Product Description

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

For at least the last fifty thousand years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given, either by believers or atheists, to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have an evolutionary basis. Did religion evolve, in other words, beacause it helped people in early societies survive?

In this original and controversial book, longtime reporter for The New York Times's Science section Nicholas Wade gathers new evidence showing why religion became so essential in the course of human evolution, and how an instinct for faith has been hardwired into human nature. This startling thesis is sure to catch the attention of both believers and nonbelievers. People of faith may not warm up to the view that the mind's receptivity to religion has been shaped by evolution. Atheists may not embrace the idea that religious expression evolved because it conferred essential benefits on ancient societies and their successors. As The Faith Instinct argues however, both groups must address the fact, little understood before now, that religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature.

How did we evolve to believe? Wade shows that the instinct for religious behavior is wired into our neural circuits much like our ability to learn a language. Religion provided the earliest human societies with the equivalents of law and government, giving these societies an edge in the struggle for survival. AS a force that binds people together and coordinates social behavior, religion supported another significant set of social behaviors: aggression and warfare. Religious behavior, both good and ill, will remain an indelible component of human nature so long as human societies need the security and cohesion that belief provides.

Social scientists once predicted that religion would progressively fade away as societies advanced in wealth and education. They were wrong. The first objective and nonpolemical book of its kind, The Faith Instinct reveals that to understand the persistence of faith, one must first acknowledge that religious behavior is embedded in human nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4729 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594202285
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Highly intriguing...In this probing work of science reporting, New York Times correspondent Wade sheds light on what is sure to bea controversial new field of research in evolutionary psychology, genetics and anthropology...A turning point, and advancement, in the science-religion debate."
-Kirkus Review

"[In The Faith Instinct], longtime New York Times science reporter Wade deftly explores the evolutionary basis of religion. He draws on archaeology, social science, and natural science as he vigorously shows that the instinct for religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature...Wade's study compels us to reconsider the role of evolution in shaping even our most sacred human conditions."
-Publishers Weekly

"The Faith Instinct is a big winner! Its highly intelligent and much- needed narrative about why religions have proved essential to human success kept me engrossed from its beginning to its final pages."
-James D. Watson, author of The Double Helix

"There is so much...in this compact account, including cultural-evolutionary explanations of the three great monotheisms-enough, in fact, to make it a cornerstone of popular religion-and-science studies."
-Booklist

"It is a rare book that will be read as eagerly by religion's defenders as by its detractors. Building on his rightly admired Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade has written just such a book."
-Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

"As he did earlier for human prehistory in Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade has delivered the most balanced and fact-based account available of a subject fundamental to human self-understanding. His scholarship is thorough, and his writing crystalline and exciting."
-Edward O. Wilson, author of Consilience and The Future of Life

"Instead of attacking or defending religion, as so many have done lately, the biggest challenge is to explain how we became the only religious primate. In a spell-binding and wide-ranging account, Nicholas Wade offers a natural history of religion and convincingly explains why the phenomenon is here to stay."
-Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy

"Of all the recent books on religion, I believe The Faith Instinct is simultaneously the most complete, the most correct, and the most accessible to the general public. Wade tells an extraordinary story in which morality, community, and religion are three strands of the same rope. Free of jargon and partisanship, The Faith Instinct is full of fascinating and up-to-the- minute scientific discoveries."
-Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

"With his new book, New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade positions himself as a serious challenger to Steven Pinker for the title of Best Living Popularizer of the Human Sciences."
-The National Review

About the Author
Nicholas Wade is a longtime reporter for The New York Times's Science section, which studies by the Times have shown is the most popular section of the paper around the country. Before writing for the Times, he was the deputy editor of Nature magazine in London, one of the world's most prestigious science publications, and a reporter for Science magazine, the world's premier science journal. He is the author or coauthor of five previous books. His most recent book, Before the Dawn, tells the story of human origins in terms of new insights from the human genome.

Customer Reviews

Finally, A Great Evolutionary Account of Religion
Nicholas Wade established himself years ago as one of the country's best science journalists but The Faith Instinct is his finest book. Indeed, it is by far the best book on religion written from an evolutionary perspective, far surpassing the cranky and deeply flawed works of Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins. I say this because these other books fail to acknowledge that religion is universal and must have been adaptive, while Wade starts with that fact and it informs the whole book. As he puts it early in the book, "Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages--such as a group's strong internal cohesion and high morale in war--that would lead to a society's members having more surviving children, and religion for such reasons would be favored by natural selection." (p.12).

After the introductory chapter on the nature of religion, the book has an excellent chapter on the work of moral psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and Mark Hauser. The work of moral psychologists at this point vindicates Hume over Kant because the evidence is overwhelming that sentiments are more important than reasoning in morality. This chapter is followed by three chapters that are at the crux of Wade's argument--"The Evolution of Religious Behavior", "Music, Dance and Trance", and "Ancestral Religion." All three chapters deal chiefly with ancestral religion drawing mainly from research on three contemporary hunting and gathering societies--the !Kung San, the Andaman Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. He says, "With all three peoples, religion was a major part of their daily lives. Religious practice involved all-night ceremonies with vigorous singing and dancing and intense emotional involvement. The emphasis was on ritual rather than belief...And the central purpose of the rites in all three groups was to bind the community together and fortify the social fabric"(p.118). Religion excites emotional attachment to one's group and manages to sometimes subsume self-interest to the good of the whole group, while at the same time, and for these reasons, fostering hatred of other groups.

The remainder of the book treats religion after the domestication of plants and the eventual emergence of states. Of course such religion is important but it is ancestral religion that is alone significant to comprehending how and why religion evolved and is adaptive. Unlike highly unequal agricultural societies, foraging societies were and are egalitarian, and religion more than anything else provided/provides the social glue that made it possible for societies to out-compete and/or defeat their neighbors. Ancestral religion was about social cohesion and cohesive social groups defeated other social groups when at war.

One of the most important sections in the book, titled "Religious Behavior and Group Selection" (pp.67-74), contained in the chapter "Evolution of Religious Behavior," describes the selective advantages of groups unified by religion. Wade discusses a recent article by David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson arguing for the plausibility of group selection. David Sloan Wilson has been making this case for decades and ten years ago E.O. Wilson scoffed at the argument. The remarkable comeback of group selection is strongly indicated by the conversion of one of America's most influential evolutionary thinkers, E.O. Wilson.

This may seem an odd point to share a criticism of this superb book, but Wade fails to distinguish group selection of genes--which is theoretically possible but likely extremely rare--and group selection of (human) cultural variants. The latter has been the main focus of group selection theorists focused upon human beings, thinkers such as Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, William Durham, and Herbert Gintis. This is, in fact, a significant and surprising lacuna, given how widely Wade reads, but one easily remedied by the eager and energetic if they read Wade first and then move to the work of these other thinkers.

Brad Lowell Stone

Since it evolved, therefore it's good
I recently purchased this book, The Faith Instinct, with high expectation, but with also reserve, I was a little hesistant mainly because of the book's subtitle, How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures; I must preface this with the fact, that I am an atheist, however I understand that certain traits must have an evolutionary basis. But Wade's book just went way off the scientific foundation, into the mirky waters of compassionate darwinism.

This book is so flawed in its scientific presentation of religion, that I urge anyone who is a fan of evolutionary psychology and reputable darwinism, to may be borrow this book from a library.

not worth the paper its printed on
Mr. Wade offers one "proof" for the biological basis of religion, that being that it is a universal phenomenon. That sociological fact is the sole support of his "bio-evolutionary" premise. To make matters far worse, his anthropology is hopelessly outdated and his history is filled with inaccuracies. This is a very poor piece of scholarship, or the complete lack thereof.