[ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Mon Jan 31 18:53:15 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 05:31:17PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:
>> snip
>>
>> I think atheists would be much better off to try to understand why (in
>> an evolutionary sense) humans have religions at all.
>
> http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2010-December/008311.html
>
> referencing http://www.springerlink.com/content/m0v73485k8t58571/

It's interesting, and I don't doubt their data, but this isn't the
origin of religions.  Even if there is a correlation between
reproduction and religiosity today, correlation is not causation, and
in this case, it can't be. The divergence between the reproduction of
the religious and the not religious can't be more then single digit
generations.  Three to four generations back virtually everyone who
got married at all had a bunch of kids.

The rules for invoking EP require that there be both selection
pressure and time for evolved psychological traits to emerge.  The
stronger the selection pressure, the faster the traits get selected.
But even in the case of the tamed foxes, it took 8 generations to get
even partly tame foxes.

Gregory Clark makes a case that it took 24 generations of very strong
selection for the psychological traits needed for the industrial
revolution to become common.

So the current correlation between reproduction and religiosity has to
depend on something deeper and much older.

I make a case that the human capacity for religion came from the
evolved mechanisms that turn wars on and off as environmental
conditions make wars more or less desirable from the viewpoint of
genes.

But you knew that.

Keith



>> I make one case, perhaps there are better explanations.
>>
>> Keith
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> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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