Jeune Street

David Sloan Wilson, Director of the Evolution Institute, applies the evolutionary theory of group selection to make an atheist case for religion:

The empirical evidence points to substantial group-level benefits for most enduring religions.

Benefits include defining the group, coordinating action to achieve shared goals and developing elaborate mechanisms to prevent cheating. The same evolutionary processes that cause individual organisms and social insect colonies to function as adaptive units also cause religious groups to function as adaptive units. Religious believers frequently compare their communities to a single body or a beehive. This is not just a poetic metaphor but turns out to be correct from an evolutionary perspective.

...I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.

While I think viewing religion as a socio-biological phenomenon provides a very limited perspective, it produces some useful observations. Chief among them is that religion generates patterns of trust, reciprocity and cooperation that generates and sustains social complexity (and survival). It's good to see an evolutionary biologist, aside from Robert Wright, calling attention to these social functions of religion.

Now, how do we define 'religion'? That's another question.