richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

170 T H E G O D D E I. U S I O N
idea that Darwinian selection chooses among species or other
groups of individuals. The Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew
suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group selection
because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and in-group
brotherly love, and this helped religious groups to survive at the
expense of less religious groups. The American group-selection
apostle D. S. Wilson independently developed a similar suggestion
at more length, in Darwin's Cathedral.
Here's an invented example, to show what a group-selection
theory of religion might look like. A tribe with a stirringly
belligerent 'god of battles' wins wars against rival tribes whose gods
urge peace and harmony, or tribes with no gods at all. Warriors
who unshakeably believe that a martyr's death will send them
straight to paradise fight bravely, and willingly give up their lives.
So tribes with this kind of religion are more likely to survive in
inter-tribal warfare, steal the conquered tribe's livestock and seize
their women as concubines. Such successful tribes prolifically
spawn daughter tribes that go off and propagate more daughter
tribes, all worshipping the same tribal god. The idea of a group
spawning daughter groups, like a beehive throwing off swarms, is
not implausible, by the way. The anthropologist Napoleon
Chagnon mapped just such fissioning of villages in his celebrated
study of the 'Fierce People', the Yanomamo of the South American
jungle. 77
Chagnon is not a supporter of group selection, and nor am I.
There are formidable objections to it. A partisan in the controversy,
I must beware of riding off on my pet steed Tangent, far from the
main track of this book. Some biologists betray a confusion
between true group selection, as in my hypothetical example of the
god of battles, and something else which they call group selection
but which turns out on closer inspection to be either kin
selection or reciprocal altruism (see Chapter 6).
Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle
it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant
force in evolution. When it is pitted against selection at lower levels
- as when group selection is advanced as an explanation for
individual self-sacrifice - lower-level selection is likely to be
stronger. In our hypothetical tribe, imagine a single self-interested