This article is a continuation of the post located here.

So the question boils down to: what are the minimal mental requirements for the software religion? As I stated in a comment to the previous part, the purpose of religion is to communitize. Religions discriminate because they don’t want their youth marrying into another population. Why should you give their genes free access into another generation? If you reproduce with one of us, then the relatedness of your baby with us will be closer to one. No one says this consciously of course (imagine if they did!) but this is the underlying structure of all discrimination. This further leads to creation of myths and taboos.

Muslims and Jews must not eat pork; originating from the same part of the world and the same tribes, the early populations of these religions were threatened by the attacking Romans. The Romans of course were hedonists. Imagine a common scene where the invading population would gather around all the meat shops (primarily pork for the Romans). An undeclared rule would prevail forbidding the early Jewish children from the pork markets. A few generations down, this would become a communal law. Similarly the Hindus don’t eat beef, even though it is well known that they did till about 1000 A.D. This was the exact time the Muslims invaded. Practicing Hindus today find the consumption of beef and meat in general to be literally “disgusting”, and by the rules of hereditary, all people who consume something disgusting must acquire the same properties. It can also be noted that South Indians (a region the attackers did not reach) continue to consume this meat. So in these unsaid and undeclared ways, taboos emerge. And this is the essence of religion. Even moderate populations today do eventually marry into their own religion and race. Even if you don’t discriminate, that familial instinct remains, and indeed it has its roots in our ancestral societies.

We can prove this by showing that taboos are not static, but variable to communal pressures. Incest is the best example that comes to mind. A serendipitous experiment Napolean Chagnon conducted with the Yanomamo, shows us how shaky the rule can be. In isolation, himself and a friend interviewed men and women about their phylogenic tree. Many tribal cultures have strong taboos against naming the dead (with fear their ghosts might return or something along those lines); so it was very hard to get them to name the deceased relatives. But the purpose of the experiment was not to test their knowledge of the subject, but to see how quickly could men return the correct answer as opposed to women. And the initial assumption that gave cause to the experiment was found true. Men did answer more questions significantly faster with more accuracy. This shows that men (in tribal societies) are much more aware of the distance that exists between themselves and any given female. They have to know this better to be able to draw the line of incest in their minds. With abundance of women and low competition (like our societies), the incest bar is set very high. No one crosses it, and if they do, they are looked upon with the utmost contempt. But when your village has only about 10 or so people remaining, that bar is suddenly lowered. A chart in a 1973 publication shows what Chagnon thought the society of all our ancestors looked like. It is a great chart to look at, but I don’t have access to it right away. It showed how rare it was for all members of a family to be alive all at once. If mother, daughter and son were alive, then father might be already dead, or some iteration thereof.

So we can begin to surmise the reasons religion might have evolved: the necessity of promoting our own genes over other populations’. But these communal pressures do not belong only to humans, but all social animals. So why don’t we see capybaras and vervet monkeys adhering to strange societal laws? Well who says we don’t? They don’t pray but they certainly do discriminate. Gang warfare is common amongst primates. Rodents are often known to be stingy with resources. All other social animals also follow this pattern. But the major distinguishing factor between our religions and theirs is that of language. We have it, they don’t. We set rules and pass them on through generations, they don’t. And recently, since we started writing, our rules have gained the ability to remain verbatim through several generations. This also allows for gross misinterpretations by it’s modern followers.

So now our job is to draw a separator at the point at which modern language evolved and then we could answer the title-question. But this is where the problem arises, we don’t know when language evolved, and we are not even sure how it evolved. Christine Kenneally gives a very nice history of the field in her book “The First Word.” She draws up the political chart with Chomsky at the right and Sue Savage Rumbaugh at the left. Steven Pinker lies somewhere between Chomsky and the mid point, and Philip Liberman at the symmetrically opposite. Some on the left insist that language comes from many different parts of the brain, and it emerges not as a single object but rather more like an illusion formed by many functioning parts. With this they suggest that it is futile to search for an evolutionary point for language, because it does not exist. Those to the ‘extreme’ right suggest that all language evolved with a single mutation. Though there are less than a handful of people that share this view, most on this end believe that some mental faculties did evolve for the specific purpose of language. It is now well known that there are no specific language organs, but I think the evidence also shows us that there are some “key” language centers in the brain. The function that they serve is so specific, it is difficult to explain their history if we do not assume they evolved for their namesake.

The most convincing argument I have heard towards the left is that regarding “recursion”. Recursion is that property of our language that sets it apart from everything else that exists; it is the ability with which we can make sentences infinitely long. By embedding one phrase into another, we can produce sentences like “Mary thought that Harry thought that Larry thought…she liked him”. We can replace ‘…’ with any number of phrases. The right requires recursion to have evolved for the specific purpose of communication, but the argument sets-up a scenario where even without language, recursion could be used to keep social networks in mind (like suggested above). For reasons like this, I lie close to the center-line, though on the right side.

Many researchers like to stress that we are not thinking machines, but feeling machines that think. Our emotions precede our words, but that does not mean our words do not have any domain over our emotions. Types of swearing demonstrate just this. Calling someone a “piece of shit” does nothing more than remind them of something unpleasant, something their brain is programmed to respond to with “disgust” for any number of reasons (hygiene in this case.) So in this way, words could be an immensely powerful weapons. From kindergarten schoolyards to Mccain-esque politics, words govern the largest aspects of our social lives. They can inspire life-long embarrassment and bring a lack of other human qualities into power (most headmen in tribal societies are accomplished orators). So is it so hard to imagine that there is a survival advantage to language organs? To those who say there is little evidence to support this view, I say be patient. The last few years have brought in a flurry of achievements in genetics, and the whole FOXP2 extravaganza symbolizes just this.

Artifacts such as the Lascaux paintings and the Venus of Willendorf are evidence enough to show that humans of 30,000 years ago were genetically modern. They probably did have language, even if it was not as rich as ours*. Before that, the neanderthals survived a period of 600,000 years hunting and gathering lacking the tools other carnivores had (sharp claws and immense strength). So they must have had a secret weapon that made them so successful, and I propose it might have been an elementary form of language. It might have been perhaps based more on pantomime than vocabulary, but certainly capable of a rich syntax, and fancy features such as recursion. Nothing else I can think of could have made them so successful. But hominids that lived before them also did so for long periods. Some of them were the pioneers who discovered and rediscovered new continents and ecosystems. To prevail in these could not have been an easy task.

If the abilities with which are our extant cousins communicate are homologous to those of our common ancestors, then we can even suggest primitive linguistic abilities must have evolved over 6 million years ago. The question that still completely eludes us though is that of the evolution of completely human linguistic abilities. Though that can be left for another debate.

If we are creative enough, we can imagine the neanderthals and homo ergasters conquering new lands (and consequential challenges) with group dynamics. They would then meet new groups and control their own expansion with primitive creoles. And when the problem would get large enough, there is a good chance, they must have prayed.

*The only reason I suggest it might not have been as rich as ours is not because they had an inferior brain, but because language is ultimately a meme that grows through use. English is the perfect example: it is a rapidly changing language that has morphed into many forms before. And it continues to do so because of the vast number of people today that speak it. These memes are so heavily animated today because of the many networks we use to communicate.

Last 5 posts by Abhishek Bhatnagar

• Where is the case for optimism? - December 29th, 2008
• Mutiny on a Chromosome - December 20th, 2008
• Conservation-ing - December 1st, 2008
• The life of a language - November 30th, 2008
• Five animal names that make you giggle - November 16th, 2008

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