No, really, I doubt that religion is adaptive

PZ - nice straw man with that iPod example. Just keeping us on our toes, sorta like Dembski, I guess.

On a more serious note, I'd recommend reading Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer. It contains some thought-provoking arguments about how a lot of pan-cultural aspects of religion (spirits and ghosts, for example) fit into various neurologically-coded inference systems that do have adaptive value, and which would be heritable. Religion is not necessarily adaptive, although it certainly can be argued that some of the social aspects could be adaptive.

I'm plowing my way through a copy; it is tough sledding for my ancient synapses. You'd probably read it more quickly

The iPod example isn't a straw man -- it shows that ubiquity+variation is not sufficient cause to expect an adaptive explanation.

I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club -- he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that's also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists' advantage.

In a debate setting, members of the IDEA Club at Cornell have used the treatment of ID in MacNeill's seminar as validation that it is a legitimate topic for discussion in science classes.

BTW, on their blog The Design Paradigm, they cut off posting to their topic Does Darwinism predict anything? after only 3 days. I guess it wasn't going the way they wanted it to.

Yeah, except for the fact that iPods are (at least not yet) pan-culturally ubiquitous. And they don't (at least not yet) reproduce by themselves.

Look, I don't really want to argue about your analogy. I would be interested in your take on the ideas in Boyer's book.

If the ubiquity of religion is an evolutionary adaptation of humans, is the ubiquity of fleas, then, an evolutionary adaptation of dogs?

I Agree with you PZ This is my Life in Two worlds.

The religious world is kept together by continuous reading of the scripture,church services, group fellowship and prayer with others of the faith.. It is necessary to continually reinforce ones beliefs otherwise one is likely to backslide.

The non religious scientific world consists of understanding that the world is the result of natural phenomena with no supernatural intervention.It is actually difficult to comprehend and also requires constant study to keep one on track.It is much easier to believe that 'God did it' and without a reasonable understanding of molecular biology,genetics evolutionary biology and paleontology one can easily believe in ID or whatever.

I have had the benefit of living in both worlds being born into a very religious family but being rather idle didn't much go for studying the bible, which in any case didn't make any sense to me, though I enjoyed the fellowship. However with the inevitable backsliding through my studies of biology genetics biochemistry, micro-biology and ecology long before any of my lecturers knew anything of the DNA molecule and its implications. It almost seems they knew nothing of Darwin or evolution because they never mentioned it.This in the 1950's and I'm closing in on eighty. Only later did I with great effort learn about DNA with a smattering of Molecular biology that I managed to come to grips with, though I am sure I now understand more than most people. I studied evolution through the help of many writers adding to the knowledge I already had, so that now everything is understood in the light of evolution and it makes sense. But with my 'evolution' I wondered why my very intelligent friends, accountants and lawyers, didn't move on with me. Now people like Richard Dawkins are helping me to understand this very strange phenomenon.

Which of these elements have to be present for something to be religion?

1. Manicheanism: History is defined by a struggle between the saved / enlightened / good on the one hand and the damned / benighted / evil on the other.

2. Millenarianism: The bad, sinful, despoiled world / system will be destroyed and replaced by a perfect one.

3. Magical thinking: Wanting things to happen can make them happen. (prayer, sorcery, The Secret...)

4. Anthro-telos: The cosmos was created for a purpose and humanity has a role in the fulfillment of that purpose.

5. Anthropomorphic deity: There exists a deity who cares about humanity and has humanlike emotions such as jealousy, anger, and mercy.

Yes! Unleash your Inner-Gould, PZ!

Belief and Biology, Robert Sapolsky's talk to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is very interesting.

I don't see why the Ipod example counts against adaptivity, in fact the example of language rather suggests the reverse. If it's plausible that a talent for language is innate (even though speaking a particular language is not), why is it not also plausible that an inclination towards buying the latest in-group-sanctified object of desire is also innate (even though a lust for white headphones is not)? Ditto a tendency towards magical thinking (as contrasted with belief in a specific doctrine).

For one thing, religion almost certainly is too late to be considered to be "adaptive" simply because of its near-ubiquity in cultures. Does it exist more than 100,000 years ago? At least we don't know that it does, nor even that it exists 50,000 years ago, even if slightly later cave paintings are often interpreted as "religious".

Far too many biologists look at a "feature" and suppose that it exists for a "function". They don't ask what religion actually is. That is, they don't ask how primates lacking definite knowledge about the world (except for a very few basic functions and observations) even could know the world, except "spiritually". Early humans had to think of things in terms of their own functions and capabilities, and they also encountered much that would provoke "spiritual awe". "Primitive religions" appear to be due to not much more than these factors (as socially developed), so that this "religion" is primarily a linguistic manipulation of the basic "knowing" of the world by a primate who was profoundly ignorant of said world (quite contrary to Gonzalez's ramblings about how we're suited to knowing our world--see The Privileged Planet).

As such, religion is merely a bastardization of the "spirituality" with which we humans had to meet the world originally. I say that because I do think that such a basic "spirituality" can have value on its own, with little value to the individual (and much value to anachronistic groups) when religions co-opt this native "spirituality". Even to understand religion itself requires that we recognize how the human psyche was taken over by powers who knew how to twist the psyche to their own purposes.

There's no doubt that religion has had adaptive value to social groups who wanted to control other humans, yes, but that's about as far as I'd go with that. So it is true that civilization probably does rest at least in part on the control and reduction of the native "spirituality" which is actually just our means of understanding the world prior to science, however there is absolutely no reason to think that even that function is anything more than an anachronistic division of the world into barbarian and "us" (perhaps necessary for Greeks to survive, not very conducive to the prevention of nuclear annihilation today).

The naive assumption that the "spiritual psyche" exists for religion is about as pig-ignorant and contrary to science as the belief that our ability to detect patterns ought to lead us to the belief that life was designed. Of course it is important to understand how religion came out of evolutionarily adapted traits, however MacNeill only begs the question of evolutionary processes if he assumes that the apparent consequent of religion was actually the "goal" of our "spiritual" understandings of "nature".

The "spiritual" psyche almost certainly is the result of tens of millions of years of evolution, while religion is probably at most 100,000 years of social misconstrual of the psyche into an ever-shifting domination of our "natural spirituality". Religion is what represses the individual's "spiritual" understanding of the world, and if it is very important to cultural evolution, almost certainly it is unimportant to understanding biological evolution.

What is more, there is no obvious reason why all "religions" belong within a single category. MacNeill is mistaking a linguistic convenience, a broad lumping together of greatly varying cultural phenomena which we call "religion", as if it necessarily designated one single phenomenon (yes, there are shared features--doesn't mean that they're the same sort of phenomenon in fact).

A religion based upon a book may well be considered a different phenomenon from an animistic and evolving cultural tradition by which certain peoples know their worlds. If you're going to discuss the two together, you had better investigate and explain why they're legitimately discussed together, rather than simply assuming that they're the same basic phenomenon based upon some overly simplistic English words.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

I would like to make the point the religions clearly change over time. Although religions tend to claim along with infallibility and self evident truth, eternal unchanging beliefs, in fact within a matter of decades (certainly faster than many evolutionary changes) they change dramatically. Of course referring to them as evolving (beyond the irony) is metaphorical. So called Cultural evolution not the same as physical evolution.

Religion spreads and evolves exactly like a virus. Humans speak different languages. Religion, by and large, cannot pass the language barrier.

Maybe humans speak different languages for the evolutionary reason of protecting language speakers from the potentially harmful effects of their neighbors religions. If everyone spoke the same language, then a religious idea that evolved to spread fast and was destructive to it's host would wipe out humanity.

Kp t p PZ. Mk sr y shw n rspct fr yr ppnnts.

Ths wll nsr tht thy dn't vr rspct y, nd mk t hghly nlkly tht thy wll cm rnd t yr pnt f vw.

f crs, thts nt th pnt, s t? Th pnt S t nslt nd hrt, bcs t mks p fr dspntmnts n lf.

Rght, PZ?

I think the question is not correctly formulated. "Religion" is without a doubt on the list of human universals. This does not mean that if you find one culture without religion, you take it off that list. This is not how it works.

Being a "universal" is not the same thing as being an adaptation, and I essentially agree with PZ's arguments in this regard (and yes, to an evolutionary psychologist ... well, who cares what they think so let's not even go there... )

But this does not mean that there is nothing to be learned about this trait ... religion as a common behavior ... from an evolutionary perspective.

One of the problems, by the way, in this discussion is linking "adaptation" with some kind of value judgment ... this is why people either really want to or really don't want to see something like religion, or something like racism, as adaptive or as an adaptation.

I personally think there is an evolutionary "explanation" for religion. My own version of this is nothing I would put forward as anything like a certainty, I've just got a few ideas on it. I don't want to close down the idea of discussing religion as a phenomenon that can be understood in a broad evolutionary framework. This is not to say that there is some straight forward fitness value to religious behavior. In fact, I would put religious behavior as not one thing, but a collection of effects that arise from various aspects of human kinship behavior and other aspects of social behavior. Certainly, there can be no heritable component in the sense that there is a gene or set of genes that ultimately cause the development of a religious brain.

Indeed, if we could manage one whole generation without religion, that would be the end of it as we know it. It may re-emerge in various forms here and there (it almost certainly would). So would a lot of other "universals." But children grown in isolation would, I think, have a low probability of thinking it up!

I disagree with PZ here. I believe Religion was selected for as an earlier version of human thought to try and see order in the world, and share that order with the next generation. Just because religions are often stupid and maladaptive in this modern world does not mean they did not have an adaptive origin at one time..

The point of the language example is being misconstrued. It's a complaint with the people who argue that religion is adaptive; I'm saying it's comparable to saying English is adaptive. It misses the point that what's significant is some much more general, broader property -- language, or in religion's case, a collection of things like pattern recognition, empathy, or social reinforcement. Stating your premise as a search for the adaptive qualities of religion is simply asking the wrong question.

There's a problem of conflation that plagues these discussions (well, at least one conflation. Maybe more). And to examine the issues rationally, one has to pick them apart.

To wit: superstition vs. religion.

The word 'superstition' has a bad connotation, but setting that aside, it means a "belief in things not seen". If you're going to try to understand universal human behavior, and possible evolutionary pecursors/consequences of belief, it's superstition you need to look at.

Religion, on the other hand, is "organized superstition", and is best understood as a parasitic meme that feeds off of superstition.

Lago: What is the adaptive value of understanding order and passing that on? How does that get selected for?

PZ: I agree, but I would add and underscore kin relationships.

Kinship systems function in ways that require inclusion, reference to, power relations regarding, and mating systems organized in reference to individuals who are not actually part of the immediate kinship system (ancestors). Some of these ancestors never really existed. Human kinship systems are distinct from chimpanzee systems, for example, because we regard as relatives blood kin that we have never met, while chimps almost never do (they are treated indiscriminately during the chimp "wars" for example).

A natural extension of, and potential tool to use in connection with, this kinship behavior includes spooky stuff like spirits.

(The distinction between fairies and gods is vague!)

Yes -- there's a whole bunch of stuff that coagulates into this unpleasant mess called religion.

Better questions would be "what are the heritable properties of the human brain that contribute to complex social behaviors?" and "How do cultural epiphenomena like religion coopt these properties?"

MacNeill wrote: To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation.

Huh? IIRC, MacNeill has been quite critical of panadaptationism. And now he goes around and blithely applies it to religion. Or is he talking about some general evolutionary biologist types and not himself?

Does it exist more than 100,000 years ago?

The Tan Tan and Bhereket Ram finds indicate that it did.

That is, they don't ask how primates lacking definite knowledge about the world (except for a very few basic functions and observations) even could know the world, except "spiritually".

Eh? They would know the world through their senses. Unless you define "spiritually" usefully, it is also gibberish.

I would put religious behavior as not one thing, but a collection of effects that arise from various aspects of human kinship behavior and other aspects of social behavior.

I'll go along with that. Emergent behaviour.

I'm not sure that I agree, but it kind of depends on how literally you expect to read the term "evolution". If you're talking about evolution as a biological process, then fair enough; I'm not even going to try to comment on that.

But otherwise, if you're meaning "evolve" in a much less literal sense to mean the adaptation and selection of concepts (or products, as in your iPod example) which can trace their origins back through a succession of related predecessors, then I don't honestly think the idea can be dismissed at all.

If all you have is a hammer, you will treat everything like a nail. If all you have is a symbolic brain, you will treat everything like a symbol. Thus, we should not be surprised to find that most human behavior is "emergent."

(This is probably not limited to humans, that would be an assumption worth investigating but not worth relying on).

By the way, it has been argued that there is proto religious behavior (whatever that is) in chimps. It is implied, for instance, at the end of the film "The New Chimpanzees." Male chimps are vigorously displaying at a waterfall. The music is intense (added later, I assume). Jane Goodall's voice is inspiring. She speaks of the waterfall " ... always coming, always going, never the same from moment to moment..." and stuff like that.

It actually is not too difficult to make the transition in one's mind from the chimps displaying at the waterfall to, say, a bunch of holy rollers speaking in tongues and getting off on snakes.

@PZ(#16):

It's a complaint with the people who argue that religion is adaptive; I'm saying it's comparable to saying English is adaptive.

Aren't you attacking a straw man? Has anyone really argued that holding a particular religious belief is adaptive? I've read a fair amount of this stuff and never seen anyone suggesting anything so silly. They generally agree with you when you say:

... what's significant is some much more general, broader property ... like pattern recognition

Careful! That's what Dennett says. You wouldn't want to be caught agreeing with him, would you? ;-)

The really interesting question is where do things like "belief in things unseen" fall in this distinction: are they like Ipod headphones or pattern recognition?

There's no doubt that organized religion has helped some to survive. For some, it creates a social framework that may lead to spouses, jobs, removing destructive personal habits, emotional well-being, etc. In ancient societies, it may have been absolutely necessary to partake in religious ceremonies, to avoid being an outcast. But if religion is "adaptive", then so are schools, clubs, and corporations, political parties, and almost any social organization, since they can have similar effects. More complex adaptive things may actually be going on, and religion is just one way to package them.

The "social" aspect of religion is obviously vital. If it was just the "spirituality", they wouldn't have any need for organized religion, or weekly meetings. People would satisfy "spiritual" needs on their own, via meditation or whatever. But I don't see too much adaptive value to that.

Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they're nuts.

Actually, squirrelly is what comes to my mind. :-)

MacNeill seems to go a long way to be provocative, but I think I have seen him discussing his underlying idea before, on his blog and elsewhere: "the specific context within which the capacity for religious experience has evolved is warfare".

I guess he will have to discuss the order of business here, religion vs warfare, with another evolutionist, Dawkins. And in all fairness, he not only claims it will be a discussion, he has as required text "The God Delusion". Probably not so common in courses yet, and again rather provocative.

I don't like his idea any more than when he opened himself up to become an authority reference for the ID movement. But this he should explore. And at least this time his course will be about science.

I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function.

Whether religion is an epiphenomenon or not, I believe Greg is on to something, the other side of the coin as it may be.

There are other persistent facts that may or may not be "universals", like the fact that women own about 5 % of the global capital (IIRC, UN figures), that would likely have a hard time reappear if a couple of generations get used to the opposite.

Not that the contingency helps us to make the transition to a better state, but it is nice to have the hope it may be a stable change. While slavery isn't eradicated due to activities like sex trade and child labor, it isn't nearly as ubiquitous as in earlier history, in spite of that 'the market' is still there.

So when people object to the idea that religion could possibly follow the same path towards extinction, I always have the feeling they make a special plea based on no specific evidence. As so often with this topic. :-(

I think if we are considering religion/spirituality and evolution then we need to consider an evolutionary significant time span. If this is significantly longer than a few thousand years, then whatever effects may have happened would be dominated by primitive religions, not the sort of modern world-religions we are most familar with today.
So presumably these religions most resemble Shamanism. Shamans often regulate important functions, such as what to plant when, and often are associated with primative usually herbal medicine. I suspect these Shamans probably learned some societially useful crafts, such as how to tell what time of year it is, and what sorts of plants are useful for treating illnesses. So they likely had societal benefits.

Could they also have individual benefits in the Darwinian sense, of improving the prospects for the Shaman's -or his close relatives genes? That question just might still be answerable by anthroploigists, or do too few uncontaminated humans now exist? Certainly one thing that has struck in my mind regarding evolution, is power-hungry behavior. It was discovered that an alarming fraction
(I think around 1%) of Orientals have the same Y chromosome -attrituted to Gengis Khan. So it seems that behavior which leads to a no-holds barred grab for power, while most likely leading to the premature death of the individual, may confer such high (Darwinian) fitness via the few winners as to be adaptive. So perhaps Shamanism -or at least the ability to become the Shaman might be highly adaptive.

Religion does not have to be a genetically-based evolved module in order to: a) undergo replication, b) be subject to selection, or c) be potentially adaptive.

The question is, adaptive to what?

Some argue that religion is only adaptive to itself and is maladaptive to its hosts; in other words, it is a parasitic meme (mind virus).

But some variants of religion can be adaptive for their host populations. Especially if they enhance mass mobilization, and hence promote the formation, maintenance, and spread of host populations. Hence, it can promote the maintenance and spread of the host populations genes and other associated replicators - which need not have anything to do with religion itself nor specific faiths.

See the literature on dual inheritance, behavioral ecology, multilevel selection, inheritance systems.

I think that the predisposition to think religiously and the predisposition to think scientifically are both present in the evolved human brain.

Protoreligion and protoscience, for instance, both result in invention of the lunar calendar, presumably for both astronomical and menstrual reasons.

This continued in the European calendar revisions for calculating Easter.

See, for example, neolithic lunar calendars carved in bone, and more mysteriously abstract:

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/?q=a100000&sort=0&fmt=0&lan…

"... the oldest known mathematical object [made by humans]. The bone owes its name to the site where it was discovered. Ishango is in the Congo, 15 km from of the Equator, on the bank of the Edward lake. This large African lake, one of the sources of the Nile, is 77 km long and 42 km wide. The area is close to the Virunga National Park and the Congo-Uganda border." - Brussels Museum for Natural Sciences.

And no more jokes about menstruation and mensuration. Period.

The Tan Tan and Bhereket [sic] Ram finds indicate that it did.

Hmm. What specific evidence indicates that these painted venus figurines were used in a religious context instead of being mere art or idols? (Art with n*u*d*e females seems to be popular in many cultures, btw. ;-) [Note: n*u*d*e is a dirty word on scienceblogs. Sigh!]

Hello, everyone; I was out of town and didn't know the new summer course had hit the airwaves until this PM.

Despite my many attempts to be as clear as possible, it seems that I have failed. I am not asking if "religion" is adaptive, and certainly not if any particular religion is adaptive. On the contrary, what we will be considering this summer is whether or not the capacity for religious experience (i.e. what goes on in the human nervous system when one has a "religious experience") is adaptive.

To piggyback on PZ's analogy, it should be clear that the capacity for language is highly adaptive, but any particular language is entirely learned. I believe that the capacity for religious experience is exactly the same, and that will be my stated position in our seminar the summer.

And yes, pan-specificity is one of the criteria one looks for if one is interested in finding adaptations - notice, however, I said "finding" not "verifying" if something is, in fact an adaptation. As George Williams pointed out back in 1966, the concept of "adaptation" is an "onerous" one, and requires several levels of verification.

The approach that I have taken on this question is that, to qualify as a genuine evolutionary adaptation, a characteristic should ideally satisfy the following six criteria:

(1) It should be found in most (but not necessarily all) of the individual members of a particular species (or, to be more precise, a particular taxon)

(2) Despite being pan-specific, it should also exhibit what Darwin and R.A. Fisher called "continuous variation;" that is, it should exhibit a range of expression approximating a normal distribution (as in, for example, bill size in Galapagos finches), from individuals that express it to an extraordinary degree to individuals who hardly express it at all (with the majority somewhere in the middle)

(3) It should be possible to identify specific anatomical/biochemical/physiological structures that produce the specified function

(4) It should also be possible to identify a specific genetic basis for the characteristic; this genetic basis need not consist of a single gene, however (and indeed may consist of an entire hierarchy of interacting genes)

(5) Since adaptations are the result of natural (and/or sexual) selection, then it should also be possible to show that individuals having the characteristic have relatively higher reproductive success, compared to individuals that do not (or who do not express the characteristic as strongly)

Notice that in none of these have I mentioned the "ultimate" criterion:

(6) It should in principle be amenible to "functional analysis;" that is, it should be possible to answer the question "what is it for?"

That's because I believe (a la G. C. Williams and in keeping with the spirit of Gould and Lewontin's "spandrels" concept) that this criterion can only be inferred once one has verified the others, and only then with the greatest reluctance. To jump to this conclusion first is to become fatally seduced by teleology.

Furthermore, as I clearly stated in the course description, there are at least three different ways that the capacity for religious experience could qualify vis-a-vis the foregoing criteria:

(A) The capacity for religious experience could be directly adaptive in-and-of-itself (this is my position)

(B) The capacity for religious experience could be an epiphenomenon of another adaptation, such as "agency detection" (this is Pascal Boyer's position, and basically the "standard model" in the field today)

(C) The capacity for religious experience could be entirely parasitic, a kind of "mind virus" that exploits other adaptations but is neither directly adaptive nor an epiphenomenon of another adaptation (this is Richard Dawkins's position)

For myself, I believe that the capacity for religious experience qualifies as an adaptation on the basis of all seven of the criteria listed above:

(1) Pan-specificity: As Donald Brown and others have pointed out, there is no culture in the ethnographic record that does not include people who have this capacity

(2) Continuous variation: As PZ himself admits, he entirely lacks this capacity, but admits that there are many people who do; he thinks that those people are deluded, but I think that they are no more deluded than people who speak Yiddish in the midst of a dominant culture that speaks German are deluded

(3) Structural correlation: As D'Aquili & Newberg (among a growing cadre of researchers) have found, there are specific brain regions correlated with the capacity for religious experience

(4) Underlying genes: As Dean Hamer and his colleagues have discovered, there are also specific genes correlated with this capacity (the principle one being VMAT2, a gene that produces a protein that regulates the packaging of catecholamines in the CNS, especially dopamine and seratonin)

(5) Reproductive success: this one is trivial, as anyone can find examples of populations in which the capacity for religious experience has fitness consequences (check out the relative reproductive rate of the Amish, for example, or Catholics...but skip the priesthood ;-)

(6)Function: to put my hypothesis as concisely as possible, here is "MacNeill's Law":

Religion facilitate warfare, which facilitates religion.

There may, of course, be other functional explanations; that's why we're getting together this summer to talk about them.

For more on all of this, please check out my blog at:

http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2007/03/evolution-and-religion-is-rel…

There are other posts relating to this topic in the archives, but if I list more than one here, the spam filter will deny posting this.
--Allen

P.S. As for courage, I don't think it takes that to do what I'm doing; I'm just having a blast! Curiosity may eventually kill this cat, but if so, I'll still have seven lives left after this summer is over...
*********************************
Allen D. MacNeill, Senior Lecturer
The Biology Learning Skills Center
G-24 Stimson Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
*********************************
phone: 607-255-3357 (Allen's office)
email: adm6@cornell.edu
website: http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/
*********************************
"I had at last got a theory by which to work"
-The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
*********************************

To elaborate on my previous comment: These features are not required for religion to be potentially adaptive for host populations (the question of whether any of these are features of religion aside):

1) non-decomposability into other faculties (sociability, curiosity, empathy, anthropomorphic bias, binary thinking etc.), 2) genetic heritability, 3) status as an evolved cognitive module, 4) great antiquity, 5) universality, 6) adaptiveness in all of its specific manifestations, 7) adaptiveness in all contexts, 8) guaranteed future persistence.

I keep thinking about the Andeman islanders. Being near the epicenter of the great earthquake, it was widely assumed that they were completly wiped out the the tsunami. It turns out their creation myths told them that when the earth shakes -run as far from the Ocean as possible. Unlike their modern neighbors in Indonesia, none of them were lost to the tsunami.

Forgive me, but I seem to be missing something. The ipod analogy seems to me very dubious. I think that it's obvious that the extent of its universality is due to the globalization of information (advertising). If it were not for the internet and TV, stuff like that won't be universal at all. It would be very interesting if modern societies developed their own ipods individually, without any information from outside.

Maybe music itself would be a better analogy. In fact, I believe the ipod owners prize their ipods because of the music that's contained in them, rather than the ipod itself. They only prize the ipod to the extent of the sacrifice required to obtain it ($300 is a lot for students), but that would be the same as any other $300 piece of anything.

By the way, I don't know if you're giving the free flow of information (especially scientific advances) its due credit. I mean, that's mostly the reason why countries have become mostly secular and atheistic, and it's only happened since information is free to run, and only in those countries with most freedom of information. Even about half a century ago it would have been very difficult for a regular person to become an atheist, let alone whole societies.

So I think that the fact that people still persist on religion, and especially the fact that people re-convert to religion, as a possible indication of superstition and religious belief being in us. It's just our instincts and emotions clashing with reason one more time. Of course I don't have much evidence, but it seems like a reasonable assumption, as so seems yours.

I think that the predisposition to think religiously and the predisposition to think scientifically are both present in the evolved human brain.

The idea that there is a predisposition to think scientifically would be a rather novel thought, wouldn't it? Science as a successful activity is young. And most often one sees scientists complain that it is hard work and wisely note that "common sense" has nothing to do with its results.

Now, while these early tally sticks were interesting, I think it mostly merely points to our ability to count, as well as the calendar does. The later, as most early astronomy, also seems to attest to our ability to look for patterns.

Which btw the rather loose modern interpretations of diverse artifacts points to as well. Most of the links to the Ishango bone was outdated, but the Wikipedia article had a rather "overly enthusiastic view" (as another site said about a mathematicians analysis of the bone). Any article facilely mentioning prime numbers in artifacts is bound to raise a red flag in a skeptical reader.

I was asked: "Lago: What is the adaptive value of understanding order and passing that on? How does that get selected for?"

When you are dealing with changing worlds, being able to adapt fast helps. Most mammals can evolve fast with simple variations in teeth while birds can do much the same as selective results in beak morphology increase chances of survival. Behavior on an "Pure" instinctual level does not evolve near as fast as learnt behavior can. By learning through trail and error, and then being able to teach what has been learned, a group can adapt much quicker to environmental change, and by way of doing so, out compete the competition.

How does this get selected for? Well, the ability to make correlations, that is seen in many animals to some degree (usually relatively small) can be selected for. The genes used to develop the brain in such a way that allow for increases associations would be to a selective advantage here, and this is just what we humans do. We not only can hear a can opener, and think "Food!", but can see patterns, and associate them with sounds, and then those sounds with ideas and so on. We do not need to ask, "why do I know that sharpening this stick, increases the ability for it to kill that animal?", we just need to know that association, by way of learning can tell us we increase our chance of eating if we remember these associations.

In short, early associations do not need make sense, just need to be able to help us survive. Having selection for an emotional response between these association would help cement these associations and help stimulate us into reacting to young, or others conflicting with them, as seeing a child picking up a bug or plant we have associated with sickness. If we then see a child "breaking the rules" we respond, and the child now can be selected for by how well he responds to being told not to pick that plant up...

MacNeil lists three distinct models for the evolutionary explanation of religious belief. My bet is all three are right. In favor of Boyer, the mechanisms behind simple superstitions seem to be a misfiring of quite useful pattern-recognition systems and not much more. In favor of Dawkins, the religions that currently dominate have many features that seem designed to keep people believing independently of whether or not the claims are true, and the virus model fits this very well. However, the extraordinary human tendency to believe strange things seems to go far beyond what can be explained by either of those two models. This fact, combined with the frequent sucess of religious institutions as instuments of social cohesion, leads me to think that part of the reasons we have religion is that false beliefs, under the right circumstances, are very effective at motivating action that will promote survival.

Actually, PZ, I think your post and comments clearly demonstrate why religion *is* adaptive (or at least clearly point the way toward the adaptive behavior of which it may well be a substrate). It's precisely what raises my hackles most about religion (and about your posts re religion vs. atheism and many of the comments on those posts). Very simply, it's "us" vs. "them."

Anything that tends to identify one more closely with a group - a group that might come to one's aid in time of danger, that might assist with various tasks of daily life - seems likely to enhance chances of survival and finding mates beyond what might be expected if one goes it alone. Saying proudly to one's like-minded fellows, "I am Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/Atheist - I am one of *you*, not one of those Atheist/Buddhist/Muslim/Jewish/Christian fools!" - is an act for which analogues might well be found in the behavior of evolutionary predecessors.

"The idea that there is a predisposition to think scientifically would be a rather novel thought, wouldn't it?"

I don't know. Is this novel? Although I have taught the History of Science to hundreds of adult students, I do not pretend to be an expert. Although my on-line chronology of the development of Math and Science and Literature is many megabytes of text, it is mostly derived from secondary references, and not a scholarly research in and of itself.

http://magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline.html

I still think it plausible (not proven) that "there is a predisposition to think scientifically..." I am also biased by my Science Fiction professionalism, where the notion is widely held that "a predisposition to think scientifically" evolves in many taxa throughout the cosmos, and is very strongly selected at the interstellar scale. That is, the species that do not evolves the ability to think scientifically are less likely to design and build and use starships, and thus do not particpate in "directed panspermia." That's my most speculative argument., Let's try the more conventional.

In the MacNeill framework:

(1) Pan-specificity: As Donald Brown and others have pointed out, there is no culture in the ethnographic record that does not include people who have some capacity for counting, plane geometry, abstract cause-and-effect reasoning, so far as I know.

(2) Continuous variation: At one extreme stand Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Ramanujan, Terry Tao, Euler, Gauss, Erdos, non Neumann, and their astonishing like; at the other, those suffering clinical Dyscalculia, many of whom I've helped in emedial Math classes, and those meta-studied by my wife who can't do elementary Physics, in part because of bad teachers and wrong textbooks, but google also the Science article "Observation is Insufficient for Determination that the Surface of Still Water is Invariantly Horizontal" [I think that was the title, it is at least close];

(3) Structural correlation: there seem to be specific brain structures for syntactic, causal, and mathematical experience, that underlie the ability to think scientifically;

(4) Underlying genes: weakness in theory: I do not know of specific genes associated with Math or Science as such, or, for that matter, Chess and Music, where there are also multigenerational world-class families and the ability to do world-class work while still a child; nor have such genes been ruled out; this may or may not relate to genetic correlates to autism, schizophrenia, language ability;

(5) Reproductive success: several papers in past decade asserting that Men do science to get the babes; worked for me, but that's another story;

(6)Function: to put my hypothesis as concisely as possible, here is "Post's Law of Science Evolution": "a neurological predisposition to think scientifically leds to technology for peaceful, abstract, economic, and warfare advantages, which lead to the development and spread of civilized populations, which lead to a neurological predisposition to think scientifically."

I've never stated this before, so I apologize if the concept is poorly articulated. Please attack it, that I may learn.

Think it through, people. Some of you are almost getting it. If I were to argue that there was selection for human use of the iPod, you'd all disagree and tell me no, the interesting phenomenon here is music, and why people like that...the iPod is just a transient and superficial device for playing music.

I'm saying religion is the same thing. It's the latest human fad for expressing deeper, more fundamental attributes -- focusing on religion actually gets in the way of examining core properties, just as getting hung up on iPod engineering or style would lead you astray.

Another key point: atheists like me are not somehow different in any meaningful way from other people. We almost certainly have the same drives and the same biological imperatives as the religious, but we can wipe away that religious encrustation with no ill effect, no loss of human values or meaning. That alone should tell you that religion is merely one peculiar pattern of expression of the interesting stuff underneath.

atheists like me are not somehow different in any meaningful way from other people

Except for the tentacles.

PZ wrote:

"It's the latest human fad..."

In that case, it's a fad that has existed in some form for over 40,000 years, as far as we can tell; that's over 2,500 human generations, which is much more than enough to allow for considerable evolutionary change

"...for expressing deeper, more fundamental attributes..."

Such as? Pascal Boyer has identified several in Religion Explained, including the one I think is pivotal: the ability to infer the existence of "agency" - that is, intentionality in entities in one's aurroundings. For example, being able to infer that the cave bear has intentions on your life (i.e. ending it, and making you into lunch) would be at least a moderately fitness-enhancing trait, don't you think? Even more so if the entities in whom you are inferring intentionality are your conspecifics (i.e. the bunch of yahoos from over the next ridge, who want to kill you and kidnap your women).

"...focusing on religion actually gets in the way of examining core properties..."

Which is, of course, why we will be focusing primarily on the capacity for religion this summer. I'm not very interested in particular religions, any more than a linguist might be interested in a particular language when trying to figure out how the capacity for language works.

Clearly, PZ is solidly behind the Dawkins/"mind virus" position (as he all but stated in the title of his post), but to me that position admits that the capacity for religious belief is adaptive. If it weren't, our brains wouldn't work the way they do, and "mind viruses" like wouldn't be as contagious as they clearly are.

In other words, the capacity for religion is essentially an innate capacity for learning a particular set of beliefs, a capacity that is strongly biased in particular ways under particular conditions (hence our ability to correlate particular religions with particular ecological subsistence patterns), and therefore qualifies as an evolutionary adaptation.

The exact details of the religions themselves don't matter at all; indeed, IMHO they're irrelevent. What is relevent is the effects such beliefs have on reproductive success. If they have any at all, then the capacity to formulate and transmit such beliefs is clearly adaptive.

No, actually I'm not a big fan of the "mind virus" idea. I'm saying religion is a spandrel.

There are properties of the mind that are useful and may have been selected for, such as being able to infer agency as you mentioned. That's adaptive. That the capability sometimes goes off cockeyed and starts assigning agency to thunder and disease and the seasons is a side-effect, one that gets needlessly amplified into religion.

I'm saying Science is NOT a spandrel.

As to "thinking scientifically" being adaptive, if you replace the phrase with "thinking rationally" it clearly is. Indeed, being able to infer cause and effect relationships (which is, of course, the core of "scientific" rationality) is and has been essential to human life.

However, I think it's just as likely that this same ability, coupled with the "agency detector" hypothesis of Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber, is the basis for religious thinking. Cause-and-effect logic only has to "work" - that is, to bring about an adaptive effect - it doesn't have to be "scientific."

For example, let's suppose you live next to a river and you don't want your children to fall in an drown. You can tell them not to go near it, but that's not going to stop a two-year-old...at least it won't stop most of the two-year-olds I know. So you tell them that a demon (named "Jenny Greenteeth" or "the Boogie Man" or "the Kelpie" live in the water and want to eat you alive and if you go too close to the water, she/he/it will reach out and pull you in.

The ability to believe in things like demons can have extraordinary fitness consequences, especially if the demons are the people who live over the next ridge who want to kill you and kidnap your women (and BTW, their women are quite attractive, don't you think? Maybe we should kill ≤i≥them≤/i≥ and kidnap ≤i≥their≤/i≥ women...after all, they aren't The Chosen People and we are, right?)

I think it's actually much more difficult to show any way in which religious beliefs (or, more precisely, the capacity for such beliefs) are ≤i≥not≤/i≥ adaptive (i.e. have fitness consequences, i.e. have effects on differential reproductive success).

Well, I grew up near a river, and it was far more effective to tell me I could fall in and drown than to tell me that a fictitious monster lived there...especially since I could grow up, discover mom and dad lied to me about the river monster, and then begin to suspect that they also lied when they told me the girls of the forbidden clan had cooties.

The idea that there is an actual evolutionary advantage to being able to consider reasons for behavior isn't controversial to me, at least. What I'm saying, and that is well illustrated by your example, is that religion represents an error, a short circuit, a fallacious side effect of a useful property that only persists because in most cases it doesn't have any immediate deleterious effect. And again, that atheists and religious people all share that same useful core property -- atheists have just scraped off much of the useless mistargeting.

PZ wrote:

"I'm saying religion is a spandrel."

Then in that case you're in favor of Pascal Boyer's "epiphenomenon" hypothesis for the evolution of the capacity for religion.

However, let's consider the "spandrel" idea a little more closely. As Gould and Vrba pointed out in their 1982 paper, a "spandrel" is more precisely defined as an "exaptation" - that is, a characteristic that is not currently adaptative (for whatever reason) but that may become so in the future. I think that a very strong case can be made for the hypothesis that ALL adaptations start out as "exaptations" (i.e. spandrels), and become adaptations when they begin to affect reproductive success. Otherwise, you have to be a teleologist and think that adaptations somehow come into existence being already adaptive, and that violates a basic assumption of scientific naturalism, which I assume both you and I hold.

But in that case, any "spandrel" (i.e. "exaptation") immediately becomes an adaptation when it has fitness consequences. So, the real question becomes (and this is the question we will be considering in depth this summer)

Does the capacity for religious experience have fitness consquences, and/or has it had fitness consequences in the past?

And I believe that the answer is not only "yes," but that the ecological context in which such a capacity is most likely to have had fitness consequences is inter-group competition...i.e. warfare.

Here's what I wrote about it in Evolution & Cognition 10:1 (July 2004), pp. 43-60:

"Here is where the capacity for religious experience is crucial. By making possible the belief that a supernatural entity knows the outcome of all actions and can influence such outcomes, that one's "self" (i.e., "soul") is not tied to one's physical body, and that if one is killed in battle, one's essential self (i.e., soul) will go to a better "place" (e.g., heaven, valhalla, etc.) the capacity for religious experience can tip the balance toward participation in warfare.

"By doing so, the capacity for religious belief not only makes it possible for individuals to do what they might not otherwise be motivated to do, it also tends to tip the balance toward victory on the part of the religiously devout participant. This is because success in battle, and success in war, hinges on commitment: the more committed a military force is in battle, the more likely it is to win, all other things being equal. When two groups of approximately equal strength meet in battle, it is the group in which the individuals are more committed to victory (and less inhibited by the fear of injury or death) that is more likely to prevail."

Also, please note that I am absolutely NOT arguing for the superior rationality of religion over science, or even common sense. Far from it: I think that scientific rationality was and is the greatest boon to our species in all of our immensely long evolutionary history.

However, that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the capacity for religious experience was once adaptive. I think it was (although it very well may not be now), and that explains why we have brain regions that light up when people meditate and/or pray, and why there are genes (VMAT2 is the first known example) that are correlated with the tendency to have religious experiences and beliefs.

Indeed, let me take this a little further: I think that the capacity for religious experience is an evolutionary adaptation that was once adaptive but is now either neutral or maladaptive...and I'm leaning toward the latter. But, that has no bearing at all on the kind of evidence that would verify or falsify that hypothesis. That evidence is rapidly being collected, analyzed, and reported right now (check out the list of references in Daniel Dennett's new book Breaking the Spell if you want a detailed list) and that's what we're going to be discussing this summer.

And BTW, citing the fact that YOU grew up near a river and didn't need Jenny Greenteeth to keep you from going near it seems suspiciously like anecdotal evidence to me. The fact that it didn't work with you is far less a commentary on the effectiveness of such beliefs in general, and far more a commentary on your own, particular life experiences, which I might add, did not include living next to a river in the fourth century, when virtually everybody believed in beings like Jenny Greenteeth.

Indeed, the fact that a huge number of people have the ability to believe in things like demons is a strong prima facie argument that the human mind is predisposed to believing in such things, isn't it? Either that predisposition is an epiphenomenon of some other capacity or it has fitness consequences in and of itself. That's what we are going to be discussing this summer. I'm pretty strongly convinced that it's an adaptation, but I may change my mind, if someone makes a convincing argument (supported by convincing evidence) to the contrary.

So far, you have failed to do so, but please keep trying...that's what this is all about, right?

BTW, if anyone is coming late to this discussion, the seminar course I offerred last summer was my own modest attempt to shred intelligent design theory in the context of a collegial sharing of views. And that's pretty much how it went:

http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/macneill.html

Of course, the other side viewed the outcome a little differently, but their side is rapidly going the way of the dodo anyway, so all in all I think it was a useful exercise. I enjoyed it anyway...

"a fallacious side effect of a useful property"

Fallacious in the sense of empirical truth value, sure. Fallacious in terms of fitness? That depends. For members of anti-sex castration cults, certainly. But consider the spread of Islam and the spread of Christianity, and the concurrent spread of the genes of their hosts. That has something to do with religiously mandated mass-mobilizing imperatives to spread the faith and multiply the faithful.

Durkheim had the adaptive value of religion figured out a long time ago.

Hello.

I posted a comment a while ago and I got a message that it was pending administrator's approval. I didn't link anything, I don't know why it got picked for "review".

Is it gonna show up at all?

Thanks.

I linked to your article from The Thinking Blogger Award - A Gift and a Curse

You have been tagged - congratulations.

Picking up on something "TomK" said:
"Religion, by and large, cannot pass the language barrier.

Maybe humans speak different languages for the evolutionary reason of protecting language speakers from the potentially harmful effects of their neighbors religions. If everyone spoke the same language, then a religious idea that evolved to spread fast and was destructive to it's host would wipe out humanity."

Erm, codswallop.

How many languages has the christian bible been translated into?
And why do the islamofascists insist that the "recital" NOT be translated into non-Arabic languages - because then they might lose their control, and/or peole might find out what a load of pig-droppings the whole thing is.

And people speak different languages, because earlier tribes and groups became separated, and languages change with time, though since the invention of widespread printing, the rate ahs slowed enormously, so we can understand almost all of Shakespeare, but not so much of Chaucer, and very little of Beowulf.

Until someone with sufficient expertise in human social behavior over evolutionary timespans joins in this discussion, I fear we're all just talking out our butts. PZ is, as pointed out by Dr. MacNeill, falling back on anecdote and analogy. OTOH, Dr. MacNeill's claims for VMAT2 seem premature and overblown.

This thread has enough opinions - what it needs is more science.

Mr. MacNeill,

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this at all:

Otherwise, you have to be a teleologist and think that adaptations somehow come into existence being already adaptive, and that violates a basic assumption of scientific naturalism, which I assume both you and I hold.

Are you suggesting that *mutations* cannot be immediately adaptive? While it may be rare, I'm not aware of a reason why it can never happen.

Shades of Robert Ardrey! Speculating that religion helps commit a larger proportion of the population to war is not enough. You have to show that a) this is a significant phenomenon relative to other factors (clan loyalty, nationalism, etc.); b) it's actually got data to back it up -- are secular people less likely to enlist than religious people? c) that cultures actually benefit from greater commitment to war, d) that the religious impulse is heritable (that's key!), and e) that people with a heritable propensity to engage in risky behaviors like war aren't culling themselves out of the population. You have a very long way to go before that argument is at all convincing.

As for the question of whether fear of drowning or fear of invisible river monsters are better deterrents: I know that what I was suggesting was a mere anecdote. You're giving me the impression that you don't know that you're offering anything other than an anecdote yourself. Are there actually measurements of frequency of drowning in kids who believe in river monsters vs. kids who do not believe in river monsters?

Once it has occurred, a mutation can become adaptive, but at the moment of its origin (i.e. when the base sequence changes, or the chromosome number, or whatever) it cannot be adaptive by definition. This is because adaptations are the result of natural or sexual selection, by definition, and therefore cannot be adaptive until after selection has had a chance to operate on them. Otherwise, one could argue that a dropped rock is already on the ground when it leaves the hand. Yes, it will wind up on the ground, but not until gravity has had a chance to work on it.

Allen D. MacNeill...
One question - if warfare was the selection process, why are females in general more religious than males?

And...

"When two groups of approximately equal strength meet in battle, it is the group in which the individuals are more committed to victory (and less inhibited by the fear of injury or death) that is more likely to prevail."

Are you sure? I thought tactical or technological superiority were important. And being able to avoid injury and death can help win the war if not every battle.

Don't get me wrong - you may be correct, but have you looked for instance at what happens in primitive societies today to test your hypothesis. There is a book just published in Germany recently (translated Jungle Child) in which a white family lived with a primitive native tribe in New Guinea, and that tribe was being decimated (the population was declining) by tit-for-tat warfare.

There is plenty of evidence of trances and drugs being used to enhance success in warfare, but whether that enhances long term breeding success, well I wonder. Fecundity is surely higher in peace time. There is of course the Genghis Khan effect, but I would have thought historically such large scale success was the exception rather than the rule.

PZ wrote:

"Speculating that religion helps commit a larger proportion of the population to war is not enough."

That's true; that's why I generally refer to this idea as the "Mars hypothesis," as there is a lot of verification left to do. But that, of course, is what hypotheses are for. And for that matter, Darwin had no data on natural selection at all in the Origin. Indeed, he only had two examples of selection in action (see chapter 4 of the 1st ed.), and they were both imaginary. That's the way it is with hypotheses; you suggest them, and then you (and, if you're lucky or very persuasive, other people) test them by gathering data.

PZ also wrote:

a) this is a significant phenomenon relative to other factors (clan loyalty, nationalism, etc.)

MY REPLY: Both of these are related to the tendency to go to war, and would simply reinforce whatever effect the capacity for religious experience had. Indeed, I believe a strong argument could be made for the claim that essentially the same cognitive mechanisms would apply to these factors as to the capacity for religion, as they all involve recognition of and emotional committment to a "super-individual entity".

b) it's actually got data to back it up -- are secular people less likely to enlist than religious people?

MY REPLY: This one is easy - the answer today is yes. Religious believers are over-represented in the United States military, as members of the volunteer military are also more likely to come from small towns and from the southern United States.

However, this is simply mistaking correlation with causation. Furthermore, it's committing the fallacy of assuming that the same patterns hold today as were the case when the capacity for religious experience first evolved. That was during the Pleistocene, and we have only indirect evidence. This is why I laid out the six criteria for verifying whether or not some characteristic is an adaptation; barring the invention of a time machine, that's all we have to work with today.

c) that cultures actually benefit from greater commitment to war

MY REPLY: If they didn't, why would warfare be so ubiquitous? The real question is not whether or not humans find warfare culturally beneficial; of course we do, otherwise we wouldn't do it with such alacrity or zeal. The question is, what has facilitated it in the past so much that we do it virtually all the time now? I think the capacity for religion is one strong possibility...worth investigating, anyway.

d) that the religious impulse is heritable (that's key!)

MY REPLY: This one is also easy: multiple twin studies (i.e. comparison of MZTs versus FTs) have shown that the tendency for religious belief and behavior has a heritability of over 60% (obviously we are talking about the capacity, not the particular sect; one doesn't inherit the tendency to be a catholic, for example). This is pretty high compared with most traits (the average is about 50%), and therefore suggests that there is (or was) something pretty valuable about this particular tendency, at least during our evolutionary past.

e) that people with a heritable propensity to engage in risky behaviors like war aren't culling themselves out of the population

MY REPLY: Extensive studies have shown that young males in particular have exactly this propensity; and (surprise, surprise) these are exactly the individuals who are most likely to participate in warfare. Is there a connection here? I think so...at least I think there is one worth investigating.

The real question is, why are people so prone to believing in something so obviously irrational as supernatural beings? I think the answer is that this tendency must have some adaptive value, otherwise it would long ago have been selected out of us.

Therefore, there are three possibilities: (1) direct adaptation, (2) epiphenomenon, or (3) mind virus. I think it's most likely to be #1, and that the most likely candidate for the EEA in which it evolved is warfare, but I'm willing to consider evidence in favor of the other two.

BTW, Scott Atran, Daniel Dennett, and David Sloan Wilson are in my camp on this issue (athough neither of them specifically cites warfare as the underlying EEA), while Boyer supports #2. That's why their books are all required reading for our seminar this summer.

I agree and disagree. I think there is some evolution in this brain-religion dynamic. However, I think all the evolution is on the side of religion. To look at religion and say, look how it amazingly hit on all the things we as humans are apt to believe, hell for the bad, heaven for the good, ghosts, spirits, that we exist apart from our brains. Our brains must be adapted to religion!

Roughly, this is what Albatrossity brought up when he talked about pan-cultural aspects of religion. Which is roughly equal to saying that our hands must be designed (evolved works too) because 'look how perfectly they fit into our gloves!'

Religions evolve, those that work better succeed; those that work worse don't. It's no mystery then that they should be quite well adaptive to their environment (our brains). I daresay if anything, a number of atheists have completely misjudged the fitness of religion within the meme-world. We figure that since it is false, it is less fit than the truth. That because a meme or meme system is detrimental its host that it is less fit than a meme system used to unequivocally generate true memes, and verify the truth of preexisting memes. A sad miscalculation. A good lie can travel half-way around the world before the truth can put it's pants on.

So really, does saying religion is adaptive mean that the brain adapts to religion in that case the answer is clearly, no. However, does the religion adapt to the brain? Undoubtedly. Just as the iPod is the latest iteration of Walkman technology, and certainly there's some major adaptations there which make them popular though admittedly design plays a pretty big role in such cases.

Creationists are a pretty resourceful bunch, give them an inch and apparently they can figure out a way to hang you with it. I mean, they manage to macgyver condemnations into quotes of praise, rehashing non-evidence into a science, and they turn the error checking power of science into a tool to show how error-ridden science is! They are pretty resourceful and stupid.

People like to clap and smile and feel a magnetic attraction to someone. They like to experience well-being.

Religion, the stuff on the iPod, Elvis - all different names for that craving for stimulus and well-being that constantly goes on in our brains.

We give all the stimuli special names, but our brain doesn't care whether we are clapping in the pew or clapping for Elvis - it's all the same (I'm generalizing).

Unless our brains have a dedicated religion area, religion should be seen as a ready-to-hand stimulus we employ to feel content, happy, whatever - not very much different from a lot of other things we have invented to stimulate ourselves.

If it's not very much different, it can be gotten rid of.

Of course the capacities that produce religious experience are adaptive - they're the capacities for pattern recognition and understanding the actions of volitional beings.

But they aren't adaptive *because* they produce religious experience. That's the whole point of the "spandrel" explanation. Their adaptiveness is separate from, or even in spite of, their tendency to produce religions.

Seeing a pattern in the rustling underbrush and inferring the agency of a hungry wolf or a hostile tribe is adaptive. Seeing a pattern in the weather and inferring the agency of a thunder god is not. But overall, on balance, pattern-seeing does more good than harm to the people who have it.

Mammary glands in females, which can nurture their young, are adaptive. Mammary glands in males are, well, as useless as teats on a bull. But overall, on balance, genes for growing mammary glands do more good than harm to the species that have them. Summing this up as "male nipples are adaptive" is... unhelpful, at best.

I don't really see a difference between Boyer's position and Dawkins's; Dawkins just focuses more on the historical and present harms caused by religion, pointing out that it is not just a side effect, it is a *dangerous* side effect and one that we might want to consider reining in. Viruses, after all, cannot exist except by subverting some capacity of their hosts which is, in many cases, normally beneficial to the host. But the adaptive nature of those capacities is not normally relevant to discussions of the virus and what to do about it.

I would also point out that when Dawkins talks about the harm done by religion, I think he frequently means harm in a human or moral sense, rather than an evolutionary one. Rape, murder, cannibalism and genocide may all be adaptive under the correct circumstances, but that doesn't mean we ought to regard them as admirable. If a religion makes a tribe more effective at murdering its neighbors, that may be adaptive to them, but it's still harmful to everyone around them. The harmfulness - in that sense - of religion has no bearing on the question of whether or not it is evolutionarily adaptive, and vice versa.

I agree with Allen that PZ seems to be leaning toward Boyer's hypothesis that religion is an epiphenomenon, using inference systems that have adaptive value, but almost certainly having no adaptive value itself. It does seem to me that real "religion" arrived too late on the primate evolutionary scene to have any possibility for selection to act on it.
Of course, that depends on how you define "religion". One of the pan-cultural hallmarks of human religion would be rituals for the dead, and I have seen Black-billed Magpies conduct a "funeral" for a deceased member of their species. This has also been reported previously, see this article in Murrelet from 1988). If we accept that as evidence for "religion", we'll definitely irritate the Bibleists...

c) that cultures actually benefit from greater commitment to war

MY REPLY: If they didn't, why would warfare be so ubiquitous? The real question is not whether or not humans find warfare culturally beneficial; of course we do, otherwise we wouldn't do it with such alacrity or zeal. The question is, what has facilitated it in the past so much that we do it virtually all the time now? I think the capacity for religion is one strong possibility...worth investigating, anyway.

If we don't benefit from colds, why are they so ubiquitous? The real question is not whether or not humans find infectious disease culturally beneficial; of course we do, otherwise we wouldn't sneeze with such alacrity or zeal.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. The fact that warfare exists does not mean it is beneficial to anyone. Your reply is bizarrely Panglossian - we do it, therefore it must be good for us or we wouldn't do it. (Never mind the obvious profound capacity for human stupidity. But wait, that must benefit us too, or it wouldn't be so ubiquitous!)

And while everyone knows the names of the successful warlike cultures, the unsuccessful ones are known only to historians (or not even that, for the really old and/or small ones). To point to the Romans, the Mongols and the Huns and conclude that warfare leads to success is remembering the hits and forgetting the misses (another ubiquitous behavior that seems unlikely to be beneficial). Quite a lot of cultures that lived by the sword died by the sword. Warfare has large risks and it's not at all clear that the benefits outweigh them *on average*, taking into account the fact that you may lose the war.

#21Does it exist more than 100,000 years ago?

The Tan Tan and Bhereket Ram finds indicate that it did.

Right, just as the Lincoln Memorial indicates that 19th and 20th century Americans worshipped a god called "Lincoln. Moron.

That is, they don't ask how primates lacking definite knowledge about the world (except for a very few basic functions and observations) even could know the world, except "spiritually".

Eh? They would know the world through their senses.

My God you're stupid. Anyone who had senses but no manner of manipulating them in some contextual way would be as useless as anything that didn't have senses at all. That is, tabula rasa is impossible, as anyone slightly educated knows.

Unless you define "spiritually" usefully, it is also gibberish.

I can tell that you're incapable of understanding what is usually meant by "spirituality", hence you must turn your ignorance into projections of "gibberish". Cretin. You sound like so many IDists, who, not being capable of conversing intellectually, demand "definitions" (Dolt, definitions are hardly the issue, contextual meaning is) to try to cover up their idiocy.

I don't think it would be profitable for me to try to enlighten someone so colossally ignorant as to be a naive realist, as apparently you are.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

PZ wrote:

"Speculating that religion helps commit a larger proportion of the population to war is not enough."

That's true; that's why I generally refer to this idea as the "Mars hypothesis," as there is a lot of verification left to do.

More like it, you have no evidence so far at all for that "hypothesis". You're throwing all religions together, as if they were all war-like, when many "primitive religions" have been anything but war-like. Clearly religions have also been far too pervasive throughout cultural life for the Mars hypothesis to be anything but an minor hypothesis within any real explanation for religion.

But that, of course, is what hypotheses are for. And for that matter, Darwin had no data on natural selection at all in the Origin.

Apples and organges. Anyway, that's confusing the issue with semantics, for he did have abundant evidence for natural selection. One might say that he didn't have "data", yes, under a narrow definition for that term, but he had a world of evidence for how natural selection might explain well-known puzzling phenomena.

Indeed, he only had two examples of selection in action (see chapter 4 of the 1st ed.), and they were both imaginary. That's the way it is with hypotheses; you suggest them, and then you (and, if you're lucky or very persuasive, other people) test them by gathering data.]

Wow, that's the sort of argument I'd expect IDists to use. You can always cut down the evidence that Darwin and other evolutionists had if you demand "full explanations" like Behe does, without paying attention to the powerful explanatory ability of the theory to tie various phenomena together.

PZ also wrote:

a) this is a significant phenomenon relative to other factors (clan loyalty, nationalism, etc.)

MY REPLY: Both of these are related to the tendency to go to war, and would simply reinforce whatever effect the capacity for religious experience had. Indeed, I believe a strong argument could be made for the claim that essentially the same cognitive mechanisms would apply to these factors as to the capacity for religion, as they all involve recognition of and emotional committment to a "super-individual entity".

Sure, that explains rain dances and magical cures for disease, doesn't it? Why are births and deaths attended by ritual in almost every culture? For the sake of warfare? Get real, you've got your one "explanation" for religion, and you ignore the rest of what makes the heart of religious experience.

b) it's actually got data to back it up -- are secular people less likely to enlist than religious people?

MY REPLY: This one is easy - the answer today is yes. Religious believers are over-represented in the United States military, as members of the volunteer military are also more likely to come from small towns and from the southern United States.

You're making a lot of assumptions from one culture. The fact is that America's religion is unusually associated with militarism and patriotism, while religions in many other parts of the world are quite the opposite. In Europe religion is often associated with pacificism, while this is probably even more true of Eastern religions.

The trouble with MacNeill and his "hypotheses" is that he's looking at proselytizing religions which have gone to war in order to spread, namely Xianity and Islam. These religions have run over many of the more gentle religions, and thus have become successful. And since he primarily knows of the religions that succeeded through warfare, he thinks that that is what religion is about (and in fact neither Xianity nor Islam is overwhelmingly war-oriented, it is simply a major facet of their success).

However, this is simply mistaking correlation with causation. Furthermore, it's committing the fallacy of assuming that the same patterns hold today as were the case when the capacity for religious experience first evolved. That was during the Pleistocene, and we have only indirect evidence. This is why I laid out the six criteria for verifying whether or not some characteristic is an adaptation; barring the invention of a time machine, that's all we have to work with today.

The trouble with your six characteristics is that you're begging the question of whether or not religion is an "epiphenomenon". Since you're not addressing that question, you can't legitimately apply your criteria.

What are you supposing, that warfare didn't exist prior to religion? Then just where does religion come from? There would have to be precursors. However, we already know the precursors, which in fact are what religion most likely can be reduced down to in any solid analysis.

You're merely assuming that religion is something other than the primitive psyche, clan loyalties, and the work of supplying "causes" where these may be inadequately discovered in the "primitive condition", etc.

c) that cultures actually benefit from greater commitment to war

MY REPLY: If they didn't, why would warfare be so ubiquitous?

It isn't ubiquitous. Many clans and peoples have not been warlike, where they didn't have to be. We do seem to have the capacity for war, but need not engage in it.

You need to study anthropology, for Chrissake.

Religion is what is at least nearly ubiquitous, not warfare per se. Even to say that is to lump many different "religious" phenomena under one rubric, however.

The real question is not whether or not humans find warfare culturally beneficial; of course we do, otherwise we wouldn't do it with such alacrity or zeal. The question is, what has facilitated it in the past so much that we do it virtually all the time now? I think the capacity for religion is one strong possibility...worth investigating, anyway.

Warfare has often been beneficial to a tribe or people. Assuming that this is always so is hardly the work of a careful scientist, however.

d) that the religious impulse is heritable (that's key!)

MY REPLY: This one is also easy: multiple twin studies (i.e. comparison of MZTs versus FTs) have shown that the tendency for religious belief and behavior has a heritability of over 60% (obviously we are talking about the capacity, not the particular sect; one doesn't inherit the tendency to be a catholic, for example). This is pretty high compared with most traits (the average is about 50%), and therefore suggests that there is (or was) something pretty valuable about this particular tendency, at least during our evolutionary past.

Again you're assuming what you ought to producing evidence for. Humans have a "religious tendencies" (itself begging the question of what these are, but no matter for now) which no doubt are hereditary, but that does not mean that they have "religious impulses". You're confusing terms for the benefit of your biases.

[clip]

BTW, Scott Atran, Daniel Dennett, and David Sloan Wilson are in my camp on this issue (athough neither of them specifically cites warfare as the underlying EEA), while Boyer supports #2. That's why their books are all required reading for our seminar this summer.

Oooh, arguments from authority. As I recall, most of them are given to assuming what they ought to demonstrate as well. How about doing some science instead, for once?

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Glen D tells Graculus:

Moron. // My God you're stupid. // Cretin. // Dolt // and: I don't think it would be profitable for me to try to enlighten someone so colossally ignorant...

Ah, the intellectual shallowness, logical cluelessness and rational perfidy of PZ's peanut gallery/live-in goon squad is once again displayed for all the world to see.

Glen D tells Graculus:

Moron. // My God you're stupid. // Cretin. // Dolt // and: I don't think it would be profitable for me to try to enlighten someone so colossally ignorant...

Ah, the intellectual shallowness, logical cluelessness and rational perfidy of PZ's peanut gallery/live-in goon squad is once again displayed for all the world to see.

Oh yes, the vacuous lies of yet another name-calling idiot. Since you can't begin to deal with the stupidity of Graculus, you being equally stupid by all indications, you simply attack the victim. That's the usual mindless sense of "justice" expected from the IDiots and cretinists, who we have to call names once they've indicated that they have no capacity for reason, thought, or argumentation.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Here's a whole list of peoples who were essentially unwarlike, as opposed to MacNeill's totally unevidenced claim that warfare is "so ubiquitous" among humans (the descriptions start on p. 29):

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Ul5-XBtvgzUJ:dissertations.ub.rug.n…

And as we well know, all of these peoples would be credited as "being religious", whatever that is supposed to mean.

Note that many of these peoples are said to hide when attacked, so that they generally didn't even use warfare to defend themselves. One of the tribes itself claims to have "hearts of chickens".

If even a few of these accounts are true, and it is probably quite a lot more than a few, the idea that religion exists for the sake of warfare has already been falsified. Let alone the fact that MacNeill and his ilk ignore the many practices and apparent purposes of religion, most of which are internal to the culture.

One does not oppose religion so much because it is warlike, after all, but because it is oppressive to the members of a culture, namely ourselves. The idea that religion would insinuate itself into virtually every aspect of the lives of the members of a culture--which is standard for religion--all for the sake of warfare, is far from the scientific ideal of matching cause and effect.

MacNeill is being extremely reductionistic, ignoring virtually all that has been written about religion by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. His course sounds like nothing but the teaching of a pseudoscientific idea to students. If you want to see atheists misusing their disbelief to mislead people, this is a case in point. I am all for explaining religion as something quite unlike what it actually claims to be, however this exercise in misdirection is inappropriate on so many levels that it stands as an indictment of the university system.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

By the way, jb, you're well known for never being able to respond intelligently. And yes, fucking idiots like you and Graculus are unworthy of the intelligence that you stomp on with such mindless tripe.

I wrote an intelligent post, Graculus wrote a fucking stupid reply indicating that he knows nothing of any note. And you, being too dumb even to check out what the issue is, totally ignored my first post, writing another fucking stupid response to my abuse of the first fucking stupid response.

Because you can't deal with anything that is above mere name-calling, you dishonestly ignore the context in which I wrote something worthwhile, and accuse in your usual abysmal ignorance. And you stereotype as moronically as any pig-ignorant fool.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

PZ wrote

Another key point: atheists like me are not somehow different in any meaningful way from other people. We almost certainly have the same drives and the same biological imperatives as the religious, but we can wipe away that religious encrustation with no ill effect, no loss of human values or meaning.

Indeed. Part of Allen's problem is that he believes that self-described "deeply religious" people like Hannah Maxson are "different."

But they're not different from the rest of the world's rottenest lying scumbags. Allen likes to pretend otherwise because he believes that his particular contemptible notion of "civility" is the most important human value.

In short, Allen is a very white very uptight prick.

Glen D:

By the way, jb, you're well known for never being able to respond intelligently.

Actually, one of my jobs is to cover the "Science" corner of the blogosphere as a journalist, and I am often frustrated and dismayed at how little actual science there is being reported and discussed in so-called "science blogs." Like this one, for instance. Rather difficult to find much of real general interest to report about, a lot of self-important garbage I couldn't recommend to anyone who managed to get past grade school.

Have a nice life, don't forget to hold on to the chains - that swingset is a little shaky.

Actually, one of my jobs is to cover the "Science" corner of the blogosphere as a journalist,

Yes, we've seen how stupid so many journalists are, fuckhead.

and I am often frustrated and dismayed at how little actual science there is being reported and discussed in so-called "science blogs."

OK, you're a journalist and still too dumb to recognize that this isn't a "science blog" per se. It is a blog by a scientist. I'm not unaware of how little you journalists know about science (apart from a few notable exceptions), but if you were even slightly competent you'd know that this isn't claimed to be just a "science blog". And your incompetence shines all the more if you're unable to see how much science there actually is on this blog.

Besides, I rather suspect that you're a "journalist" much like O'Leary or Jason Rennie are (you may be Jason Rennie, for all I know). A biased, incompetent fool who knows essentially nothing about what he "covers", rather he's only looking to fault those who discuss the science.

Like this one, for instance. Rather difficult to find much of real general interest to report about, a lot of self-important garbage I couldn't recommend to anyone who managed to get past grade school.

How'd you manage to get past grade school? Oh, that's right, journalism is hardly rocket science, or even science.

Have a nice life, don't forget to hold on to the chains - that swingset is a little shaky.

You'd know it, howler monkey.

You've not managed not to write anything other than retarded boilerplate, buffoon. Gee, it must be frustrating to be so stupid and yet to be assigned to recognize science in the blogosphere.

Here's what I actually wrote to Graculus, shithead:

Right, just as the Lincoln Memorial indicates that 19th and 20th century Americans worshipped a god called "Lincoln. Moron.

My God you're stupid. Anyone who had senses but no manner of manipulating them in some contextual way would be as useless as anything that didn't have senses at all. That is, tabula rasa is impossible, as anyone slightly educated knows.

I can tell that you're incapable of understanding what is usually meant by "spirituality", hence you must turn your ignorance into projections of "gibberish". Cretin. You sound like so many IDists, who, not being capable of conversing intellectually, demand "definitions" (Dolt, definitions are hardly the issue, contextual meaning is) to try to cover up their idiocy.

I don't think it would be profitable for me to try to enlighten someone so colossally ignorant as to be a naive realist, as apparently you are.

You, moron that you are, quote-mined it and wrote absolutely vacuous, libellous, stupid shit. If you are a journalist, I can tell that you're no more capable of journalism than you are of science. I actually answered the idiot Graculus, no matter that he's no more intelligent than a grackle (any more than you are).

All you know is to call names, to use ad hominems to cover up your inability to discern science, to commit proper journalistic practices, or to notice what I wrote on post #10 that the equally vacuous and stupid Graculus both quote-mined and failed to understand. Rather than to deal with what is written with intelligence and education, you run right into the much as the yellow journalist that is the best you can hope to be (right now I suspect that your only task is lower than yellow journalism, a quote-mining jerk in the hire of the IDiots. As we all know, lack of competence in thought is the requirement for that job).

Oh yeah, lackwit, you managed to write your lies only after I had already posted a considerable response to MacNeill's incompetent defense of the "Mars hypothesis". So you missed yet another substantive post, only to quote-mine a less substantive (but still having more sound argumentation than you've evinced on this forum) post and to tell your lies. You're certainly not one who works according to journalistic ethics, you work only like a quote-mining IDist hack incapable even of any slight recognition of the dynamics of a forum like this one.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Part of the problem on this thread is that there is no mutual agreement on what the most relevant facets of religion are. Is it about a vague "spiritual" awareness (the "oceanic feeling")? Or is the most important thing its implications for group behavior?

I mostly agree with PZ on the genetic and neurological substrate of religion, more precisely, the faculties that can be socially shaped and manifested as "religion." What I disagree with him about is the potentially adaptive nature of religion.

As for the evolved genetic basis of religion as a distinct faculty, or the putative genetic differences between hardline atheists (PZ opposed) and the religiously-minded (Sapolsky hypothesis): Well, it's interesting, but genes, schmenes. Not everything that is transmissible and is subject to selection is genetic.

Posters on this thread tend to think of own views as facts, or at least the logical default positions, and dismiss the views of others as mere handwaving or pop-inspired whimsy. No, all of the views advocated on this thread - yours, mine, and everyone else's - are just hypotheses or proto-hypotheses at this point.

"No, all of the views advocated on this thread - yours, mine, and everyone else's - are just hypotheses or proto-hypotheses at this point."

Thanks for the insight.

[[rips huge fart]]

PZ: "Are there actually measurements of frequency of drowning in kids who believe in river monsters vs. kids who do not believe in river monsters?"

I'd love to see the grant proposal for this one...

By the way, my wife and I saw Jimmy Carter interviewed on TV this weekend. This is not the thread on why Gonzales should resign, but ex-Prex Jimmy said something germane to this blog thread that made us take notice: "We worship the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of Premptive Strikes."

This is getting off-topic, but it was St. Jimmy Carter who began the arming of the mujahideen and initiated the pro-Saddam tilt.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2292

Actually, one of my jobs is to cover the "Science" corner of the blogosphere as a journalist

Enjoy your fantasy life, Mr. mitty.

"Do evolutionary biologists look at the iPod and say "A-ha! There is an evolutionary adaptation"? Probably not. Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they're nuts."

Didn't Dawkins, with whom PZ broadly agrees, write a book in 1982, about beavers' dams, spiders' webs etc being extentions of the genotype ("The Extended Phenotype")? Same principle, in a way...

Maybe the suspectibility to be indoctrinated is heritable, to some extent? After all, genes (yes, AND environment!) have to build the physical body/brain, for it to be indoctrinated at all. Also, religion could be an evolutionary adaptation, but a MEMETIC evolutionary adaptation! i.e. the memes exploit the traits PZ mentions - existential curiosity (why are we here, where did the Universe come from, why THIS universe, etc), and social communal instincts...

We'll know the answer to these questions when Salvadore Cordova and Hannah Maxson have their love child.

Glen Davidson, you accused others of only knowing how to call names and use ad hominems, but you were by far the worst offender on that count. You may have had some valid points to make but they were lost in your anger, name calling, and personal attacks - whatever message you may have had was overwhelmed by the bad behavior you accused others of. If you truly think you're right you can best make that point with your arguments alone - the rest just destroys credibility you might otherwise have. All the swearing and insults is like a loud proclamation that you don't believe your arguments can stand on their own merit.

I thought folk in this thread might be interested in a few examples of
religious behavior .

Glen was right.

I agree with randi... this was almost parodcial. One of the most interesting and rewarding threads here ever rapidly degenerated into a catfight of verbal feces-flinging. Kudos to PZ, Allen and some of the others for maintaining the discussion before the fourteen year old kids took over.

McNeill

"Indeed, the fact that a huge number of people have the ability to believe in things like demons is a strong prima facie argument that the human mind is predisposed to believing in such things, isn't it?"

What are "things like Demons", Allen? Do you mean made-up garbage that suits a purpose, sort of like your belief in "sincere creationists" capable of engaging in "civil" discourse?

Has your protected li'l genius Hannah managed to apply her hero's "simple" theories to FtzK yet? Be sure to let us know when that happens, Allen. God forbid anybody -- especially you -- ask that lying sack of shite to come clean in public.

"BTW, if anyone is coming late to this discussion, the seminar course I offerred last summer was my own modest attempt to shred intelligent design theory in the context of a collegial sharing of views. And that's pretty much how it went:"

That's because anybody who attempted to compel McNeill's ID-peddling comrade Hannah to tell the truth or back up her bizarre bullcrap was banned, with Allen's approval.

It's easy to appear "collegial" when the art of demonstrating that a person is lying is declared off-limits. Such behavior makes a joke out of the term "civilized." Allen is aware of this but, like his friend Hannah, he'd rather make up a pleasing story than admit the truth about his complicity in the promotion of creationist horseshit.

"The real question is, why are people so prone to believing in something so obviously irrational as supernatural beings? I think the answer is that this tendency must have some adaptive value, otherwise it would long ago have been selected out of us."

Gawd, what garbage. People are "so" prone. It's "so" irrational. This "tendency." It must have "some" adaptive value. "Long ago."

This is a castle of wankery built on top of a mountain of super-wankery. I'm sorry, Allen, but "real" questions are built on "real data" and you've got nothing but fluff and puff.

Maybe when you find a car accident victim whose head injuries changed her from a devout nun into an atheist physically incapable of "believing in the supernatural" you'll have a dust speck of evidence to support your baloney.

Let me make a prediction: it'll never happen.

What I don't understand is why you'd want to study the "evolution" of "religious belief" in the first place. It would be so much easier to study simple straightforward lying, especially at Cornell when you're surrounded by such magnificent subjects.

#83Glen Davidson, you accused others of only knowing how to call names and use ad hominems, but you were by far the worst offender on that count. You may have had some valid points to make but they were lost in your anger, name calling, and personal attacks - whatever message you may have had was overwhelmed by the bad behavior you accused others of. If you truly think you're right you can best make that point with your arguments alone - the rest just destroys credibility you might otherwise have. All the swearing and insults is like a loud proclamation that you don't believe your arguments can stand on their own merit.

Retard boy.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Maybe I'll explicate a bit for someone as befuddled and incompetent at discussing these issues as Shimnosky. I mean, he's more dense than he is ill-disposed (well, perhaps), sort of believing what mommy told him, and what Jesus says in the Bible the proper response should be.

I have no problem with my arguments standing on their own merits, but when ill-educated boors and self-righteous cretins decide that the little bit of tripe they heard in school trumps what a philosophical and scientific education has to offer, there's little that can be said to such morons except to point out how little they know. Likewise when Shimnosky fails to understand that the learned often have the duty to call the idiots what they are (a responsibility that MacNeill has neglected, seemingly to some benefit for pseudoscience) and merely repeats the chidings of the dull and the derivative, he deserves to be called on such retarded and unreflective tripe.

One hasn't enough time to try to teach such idiots the massive amount of knowledge that they're missing (and they may not be capable of learning in any event). One thus simply writes from what one knows, hopes that the idiots will at least know when not to reveal their idiocy, and points out what sorts of retards repeat the plodding and earnest denunciations of unwelcome honesty that all persecutors of knowledge have repeated.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

But if religion is "adaptive", then so are schools, clubs, and corporations, political parties, and almost any social organization, since they can have similar effects.

Monkeys have banana clubs, I think. Maybe that's where we inhairited our trend.

This is what happens when biologist step outside their areas of expertise. Religion has many components, some of which may be adaptive. But religion in the modern sense is just a current cultural adaptation of some of these pan-cultural themes. If you define religion wide-enough to be pan-cultural, you're left with sand slipping through your finger: there's nothing there but vague similarities.

On the other hand, ritual is universal, as so is story-telling, art, singing and ideology. Some of those may be adaptive responses by human beings, and one combination of them is religion. It might be a parasite on those responses - that requires research. It might be a neutral organization of those responses - even though I doubt it. It might even be functionally adaptive under a narrow range of conditions.

But biologically adaptive? That's an error of type, in addition to being an error in fact. But as I said, biologists should be very careful when treading outside their field; I wouldn't be getting my molecular biology from anthropologists (in general), so why should the converse be true?

Frog wrote:

"But religion in the modern sense is just a current cultural adaptation of some of these pan-cultural themes. "

Precisely; that's why we will be considering the capacity for relgious experience as a possible evolutionary adaptation, rather than any particular religion. And of course, ritual, story-telling, art, singing, ideology, and a whole lot of other things get tied into the practice of religion (i.e. are facilitated by, and in turn facilitate the capacity for religion). That's also precisely the point: is the constellation of human behaviors and cognitive abilities that produce what we call "religion" accidental (in which case the capacity for religion is essentially a pleiotropy), or is it the result of differential reproductive success? I think it's the latter, but if anyone can cite reputable empirical studies that support the pleiotrpy/epiphenomenon hypothesis, I'm certainly willing to change my mind.

As to Dawkins's hypothesis that religions are purely and simply memes (i.e. "mind viruses"), I think that assertion collapses of an inherent internal contradition: if the human mind is constructed in such a way as to allow the formulation and propagation of such mental viruses, then isn't that prima facie evidence that the human central nervous system is adapted to at least allowing such things to be formulated and promoted?

In other words, I think there are really only two alternative hypotheses:

1) direct adaptation

2) pleiotropic epiphenomenon

and I think that the bulk of the evidence to date supports hypothesis #1.

Okay, I finally got down to MacNeill's response, and it's even worse than I thought. He's looking for the capability for "religious experience," an ill-defined concept if I ever saw one. This is a perfect example of seeing everything through a modern lense, and then projecting your tools of analysis back on other cultures. How do we know when and where "religious experience" started, or how it's differentiated from other experience, given that many cultures don't have a concept of "religious experience" that maps onto our own?

Many cultures don't even have concepts of human minds similar to our own. Why don't we start with that one first, and work our way down?

Are we going to throw the experience of hymnals in the Church of England together with Voodoo posession, Shamanistic transmigration, cannibalistic property-absorption, buddhist meditation, animistic vitalism recognition, traditional Polynesia canoe-making, and Sumerian beer production? And MacNeill thinks there's a gene, or a complex of genes, that tie all those together?

I know what genes those are - they're the genes that give us expensive human brains. The entire set. This is almost as bad as some half-baked chemist expounding on ID because he has a PH.D., so therefore he must be an expert on biological evolution. Arrgh...

Once we've managed to reduce cell behavior to physics, then maybe you can start on the project to reduce culture/mind to biology. Until then, I'd hold off. Maybe we want to start by understanding how single neurons work?

Glen D:

Nothing that you have written here deserves comment of any kind; hence, this is the first and very last comment I will make regarding what you have written.

Thankfully, the people I work with every day (i.e. the students and faculty at Cornell) are by and large nothing like you: they constitute a community of scholars for whom honor, personal integrity, and mutual respect still matter.

Good bye.

Allen,

What is it precisely that you are suggesting is adapting? A general capacity for everything under the sun that is religious? Something more specific that I'm missing? How can you differentiate between your two hypothesis, since religion universally overlapped everything prior to the last 500 years. I'm not sure how you can distinguish religious experience, as a "thing" to be adapted to, outside of modern society.

Also, how do you distinguish between cultural adaptation, from biological adaptation, given that it will be almost impossible to tease out the gene set required for biological adaptation? I'm assuming that you want to differentiate between cultural capability from religious capability.

Have you looked at the early work on ecological adaptation in Anthropology? Rappaport was the leading light in that area until postmodernism got him sidelined - look up Pigs for the Ancestors and his work on ritual. He tried to draw this line from the other side. It's much easier on his side, for emergent properties - but I still would suggest that he didn't get too far.

Nothing that you have written here deserves comment of any kind;

Why no, you're unwilling to question your idiotic assumptions, thus any opposition fails to "deserve comment". You're beneath contempt.

hence, this is the first and very last comment I will make regarding what you have written./

Wow, the logical contradictions just pile up. First nothing I wrote deserves any comment, as you comment. Now you explain that this is why this is your first and last comment to me.

Can you even think?

I see that this particular bit of dishonesty keeps you from explaining how so many religious unwarlike people nonetheless fit your unevidenced and falsified "hypothesis". Since you're incapable of backing up your mindless rhetoric, you project your incompetence.

Thankfully, the people I work with every day (i.e. the students and faculty at Cornell) are by and large nothing like you:

Oh, I'm sure that you're glad that most people who surround you fail to criticize the glaring errors in your project. What would you do if everyone knew the many unquestioned assumptions and outright contradiction of the evidence that you use to shore up your pseudoscience?

they constitute a community of scholars for whom honor, personal integrity, and mutual respect still matter.

Yes, "mutual respect" allows one to say whatever one wants, as long as this "mutual respect" fails to get at the core of your failure to support your "hypothesis". Truth matters to me, not the pathetic ramblings of some out-of-his-depth purveyor of pseudoscience (in this case, at least).

Good bye.

I always wonder why people like you turn normal pleasantries into hopefully barbed dismissals. I mean, I'm honest about how little I think of your useless "hypothesis" and its various resorts to argumentum ad verecundiam, careful avoidance of phenomena contrary to your "hypothesis," and IDist-like misconstruals of the evidence behind Darwin's arguments. You're using whatever ad hominems and "polite" rubbishing that you can in turn, which just goes to show who cares to discuss the evidence.

Well, you may as well run from sound criticisms of your "project". Try to make it out that you're just too high and mighty to respond, while you continue to churn out poorly-based and often false claims to support your biases.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Allen: if the human mind is constructed in such a way as to allow the formulation and propagation of such mental viruses, then isn't that prima facie evidence that the human central nervous system is adapted to at least allowing such things to be formulated and promoted?

Now that's one you want to drop right away. Like a pot of scalding water. Does that fact that virii infect human cells imply that human cells are adapted to allowing such things? The answer is no by implication, and empirically most likely no.

Any Turing complete computational system will be liable to virii, no matter how finely adapted. If nothing else, they can always be Goedel-ized into undecidable propositions. Hmm, that sounds familiar to a certain class of beliefs...

Wouldn't this kind of question beg for a serious inter-disciplinary approach? Who could hope to research this area without tight collaboration from, at least, an anthropologist, a biologist, an engineer (in information theory), maybe a mathematician. You'd definitely want to exclude philosophers, though.

Who gives grants for this sort of work without demanding a team of that kind? You see it all the time coming out in neuroscience, even though neuroscientists aren't really neuroscientists, but primarily molecular biologists of the neuron, with some training in anatomy. And they start to study something like "empathy." There was recently a Science paper, I believe, and all I could thing was GIGO.

Btw, Packmeal, there's a substantial overlap between what frog wrote and what I wrote. So apparently your "judgment" of what is worth responding to is inconsistent and unreliable.

Why don't you ever think of such obvious mistakes (and the previously mentioned ones) in your perception/judgment/reason? You know I'll pounce on them. Surely you really could think them through, at least if you really tried for hours, maybe got some help.

I don't always think GWW's responses are the best (and don't bother me about it GWW, I mean that it truly is my opinion, and I obviously find your responses to be about right often enough in any case), however it looks to me like hers was probably the better choice in at least this case, given the inability of you to respond with reason.

Btw, Shimnosky, and the cretin forsen, if you want to see mere feces flinging and unreasoned response, look to MacNeill. Clearly he wrote in anger and without much in the way of reasoned capacity, or he wouldn't have left himself so much in the open. I don't write in anger (you sure are incapable of thinking outside of your little verities, Shimnosky), I write the appropriate responses for the given material.

I gave MacNeill more credit than he deserved, not necessarily inappropriate prior to his angry doltish response to me (one often waits for the shoe to drop, so that MacNeill will expose more errors to compound all of the foregoing ones). Now he's shown what regard for reasoned judgment, and the evidence I produced, really is--utter contempt for the truth, never mind how harshly it may be couched.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Frog:

An excellent point. Thank you!

Indeed, viruses exploit the various adaptations of their host cells to enter and infect them, without the cells doing anything to encourage this process.

However, I am already coming around to the position that the "mind virus" hypothesis is simply a version of the "epiphenomenon" hypothesis. Indeed, this squares with your insight about viruses, in that the ability of viruses to infect host cells is an "epiphenomenon" of the cells' various adaptive structures and functions.

For example, HIV exploits the endocytotic capabilities of the CD4 receptor to enter T4 helper lymphocytes. This means that infection of T4 lymphocytes by HIV is an "epiphenomenon" of the adaptive function of the CD4 receptor mediated endocytosis process.

Therefore, the two alternatives for the evolution of the capacity for religious experiences become:

1) direct adaptation

2) epiphenomenon/pleiotropy

At least, that's the way it looks to me.

Allen,

No, epiphenomenon and mind virus are still distinct. The former can still be selected for as a constellation of traits that function in a certain way together. Mind virus is explicitly parasitic, and not teleological in the functioning of the healthy system.

Irrigation systems are an epiphenomenon of high human population densities, that then feeds back on that population density. Priests, on the other hand, are a kleptocracy that then piggy back on that culturally selected for trait. Two different things. Confusing the two is quite dangerous - both are teleological, but teleological for different organisms.

was probably the better choice in at least this case, given the inability of you to respond with reason.

Yeah, Glen, McNeill belongs to the self-perpetuating school of "I'll lick your ass if you suck my balls." You need to bow down and genuflect before Thee Mighty Perfesser or be dismissed. Because he is aware of other wankers who enjoy measuring the points on their heads, he has no need for "critics" who aren't willing to consume half the hogwash he dishes out before commenting on the bland yet patently fecal taste in every fucking bite.

It's a pity, really, because when it comes to ID peddling, Allen mostly gets it and every once in a while a sublimely aware comment will dribble out. But it's impossible to reconcile that awareness with his willingness to get in the jacuzzi with the pigs as long as they are considerate and properly drink their wine out of plastic cups. What does he think he proved? That trained pigs can sit in a jacuzzi and drink wine out of plastic cups? Hallelujah, I guess.

"Indeed, this squares with your insight about viruses"

Notice the gratuitous ass-kissing. Sal Cordova would be proud.

Here's one suggested elaboration of Dr. MacNeill's characterization of the competing hypotheses.

The main disagreement is about whether or not it is a direct adaptation or epiphenomenon. Within the epiphenomenal camp, there is disagreement about whether it is a meme, robust inevitable byproduct, or superficial glitch. Meme-ists disagree about what kind of meme it is (or often is).

1) direct adaptation (evolved genetically-based module/faculty/device like language)

2) epiphenomenon/pleiotropy

a) meme
i. usually neutral
ii. usually harmful (Dawkins)
iii. often beneficial (Colugo - often harmful too)

b) robust inevitable byproduct (Razib - "natural emergent property", John Hawks)

c) superficial glitch; easily exploited but easily corrected (PZ Myers)

Frog:

Again, thanks. And I totally agree with you on the subject of the priesthood. Jared Diamond makes essentially the same point in GG&S.

To more clearly specify my object: be careful with levels. The epiphenomenon can be adaptive at its own level. In information systems, they probably must be adaptive at their level, because any supra-level of organisms will be propagating systems in their own right. But that level of adapatation must be fundamentally distinct from lower levels (even if there is feedback across the levels). Viruses are not epiphenomenon in this way; they are epiphenomenon of the ecology that includes the epiphenomenon.

So "infection of T4 lymphocytes by HIV is an "epiphenomenon" of the adaptive function of the CD4 receptor mediated endocytosis process" is a badly formed statement. That infection is an epiphenomenon of the entire ecology including the AIDS virus - a much higher level construct.

Bertrand Russell is your friend. Gregory Bateson can help bring his stuff down to earth.

GWW, you do have a way of getting to the heart of the corruption caused by such inbreeding.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

Bateson's Angel's Fear and Mind and Nature are on the supplemental reading list. Any others?

Also, what references by Bertrand Russell would you recommend?

Bateson - some of the papers in steps to an ecology of mind are probably relevant. I'd have to find my copy - it's been awhile.

Russell is tougher, since it's not directly connected. It's more background material on the rules of building an epistemology; offhand, I don't know any Russell for biologists, and Principia would be a course on its own. Maybe someone else's work on Russell might be better for non-mathematicians. Bateson probably reviews some of his material in the proper context. Do y'all have any old-style liberal anthropologists? They might bring something up that is properly contextualized.

Sorry about the delay.

Jonathan:

I've never stated this before, so I apologize if the concept is poorly articulated. Please attack it, that I may learn.

Hmm. It seems we are defining "science" and "science though" differently. Not surprising, since it is such a large subject, and there are no comprehensive description for either term.

I grant you all your points, and there are probably more. In fact, most of what is underlying science language and ideas could be domain general abilities.

What I was zeroing in on was "successful activity". My loose idea is that thinking (or primarily acting) in terms of experiments, theories, predictions and validations was what got the positive feedback started. There were many attempts of descriptive and philosophical nature before that.

(It is probably not enough. Technology and industry are also involved IMHO.)

Allen:

In that case, it's a fad that has existed in some form for over 40,000 years, as far as we can tell;

How do we tell? I asked about the figurines earlier - why are they interpreted as religious artifacts? Btw, if it is burial or grieving behavior it doesn't cut it as I understand it, see the magpies, apes or elephants.

It would help here if we can frame the definition and age of the behavior when discussing likely explanations.

Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they're nuts.

Actually, squirrelly is what comes to my mind. :-)

MacNeill seems to go a long way to be provocative, but I think I have seen him discussing his underlying idea before, on his blog and elsewhere: "the specific context within which the capacity for religious experience has evolved is warfare".

I guess he will have to discuss the order of business here, religion vs warfare, with another evolutionist, Dawkins. And in all fairness, he not only claims it will be a discussion, he has as required text "The God Delusion". Probably not so common in courses yet, and again rather provocative.

I don't like his idea any more than when he opened himself up to become an authority reference for the ID movement. But this he should explore. And at least this time his course will be about science.

I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function.

Whether religion is an epiphenomenon or not, I believe Greg is on to something, the other side of the coin as it may be.

There are other persistent facts that may or may not be "universals", like the fact that women own about 5 % of the global capital (IIRC, UN figures), that would likely have a hard time reappear if a couple of generations get used to the opposite.

Not that the contingency helps us to make the transition to a better state, but it is nice to have the hope it may be a stable change. While slavery isn't eradicated due to activities like sex trade and child labor, it isn't nearly as ubiquitous as in earlier history, in spite of that 'the market' is still there.

So when people object to the idea that religion could possibly follow the same path towards extinction, I always have the feeling they make a special plea based on no specific evidence. As so often with this topic. :-(

The Tan Tan and Bhereket [sic] Ram finds indicate that it did.

Hmm. What specific evidence indicates that these painted venus figurines were used in a religious context instead of being mere art or idols? (Art with n*u*d*e females seems to be popular in many cultures, btw. ;-) [Note: n*u*d*e is a dirty word on scienceblogs. Sigh!]

I think that the predisposition to think religiously and the predisposition to think scientifically are both present in the evolved human brain.

The idea that there is a predisposition to think scientifically would be a rather novel thought, wouldn't it? Science as a successful activity is young. And most often one sees scientists complain that it is hard work and wisely note that "common sense" has nothing to do with its results.

Now, while these early tally sticks were interesting, I think it mostly merely points to our ability to count, as well as the calendar does. The later, as most early astronomy, also seems to attest to our ability to look for patterns.

Which btw the rather loose modern interpretations of diverse artifacts points to as well. Most of the links to the Ishango bone was outdated, but the Wikipedia article had a rather "overly enthusiastic view" (as another site said about a mathematicians analysis of the bone). Any article facilely mentioning prime numbers in artifacts is bound to raise a red flag in a skeptical reader.

Sorry about the delay.

Jonathan:

I've never stated this before, so I apologize if the concept is poorly articulated. Please attack it, that I may learn.

Hmm. It seems we are defining "science" and "science though" differently. Not surprising, since it is such a large subject, and there are no comprehensive description for either term.

I grant you all your points, and there are probably more. In fact, most of what is underlying science language and ideas could be domain general abilities.

What I was zeroing in on was "successful activity". My loose idea is that thinking (or primarily acting) in terms of experiments, theories, predictions and validations was what got the positive feedback started. There were many attempts of descriptive and philosophical nature before that.

(It is probably not enough. Technology and industry are also involved IMHO.)

Allen:

In that case, it's a fad that has existed in some form for over 40,000 years, as far as we can tell;

How do we tell? I asked about the figurines earlier - why are they interpreted as religious artifacts? Btw, if it is burial or grieving behavior it doesn't cut it as I understand it, see the magpies, apes or elephants.

It would help here if we can frame the definition and age of the behavior when discussing likely explanations.