But there's an interesting and telling exception from the perspective of evolutionary studies. While no non-religious populations of Russians are known to have retained at least replacement levels, some religious groups have. Here's a report on a group of Traditionalist Orthodox Christians ("Old Believers") that managed to survive in Latin America and recently returned to Russia. Dubbed the "Russian Amish", these groups are showing the gold standard of evolutionary success: many children.

As I did my first studies on religion & fertility many years ago among the "American Amish", the evolved homologies seem to be quite striking. Shedding the legacy of the former Soviet Union, cooperative and reproductive potentials of religiosity are beginning to emerge.

Report on "The Russian Amish"

Special thanks go to @Rjrasva for tweeting this report!

Although we are beginning to understand the emergence and expansion of non-religious worldviews better than ever, a major question remains: Are human populations lacking any beliefs in superempirical agents doomed to demographic extinction?

It's not only that religious people tend (on average) to have far "more" children than their non-religious peers - it's also about that ominous fact that we do not know about a single non-religious group or population that managed to retain at least the reproductive replacement level for just a century. There have been numerous attempts since Greek and Indian antiquity, not to speak about those late Western cultures and countries - but up to now, there has not been a single demographic success on the communal level.

Reasons for not having children

A new recent survey about the reasons of many Germans not to have kids pointed out three main arguments:

1. 60% of the respondents claimed that they wanted to be "free and independent".

2. 58% pointed out that raising children would be "too expensive".

3. 51% argued that "the professional career is more important than having a family".

Religious vs. Non-Religious Arguments

To me, it seems to be rather obvious that religious traditions are able to counter such arguments, referring to their respective superempirical agents (such as ancestors or gods): Parts of the individual freedom should be submitted to their will, money and professional self-fulfillment should not be held higher than the needs of communities and families. Even if you chose not to have children (for example as a religious Celibate), you should contribute to the survival and cooperation of the religious group! And the superempirical agents are watching and judging your behaviors!

In contrast, I can't see any convincing arguments acceptable to an educated non-believer. Philosophically, Society or Evolution are no absolute values and the simple answer that there might be "too many humans" around would be able to counter and silence any remaining moralistic claims.

Therefore, the empirical irony remains: The more Atheism is flourishing numerically, the more Religion(s) are winning out evolutionarily.

If there's a God, he seems to sport a certain sense of humour...

Established science history is crediting two male scientists with the discovery of parental investment: Ronald Fisher in the 1930s and Robert Trivers in the 1970s.

But while working on the (German) biography of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, I was surprised to find her describing parental investment back in 1875 in "The Sexes throughout Nature"!

As the book is available for free download in archive.org, you might want to check it out for yourself. Although a great work of early science by a contemporary colleague of Darwin (both earned their degrees in theology), the contribution of Antoinette Brown Blackwell has been largely ignored.

Therefore, I wouldn't assume or claim that Fisher and Trivers knew about it. They re-discovered what had been forgotten as the work of a woman.

I think it would be fair (and rightfully encouraging to girls and women taking interest in natural sciences) to credit Antoinette Brown Blackwell with the discovery of parental investment along with her male successors.

The impressive person I am talking about is Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825 - 1921). Although she deserves to be named among the most remarkable voices of relligious history and early evolutionary studies, her name and life are unknown to most English speakers - and completely foreign to German speakers.

Thus, in order to do my little piece, I published the first German biography of this great woman as a sciebook at €1.99 available for all eBook-readers abroad.

Although some people predicted that there wouldn't be much interest in an American women of history, I decided for myself that every single reader (male or female) would be worth the effort.

But now, I got a notification that all published articles which ever appeared on RBB are free for download throughout February 2013!

I mean, not only book reviews like the one I did recently on Eric Kaufmann's "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?" - but all!

If you are having any interest in evolutionary studies whatsoever, I would recommend starting with the ranking of the most-read papers here. Grab some content - and enjoy evolutionary studies of religion at its best!

Blogpost 1: Is it just affiliation?

In his first blogpost, Jonathan asked whether I might have missed that my blogpost "depends on the premise that affiliation to these groups as revealed in, say, censuses, is a reliable indicator of religiosity".

Well, no, we haven't missed that. Understanding diverse perspectives concerning religious affiliations, beliefs and practices is mandatory in German Religionswissenschaft (the scientific study of religion). That's the reason we are combining multiple qualitative and quantitative approaches and databases for testing and refining respective hypotheses.

Actually, our very first empirical study on the subject of religion & demography back in 2006 explored which factors played a role in determining the higher numbers of children among religious Germans in comparison to their non-religious peers. Among the findings (you may download the article for free here) are those pointing out that religious practice (i.e. frequency of prayer) is correlating stronger with the reproductive success than religious self-declaration.

 Credit: Blume, M. et al. (2006)

Jonathans blogpost concludes with the assumption that my perspective "excludes from his analysis ‘those religious communities who do not build and support families … (i.e. late Greek and Roman Polytheism, Gnostic groups, the Shakers)’.". This is feeling rather odd as the graph I added to my blogpost is featuring i.e. those very Shakers... They are also mentioned and discussed in some of the linked articles and in blogposts such as: "The Shakers and Their Importance for Evolutionary Studies"...

So, let's just proceed to...

Blogpost 2: But you haven't been there, in the past

After repeating some of his objections from blogpost 1, Jonathan is bringing up the very classic aimed against evolutionary theory and evolutionary studies in general: You can't know for sure because you haven't been there! Maybe it's all just storytelling! There's "plenty of evidence that the idea of a discrete religion that comprises a combination of {(i) an exclusive, systematic religious doctrine + (ii) exclusive use of certain religious practices + (iii) a specific and exclusive religious affiliation} is a relatively recent invention that is even now by no means the norm, and which requires a great deal of policing to make sure that people defined by any one of these characteristics are also defined by the other two."

Yes, sure. But I wonder where I (or Darwin himself) wrote anything about religion starting with "exclusive, systematic religious doctrine" and "specific and exclusive religious affiliation"? The widely accepted evolutionary definition of religiosity (dating back to Darwin himself) I brought up in the post named "beliefs in superempirical (or supernatural) agents" - including ancestors, spirits, angels and demons, gods and (according to Darwin: finally) God.

Let's read the founder of evolutionary studies himself, in his famous "Descent of Man" (1871):

"Belief in God – Religion. – There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still ex-ist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their lan-guages to express such an idea. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture. [...] “If, however, we include under the term "religion" the belief in unseen or spiri-tual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be almost uni-versal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose."

Source: Evolutionary Studies of Religiosity and Religions, started by Charles Darwin. Lecture given at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), 2011.

In a sense, the very logic of evolutionary thinking is not to assume that traits and traditions "just happened", but to trace their evolutionary histories to roots and causes. These empirical reconstructions are always falsifiable by better variants, fresh findings and data. They are no more "just-so-stories" than reconstructions of dinosaurs, which we have never encountered, too...

And concerning the assumed link of cooperative and reproductive potentials of religiosity ranging to the past, I'd just like to point out

1. If empirical (quantiative and qualitative) studies are pointing out cooperative and reproductive potentials in today's languages, arts and religions, it's reasonable to assume that these potentials emerged in the past.

2. Ranging back to the oldest mythologies available, family topics are highlighted in religious traditions. For example, the first biblical commandment according to Jewish tradition is Genesis 1,28: "Be fruitfull and multiply!" And the legendary struggle between the emerging Israelites and the Pharao in the story of Exodus is about the demographic performance of the Monotheists...

3. Finally, early religious art is featuring dominantly female "Venus figurines" depicting women being fertile or even giving life (birth). And there's a very close connection to the observation of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and others concerning humans to be "cooperative breeders".

Credit: Venus of Tursac - Female figurine giving birth, ca. 25.000 yrs BP

Of course, I'd agree that every evolutionary hypothesis HAS to be falsifiable by better data and arguments - that's the point in every empirical science. But I do think that those findings already available are strong enough to assume that the cooperative and reproductive potentials of today's religious communities had their predecessors ranging back in history.

Blogpost 3: Seculars could make it, too... somewhere!

In his third and (yet) final post, Jonathan discusses a central empirical finding from my original post:

We found many religious traditions that were able to attain high levels of fertility throughout the generations. But in sharp empirical contrast, we didn’t find a single non-religious community, movement or population that was able to retain at least replacement level (two births per woman) for a century!

At first, Jonathan tries to show that there "could have been" some highly fertile, non-religious groups by presenting a historical, communist propaganda project aimed at lifting birth rates (which clearly indicates that there was a problem, right?). But, alas, neither did Communist (or National Socialist, or Humanist etc.) groups retain high birth rates nor did they thrive for a single century.

But if no empirical falsification is available, this could be due to the "historical novelty of secularism. The idea of having communities or institutions that exclude religiosity (on your definition) simply does not have a long history."

Well, for one, that's the very topic: If religion would not be an important or even necessary component of societal live, we should expect at least to find some historical examples of thriving non-religious groups. If there are none, that's a strong argument for assuming that religion cannot easily be replaced. And historically speaking, there have been non-religious worldviews ranging back to Greek and Indian antiquity, together with prominent teachers and followers. But they just never managed to build sustainable traditions.

Then, numerous non-religious communities started during the 19th century in the USA. My favorite example have been the scientific-egalitarian Icarians, who managed to inherit land and buildings in Nauvoo, as a Mormon community had been driven away. In their peek time, the community had more than 500 members! But, alas, the Icarians dissolved like all other secular communities, whereas the Mormons are still thriving today.

To transfer the anecdotical to the empirical, anthropologists (!) Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler explored "cooperation and communal longevity" of religious and secular communities founded during the 19th century within the USA. The results are pretty clear and congruent to all those already mentioned: Strict religious communities turned out to be far more lasting than secular communities, which tended to dissolve rather quickly.

Credit: Sosis & Bressler 2003

And there's no shortage of more examples - such as the Israeli Kibbutz movement, which started dominantly with secular communes. But nearly all of them dissolved one way or the other - whereas the minority of religious Kibbutzim grew into a solid majority. (Of course, the overall demography of Israel, or Turkey, or the US... are other points in case.)

Everyone is free to believe there "shall be" fertile, non-religious groups in the future. But concerning the past, the findings are pretty clear: Although there have been abundant possibilities, no human population lacking religious mythologies has ever been found to succeed in evolutionary terms for just a century.

So, I want to thank Jonathan Mair for the chance to clarify some issues concerning evolutionary studies of religiosity and religions here. Although it should be clear that blogposts have their limits concerning scientific discourse, I hope you enjoyed the exchange and got some interest in a relevant and thriving field of scientific study.

But whatever ironies happened across my way of educating about the Amish, nothing yet compared to the videoclip "Amish paradise" by Weird Al Yankovic sent to me by one of my former students in Jena, Klaus Lohmann. And if you didn't know it until now, I feel that most of you'll probably join in the thanks to bring this one to our attention. Enjoy (and forward)!

In the next post on this blog, I plan to answer some of those very good questions by Jonathan Meir in this discussion.

Credit: http://www.spiegel.de/

Written by the science journalist Manfred Dworschak and illustrated by a range of well-chosen pictures, key findings of some leading colleagues such as Jesse Bering, Ara Norenzayan, Klaus Schmidt, Deborah Kelemen, Pascal Boyer, Gabriele Helmer, Sebouh Aslanian and Richard Sosis are presented. The story is closing with my findings about the reproductive potentials of religious communities and traditions. And - thank all the Superempiricals - Dworschak managed to condense and to sharpen the science without deseeding it. Great!

Of course, numerous articles and books have appeared these last years in the scientific field. For example, you can download (for free) the respective lead story "Homo religiosus" of the great German "Geist & Gehirn"-magazine about the naturalness and (potential) adaptivity of religious beliefs.

Credit: Gehirn & Geist

But although every one of these steps felt uplifting by itself, the progression of science into the wider public might be something special. These next days, thousands of people in Germany will read, think and debate about evolution and religion, about traditions, functions, dangers and meanings. Some of them will take science as a chance to improve their perspectives on their outer and inner worlds.

To me, today feels like a great day.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers of The Nature of Faith and of EVOLUTION - This View of Life!

Yours, Michael Blume (Homepage)

Both genders are exercising evolutionary choices: Women more often favoring stronger marital and communal security (as in strict, monotheistic religions) and offering privileged roles to men in return - whereas the latter tending in higher percentages toward hedonistic, poly- or atheistic worldviews. Even celibate institutions (offering services like policing rule-abiding behavior, strengthening communities and families, child care, education, healing and more) can be adequately described as religious helpers-at-the-nest swapped between family networks (i.e. by Berman et al. 2007).

Survival benefits of religiosity (like health, welfare, security and more) might also apply. But from a biological (and biocultural) perspective, the strong intra-generational "reproductive advantage of religion(s)" (F.A. von Hayek) is setting the decisive benchmark of evolutionary success.

Introduction to the Web Resources on Religion & Reproduction

Thanks to the creativity and contacts of the German honorary consul Harald Klein in Brazil, the Catholic church agreed to advertise the upcoming year of German-Brazil-friendship by allowing for a nightly illumination of the famous Cristo Redentor statue in Rio with the colors of the German flag: Black, Red and Gold. The event took place at the national holiday of Octobre 3rd, the day of the peaceful German reunification in 1990.

I wanted to share with you an interesting (if thought-provoking) piece of art- and playfull recombination of religious and national symbolism, tradition and modernity.

Credit: German Honorary Consulate, Vitoria, Brazil