet we often exclude religion from civilized discussion
because of the ill-feelings differences can cause. Religion tends to be a conver-
sation stopper.
In short, religion looks maladaptive enough for selection to have eliminated
religious tendencies. Instead, religious beliefs are connected to powerful emo-
tional and motivational systems, they are impervious to scientific criticism,
and constrain thought and behavior in manifold ways. They impair us. To
understand why this is so, we need to consider how this self-imposed impair-
ment functions to signal our co-operative commitments to those around us.
In developing an alternative to cultural maladaptivism, we must consider a
hypothesis that Dennett ignores: the commitment-signaling theory of religion
(Dennett 2006).
V. Social complexity, commitment and pre-commitment
The literature on dual inheritance stresses the technological mastery that

comes through minds empowered to learn the collective wisdom of a tribe.
Our minds are adapted to acquire know-how for dealing with fast-changing,
ecological circumstances and artifact worlds. One of the drivers of human
cognitive evolution was surely the presence and increasing utility of sophisti-
cated technological mastery and material culture. Yet another, related driver,
was the Machiavellian world of other social agents; the most crucial and
most fast-changing strategic targets in nature are other people. By creating
common cause and coordinating our efforts, vastly many more goods become
available that would otherwise be impossible to secure on our own. We have
much to benefit from each other, but we also have much to lose. Notoriously,
co-operation is fragile. Prisoner’s dilemmas and tragedies of the commons
threaten social exchange. While often the best plan for all is collective action,
individuals frequently do better still by accessing collective benefits without
paying the price.
The “social complexity hypothesis” holds that increasing social complexity
selects for increasing cognitive complexity, creating a feedback loop in which
social and cognitive complexity elaborate each other. As social groups grow
larger, the memory demands for tracking behavior grow sharply. Agents must
be able to store and update information about other agents’ skills and charac-
ter. But agents also need to track the relationships of other agents to each
other. So, the number of potentially relevant connections grows much faster
than the number of new group members. Moreover, information must be
regularly updated to reflect changes in a social landscape—a falling out, a
female coming into season, injuries, a challenge to authority, marital troubles,
or the acquisition of new resources by a belligerent thug. Furthermore, the
prospect for intra-group formation produces vastly more complexity for social
units because a social group is more than a collection of individuals. Within
groups there are informal and formal alliances and these will matter to social
outcomes. You probably could take that tiny punk, but not if his friends carry
bats. Proto-group structures such as kin groups and clans, hunting and trading
groups, military units, symbolically marked structures (such as totems), polit-
ical affiliates, economic partners, and other salient individuals also must be
monitored. Their relationships to each other, and other individuals, must also
be tracked. Thus, vertical complexity creates further dimensions of exponen-
tially enlarging complexity. The playing out of social chess matches at all these
levels makes a complex social world extremely unpredictable. There are few
stable targets here for natural selection to identify in advance of actual social
dramas. Default, modular, and stereotyped solutions are unavailable. Unlike
the complexity of a visual landscape or the grammar of language, we cannot
build all the information we need before inhabiting a social world. The com-
putational problems are genuinely intractable, for unlike ordinary chess, the
rules of the game and its parameters are subject to change with each move.
Thus, while social complexity and social intelligence will elaborate each other,
internal competition, the threat of defection, and the escalating demands of
Machiavellian memory and maneuvering mean that social intelligence will
not keep pace.
Recent work on the evolutionary transition to co-operative life has focused
on norms and social marking as mechanisms that dramatically reduce the cog-
nitive load of social complexity. Norms render expectations explicit. Fair-
minded, well-intentioned altruists may nevertheless disagree over what is due
to them. Yet, rules standardize these expectations. This eases the computa-
tional burden of co-operative living. The relevant distribution of goods and
services does not need to be worked out each time a pig is killed or a border is
defended. Moreover, norms alter payoff schedules for defection. Norm viola-
tions can be cheaply punished, and their negative impact can be delivered
immediately, as opposed to at some future time. In Sterelny’s words: “Norms
against (say) drunkenly groping your superior’s partner will have immediate
and hence motivationally salient costs, not just distant disutility”. In a norm-
governed world, failures to co-operate become easier to detect, and so easier to
punish. Thus, norms amplify the signals that make co-operation possible.
Norms bring predictability. They lay stable tracks for social interaction.
Moreover, norms that regulate group membership—conventions of symbol
marking—increase the internal homogeneity of groups, and this also increases
external differentiation between groups. Marking conventions thus provide a
foundation on which group selection can target group-benefiting norms.
There may well be no social life whatsoever outside a group; this is particularly
so if the relevant social markings are visible and permanent. Scars, circumci-
sions, tattoos, neck elongation, and body piercings all motivate good behavior
towards one’s fellows, because once one has been marked as a member of
one group, defection to another isn’t possible. Permanent marking is a pre-
commitment device. A Nazi with “HITLER” tattooed to his forehead will not
fair well if neighboring Antifas overwhelms the group; that marked Nazi is
thus more predictably trustworthy in a fight. The success of his group is his
only chance. Finally, conventions regulating the distribution of merit and
shame can further reinforce social marking practices by linking public mark-
ings to a system of social prestige. These conventions cheaply reinforce
exchange by standardizing relations (and expectations) of power. If a “HITLER”
tattoo signifies high social status, all will have an incentive to obtain one.
The upshot of this recent literature on social and cognitive evolution is that
in a world braced by norms and symbolic conventions, self-interest and social
benefit will frequently converge. Such a world is one that powerfully dimin-
ishes the cognitive costs of social complexity. Norm-governed worlds lead to
salient, unambiguous co-operation and co-ordination signals.
The problem, however, is that norms do not secure co-operation. For even
where they are easily punished, norms remain only extrinsically motivating.
Because defection still pays, norms select for subtle cheaters. Moreover, norms
do not secure commitment when it is against one’s interests to commit. I may
well violate a norm against retreating from an enemy if I think there’s a good
chance they will scalp me, but where all retreat, all get scalped.
Permanent symbolic marking does pre-commit individuals to act for the
welfare of a group, as a group competes with other groups. But it does not
pre-commit individuals to social exchange in domains unrelated to group
selection. That tattooed Nazi may still steal his neighbor’s goat or attempt an
extra pair-bond copulation. We shall see that religion evolved to support these
exchange norms by providing them with intrinsic motivational power. Norms
build commitments, but religion builds normative pre-commitments.
VI. The Religious Niche and the Propagation of Religious Illusions
Call a “religious niche” a system of organized behavior and knowledge, together

with whatever artifacts and other symbolic structures (musical scores, texts,
religious architecture) that are supported, retained, improved, and transmitted
at least in part because we possess the cognitive capacities to believe and mor-
ally commit to supernatural realities and purposes. For now, leave open the
question of whether the relevant cognitive capacities are dedicated and cogni-
tively entrenched (I raise this question below). Whatever its psychological
basis, the religious niche reduces social complexity by strengthening and dis-
ambiguating signals of co-operation. It does so by rendering norms intrinsi-
cally desirable.9
Begin by considering the solidarity effect of very specific supernatural illu-
sions. Suppose a group of co-operating individuals were routinely and system-
atically to attach erroneous values to non-cooperative strategies. These distortions
and biases favor mutually benefiting exchanges. Here we would find that very
specifically configured misperceptions might reliably link religious commit-
ment to social commitment. If exchanging agents think that cooperation pays
best, defection threats vanish—no matter what they actually pay.
Let us focus on a co-operative exchange problem called a generalized pris-
oner’s dilemma. I will use the prisoner’s dilemma only to illustrate a threat of
defection that faces agents living in co-operative groups where interests only
partially overlap. I do not believe that all exchange problems are generalized
prisoner’s dilemmas. Indeed, many are pure co-ordination problems, even
those requiring substantial personal investment. To catch a stag, all must act
or none will benefit. Nevertheless, even in a heavily norm-bound co-operating
culture, there remain incentives to skirt the rules, and where skirting is com-
mon—or needs to be policed—all fare less well than they could.
Suppose a pig is charging. If Ricardo and LeBul work together they will
catch it. But collective action comes at a cost—both will come off smelling of
pig. If both flee, neither will get a portion of the dense nutritional package. If
only one flees, the pig will maul the altruist. This mauling will slow the pig,
making it an easy kill, thus doubling the nutritional package to the defecting
partner (dead friend + dead pig). What to do? The smart choice is mutual
cooperation. Yet the economically rational choice is mutual defection, to get
nothing, even if the value of:
9
It may do more besides. It may provide “meaning” and “hope,” give answers to existential or
scientific questions, help agents to cope with grief, and unleash the body’s capacity for placebo
healing. But I set other candidate functions to the side here to focus on the social solidarity func-
tion. For an argument that collapses these functions, see Bulbulia (2006).
Pig-smell + dead pig > Ordinary-smell + no pig

Much is at stake. No one wants to stand a charging pig alone. And no matter
how the other agent acts, one always does better by defecting. Let T = tempta-
tion (defect on a co-operator), R = reward (mutual co-operation), D = defec-
tion (mutual defection), S = sucker’s payoff (co-operate with a defector).
Assume the true payoff schedule favors mutual defection, even though mutual
co-operation pays better. Thus: T > R > D > S
For each player: Ricardo LeBul
Preference 1 T T
Preference 2 R R
Preference 3 D D
Preference 4 S S
This scheme describes the natural payoff matrix for exchange. Preference 2 is
available to both agents. But rational choice theory predicts agents will opt for
Preference 3, though it produces less utility. Preference 3 is the Nash equilib-
rium in a two-party prisoner’s dilemma. Natural selection comparing alterna-
tive designs over evolutionary history will target the most economical design.
So it seems natural selection will ratify strategies of defection.
Notice however, that in a prisoner’s dilemma, it would each player if both
were to misunderstand the payoff matrix, for example judging that: (R or S) >
(T or D)
For each player: Ricardo LeBul
Preference 1 R R
Preference 2 S S
Preference 3 D D
Preference 4 T T
Call this interaction based on mutual misunderstanding “the illusion game”—
we assume the actual payoff matrix remains the same. What form may such an
illusion take? Consider extrinsically motivating beliefs: defectors face eternal
suffering in an afterlife; or will be menaced ancestor spirits; or will be harmed
by the accumulation of karma; or will get done in by a spirit. Such commit-
ments alter the utilities that agents attach to actions by altering their expected
outcomes. Agents must factor the uncertainty of their belief with the size of
the reward and the timing of its delivery. All of these factors play into an
agent’s decision. Even low certainty for a reward that comes in the future will
have motivating influence if the expected return is infinitely large—the cor-
nerstone of Pascal’s wager.
Much of the literature on “supernatural punishment” has stressed extrinsic
rewarding. But intrinsically rewarding supernaturalism is both available and
more powerful, for the intrinsically motivated payoff structure alters the per-
ceived utilities that agents attach to defection acts themselves. Intrinsic motiva-
tions do not require a conscious misunderstanding of future payoffs. By
thinking of morality as either sacred in itself or inherently pleasing to a beloved
god, immediate motivational power can be imparted to otherwise undesirable
altruistic exchange options.
Supernatural norm re-enforcement looks adaptive, but as I have conceived
of them, such capacities are un-evolvable. A disposition to believe in intrinsic
or extrinsic supernatural support cannot spread in a population when it is rare.
Defectors will always fair better by exploiting proto-religionists. Moreover,
even in a population of altruistic exchangers, belief in policing illusions
will come under negative selection pressure, for such a community is subject
to invasion by defectors, who may pretend religion only to steal the prize.
While co-operation brings benefits, defection strategies often pay better
and these strategies will eventually swamp moralizing religion. The returns
from the accurate perception of outcomes, plus a disposition to fake religion,
exceed the value of moralizing religion. Religious co-operators therefore face
a recognition constraint. For religious altruism to evolve, religionists need access
to signals of religious commitment that are clear, unambiguous, and hard
to fake.
For religious solidarity to work, co-religionists must track the behavior (and
other indirect evidence) of fellow co-religionists, and from these data discern
their intentional and motivational states. This assessment is critical to forecast-
ing future behavior. In a hostile world, such judgments will sometimes need
to be made rapidly, with life and death at stake. Under siege, we cannot pon-
der and ruminate over options.
Language is an adaptation for communication of near-telepathic possibility,
but the capacity to convey information by linguistic means will not solve
the recognition constraint. Defectors, or course, can lie. They can say “I am
religious” and mean “I am not religious.” With language they can do this
just as easily as you can say “It is Tuesday” knowing it is Friday. Crucially,
this fact about language applies to norms. It is easy to articulate a norm, but
we cannot presuppose that selection will favor strategies to enforce norms.
Punishing the norm violator will generally exact a cost, which an audience
to defection will seek to avoid; this is true even when the net cost of punish-
ment is low. What Darwin has called “a grain in the balance” will tend to favor
the economically optimal strategy. The benefit of a natural perception of
outcomes (and defection motivations) plus the disposition to produce false
linguistic statements exceeds the value of truthful avowal of genuine religious
illusions. Selection cannot ratify the linguistic option because language is not
an effective security technology.10 We need a signal that only religious agents

can produce.
Emotional signals go part of the way to solving the recognition problem.
Religious commitment is not only social commitment, it is passionate moral
commitment. And these passions are open to public scrutiny. The gods of the
folk are not the gods of the philosophers. The folk drop to their knees for their
religion and some will want to hang you for not joining them. Try to fake the
knee-dropping posture and the “hang you” expression; it is not easy. This is
because emotional expressions are processed outside the cerebral cortex, and
are difficult to manipulate on cue. Most of us could not present a credible
expression of committed love for a cosmic deity named “Bob.” Without the
relevant commitment, we cannot convincingly affirm, “The devil wants to
take your soul!” If you can’t so much as fake a smile for the camera, how can
you fake religion? There is evidence we do use emotions to predict future
behavior. So, there are good prima facie reasons to think we do so for religious
emotions. For these are just emotions expressed toward a supernatural target.
If emotional states are visible markers of the relevant moral motivations and
exchange intentions, then selection can target and amplify emotional signals.
All of us have an incentive to solve a prisoner’s dilemma. However, in larger
cohorts it is often difficult to individually scrutinize the religious emotions of
all. Emotional signaling alone is insufficient to solve the co-operation dilem-
mas that faced our ancestors.
Public rituals that elicit, cultivate, and broadcast religious emotions furnish
a powerful exchange technology. My use of “technology” here is deliberate. If
religious signaling stably re-enforces exchange, then rituals are not best ana-
lyzed as cultural maladaptations. With signaling technologies, any gradual
improvement in the generation and filtering of reliable signals will be cultur-
ally selected, as Tomasello’s ratchet turns over religious practice.
Irrespective of the emotions it produces, merely observing a ritual involves
non-trivial participation costs. This is important. The undertaking of these
costs, too, is a reliable index of commitment. Normally, only the committed
will be willing to pay for ritual expense: the opportunity cost of lost time; the
metabolic costs of physical investment; the material loss incurred by capital
10
Andrew Mahoney has pointed out to me that the theological knowledge displayed in reli-
gious language can function as a hard-to-fake signal of religious learning, and so of religious
commitment. However, theology is not ordinary (denotational) language. It is the medium
through which agents display past intellectual investments. Moreover, I am setting aside the
potential of language to convey emotional information—not by what is said, but by how it is
said. For the modulations of our voice may, for example, give hard to fake evidence of how
we feel.
outlay; the financial support of clergy; the risks and pain associated with dan-
gerous and invasive procedures; meditating among wild animals; ritual immo-
lation; ordeals by knife or fire; or substantial body piercing. Ritual costs are
not trivial costs, and we do not suppose the gods repay them. Yet, co-operative
signals are critical to social flourishing. So, there is scope for culturally trans-
mitted technology to build, refine, and amplify co-operative signals through
the configuration of cost.
Commitment-singling theory predicts that signaling technologies will iden-
tify the following utility function in religiously committed agents:
Expected religious costs x frequency < expected utility of religious practice + con-
ditional expectation of altruistic exchange.
Defectors will not seek to undertake substantial ritual costs, because they do
not believe the gods will repay the investment, and they find no sacred value.
Moreover such would-be signaling defectors have to factor the conditional
risk of getting caught and punished as they cannot easily manage the emo-
tional signals that will be scrutinized in public gatherings. So their expected
utility from costly religious practice may well exceed their perceived utility
in faking signals and cheating the devout. Defectors will perceive no super-
natural benefit, and they face non-trivial punishment risks. Thus, for non-
religiously committed agents:
The conditional probability of value from cheating the devout < expected reli-
gious costs x frequency + conditional expectation of altruistic punishment
Because scrutiny is imperfect, religious imposters may nevertheless invade reli-
gious communities. The threat is particularly high when the benefits of defec-
tion are high. An optimal signaling regime will assess not just the presence but
also the strength of religious devotion. We can therefore predict that ritual
costs and frequency will correlate with defection incentives. When facing a
crisis, the model predicts that religious individuals will devote more time and
material resource to costly ritual participation than when times are better. This
is a non-trivial prediction. We would ordinarily predict conservation strategies
as resources dwindle and threats on them increase, but this isn’t what happens.
For example, Daniel Chen observes that during Indonesian financial crises
of the late 1990s, Muslim families devoted more resources to religious institu-
tions as the crisis deepened. Though apparently maladaptive, Chen argues
that religious institutions provide social insurance. They minimize risks to
individuals and their families by providing collective support to the most
needy. Here, costly observance in insurance societies makes the join-defect-
leave strategy more expensive. Thus, ritual cost functions as an elaborate polic-
ing technology to prevent raiding by committed defectors. The costs police
behavior because they assess the strength of commitment. Religious practice

tests the bond.
William Irons, Lee Cronk and Shannon Steadman found that among the
Island people of Utila, men prefer to marry women who frequently attend
church. On Utila, religious piety is associated with female desirability. How-
ever, Irons reports this preference is not reversed. He explains that the men of
Utila are fishers who spend a substantial portion of their time away from
home. Given frequent and long enduring mate separation, the risks for sexual
infidelity (and more importantly, for cuckoldry) are especially high for men.
Irons suggests that Utilan women are pious as a signal of sexual virtue. Other-
wise these discrepancies between male and female religious preferences are
hard to explain.
Richard Sosis and his colleagues have collected an impressive body of evi-
dence for commitment-signaling technology. In a comparative study of two
hundred religious and secular communes in the 19th century, Sosis deter-
mined that the religious communities were far more likely to outlast their
non-religious counterparts. Impressively, they were four times as likely to sur-
vive in any given year. In a subsequent study, Sosis and Bressler showed that
religious communes imposed over twice as many costly requirements on their
members than did secular communes. The authors also demonstrated that the
number of costly requirements was positively correlated with group lifespan.
No such effect was observed for secular communes. There, costly requirements
did not correlate with secular commune lifespan. This suggests that supernat-
ural commitments are especially motivating of co-operative commitment.
Moreover, Sosis and Ruffle designed experiments to show that religious
ritual influences co-operation in contemporary religious kibbutzim. Using
common-goods resource games, the authors found that religious males were
significantly more altruistic in their play than were religious and secular
females, and secular males. The authors discovered no sex differences in co-
operation among the secular kibbutz members, thus eliminating the possibil-
ity that there were more basic differences in the ways males and females play
the game. Noting that only orthodox men are expected to participate in inten-
sive communal prayer regimes, Sosis and Ruffle concluded that costly ritual
participation accounts for the discrepancy.
Clearly more studies in the area are needed. I have focused on those
elements of a religious niche that distill and amplify signals of co-operation.
But there are many other benefits that public religiosity brings. To be very
clear: I do not suppose that signaling is a religious niche’s only function! For
example, symbolic marking secures commitment differently. Marking tech-
nologies (especially permanent marking technologies) do not merely assess
commitments—they forge them by making defection especially costly. Once
marked, forever branded. Moreover, dramatic religious rituals may support

religious experience, and the storage of religious knowledge in semantic for-
mats. These formats are an especially useful means by which to link religious
belief with moral emotions as episodic memory is experiential memory. The
motivations recalled through re-experiencing the gods in contrived emotional
settings may well enhance social solidarity. (I will return to Whitehouse
momentarily). Such rituals are also important in their developmental role, as
a means for directing childhood and adolescent religiosity to specific, mature
psychological end states. Here, the costs of religious practice reflect the expense
of schooling more than signaling. Moreover, religious thought and behavior
may bring costs that are never repaid. It may be dysfunctional, particularly in
the modern period, in a world vastly different than the one that selected for
it. Kashmir, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Palestine, and other hotbeds of
religious conflict give vivid evidence for the scale of damage that unrelenting
social pre-commitments may bring.
Pulling these threads together, the evolutionary transition to co-operative
life happened because our ancestors were able to the overcome significant evo-
lutionary barriers to cooperation. Even in societies where group migration was
not easy, defection in exchange could never have been eliminated. Subterfuge
and deception, secret agendas, the formation of cabals, unauthorized sexual
liaisons, lying, pact breaking, retributive violence, and theft all characterized
the ancestral world, as they do ours. We have seen how belief in immediate
and substantial (typically intrinsic) supernatural utilities would have strongly
enhanced solidarity, and the costly signals of commitment that authenticated
these beliefs would have been targets for ritual expression, as the technologies
that implant, structure, and refine religious thought and feeling began to
scaffold early religious communities. Religious cultural variants (“memes”) did
not evolve as virulent information that infests gullible minds. I have tried to
make a compelling case for viewing religious culture as evolved to promote the
success of religious individuals and groups.
VII. Entrenched Psychological Features
Suppose we treat religious culture as adaptive technology. A dual inheritance

model seems salvageable. It may appear that we can retain everything in
the cultural maladaptationist hypothesis except the “mal.”11 We can think of
11
Such appears to be the position of Wilson (2002), who views religious systems as discrete
collections of group-level adaptations.
religious cultural systems as smoke and mirror houses intricately arrayed to

modify the flow of information to religion-prone agents about otherworldly
police forces. Given the functionality of religion, the expectation is that ritual
technologies will evolve to generate dramatic and convincing evidence for
religious commitment. We can use to elucidate these functions. Whitehouse
suggests that “extreme sensory pageantry” characterizes a distinctive mode of
ritual organization, and that ritual events are arrayed to generate lasting, highly
emotional episodic memories. We do not forget that day when the knife was
taken to our genitalia, or when we leapt headfirst from an extraordinary height,
or when we fled the charging bulls. Whitehouse also suggests that mundane
repetitive rituals—those performed in the “doctrinal mode” of religiosity—
generate semantic memories that embody the collective norms and wisdom of
a tribe, and support institutional and sociopolitical arrangements. We may
also view doctrinal practices as functional props and screens that assess (as well
as instill) moral commitments. It would seem that agents lacking spiritual
commitment do not easily suffer rituals. It makes little sense to perform rituals
that one consciously believes bring no effect. Whatever the correct analysis of
religious functions, it may seem plausible to view religious technology as one
of a number of cultural technologies we inherit, improve, and transmit—one
that creates and tests the bonds of religious (and so exchange) commitments
(and potentially much else besides).
However, cultural resources and conformist/success biases alone do not
appear adequate to motivate adaptive religious commitments. Whatever pomp
and display the religious niche can manage, the poverty of supernatural stimu-
lus is next to complete. We assume there are no gods to support our experience
of the gods, so it is striking that many are able to characterize some of their
experiences as of the gods. It is astonishing that religious beliefs do not face
more strenuous epistemological questioning than they do. It is even more
astonishing that such agents are able to morally condemn those who are suspi-
cious of religion for its lack of empirical support. Recall Sterelny’s point that
religious fantasy is easily maintained in domains where cultural groups lack
the science necessary to answer basic questions. Not able to scientifically
examine our origins and fates, we fall back on wild and astonishing tales.
However, two facts count against this interpretation. First, as we examined
above, foragers and agrarian peoples are technological masters of their domains.
The efficiency, skill, and productivity that “untutored” peoples manage deal-
ing with each other and their harsh environments are truly spectacular. Given
these wondrous capacities and technologies, it seems well within the cognitive
reach of such persons to admit “we don’t know” to such large and overwhelm-
ing questions—or even to find such questions uninteresting. Given the costs
of the alternative—believing that the sun god is thirsty for blood, that the
lords of the universe require you to walk a fire, or that it is our sacred duty to
flagellate and mutilate our bodies—“we don’t know” seems perfectly sensible!
Holding aside commitment-signaling advantages, it would appear that cul-
tural and individual selection pressures would strongly favor spiritual circum-
spection. Moreover, we should not lose sight of the importance of religion in
the lives of many of our scientifically enlightened contemporaries. Were some-
one to tell you that an individual named “Bob” wanted to give you a million
dollars for worshiping him, you would probably be deeply incredulous. Were
you furthermore informed that Bob savages those who do not worship him,
but is also worthy of worship, you may think a not-very-funny joke was at
play. If you were told that Bob allowed thugs to nail the hands and feet of his
son John-boy to some wood just before killing John-boy, so that he could
forgive these thugs their sins, you would think this unpleasant joke had turned
perverse and morbid. Were someone to persist in an attempt to persuade you
of this all-important “Truth about Bob,” you would likely judge her either not
very intelligent or not very sane. But such is the position of millions of other-
wise functional, clever, sensible, and intellectually responsible persons world-
wide. I think this ought to strike us as uncanny.
We have seen how the advantages of erroneous supernatural beliefs more
than repay their costs. Yet because effective defection pays better, audience
agents will evolve or develop capacities and strategies for the accurate assess-
ment of religious belief. Thus religiosity is bounded by the conviction con-
straint. To remain adaptive, religiosity requires substantial motivational
commitment. For it is precisely this moral conviction that emotional signaling
and commitment-signaling technology must assess. Any reduction in convic-
tion to a norm-supporting god threatens social commitment by reducing its
perceived utility (because a utility curve must factor [benefit x degree of cer-
tainty] and divide his amount by the timing of a reward). Were you to doubt
the watchful god “Bob” you might also doubt Bob’s prohibition against (say)
pig thievery, and so your neighbor’s pig may go missing in the night. Were
such uncertainty to spread in the absence of further defection controls, much
co-operative exchange would be threatened. Yet, living among the Bob-fear-
ing, we do not need to look over our shoulders.
To enhance confidence in a supernatural world, religiosity benefits from a
biasing and distorting of information, what Trivers calls “self-deception”. By
retrieving confirming evidence for religious commitment, certainty will rise.
But critically, we cannot instruct children in self-deception without losing the
deception. We cannot ask children to believe, with moral conviction, in an idea
that is false. Stable religious commitment must derive from biases to form and
retain religious commitment. The conviction constraint is resolved by an inter-

nal psychological propensity to strongly believe in supernatural characters.
Consider the evidence. It appears that children have an easy time imagining
god-like beings. Using a standard false belief task, showed that young children
better conceptualize the mind of God than they do the minds of natural per-
sons. The authors attribute this result to the fact that God conceptualization
is less computationally intensive than are theory of mind capacities. Coming
to understand that agents have imperfect knowledge is an achievement, one
that children before the age of 4-5 cannot manage. That young children come
equipped with the capacity to acquire religious understandings very early sug-
gests that children may be “intuitive theists,” naturally preferring teleological
and intentional purposes in explanations about the natural world. When asked
the question, “What is this for?” children find intentional explanations appro-
priate not only for body parts and artifacts but also for living things (“to go to
the zoo”) and non-biological kinds (clouds are “for raining”). Keleman also
found that children prefer teleological accounts for how nature came to be, for
example, preferring the explanation that rocks are pointy “so that animals
would not sit on them and smash them” to natural explanations like “bits of
stuff piled up for a long period of time”. In recent work, Keleman and col-
leagues have suggested that intentional and teleological ascriptions may be
linked. Children prefer attributing agents as the causes of these teleological
functions. Similarly, a striking series of experiments shows not only that chil-
dren prefer creationist accounts for the world around them, but even children
raised in non-religious households prefer creationist accounts, with the effect
only moderating in 11-13 year olds. Children are probably not learning this
religious bias from their parents—at least, not straightforwardly. Moreover,
Bering has recently shown that when primed to believed that there are super-
natural agents in their midst, 5 year olds exhibit a tendency to modify and
police their actions. Children are not only intuitive theists, they appear to be
intuitive supernatural moralists.
I don’t want to overstate the case for entrenched cognitive design. The
developmental literature does not evidence a dedicated “god module.” But it
does suggest that the acquisition of locally common religious commitments
will not be difficult, and it suggests that these commitments have the power
very early in development to motivate pro-social behavior. Children are pre-
pared to interpret their world as animated by supernatural beings who have
created it, and who are capable of observing and policing prohibited behavior.
It does not require special cognitive effort to persuade children to find evi-
dence of supernatural beings, for this is their default interpretive strategy. If
anything, the data suggest naturalism is difficult to learn.
Let’s take the case for internal cognitive design further. We assume that gods
do not form part of the causal explanation for why agents believe in gods.
Thus, strictly speaking, we assume that religious commitment is false belief.
Critically, then, religious information needs to be managed so that it does not
come into contact with core practical domains outside co-operative contexts.
Religious persons not only face a conviction constraint, they also face an
encapsulation constraint. In many domains belief will be extremely maladaptive
unless it is inferentially inert. Religious persons cannot believe in the reality of
benevolent superhuman agents when deciding, for example, whether to rely
on these agents to pay their wages. Practically, we cannot ask the gods to
deliver us our daily bread, or else we will have no bread; the gods cannot be
called upon to deliver us from our enemies, lest those enemies overwhelm us.
Moreover, though the gods are imagined to police behavior, it would be
extremely maladaptive to leave the punishment of defection in their hands.
Only the faithful can load rocks onto the chests of defectors and tighten head
screws (supposing the gods are causally inert). Put another way, religious
agents must believe with conviction (the certainty constraint) but must not be
literal-minded about religion. On the adaptationist model, religious belief
must be corralled to only those domains in which its expression will be func-
tional. Here again, we cannot explicitly teach children to erect cognitive fire-
walls around religious commitment without threatening commitment. Yet,
how can agents meet the substantial demands of information management?
Counterfactual and fictional reasoning may shed light on how agents man-
age both rock-jawed religious certainty, on the one hand, with a tendency to
separate religion from the hard demands of life, on the other. In counterfac-
tual and fictional reasoning we find fairly straightforward examples of how
psychological mechanisms permit agents to separate representations for off-
line treatment. Counterfactuals and fictions are lies we take seriously. When
planning how to retrieve a coconut from high in the palm tree, we can simu-
late a number of possible scenarios to help us develop an effective plan:
“Even if I hit the coconut with a projectile, I am unlikely to bring it down . . . these
short branches will not reach it . . . this long one is too thin . . . if I were to climb
the arch, I could position myself to strike the fruit with this thick stick, though
this might be dangerous (simulation of a hard fall) . . . HENCE: → (practical
inference) command young Friday up the tree → (execute) ‘Hey Friday, go up
that tree! ’ ”
Considering a future course of action is very different from believing that
these actions are actual. In thinking about what we might throw, we do not
take ourselves to be actually (now) throwing. We bracket off the representa-
tion of the merely possible from ontological commitment to the actual.
Contemplating fictional scenarios also requires bundling a set of representa-

tions for special off-line consideration. Here there is no thought that what is
imagined connects with a possible future. We can ask ourselves whether Anna
Karenina was unwise and feel sorry for her fate, without actually believing
either that Anna Karenina is an actual person or that she ever was or will be
actual. Fictional thought requires a meta-representational capacity to remove
certain representations from directly feeding inferences to motor and behav-
ioral systems. Notice again that without a substantial cognitive firebreak there
would be little to distinguish fictional thought from schizophrenic impair-
ment. To wonder about Anna Karenina is one thing, to believe she exists quite
another.
Call “IMAGINE” the meta-representational operator that binds a collec-
tion of representations for fictional consideration:
IMAGINE + [REPRESENTATIONS OF FICTION]
For example:
IMAGINE + [1) ANNA KARENINA COMMITS SUICIDE FOR REVENGE →
fictional inference 2) ANNA KARENINA WAS UNWISE]
+3) ANNA KARENINA DOES NOT EXIST
Without the IMAGINE operator binding a set of representations for special
consideration, we could not simultaneously hold 1, 2, and 3 to be true. More-
over because the contents of a collection of representation are in this instance
bound, we can draw specific inferences about (for example) characters of a
drama that are not specifically stated within the context of a drama. 2 and 3
can simultaneous be held without contradiction, because fictional represen-
tations are separated from actual representations in a format that avoids
confusion.
The simplest assumption is that something like a fictional meta-representa-
tional operator underlies our capacity for contemplating supernatural worlds
as the functions are, in many respects, similar. Certain representations must be
bound and bracketed so that internal inferential relations do not spill over into
practical domains. The difference, of course, is that to satisfy the conviction
constraint, the systems that represent belief to self-consciousness need to read
religious representations as true, indeed as certainly true. Yet we have seen how
that same system needs to remove religious representations from practical
involvement, again, much like counterfactual and fictional meta-representa-
tional markers do. Postulating specific meta-representational powers enables
us to understand why religious commitments, though genuinely believed, do
not disengage organisms from practical planning and from fearing all the
many obstacles that threaten life and human flourishing.
Call the operator that binds religious representations the ®IMAGINE

operator and examine the properties we can infer through an understanding
of the design constraints of a functional (indeed, non-lethal!) commitment-
signaling system.
®IMAGINE + [(religious) FICTION]
Here we suppose that ®IMAGINE operator directs information to the sys-
tems that self-consciously represent information as “TRUE” and also directs
information to the systems that mediate interaction with hostile reality as
“FICTION.”12 Given the restrictions and movements of such an operator,
religious agents may find it plausible to hold:
1) I believe that after death I will immediately go to a supremely wonderful
place.
And
2) I worry about death.
But without substantial qualification, the following will appear strange:
1*) I believe that after leaving I will immediately have a supremely wonderful
time.
And
2*) I worry about leaving this building.
Of course, if religion is to be adaptive, the scope operator must allow certain
moral permissions. Religion not only faces an encapsulation constraint but
also an integration constraint. Religious scope operators cannot be mere fictio-
nal operators and still remain functional. Minimally, religious cognition must
also allow for the production of hard to fake signals of commitment; it also
requires a willingness to act on such commitments. Without authenticating
signals and moral connections, religious beliefs would not be interesting to an
exchange audience. The costs of religion would not be repaid with adaptive
benefits. Hence, religious scope operators must be informationally porous. They
must allow specific types of information to migrate from bounded religious
fictions to the systems that guide social action. They must also feed informa-
tion to the systems that produce authenticating emotions and motivations.
Here we suppose that the ®IMAGINE marker directs information to the
systems that self-consciously represent religious information as “TRUE” and
12
For a non-adaptationist discussion of scope restriction and religious commitment see
Pyysiainen 2003.
also directs information to the systems that mediate interaction with hostile
reality as “FICTION.” Given the presence of such an operator, religious agents
may find it plausible to hold:
®IMAGINE + [1**) Unborn children have souls →2**) Abortion is the deliber-
ate taking of innocent life.]
PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (SIGNALING) → 3)** March in the
Abortion protest.
PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (GROUP EFFECT) → 4)** Get angry
with abortion doctors.
PRACTICAL MORAL INFERENCE (PERSONAL EFFECT) → 5)** Never
have an abortion.
THEORETICAL MORAL COMMITMENT → 6)** It is morally OK to kill to
prevent the deliberate taking of innocent life.
PRACTICAL OVERRIDE → 7)** Don’t kill an abortion doctor.
It would seem that because agents assume 2** and 6**, then they cannot
coherently hold 7**. For if abortion is murder, and one can kill to prevent
murder, it seems morally okay to kill abortion doctors. Yet few would draw
this moral conclusion, at least in practice (thankfully). The occurrence of 2**
within the parameters of a religious scope operator resolves the paradox. For
while religious commitments are believed with strong conviction, they are not
believed unrestrictedly—for example, when doing so would violate more
highly prioritized practical commitments. However, that religious moral infer-
ences are taken seriously is born out by the coherence of such moral inferences
as described in 3**, 4**, and 5**. These moral inferences seep through the
pours of religious scope restrictions, for people do act on religious conviction,
often at substantial personal cost.
Abortion morality illustrates the impact of external cultural variance on the
norm-inferring systems that guide religious morality. For example, in Japan,
abortion is considered the deliberate taking of a life, which Buddhism prohib-
its. Yet abortion occurs on a massive scale in Japan, probably over 400,000 per
year (accurate statistics are not kept). But abortion does not rend Japanese
society in two, as it does for example in the United States. The same Buddhist
communities that view abortion as the woeful ending of life also provide ritu-
als for addressing the complex emotions that those participating in abortion
practices experience. They call these Mizuko Kuyo rituals. Mizuko means
“child of the waters” and Kuyo “to give nourishment.” Parents partake in a
symbolic gifting of an intimate resource to the souls of their children, who are
acknowledged in these rituals, and they do so in highly public settings with
other parents. These are not rituals of profound contrition and shame. Nor is
abortion understood to be nothing but an ordinary medical procedure. These
rituals are death memorials. An offspring’s life ends before that of its parents,
a supreme tragedy. But parents—for an array of complex reasons—may also

feel relief for the ending of that life. Mizuko Kuyo rituals deal with complex
and contradictory feelings that the wide-scale practice of abortion generates.
There certainly are moral inferences that the religious interpretation of this
practice yields, but they are inferences that focus on spiritual healing rather
than on the tropes of murder and liberty ; for a contrary interpretation see. I
have urged that an invariant and core function of religious conviction is to
inspire moral commitment, yet which moral judgments religious commit-
ments inspire vary widely. Local and contingent cultural histories are relevant
to that causal story.
VIII. Conclusion
Let’s consider how the religious niche alternative fares against the Cultural
Maladapationist Hypothesis.
First, the poverty of stimulus. Religious commitment targets the non-natural,
but there is only nature. I have urged that we tend to believe in gods because
we possess cognitive dispositions that bring conviction to the religious infor-
mation supplied through local cultural encounters. The systems that control
religious cognition distort and bias information flow to support supernatural
belief and practice. We have these cognitive dispositions because, over the long
course of human evolution, they helped to reduce Machiavellian social com-
plexity. The adaptationist hypothesis suggests that only a few modifications to
the metarepresentational systems that support counterfactual and fictional thought
yield a functional cognitive design capable of supporting non-damaging, func-
tional religious commitment. I urged thinking of religious conviction as nor-
mative belief that is marked to self-consciousness “as true,” on the one hand,
but which, on the other hand, is silently not applied to many practical domains.
Picasso famously called art a lie that tells the truth. Such also is true of reli-
gious culture. We mistakenly believe in the gods, yet for this mistake are
rewarded dearly. These rewards are not supernatural benefits (so we suppose),
but rather those benefits uniquely accessible to highly cooperative groups.
Second, the cost problem. Religious commitment brings epistemic and prac-
tical costs. We get the world wrong, and we pay for it. Given these costs, it
appears that we should have evolved skeptical biases. We should have evolved
to fear and hate religion. Yet, supernatural commitment arises easily and
everywhere. The adaptationist alternative explains these costs as adaptations
that promote fragile but mutually benefiting co-operative exchange. The the-
ory suggests that many (though not all!) of these costs are signals that support
social exchange by vindicating the religious (and so, moral) intentions of reli-
gious exchange partners. Other costs can be viewed as investment costs that
support and maintain external religious environments, as technologies for co-
operation, and there may be other functions besides.
Third, the reality of manipulation. Religious commitment exposes agents to
exploitation. Religious agents remain exposed to information arrayed to
deceive, defraud, and manipulate them. However, because religious organiza-
tions are generally functional, and because religious authorities will generally
have survived the costly testing of their commitments, the risks for manipula-
tion are significantly reduced. Clearly, the risks are not eliminated. The guru
intent on a harem will always remain a threat, but the commitment-signaling
model predicts that the commitments of religious authorities will generally be
co-operative commitments. Even where they are not genuine, the benefits of
exchange may be so favorable as to tolerate the costs of propping up sacred
tyrants. Clearly, further analysis is required here. The worry that religion is a
tool elites use for the oppression of the masses is expressed vividly in, and
enters into current evolutionary theory in and. We do not exclude such mal-
adaptive variants of religious systems. Nevertheless, given the entrenchment of
religiosity in our psychological design, we think that the best explanation for
psychological dispositions to structured religious pre-commitments is that
they best served the biological interests of those who were prone to them over
the vast epochs of human evolution. The evidence suggests they helped to
make large scale cooperative exchange an evolutionary reality deep in the
human lineage.
Fourth, the role of intricate social learning. The Cultural Maladaptationist
Hypothesis underestimates the cultural practices, conventions, and resources
that structure religious experience. That is, it underestimates the importance
of stable religious niche construction. Commitment signaling moves religious
expression to the center of social life, as the commitments that underlie reli-
gious exchange would have been critical in the vast eras before democratic
policing. Parents have an interest in cultivating and orienting religious com-
mitments (which, as we have seen come easily to children) for the benefits
these commitments bring to children over the long haul. In living in a group
of strongly motivated co-religionists who reliably recognize the genuine com-
mitments of others, no external policing is required to support social sacrifice.
This may be true even in the face of substantial temptation to act in our self-
interest. For unlike ordinary extrinsically policed norms, religiously held val-
ues may be intrinsically satisfying, but these values do not appear merely
because we hold a belief. Strongly held convictions typically come through
powerful emotional experiences. The vast diversity of spiritual practices—body
manipulations, postures, chants and song, prayer, dance, and the like—generate
forms of consciousness that support supernatural commitment. These prac-
tices are poorly explained through conformist and success biases alone. They
are aspects of a peculiar form of human epistemic niche construction, one in
which cultural practices are artifacts arrayed to support very specific misun-
derstandings, which in turn are identified and dispersed in highly emotional
formats to police and co-ordinate the social activities of a tribe.
Fifth, the impact of encapsulation. Religious commitment is often expressed
as a belief. If it were believed as an ordinary unrestricted proposition it would
be deadly. Motivating beliefs and experiences of supernatural powers that do
not exist leads to very unwelcome, schizophrenic-like inferences. We have seen
how the encapsulation constraint may be satisfied through specialized reli-
gious scope operators that minimize inferential damage. For if information is
bound so that it does not migrate without limit from within an inflected
domain, then functional religiosity becomes available. We have seen how
counterfactual and fictional operators satisfy the encapsulation constraint. I
observed that only a minimal modification to these inflectors produces a
porous representational system, one that allows for the migration of religious
information to moral domains but not others.
Sixth, the patterns of moral integration. Religiosity is not just accepted as
technology; we experience moral passion over religious matters. We have seen
how religious commitments, when linked with pro-social exchange emotions,
generate powerfully adaptive solutions to core problems that beset a social spe-
cies equipped with Machiavellian minds and living in extended, internally
differentiated groups. In this way, selection has forged links that interfuse
religious commitments with moral commitment. It does so to empower co-
operative norms by rendering pre-commitment to those norms open to public
scrutiny. From a naturalistic stance, religiosity could be described as a kind of
adaptive madness as fictional understandings and moralistic wonderment
guides religious agents to the enormous benefits and efficiencies of reliable
cooperative life.
In the preceding, I have urged that The Cultural Maladaptationist Hypoth-
esis does not adequately explain the data surrounding religious culture. After
explaining CMH, I presented an adaptationist alternative. I demonstrated
how the apparently maladaptive epistemic and practical costs that surround
religious commitment are adaptations that better equip agents to solve the
exchange problems that arise in complex social environments. These adapta-
tions function at two related levels. Cognitive adaptations function to bias and
distort information flow, giving credibility to judgments that religious worlds
are real. I observed that the capacities that underwrite our beliefs in such
worlds are similar to the capacities that underwrite our ability to contemplate
counterfactual and fictional scenarios. Yet, whereas fiction helps us to under-
stand social complexity, religion helps us to reduce it. For religiosity’s most
basic evolutionary function is to support the norms of exchange that build
functionally integrated and efficient communities. Religious adaptations also
function at a cultural level. I argued that culturally transmissible features of
religion are best explained as technologies adapted to foster locally adaptive
religious commitment. In particular, I focused on technologies that identify
and project hard-to-fake signals of co-operative intention and motivation. I
also cited evidence that such technologies modify the social worlds agents
inhabit by supporting the norms on which co-operative patterns of exchange
depend. Thus, religious agents inhabit a strange but immensely functional
epistemic niche. Though fictional, the religious niche enables us to adjust to
the difficult circumstances of life by better adjusting us to each other. Though
not always adaptive, religiosity evolved as a powerful fuel for biological success.
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Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative To TH e Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis

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Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 67-107 www.brill.nl/mtsr

Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction?

I. The Standard Picture of Evolutionary Psychology

I begin by motivating a partial rejection of what might be called the “standard

e) Thus, the proximate functions of the mind/brain are ultimately designed to

Increasingly elaborate cognitive systems equip agents to solve increasingly

A massively modular architecture empowers an organism to functionally

II. Reservations with the Standard Picture

predator infested savannah. Our marvelous capacities for local improvisation

There are important psychological adaptations that promote our capacity

III. Cultural Maladaptations

We have seen that cultural information endures through hi-ﬁdelity transmis-

that makes up generation N was attractive enough to endure a selection at

IV. The Limits of Cultural Maladaptationism

Having used the literature on cultural evolution to enrich Dennett’s meme-

into adolescence, and in some religious traditions, are supported through a

V. Social complexity, commitment and pre-commitment

The literature on dual inheritance stresses the technological mastery that

VI. The Religious Niche and the Propagation of Religious Illusions

Call a “religious niche” a system of organized behavior and knowledge, together

Pig-smell + dead pig > Ordinary-smell + no pig

an eﬀective security technology.10 We need a signal that only religious agents

behavior because they assess the strength of commitment. Religious practice

marked, forever branded. Moreover, dramatic religious rituals may support

VII. Entrenched Psychological Features

Suppose we treat religious culture as adaptive technology. A dual inheritance

religious cultural systems as smoke and mirror houses intricately arrayed to

retain religious commitment. The conviction constraint is resolved by an inter-

Contemplating ﬁctional scenarios also requires bundling a set of representa-

Call the operator that binds religious representations the ®IMAGINE

a supreme tragedy. But parents—for an array of complex reasons—may also

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