Supernatural Power and Cultural Evolution

An evolutionary perspective that emphasizes the observable consequences of religious faith, and recognizes how beliefs can give rise to behavior that regulates access to essential material resources, may be productive in explaining the early origins and universality of belief in supernatural power.

All human cultures appear to include faith in supernatural power, and it seems that this tradition has played an active and essential role in influencing how our ancestors perceived and adapted to their environment. This relationship between human belief and adaptive behavior may have played a critical role in shaping cultural evolution.

The history of any society can demonstrate how sacred beliefs change over time, how they are created or borrowed, consciously or unconsciously, and how they may be subsequently abandoned. Beliefs about the natural environment and the supernatural environment are part of a larger system of learned ideas and customs that comprise a culture. And entire cultures change over time in the same way beliefs do. Human populations no longer adapt to environmental change by evolving generically. We now adapt to change by altering our beliefs and behavior. Human evolution from Australopithecines to Cro-Magnon, the first of our ancestors to have the physical features that characterize all human populations today, depended largely on slowly changing gene frequencies. For at least the past 60,000 years, human biological evolution has been relatively inactive. During this time, the evolution of beliefs has come to determine which populations had the greatest capacity to survive.

Cultural and Group Beliefs

At an early stage in cultural evolution, all societies began to believe in supernatural power, the common denominator of all religious beliefs. Tribal societies studied by anthropologists have provided numerous examples of belief systems that may be similar to those of our ancient ancestors. Modern American proclivities to endorse many forms of supernatural power may make us more intellectually similar to tribal societies than to other industrialized ones, but all human cultures today include faith in some spiritual beings and forces. From an evolutionary perspective, this universality suggests that such beliefs must have played some essential role in ensuring the wellbeing of human populations. And here the reference is not to miracles, magical cures, and spiritual intervention. It is the belief in such things that is likely to be instrumental in this regard, nor the things believed in.

Individuals and small groups are capable of cherishing beliefs that are detrimental to their physical welfare, as exemplified by the followers of Heaven's Gate in California or Jim Jones in Guyana. Cults often begin by promoting behavior that is antithetical to the physical wellbeing of members, but those that evolve into established denominations do so by becoming less exclusive and more reflective of the surrounding culture. Consequently, they abandon their self-destructive behavior. Individuals and fringe groups may hold religious beliefs that compromise their survival, but beliefs that are traditional and generalized throughout a society are likely to enhance the survival of that society. It is as if individuals can afford to be really stupid, but the collective wisdom of a society must be far more practical in its consequence.

Some populations maintain customs that threaten the survival of certain individuals and, at the same time, help to ensure the survival of the society. For example, the belief that first-born females are cursed and the practice of female infanticide in a tribal society can effectively check population expansion in an environment where unlimited growth would likely lead to mass starvation. Similarly, the traditional prohibition against slaughtering cows in India, where famine was not unusual, meant that many poor people would starve rather than eat beef. But the belief that cows were sacred enabled them and the oxen they produced to survive, thus ensuring that beasts of burden would be available for their essential role in this agrarian society. Had the consumption of beef not been taboo in this largely impoverished and rapidly expanding population, cows would be consumed faster than they could reproduce, oxen would no longer be available for plowing, agricultural output would steadily decline, and the entire society would be hard-pressed to survive.

Proposing that traditional faith in supernatural power has utility for the believers is not at all new. Sigmund Freud, who did nor much care for religion, nevertheless gave it credit for its emotional functions such as reducing anxieties. And Emile Durkheim, regarded as the first sociologist, proposed that belief in magic and spiritual beings was highly beneficial for the maintenance of society. But anthropologists now are suggesting that belief in supernatural power is more practical than meeting mere emotional and social needs; it may have played an essential role in ensuring that our ancestors' material needs were met.