Motivation

Richerson and Boyd make a interesting point of relating group selection theory and group-beneficial beliefs to religion. To those authors, the adoption of religion can be modeled as a propensity to imitate successful neighbors. Christianity, according to the authors, experienced great success in attracting Roman converts because Romans “were attracted to what they saw as a better quality of life.”

I have two main concerns about applying group selection theory to religion, and how religion may play a role in regulating group behavior and sociality:

1. Richerson and Boyd seem to underestimate the transaction costs involved in attracting individuals to a religion, new or old. True, evangelizing religions such as Christianity and Islam go to pains to ease the conversion process. There are other religions, however, that require months or year-long conversions, and still others that do not reveal the religion’s utmost secrets but to only a select few. To most, the transaction cost of converting to a new religion may outweigh the benefits of the “better quality of life”.

2. The authors’ arguments on the spread of norms in the context of religion is largely circular. The authors mention that “the better norm will spread because people imitate their more-successful neighbors.” However, the majority, if not all, of the world’s religions can be viewed as perceiving success itself in various ways. Is the maximization of individual and/or group success defined by maximizing the ability to reproduce (see Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, where use of contraception is prohibited), or is population control and reproductive choice through the use of contraception (see certain Protestant denominations, Reform Judaism) more reflective of Darwinian “success”?

Take this combined with the fact that throughout history religious adoption has often occurred through coercion rather than assimilation, and it seems to me that religion is not a good example of the spread of group-beneficial cultural variants.