Religion is a product of evolution.
Seeing as the mods have elected not to ban one-line diaries, here's my contribution in the new haiku-diary style.
The least I can do is link the article, and the commentary.
From the commentary
God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.
The program is called EvoGod, and here is the code..
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References -
I'm gonna see if I can port it to MATLAB and try it out.
--The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
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)of an elephant she had known well, a member of her clan. She gently held the skull, and delicately traced the tip of her trunk into the eye sockets. Her little herd stood around, for all the world as would humans at a funeral, very quietly grieving.
I have seen a bird after a snake took her babies, crying pitifully. Monkey mothers will carry their dead infants around, bitterly stroking them, trying to bring them back to life. I have seen dogs grieve for those they loved. Surely grief is not a wholly human emotion.
In the Qafzeh Cave in Israel, we find ocher in Neolithic burials. At Hamneda in southern Sweden, we find flower pollen and pots containing cereal grain. The body was covered in the flowers of Anemone nemorosa
Surely all things must die, but funerals are for the living. We love and we lose, until at last we ourselves are lost, returning into the earth, leaving only memories and artifacts behind. And as the grieving people of Qafzeh and Hamneda did long ago, we honor our dead in our own way. Surely prayer sprang from grief and was in time codified. Like the elephant gently touching that bleached skull in the Serengeti, we remember and extrapolate from that memory the certain knowledge that all things must pass away, including ourselves.
We stretch the skin of faith over the unknown, we look into the sheltering sky and the moving sea, dreaming of gods, personifications of the forces beyond our control. Dow would tell us these things are unverifiable, unreal, impractical. Smug idiocy! The unseen is all too real, and Dow has no explanations for love or loss or the joy of weddings or the rites of transformation. Genetic religion, quatsch! Love is not unique to man, nor is grief nor joy. Nor is he alone in looking into the night sky and contemplating eternity, the universe in a drop of water or the majesty of a surfacing whale. It is the sheerest hubris to believe our species is superior to the others. Time and tide led us here, and mankind is forever attempting to describe what lies beyond his reach, This was our purpose, from hence arose these massive frontal lobes.
Religion may seem silly and impractical, but until you have seen a lesser bird of Paradise hang upside down from a tree branch, spread his beautiful wings and squawk his improbable mating call, do not tell me nature does not have a sense of humor. Nature loves impracticality: the ridiculous is its specialty. Contemplate the nudibranch, wavering along in the current, a creature completely unsuited to swimming somehow manages the task. That man should build temples to his gods seems no less improbable.
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)But that merely poses the question do animals have religion? I have asked my cat, but he refuses to tell me. I have begun to suspect he thinks he's god... :)
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I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
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| parent )DOG: People are great. They feed me, pay my medical expenses, pet me and cater to my every need. They must be gods.
CAT: People are great. They feed me, pay my medical expenses, pet me and cater to my every need. I must be a god.
An oldie, but it'll never stop being true. :)
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )and surprisingly little effort has been put into the problem. For all our talk about life on other planets and throwing billions into sending men to the stars, we're destroying species we don't even have names for yet, much less understand their behaviour. How much less are we able to probe the inner workings of their minds. We can't even manage this with animals we've tamed.
Does it all have to be oriented to human consciousness? The cat seems capable of some forms of rational thought. It seems the great apes can tell us lies when it suits their purposes. Cats are devious and cruel, a sort of emotional parasite, I know how kitties are, being a cat man myself. Look at how we fall for their schemes. Like boxes of shid in your house? Get a kitty. Surely great areas of their mind are given over to aspects of consciousness in accordance with their sensory inputs.
We evolved this gigantic brain to think abstractly, make tools and such, because we didn't have wings or stingers or claws or much else of that sort. Fierce little grinning hominids, waging war on each other, gussying it all up in abstract terms like Patriotism and Freedom. It's all BS. Maybe instead of investigating Religion as a useless and dangerous byproduct of our evolution, someone should take on Patriotism and war lust. I don't see chaplains in corporations, but I do in Army battalions.
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| parent )I posted a diary about your reply, but something new has been added.
"Maybe instead of investigating Religion as a useless and dangerous byproduct of our evolution"
Who said anything about useless or dangerous? Granted, it might be under some circumstances, just as a power-drill, a gun or a hot cup of coffee can be. But likewise, there would appear to be plenty of circumstances where it is quite the opposite. And why "byproduct"? Possibly it's massively adaptive and nothing sort of a primary tool. I dunno.
Either way, though, you seem to be putting some nasty connotations on "evolved" that I don't get. As I said in my post, I'm a product of evolution(s). I like me just fine, regardless, in all my loves and war-lusts and greeds and compassions. That they might be there for some purpose other than my own (to wit, a zygote's way of making another zygote, as Heinlein put it) in no way diminishes the reality or my self-love.
--The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
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| parent )I'm just observing a larger trend in such things, a general hostility to religion, as if it were dangerous. Unreal information, maladaptive reuse of other modules evolved for other purposes, costly symbols demonstrating obedience are all premises of the James Dow article, and wrapping it all up in bullet points under the heading of Modern Biocultural Theories does seem a bit precious and smug.
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| parent )a general hostility to religion, as if it were dangerous
It is dangerous, but only in that it can be used to serve evil ends. I have long suspected that religion was a necessary adaptive prerequisite for civilization. Without the concepts of a natural order, hierarchy and rules humans would not self organize into larger social entities.
I think dogs must have religion, they have social structure, hierarchy and all the trappings of politics and conflict. On the other hand, I have long suspected that cats see themselves like Time Lords and above the petty concerns of this material world. In some respects they seem like Olympians, with their squabbles over territory and their cruel dominion over the rodents. Cats will never form a civilization, not just because they don't have opposable thumbs, but they are not temperamentally suited to cooperation and social order.
Because religion is a hierarchal social framework it is easy to misuse. Since one of its primary purposes is to establish social rules and define "us" and "other" it is used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. In this, it is no different than any other jingoistic identifier. It should come as no surprise that liberal Christian theology emphasizes the personal nature of god and does away with the hierarchy. This allows its focus to be a tool for spiritual growth and personal salvation rather than a method to provide order or force cooperation.
While I have little use for religion per se, I am a sucker for ceremony, pomp and circumstance. We humans have a deep seated need for social observation of life events. Shared joy is multiplied, while shared pain is divided.
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I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
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| parent )and stratification posited for a Godmaker, lions, for example.
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| parent )Reading up about their complex social structure on wikipedia, god must have told them to do it that way. :)
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I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
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| parent )one of my grandfather's barn cats walked out to the space where a litter of her kittens was run over in the road and cried for days -- walked out, cried, walked back to the barn to sleep, walked out, cried -- until she was finally consoled.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )DNA (genes) are not the only selfish replicators (see Dawkins - selfish gene theory) and meme theory posits that evolution works with any category of information that meets certain parameters.
William Calvin: THE SIX ESSENTIALS? Minimal Requirements for the
Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality
If genes and memes co-evolve in a symbiotic fashion then what can be good for memetic survival (martyrdom) may not be so good for genetic survival.
Which better represents "us" ?? Our DNA or our beliefs?
If Religion exists to propagate memes (in the sense that chickens exist to create eggs, rather than the reverse) then to sacrifice the occasional cluster of DNA (organisms) isn't any big deal.
= = =
We (humans) consist of genes and memes and both are selfish replicators. None of which tells us anything about whether God [does] or [does not] exist.
--Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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)... and there's no underestimating the heuristic value of a good analogy, but that seems to me a far cry from accepting 'memetics' as a legitimate field of inquiry. That the methods and concepts of evolutionary biology should be relevant to the realm of culture (whatever we end up meaning by that), there can be little doubt; but that inference seems like the barest beginning of an evolutionary anthropology, while memetics--at least in some of the articulations I've seen--proceeds with much less restraint. I'm not sure I'd call it, as some of it's detractors do, pseudo-scientific, but it sure does seem pre-scientific.
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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| parent )Part of the difficulty is isolating what the memetic equivalent of "gene" might be. Also genetics is digital not analog with discreet condons -- G A T C U -- meaning pea plant bred true in strict mathematical ratios.
Also (and this is a big one IMHO) memetic evolution lacks the clear genotype / phenotype divide and therefore will be ultra-Lamarckian.
We are a long long long way from a true science of memetics.
However BECAUSE we lack such a science, a scientific explanation of religion is also not currently feasible. And this actually was my point. It is premature and shallow to seek to explain religion "scientifically" insofar as we lack the tools needed to do that.
= = =
William Calvin asserts (and I am very much NOT qualified to judge) that he has discovered Darwinian processes at work within the neuro-chemistry of the brain. That our brain cells create patterns to emulate the outside world and our brain functions by running "competitions" at very high speed between these various emulations.
--Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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| parent )I'm partial to a non-genetic "social evolution" of the Lamarckian sort you posit above, Bill. That said, a genetic/biological basis either is or is not there. I don't see the harm in somebody starting to push for a biological underpinning if they see a plausible model. The truth will out eventually.
--The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
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| parent )underpinning, unless we allow "supernatural" causes back into the equation. Which I reject.
However, given our current inability to craft persuasive scientific theories as to how "ideas" evolve and propagate (memetics) to push "too hard" for a biological explanation results in something Daniel Dennett calls "the greedy reductionist"
Greedy reductionists hand-wave away unexplained complexity.
The truth will out eventually. But that might be a very very long time.
= = =
"Religion" as a sociological phenomenon certainly is the product of evolution. But the evolution of what? To say that DNA determines everything in a form of strict predestination offers an excessively "greedy" reductionist point of view.
--Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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| parent )The commentary article to which Manish linked seemed to me, as I indicated in my comment below, to write a check the actual article couldn't--and didn't try to--cash. I'm not sure, though, that it's "shallow" to speculate about the evolutionary origins of religion. Some speculation might be shallow, and some might not; I'd guess how robust and detailed a notion one has of 'religion'--a term which has to cover a pretty wide array of historical species, to say nothing of prehistorical versions--makes a good deal of difference in that regard.
And on that score, I'm not sure Dow's article comes off particularly well.
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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| parent )This is what I assert is shallow since I don't find this hard to imagine at all once we posit a symbiosis of selfish replicators. Merely because we lack a valid science of memetics does not mean "memes" are not shaping us at this very instant.
Marconi did not invent radio waves, he discovered and harnessed what already was there.
= = =
A celibate priesthood -- by definition -- sacrifices genetic propagation in favor of memetic propagation, the propagation of the Faith. Is this irrational? Depends on one's perspective.
DNA and our genome is merely a mechanism for coding information.
There is no inherent reason why it is the ONLY mechanism that can code and replicate information and "evolution" will bootstrap complexity if that mechanism contains the mathematical properties identified by Calvin. Evolution after all merely is a ratchet that allows complexity to avoid the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Just as pulleys and levers allow me to lift weights I could never otherwise lift.
I simply see no reason to conclude that DNA and genetics can possibly explain everything or that other selfish replicators do not exist.
--Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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| parent )Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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| parent )--or at least the piece you pick out does. The study isn't using believers and non-believers as groups; it uses unreal-info-communicators and real-info-communicators. Talking about 'belief' seems to muddle the picture unnecessarily. Dow speculates that the unreal-communicators "are attracting others to communicate real information to them," but the (more modest) upshot seems to be that the 'unreal' (i.e., non-sensuous) testimony component of religious behavior is not selected-against (as one might expect) in virtue of some other component of religious behavior. What exactly is selected-for is still a matter of speculation.
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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)