Evolution, Religion, and Other Meaning Systems
Religions puzzle the scientific imagination for two reasons: First, why do people believe in the existence of supernatural agents, despite the absence of empirical evidence? Second, why do religious beliefs cause people to behave in ways that seem so costly, such as the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son to his God? Evolutionists who study religion are faced with the same puzzle, but they have made more progress than traditional religious scholars because evolutionary theory is designed to answer questions about the presence and absence of functional organization. The most important insight to emerge from evolutionary theory, however, is that the study of religions must be nested within the more general study of meaning systems, defined as sets of beliefs and practices that receive environmental information as input and result in action as output. Almost everything that holds for religions (including adaptive fictions) also holds for other meaning systems.