All Annotations of Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests - New Scientist[Preview]

saved byken meece on 2008-05-27

• "If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community,"

• Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that

  religion is a mental artefact

  , co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

  
  
  
  
  

  Aiding the people

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.

• The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

  
  
  
  
  
  

  The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

• Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.