Olivia Strittmatter - Religion evolved with humans

April 3, 2020

 Outside of class reading 2

This is part two of my blogs on Here Be Dragons, my previous blog post is part one and goes over the evolution of languages. This is second part, chapter 7 pages 163-180, McCarthy talks about human evolution and how biogeographic principles that impact the plants and animals also must impact the humans along their evolutionary path. I’m a biology major and don’t have any other classes similar to this one. I wanted to talk about the biological evolution of language and religion, using this chapter as a basis for human biogeography. The previous blog post has more information on very basic information on the evolution and spread of humans. This blog will be the evolution of religion.
To recap, the definition of biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals, including humans. I think that religion evolved similarly to how language evolved. Like how we were reading in The Spell of the Sensuous by Abram and Orality and Literacy by Ong, language evolved from the ecosystem where the people live, I think that religion is similar. If you look at nature-based religions like Paganism, or Native American religions, or the Aboriginals, they’re nature based religions and are highly based on the environment that they live in. Just like my previous blog post, while I read through this chapter I was wondering, did all religions also originate from one primal, nature-based, oral religion? Personally, I don’t think all religions originated from one “ancestral” religion. I think that religion is something that originated in multiple groups of humans, probably around the same couple centuries. I think this because nature-based religions are highly based on the environment in which they live, and therefore they needed to have a good understanding of how their particular ecosystem worked prior to producing a religion. I think that it is possible though that all religions came from one original thought from a group of people, but that it wasn’t developed enough to be considered a “religion” though. Then there’s more recent religions like Christianity though, which are based on previous religions like Judaism and Paganism, but Christianity doesn’t count as a primal religion, so it don’t need to be connected to the basics of evolution, ecology, and biogeography.

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