Abstract
A short commentary on different models of religious evolution with the following results: Currently, there is no model for the evolution of religions that meets the strict scientific requirements of an evolutionary model. Either the focus is placed on the evolution of the human mind, making it a quest for the evolution of Homo sapiens, or if indeed the correct question is being asked, the evolution of religion, then the issue of the natural evolving unit is not addressed and consequently, the known religions cannot be categorised within an hierarchic-encaptic system, the interpretation of which would have by default indicated an evolutionary process.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Behaviourism traces any behaviour back to mere internal or external stimulation. B. Frederic Skinner, main proponent of behaviourism and a decided critic of religion, interprets religious behaviourisms as the result of operant conditioning (Skinner 1947).
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A comprehensive overview can be found in Geertz 2015, pp. 388–389.
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It should thus also become clear why cognitive-scientific approaches are not helpful to us: they allow only intelligent speculation about the origins of religion.
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We have discussed this issue by resorting to Viktor Witter Turner’s research concerning the connection between social conflict and religious ritual . Consequently, conflict-solving rituals must have been in effect during the early phase of sedentariness and not Norenzayan’s Big Gods (Wunn et al. 2015, pp. 137–154; Wunn and Grojnowski 2016, pp. 153–172).
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Blackmore (1999, pp. 53, 56), herself an enthusiastic support of the meme, for which she had established an entire theoretical structure, had to admit that “We cannot specify the unit of a meme” and “We do not know the mechanisms for copying and storing memes”.
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Wunn, I., Grojnowski, D. (2018). Why a “Darwinian” Approach on Religious Evolution?. In: Religious Speciation. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04435-0_3
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