Tooby, Cosmides, and Barkow’s The Adapted Mind has been a foundational work for my research since I left my undergraduate. I think that they have the most promising framework for the study of culture and society that is currently being offered and that it is far more empirically grounded and logically promising as a scientific approach than “cultural evolution”.
And indeed, the Spandrels of San Marco was required reading for my BA in religion and my MA in History/Anthropology
“Would you say in a traditional society religion is resource expensive, or at least religion is not a trivial resource investment? Would evolution (non-anthropomorphically) tolerate a functionless byproduct if it punishes the smallest extravagance? Or does religion reinforce social cohesion and is therefore not selectively neutral and is not a byproduct?”
So, I’m going to attack this like a list.
1-yes, religion is resource expensive, I think that much is clear by the time and physical resources that we put into religions. Historically speaking, it seems we invested more than we do now however. Even today though, it is a non-trivial resource investment for most humans.
2-Evolution could tolerate a functionless byproduct if the byproduct is scaffold-ed upon functionable (i.e. adaptive) mechanisms. For example, evolution can tolerate humans having sex standing up as a by-product of our bipedalism even though it may not be the most fitness enhancing way of procreating.
I think religion does reinforce social cohesion, but this has been demonstrated to be achieved by many secular groups as well. Religion, as a by-product is able to exploit our cognitive abilities to foster social cohesion and it does so quite well. This, however, does not mean that the by-product becomes adaptive; it isn’t any more adaptive in most contexts than any secular social group and even if it were, Religion (capital R) has not been defined in such a way that makes it anything more than an academic abstraction.
I explain it a little bit more in this:
the same PDF is available here if you can’t access it through the journal…
