A group of leading evolutionary scientists predict that the people of the world may soon outgrow their use of religious beliefs as they become richer and more developed in the coming years.
Religions such as Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity came about as a form of evolutionary response to how different the lifestyles of early people were between the rich and poor members of their societies.
Dr. Nicolas Baumard, an evolutionary psychologist who co-authored the study, explained that people who became rich during ancient times developed a "slower" type of lifestyle, causing them to be less aggressive, less sexually active and more laid-back compared to others.
Baumard and his colleagues wrote that having absolute affluence can produce predictable effects on how people motivate and reward themselves.
It can cause them to shun a "fast life" approach, where they need to acquire resources themselves and even coerce interactions with other people, and prefer a "slow life" approach, where they practice self-control strategies and cooperate with others around them.
Having a "slow life", however, placed wealthy people at a significant evolutionary disadvantage since it caused them to reproduce at a later point in their lives and have fewer offspring compared to their poorer contemporaries. They also had less food to eat because they weren't able to get enough resources themselves.
To remedy their situation, these rich people introduced moralizing religions to poor members of society in order to have them follow "slow-life" strategies as well, according to Baumard. This allowed the wealthy to offset their evolutionary disadvantages.
The researchers said that religious beliefs had already existed even before people became aware of the divide between the rich and poor. However, these practices didn't focus on the concept of fulfillment and morality as much as present-day religions do.
The team believes that religion is not based on the physical or material fulfilment of a person, but rather on his or her spiritual fulfilment.
"To most people, believers and non-believers alike, it seems obvious that religion is on the side of the spiritual rather than the material world and that it fosters self-discipline and selflessness rather than license and greed," Baumard and his colleagues wrote.
Their findings suggest the idea that genuine salvation could only be obtained through moral behavior and not by having the most sex and the most food, may have possibly served as a form of distraction for poor people, causing them to live a slow life.
However, since more and more people are becoming richer in recent times, Baumard said people may no longer find a need to maintain moralizing religions.
He said that having a slow lifestyle is becoming commonplace among larger populations, leaving people more motivated to cooperate with one another and achieve their fulfilment in other areas of life aside from merely the physical.
This means an increasing number of poor people are starting to outgrow the need for moralizing religions to help control their behavior.
Baumard and his colleagues' findings are featured in the journal Current Biology.
Photo: Wagner T. Cassimiro | Flickr
