Six good reasons why understanding religion requires a multidisciplinary approach: response to commentators

Abstract

I appreciate the thoughtful observations that all six commentators have provided on my book How Religion Evolved, and Why It Endures. They raise a number of important and interesting issues that merit far more attention than space allowed me to give them. As Lang rightly observes, this book is a deliberate (and, I hope, timely) return to the tradition of big theories in anthropologyan attempt to provide, albeit in necessarily brief format, an overview of how, why and when religion came to be part of the wider human social toolkit. I emphasise this at the outset here because, as Lockhart observes, this book explores in more detail one small corner of the grander story of human social and cognitive evolution summarised in my earlier book Human Evolution (2014a). The present book is really premised on the question: How did historical humans manage to maintain such large social groups as they did as coherent social entities? In fact, this is the single most important (and largely overlooked) issue at the heart of primate social evolution, but it looms especially large in humans because of their much larger groups. It is why religion came to play a significant role. Since it may help readers who haven't read the book if I give a thumbnail summary of its argument, let me first set the wider scene before addressing some of the specific issues raised in the Commentaries.