promise some kind of escape from death that is conditional on good
behavior, that is, on adherence to the local norms. Terror-manage-
ment seems to provide a sophisticated and experimentally tested ver-
sion of our common intuition that religion does provide a shield
against mortality anxiety. After all, what religions seem to say about
death is invariably that it is but a passage.^4
However, the explanation is not really plausible. The connection
between emotions, cultural institutions and our evolution is real. But
to understand it we must consider more seriously the way evolution by
natural selection fashions individuals and their dispositions, including
[206] their representations of death and mortality. The "survival impera-
tive" is not quite as self-evident as it seems. True, humans and most
species avoid life-threatening circumstances, but is that really because
there is an evolved drive to survive at all costs? Evolutionary biology
suggests that the explanation for many behaviors and capacities lies
not in the organism's drive to survive but in a drive to pass on its
genes. Some environments frequently present an organism with a
choice between surviving but failing to pass on its genes or preserving
the genes without surviving. In such situations self-sacrifice genes
spread, as explained in the previous chapter.
So if human emotions are explained by the history of the species,
we should expect a more complex set of fears and anxieties, as there
are many different kinds of threats to genetic transmission. The
potential loss of offspring would be one major component of this
panoply, but so would a failure to attract one's parents' attention and
investment, the absence of a sufficiently high level of trust in one's
social network, the fact that one is not considered attractive, or the
fact that one is clearly at the bottom of the social ladder. All these pre-
sent a clear threat to genetic transmission and are clearly connected to
anxiety, butthese situations are all specific and require specific strate-
gies. Complex organisms do not survive by having "death-avoidance
behavior" programmed into their minds, because different life-threat-
ening situations require different responses.
Although terror-management is too primitive an explanation, it
helps us frame the question in a way that will prove fruitful. There are
emotional programs and mental representations associated with death.
The representations are complicated and not entirely consistent,
because different mental systems are activated by death-related
thoughts. It is only against this background that we can understand
how religious representations of death become salient.
RELIGION EXPLAINED