Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo: Origins and Building Blocks

Abstract

The large, ancient ape population of the Miocene reached across Eurasia and down into Africa. From this genetically diverse group, the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans evolved from populations of successively reduced size. Using the findings of genomics, population genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and archaeology, the authors construct a theoretical framework of evolutionary innovations without which religious capacity could not have emerged as it did. They begin with primate sociality and strength from a basic ape model, and then explore how the human line came to be the most adaptive and flexible of all, while coming from populations with reduced genetic variability. Their analysis then delves into the importance of neurological plasticity and a lengthening developmental trajectory, and points to their following article and the last building block: the expansion of the parietal areas, which allowed visuospatial reckoning, and imagined spaces and beings essential to human theologies. Approximate times for the major cognitive building blocks of religious capacity are given.

Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo: Cognitive Time Sequence

“…This is the second in a series of three articles whose purpose is to describe the theoretical underpinnings for an evolutionary model of the biological emergence of religious capacity in the genus Homo. Once religious capacity is present, culture becomes fully involved in the further, biocultural evolution of religion in modern human beings, through cognitive feedback loops that we note here, and in the other articles of this series (Rappaport and Corbally , ), and previously, in a model of Homo erectus as the first species with a rudimentary moral capacity (Rappaport and Corbally , ).…”

“…The Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs were a time for hominin radiation, just as the Miocene was a period of ape radiation (Rappaport and Corbally , 126, table 2). A variety of different hominin forms emerged.…”

“…We concentrate on the timing of evolutionary “building blocks” that together constitute a foundation for religious capacity, because a central issue in cognitive evolution concerns timing (MacLean ). The first of our three articles (Rappaport and Corbally ) fully defines the “building block.”…”

What is Right and What is Wrong in the Darwinian Approach to the Study of Religion

“…The human ability for large scale cooperation may be understood as the combined result of social norms and norm-psychology (Chudek and Henrich 2011: 218). Evolution of religion is a feedback with social evolution (Rappaport and Corbally 2018a, 2018b, 2018c. Religious beliefs and behaviors have affected but also were affected by social changes like division of labor, development of new modes of political organization, or development of money and writing, just to mention a few (Bellah 1964: 13065).…”

Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo: Trait Complexity in Action Through Compassion

“…This is the third in a series of three articles that describe the theoretical underpinnings of an evolutionary model for the biological emergence of religious capacity in the genus Homo. In the first article, “Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo: Origins and Building Blocks” (Rappaport and Corbally ), important adaptations undergirding modern human religious capacity are identified, probed, and set in place for a model that is presented more fully in the second article, “Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo: Cognitive Time Sequence” (Rappaport and Corbally ). The second article explores additional cognitive, neurological, and genomic research findings that support our model for the biological evolution of religious capacity, which, we propose, occurred only in Homo sapiens .…”