Free The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade Page B

territory, the struggle to survive in a dog-eat-dog world.
    Early human societies transitioning away from male dominance thus faced two social problems of the utmost severity—the threat of free riders from within and the threat of hostile neighbors from without. How were the new societies to be fortified against these threats? One solution wouldhave been to build on the premoral systems that had evolved inprimate societies: from these emerged the innate moral dispositions of early humans.“There appears to be a universal short list of values that all cultures share: negative ones that proscribe killing, seriously deceptive lying, or theft within the group, and positive ones that call for altruism and cooperation for the benefit of the whole community,” writes Boehm. 53
    But moral restraint by itself is not sufficient to deter freeloading or to energize a group to prepare for warfare. Knowing what’s right and doing it are two different things. Freeloaders may figure the chances of getting caught are acceptably low. A man may desire deeply to defend his community, but what rational motive could make him sacrifice hislife to do so?
    A solution gradually emerged to counter the two acute threats of freeloading and of warfare: religion.
    Religious behavior addressed these two leading challenges to social order in the evolving human lineage. It both enforced the moral instincts and motivated people to pay any cost in defense of their community. Religion secured a new level of social cohesion by implanting in people’s minds a stern overseer of their actions. The Nuer, for instance, believe that “if a man wishes to be in the right with God he must be in the right with men, that is, he must subordinate his interests as an individual to the moral order of society,” writes Evans-Pritchard. 54 It was belief in these supernatural supervisors that enabled egalitarian societies to emerge from the dictatorship of the alpha male that primate societies had endured for so long.
    Ants, the other evolutionary masters of social living, are distinctive for the high degree of cooperation between members of the same colony. But with ants, just as with people, sociality toward the in-group is combined with relentless hostility toward other ant colonies. Ants are territorial and will fight pitched battles at their borders with neighboring groups. Some species have developed special soldier castes. Victory may lead to the opponents’ extinction, their queen being killed, their workers and larvae eaten or enslaved, and their territory and other property annexed. “The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,” observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel. 55
    It is striking that, with both ants and people, evolution should have made cooperation and warfare two sides of the same coin. Social cohesion is critical to both the ant and human systems. With ants, cohesion is secured by the shared chemical signals that regulate their behavior and by the high degree of relatedness among members of a colony. Neither of these factors is compatible with human physiology. This is why ants don’t need religion but people do.

Religion and the Supernatural
    All religions have concepts of the supernatural, whether in the form of gods or the spirits of departed ancestors. These supernatural entities, whether real or not in themselves, exerted a pervasive impact on human societies. To understand religion, it seems essential first to reconstruct how the gods came into the picture and what their primary role might have been.
    In the view of nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, people assumed that the figures seen in dreams were spirits. Speculating about the nature of death, they inferred that after the body wasdead, its spirit essence lived on in another world. In dreams, the appearance of particular spirits known to the dreamer proved that this was so. It was a small step from there to