Cultural Evolution of Religion, Spirituality and Ritual: Impacts On Human Cooperation

From the classic gene-centred view of evolution, cooperation is a mystery. This paper reviews the cultural evolutionary approach, which asks how genes and culture both carry information across generations to produce adaptive responses. Cultural evolution approaches ritual, religion and spirituality as collective responses to cooperation challenges. Ritual engages with individual and collective neuro-biological responses that cue group cohesion and facilitate trust. Ritual simultaneously cues social learning and can alleviate anxiety by downregulating neurological arousal. Religion forms a complex set of socio-cultural behaviours and beliefs that facilitate group identification and may help to resolve classic dilemmas of cheaters and free-riders who threaten the long-term survival of cooperative systems. Spirituality engages ways of being that are targeted at relational, holistic, and communal awareness that facilitates healthy relationships among individuals, communities and ecosystems. The cultural evolutionary view can reveal an underlying sensibility to beliefs and behaviours that seem on their surface nonsensical to an outside observer—helping to explain why they persist across groups despite costliness to individuals. It can also help to shed light on why some religious and spiritual forms spread while others do not, providing insight into how these forms change when groups mix.