devotees and make them sick. Nuer, therefore, do not hesitate to bargain with these spirits, speaking through their mediums, in a downright way which astonished me. The sense of the bargain is always the same: if we give you an ox or a sheep or a goat will you leave the sick man alone that he may not be troubled by you?” 37
The sacrificed animal is the intermediary between the sacrificer in the living world and the gods in the supernatural world. In some religions the sacrificer sacrifices himself, but this, Hubert and Mauss note, can only happen when the sacrificer is himself a god. In Christianity, the sacrifice has become the death of Jesus, and is performed by the priest metaphorically in the communion rite. Jesus was killed by men of ill will “but by a complex transformation this has retrospectively become a sacrifice, in that the murder was willed by God,” writes the social anthropologist Edmund Leach. “The sacrifice is now a persisting channel through which the grace of God can How to the devout believer. The donor of the sacrifice is Christ himself and the priest, in offering the bread and wine to the congregation as ‘the body and blood of Christ,’ is, by implication, timelessly repeating the sacrifice at the behest of the divine Donor.... The Christian Mass, as a whole, is a transformation of the Jewish Passover and the crucified Christ ‘is’ the sacrificial paschal lamb, ‘the Lamb of God.’ ” 38
The remarkable variety of the world’s religions can thus be seen to depend on a handful of common behaviors. Foremost among them is the belief in the gods as awesome governors of society and enforcers of moral standards. Though the gods are known to live in the supernatural realm, people believe that they closely follow events in this world and can be swayed by prayer, sacrifice and appropriate rituals. Societies whose members embraced such beliefs would have been more cohesive and united in attaining difficult goals, whether in peace or warfare. Because an instinct for faith would have promoted survival, genes that favored such an instinct eventually became universal in the early human population.
Religious Behavior and Genetics
The universality of religious behavior suggests that, as with language, it is mediated by specialized structures in the brain. Language is known tobe supported by neural circuitry in certain regions of the brain because, if these regions are damaged even minutely, specific defects appear in apatient’s linguistic abilities. No such dedicated regions have yet been identified with certainty for the neural circuitry that may underliereligious behavior. Excessive religiosity is a well-known symptom of temporal lobeepilepsy and could reflect the activation of neural circuits associated with religious behavior. But there is no agreement on this point, and the search for such circuitry in people who don’t suffer from epilepsy is “suggestive but not conclusive,” according to the neurologist Steven Schachter. 39 It could be that religious behavior itself does not require a dedicated brain region large enough to be detectable by present methods.
The fact that religious behavior is universal strongly suggests that it is an adaptation, meaning a trait shaped by natural selection. If it is an adaptation, it must have a genetic basis, such as a suite of genes that are activated during development and wire up the neural circuits needed to induce the behavior. Identification of such genes would be the best possible proof that religious behavior has an evolutionary basis. The lack of any progress in this direction so far is not particularly surprising; the genes that underlie complex diseases have started to be identified only recently and funds to support such expensive efforts are not available for studying nonmedical complex traits.
An indirect approach to the genetic basis of religious behavior is through psychological studies of adopted children and of twins. Such studies pick
The sacrificed animal is the intermediary between the sacrificer in the living world and the gods in the supernatural world. In some religions the sacrificer sacrifices himself, but this, Hubert and Mauss note, can only happen when the sacrificer is himself a god. In Christianity, the sacrifice has become the death of Jesus, and is performed by the priest metaphorically in the communion rite. Jesus was killed by men of ill will “but by a complex transformation this has retrospectively become a sacrifice, in that the murder was willed by God,” writes the social anthropologist Edmund Leach. “The sacrifice is now a persisting channel through which the grace of God can How to the devout believer. The donor of the sacrifice is Christ himself and the priest, in offering the bread and wine to the congregation as ‘the body and blood of Christ,’ is, by implication, timelessly repeating the sacrifice at the behest of the divine Donor.... The Christian Mass, as a whole, is a transformation of the Jewish Passover and the crucified Christ ‘is’ the sacrificial paschal lamb, ‘the Lamb of God.’ ” 38
The remarkable variety of the world’s religions can thus be seen to depend on a handful of common behaviors. Foremost among them is the belief in the gods as awesome governors of society and enforcers of moral standards. Though the gods are known to live in the supernatural realm, people believe that they closely follow events in this world and can be swayed by prayer, sacrifice and appropriate rituals. Societies whose members embraced such beliefs would have been more cohesive and united in attaining difficult goals, whether in peace or warfare. Because an instinct for faith would have promoted survival, genes that favored such an instinct eventually became universal in the early human population.
Religious Behavior and Genetics
The universality of religious behavior suggests that, as with language, it is mediated by specialized structures in the brain. Language is known tobe supported by neural circuitry in certain regions of the brain because, if these regions are damaged even minutely, specific defects appear in apatient’s linguistic abilities. No such dedicated regions have yet been identified with certainty for the neural circuitry that may underliereligious behavior. Excessive religiosity is a well-known symptom of temporal lobeepilepsy and could reflect the activation of neural circuits associated with religious behavior. But there is no agreement on this point, and the search for such circuitry in people who don’t suffer from epilepsy is “suggestive but not conclusive,” according to the neurologist Steven Schachter. 39 It could be that religious behavior itself does not require a dedicated brain region large enough to be detectable by present methods.
The fact that religious behavior is universal strongly suggests that it is an adaptation, meaning a trait shaped by natural selection. If it is an adaptation, it must have a genetic basis, such as a suite of genes that are activated during development and wire up the neural circuits needed to induce the behavior. Identification of such genes would be the best possible proof that religious behavior has an evolutionary basis. The lack of any progress in this direction so far is not particularly surprising; the genes that underlie complex diseases have started to be identified only recently and funds to support such expensive efforts are not available for studying nonmedical complex traits.
An indirect approach to the genetic basis of religious behavior is through psychological studies of adopted children and of twins. Such studies pick
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