Just saw a very interesting lecture by David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Well, maybe it wasn't so much a great lecture as it was an exposure to something completely novel to me.
He began by talking about recent (I have no idea how recent) work in evolutionary research that talks about selection for group behavior. Sure, we've all heard of the selfish gene, but he makes the argument that selection actually takes place for cooperation. Well, sometimes at least.
He described an experiment with chickens where the best egg layers were chosen from a bunch of groups, but they turned out to breed completely psychopathic hens that pecked each other to death. Instead, the best group of egg layers was selected, and they did very well, because they cooperated with each other. (I don't know nothin bout no chickens, but Pam does, and her description of brooding behavior describes why this experiment may have turned out the way it did.) In this case, the egg laying trait was selected by the group rather than the individual.
He further developed the argument by stating that selection for social control seems to be preferred to selection for altruistic self-sacrifice. The end result of this selection is that conflict moves from inter-individual behavior to inter-group behavior. There's an example of this that was gleaned from the Human Relations Area Files, which is a ethnography database that allows for cross-cultural behavior analysis. This example shows that group-based social control is actually the evolutionarily preferred method.
This brings us to religion.
Wilson reports that the prevailing view from the sociology of religion folks is that religion is a by-product of the evolution of human culture. (Someone named Stark is the chief proponent.) You might not be able to tell that by just looking at religion, but if you look at the whole suite of traits that surround religion, overall it has social benefits. By itself however, it seems to make no sense. He had a great example from ascetic Janism, that I won't go into here.
So, his method got me really excited. He argues that the bulk of religious information is rather reverently (my handwritten notes say 'prayerfully') descriptive. Then there's new-ish social science work that is all quantitative and scientific. (Is this starting to sound familiar? When I first got exposed to STS literature, I couldn't help but draw comparisons to LIS.) His argument then was that this was exactly the situation when Darwin came up with his theory of evolution--the bulk of the literature was descriptive: he just mined it for his data. (Of course, an hour later I see that he's comparing himself to Darwin, which might be absurdly pompous, but he didn't come off that way at all.)
Someone else, along the way, had already drawn this sort of comparison with early Christians: they were actually autonomous groups that were 'adaptive units' --evolving their own belief systems in order to function. The codification of the gospel literature was actually a central authority asserting itself over these little groups. (I think this was Elaine Pagel, 1995.) His next step in this process was to take a 'random sample' of religions by opening an encyclopedia of world religions and studying each of them to see if this sort of evolutionary group behavior was common. He found it was! (Note: at this point, I need to figure out a way to take a random sample of information communities.)
He ended with an 1887 quote from Darwin, which I can only paraphrase here, and I think meshes really well with my own views of LIS: Looking back on a fossil hunting trip with a teacher, before the theory of glaciation took hold, Darwin remembered that the signs of the glacier were all around him, and that the only way they could have been less obvious was if the valley was still filled with a glacier. That said, you can say that when you're doing science in the absence of theory, you can't see what's right in front of your face.
In the Q&A, he ended by coming back to this quote, and remarking that before evolution, science couldn't explain anything functionally--it could only describe. At first, I took this as an absurd statement--sure, maybe biology couldn't, but math and physics seemed to be doing just fine. Then I realized that there weren't really such things as math and physics and biology when Darwin came out--there was just natural philosophy. It was just at about Darwin's time that we started to have disciplines.
Pretty dang brilliant. You always hear about the 'real scientists' getting annoyed at the social scientists coming and poking around on their turf. Do the social scientists get annoyed at this guy?
Posted by jonjab at January 9, 2004 06:25 PM