A Cognitive Theory of Religion

Stewart Guthrie Animal Animism: Evolutionary Roots of Religious Cognition There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties . . . the tendency in [humans] to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by . . . my dog [which] was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol . . . every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must [unconsciously have felt] that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent. – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man Permeated by [divine] power is everything that moves in the universe. – First mantra, Isa Upanishad Introduction Despite Darwin, most scholars still see religion as marking a sharp divide between humans and nonhuman animals. Religion, in their view, involves symbolism, wishful thinking, explanation, or some combination of these activities, of which only humans are capable. Thus any explanation of religion begins and ends with ourselves. A few writers, however, root religion in a biological matrix shared by other animals. A key part of this matrix is that we and other animals all inhabit ambiguous environments that we must scan for hidden agents. In scanning for such agents, we encounter false positives: we think we see agents where none exist. I hold, then, that nonhuman animals display the common denominator of religions: seeing more organisation in things and events than these things and events really have. Like us, other animals appear to attribute characteristics of life and agency to the inanimate world. In this sense, other animals are animists. This is because we all respond to perceptual ambiguity in a strategic way, produced by natural selection: when in doubt about whether something is animate or intentional, or is the result of action by something animate or intentional, we assume that it is. Because all perception is ambiguous and because natural and human deceptions increase this ambiguity, both we and other animals always must assume that there is more to the world than meets the eye. Previously I have argued that religion is grounded in a general perceptual and cognitive strategy. I now am extending this argument by suggesting continuities and similarities between religious thought and action on the one hand and nonhuman animal perception and behaviour on the other. Far from requiring unique explanations, religious ideas are generated by cognitive mechanisms that are not only ordinary (Hume 1957 [1757]; Darwin 1871; Tylor 1871; Horton 1960, 1993; Guthrie 1980, 1993, 1997a, 1997b, 2001; Lawson and McCauley 1990; Boyer 1994; Barrett 2000) but also broadly distributed in the animal world. Religion doubtless has uses — “functions” — that are typically human (McCutcheon 1997), but its existence cannot be explained primarily by such uses. It can be explained, however, as a byproduct of something else: a perceptual and cognitive strategy. As it arises, religion may well serve various purposes – just as do other accidental products of evolutionary process – and serving such purposes may encourage it. The fundamental question is, however, why religion arises. (Jensen, this volume, remarks that this always has been the grand question; and Anttonen, this volume, writes that “for scholars, there is hardly a more serious task.”) My answer is avowedly reductive. I find it in religion’s continuities with other thought and action, including those in nonhuman animals, and in features of the natural environment in which such thought and action evolved. This approach agrees with recent assumptions in cognitive science about the fit between minds and the environments in which they have evolved, as well as with older assumptions in biology (e.g., Uexküll 1992 [1934]). Cosmides and Tooby (1994: 103), for instance, write that because “ancestral environments caused the design of psychological adaptations”, investigating environments should guide “exploration of our cognitive mechanisms.” That is, understanding the natural environments of our ancestors will help clarify how our own cognition works. Such clarification aims at what Sperber (1996: 4) calls the “prototypical natural-scientific goal”, namely, to “discover some natural mechanism that explains a wide range of phenomena in a testable manner.” What is at stake in my argument is not so much the question of what analogues to religion nonhuman animals may have, as what the answer can tell us about what humans have and why they have it. I have argued earlier (1980, 1988, 1993, 1996b, 1996c, 1997a, 1997b, 2001) that religion may best be considered cognitively, as a form of anthropomorphism (and of the related phenomenon of animism). I’ve argued moreover that the cognitive processes producing anthropomorphism and animism are deeply intuitive — as this term is used by Sperber (1996: 89), for example, who describes intuitive beliefs as “typically the product of spontaneous and unconscious perceptual and inferential processes; in order to hold these intuitive beliefs, one need not be aware of the fact that one holds them, and even less of reasons for holding them.” This describes most anthropomorphism and animism very well indeed — and hence, in my view, most religious thought and action. In contrast, however, Sperber himself (1996) and Boyer (1994 and this volume), Pyysiäinen (this volume), and some others regard religion as in conflict with intuitive thought and action. Indeed the latter two scholars find the explanation for the existence of religion in this very conflict. Thus although we all approach religion cognitively, we do so from quite different directions. Our diversity, however, is not unusual among theorists of religion, who, as Anttonen (this volume) notes, still are quite heterogeneous. Is Religion Uniquely Human? The prevailing answer to the question whether religion is unique to us is yes (e.g., Lessa and Vogt 1979; Carey 1995; Atran 1995; Mithen 1999; Rappaport 1999). In this view, religion is different from anything in nonhuman animals. It is diagnostically and decisively human, and depends on capacities and preoccupations that set us off radically. One familiar analysis of religion (Feuerbach 1972; Freud 1964; Malinowski 1948) that limits it to humans is that it consists of wishful thinking. Caught in various existential traps, not least our knowledge of our mortality, we fantasize ourselves rescued by gods and enjoying some comfortable post-mortem existence. Since only humans know that they will die, and only humans imagine something better, only humans have religions This wishful-thinking account (which appears as early as the Greeks and as recently as Stark and Bainbridge 1987) doubtless has some truth, but it appears insufficient. For one thing, many religious ideas picture a world we would not wish for, with demons, angry gods, or terrifying afterlives. Indeed Burkert, noting that many religions are frightening, writes, “to transmit religion is to transmit fear” (1996: 30-31). For another, we do not believe just anything we want. As Pinker (1997: 555) puts it, people freezing to death don’t comfort themselves with a belief that they are warm. That is, even if all religious beliefs were comforting, we still would need to know why they are plausible. Thus the wishful-thinking theory is weak, and an absence of wishful thinking in other animals would not necessarily mean the absence of the basis for religion. A second analysis of religion, often called intellectualist or, more generally, cognitivist, is that it constitutes explanation (Hume 1757; Tylor 1871; Horton 1993) and, of course, only humans explain. Again there is some truth here. Religions often do offer explanations, and these, as far as explanation is propositional, require language and symbols. But, as Lawson and McCauley (1990) argue, explanation is closely interwoven with interpretation and is hard to distinguish from it; and certainly other animals interpret the world, since all perception is interpretation, as Wittgenstein pointed out. A recent cognitive account of religion that also seems to make it unique to humans is Boyer’s (1994, partly adopted by Pyysiäinen and by Anttonen, both this volume). This account explains not how religious ideas arise, but why they persist. As in Darwinian selection, they persist because of a selective advantage: here, their memorability. Memorability is conferred by a combination of intuitiveness and counter-intuitiveness. Ideas with this combination are variously “supernatural”, “nonnatural”, and “extra-natural”. As this account relies heavily on the notion of the counter-intuitive, and as animals give little or no instruction (much less in metaphysics), we might conclude once more that animals cannot share the common denominator of religion. Several problems with this theory arise, however, that are pertinent to my own argument. The most basic is that because the reproductive success of ideas is independent of the success of their bearers—unlike the relation of genes to their bearers—the theory is inconsistent with the Darwinian account of selection. Only by conceiving of ideas themselves as life forms (as does Sperber, below) can this inconsistency be avoided. But such a conception, giving life to ideas, is both reifying and animistic and hence best avoided. Another problem arises, as Talmy (1995:647) and Guthrie (1996a) note, because Boyer describes the counter-intuitive components of religious ideas as generated randomly. Which ideas persist and which do not is determined solely by the need for some balance of intuitivity and counter-intuitivity. Thus, memorable non-natural ideas should encompass an endless range of combinations. But instead certain features, such as the frequent invisibility and intangibility of agents, in fact commonly recur while virtually limitless others, equally counter-intuitive, do not occur at all. A third, related problem is whether invisibility and intangibility are indeed counter-intuitive or merely, as Talmy suggests, consistent with experience in natural environments. Ethology and human experience alike suggest that the latter is the case. First, animals in the wild not infrequently behave as though in the presence of unseen agents (for example, even with no predator in sight, they often act cautiously – though occasionally, as in the chimpanzee rain dance, with bravado). This behavior is not surprising, since invisible agents are common in nature and in human experience, and intangible ones are not unusual (Guthrie 1993 and below). And it is, of course, in a natural context that human intuitions also have evolved. Further, the ethologist Uexküll (1992: 377) recounts instances of animals from various phyla acting in Umwelten (subjective worlds of perception and action) that possess “phenomena which, however, are visible to the subject alone and are bound to no experiences.” Such phenomena include search images triggered in the absence of any objective stimulus. One might call such phenomena “imaginary”, but Uexküll calls them, together with the consequent behaviour, “magical.” For example, a pet starling, which never had caught or even seen a fly, one day was seen to “suddenly rush toward an invisible object, catch it in mid-air, return with the object to its perch, peck away at it with its bill as any starling will do with a captured fly, and finally swallow the invisible thing . . . There was no doubt that the starling had had the apparition of an imaginary fly in its Umwelt. Evidently the starling’s whole world had been so charged with the ‘feeding tone’, that even without the appearance of a sensory stimulus, the functional image of fly-catching, which was in readiness, forced the perceptual image to appear, and this released the entire action chain. This experience indicates that otherwise utterly puzzling actions by various animals should be interpreted magically” (Uexküll 1992:378). Moreover, in human experience, people commonly act at a distance, as through place markers, projectiles, land mines, and other artifacts. This produces what Gell (1998) calls the “distributed person”: the fact that persons, through their distributed artifacts, typically are agents in various places at the same time. They need be neither visible nor tangible to have a presence. On the other hand, the invisibility and intangibility of most gods and spirits, like those of most animals, are neither complete nor intrinsic but only partial and contingent (Guthrie 1993). They are achieved by the Greek gods, for example, by producing a screen of fog or smoke. Burkert (1996, like Guthrie 1993) notes that dealing with gods we never see is little different from dealing with monarchs or distant trade partners we never see. In addition, many gods, such as those of the Hawaiians and Aztecs, not only have been perfectly visible and tangible but also have looked very much like humans — thus enabling Captains Cook and Cortez to be mistaken for returning deities. Reports of agents who are invisible and intangible may demand our attention. As Burkert suggests, however, this probably is simply because these features make such agents more powerful — and sometimes more sinister — than agents without them. The same attention would be demanded by reports of camouflaged men in the woods or reports of invisible microbes on one’s food. No “supernatural” qualities are required. This conclusion avoids a potential ethnological problem, moreover, since, as Hallowell (1960) and Saler (1977) argue, the very notion of supernatural is Western and culture-bound. As Horton (1993) observes, applying this notion to traditional African religions is no more useful than applying it to nuclear physics on the grounds that physics invokes invisible entities and powers. Rather, Horton continues, both science and religion begin with familiar models — those of common sense — and adapt them to account for a broader range of phenomena by changing or dropping certain features. The planetary model of the atom, for example, began with the model of our solar system, but changed the scale and dropped such features as color. Similarly, such religious models as those of ancestors begin with persons and lineages, and modify or drop features such as embodiment. Gell (1998) similarly argues that magical thinkers using principles of contagion and sympathy do not so much contradict modern physics as simply do without it; and Saariluoma, this volume, also finds “nothing unintuitive in inferring the properties God has in the human mind, culture, and existing religious texts.” A corollary of Horton’s comparison of religious and scientific theories is that the more abstruse versions of both are the province of professional scientists and theologians. Most of us stick closer to home, where matter remains solid and gods are neither totally Other nor totally disembodied. (Barrett 1999 and 2000 also makes this point, distinguishing ordinary religious ideas from theological ideas. In this volume he writes similarly that “regardless of theological tradition, in non-reflective contexts, concepts of gods conform to intuitive expectations . . . about all intentional beings.” For most people, for example, God is not omnipresent but can be in only one place at a time.) The third and last human capacity held to make religion unique to our species is that for language and associated symbolism. Scholars who assume that religion essentially is symbolism are a majority; just a few of the best-known include Durkheim (1915), Turner (1967), Geertz (1996), and Rappaport (1999). For most scholars, religious symbolism is a means indirectly to express, promote, or control certain social relationships and our feelings about them (Anttonen 1996, 2000 offers persuasive versions of this view); and for most of these scholars, the uniqueness of humans is hardly in question. Rappaport (1999: 16) writes in his last book, “religion emerged with language. As such, religion is as old as language, which is to say precisely as old as humanity.” Against the view that symbols are uniquely human, one might counter that chimpanzees and other apes have rudimentary symbolism (e.g., branch-dragging to suggest a direction of travel and occasional false warnings, which Rappaport 1999: 55 calls “proto-lies”). Moreover Rappaport, who sees ritual as the source of religion, makes plain that ritual is not only human but is shared also by “the birds, the beasts and even the insects” (1999: 25). As an ethologist writes, “attempts to place humans apart from and above nonhumans, have, in a sense, backfired. Comparative research in animal cognition has demonstrated evolutionary continuity in many cognitive abilities. It has also shown how connected humans are to other animals” (Bekoff 1998: 176). Nonetheless, religion as such — like most human institutions — typically does involve well-developed symbolism including language, and other animals do not have this. Language, of course, makes a big difference. Among other things (as Jensen, this volume, puts it) it “permits us to imagine collectively.” Animal animism, then, is not a system of symbols but rather a set of non-symbolic features of perception, cognition, and action that appear basic to religion and that are present also in nonhuman animals. These features include, as noted, perceptual uncertainty (Kahneman and Tversky 1982), a need to discover hidden agents, and an overestimation of agency. Although these features are unsystematized and nonsymbolic in most nonhuman animals (the chimpanzee “rain dance”, which appears cultural and systematic, may be a borderline case), they are crucial both to humans and to nonhumans. Religion in a Biological Matrix A few scholars of religion have tried to bridge the gap between humans and nonhumans. One is A.F.C. Wallace (1966). For Wallace, religion is mainly ritual, and to understand it we must set it in the wider context of ritual in other animals. Wallace’s evolutionary rationale is similar to mine: one can regard religion “as a special case . . . of a more widespread pattern” (1966: 217). However, his (functionalist) view of religion as essentially ritual that promotes cooperation among humans encounters the problem found in all functionalist accounts: one cannot explain how something arises by the uses to which it may be put. More recently, Walter Burkert (1996) also tries to place religions within a “biological landscape” (1996: 65). Burkert sets this biological context partly by finding analogies for religion in nonhuman-animal behavior. Many of his analogies are unpersuasive, such as that between religious sacrifice and the abandonment by zebras of one of their number to lions, or the abandonment by a lizard of its tail to an attacker. These analogies (as Saler 1999 notes) are distant or coincidental. Nonetheless, Burkert produces a substantive, family-resemblance account of religion that is somewhat plausible. In his account, religion grows directly from innate dispositions that we share with other animals, especially with other primates. Most important are dispositions to deal with the world in general as though it were social and communicative. For all animals, Burkert (1996: 156) writes, the world is composed of signs and signals. Among humans, who attribute “language . . . to nature” (p. 163), the abundant signs in nature turn “into [voices everywhere] . . . as if every being, everywhere, were telling a message” (p.160). What is lacking both in Wallace and in Burkert is a unified account of what makes these (usually) unseen agents credible. Burkert (1996) does note — crucially, in my view — that we have inborn tendencies to think and act in social and linguistic ways vis-à-vis the world at large, and that the ambiguity of the natural environments against which these tendencies play out provides fertile ground for them (p. 118). Nonetheless, he concludes that the problem of explaining religion – “serious communication with powers that cannot be seen” (p.176) – has no single solution. Instead, he simply proposes that there are “biological patterns of actions, reactions, and feelings” that stem from our ancestral contexts of evolution. Well and good. But what were those contexts, and how and why do the resulting patterns of perception include humanlike, but non-human, others? Animism Explained The diverse biological patterns to which Burkert points may be unified under the more general heading of animism. Animism, of course, has meant many different things. Even within anthropology, the discipline that effectively created the term, it is ambiguous, sometimes meaning the belief (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 24-25) that “not only creatures but also inanimate objects have life and personality” and sometimes the belief that “in addition they have souls.” In Tylor’s famous formulation, animism is the “belief in spirit beings” — though exactly what spirit beings are remains unclear, as Saler points out (1993: 88-93). At present, owing largely to its widespread use by post-Tylorian comparative religionists, animism most commonly means a “belief in living, personal powers behind all things” (Pals 1996: 24). The varied meanings fit, I think, within animism as defined by Piaget and other developmental psychologists, namely as the attribution of characteristics of animacy to nonliving things and events. For the kinds of life that most concern humans, these characteristics may include form, such as eyes and bilateral symmetry. (As Dennett 1993 notes, through much of human evolution such symmetry may have represented the face of a predator gazing at us.) More important, however, is behavior, including spontaneous motion, responsiveness, and orientation to a goal. In cognitive ethology, for instance, a philosopher and an ethologist remark that it may be a mistake to assume that animals perceive predators mainly by “morphology. Instead, predators may be conceptualised according to what they typically do” (Allen and Bekoff 1997: 121). Similarly, Uexküll, having described a tame jackdaw that chose a series of companions including Konrad Lorenz, a younger jackdaw, and crows, notes that “there is no uniform perceptual image for the companion in the jackdaw’s world. Nor could there be one, since the role of the companion changes all the time” (1992:371). For such situations, Uexküll suggests, we should posit that animals employ not specific search images but instead “search tones”, which are more general. “Now we do not always look for a definite object with a single receptor image, but far more often for one that corresponds to a specific functional image. Instead of a specific chair, we look around for something to sit on, that is, for a thing that may be connected with a certain performance tone. In this case we cannot speak of a search image, but only of a search tone” (1992:375; emphasis added). This, together with the case of the jackdaw and the imaginary fly, suggests once again that an emphasis on visibility and tangibility in agents, with its corollary of an expectation of specific form, may be misplaced. Animism, in the sense of the attribution of agency to objects that do not have it, appears widespread among both humans and animals. I shall first address the question why this should be and then cite examples. Because I’ve offered a general theory both of animism and of the related phenomenon of anthropomorphism in other places (e.g., Guthrie 1993), the explanation here will be condensed. However, a preliminary note about what my explanation is not may be in order. This is the common notion that animism and anthropomorphism are “projections”, a notion popularised by Freud and adopted (and attributed to me) by Boyer in this volume. Projection has no place in my explanation. Indeed, the whole of Guthrie 2000 is an argument that, as a psychological concept, projection is without merit. (Its principal basis apparently is a folk psychology, dating back to the Greeks, of vision as a projection of beams from the eye.) Rather than projections, “animism” and “anthropomorphism” describe certain perceptions that we have decided, after the fact, were mistaken. The perceptual stance that produces these mistaken perceptions as occasional byproducts, however, is no mistake but a vital and unavoidable strategy. In brief, we and other animals live in a perceptual world that always is ambiguous (as one writer on primate behaviour puts it, “nature cloaks herself in many modes of unpredictability” [Miller 1997: 312]). In this world, we need to distinguish, among other things, what is animate from what is not. The world is ambiguous (though normally we’re not aware of this) because even the simplest perception is an interpretation – or, as Gombrich (1973) puts it, a bet. (Quiatt and Reynolds 1993: 5, writing of primates, note similarly that “perception, for all species, is the interpretation of sensations.”) Interpretation, in turn, aims at significance or meaning. The most meaning, finally, is in things that are alive, not inanimate. Hence we spontaneously interpret a tapping at our window as a visitor, not a branch, and a tickling on our neck as a bug, not a loose thread. Interpretation may be urgent, for example when what is alive is something we may want to capture [figure 1], or something that may want to capture us [figure 2]. Insert figures 1 and 2 about here --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Because ambiguity is chronic and time is short, we generally must interpret without enough evidence to be sure. In this situation, our strategy is, better safe than sorry (Guthrie 1993, 1997a, 1997b, 2001, forthcoming; Boyer this volume adopts the idea): when in doubt, we assume that it is alive. An S-shaped object on a woodland path might be either a stick or a snake, for example, but we tend automatically to see it first as a snake. As Ristau (1998: 139) puts it, a “fail-safe mechanism for most species would be to interact with an unknown object as though it were animate, and probably predaceous.” When we look at the world of animals, the ambiguity of perception is exacerbated by deception. This deception includes various means to invisibility and intangibility. These means are widely diverse and almost universal among wild animals, since “if an animal is seen, heard or smelt it is potentially in danger [and hence] deception as a way of life occurs throughout the animal kingdom” (Owen 1980: 9,17). Visual deceptions alone include at least five distinct sorts (Owen 1980). These are camouflage (which makes the animal look like its background, often with countershading that destroys the appearance of solidity), colors that are diverse or changeable in individuals (this makes forming a search image difficult), structures and colors that divert (this distracts predators from vital parts) [figure 3], colors and patterns that startle, and imitation of noxious animals or material [figure 4]. Because of these deceptions, we and other animals often encounter others without knowing it. As a corollary, we often judge that others are there when they are not. The world is, in fact, full of invisible others, and we must always assume more than we see. Insert figs. 3 and 4 about here In addition to animals that are invisible, many animals are virtually intangible, for one of three reasons. One is a diffraction grating producing a shimmering opalescence that makes size and location difficult to judge (Hinton 1973). A second is swarming, flocking, or schooling. This, too, presents predators with a target of indefinite location. A sea lion trying to feed on a school of sardines, for example, may be baffled by the constantly shifting pattern confronting it. A third kind of intangibility — coupled with invisibility until microscopes appeared — is that of being very small, as in microorganisms. One result of the invisibility and intangibility of microorganisms is that until recently, most people saw contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, and plague, as the work of intentional but invisible agents. As I have noted earlier (Guthrie 1993), people usually think they detect gods not by seeing them--though this also happens--but by seeing natural phenomena as the results of their actions. (Some see AIDS, for example, as divine punishment.) Moreover, recognizing invisible agents does not require sophisticated (or counterintuitive) thought, as a study of preschoolers’ understanding of germs suggests: “three-year-olds recognized that the causes of illness may be invisible . . . . children will focus on a specific invisible entity when judging a potential causal relationship within the domain of biology” (Kalish 1996: 99, 100). Another kind of deception often occurs within groups of animals: misleading communication, such as warning calls when no danger is present. Such deceptions typically distract competitors. Shrikes living in mixed-species flocks, for instance, occasionally give false hawk warnings when a bird of another species is about to seize an insect, causing the other to flee for cover and leave the bug for the shrike (Gould and Gould 1994: 134). Primates also deceive, often with apparent intent. Indeed, primate intelligence may be largely “machiavellian,” or devoted to deceiving, and avoiding being deceived by, their fellows (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1997). A vervet monkey on the losing side of a fight between troops may give a false leopard alarm, frightening off the combatants and resetting the contest at zero (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). A baboon chased by another may stop and stare as though at a predator, halting the pursuer (Byrne 1995: 125). Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans appear even more deceitful. Both wild and captive chimpanzees have been seen leading others away from hidden food that was known to the leaders but not to the led (Goodall 1972:96, Byrne 1995:132). A captive chimpanzee, subordinate to another that was afraid of the dark, went outside after dark, made banging noises and other strange sounds, and came back inside looking scared. His erstwhile oppressor, now frightened, approached him for reassurance (Savage-Rumbaugh 1988: 228). Capacities for deceiving others are related to capacities for self-deception and for play (Mitchell and Thompson 1986). Two captive chimpanzees developed a game in which they pretended to attack an imaginary opponent in a cage, and a captive bonobo has produced imaginary playmates (Savage-Rumbaugh 1988). The sign-using orangutan Chantek signed “cat and dog – animals which frightened and fascinated him – when he wished to prolong or start a walk, acting as though seeking out a hidden cat or dog” (Mitchell 1993: 81). Burkert, invoking work on primate deception to help understand religion, writes: The suspicion has been voiced repeatedly that religion is mainly trickery and make-believe produced by those who profit from it. Forms of deceit abound already at prehuman stages. . . . The unseen in particular can be the object of manipulation. [Monkeys, for example] may avoid confrontation by staring into a corner and voicing sounds of alarm, as if reporting “there is a monster in the corner” (1996: 24-25; emphasis added). Burkert also says religion assumes humanlike beings whom we normally do not see. He notes, with Lawson and McCauley (1990), that ritual “refers through formulaic acts to nonpresent partners.” However, deceptions in themselves “would be a grossly insufficient foundation for the origin of religion. Even among monkeys the trick cannot be repeated very often without being recognized . . . The point is that the common world of language characteristically produces contents beyond any immediate evidence” (Burkert 1996: 25). In human communication, recent researchers have noted the “ubiquity [and] sheer ordinariness” of deception (Lewis and Saarni 1993: v) and maintained that it is a normal consequence of communication and information (just as illusion is a natural outgrowth of perception). Communication, deception, and play all appear interlinked. Creative abilities in this realm constitute abilities to envision a world and an alternative, what is present and what is not. These abilities are graded among animals and seem present among vervets and even among shrikes. One consequence of ubiquitous deception, in addition to the inherent ambiguity of perception, is that it is perpetually difficult to tell what is living from what is not (Guthrie 1993, chapter 2). This prevents us from easily and reliably applying any domain-specific expectations we may have to any particular part of our environment. Carey (1995) levels this point against the notion, shared by Sperber (1994) and Atran (1994), that such domain-specificity can characterise folk biology and indeed make such biology an innate “core module” of the human mind. She notes, for example (1995: 275), that in “one of the cultures that Atran has studied, the Itza Maya, fungi and lichens are not considered alive.” Raising the “problem of perception”, she asks (p. 278), “On what basis does the [Sperber-Atran] input module categorize entities as animals? The folk-biology module will be useless unless the cognitive system can identify the animals in the world.” Animism Among Animals The attribution of characteristics of animacy to the nonliving and to plants appears widespread among complex organisms. Because illusion is an inevitable concomitant of perception, such attribution may be universal. Among invertebrates, known instances of susceptibility to such illusion range from echinoderms to insects. Regarding sea urchins, for instance, Uexküll remarks that “a receptor image held in . . . general terms can always give rise to mistakes. This has already been shown in the sea urchin, in whose world cloud and ship are constantly confused with the enemy fish, because the sea urchin responds in the same way to any darkening of the horizon” (1992:370). Various insects are fooled by insect-eating plants, such as the Venus fly-trap; and some flowers, by resembling bees or wasps, fool these insects into pollinating them as they attempt to mate. Among vertebrates, evidence of hard wiring to detect signs of life, and evidence of corresponding illusions, are abundant both from experimental settings and natural settings. The possible signs of life include both form and motion. Regarding form, for example, “we and many other creatures are built to be extremely capable of detecting eyes” (Ristau 1998: 141) and we respond readily to anything that resembles them. Ethologists have found sensitivities to eye-like displays in fishes (even larval ones; Miklosi et al. 1995), iguanas (Burger et al. 1991), garter snakes (Bern and Herzog 1994), wild birds (Scaife 1974), domestic chickens (Gallup 1971), and human infants (Morton and Johnson 1991). The eye displays need not be convincing to a human observer: even marbles on the ends of two sticks suffice to alarm chickens (Gould and Gould 1994: 135). This sensitivity also is exploited by many species, especially those of insects and fishes, that display false eye-spots as a means of defense. Similarly, sensitivity to bilateral symmetry, a feature of most mobile animals, has been shown in animals ranging from insects to birds to dolphins and other mammals. Humans often exploit the animal tendency to animate. Fishermen can catch various fishes with nothing more than a bit of white rag on a hook. Hunters can lure waterfowl and other birds even with crude decoys. To frighten parrots from an orchard, I have set out a simple, weather-beaten plastic owl and found it mobbed within seconds by blue jays, blackbirds, and a cardinal. Human-like scarecrows the world over are effective even with only a sketchy resemblance to people. Inuit, for example, are able to funnel caribou into ambush using scarecrows consisting of tall rockpiles. In natural settings as well, birds and mammals may treat inert matter as though it were alive. Bekoff (personal communication) reports young coyotes mistaking sticks for grasshoppers, and a coyote stalking a blowing sage brush. Hinton (1973) reports birds mistaking twigs for caterpillars, and Marshall Thomas thinks “many dogs treat cars as though they were animate” (1993: 12). Primates animate at least as broadly. Menzel (1997: 231) writes, “So-called ‘social’ behaviour patterns can be directed toward inanimate objects. Rhesus macaque (monkey) infants form attachments to cloth-covered surrogate mothers; tamarins (a kind of monkey) will groom a fur-covered object; an infant chimpanzee will threaten an unfamiliar piece of food.” Vervet-monkey infants give the aerial-predator call on seeing falling leaves (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990), and, as noted, a young adult vervet’s false terrestrial-predator call caused opponents to flee from a “phantom leopard” (Gould and Gould 1994: 135). Macaques on Gibraltar have threatened an electric fence. When an observer there accidentally stepped on an electric cable in the grass, an infant macaque screamed at its motion, evidently taking it for a snake (Anne Zeller, personal communication). A baboon being chased may, as noted, stop and stare at nothing, apparently producing a phantom predator that deters the pursuer. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans show the most varied animism. In captivity, as noted, they all may produce phantom playmates or monsters (sometimes to fool a fellow ape or a caregiver). The orangutan Chantek “engaged in chase games in which he would look over his shoulder as he darted about, although no one was chasing him. He also signed to his toys and offered them food and drink. Like children, Chantek showed evidence of animism, a tendency to endow objects and events with the attributes of living things” (Miles 1993: 49). A captive chimpanzee also has directed alarms calls toward its own shed teeth. Its caregiver (Sally Boysen, personal commnication) thinks it saw the teeth as beings that had made its mouth hurt and bleed. Finally and most tellingly, wild chimpanzees (Goodall 1975, 1992, personal communication; Whiten et al. 1999) often respond to thunderstorms, to rapid streams, and to waterfalls with the kind of display (shaking and dragging branches and rushing about vigorously) that they use as a threat against predators and other chimpanzees. Observers have reported this behaviour in six communities of African chimpanzees, out of nine communities that have been closely studied (Whiten et al. 1999). Goodall and many other chimp-watchers think this behaviour is indeed a threat directed toward these inanimate targets as though they were alive. The response is both widespread and indiscriminable from those toward actual, natural agents, visible or not. Although no one knows whether chimpanzees think of storms and streams as “supernatural,” any hypothesis that they do so seems unnecessary. More likely, as Pyysiänen (this volume) puts it, “the thunderstorm triggers the same reaction as does a predator, without a representation of a . . . counter-intuitive agent being involved.” Animism and Anthropomorphism in Humans Most scholars (e.g. Piaget 1929) concerned with animism attribute it to children and to people in small-scale (“tribal” or “primitive”) societies, and most scholars see anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events – as unrelated to animism and as a minor though lamentable problem in human cognition (Mitchell et al. 1997 present a recent set of exceptions). In contrast, I see animism and anthropomorphism as pervasive in human thought and action, and as closely related, spontaneous over-attributions of organisation to things and events (Guthrie 1993; 1997a; 1997b). Just as animism may be seen as one result of a bettersafe-than-sorry strategy of perception in an ambiguous world, anthropomorphism may be understood the same way. The two often overlap. Anthropomorphism has been the object of criticism for hundreds of years, yet it continues to flourish. It flourishes in the arts and even the sciences (Kennedy 1992; Guthrie 1993, forthcoming; Mitchell et al. 1997). It also flourishes in the spontaneous perceptions of daily life, as when we hear voices in the wind or the plumbing, or see some mechanism as resisting us. Animism is similarly widespread. Evidence of the pervasiveness of anthropomorphism and animism, even in complex, industrial societies, comes from many sources (Guthrie 1993). Here I’ll only draw briefly on developmental, experimental, and clinical psychology, and on commercial art. Systematic work in psychology on animism and anthropomorphism began with Jean Piaget (1929), who called them both animism and found them universal among young children. Piaget’s basic finding — that child animism and anthropomorphism are spontaneous and ubiquitous — has been disputed in some details, such as its relation to his scheme of cognitive stages. Generally, however, it has been broadly supported (e.g., Inagaki and Hatano 1987; Inagaki 1989; Ochiai 1989; Cherry 1992; Berry and Springer 1993; Harris 1994; Poulin-Dubois and Héroux 1994; Carey 1995). Harris (1994: 308) writes, for example, “A long tradition of work on animism shows that children extend psychological explanations to . . . rivers, clouds, and so forth.” Among the features that produce animistic and anthropomorphic responses, motion appears preeminent, as my epigraphs suggest. (Indeed Aristotle made a capacity for self-movement the chief criterion of animacy.) Berry and Springer (1993: 275), for instance, write that “very different methodologies have shown that certain movements by inanimate objects elicit attributions of animacy from preschoolers”, and Poulin-Dubois and Héroux (1994: 329) similarly find that “over-attribution of mental states” characterises preschoolers’ responses to moving objects. Such responses, of course, reflect the importance of motion. As Barry (1997: 46) writes, “movement perception is so essential to our being . . . because the visual system has evolved to alert us to danger or to the presence of potential food.” We not only animate the inanimate, but we also anthropomorphise the animate or the apparently animate (Guthrie 1980, 1993; 1997a; 1997b, 2001, forthcoming), whether moving or not. As Gigenrenzer (1997: 275) writes, “human intelligence cannot resist [attributing] human social categories, intentions and morals [to] nonhumans.” Carey (1995: 279) notes that “infants attempt to interact socially with a mobile that moves in response to a leg kick.” Richards and Siegler (1986) write that children over a wide range of ages teleologically attribute anatomical and other features of organisms (plants, for example) to the “purposes” of those organisms. More generally, Dennett (1987) posits an innate “intentional” or design stance with which we interpret the world, Keil (1994: 251) sees both teleological and intentional “modes of construal” as attitudes with which people are natively endowed, and Kelemen (1999: 280) proposes that an innate “promiscuous teleology” makes humans “prone to systematic biases in their reasoning about the natural world.” Most directly to my point, Kelemen also writes that “one of the best indicators that people are compelled to reason in teleological terms is provided by the ubiquitous phenomenon of religion. Adults’ propensity to view objects and events as purposefully caused by intentional agents or gods is . . . prevalent . . . . [F]or all the profound differences between religions and their associated mythologies, a common moral tends to underlie most: objects and events have an intended purpose. Everything has a function to perform within a contrived natural order of which humanity is a significant part” (1999:280). This closely parallels Piaget’s classic description of teleology in young children. The phenomenon also supplies (as Guthrie 1993 notes) an answer to Hume’s (1932:I, 157) quandary about the nature of our sense that the world shows design—a sense so strong as to underlie the Argument from Design, for God’s existence. As a Hume scholar writes, there is an apparently universal “propensity of the mind to ‘see’ design in natural order” and an “insistent feeling in most of us that natural order springs from a designer” (Gaskin 1988:127, 6; emphasis his). Kelemen dubs this phenomenon “Promiscuous Teleology”, noting that it “is not inherently restricted to any category of objects” (1999:290). Bacon (1960), of course, centuries ago began a scientific revolution by pointing out that humans, but not nature or even living things in general, have goals, and that the widespread human failure to understand this constitutes anthropomorphism. Equally important for my purposes is one major correction of Piaget, made by various developmental and cognitive psychologists. The correction is that, contrary to his claim that animism disappears by age twelve, it appears to persist throughout life (Dennis 1953; Sheehan, Papalia-Finlay, and Hooper 1980-81; Tamir and Zohar 1991; Cherry 1992, Kelemen 1999). Hauser and Carey (1998: 84) write that people generally are “primed, perhaps innately so, to take an intentional stance . . . toward a wide array of moving objects”. Similarly, Barrett (this volume, pace Pyysiäinen, this volume) writes that “given only enough evidence to believe an object can willfully initiate its own action . . . children and adults automatically attribute a host of human-like psychological properties. To illustrate, when trying (with little success) to place small magnetized spheres in a particular configuration, college students described the marbles as having beliefs, desires, and even personality traits, accusing some marbles of ‘attacking’ others and being deliberately mischievous.” The pervasive tendency to animate and anthropomorphise, moreover, is not limited to spontaneous interpretations such as those of young children and the college students cited but appears as well in more considered interpretations, including moreor-less scientific work. Of numerous examples (Guthrie 1993, esp. chapter 6), a particularly relevant one is Dawkins’s (1978) genes, which notoriously are selfish, and his “memes,” which similarly are self-interested and which “replicate.” Even more strikingly, Sperber (1996: 1) describes ideas as “born in” and as “invading” brains, as “propagating”, and as having “descendants.” Whereas the Greeks saw the anima or life force as the central causal principle for the behaviour of human (and other) bodies, Sperber gives this role to ideas. “The central theme of this book is quite simple,” he begins (p.1). “Our individual brains are each inhabited by a large number of ideas that determine our behavior.” These determinative ideas not only “are born, live and die” but also constitute “families” (pp. 81 and 83). One might consider Sperber’s terminology here as mere metaphor (on p. 2 he calls it “barely metaphorical”) except that his central notion, an epidemiology of culture, depends on it. Equally important, if, as Lakoff and Johnson argue (e.g., 1999, echoing Nietzsche 1966), most human thought is metaphoric, “mere metaphor” is an oxymoron. What matters is not whether a given model is metaphoric or not, but whether it is useful or not. In the standard view — which I share — animistic and anthropomorphic models are not useful (though the strategy of perception that produces them as byproducts, i.e., scanning first for what matters most, certainly is). That animistic accounts such as Dawkins’s and Sperber’s nevertheless are appealing illustrates the continued vitality of animism among us all. Other evidence of pervasive animism and anthropomorphism comes from clinical psychology, for example in Rorschach testing. Respondents see ink blots mostly as humans or parts of humans, and as certain animals such as bats and butterflies (Beck and Molish 1967). Other animals come next, followed distantly by plants and inanimate objects. A cross-cultural study (De Vos and Boyer 1989) suggests that this pattern is widespread. Still other sources of evidence include folklore (Thompson 1955), literature, and graphic art, in which personification and other forms of anthropomorphism, as well as animism, are common worldwide (Guthrie 1993, figure 5). In sophisticated art, these phenomena are, to be sure, often self-conscious and sometimes manipulative, not spontaneous; but their pervasiveness and diversity there nonetheless reflect their power. Insert fig. 5 about here Neither anthropomorphism nor animism in itself, of course, constitutes religion. Rather, religion is a form of them that is systematised, symbolically elaborated, and taken seriously (Guthrie 1980; 1988; 1993; 1996; 1997; 2001). In this form, they are adapted to varied political, economic, military, and other social purposes. Conclusion: An Evolutionary Framework for Explaining Religion Earlier writers on religion as anthropomorphism (most notably Spinoza 1955, Hume 1957; Feuerbach 1972; Freud 1964; and Horton 1993; and recently in a vein similar to my own, Wenegrat 1990) or as animism have disagreed on the nature of these two phenomena and have produced no broadly convincing explanation of them. As a result they have produced no broadly convincing theory of religion. Part of what has been lacking, in my view, is a cognitive account of anthropomorphism and of animism that addresses them in general rather than only in religion. I have aimed much of my work at just such an account. A related part of what has been lacking is an evolutionary framework for the issues in question. Such a framework, still very much in the making, potentially can link us to our animal relatives by joining cognitive science to ethology. Such a framework would encourage us to see that in chimpanzees, for example, both the ability to create an imaginary playmate or monster, and the ability to track other chimpanzees through the forest by visual signs such as litter and broken foliage, are the ability to imagine what is not present. It is no great leap to the ability, famous in hunter-gatherer peoples, to “see” game from tracks and other traces. This ability means putting together a world from indirect evidence. This daily-life activity, of course, is the same in science as well (for example, in positing subatomic particles from their bubble tracks) and in religion (for example, in the Argument from Design). In the search for an explanation of religion, I believe, we have been beguiled by symbolism and misled by a false sense of human uniqueness. As a result, we have forgotten a vital need that we share with other animals: to interpret an ambiguous world and to discover real agents hiding in it. 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