[ExI] [Extropolis] Religion

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 5:16 PM Dylan Distasio <interzone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't wanna be the guy who says that to someone with a hammer everything looks like...but...

I think most of you have seen my (so far) unpublished paper

Genetic Selection for War in Prehistoric Human Populations

Authors: H. Keith Henson,* Arel Lucas Email: hkeithhenson at gmail.com,
arellu at gmail.com

Abstract: Behavior, including human behavior related to war, is no
less subject to Darwinian selection than physical traits.  Behavior
results from physical brain modules constructed by genes and
environmental input. The environmental detection and operation of
behavioral switches leading to wars are also under evolutionary
selection. War behavior in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness
(EEA) was under positive selection when the alternative (starvation)
was worse than war.  The model is then applied in an attempt to
explain the behavioral difference between chimpanzees and bonobos with
additional thoughts on the KhoeSan People of Southern Africa.

It has a math model of how psychological traits for war were selected.
(War is shown to be better for genes when the alternative is worse.)

If you want a copy, ask.

> I think xenophobia is downstream of religion if we are talking about them together (not saying all xenophobia is caused by religion though), and religion exists (and persists) because it is quite a terrible prospect for a self conscious, intelligent organism to contemplate their mortality.   I would suggest Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life as a guidepost in explaining why it exists and the tension between Faith and Reason.

My argument is that one of the traits for war turns up the "gain*" on
the circulation of xenophobic memes after the detection of a bleak
(resource short) future.  This is fairly obvious. Somewhat more
speculative is that the psychological mechanism that supports gaining
and holding xenophobic memes about the tribe to be attacked is also
the mechanism behind gaining and holding religious memes

> A great deal of life on this planet is suffering, and without the hope of an afterlife the outlook is pretty bleak.   I say this as an atheist.

Hmm.  Are you signed up for cryonics?

>   Religious belief systems inspire hope which leads to greater reproduction in that group.

This I doubt.  I would be interested in a model that shows more
reproduction for groups with a religion than without, especially back
when most of the selection was going on, say 50,000 years ago.

> There are alot of additional directions I could go in as to why early, primitive religions exist in terms of explaining and controlling your environment (or rather the appearance of control) but I think the crux of my answer is in my argument above.

See if you can generate a numeric model such as I did for the
differential survival of genes in the war paper.

Keith

> Memento mori.
>
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 7:58 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The interesting question is why do humans have religions at all? I
>> make a case that it is a side effect of selection for war.
>>
>> Religion is a class of mutually exclusive memes. I.e., it is seldom
>> that a given person has more than one of them, so you don't expect
>> someone who identifies as a Catholic to also be a Methodist. This
>> brings you to the interesting conclusion that communism is a religion
>> since being one makes it unlikely to have any of the common religious
>> memes.
>>
>> This classification does not help with the question of why humans have
>> (or are infested) with such memes. From how common this is, religious
>> memes (or something related) must have been important to survival in
>> the Stone Age.
>>
>> Religious memes seem to be descended from xenophobic memes.
>>
>> Xenophobic memes are the first step in the path to war. I think
>> genetic selection for war is the origin of susceptibility to religious
>> memes.
>>
>>
>> Keith
>>
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