Tough times mean people more likely to turn to gods

A major new cross-disciplinary study has found strong evidence that human cultures in poorer environments are more likely to believe in moralising, high gods.

A major new cross-disciplinary study has found strong evidence that human cultures in poorer environments are more likely to believe in moralising, high gods.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, explores the evolution of human cultures and finds ecological factors play a part in shaping human societies, including religious belief.

“When life is tough or when it’s uncertain, people believe in big gods,” says Professor Russell Gray, from the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology. “Pro-social behaviour maybe helps people do well in harsh or unpredictable environments.”

The emergence of religion has long been explained as a result of either culture or environmental factors but not both. The new findings imply that complex practices and characteristics thought to be exclusive to humans arise from a medley of ecological, historical, and cultural variables.

Professor Gray studies the intersection of psychology and linguistics while the study’s primary author Dr Carlos Botero from the Initiative for Biological Complexity at North Caroline State University is an evolutionary ecologist.
The authors, including Dr Joseph Bulbulia from Victoria University of Wellington, used historical, social and ecological data for 583 societies to illustrate the multifaceted relationship between belief in moralising, high gods and external variables.

Where previous research relied on rough estimates of ecological conditions, this study used high-resolution global datasets for variables such as plant growth, rainfall and temperature.

The team also used data from the Ethnographic Atlas, an electronic database of more than a thousand societies from the 20th Century, for geographic coordinates and sociological data including the presence of religious beliefs, agriculture and animal husbandry.

“A lot of evolutionists have been busy trying to bang religion on the head but I think the challenge is to explain it,” Professor Gray says. “Although some aspects of religion appear maladaptive, the near universal presence of religion suggests that there has to be some adaptive value and by looking at how these things vary ecologically, we get some insight.”

Dr Botero said the study was the tip of the iceberg in examining human behaviour from a cross-disciplinary standpoint and the team planned further work to explore the processes that have influenced the evolution of other human behaviours such as taboos, circumcision and modification of natural habitats.

The work was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre, a non-profit science centre based at Duke University at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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