[ExI] Basis of Belief (Meta)

[hkhenson]

At 02:25 AM 2/27/2008, you wrote:
>Keith writes
>
>>Why do people have beliefs, particularly religious beliefs at all?
>
>"beliefs" with a small "b" include perceptions, sensations, 3D knowledge,
>appreciations of personality differences, recall of favors, what local
>landmarks there are, and so on and on. We've had them forever, and
>so do animals.
>
>But you are talking about "Beliefs" with a capital "B". In his very nice
>book "Before the Dawn (Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors)",
>author Nicolas Wade mentions the not-very-recent theory that religion
>evolved as a defense against lies.

Considering the non existent relation between religions and objective 
truth, that's a weird theory.

>It started as a marker of who you
>could trust and who you could not. Obviously this fed into group 
>loyalties, and the evolution of "us" vs. "them".
>We might say, in the case of religion and nationality (of the "nationalism"
>variety) that these were developments that allowed for social cohesion
>to extend much further.  That is, your "tribe" need no longer be restricted
>to just those who you had met.

While the psychological mechanisms for religious beliefs may have 
figured into the cohesion of groups larger than a tribe, that wasn't 
the discussion I was looking for.  Groups larger than hunter-gatherer 
bands are a recent phenomena in genetic selection terms.

Human psychological mechanisms are the result of natural selection in 
the EEA.  For example, capture-bonding, the psychological mechanism 
behind Stockholm syndrome, was obviously directly 
selected.  Something like 10 % of our female ancestors were filtered 
though this selection process every generation.  Drug addiction is 
just as clearly a side effect of selection for some other 
psychological trait.  (Unless you can come up with a selective 
advantage for lying under a bush wasted on plant sap.)

Since the psychological mechanisms behind religious beliefs are so 
common, perhaps on a par with the mechanisms behind capture-bonding, 
those mechanisms must have had a substantial genetic advantage in the EEA.

But I strongly suspect that "genetic" advantage was in "inclusive 
fitness" i.e., copies of genes in relatives.  The model is that the 
mechanisms that lie behind religions (xenophobic memes) were those 
that fired up warriors for a do or die attempt to kill neighbors when 
the future started looking bleak.

>Once in place, I will suggest, this evolved towards "us-them" in everything
>else.

How long did this take?  The EEA includes right up to the present, 
but you have to have a heck of an advantage for a gene to spread in 
the time since settled agriculture.

>>I think I know the answer, do you?
>
>What?

See above.

Keith