echoes

I'm currently enrolled in a seminar that discusses the genetic origin of human traits (aggression, sex, religion, etc). One day we were discussing sex, and we discussed a theory for why homosexuality has persisted that E.O. Wilson wrote about in "On Human Nature." For those who aren't familiar with the theory, it says that while gay people don't pass down their own genes, they may serve to facilitate the survival of their close relatives. Those close relatives most likely have some "gay genes," not enough to make them gay, but those genes get passed down and some fraction of the descendants are gay.

Basically the theory explains how a seemingly worthless trait (as far as evolution is concerned) is actually functional. We've also discussed a theory about why religion has advantages... so I want to explain why atheism (also a seemingly disadvantageous trait) has persisted.

Here's an explanation of how religion may be advantageous that was posted by Fiach in "Why reach for God?" in "The Existence of Gods" forum.

The hypothesis that theism and/or religion were a Darwinian survival trait or survival advantage has much merit. I am an Atheist. But I know that worldwide I am only 20% of the world's population and only 5% over there in America. That must mean something. In centuries past, such as the Middle Ages, Atheism was extremely rare as far as we know. Religion pervaded society.

I have postulated before, that religion is brain based. It occurs only in those humans whose brains are hard wired to process religious concepts unquestioningly. Atheists by contrast have circuits that reject religious concepts and magical thinking. We are incapable of believing in gods or invisible pink unicorns because of our brain structure as well as early programming perhaps. We now know that our brain structure is 95% determined by genetic codes in the Human Genome, while about 5% may be experience or programming altered synaptic connections. Therefore, a nucleotide code ultimately determines whether you or I will be likely believers or resistant sceptics.

Why would greater than 80% of all humans have such a gene? As a Neo-Darwinian molecular geneticist and neuroscientist, the answer seems obvious. The "religion gene" must have given the ancestors of modern humans a survival advantage. Early humans who possessed the genes survived while most of those who didn't possess it perished or failed to pass on the "sceptical gene". What advantages did the gene confer?

First we must look at religion and religious behaviour. Religion today provides a worldview, but it is also a restrictive and exclusive worldview. It sets those with the same view apart from others. This gives the group an identity, and makes others who differ, unwelcome if not dangerous. We have seen that religion is associated with suspicion of others, and quite often homicidal violence against "wrong believers". Each group creates its gods. The group members fear and hate those who reject their gods and vice versa. Religion is associated with hyper sexuality (even hyper homosexuality) that usually results in higher birthrates.

OK, so we have some early humans who have their own protective gods. They are militant and aggressive toward unbeliever tribes. They have strong group identity. The identity is as much kinship as religious. Even tribe members who are kin are banished or killed for heresy and unbelief. Religion is almost always a mind control system as well. That imposes discipline. Underlings follow orders from the shaman or the god appointed chieftain.

So, a religious tribe has identity, discipline, aggressiveness, prolific reproduction, paranoid fear and hatred toward those who are different in belief, a tendency to violence, and may be easily propelled toward attacking an unbeliever tribe by a shaman or a chieftain who also covets the extra land and female slaves taken in a war.

Suppose the tribe nearby is unreligious or weakly religious. Those people would be like modern atheists. They would be argumentative, resistant to orders (i.e. undisciplined), uninterested in risking their lives for hypothetical gods. They sadly would be under-prolific with fewer children and eventually fewer warriors.

So in a war between the two tribes, who would triumph? Obviously the disciplined, more aggressive, mutually supportive, paranoid, violence prone, warriors who believe the gods protect them would win. The result would be that the genes of the religious tribe would be passed down. The sceptical tribe's sceptic gene would be exterminated or nearly so.

The gene that programs for religious belief essentially programs a set of behaviours not just belief in gods. The gene's effect in programming the limbic lobe of the brain produced all of the behaviours that we see today in religion: intolerance, hate, discipline, submission to leaders, willingness to risk life and limb for tribe's god (promising Heaven or Valhalla), gullibility (which makes them pawns of their chief and shaman), and hyper sexuality.

In patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Marcel Mesulam has noted traits of hyper sexuality, violence, seeing/hearing god or gods, and hyper religiosity. The two behaviours are very closely linked anatomically in the limbic/temporal circuits, perhaps the same circuits. Observations of religious charismatic experiences have shown autonomic phenomena similar to sexual orgasm, (pelvic thrusting movements, penile erections in males, submissive sexual postures and flushing in women Pentecostal ecstatic states.)

It is apparent that this gene and its resultant brain hard wiring produced people with the above behavioural tendencies. Anyone who has attended a meeting of the British Humanist Association or a meeting of Evolutionary Psychologists is immediately impressed by the fact that they are all arguing with each other, can' t agree on a common statement of policy, and are as difficult to organise as herding cats. Applying such behaviour to early humans would show that they are at a great disadvantage in a conflict with a hyper religious group or tribe.

Therefore, humans with the religion gene passed it on along with its constellation of behaviours. It was a survival advantage because it facilitated the development of disciplined groups of aggressive, violent, paranoid, relatively fearless of death, gullible followers of leaders, which was a successful formula.

Those with the more recessive sceptical genetic codes have only prospered in modern times with Enlightenment influenced constitutions. Yet, even then they remain a minority in all but a handful of West European and East Asian countries. And perhaps the smaller minority of sceptical gene carriers have been allowed to survive in very religious countries like the USA is because we are useful to the society in providing nearly all of their scientists, physicians, psychologists, and inventers. In those professions the sceptical gene provides an adaptive advantage that religious gene carriers lack.

Slainte mhaith,
Fiach

Fiach started going into the advantages of nontheism a little bit at the end, but obviously I want to expand on that, and a) evaluate the genetic basis for nontheism, b) and if there is a significant genetic basis for nontheism, try to give an explanation. I expect much of the explanation to be an argument for the dependence of society on science-oriented individuals throughout history.

I expect this paper to be very broad, and cover evolution/genetics, philosophy, history, etc.

So I'm curious to see if anyone has any ideas/advice for me, any sources you'd recommend, or if you could direct me to anything out there that already discusses this, etc; I'm curious to see what other infidels think of this.

Thanks.

[ November 22, 2002: Message edited by: echoes ]</p>

Ojuice5001

Why is it that it is quite common for evolutionary thinkers to see that there is likely to be a survival advantage to believing in a supernatural, magical aspect of the world, and yet, when they look for an explanation this fact, they seldom or never consider that supernaturalism may be true? I don't see major flaws in explanations like social solidarity, but an obvious and intuitive alternative is that supernatural causes and effects are real.

The reason our brains are made to look for natural causes and effects is that these are real. The reason our brains are made to be suspicious of strangers is that many strangers do in fact deserve suspicion. Maybe there is a different explanation for supernatural beliefs, and yet the more obvious answer is that supernaturalism is true. I don't see any reason to give it less consideration than social-solidarity factors, and yet most naturalistic atheists give it little or none.

theyeti

Just so you know, Wilson's theory has been thoroughly rejected by modern evolutionary psychologists. There's really no evidence that gay people put an inordinate amount of effort into taking care of close family members, nor would that even do anything to explain why they're gay. (It would make more sense if they were sterile and had no interest in sex.)

As for religion, it scores relatively low on the inheritance scale, around 0.4 or so (meaning that about 40% of a person's likelihood of being religious comes from inheritance.) In contrast, human height scores about 0.9. But those studies have to be taken with a grain of salt because they have severe methodological limitations. Nevertheless, the claim that religosity is determined almost exclusively by genetics, or even mostly by genetics, is highly unwarranted.

theyeti

theyeti

I don't think our brains make an innate distinction between natural and supernatural causation. These are just classifications that we lump things in after the fact. What our brains are built for doing is finding cause and effect, and we seem to do this mostly by noting relationships between two or more things. (This is undoubtedly the genesis of many superstitious beliefs; for example, if someone notices that the weather gets better right after he yells at the sky, he's likely to attribute some sort of causal connection.)

Natural and supernatural causes are typically distinguished by the former being regular, observable, and often capable of being manipulated; whereas the latter is rarefied, obscure, and uncontrolable. Note that when one is in a state of total ignorance, he cannot say when something is natural or supernatural. If I know absolutely nothing about meteorology, and have never observed weather patterns, even informally, then I can't say if a rain storm was the result of natural causes or an angry god. As people have learned more and more about the world, we have attributed fewer and fewer phenomena to supernatural causes.

As for the the idea that supernaturalism is true being the best explanation for why a lot of people believe it...it's certainly not the "more obvious answer". It is one possible answer. But people tend to believe lots of ridiculous things, so mere popularity tells us nothing. What we have learned is that attributing events to supernatural causation is almost always wrong. (The rest of the time it's just inconclusive.)

theyeti

pz

Or even a little bit by genetics. You can get similar measures of heritability for membership in the Democratic or Republican political parties, but nobody talks about a Republican gene. I hope.

Ojuice5001

I draw a distinction between miracles, which are events produced by a supernatural cause and no natural one, and directed-chance supernaturalism, which says that events with a random aspect (e.g., weather, dice, thinking of a plot for a movie) are produced by both a natural cause, which makes the event happen in the first place, and a supernatural cause, which affects the random aspect and makes things happen one way rather than another. Has science really made directed chance less likely, or only miracles?

Beneficial beliefs in general are true, and are beneficial because they are true. Cases where this isn't the case are the exception, not the rule.

Corona688

Miracles only exist in the mind of those who believe in them. Unless you care to demonstrate that the universe allows exceptions to it's observed behavior when it feels like it? Burden of proof is on you as usual.

theyeti

To me the phrase "directed chance" is a contradiction in terms. While there could be supernatural direction of what appear to us to be chance events, if it's having any effect on the real world then it should be noticable. For example, if we role some dice many thousands of times and we see the distribution that's predicted to arise by chance, then it would make little sense to attribute hidden supernatural causes. However, it's certainly possible that there are supernatural causes opperating that are too subtle for us to observe. All that can be said about it is that we don't observe it. From a scientific standpoint, we discount it due to parsimony, but that's just a methodological constraint. You're metaphysics can choose to incorporate it or not.

I don't think they're beneficial because they're true. People live their lives deceiving themselves and others constantly, even if they're usually regarded as honest. Deception and self-deception are strong characteristics of the human psyche; we do it to our bosses, our significant others, our coworkers, our friends, and ourselves. In many cases, the truth is definitely not a beneficial thing to believe.

It's trivially easy to think of things that are beneficial for people to believe but are not true. The belief that you are superior to your cohorts, that you are more worthy than others, that your beliefs are the only path to a moral life, etc. are all things which are usually not true, but can be beneficial to believe. People also tend to believe that they have more skills than they really do, that they're more trustworthy than they really are, and that they work harder than they usually do. It's beneficial to believe these things because acting this way impresses others. Truth has nothing to do with it.

theyeti

Jesse

echoes:
I have postulated before, that religion is brain based. It occurs only in those humans whose brains are hard wired to process religious concepts unquestioningly. Atheists by contrast have circuits that reject religious concepts and magical thinking.

This idea doesn't have any empirical basis in studies of brain anatomy. What's more, plenty of atheists have had "mystical experiences" due to temporal lobe seizures, high doses of psychedelic drugs, near-death experiences, etc., which suggests that they are not lacking the "god part of the brain"; they just tend to interpret these experiences differently in retrospect. I recommend the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511096/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">Zen and the Brain</a> for a good survey of what we can learn about religious experiences from neuroscience.

TerryTryon

It is relatively easy to teach a rat to become superstitious. Put the rat in a Skinner box. With operant conditioning, the rat will soon learn that if it presses a lever, it will receive a food pellet. After the rat is well conditioned, put the pellet delivery on a schedule independent of the lever. The rat will soon begin te exhibit a set behavior pattern such as standing on its hind legs or chasing its tail.

Sorry, I can't give you a citation on this experiment, but it's become more an urban legend than science to me. (It could even be a hoax; I'll never forgive the guys who "taught" planarians using cannibalism. They f**ked up my masters thesis royally.)

Nevertheless, when effort and reward were clearly defined in the rat's environment, there was no irrational behavior. When effort and reward were divorced, superstitious activity developed.

This model is strikingly consistant with the development of cargo cults in the South Pacific. Also, consider what state of mind, cult inductees are in and the conditioning they undergo, once they are inducted. When Christians testify about their conversions, analyze their story in light of the rat's tale.

When one lives in a world where effort and reward are uncoordinated, where natural disasters are frequent and unpredictable and windfalls are likely, religion will develop. When natural disasters and windfalls are predictable and the outcomes can be controlled or mitigated, there is little interest in the supernatural.

Culture, of course, can perpetuate religion for many generations and obscures somewhat this simple relationship. But, there is no reason to posit a "god gene" or a genetic basis for belief.