The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures [Hardcover]

Nicholas Wade (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 12, 2009

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

For at least the last fifty thousand years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given, either by believers or atheists, to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have an evolutionary basis. Did religion evolve, in other words, beacause it helped people in early societies survive?

In this original and controversial book, longtime reporter for The New York Times's Science section Nicholas Wade gathers new evidence showing why religion became so essential in the course of human evolution, and how an instinct for faith has been hardwired into human nature. This startling thesis is sure to catch the attention of both believers and nonbelievers. People of faith may not warm up to the view that the mind's receptivity to religion has been shaped by evolution. Atheists may not embrace the idea that religious expression evolved because it conferred essential benefits on ancient societies and their successors. As The Faith Instinct argues however, both groups must address the fact, little understood before now, that religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature.

How did we evolve to believe? Wade shows that the instinct for religious behavior is wired into our neural circuits much like our ability to learn a language. Religion provided the earliest human societies with the equivalents of law and government, giving these societies an edge in the struggle for survival. AS a force that binds people together and coordinates social behavior, religion supported another significant set of social behaviors: aggression and warfare. Religious behavior, both good and ill, will remain an indelible component of human nature so long as human societies need the security and cohesion that belief provides.

Social scientists once predicted that religion would progressively fade away as societies advanced in wealth and education. They were wrong. The first objective and nonpolemical book of its kind, The Faith Instinct reveals that to understand the persistence of faith, one must first acknowledge that religious behavior is embedded in human nature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Taking up where he left off in Before the Dawn (2006), an engaging examination of human evolution in light of explorations in the human genome, longtime New York Times science reporter Wade deftly explores the evolutionary basis of religion. He draws on archeology, social science and natural science as he vigorously shows that the instinct for religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature because, like other human social traits that have evolved over many thousands of years, the practice of religion conferred a decided survival advantage to those who practiced it. Natural selection operates according to principles of survival and reproduction of offspring with heritable traits. Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages—such as internal cohesion—that lead to a society's members having more surviving children. More importantly, since religions have evolved as their societies have developed, is it possible, Wade asks, for religions to be reworked so that as many people as possible can exercise their innate religious instincts to their own and society's benefits? Sure to be controversial for its reduction of religion to a product of natural selection, Wade's study compels us to reconsider the role of evolution in shaping even our most sacred human creations. (Nov. 16)
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From Booklist

Evolutionary studies have accumulated enough convincing explanations based on enough factual discovery for it to be indisputable that religion is biologically rooted. Wade, a science journalist whose vita includes stints with the revered journals Nature and Science before he joined the New York Times science section, draws on the most famous and influential researchers to synthesize the story of religion through the ages. While religion has utility for the individual, it is overwhelmingly important for group cohesion and loyalty, as evidenced by the mass dancing, chanting, and trance-seeking of hunter-gatherer cultures, in which what much later Christian idealists called the priesthood of all believers genuinely obtained. When stationary communities arose, hierarchies followed in all enterprises, including religion, and if anything, religion’s community-binding function became more crucial as populations and then technology burgeoned. By now, it should be obvious that religion not only won’t but can’t be expunged. There is so much more in this compact account, including cultural-evolutionary explanations of the three great monotheisms—enough, in fact, to make it a cornerstone of popular religion-and-science studies. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (November 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202281
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202285
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion
  • #95 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Sociology

More About the Author

Dear Amazon Reader,
I'm the author of two books on recent human evolution. They are addressed to the general reader interested in knowing what the evolutionary past tells us about human nature and society today.
One, Before the Dawn, traces how people have evolved during the last 50,000 years. As of this writing the book has received almost 100 reviews from Amazon readers, most of whom have been kind enough to say they liked it.
The other, The Faith Instinct, looks specifically at religion. In it I first explore how religious behavior evolved in early humans, and then follow the cultural development of religion from hunter gatherer societies to those of the present day. One of the book's themes is that religious behavior evolved because it conferred significant advantages on the first societies to practice it, and that it is of continuing value today. The book should be of interest both to people of faith and to those with none. It does not attack the central position of either side, having nothing to say about whether or not God exists; it's about religious behavior, which everyone agrees does exist. Publication date is November 11, 2009.
How did I came to write these books? Not by any very direct or logical route. I was born in Aylesbury, England, then a rural outpost where cattle were stalled in the central town square on market days. I was educated at Eton, a school founded for poor scholars by Henry VI in 1440 AD, and then at King's College, Cambridge, also founded by Henry VI. Perhaps this connection with the medieval past gave me a fondness and respect for history. Still, I got my degree in science and have spent much of my life as a journalist writing about scientific issues of various kinds.
My first serious job was at Nature, a leading weekly scientific magazine based in London, after which I moved to Washington DC to join Science, Nature's principal rival in the United States. Nature and Science exist mostly to publish research findings but both have news sections addressed to scientists. It was in the course of writing news articles for Science that I learned of the epic rivalry between Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally to win the Nobel prize. Their 21 year race was the subject of my book The Nobel Duel, (now alas out of print).
Another book that grew out of reporting for Science was Betrayers of the Truth, written with my colleague William Broad. We analyzed the many cases of scientific fraud we had reported for Science, trying to find common patterns in who commits fraud, why they do it, and why they are almost never detected by the vaunted checking mechanisms of science like peer review and replication. The book appeared many years ago, but nothing has changed since. Fraud continues to be detected by those with personal knowledge of the deceiver, not by the official procedural safeguards of science.
Leaving Science, I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer and wrote about political issues to do with science, the environment and defense. After 10 years of issuing opinions, I moved to the more objective realm of the paper's science section, first as its editor and then as a reporter. A great benefit of reporting is that the job requires speaking to the leading experts in a field, through whom one has the chance to become very well informed - the perfect vantage point from which to write books. I wrote Lifescript (2001), an account of the race to sequence the human genome and its consequences. Then followed Before the Dawn (2006), the story of evolution since modern humans dispersed some 50,000 years ago from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa.
Before the Dawn gave me the idea of trying to reconstruct the genesis of religion, a crucial social behavior that clearly emerged before modern humans left Africa. The Faith Instinct takes the reader from the religious practices of the ancestral human population, to the spring and harvest festivals of early agricultural societies, the historical origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the role of religion today in morality, reproductive behavior, warfare and statecraft. I learned much fascinating information from writing the book and reached conclusions that I hadn't at all expected to arrive at. If a book is a surprise to its author, as this one was to me, there's a chance it will contain something new and interesting for the reader, as I hope will be the case.
- Nicholas Wade

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

162 of 169 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, A Great Evolutionary Account of Religion, November 22, 2009

By 

R. Stone "bradlowellstone" (Lawrenceville, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Hardcover)

Nicholas Wade established himself years ago as one of the country's best science journalists but The Faith Instinct is his finest book. Indeed, it is by far the best book on religion written from an evolutionary perspective, far surpassing the cranky and deeply flawed works of Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins. I say this because these other books fail to acknowledge that religion is universal and must have been adaptive, while Wade starts with that fact and it informs the whole book. As he puts it early in the book, "Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages--such as a group's strong internal cohesion and high morale in war--that would lead to a society's members having more surviving children, and religion for such reasons would be favored by natural selection." (p.12).

After the introductory chapter on the nature of religion, the book has an excellent chapter on the work of moral psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and Mark Hauser. The work of moral psychologists at this point vindicates Hume over Kant because the evidence is overwhelming that sentiments are more important than reasoning in morality. This chapter is followed by three chapters that are at the crux of Wade's argument--"The Evolution of Religious Behavior", "Music, Dance and Trance", and "Ancestral Religion." All three chapters deal chiefly with ancestral religion drawing mainly from research on three contemporary hunting and gathering societies--the !Kung San, the Andaman Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. He says, "With all three peoples, religion was a major part of their daily lives. Religious practice involved all-night ceremonies with vigorous singing and dancing and intense emotional involvement. The emphasis was on ritual rather than belief...And the central purpose of the rites in all three groups was to bind the community together and fortify the social fabric"(p.118). Religion excites emotional attachment to one's group and manages to sometimes subsume self-interest to the good of the whole group, while at the same time, and for these reasons, fostering hatred of other groups.

The remainder of the book treats religion after the domestication of plants and the eventual emergence of states. Of course such religion is important but it is ancestral religion that is alone significant to comprehending how and why religion evolved and is adaptive. Unlike highly unequal agricultural societies, foraging societies were and are egalitarian, and religion more than anything else provided/provides the social glue that made it possible for societies to out-compete and/or defeat their neighbors. Ancestral religion was about social cohesion and cohesive social groups defeated other social groups when at war.

One of the most important sections in the book, titled "Religious Behavior and Group Selection" (pp.67-74), contained in the chapter "Evolution of Religious Behavior," describes the selective advantages of groups unified by religion. Wade discusses a recent article by David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson arguing for the plausibility of group selection. David Sloan Wilson has been making this case for decades and ten years ago E.O. Wilson scoffed at the argument. The remarkable comeback of group selection is strongly indicated by the conversion of one of America's most influential evolutionary thinkers, E.O. Wilson.

This may seem an odd point to share a criticism of this superb book, but Wade fails to distinguish group selection of genes--which is theoretically possible but likely extremely rare--and group selection of (human) cultural variants. The latter has been the main focus of group selection theorists focused upon human beings, thinkers such as Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, William Durham, and Herbert Gintis. This is, in fact, a significant and surprising lacuna, given how widely Wade reads, but one easily remedied by the eager and energetic if they read Wade first and then move to the work of these other thinkers.

Brad Lowell Stone

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Get it from the library, April 13, 2010

By 

SB - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Hardcover)

I feel that Wade got things backwards in this book. He says that religion evolved and is necessary for survival because it creates group cohesion. Wade believes that ritual, group solidarity and moral behavior were products of religion. Since these things are necessary for survival, Wade concludes that religion evolved as a necessity for survival. However, I think it is much more accurate to say that ritual, group cohesion and moral behavior are genetic and came before supernatual belief systems. All of these are observable in primates and both ritual and group cohesion are observable in other animals.

Religion is much more likely a product of our genetic tendency to form social groups and engage in ritual. Codes of behavior are needed to hold social groups together. Even street gangs and crimimal organizations have rituals and codes of behavior. They have harsh consequences for violation of group rules. Religions bear a lot of similarity to other social groupings, such as armies and gangs, in their structures.

As a result of Wade's idea that religion itself is genetic rather than a product of other genetic tendencies, he spends a good portion of the book explaining why we absolutely have to have religion. He also has to explain why secular societies in Europe are not coming apart (the religious minority is enough to create the needed moral climate), why atheistic China isn't falling apart (their largely Han Chinese ethnic identity is enough to create stability) and why religiously diverse America isn't falling apart (the idea of America is like a religious concept in itself).

The early part of the book is very interesting. However, if you don't buy into Wade's idea that religion is a survival mechanism you will find much of the book annoying to listen to (I bought the audio version). It is worth getting from the library. Despite the poor conclusions there is some good information.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wade sheds light on a complex issue, January 14, 2010

By 

Meade Fischer (Santa Cruz county, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Hardcover)

Nicholas Wade cleared up a mystery for me. The more I read about and thought about religion, the more trouble I had understanding how educated people could overlook the inconsistencies and contradictions in their religions and simply accept them uncritically as a given, Modern scholarship and science would seem to make traditional religion obsolete, yet it thrives.

Wade's, The Faith Instinct: How religion evolved and why it endures offers a fascinating theory: The tendency toward religious belief has genetically evolved as an adaptive mechanism to help early human societies survive. Early belief in supernatural agencies, along with the associated rituals, made early hunter gather bands more cohesive, giving them the sense of community necessary to work together for their mutual benefit and to make them willing to risk their lives for the group during the many wars that have always been a fact of life.

Wade supports his argument with references from biology, sociology, anthropology and historic scholarship, quoting sources like Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Samuel Huntington, Emile Durkheim and the Bible.

While neither supporting or denigrating religion, Wade systematically spells out how it has had survival benefits, which continue to operate into modern times. He traces the evolution of religion, using early studies of isolated, primitive tribes, historical accounts of how new religions developed from older ones and the evolution from preliterate rituals to modern text based faiths.

The issue of group selection was a sticking point, with many biologists arguing against the idea that natural selection could operate at the group, rather than the individual level. However, it does seem that group selection need not be proposed for hunter gathers willing to risk their lives in warfare. A warrior does not fight assuming he will die, and in fact the majority survive. However, a brave warrior elevates his status, allowing him more opportunities to mate and pass on his genes to the next generation. War heroes make attractive mates.

While scholarship is divided on many of the points Wade raises, he makes a coherent case for the evolutionary benefits of religion, while illuminating its history, without addressing the thorny issue of the existence or non-existence of supernatural beings.

In the end I came away with a broader and deeper understanding of the issue, and that's the best thing one can say about a book. I consider this a must read for anyone interested in the subject of religion.