Reader Ant called my attention to an article in the May 9 Independent, “Religion could die out as world’s population gets richer, evolutionary scientists claim.” Well of course that got my attention. I’ve long argued—and the claim comes not from me, but from sociologists—that religion, as Marx argued, is an artifact of low “well being”. When you don’t have society to take care of you, or your life is uncertain, or you feel that you’re not as well off as most others, then you may turn to faith as a form of solace or a communal source of welfare. There’s a fair amount of evidence for this claim, and to start you can check out the newly-published second edition of Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.

So when I saw the Independent‘s title, I thought, “Aha, more evidence, and from ‘evolutionary scientists’, too!”

Well, the claim from the article goes back to a paper from January of last year in Current Biology by Nicholas Baumard et al. (reference below, download free; the last author is Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained). And that paper doesn’t really support the Independent headline. Baumard et al. give data showing that several moralizing religions originated between 500 and 300 BC, and in three different places, the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys, the Ganges Valley, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Those religions, said to have eventually given rise to Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity, were Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, and “Second Temple” Judaism, and are said to differ from earlier faiths in their increased emphasis on transcendence, meaning, a divine morality, and the promotion of abnegation and renunciation—as opposed to earlier faiths that were more materialistic.

Using a series of regressions, Baumard et al. found that material variables, in particular economic well being as measured by energy usage (the threshold was 20,000 kcal/head/day), explained the rise of these religious civilizations much better than did political variables.  This confirmed their hypothesis that these self-sacrificing “axial religions” emerged based on changes in economics rather than politics. The authors speculate why this is so, but come to no definitive conclusions, although, they give three possibilities:

One possibility, originally proposed by Jaspers , is that axial religions resulted from the emergence of a new class of scholars or priests who had the resource and the time to elaborate more abstract religions. Additionally, economic prosperity could have changed religions through the development of literacy and schooling, giving rise to more educated believers.

Although this hypothesis explains the clear increase in cognitive sophistication in religious doctrines during the Axial Age, it does not account for their specific content (rising importance of morality and spirituality) and the practice they are associated with (generosity, asceticism). In particular, it does not account for why the new upper class would have been particularly attracted by the condemnation of earthly pleasures, food, luxury, or social status.

Another possibility is that affluence may have promoted a new way of life through the emergence of more cosmopolitan, open, and diverse societies in which generosity, universality, and self-control became more attractive. This alternative fits very well with the importance of main city population in our model, a proxy for the development of urban life, and with the social recruitment of the axial movement among the better off.

Finally, the effect of affluence on religion could be understood in terms of life history theory, specifically focusing on the contrast between a “fast” strategy, with short-term investment of resources (e.g., early reproduction, more offspring, and less nurturing), and a “slow” strategy, with opposite characteristics. Shifts of strategies are known to be triggered by environmental cues, such as the harshness or unpredictability of environments; they result in lower or higher degree of cooperation and in investment in the self, a phenomenon originally described by Maslow in his “pyramid of needs” model.

What happened, when author Baumard talked to the Independent, is that somehow the first two explanations disappeared, and the last explanation took over. (By the way, I wouldn’t characterize any of the authors as “evolutionary scientists,” but that’s not relevant here.)  Baumard presents explanation 3, the “fast” versus “slow” strategies, as THE explanation:

Evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard said affluence and wealth caused humans to have a “slower” lifestyle, suggesting the wealthy elite 2,500 years ago would have been less sexually active, less aggressive and overall lead more laid-back lives.

“Absolute affluence has predictable effects on human motivation and reward systems,” Dr Baumard et al wrote in a study, “moving individuals away from ‘fast life’ strategies (resource acquisition and coercive interactions) and toward ‘slow life’ strategies (self-control techniques and cooperative interactions.”

The study says living a ‘slow life’ put the elite at an evolutionary disadvantage, as they may have had fewer children, had less to eat (since they were less aggressive about acquiring food) and have reproduced later in life.

In order to offset this disadvantage, Dr Baumard believes the wealthy introduced moralising religions to the poor as a way to introduce them to ‘slow-life’ strategies, therefore offsetting the evolutionary disadvantages the elite faced in being less motivated by acquisition, greed and procreation.

That’s a bit of a stretch, for it posits a prescience of the “elite” that I can’t credit (“if we don’t give them this religion, they’ll outbreed us and we’ll go extinct”). And what is the evidence anyway that back then the “elite” had fewer children than did the rest of society? If anything, I’d say the opposite, but the fact is we don’t know the answer. Further, wouldn’t it be easier for the elite to simply live the “fast life,” at least in terms of breeding? Why did they have to practice self-control? Why couldn’t they just tell the lower classes to do that as a religious obligation, and—if they were really so concerned about going extinct—they could have bred merrily away? The whole emphasis on evolution, and concern for perpetuating your class, has led author Baumard to propose a dubious hypothesis.  (Remember, the paper on which this is based doesn’t mention this “evolutionary” theory at all!)

Finally, Baumard proposes that the slow life/fast life theory predicts that religion is on its way out. Why?

But Dr Baumard said that, as affluence becomes more widespread, moralising religion could be on its way out.

He said living a ‘slow’ lifestyle was becoming more common among the general population, with people motivated to cooperate with each other and focus on fulfilment in areas of life that are not just physical – which means there is less need for moralising religions to control the behaviour of a large poor population.

Writing in the New Scientist, Dr Baumard said: “As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so.

“If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.”

If that is the case, why are many Abrahamic moralizing faiths, like Orthodox Judaism and Islam, still urging their adherents to reproduce? And let’s put Catholics into that pot, too.

There’s a simpler hypothesis than all this stuff: that as people become more affluent, their need for religion simply decreases (see above). That predicts that all religions offering some kind of social comity, or that promise rewards in the afterlife, will decrease with greater affluence and well-being. This explains the decline of religion in affluent societies, for which there’s much evidence, as well as the perpetuation of Abrahamic religions in societies with less well being.

And here’s a prediction, which is mine: the religions that don’t do that stuff, like Confucianism and many strains of Buddhism, won’t disappear as fast as the others when affluence increases (and equity, for remember that income inequality, regardless of income, erodes your feeling of well being). Such religions are perpetuated not as a form of solace for those in need, but as forms of philosophy.

Anyway, what struck me about the Independent piece were two things: how a tentative suggestion in a scientific paper got converted into a full-blown explanation in a newspaper (with other hypotheses conveniently discarded), and the weakness of that explanation. Once again, journalists fail to work through the consequences of what they write, and simply print what comes out of an academic’s mouth.

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Baumard, N., A. Hyafil, I. Morris, and P. Boyer. 2015. Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions. Current Biology, Volume 25, Issue 1, 5 January 2015, Pages R37-R38