Modernization Theory is Hokum.

[jmm99]

This is an interesting article by Allen MacNeill (an evolutionary psychologist at Cornell), The Capacity for Religious Experience Is an Evolutionary Adaptation to Warfare (2004) (his BLUF):

Genes, Memes, or Both?

It is extremely unlikely that any human behavior (or the behavior of any animal with a nervous system complex enough to allow learning) is the result of the expression of any single gene. On the contrary, it is almost universally accepted among evolutionary psychologists that all behaviors show a blend of innate and learned components.

What is interesting to ethologists is not the question of “how much,” but rather the much simpler question of “how”? One answer that has been suggested is that there are two different carriers of information that can be transmitted among humans: genes and memes. According to Dawkins, a meme is “a unit of cultural transmission” corresponding to things like “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (1976, p. 206). Dawkins even addressed the possibility that God Himself might be a meme:

Consider the idea of God…. What is it about the idea of a god which give it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next …. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture (p. 207).

Is all of religion simply a meme, or more precisely, a “meme complex”? And does the answer to this question tell us anything about the connection between the capacity for religion and warfare? There are at least three hypotheses for the mode of transmission of the capacity for religious experience:

• Hypothesis 1: The capacity for religious experience might be almost entirely innate; that is, it arises almost entirely out of “hard-wired” neural circuits in the human brain, which produce the sensations, thoughts, and behaviors that we call religious.

• Hypothesis 2: The capacity for religious experience might be almost entirely learned; that is, it arises almost entirely from concepts (i.e., “memes”) that are transmitted from person to person via purely linguistic means, and without any underlying neurological predisposition to their acquisition.

• Hypothesis 3: The capacity for religious experience might arise from a combination of innate predispositions and learning; that is, like many animal behaviors, the capacity for religious experience might be the result of an innate predisposition to learn particular memes.

Both Boyer’s and Atran’s theories of the origin of religion are closest to the third hypothesis. From the foregoing analysis, it should also be clear that my own hypothesis for the origin of the capacity for religious experience is closest to hypothesis 3. However, unlike Boyer and Atran, I have proposed that the specific context within which the human nervous system has evolved has been persistent, albeit episodic, warfare.

This article was presented at a 2003 NEI conference (David Livingstone Smith; The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, and Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others), "Religion, Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology", and published by Konrad Lorenz Institute in 2004 (link), which presents all the articles presented at the conference.

MacNeill has tackled a political hot potato - for which I give him credit. But, a lot of people, who sincerely believe that religion is peace, will be disturbed by the inferences that can be drawn. And, as were drawn by Jack Miles (the lede to MacNeill's piece):

If we were forced to say in one word who God is and in another what the Bible is about, the answer would have to be: God is a warrior, and the Bible is about victory. —Jack Miles, God, A Biography (1995, p. 106)

Regards

Mike

PS: Also from Allen MacNeill, Evolutionary Psychology II (2011; 122 pp.), a lecture course on the same topics - suggested readings start with Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (1974), and include Wrangham, Kelly, Keeley, etc.