Nicholas Wade & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv

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We talk about The Faith Instinct.

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Any chance you could post a few links to the Islam origins hypothesis Wade discusses? It looks like the folks at Bloggingheads couldn't find anything.

The one thing I couldn't figure out was his response to the agency detection false positive point. It seemed muddled and I couldn't figure out exactly what he was arguing. It sounds like he was saying that if it was just false positives there would be selection pressure socially against that. But that didn't make much sense to me. Yeah in some communities once people agree on false positives there is some cost involved. But is it enough to get rid of agency detection? After all it's a trade off between false negatives where you tend to die and false positives that *may* cost more in terms of resources. Especially in Australia where it seems half the animals can kill you. (Or maybe I've just watched too much Crocodile Hunter)

^^

I think he was trying to argue why agency detection doesn't fine-tune, or re-calibrate itself through selection to better reduce false positives.

About cross cultural tests using the overseas Chinese: Does anyone have any figures about the religious breakdown of overseas Chinese communities? My anecdotal impression (from interaction with relatively small groups of Chinese-Americans) is that some of them become evangelical Christians, but I have no figures. Is the trend different in larger communities? I mean if there is a big China town, does that help more traditional Chinese religions to survive?
If current trends hold up, are the three monotheism (or rather, the two big ones) going to divide up the world or will large numbers of Chinese and Indians hold out for their own versions of religion?
I agree with your observation that the monotheism themselves are breaking down into smaller scale churches rather than one big organized religion dominating the whole state in some centralized fashion. Where does salafist Islam with its bottom-up organization but its top-down vision (one religion, one god, one caliph, one large superstate of Islam) fit into this picture? Will their vision be a violent failure, with Salafists gradually evolving a more personal religion compatible with secular states (though thoroughly unhappy with these states and many of their obscene ways.... like some Christians feel in heathenish America)?

Razib, your off-the-cuff comments on Wade's theory on the relationship between music and religion was very intriguing. I, too, combine a rather limited enthusiasm for music (e.g., I have never purchased a record or gone to a concert)with a complete lack of emotional response to religion. Is there any hard data on this relationship?