[ExI] Terrorist? Who can tell?

[Damien Broderick]

At 12:26 AM 9/9/2008 -0700, Keith wrote of:

>people who do not understand why human evolved the trait to have 
>religions at all.
>
>Roughly religions are xenophobic memes that gain influence in 
>populations when they are under stress and perceive a bleak 
>future.  In the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, they 
>served to synch a tribe's warriors into a frenzy to go out and kill neighbors.
>
>As long as the income per capita is rising this mechanism is turned 
>off.  But when it is turned on, we did not evolved to resist it.

This assertion seems to me poorly phrased or maybe conceptualized. 
It's a bit like saying "Music is a xenophobic meme that evolved to 
bind bands of cousins together and arouse their bloodlust when they 
went out to kill other bands." Or "Language is a xenophobic meme that 
evolved to let bands of cousins communicate more efficiently when 
they went out to kill neighbors." That is surely a subset of what 
religion, music and language do, and one of the drivers for their 
retention. But all these behaviors and tropisms also and more 
importantly sustain bonding between unrelated peoples and between 
individuals and their ecological setting that is quite independent of 
warlike uses. To put it mildly.

Damien Broderick