The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

by Nicholas Wade

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Science, Evolution, Psychology, History, Anthropology

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wile I personally do not 100% resonate with all of the conclusions Wade makes in this book (I am currently pretty far out on the Dawkinsiean atheist tip and am subsequently more skeptical and hostile towards religion than Wade).

I did thoroughly enjoy this book and I also learned a lot. If anything, this book has brought me back to a more rational, balanced, less hostile view of religion and it's apparently necessary role in human culture. Great stuff.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

TL;DR: Wade’s book is worth the purchase, but there are some severe problems that the reader should watch out for.

I want to be kind to this book. I really do. Part of me thinks this book has greatness in it.

Wade presents so much useful information about the subject of religion and evolution. For instance, he shows compelling biological reasons that religion might evolve in the human species, offers a brief history of the three major monotheisms in the context of this discussion, and offers insight into why people might become suicide bombers from a biological perspective. His work strikes the right tone with this information, as it doesn’t feel judgmental; he cautiously states that some of the theories he summarizes in the book are still being reviewed by scholars and even goes so far as to offer competing theories for the sake of completeness. I know few writers who would be willing to do this, and I admire him for his thoroughness.

To put this in the fairest terms I know: If you want a good summary of religion, and if you want that summary from a biological background, then this is your book. Wade is a great source of information.

And now here is the list of ‘However’s.

However, the writing is atrocious in some spots. However, the project is perhaps too ambitious and overwhelms the books. However, Wade does what some academics might call ‘reaching’ in his work. Let me address these one by one.

First, let’s talk about the writing. Early in the book I almost gave up because I felt I wouldn’t be able to stand it for the full length. His writes what I call machine-gun sentences. They are simple constructs. They work like this. They get the job done. He doesn’t always do this. It was enough to be apparent. I felt my brain going numb. It was bad. I didn’t like it. Get the point yet? In his defense he didn’t do this throughout the entire book, but it was especially noticeable in the early sections.

I noted two other issues too: Wade needs to work on how to present a topic sentence in a paragraph, and he needs to be careful of the Oxford comma. (If these issues make your eyes roll back in your head, skip to the line below.) In several places in the book, Wade leads into a paragraph with a sentence that throws the entire thing off. For instance, in one section he starts by discussing Taliban dancers, but then offers three more sentences that make broad claims about dancing and music in general:

“Even the Taliban, who banned most forms of music in Afghanistan, allowed men to sing a capella. Music and dancing give participants a vigorous sense of community. The shared emotions evoked by the rhythmic activity create feeling of exultation that bind the group to a common purpose. The origin of music has long been mysterious, but its social role, as a pillar of ritual, may have been the reason the natural selection has made sensitivity to music a universal property of the mind” (82).

From an organizational standpoint, it is unclear whether these sentences are 1) about Taliban dancers, or 2) broad statements that just happen to be in a paragraph with a sentence that has nothing to do with them. In either case, the lessons from a basic college writing class need to be applied better, as this lack of organization makes the book difficult to read in some spots.

As concerns the second issue, Wade does not use the Oxford comma; this makes some of his thoughts difficult to read because the items in the list of long, complicated strings. PLEASE NOTE: I do realize these are technical hang-ups that not everyone is interested in, but I noted from the flap that Wade is an editor. I would expect more.

_____________
Now let’s move to the ambition of the book. The book can roughly be divided into three major sections. The first deals with the evolution of religion, the second with the aforementioned histories of the great monotheisms, and the last with some of the social, political, and other miscellaneous implications of the first and second section. Maybe this is a bold claim on my part, but I honestly feel the first and third sections should have been the main focus of this book and that the second could (and should) have been its own book. The topic on the cover seemed to indicate to me that the author was going to write about biology, religion, and social functions. The history portions were great (and well written—they kept me reading), but they felt a bit out of place in the general discussion. I do understand his project and why he would wish to include a thorough understanding of the monotheisms, but the general principles of his ideas as concerns these institutions would have served just as well.

Last, I must note Wade’s attempts to enter the discourse surrounding evolution, religion, and language are a mixed bag. He only sketches the ideas of some of the thinkers he uses (Pinker, Fitch, etc.) without offering enough information to truly dispel/engage with the ideas these things present. Again, the book needs more—it could have been much longer, and it feels like a sketch. I don’t know what the situation is behind the scenes here (maybe someone told him to do it this way; maybe he didn’t have more time; etc.), but the book suffers for it.

Okay, so to summarize: I would encourage potential readers to buy this book, though I would also note that they should be prepared for some significant hiccups along the way. Wade’s work shows a great deal of promise, but it cannot fully deliver on the promises that it sets forth on the cover. I really have strong, mixed feelings—I am disappointed, but I also admire much of what the author has done.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the wedding I attended last weekend, I was a bit disappointed there was only one hymn because, despite being nonreligious and a terrible singer, I love hymns. Why, though? What itch is scratched by hymn-singing that isn't scratched by karaoke or listening to an Orlando di Lassus CD? In this book, Nicholas Wade talks about the purposes and methods of religion from an evolutionary point of view and concludes that the most fundamental ingredients of religion are singing and dancing together. Because of the powerful, positive, unifying influence of religion in primitive societies, we evolved hardwired to appreciate ritual singing and dancing in unison.

The author describes the simple religious practices of egalitarian, hunter-gather societies for a bit, then goes on to talk about how the establishment of settled, agrarian societies was reflected in the increasing distinction between a professional priest class and the ordinary congregants. In that era, religion provided social cohesion and motivations for socially beneficial behaviors that allowed some societies to outcompete others. Two major functions of religion were to discourage freeloading and steel people for warfare.

Then he talks about the three major monotheisms, with a certain amount of emphasis on how their sacred books are more politically useful myth than archaeologically verifiable fact. This part of the book is quite interesting--e.g. the odd idea that Muhammad wasn't a historical personage but a grammatical misreading of a reference to Jesus--but isn't as tightly connected to the idea of evolution and societal fitness. He does discuss how establishment religions continually contend with movements that get back to the passionate singing-and-dance roots of religion, either reabsorbing those movements or causing a schism.

The author stakes out an odd position: At no point in the book does he betray the slightest belief that any of the deities he describes are real, and he also devotes quite a few pages to how the books of the three monotheisms don't square with history. But he also says that atheists would probably turn out to be less moral than religious people if you removed them from a society with a critical mass of religious people to set the moral tone. (He's not concerned about this, though, because the prospect of an all-atheist society is remote.) This struck me as an interesting if not bulletproof argument to present against the coterie of atheist authors writing today. Rather than a series of straw man debates between "God requires you to accept Jesus" and "religion is bad for society," this book presents an argument that "religion is good for society" which at least changes things up.

The book is undermined by a very strange section at the end, where the author talks about how religion in schools promotes a cohesive society, and with 95% of Americans identifying as either Christian or non-religious, it's very selfish of those pesky Jews, Muslims, and Hindus to have litigated about it, and the result satisfies no one but lawyers. This is a huge, and fairly offensive, claim that is presented without further evidence or argument, and the only reason I'm not knocking off a star for it is that it only goes for a page or two.

There are big sections of this that seem quite speculative, but I found it thought-provoking, and it's definitely more worthwhile than The Moral Animal.

[Julie Ellis · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of this book was interesting. The author reviews the evidence for the evolution of morality and religion. He gives an interesting and believable argument in favor of group selection in evolution under special circumstances. Group selection is very controversial in biology. He makes a good case for it. After that, however, things start to go awry. After his discussion of the evolution of morality, he then goes on to say that religion is the source of all morality in society. Furthermore, he suggests that nonbelievers are incapable of being moral on their own. That kind of thinking is extremely prejudicial (speaking as a nonbeliver). In addition, he glosses over the cruelties - and there is a long list - done in the name of religion throughout history. He pays scant attention to the antisocial qualities religion can possess. Finally, he gives no serious discussion on the maladaptiveness of traditional religion in a modern society. Ultimately, I was disappointed, even though Wade claimed to take an objective look at religion, it was clear he was promoting it. This weakened his earlier arguments.

[Rod Hilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Faith Instinct is not a bad book, but it may not be what you're expecting. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting.

Based on the title, "How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures" I was expecting some pretty hard scientific data. Brain imaging, scientific experiments, and psychological case studies, however, are not to be found in this book. Instead, author Nicholas Wade approaches the question of religion not from a scientific or psychological perspective, but an historical one.

In this way, it is very much like The Evolution of God, in that it is a book that starts at the earliest concepts of religion (tribal myths) and works its way up to modern religion. Wade offers some additional insights, but most of them center around the notion that religion formed because it enforced social rules, which increased social cohesion and increased chances of group survival. This isn't a particularly new observation, and it is one that fails to answer certain questions, such as why some religions practice things like "honor killings" which would seem to hurt group cohesion more than help it. On a few occasions, Wade responds to questions like these but the explanations feel hand-wavey and incomplete.

I was disappointed by the lack of hard science in the book, but once I accepted that it was largely a historical chronicling of religion on the planet, it became somewhat more tolerable. The chapters on Christianity and Islam were quite interesting and, though they retread well-worn ground, I found them quite enjoyable to read.

Not as thorough as The Evolution of God, not as insightful as a book like Breaking the Spell, The Faith Instinct is really only worth a read if you're desperate for more material on the subjects it addresses.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade argues that religion is a gene-based adaptation that allowed those groups that had it to survive where those without perished, “religion” being defined as “a system of emotionally binding beliefs and practices in which a society implicitly negotiates through prayer and sacrifice with supernatural agents, securing from them commands that compel members, through fear of divine punishment, to subordinate their interests to the common good.” (p. 15) Religion developed to promote group survival; and just as the human brain was built up from pre-existing structures, so too was religion built up from a foundation of (almost certainly innate) behaviors that includes a capacity for music and rhythmic movement, a moral instinct, and language; it wasn’t designed but is an agglomeration of adaptations that worked better than others. The first half of the book focuses on the evolutionary role of religion, and Wade builds a strong case for its adaptive utility (though not necessarily for its existence as a genetically determined characteristic; see below). The second half is practically another book as the author takes us on a historical overview of religion – chiefly the Abrahamic monotheisms though he manages to sneak in the Aztecs – which seems oddly out of place in the context of the preceding pages. I have sympathy for the theories that the book of Exodus is as much a myth as the labors of Heracles or that Pauline Christianity triumphed because its Jerusalem-centered rival perished in the Roman sack of AD 70 or that Muhammad is a fictional character who arose from a misreading of a Christian Arab inscription on the Dome of the Rock but these are not scientific theories about the genetic basis of religion or even its expression, they’re analyses of historical events.

I’ll discuss that aspect of the book in more detail below. Here, I’ll briefly give an overview of Wade’s contention that religion has a genetic basis, beginning with chapter two, where he discusses the “moral instinct.” Wade distinguishes between “moral intuition” and “moral reasoning.” The former is a person’s ability to make an instinctual judgment about the rightness or wrongness of something; a classic example is the almost universal abhorrence of incest. The latter is the conscious’ ability to articulate reasons for a choice, and plays no role in natural selection. Some form of moral intuition has evolved in the higher primates (& other mammals) “to provide the unity required to enable the group to compete successfully with other…groups.” (p. 32) With the advent of self-awareness in humans, we obtained the capacity to act against that intuition. To prevent these now-self-aware human groups from tearing themselves apart, evolution had to find a way to reinforce the moral sense and Wade believes that this was religion.

Chapter three explores the behaviors that characterize religion (or more properly what Wade calls the “ancestral religion”; in chapter six he talks about the transformation of practice that occurred with the rise of sedentary cultures). The author distinguishes five universal (or near universal) traits found in all religious practice:

1. Music/dance
2. Rites of passage
3. A way to communicate with the supernatural/divine and to influence its/their behavior
4. An afterlife (of some sort)
5. God(s) control(s) events

He then speculates that specialized structures exist in the brain that mediate religious behavior though he admits that there’s no evidence for such. (p. 43) This – for me – raised a red flag: That the bases for music, rhythmic movement, morality, language and the other components of religion are genetic, I can accept. But if no physical evidence of a “religious” area of the brain can be found then that suggests that it’s an artifact of cultural evolution rather than a biological imperative. And Wade tacitly admits this later when he discusses the success of other cultural institutions (such as the military or the nation-state) that exploit the same genetic foundations to create group cohesion, loyalty and self-sacrifice.

In “Music, Dance and Trance,” Wade considers the effects that rhythmic movement, music, language and trance states had on the development of the religious instinct. (A more extensive treatment of the subject of music & language can be found in Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body and of trance states in David Lewis-Williams’ Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods.) As with the moral instinct, these behaviors contributed to the creation of a group consciousness capable of subordinating an individual’s survival to its success.

Chapter five, “Ancestral Religion,” speculates on what form the ur-religion may have taken. As we can’t go back in time to study Stone Age hunter-gatherers, we must rely on extrapolating from the cultures of the few surviving hunter-gatherers in the modern world, including the !Kung San of Africa and the Aborigines of Australia. Thus “[t]he earliest religion seems to have taken the form of sustained communal dancing that invoked supernatural powers and promoted emotional bonding among members of the group.” (p. 98) And the following characterized it:

1. The whole community participated. There was no priestly caste, though there may have been shamans with special abilities re contacting the gods/spirit world.
2. The focus of worship was on communal activities. The modern idea of a personal relationship to God would have been foreign; there was no private spirituality (at least none that could be expressed or mattered to the community).
3. Sacred narratives (myths) conveyed both moral and practical lessons to their hearers.
4. There was also a focus on practical matters of survival over modern concerns of theology/dogma. It is perhaps ironic that religion’s strength – its survivability – lies more in the arbitrary rituals that create the “in” group than in the dogmas that priests devise.

“The Transformation” discusses the changed nature in practice and belief of post-agriculture religion. The most important changes being the development of a dedicated priestly caste and the consequent restriction of full participation to a smaller group and the suppression/control of the more ecstatic forms of worship (e.g., for the Roman Church, Theresa of Ávila was OK but the Spiritual Franciscans were beyond the pale).

As I wrote above, the second half of the book (chapters 7-12) turns from examining the genetics of religion to how different cultures expressed that behavior. There are interesting arguments concerning how religion makes possible (or eases) trade, regulates sex/reproduction, and both encourages war and ameliorates its effects but there’s nothing that really bolsters Wade’s thesis that humans have a gene-based instinct that we call “religion.” If anything, the latter half of the book reinforces the opposite – the idea that religion is a product of culture that builds upon common human instincts. The objectives and desires that religion satisfies can be accommodated by other means and have been, though he makes a strong case that religion has been the most successful mechanism produced so far.

Having read the book, I remain an agnostic at this point. The evidence and our understanding of how evolution works are still too meager to confidently claim that humans have a genetic predisposition to religion rather than that religious behavior is a cultural expression based on disparate factors of human nature. I lean toward the second explanation but The Faith Instinct remains an interesting survey of the current state of knowledge and provokes the reader into considering the possibility that god(s) is (are) in our genes.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had untold potential to tell the story of the evolution of religion, biologically and culturally, within human societies. Wade squandered it through chapters full of navel-gazing anecdata tortured into pretending to support his theses.

The first half of the book was slow and repetitive but interesting. The book's central hypothesis is that religion evolved through forms of kin selection, by providing advantages to societies largely in the form of greater cohesion and conformity. Keep in mind that for the first 45,000 years or so of the existence of modern humans, we lived in small tribes with no formal hierarchies, no legal systems, no penal code. Somehow, a common moral code must be not only developed but enforced, even when no one is watching. Enter gods, who can see you everywhere and are for mysterious reasons deeply interested in the minutiae of human behaviour.

The above was a throwaway reference to the biological evolution of religion I first encountered in a book primarily about the biological evolution of fiction, and I was hoping Wade would further expand on what's known and provide an overview of the science--after all, that's what he proposes in the book copy. No such luck. Instead, while he frequently repeats his assertion that religion facilitates the successful expansion of pre-state societies by bonding warriors together and providing them with reasons to sacrifice their lives for their tribe-mates, he provides no evidence whatsoever, and instead treats the reader to extensive digressions about his own prejudices.

There were small elements of science--sciencelets, let's call them--in the early chapters. He discusses recent neurological and psychological research on moral reasoning and moral intuition that were a pleasure to read, although if you're interested, you can find better accounts elsewhere with less baggage. Or here: science has pretty conclusively shown that people jump to moral conclusions via intuition and then reason their way into those conclusions after the fact. That's the short version. Now you can skip that chapter too.

Other than that, he quotes no science, instead relying on just-so cherry-picked anthropological anecdotes about different religions that support whatever point he's trying to make in that chapter. About halfway through, he careens right off course--dumping any pretense at talking about biology, evolution or neurobiology, and instead diverging weirdly into chapters about the historical accuracy of the bible and the koran, the role of christianity in modern american politics, and population control.

I would be less frustrated if the entirely speculative nature of this book were due to a lack of science or research on the biological underpinnings of religion. But the simplest google search shows that there is a ton out there on connections between certain genes and religious behaviour, or the neurological components or functions of religious beliefs, much of it available before the book's 2009 publication date. Wade does not discuss a single one. How do you write a 300 page book about the evolution of the faith instinct without once using the word "gene"?

You also get to read lovely bits like the following:

As other ethnic groups went through the WASP school system, they assimilated the same values, particularly the Protestant art of forming associations of all kinds. But the balance between individualism and community-building has shifted dramatically toward the former in the last fifty years .... Groups demanding rights for specific sections of the population have also undermined community in unintended ways. (p. 202)

Yup. It would be better, you see, if those uppity women and black people had kept subordinating their selfish desires to be seen as human beings and individuals. Then we would still have a sense of community. Our bad!

The Church felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group .... Some 95 percent of Americans are Christian or belong to no religion. Minorities--including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. (p. 267)

Yep. He went there. Let's ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with "no religion," aka atheists, would be alarmed and displeased to the extreme to be lumped in with Christians when it comes to religious education in the classroom. Those 5 per cent of Americans are real people! The whole point of rights is that they belong to everybody! You don't get to decide they don't count because it's a minority--that's the whole point of legal fucking rights! No one took away the Christians' rights to religious education; they just took away state funding for it, for god's sake. I'm pretty sure that people besides lawyers were very very happy to get bible learning out of the public education system.

Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. (p. 125)

Those days never existed, asshat. If he could distinguish scientific facts from a hole in the ground, he might be familiar enough with anthropological research to know this. And it's not just here. Unwarranted observations about the role and characteristics of men vs. women are scattered all over the book. None of them relate to his thesis, and all of them are demonstrably false. Worst is his constant insistence that religion = initiation rites for male adolescents = military training = success in warfare. Where's the evidence? Well initiation rites for boys are often painful (initiation rites for girls are not discussed, at all), and war is painful, so abracadabra, and let's just ignore every bit of archaeological evidence we have for the presence of female warriors throughout prehistory.

Oy.

Last criticism, promise:

It's too black and white.

There are some evolved characteristics that are required for survival, and these are universal. Like breathing. If you don't breathe, you don't live, so the biological and neurobiological mechanisms exist in all of us. To the extent that breathing is not universal in our day and age, it's because we have created some pretty fancy medical equipment that can take over this function and provide it for people who can't breathe on their own. Same for eating, sleeping, swallowing, etc, and some characteristics that are required for reproduction (the other component to evolution).

There are some traits that are not required for survival or reproduction, but which confer enough of a benefit to be very common. These exist on a continuum between almost-necessary and almost-optional. Personality and character traits are placed all over this continuum, and the same trait can have different outcomes depending on the environment. Not just in humans, by the way--I remember one fun study about extraversion in a minnow species, and how genes associated with extraversion were adaptive in some environments and non-adaptive in others (calm waters vs. rapids, though I can't remember which was better or worse for the outgoing fishies).

Well--isn't it really, really bloody obvious that the same would be true for religiosity?

Religiosity exists on a continuum. Some people are fanatical, other people are committed, some flexible, more-or-less half-hearted, willing to go along but not a believer, or committed non-believer. Much like extraversion, sensitivity, and intelligence, among other personality traits. And so like other personality traits--obviously what's adaptive and what's not adaptive varies depending on environment, including the culture.

There have always been some atheists and non-believers. I don't believe for a second that ancient hunter-gatherers didn't have any skeptics among them. That there were no people who were just going along because they enjoyed the dancing and the feasting and didn't really care if the gods existed or not. And it's a matter of historical record that in societies where religion was outlawed, some people risked their lives to continue practicing their faith. Cultures are not 1 or 0, yes or no, religious or not religious, and neither are individual people.

This could have been such a fascinating avenue for discussion. If religion is a means of enforcing social and moral conformity in pre-state societies, which I can accept as a plausible argument, then there are a range of possible adaptations and individual responses to that context. Adhering strictly to the culture's religion is one way of enhancing survival and reproductive success, but finding ways to exploit the religious beliefs of others becomes another adaptation. Like altruism: highly altruistic individuals are good for societies but their own survival and reproductive success can suffer if they give away too much; individuals very low in altruism (eg. sociopaths) can be very successful individually if they're not caught, but too many sociopaths and you don't have a society, certainly not one in which cooperation and mutual trust can flourish. So you have a tug of war between these two poles, with the optimal level of altruism at an individual and societal level being continually negotiated between shifting norms, resource levels, social commitment and conformity, and so on.

He hints at this in his chapter on the links between religious conformity, trust and commerce--particularly when briefly describing how charlatans can exploit religion to create undeserved trust--but this is a subject that deserves a lengthy and detailed discussion in any book that is truly going to explore and explain the evolutionary basis for religion.

Were prehistoric atheists well-adapted to exploit the religious beliefs of their more fervent neighbours for selfish ends? Would this have created evolutionary pressures for more in-the-middle folks--skeptical believers, if you will? What implications would this have had for the warfare-bonding or other cohesive functions of religion in society? Does religion still 'work' in this way if its adherents are 50% or 75% committed? (Though come to think of it, he spends the first chunk of the book talking about religion as a social bonding mechanism that works through ritual, not belief; and then the second half of the book talking about religion as requiring belief--this needs better teasing out before these discussions would have any meaning. "Belief" in the former context has no meaning--one could be an atheist and very devout, simultaneously.)

I would have loved to delve into a discussion on these topics, but it wasn't there. Practically nothing was there. I got more out of the evolution-of-fiction book and its throwaway line than I did from this entire manuscript.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a conciliatory tactic in the trenches of the science versus religion debate that tries to separate the responsibilities of the former from the latter. Despite its attempts to stay out of religion, though, science can’t. It has a job to do: it has to explain religion. Religion is a human behaviour, and humans are part of the physical universe. Therefore, science should have room for an explanation of religion as an emergent phenomenon. Historically, religion has tended to be the domain of sociologists and cultural anthropologists, part of a pushback against the forebears of evolutionary psychology that were also responsible, in part, for social Darwinism and the spectre of eugenics that haunted the early twentieth century. In The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade examines religion using evolutionary theory, and particularly evolutionary biology, to see if religion could be an evolutionary adaptation.

The possibility for explaining religion through evolutionary theory comes as a result of religion’s universality. It is not something that just a few groups do here and there: religion has been with us for our entire recorded history, and religious activity exists in some shape or form in every culture we study. In more recent centuries there have been some attempts, such as those in Russia and China, to create societies without religion. These have not succeeded. What keeps bringing us back to belief? More importantly, when examined from an evolutionary perspective, religion is costly. All that time and energy spent worshipping a deity or a pantheon, building temples, finding sacrifices of some kind … that’s an expensive endeavour, so for it to exist, let alone thrive, suggests it provides a significant advantage for survival.

Historically we associate organized religion with the advent of agriculture. The ability to settle and farm land created the potential for a class of people who did not provide food—a class that could include people responsible for religious duties. Agriculture gave us priests and divine monarchs, but Wade argues that religion would still have been prominent, albeit more egalitarian, in hunter-gatherer cultures. He cites anthropological studies of extant hunter-gatherer cultures; in particular, he explores the connections between music, dance, and trance and how they bring a society closer together. Wade’s thesis overall is that religion could be an adaptative way of promoting social cohesion.

So far, so good. Wade makes a good case for looking at religion using evolutionary theory, and his idea that it promotes social cohesion sounds plausible. However, his evidence to support this idea is less impressive. I enjoyed his previous book, Before the Dawn , because its analysis of our migrations is founded in genetics. As such, Wade can point to specific genes that are common to a population and make inferences about that population’s journey out of Africa. Although Wade assembles explanations from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and neuroscience, this composite corpus of evidence is rather underwhelming. For instance, Wade discusses how, much as with the capacity for language, there may be a neurological basis for religious belief. He notes that excessive activity in the temporal lobe often results in increased religiosity. However, he has to concede that we just don’t know yet.

This proves to be the recurring theme: we don’t know. We don’t have enough archaeological evidence to draw conclusions about ancient religions. We don’t know enough about how the brain or consciousness works to understand its role in religion. (I do find it interesting that Wade does not mention, at all, Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Though controversial and similarly lacking in evidence, it seems pertinent to the discussion.) Despite our best efforts, we can’t link religion to any particular genes. Wade’s theories are fascinating and his reasoning is laid out in an organized way … but without that evidence to back it up, The Faith Instinct is more thought experiment than anything else.

I suppose this is to be expected from a book that describes itself on the back cover as nonpolemical. Wade isn’t contending much beyond the fact that religion might provide an evolutionary benefit. He acknowledges perspectives that differ from his own, offering useful insight into some of the changes to the climate of anthropology and evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. Similarly, he devotes time both to the positive aspects of religions (their sense of community, their emphasis on moral behaviour) and to the negative aspects (their creation of the Other, wars and crusades and persecution). Set against the backdrop of more charged and controversial tirades for or against religion, The Faith Instinct stands out sheerly because of its level-headed and somewhat non-committal approach to the entire affair.

Wade tacitly recognizes he doesn’t have enough biological evidence for his thesis and devotes the second half of the book to an archaeological examination of various religions, mostly of the Abrahamic line of descent. This is fascinating, but all it did was make me want to re-read The Evolution of God , which does the same thing in more depth (and with more detailed endnotes!). I quite enjoy reading about sacred texts from an archaeological standpoint, but it’s a little out of place in a book about the evolutionary origins of religion…. On one hand, Wade uses these chapters to demonstrate how people have shaped their religions over time to respond to the needs of society in terms of morality, fertility, and cultural identity. On the other hand, his treatment is too general to do the subject justice.

In what is perhaps the most contentious part of the book, Wade examines religion’s link to morality. Although careful to point out that athiests can be moral individuals, Wade wonders if this is a consequence of their existing in a community whose moral standards are largely derived from one religion or another. Would a society composed entirely of atheists who are ignorant of religion still have moral standards and be able to maintain order? Wade cannot draw a conclusion one way or the other, for no such society has existed, and he argues that the innate tendency towards religious behaviour means no such society will exist in the near future.

It’s this last part, that idea that religious belief seems to be innate, that might rankle some atheists. Yet the very nature of the word atheist is a philosophical declaration against belief in a deity. It speaks of a need to differentiate oneself in the negative, something we don’t often see. As Neil de Grasse Tyson points out in a video where he explains why he identifies as agnostic, non-skiers don’t get together and talk about not skiing. Atheism is an active rather than a passive form of disbelief—and it is that way because religion is so pervasive a human behaviour.

I understand why Wade did not digress further into his discussion of the morality of a society of atheists, for that delves into philosophy rather than evolutionary biology. If such a society were to develop today, it would still possess the historical and philosophical traditions of morality, including those handed down by religion. In that case, it seems reasonable to conclude that such a society could develop secular moral tenets, albeit tenets that might descend from those proposed by religion. So Wade might have a point after all, when he claims that religion could have a necessary purpose in the development of our species. This doesn’t mean that atheism or secularism are wrong. After all, perhaps religion was necessary before but will gradually disappear, just as we evolved tails and then eventually discarded them. I don’t see that being the case, but you never know.

Part scientific speculation, part philosophical rumination, The Faith Instinct is an intriguing look at religion from a rational, science-based perspective. It seeks to prescribe neither an attitude toward religion nor a prognosis for its future role in society. Instead, Wade taps evolutionary theory to explain the universality of such a complex and diverse human behaviour. At times his explanations, while interesting, lack the necessary evidence to be persuasive. I can’t help but feel like The Faith Instinct is somewhat premature—in a few more decades, who knows what secrets of the brain we might uncover? For what it is, however, this book is good but not great. It shines the light in that one spot where we can’t, no matter how we try, separate science and religion. If you are already very interested in this subject, there are some books, like The Evolution of God, that might leave you more fulfilled. Neophytes, however, will probably find The Faith Instinct a welcoming way to begin looking at religion in this light.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chronicles a paradigm shift in the way we view religion

Nicholas Wade, who also wrote the very fine Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2007) (see my review at Amazon), argues most convincingly here that religion, our sense of spirituality, and our moral instinct have been hardwired into our brains by the evolutionary process. This book, supported in part by the Templeton Foundation, is the first of its kind to put together the body of evidence that accounts for the fact that religion has been part of every known human society while explaining why.

Is religion adaptive in an evolutionary sense? is the first and most important question to be answered. The fact that religion is universal strongly suggests that it is. But until recently this idea was rejected by most biologists including some heavy hitters such as George Williams, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. But, as Wade points out, Dawkins and Pinker in particular may have missed the boat because of personal biases. Wades writes that their opposition "seems to be driven less by any particular evidence than by the implicit premise that religion is bad, and therefore must be nonadaptive." (p. 67)

Moreover, Williams and Dawkins have been against the idea that religion is adaptive because of their belief that natural selection operates primarily at the level of the individual. For religion to be adaptive in the Darwinian sense, it helps a lot for selection to operate at the level of the group. Wade shows that biologists such as David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, not to mention Darwin himself, support the idea of group selection. Wade presents Darwin's argument from the Autobiography (see page 68) that tribes who had members who were ready to sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe would help their tribe prevail over other tribes without such people. Williams and others came to differ with Darwin by arguing that free-loaders and cheaters only interested in promoting their own genes would out-reproduce the do-gooders. This opinion has held sway in evolutionary biology for a long time, but that is changing. Wade quotes David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson as putting it this way: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary." (p. 70)

But how is religion adaptive? Why should those tribes that were religious have out-competed those that were not? Where are those non-religious tribes? The answer is there aren't any. The assumption is that they were driven to extinction by the religious tribes.

Just what is it about religion that confers upon its practitioners such a huge evolutionary advantage? The answer in a word is warfare. The intimate relationship between human warfare and religion is really the crux of the matter. As warfare became more important among human groups competing for scarce resources a greater premium was placed on winning. What religion does so very well is make the tribe more cohesive than it would otherwise be.

One of the most interesting things about religion as revealed in this book is that religion came before language! How can that be? Wade explains that in the most primitive societies, the basis of religion is communal, rhythmic singing and dancing. This singing and dancing can be seen to draw the members of the tribe closer together so that they can act as one with less fear of danger as they are strengthened by the cohesiveness of the group. People could dance and follow rhythms and perhaps sing before they could use syntactic language. We see many animals, especially birds, that perform elaborate dances. Hominids, being social creatures would dance en mass not so much to be sexually selected (although that too no doubt) but to strengthen their ties within the group.

But this ecstatic expression of religion cuts both ways. In historic times religion has become hierarchical, the rituals have become more sedate, and the basis of group membership is based not on ecstatic communal expression but more on shared beliefs. In fact some religions have banned dancing. Wade suggests that this is because the power of the leaders of these modern religions can have their authority threatened by deeper and more immediate appeals to emotion. This might be what is happening in Latin America today with membership in the Catholic Church shrinking while membership in the more demonstrative Protestant churches with singing and even speaking in tongues gaining adherents.

In the latter part of the book Wade traces the birth and growth of various religions including especially the three monotheistic religions from the Middle East. He doesn't see religion as the cause of wars per se, only as a very nice tool for being successful in wars! Finally he looks at the future of religion. He hints at a need for religions that are more in tune with the modern world. Beyond that he does not go.

All in all an excellent book that deserves a wide readership.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Religion: Reviews, Essays and Commentary”

[Steve Van Slyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had recently read and enjoyed the author's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors and so when I first considered reading this book on the evolution of religion I was fairly confident that I was not going to be lead down a pseudo-scientific garden path leading to some startling revelation like “science proves that God exists!” And indeed, such is not the case, in fact Wade never capitalizes the word god and more often than not uses the plural as in “they negotiated with the gods.”

Nevertheless, as I got into the second half the book, dealing with religions in historical times, I began to feel uncomfortable that he was assigning more benefit to them than they deserved. Up to that point I had been quite at ease and in agreement with his premise that religions originally involved in the earliest modern human hunter-gatherer groups as means of developing the group cohesiveness necessary to survive in a dangerous world where your worst enemy was not predatory animals but rather other groups of your own species. He explains that our common chimp-human ancestors maintained group cohesiveness through the rule of an alpha male, who controlled the fate of the group through his strength and his resulting ability to dole out favors to other members of the troop and thus obtain their loyalty in battles with other groups.

But as early humans moved out of the forests, hunting and foraging required an egalitarian form of organization where there were no strong leaders, everything was shared and decisions were reached as a group, as is still the case with hunter-gatherer tribes today in Africa and elsewhere. Without the alpha male something else was needed to bond the group together, and from that need the first religion was born, from which all other religions have evolved. In much the same way as there is an evolutionary tree of life and of languages, there is also an evolutionary tree of religions. This first one was simply a commonly held belief that supernatural forces were at work which determined many of daily life's events such as illness, accidents, weather, hunting success, etc. What bound the group together was the common belief in these supernatural forces, which they also believed would punish freeloaders, a critical aspect of group survival. And most important, the cohesiveness created by their shared religion was such that individuals were willing to risk or even forfeit their lives in battle to ensure the survival of their group.

The more modern form of religions evolved along with culture. As nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down into fixed-base communities, domesticating animals and plants, the egalitarian forms of religion faded away in favor of shamans and priests who either were the leaders or shared power with the leaders. Religion still remained a force for cohesion, especially in times of war, but also became a tool for controlling the behavior of group members by a select minority, presumably for the good of all.

Wade then weaves a fascinating set of stories about the three great monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and how they evolved. Some of this was familiar to me, but most was not, some of it astounding, certainly not what I had assumed. Yet it was at this point that I began to become a little nervous that perhaps the author was more tilted toward the ongoing and continuing benefits of organized religion than I was willing to accept.

But then I arrived at the last chapter, The Future of Religion. I was blown away. After I read the last word of the last paragraph, out loud I said “Wow!”.

Whether you are a committed atheist/agnostic/secular humanist (yes, you can be all three) like myself, or a liberal-minded, weekly church-goer who believes in God, I think you will find this book interesting all the way through. The author has written it with such careful effort to be even-handed that it is almost certain that no one will agree with everything he says, but nor will you be offended (note that I excluded conservatives and Fundamentalists). I won't give away what he says in that final chapter, because to do so would definitely spoil it for the reader.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think people in general spend so much time actively engaged WITHIN their religion that they never really develop an appreciation for the HOW's, WHY's, and WHERE's of their religion, or for religion as a whole.

this is an incredibly fascinating look at the origins and evolution of religion from the religions of nomadic tribes to the three monotheisms of today's civilizations.

as reportage, it's stellar, and wade makes this stuff compelling through a variety of histories, anecdotes, and distillations of prior study of religion and evolution.

his thesis, that religion is an adaptive human trait, is certainly interesting. his argument, in many ways, is compelling and hard to refute. however, as the book progresses, one starts to feel as though he hasn't quite convinced himself of this, especially as it relates to modern secular societies, modern warfare, and the robust religiosity of america despite its lack of the characteristics that tend to necessitate it. i do appreciate wade's insistence that a trait need not be a benefit to the individual in order to survive -- certain traits that are not selfish/survival traits can benefit the cohesion of a group and therefore indirectly improve the survival of the group, and therefore the individual.

he does spend some time with competing theories of religion's survival, including the popular theory that religion is a by-product other mental adaptations that occurred in our evolution. and while reading this book, i wondered why religion couldn't have been shaped by both theories? part adaptive, part by-product. the evidence for both is compelling, whereas neither seems to fully explain.

wade's book works on many levels. as mentioned above, i thoroughly enjoyed reading a concise, but detailed, linear narrative of the history of religion that took into consideration the societal and personal benefits of religion that might allow certain populations to flourish.

i would recommend this book to anyone interested in religion and/or evolution, simply to view both topics in a way that you may not have viewed them before -- if you're a layperson like myself, at least.

[Orin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author wanders awkwardly from biology to sociology to history. The chapter on "The Tree of Religion" is especially interesting and reveals some interesting points about the development of Islam, previously unknown to me. I think I agree with the author that we are sadly stuck with religion. His observations on the relationship of dancing and music with belief hit close to home. I recently had to endure a Springsteen concert. It really didn't have that much to do with the music. It was all about enthusiasm--in the eighteenth century sense of the word.

[Scott Cinsavich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, I have little more to add that hadn't been presented already, namely, that the book was skimpy on the science and genetics that would further his thesis and that the second half of the book was more speculation than hypothesis. In fact I would actually describe the book as "fringe science" and I don't necessary mean that pejoratively just that for good of for bad his arguments are daring and based on a paucity of data that may have been the result of a cognitive bias

[Adam Meek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wade presents an intriguing narrative to go along with his wild speculations, it's an interesting read whether you accept the premise of group selection or not.

[Mouldy Squid · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating exposition of a theory sure to stir controversy. Nicholas Wade carefully and convincingly puts forth the hypothesis that religion, far from being a delusion, or "mental illness" as Dawkins claims, is actually an evolutionary adaptation that selects at the group level. Wade argues that the ubiquitousness of religion, which must pre-date all civilization and perhaps language, could only have survived the crucible of Darwin if it conferred some advantage to the ancestors of human beings.

While the theory of group level evolutionary selection is not yet widely accepted, within the constraints of Wade's argument, his hypothesis is sound. Wade shows how ancestral mankind would have required some sort of social cohesion mechanism to have survived the rigours of pre-historic Earth. He further argues that religion, or that the least religiosity, would have provided not only the means to bind small social groups together, but could project that cohesion outwards into societal and cultural growth.

In support of his argument Wade discusses several aspects of religion and evolution that will be of great interest. The history of the world's great religions (particularly the monotheisms), the evolutionary pressures that would have given rise to a mechanism of social cohesion and law, the physiology and psychology of humans and current trends in both religion and secular society provide sufficient evidence for his theory. There is a wealth of information here, of interest to even those readers who would reject Wade's hypothesis.

Furthermore, Wade is careful not to "pick sides" in the controversy of whether religion is necessary for sustained human society, but rather points out how religion can provide a much more law abiding and stable culture. Wade places careful emphasis that modern secular states have replaced many of the functions that religion would have provided early, prehistoric and historic man. Of particular interest is the argument, touched only briefly, that because religion is an evolutionary adaptation it is a part of our consciousness and physiology and so cannot ever truly go extinct. This last argument fits nicely with my own theory of "secular" religion wherein the religious impulse of the individual finds catharsis in group activities such as raves, music concerts and "Burning Man" type of festivals.

This book is a must read for all students of religion (and perhaps theology) and represents some of the newest thinking in the field of comparative religion. The non-specialist will also find much of interest here and Wade is careful not to become too academic in his writing. If you have any interest in religion, its impact on mankind's evolution and history and the future of religion in an increasingly secular world, this book is an excellent choice.

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I opened up The Faith Instinct because Nicholas Wade's work on the SARS-CoV2 lab leak hypothesis really made waves in the punditariat and scientific community back in May 2021 (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-o...). It was one of many dominos that fell to shift our collective expectations toward believing a lab accident was the possible origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. This tangential preface for the The Faith Instinct serves to underscore Wade's predilection for contrarianism (sometimes curmudgeonly but often erudite) and provocation while drawing from across many different disciplines. Wade is well read in science and history and has a style that mixes these two seemingly disparate disciplines well.

The Faith Instinct is an engrossing read, especially in the early half of the work. Although I am not sold on the broad thesis of the work, Wade is nonetheless a stellar tour guide through history, religion, and biology. It is a book I hope to return too, especially after soaking in more works on evolution.

However, Wade's argument in The Faith Instinct isn't especially compelling from an evolutionary perspective. His claims are dependent on the controversial idea of group selection, relying somewhat on the esteemed work of E. O. Wilson. Unfortunately, there isn't necessarily a lot of biological and anthropological evidence to support that faith is adaptive or even a substrate that could be neatly selected for. There are certainly heritable non-cognitive traits that likely correlated with religiosity, and there is also some evidence that suggests religiosity may be advantageous for fitness in certain situations at certain times, but these potentiality together aren't enough to assert with any confidence that faith is a human adaptation.

Despite the clear limitations of the work's thesis and some discursive moment, The Faith Instinct is well worth a read.

[Farhad Zaker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book fell significantly short of what I expected of the title. The author tries to tackle a subject that should be treated with outmost care, using as much scientific evidence as possible to minimize guesswork. Despite the great effort at the beginning, the text becomes more and more of inaccurate guesswork as the author transitions to explaining Christianity and Islam.
I, myself, would have preferred that the author remained within the general premise of supporting the "instinct" facet of faith and religion. There is a tone of interesting theories in the book without in-depth exploration of scientific studies, such the role of natural selection on favoring religion. The same problem comes up when discussing the transition from hunter-gatherer to larger/sedentary societies. There are other claims such as favoring Christianity because it helped restore the roman empire's population. It gets worse when the author starts talking about Islam, it goes way into hypothetical. It borders on racism when it cites people like Samuel Huntington. I just cannot wrap my head around statements like "[population explosion] alone would go a long way of explaining Muslim violence in 1980s and 1990s"!!! or another quote stating: [the America/USA] would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil [if it was settled by French, Spanish or Portuguese]. Bringing Such simplified and borderline uninspired quotes, among other statements that simplify the rise of Christianity and worse, Islam, makes it hard to suggest this book as a must read to others.
However, if all that is brought in the book ought to be treated like food for thought, and in no case final and proven facts, one might benefit from this book to widen their horizons for a more secular narrative of history.

[David Teachout · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not entirely convinced that the point of this book was to detail how religion evolved. Confusion reigns from the title itself, seeming to connect "faith" (a way of knowing) with "religion" (a social process with varied traits). The confusion is not helped by the author defining religion as both a process manifesting in particular cultural traits including rites and rituals, and as an instinctive propensity for people at the level of genetics. It would seem that this confusion is deliberately done, as the author likely knows that attempting to prove how genetics results in particular behaviors is notoriously difficult, yet he desperately wants to salvage certain cultural proclivities without identifying instead the mental processes that they point to. Doing analysis this way allows the author to dismiss aspects of religion that he doesn't like as being "cultural" and supporting aspects that he likes as being "instinctual." This would be ok (not really, but I'm trying to be helpful here) if he applied it consistently. Instead we have him dismissing violence done in the name of Islam as being cultural and not in line with the religious instinct of Islam, yet condemning violence done in the name of Christianity as being a negative example of how the religious instinct can manifest. Nowhere is there any clarification.

I appreciate the desire to treat the religious impulse from an evolutionary perspective, rather than immediately condemning it (which is ridiculous given the many different and sometimes helpful ways it manifests) and so with that in mind, the first 10% is worth reading.

[Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It is the second I've read by author Nicholas Wade, after "A Troublesome Inheritance".
Wade puts forth his thesis that religion is a mechanism or module inherent to humanity, and that it has acted as a group-level adaptive mechanism that has allowed societies to thrive.
While we don't know for certain, as the science regarding genetics is still young; Wade theorizes that religious belief could have biological underpinnings. I have heard others argue this, including social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whom Wade cites in the book.
It is my opinion that this argument is more likely to be true than the position put forward by many "New Atheists", including Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins - that religion is not an adaptive evolutionary mechanism, but rather; a maladaptive mechanism that could be more accurately described as a parasitic mind virus (Dawkins quote).
This was a well-written book that makes for a very interesting read. Wade also talks at great length about the evolutionary role of music and dancing as well.
His quote on the formation of music, language, dancing and religion:
"So a tentative sequence of events would be:
1) Dance
2) Music
3) Proto-religion, based on ritual
4) Language
5) Religion based on shared beliefs about the supernatural."
He explores this in long-form throughout the book.
He also explores in detail the role of religion in warfare and the nation state, as well as giving the reader a cursory summary of the history of the three Abrahamic religions.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in history, religion, psychology, and social psychology.

[Rob Dewitte]

This comes on the heels of Wade's "Before the Dawn", which traced the evolution of human groups along mitochondrial DNA, which remains unmodified since modern humans left Africa thousands of years ago.

Wade's thesis, based in part on the fact that it is universal among human populations, is that on the whole, religion conferred an adaptive advantage to its believers, and thus is the result of evolution. He focuses his efforts on the concrete parts of religion that can be measured: religious behavior, relics, monuments, drawing from archaeology and anthropological accounts to draw parallels.

Though not quite as groundbreaking as Before the Dawn, which has concrete DNA findings as its underpinnings, TFI is still built of compelling blocks. It is unlikely to be appreciated by the devout, as he includes familiar references to critical analysis of sacred texts, thereby revealing them to be patchworks of more primitive religious traditions, and hence not literally true. Here, he points out scholarly doubt over the existence of Muhammad at all, and that the legendary exodus of Moses is unlikely to be historically accurate. For Wade, the chief operator here is that the history of these texts is obscured by the failure / inability of ancient human civilizations to keep very good records.

His parting question for religion is a pivotal one: since religion has been shown to be adaptive... now what?

[Shauni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book could have used a better editor, because although the content is excellent, the writing is sometimes pretty terrible, especially at the beginning.

A couple of quotes that sum up the book:

"Religion can be seen, from one perspective, as a high form of creativity. Music appeals to the auditory part of the brain, poetry to the language faculty, dance to the centers of rhythm and movement, art to the visual cortex. Religion plays on all these faculties, and through them arouses the deepest emotions of which the mind is capable, inspiring people to look beyond their own self-interest to something they may value more, the health and survival of their society, culture or civilization."

"Maybe religion needs to undergo a second transformation, similar in scope to the transition from hunter gatherer religion to that of settled societies. In this new configuration, religion would retain all its old powers of binding people together for a common purpose, whether for morality or defense. It would touch all the senses and lift the mind. It would transcend self. And it would find a way to be equally true to emotion and to reason, to our need to belong to one another and to what has been learned of the human condition through rational inquiry."

[Jamey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the several thousand books I’ve read, one of my favorites is a summary of then-current knowledge about the Paleolithic by science journalist Nicholas Wade, called Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Penguin, 2006). So I am reluctant to write this rather sour review of his next book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009).

I’m doing so anyway, because The Faith Instinct is a particular kind of unhandsome volume that I consider bad for the public because it encourages people to think they know what they don’t know at all. In the opening pages, Wade quite helpfully admits “That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence” (p. 5), and “Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists” (p. 6). While this is welcome circumspection, the book repeatedly opposes “the supernatural world” to what it calls “the real world” (e.g., pp. 94, 109, 117, 127, etc.), begging the question of whether the rites of the devout have any actual referents outside their own minds. It continually suggests that they do not.

“The existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to moral decisions is further evidence that morality is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis” (p. 22), writes Wade, with the vague implication that no evolved faculty can disclose eternal verities. Well... the existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to arithmetic is evidence that mathematics is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis—but numbers are nevertheless an indestructible part of reality. Though mathematicians differ as to whether the integers are invented or discovered, our evolved capacity to calculate is valuable because it connects us to essential features of the universe, features whose physical embodiments are just one aspect of their ultimate nature.

Wade repeatedly throws out bogus generalizations as if no reasonable person would question them. Several examples follow.

The dubious “conflict theory” of the Neanderthal extinction is cited as an obvious truism: “But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction” (p. 50). But Clive Finlayson’s superbly humane reconsideration of that story showed what an open question it really is, in The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009).

Wade writes about the brutal male dominance hierarchy of chimpanzees of the species pan troglodytes, to draw inferences about humans’ differentiation from a common ancestor we surely share with them. Very well, but he ignores the other chimpanzee species, whose social habits are markedly different, and far less conducive to Wade’s inferences. This was already popularized in Jared Diamond's 1991 bestseller, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Hutchinson Radius, 1991).

On p. 95 we hear of “the brain’s outer cortex, the seat of consciousness…” Fairness to Wade’s 2009 book restrains me from citing Mark Solms’ great work The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2021), which only appeared a dozen years later, and discredited this “cortical fallacy.” Consciousness is not the exclusive possession of the mammalian neocortex, and is enjoyed by all vertebrates by virtue of a much older evolutionary achievement we call the brainstem.

The Faith Instinct is primarily about religion, not primatology or neuroscience, but it makes several big errors there, too: “Modern religions like Judaism or Christianity emphasize creeds and intellectual belief over rituals and emotional engagement” (p. 87). Millions of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Chassidic Jews can be properly offended by this silly claim about emotional engagement. But the glib conflation of “Judaism or Christianity” as interchangeably emphasizing “creeds and intellectual belief over rituals” is appalling ignorance. Ritual and right conduct are the heart of Jewish piety, grounded in a covenantal relationship with the God that chose the Hebrew people to receive the Torah which enumerates His commandments. A great gulf separates this religion of deeds from Luther’s religion of “faith alone,” which explicitly disavowed the importance of “outer works” and “the law,” sweeping them away with an almost gleeful contempt.

And Wade steps in this same pothole elsewhere: “Christianity promises admission to heaven for obeying divine law, eternal damnation for defying it” (p. 54). No one who has read any theological work of the Protestant Reformation could hold such a view, and Lutheran theology—firmly based on the ancient Letters of Paul—is the precise opposite of what Wade says here.

“In advanced societies, control of religion often rests with a religious hierarchy which monopolizes access to the supernatural” (p. 40). Can anyone name an example of this? Jews and Catholics and Protestants and Muslims all have their mystics at the margins of the community, but they also have their mainstream practices designed to give common people firsthand experiences of the holy in their everyday lives.

Sometimes Wade contradicts himself, as if he’d rushed to publication without time to reread the work. On page 32 he cites sociobiologist Richard Alexander thus: “Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed of other groups in the same species.” But later on, we are told: “‘The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,’ observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel” (p. 52).

That is quite enough about The Faith Instinct.

[Darla Stokes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book, describing how and why religions evolved, was fascinating, engaging, and well-researched, with contradictory theories presented, and his reasons for preferring one over the other well-explained. The second half, describing his conclusions, was vastly less so. He dismissed studies backed up by evidence without either refuting those studies or providing evidence for his own counter theories. He also blatantly contradicted himself--for example, earlier in the book, he states that hell is a fairly recent addition to religion. Later on, he states that it's impossible for humans to be moral without a fear of hell and that those who don't believe in hell are only moral because of peer pressure from those around them who do. I would not be at all surprised to find that the book was written by two different authors.

[Bill Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an important book and a good read, though more broad and speculative than it is scientific. The thesis described in the title, that religion in the human individual and society is the result of natural selection, is barely discussed before Wade moves on to support a different claim, that shared religion the the glue that binds the individuals in a society. But both topics are interesting and Wade brings a lot of reading and thought to bear on each subject, so I was happy with the book.

Among the most controversial proposals is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all intentionally constructed by would be kings, emperors and caliphs in order to create new nations. The evidence is tantalizing.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wade presents the idea that religion evolved biologically and culturally as an adaptive aspect of humanity. This book has many critics on both sides of the debate. Religious fundamentalists find his assertion that religion is a product of natural laws unsettling, while many non-theists find his assertion that religion is essentially an adaptive trait misleading. Religion is obviously not the product of a single genetic trait, and Wade fully acknowledges this; however, he does argue that a complex combination of genetic and cultural circumstances ultimately gave rise to modern religious practices and beliefs.

[Linas Vaitulevicius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glad I came across this book and picked it up. Could have been a huge eye opener if read 10 years ago. Still a very compelling read, similar to Cambell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces in terms of intellectual insight. The book offers helicipter view of the multi-facet phenomenon we call 'religion'. Unless you are totally devoid of reason, you will find yourself in agreement with the author on nearly every page. I've seen the complaints about the author's writing style (short sentences and stuff). Go get yourself Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time if you judge the book by the length of its sentences. The author is a scientist, not a novelist. I found his style adequate, if not pleasant.

[JoAnn J. A. Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good book that gives some insight into the origins of faith.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how faith evolved.

[Stephie Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought Wade presented a reasonable explanation for why humans are so religious via evolution.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know that there's much I can add to the existing reviews, and I won't attempt to summarize Wade's ideas, as others have already ably done so. Plus, I'm like a decade late to this party. I do want to address some problems with this book.

I don't dispute the possibility that religious behavior is adaptive. Wade makes a strong case for religious behavior as a means of social cohesion. But the argument is largely speculative. There's really no evidence. And some of his statements are sloppy, like this one: “At the social level, religion has long been seen as essential to morality and probably still is." What does "still is" mean? Religion is still SEEN as essential to morality or religion IS essential to morality?

He continues, "For even though individuals can behave morally without religion, most atheists and agnostics take good care to observe the moral standards of their community, which even in highly secular countries are influenced by religion.” These kinds of statements make me crazy. The fact that I, as an atheist, observe the moral standards of my community has NOTHING to do with religion. OK, religion might "influence" a community's moral standards, but Wade's statement is tantamount to arguing that I don't steal or kill because I live in a largely Christian community. By that logic, a secular community would be full of immoral behavior, then? It's just a shit sentence and sloppy thinking, and other primates were capable of empathetic, prosocial behavior, so f off.

Later in the book, Wade cites legal scholar Noah Feldman in his argument that the Founding Fathers advocated the teaching of a nonsectarian, generic Protestantism in schools as "a foundation of morality," which remained in place until challenged in the Supreme Court in the fifties. He writes, “The educational years, it could be argued, are a unique and invaluable opportunity to inculcate a common frame of moral reference in an otherwise diverse and heterogeneous population.” A few pages later, he writes that even though only 5% of Swedes attend church, Sweden has a “Protestant value system." Are you kidding me, Wade? Come on, man. What is a "Protestant value system," and how exactly would teaching the Bible in public schools give children a "common frame of moral reference?" I'm sorry; conflating religion with morality is specious and irresponsible for a science writer.

I also think a fair treatment of this topic would have to do justice to the arguments of Pascal Boyer, Dawkins, and Pinker, which Wade does not do--he just dismisses them as "Oh well, what these thinkers suggest isn't very likely, plus they're hostile to religion." There's almost no mention of humans' predisposition toward anthropomorphism, magical thinking, the bias of agency, etc., which very well could have been adaptive at one time in human history (but, I would argue, are no longer). All it takes is a cursory education in mythology to make these mechanisms of human thought obvious.

I wouldn't read this book without also reading Dawkins or Pinker on the evolutionary psychology of religion (https://ffrf.org/about/getting-acquai...), and without being well-versed in mythology or at least reading a little Joseph Campbell. While I was reading it I actually imagined Campbell coming down from heaven (naturally) and beating Nicholas Wade's ass. It got a little weird then.

By the way, I'm not one of those atheists that wants to abolish religion and create a secular utopia. I just want clear thinking and for people to GTFO of here with this "American Civil Religion" nonsense. It doesn't represent me. Period.

I'm headed to Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion next (which looks textbook-y and is probably like a million dollars*).


*never mind, it's $13.99 on Kindle

[Joonhong Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Wade’s The Religion Gene offers one of the most sophisticated evolutionary explanations for why religion persists across human societies. Rather than treating religion as a transcendent truth or a mere cultural artifact, Wade approaches it as the outcome of several evolved human tendencies combining into a stable pattern of behavior.

According to Wade, humans possess a set of traits that together make religious behavior possible: a desire to belong to groups, a tendency to follow shared norms, the capacity to internalize moral rules, and strong emotional reactions—often anger and a desire for punishment—toward those who violate those rules. In addition, humans show a cognitive tendency to posit unseen agents or intentions behind events. When these elements converge, Wade argues, they give rise to what we recognize as religious behavior.

This framework is compelling because it places religion squarely within the structure of human social evolution. Religion, in this view, precedes divine revelation as an object of explanation and instead emerges from the way humans have evolved to live together. The book is particularly effective in showing why religion does not simply disappear when challenged by science, secular institutions, or rational critique. Religion is deeply intertwined with human emotion, morality, and social cohesion, making it resilient even under conditions of intellectual or institutional decline.

Reading The Religion Gene, however, also invites a broader question: are the tendencies Wade identifies truly unique to religion? The desire for group belonging, norm-following behavior, moral internalization, and punitive emotions toward rule-breakers all operate well beyond religious contexts. In fact, they appear to be essential conditions for the formation and maintenance of any durable human group. From this perspective, what Wade describes as the foundations of religion can also be understood as expressions of a more general human instinct for group formation and preservation.

Seen this way, religion may be interpreted as a particularly powerful social mechanism that emerges when this instinctive group orientation is combined with the human tendency to posit transcendent authorities. When norms are framed as commands “from above,” moral rules become markers of group identity, and violations are experienced not merely as errors but as betrayals. This helps explain the extraordinary cohesion often found in religious communities.

One of the strengths of Wade’s argument is that it implicitly opens the door to comparisons beyond religion. Similar patterns of moral certainty, emotional bonding, and group loyalty can be observed in modern political movements, where ideological communities often function in ways strikingly reminiscent of religious groups. The book itself does not dwell extensively on contemporary politics, but its analytical framework makes such extensions both natural and illuminating.

Overall, The Religion Gene is a thoughtful and provocative work that succeeds in reframing religion as a product of human evolutionary history rather than an anomaly within it. Even readers who disagree with aspects of Wade’s evolutionary assumptions will find the book valuable for the clarity with which it connects religion to fundamental features of human social life.

Reading this book led me to explore how the same human tendencies Wade describes continue to shape modern political movements as well.
I expanded on that line of thought in a short essay here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-1851...