Yeah. That’s what I said. And we don’t know what that something was. We can only speculate.
We don’t even know that for sure. There are lots of anthropologists who think our brains went through considerable evolutionary change about 70k years ago.
It is unlikely that a religion can be demonstated to have an evolutionary advantage. All of the advantages ascribed to religion could be found as well in other human constructs, such as political parties, fraternal organizations, etc… In addition, religious beliefs didn’t give the Shaker’s much of an evolutionary edge, nor did it help all those who died for having the wrong religion. That doesn’t mean that religion is not an evolutionary advantage, but given the difficulty in defining religion, conducting experiments, collecting historical evidence, it isn’t likely to be resolved.
I would point out that pacifistic and suicidal religions probably are not advantageous in an evolutionary sense.
I’ve always been inclined to believe this. It just seems kind of obvious on its face to me, because most humans are religious.
The “because you’re being watched” thing sounds silly to me, though.
The reason I’ve dreamed up in my head, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that if you just believe in/accept God outright, you can sort of run that program in the background and get on with hunting/gathering/building/making babies, etc etc etc. It’s those of us who don’t believe or aren’t sure who are more likely to spend all our time thinking about it, or devote ourselves to more artistic/intellectual/esoteric pursuits, and maybe not ever get around to that whole spreading our genes thing.
Nonesense, it made me chew my food thoroughly, because my mom always told me that ceiling cat was watching me masticate.
We were a basement cat household.
Watching you… oh wait, nevermind.
Of course it’s a science. Properly constructed hypotheses are falsifiable and the works of evolutionary psychologists are filled with such hypotheses. Unless, of course, you think that all evolutionary studies are garbage then there is no way to convince you.
At the risk of being called a latte-sipping pseudo-intellectual, here are recent heritability studies that shows gene and environmental influences on variation in religious behavior among several populations:
- Stability and change in religiousness during emerging adulthood.
- Coalitional Affiliation Rather Than Religiosity Might Explain the Heritability of Church Attendance
- Religiousness, antisocial behavior, and altruism: Genetic and environmental mediation
- Individual differences in adolescent religiosity in Finland: familial effects are modified by sex and region of residence.
Here is an association of religious upbringing on positive outcomes:
Religious upbringing and neuroticism in Dutch twin families
Fitness and life history traits, among them religion:
Natural selection and quantitative genetics of life-history traits in western women: A twin study
Although I can’t provide you a cite concerning specific genes, it’s easily understandable considering the lack of interest in the behavior genetics of religious belief in general. Of course evidence can be obtained by learning what psychological characteristics bias a person toward religious belief followed by looking for the relevant behavior genetic studies on those traits, but I suspect there will be a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening (just a prediction).
Your example of Christians in the Roman period does not seem like a good one. Clearly the Christians were cooperating with each other and if they had not, would there be more than a billion Christians on the planet today? If you want to find research on somebody generally interested in cooperation and religious belief, then look up Richard Sosis. Last I knew he was a professor at UCONN.
Could you please describe how group selection acts in social evolution? You’ve made the declaration, but I doubt there are examples of your statement. Also, concerning the proclivity for religion and genes, see the twin studies above. It’s not my favorite type of evidence but it’s a start.
I feel like someone’s watching me all the time. Then I turn, and there’s that stack of money I left behind! So foolish. ahahaha.
Pretty sure evolution doesn’t work that way.
By “group selection”, I refer to any selection that benefits the group over the individual. It may well not be the preferred term for such, but there you go. That doesn’t happen with natural selection, but it absolutely happens with human social groups.
As for the studies mentioned, I don’t have access to any of those papers, so cannot comment. Have those studies done any testing along the lines mentioned previously in this thread - namely, that religious proclivities are emergent, rather than directly traceable to genetic sources which control brain development? If not, then I don’t put much stock in them.
Altruism? Kin selection? SIT?
… which is probably why they were selected; stealth citing.
I may have been a bit too sweeping in that statement, as I really meant “as it applies to humans”. If you have some that apply to humans, I’d like to see them.
I suppose there might be some experiments that could be done to test a hypothesis with fast breeding animals like fruit flies, but I can’t see how we could do the same for large, slow breeding mammals like humans.
Group selection is technically the idea that alleles can be fixed by anything that benefits the group rather the individual (that is, the level of selection is “group”, rather than “individual”); that pretty much doesn’t happen. However, if you substitute “ideas” or whatever else can be considered the “basic unit of social development” for “alleles” (Dawkins prefers “memes”, so, if that works for ya (generic), great), it works as an analogous process.
Kin selection isn’t quite what I’m looking for, since that does happen in biological evolution, and is a major factor in the evolution of, for example, eusocial insects.
I want to believe it’s true, just for the humorous irony value. 
While it is probably true that a trait does not necessarily have to provide an advantage to be present in a species*, the presence of that trait is generally considered highly suggestive that it does.
*Though this is debated. Various roles of the appendix have been proposed lately, for instance.
What’s an example of an idea or meme that reached fixation because it benefited human groups over the individuals that make up the group as well as allowing the group to outcompete other groups?
Here’s a link to twin studies, it’s a decent wikipedia article. Since most twin studies are essentially the same, you can read the abstracts and get a good idea of the parameters they are attempting to estimate. The data is descriptive so it cannot test any specific hypothesis concerning the role genes play.
I fail to understand why you are differentiating between emergent properties and brain development. Much of our behavior can most easily be understood as an emergent property contributed to by genetic control of neural development. In fact I think that last sentence might win the uncontroversial statement of the year award.
Here is Daly and Wilson’s discussion of evolutionary psychology and behavior patterns associated with homicide. It’s not the primary research but it covers their application of mainly kin selection to homicidal human behavior patterns. They specify their falsifiable predictions based in theory and summarize the data that tested these hypotheses. Simple science.
As stated, I don’t think that the belief in god, as such, is evolutionarily advantageous; I don’t even think it’s been around long enough to make much of an impact on our evolution as a species. However, I do think that there are several heritable traits that are both advantageous and contribute to the emergence of such a belief, most of which have already been named (by begbert2 mainly, if memory serves), but the point doesn’t seem to have caught on in the thread. Indeed, I even think that going from these traits, one would have to expect the development of religion and its interaction with society much the way we see it today, regardless of whether or not there actually are any supernatural forces to believe in.
First, we’re all superstitious. This is, I trust, rather uncontroversial – famously, even pigeons have been shown to be superstitious, which seems to point very strongly to a genetic origin of the behaviour. Mostly, this means susceptibility to a fallacious ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’-reasoning: we see correlations were there are none, and then, mistake those correlations for causation. In the case of the pigeons, it was easy to train them to repeat certain behaviours that led to them being fed; however, even if they were fed at completely random intervals, certain behaviours that they randomly engaged in when they were fed stabilized themselves anyway: they became simple rituals. This makes great sense – if some behaviour appears to cause a desired effect, there is at least a certain likelihood that it might again, which is the root of learning; however, the prize to pay for this is the occasional misfire, which is the source of the belief that unseen forces react to your behaviour.
Secondly, we’re pattern-recognition machines. This is just a part of how our sensory systems work: instead of laboriously building up, say, an image from visual data, by laboriously comparing each element of the image with an internal database to identify it, we go into every situation with a pre-formed expectation of what we’re likely to see; dispelling those expectations until only those over a given likelihood barrier remain is computationally far less taxing, and hence, quicker to perform. In a sense, it’s a very scientific process. The kind of expectations we have of our visual data may be shaped by many things, including experience – see, for instance, the phenomenon of ‘priming’ --, and possibly genetics (it would certainly make sense if we knew what to look for before we encounter our first tiger, and there’s at least some data that we may have an innate fear of snakes), but the mechanism at work is certainly part of our genetic blueprint. The thing is, this mechanism is subject to false positives – we see things that aren’t actually there. All that takes is a single failure to dispel one of the expectations we had going in – a single glitch. This shows itself most clearly whenever we are subject to essentially random data, and suddenly, out pops a face (something we clearly have good evolutionary reasons to look for), i.e. in the phenomenon known as pareidolia.
Thirdly, we misattribute intention. This is similar to the previous section, only acting not on a sensory, but rather a cognitive level. I don’t really wish to come up with the EP mainstay of the hunter-gatherer in the jungle running away from a tiger that’s not actually there and surviving vs. the hunter-gather that missed the tiger that was there, and thus, also missed the chance of passing on his genes, since it would rub some posters the wrong way, but in a way, it’s pretty much that – it’s less dangerous to believe something that doesn’t actually want to eat you does, than it is the other way around. In the absence of rational explanations for the forces at work in nature, an animistic misattribution of intention is the most successful heuristic.
With these three points, we have essentially all we need for most religions – unseen, intentional forces populating the world around us which we can influence through our behaviour. Knowing about these three human traits, one would have to predict belief in the existence of supernatural entities, and ritualistic behaviour surrounding this belief, whether or not such entities actually exist.
So, it’s not the case that believing in god, as such, is evolutionarily advantageous; however, there are evolutionarily advantageous traits that may well – and, I believe, should be expected to – lead to such a belief.
I’m not going to get into a semantic pissing match with you. The point is that ideas spread more rapidly through a population than do alleles. If that doesn’t fit the exact definition of “group selection”, fine, submit your own term.
Some points:
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As others have said, we don’t actually know much about the earliest religions. Nonetheless, I am willing to believe, for the sake of argument, that it resembles somewhat modern-day shamanism. In that case, I strongly disagree that modern-day shamanism is devoid of social utility for hunter-gatherers!
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Obiously, there are a great many varieties of religious belief and inumerable gods. Purely for the purposes of argument, I’m using “religion” as a catch-all phrase for any sort of organized and systemic belief in supernatural forces.
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However, my original point was examining "religion’ as we know and love it today - which is, as far as we know (and obviously we could be totally wrong), something that developed after the last ice age, as evidenced by the creation of large-scale and apparently religious structures (I believe a very ancient temple complex, deliberately buried, was discovered in Turkey recently - pushing the date of this back a few thousand years!).
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This form of “religion” is clearly the product of a society that has gone beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. Arguably, it was instrumental in going beyond the hunter gatherer stage. The two are clearly correlated, but as to whether it is instrumental or not is, naturally, going to be a subject of a good deal of speculation, because we lack a ‘laboratory’ for human cultures. What we do know, is that invariably social evolution of the band/tribe/chieftianship variety is accompanied by religion.
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Thus, it makes a certain amount of sense to postulate that the one (religion) is perhaps a necessary ingredient of the other (social evolution).
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One could equally postulate that the one (religion) is more of an unwanted and unnecessary side-effect of the the other (social evolution). However, this strikes me as much the harder of the two arguments to support logically, given that in many cases pretty well the whole point of social organization appears to have been religious in focus over long periods of time.
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How it worked may have been like this: large-scale undertakings, and thus concentrations of effort beyond the hunter-gatherer state, may have been originally required for religiously-sanctioned events - such as communial celebratory/ritual feasting, such as the rites still observable today in soime New Guinea tribes. This in turn required oversight by organizers - big men and shamans - who gradually attempted to extend their authority for bigger and better projects - creation of elaborate totems, megalithic monuments, temples - which required ever-larger concentrations of effort (thus larger social organizations). Without supernatural sanctions, and an explaination of how this effort benefits the many (as in appeasing the ancestors or gods for the good of all), such concentrations of effort, wealth and power are effectively impossible - you can’t convince a bunch of hunter-gatherers to erect a Temple to Reason. What’s in it for them?
Once large-scale groups develop, they are clearly going to be more powerful than any hunter-gatherer group, and expand at their expense. The only defence is development of one’s own, competing large-scale organization, generally based on competing ancestors, gods, etc.
- Note that this argument focuses on social and not physical evolution. There is clearly a link, but that link lies far back in time - our social evolution has been far, far too rapid to be in lockstep with physical evolution.
Twin studies are inherently flawed, for all the reasons mentioned in that Wikipedia article. Further, measures of heritability, particularly regarding complex behaviors, have their own problems.
I am differentiating between emergent properties and genetic properties because the latter are heritable, the former are not necessarily. If religious proclivities are emergent, then any attempts to explain why they are adaptive must first show that they are adaptive. And if they are not adaptive, then evolutionary psychologists are clearly barking up the wrong tree as far as attempting to understand such behaviors.