Episode Details

The Dual-Inheritance Model explains so much about the emergence of religion in Homo sapiens millions of years ago, as well as the persistence (growth?) of atheism in a world dominated by religious humans.

This week, we bring you the second half of our conversation with Dr. Will Gervais.  We return to the kitchen table where he pulled out a wide variety of ingredients (neurobiological and cultural psychological mechanisms and definitions) one-by-one, and now watch him mix them up together to create a mechanistic soufflé that he calls the Dual-Inheritance Model for religious belief in Homo sapiens.  And he shows how this model answers two intertangled evolutionary questions: how Homo sapiens alone became a religious species millions of years ago, and how atheism can still persist today in a world that is completely dominated by religious humans.

The concepts and mechanisms that we learned about from neurobiologists — theory of mind; mind/body dualism; agency and hypersensitive agency detectors; teleology, promiscuous teleology, and intuitive creationism — are still important, but not by themselves enough to explain the emergence of religion.  It’s when you add to those the mechanisms and concepts we learned about from cultural psychologists — content- versus context-biased learning; conformist and prestige-biased learning; and, especially, credibility-enhancing displays — that you get something that’s not only exceptionally explanatory, but possibly even predictive!

We learned a lot by making comparisons between beliefs in a variety of well-known characters: Mickey Mouse, the Tooth Fairy, Zeus, Yahweh/YHWH, and Santa Claus. Each one of these has us cranking the dials on Dr. Gervais’s Dual-Inheritance Model in various directions in order to explain the differences between them. And then Dr. Gervais showed how this dual-inheritance model explained why:

• European and Scandinavian countries, who once were the hotbeds of Christian theology for centuries, are now so secular;

• Canada is making its way along the same path, while the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction, toward a hyper-religious society;

• the Shakers and the Latter Day Saints had almost identical starting points, but one quickly flourished while the other went extinct;

• my parent’s generation was hyper-Fundamendalist/Evangelical, my own generation embraced Liberal Christianity, and my children’s generation are “spiritual-but-not-religious.”

We also talked about four very different types of atheists, and how most atheists are not products of reasoning (rationalizing and educating one’s way