influenced the formation of Jesus’image as a highly symbolic, divinefigure.
Paul was actively involved in defining the boundaries and identity of the
movement, andfinding efficient symbolic markers. In Galatians 3:28, for
example, he attempted to mitigate the strong psychological motivations at-
tached to symbolically marked group memberships, such as being a“Jew,”
“Hellene,”“free,”“slave,”“male,”or“female,”and argued that these identities
were made obsolete by the new group membership“in Jesus Christ.”Paul also
paid much attention to ceremonial markers, such as baptism and the Euchar-
ist, which contributed to the formation of a shared identity. The development
of efficient symbolic markers, in turn, helped to mobilize innate pro-social
psychological dispositions, which prepared the way for the long-term success
of early Christianity.
In the domain of religious morality, a truly altruistic ethical system can be
developed only by symbolic language. Steps toward universalistic altruism are
being made both in the gospels and in the Pauline epistles. In the Gospel of
Luke, Jesus explains the meaning of the Golden Rule by telling the parable of
the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37). The question arises, however, as to how
far altruistic ethics that transcends the boundaries of a group can be a product
of group-selection. This issue seems to mirror the problems pertaining to
group-selection itself, except that truly universalistic altruism cannot emerge
by selection among multiple instances of“humankind.”There are various
proposals to solve this problem, mostly based on the notion of evolutionary
by-products (cf. sections 8.2 and 8.3). When acting altruistically, people may
intuitively believe they are acting in the framework of reciprocal altruism, their
kin-group, tribe, or symbolically marked group. It is possible, however, that
actual altruistic behavior at a universal, cross-cultural level is much less
frequent than philosophical or theological expositions of such ideals or claims
to such behavior. In a long-term historical perspective we can say that
Christianity seldom lived up to the highest ethical standards set by some of
its foundational documents.
2.6 EXCURSUS: EPIDEMIOLOGY AND MEMETICSThe reader versed in the Cognitive Science of Religion might have noticed that
in our discussion of symbolic inheritance we addressed the spread of religious
ideas in terms of memetics, glossing over the tensions between memetic
and epidemiological (attractor) models. Specifically, Pascal Boyer (1994b,
2002) explained the advantage of minimally counterintuitive ideas in cultural
transmission with the help of Sperber’s theory of cultural attractors—also
known as theepidemiological modelof cultural transmission, or cultural
epidemiology. Sperber (1996, 2000; Claidiére & Sperber, 2007) criticized
Evolution 45