ABSTRACT
Adaptive responses are seldom, if ever, isolated but seem, rather, to be organized into sequences possessing certain temporal and logical characteristics (Bateson 1972h, Rappaport 1971a, 1979a, Slobodkin and Rapoport 1974) commencing with quickly mobilized easily reversible changes in state (if perturbation continues), proceeding through less easily reversible state changes to, in some cases, the irreversible changes not in state but in structure that are called "evolutionary". (1999:6)
First, whatever the case may be for explanations of behavior and organization of other species, and of their evolution, the extent to which concepts like "inclusive fitness" and "kin selection" can account for cultural phenomena is very limited. Secondly and related, whatever the case may be among other species, group selection (selection for the perpetuation of traits tending to contribute positively to the survival of the groups in which they occur but negatively to the survival of the particular individuals in possession of them) is not only possible among humans but of great importance in humanity's evolution. All that is needed to make group selection possible is a device that leads individuals to separate their conceptions of well-being or advantage from biological survival. Notions such as God, Heaven, Hell, heroism, honor, shame, fatherland and democracy encoded in procedures of enculturation that represent them as factual, natural,
public, or sacred (and, therefore, compelling) have dominated every culture for which we possess ethnographic or historical knowledge. (Rappaport 1999: 10)
The hypothesis that group selection is responsible for the evolution of religion is probably due to the way that people instinctively see the social world. The evolved brain leads people to think that well ordered social groups with few defectors are more successful. This is absolutely true, but individual selection is the mechanism that has made it true. 'Vhat evolution has realized, and created, is not the the same thing as the mechanism by which evolution works. There is no reason to postulate benefits to a group as a whole when one can postulate benefits to individuals living in a group whose self-sacrificing members are well policed. Individual selection is a simpler, clearer, well-proven, basic Darwinian mechanism of natural selection.
