Why would someone join a group that forbade them from having children and
mandated celibacy? After all, reproduction is at the very core of the
evolution that gave rise to humans. However, this is exactly what many
religious institutions throughout the world demand. Anthropologists are now
pondering how celibacy may have first originated in light of the
practice.
Since cooperation is another pillar of human evolution, some have argued
that behaviors that are expensive to individuals, like never having
children,
can nonetheless arise
when people mindlessly submit to rules that benefit a community. Others
have suggested
that individuals eventually establish religious (or other) organizations to
further their own narcissistic or familial interests and despise others who
choose not to participate.
Now, our recent study, which was done in Western China and was
published in Royal Society Proceedings B, examines the topic of lifelong religious celibacy in Tibetan Buddhist
monasteries.
Some Tibetan families would frequently transfer one of their young sons to
the neighborhood monastery so that he may become a celibate monk for the
rest of his life until recently. Up to one in seven boys in the past chose
to become monks. Most often, families claimed that having a monk in the
family was for religious reasons. But were there additional factors related
to the economy and reproduction?
We conducted 530 family interviews in 21 villages in the eastern portion of
the Tibetan plateau in Gansu province with the assistance of our Chinese
partners from Lanzhou University. We recreated family trees, learning about
each person's ancestry and discovering whether any of their ancestors were
monks.
Amdo Tibetans, who are patriarchal, live in these villages where they cultivate tiny
pieces of land and keep herds of yaks and goats. In these societies, wealth
is often handed through the male line.
We discovered that guys who had a monk sibling were wealthy and owned more
yaks. But monastic nuns received little to no benefit. That is probably due
to competition between brothers over their parents' money, land, and
animals. Parents ended this rivalry between their boys by sending one of
their sons to the monastery because monks are not allowed to acquire
property. While monks are often second or later born sons, firstborn sons
typically inherit the familial home.
Surprisingly, we also discovered that men who had a monk brother had more
children than men who had non-monk siblings, and their spouses tended to
have kids sooner. The number of grandkids of grandparents who had monk sons
increased as a result of their non-celibate sons having less or no
competition from their siblings. Therefore, sending a son to the monastery
is a custom that supports a parent's goal in procreation rather than costing
them money.
A theoretical framework for celibacy
This raises the possibility that celibacy might develop naturally. We
created a mathematical model of the evolution of celibacy in which we
examined the effects of becoming a monk on a man's evolutionary fitness as
well as the evolutionary fitness of his siblings and other village members
in order to learn more about the specifics of how this occurs. We modeled
both the situation when a child's parents decide to send him to a monastery,
as appears to be the case in our field study, and the situation where a boy
makes his own decision.
Because monks are unmarried, there are fewer men vying for the women's hand
in marriage in the community. But even while being a monk can be
advantageous for all the males in the village, the monk's choice does not
improve his own genetic fitness. Celibacy shouldn't change as a
result.
But if having a monk brother increases men's riches and makes them more
attractive to women, the situation changes. Since the monk is encouraging
his brethren to have more children while not having any children himself,
religious celibacy can now evolve through natural selection. However, if the
decision to become a monk is left up to the child, it is likely to stay
uncommon because it isn't very advantageous from a personal
standpoint.
In the model, we demonstrate that celibacy only becomes significantly more
prevalent if the parents determine it should occur. Parents send one child
to the monastery as long as it benefits the others since they all get fit
via having children. The fact that boys were welcomed into the monastery at
an early age and suffered shame if they subsequently abandoned their
vocation implies that this was a cultural practice influenced by family
values.
This approach could also provide light on how infanticide and other forms
of parental favoritism have developed in different cultural situations. A
similar approach might also help to explain why female celibates (nuns) are
uncommon in patriarchal civilizations like Tibet but more prevalent in
societies where women are more competitive with one another, such as in
societies where they have more inheritance rights (such as in parts of
Europe).
In order to comprehend why the prevalence of monks and nuns differs among
religions and geographical regions, we are now conducting new studies.
It is frequently argued that when individuals adapt to a new norm, the
diffusion of new ideas—even illogical ones—can lead to the establishment of
new institutions. However, it's possible that people's choices on
reproduction and economics might also influence institutions. The
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