DARWIN'S GOD 3
\By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: March 4, 2007
Atran, equally unflappable, did go to see her — and ended up working for Mead, spending
much of his time exploring the cabinets of curiosities in her tower office at the American
Museum of Natural History. Soon he switched his major to anthropology.
Many of the museum specimens were religious, Atran says. So were the artifacts he dug
up on archaeological excursions in Israel in the early ’70s. Wherever he turned, he
encountered the passion of religious belief. Why, he wondered, did people work so hard
against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real
and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?
Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran
realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position
for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.
While still an undergraduate, Atran decided to explore these questions by organizing a
conference on universal aspects of culture and inviting all his intellectual heroes: the
linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologist Jean Piaget, the anthropologists Claude Levi-
Strauss and Gregory Bateson (who was also Margaret Mead’s ex-husband), the Nobel
Prize-winning biologists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob. It was 1974, and the only site
he could find for the conference was at a location just outside Paris. Atran was a scraggly
22-year-old with a guitar who had learned his French from comic books. To his
astonishment, everyone he invited agreed to come.
Atran is a sociable man with sharp hazel eyes, who sparks provocative conversations the
way other men pick bar fights. As he traveled in the ’70s and ’80s, he accumulated friends
who were thinking about the issues he was: how culture is transmitted among human
groups and what evolutionary function it might serve. “I started looking at history, and I
wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious
foundation as its raison d’être,” he says. Soon he turned to an emerging subset of
evolutionary theory — the evolution of human cognition.
Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of
interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not
tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence
of other mental modules.
Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary
use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not
exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that
constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the
individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”
At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists
— Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at
Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the
byproduct theory.
Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves
adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of
adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red
instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that
contains hemoglobin.
Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists.
Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.
Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his
colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive
value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the
V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any
purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.
In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase,
for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But
if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the
staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space
under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.
“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental
properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of
building a device with such structural complexity.”
The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the
evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?
\By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: March 4, 2007
Atran, equally unflappable, did go to see her — and ended up working for Mead, spending
much of his time exploring the cabinets of curiosities in her tower office at the American
Museum of Natural History. Soon he switched his major to anthropology.
Many of the museum specimens were religious, Atran says. So were the artifacts he dug
up on archaeological excursions in Israel in the early ’70s. Wherever he turned, he
encountered the passion of religious belief. Why, he wondered, did people work so hard
against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real
and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?
Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran
realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position
for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.
While still an undergraduate, Atran decided to explore these questions by organizing a
conference on universal aspects of culture and inviting all his intellectual heroes: the
linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologist Jean Piaget, the anthropologists Claude Levi-
Strauss and Gregory Bateson (who was also Margaret Mead’s ex-husband), the Nobel
Prize-winning biologists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob. It was 1974, and the only site
he could find for the conference was at a location just outside Paris. Atran was a scraggly
22-year-old with a guitar who had learned his French from comic books. To his
astonishment, everyone he invited agreed to come.
Atran is a sociable man with sharp hazel eyes, who sparks provocative conversations the
way other men pick bar fights. As he traveled in the ’70s and ’80s, he accumulated friends
who were thinking about the issues he was: how culture is transmitted among human
groups and what evolutionary function it might serve. “I started looking at history, and I
wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious
foundation as its raison d’être,” he says. Soon he turned to an emerging subset of
evolutionary theory — the evolution of human cognition.
Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of
interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not
tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence
of other mental modules.
Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary
use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not
exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that
constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the
individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”
At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists
— Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at
Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the
byproduct theory.
Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves
adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of
adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red
instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that
contains hemoglobin.
Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists.
Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.
Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his
colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive
value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the
V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any
purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.
In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase,
for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But
if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the
staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space
under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.
“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental
properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of
building a device with such structural complexity.”
The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the
evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?
Minorities Interests
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