While chimpanzees build no churches in which they bow down to an invisible alpha, they do engage in some behaviors that could be considered pre-religious. For example, chimpanzees will make threat displays at an approaching thunderstorm, as if attempting to bluff it away. In this case they have extended a natural propensity beyond the domain of real agents, where a threat might produce results, to the domain of non-agents (storms), where the threat will absolutely not produce results in the form of influencing the behavior of the target entity.
I will develop and discuss this aspect of chimpanzee psychology — and possibly our evolutionary heritage as it pertains to superstitious and religious behavior — in a future series of posts in my Almighty Alpha project. The title to that series: “The Buds of Religious Behavior.”
In the near term, we will continue our examination of whether or not the chimpanzee deserves identification as the truest proto-human and thus legitimate focus of evolutionary psychology.…
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