Religion: adaptation or by-product?

For years, whenever someone asks me about the evolution of religion, I explain that there are two broad categories of explanation: that religion has conferred a selective advantage to people who possessed it, or that it was a byproduct of other cognitive processes that were advantageous. I’m a proponent of the byproduct explanation, myself; I tend to go a little further, too, and suggest that religion is a deleterious virus that is piggy-backing on some very useful elements of our minds.

Now look at this: there is a wonderful paper by Pyysläinen and Hauser, The origins of religion : evolved adaptation or by-product?, that summarizes that very same dichotomy (without my extension, however). Here’s the abstract:

Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background, individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions, but that it may then have been subject to selection, creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.

The general argument for religion as an adaptive property is a kind of just-so story. Because humans are dependent on cooperation for survival, religion could have provided an internal bias to promote social cohesion, to promote feelings of guilt and fear about defecting from the group, and also to act as costly signals — you knew you could trust an individual to be a loyal member of your group if they were willing to invest so much effort in playing the weird religion game, just to get along. Strangers will not try to free-ride on your gang if membership involves snipping off the end of your penis, for instance. Also consider the chronic Christian condition of believing themselves to be an oppressed minority—that’s emphasized because if membership is perceived to be costly, even if it actually isn’t, it still can act as an inhibitor of free-riding.

The by-product model recognizes that there are advantages to cooperative group membership, but does not require the evolution of specifically religious properties; these are incidental features of more general cognitive capacities. In this case, we’d argue that such advantageous abilities as a theory of mind (the ability to perceive others as having thought processes like ours), empathy, and a need for social interaction are the actual products of selection, and that religion is simply a kind of spandrel that emerges from those useful abilities.

I favor the by-product theory because it is simpler — it requires fewer specific features be hardwired into the brain — and because it is readily apparent that many of us can discard all religious belief yet still function as cooperating members of a community, with no sense of loss. That suggests to me that religion is actually a superfluous hijacker of potentials we all share.

If you’re familiar with Hauser’s work, you know that he adds another datum: people moral judgments on the basis of a kind of emotional intuition. This intuition is independent of rationalizations and more complex institutional mandates, and is therefore far more deeply imbedded in our brains. We make choices based on feelings first, and the Ten Commandments are invoked later. Religion may work to reinforce some of those feelings, however, so it could act as a kind of cultural amplifier of more intrinsic biases.

To the extent that explicit religiosity cannot penetrate moral intuitions underlying the ability to cooperate, religion cannot be the ultimate source of intra-group cooperation. Cooperation is made possible by a suite of mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion. Moral judgments depend on these mechanisms and appear to operate independently of one’s religious background. However, although religion did not originally emerge as a biological adaptation, it can play a role in both facilitating and stabilizing cooperation within groups, and as such, could be the target of cultural selection. Religious groups seem to last longer than non-religious groups, for example.

In the future, more experimental research is needed to probe the actual relationship between folk moral intuitions and intuitive beliefs about afterlife, gods and ancestors. It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we have discussed, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence.

The idea that religion did not give us an evolutionary advantage, but has been shaped by cultural evolution to better fit and support our productive behaviors, is an interesting one. Of course, it doesn’t make religion right or good; what it suggests is that the strength of free-thinking communities could take advantage of some of the cognitive contrivances of religion, without the extraneous baggage of god-belief. We could just add a few costly signals to atheism, for instance.

So I’m going to have to ask you all to get genital piercings if you want to be a New Atheist.

(Don’t worry, just kidding!)

(via björn.brembs.blog)

Nice euphemism

It’s yet another Catholic sex scandal, this time a chronic pattern of sexual abuse by a few priests in Berlin that was known and tolerated by church leaders for almost 20 years. They’ve got a nice phrase for what was going on: “intimate, fatherly behavior.”

Catholic church: you don’t know what fatherly means, and none of you deserve the respectable title of “father” at all. I’m a dad, please don’t taint me with your skeevy, repellent attitude towards men who actually care for their children.

A reasonable deconversion

Here’s a thoughtful video about one person’s deconversion process: the interesting thing about it is that he was a believer who reasoned himself out of religion.

Although I was brought up in a religion, I’ve discovered that there is a large difference between those who were seriously immersed in a faith, like this fellow, and people who just got a fairly brief and not very deep exposure, like myself. I was rather easily disabused of religion — when I first was taught the tenets of the faith, my reaction was more like, “You believe what? And you expect me to believe it too? That’s batty!” I didn’t need the careful dissection of belief, because what jumped out to me was the raging absurdity of original sin, virgin births, gods manifesting as men, etc., etc., etc.

Don’t pay for Crazy Uncle Ratzi’s pointless tour

Look: the Pope is a crank figure, the head of a weird religious cult who promotes weird ideas, such as that condoms promote the spread of AIDS or more lately, opposes legislation to promote equality. He’s a nasty old bigot from an insignificant municipality who gets far more attention than he deserves.

Now he’s going to be visiting the UK. That’s fine; anyone, even irrelevant old coots, ought to be able to vacation where they please. However, this is being treated as a state visit and the British government is plunking down £20 million for the dubious privilege of having a weird geezer in a dress pretend to be speaking for an imaginary man in the sky to a gullible public. The guy has plenty of money of his own — he should pay for his own damn junket. Or the Catholic churches in England that want his attention should be the ones to cough up.

Speak up against the papal boondoggle. The National Secular Society has a petition — get on it.

Looking for grant money for your research?

Times are tight. It’s tough getting grants from NIH and NSF, but the government has heard your plight and has responded by opening up new avenues to request support: apply for an NCMHD Innovative Faith-Based Approaches to Health Disparities Research grant!

Purpose. The purpose of the NCMHD Innovative Faith-Based Approaches to Health Disparities Research (R21) is to solicit applications that propose translational and transdisciplinary interventions on health disparities, social determinants of health, health behavior and promotion and disease prevention, especially those jointly conducted with faith-based organizations or faith-motivated programs and the research community.  The ultimate goal is to foster empirical, formative, evaluative and intervention research on effective faith-motivated initiatives, concepts and theories that have played an important role in addressing health disparities.  Funding is also intended to provide support for early and conceptual stages of exploratory and developmental research projects.  This focus will allow studies to evaluate the impact of faith-based initiatives and programs in health disparity populations, formulate hypotheses about the role and unique characteristics of faith communities in addressing health disparities, design targeted interventions and track the efficacy of faith-motivated efforts that result from a participatory approach to research in the community. These studies may involve considerable risk but may lead to a breakthrough in addressing health disparities or the development of a model or application that could have a major impact on the field of health disparities research.

It’s not quite as vile as it sounds — they aren’t endorsing the efficacy of faith-based approaches to health, they’re just saying that there are all these churches around and people go to them more easily than they do to clinics, so explore that and see if you can sneak in some science to go with their superstition. Probably. It’s all imbedded in typical murky NIHese, and it does involve forming partnerships with faith-based institutions, so some of your $275,000 direct funds will end up supporting the nonsense we ought to be working against.

Maybe they should send them to the moon, then

I guess we’ve been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I’m sure.

Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.

According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”

I’m trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need a moon-ready Bible reader for poor lunar illiterates, anyway.

What really has me stumped, though, is trying to imagine something more useless than sending a bunch of electronic junk to people trying to recover from a disaster.

We shall win battles with our magically enchanted weapons

I don’t know about you, but I sure am reassured that our soldiers are well-equipped since I heard that one weapon supplier has been enchanting rifles with secret references to the Bible. It gives a soldier special powers to be thinking, “he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” as he peers down the barrel of a gun, preparing to blow the brains out of a Muslim. And don’t you think the Muslim would appreciate knowing that his killer was imbued with such saintly sentiments?

If Jesus had actually existed, that’s probably exactly the purpose he would have intended for his philosophy, too — for reassuring the consciences of arms manufacturers that they are promoting the cause of peace.

I had no idea it was so easy

Have you ever seen the True Christian, the kind that will calmly and confidently tell you the most insane and ridiculous things as if he were ordering a cup of coffee? Meet Randy Demain. He has raised the dead, and does it all the time. It’s easy. You just go up to an old corpse and tell it to get up, and poof, it’ll hop up and start running around.

It helps if you annoy him by interrupting his sermonizing, so he’s a bit cranky about the effrontery of the dead person for interfering with his preaching.

The psychology of these wacked out liars and fantasists for Jesus is fascinating. Also creepy.

America’s Next Religion!!!

On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I’d had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather tepid, an exposure to bland liberal Lutheranism of the Scandinavian Phlegmatic sect, and had no drama at all to it, and was more like a Unitarian Universalist church with a historical creed attached to it that no one cared much about. Yet here I’d been talking with ex-fundamentalist ex-Mennonites, people who’d had a religion that was like a hammer to the cranium. The fellow who had shown signs of thinking as a teenager, and whose older brother therefore schemed to do him a favor and kill him in his sleep before he became a hell-bound apostate ought to win some sort of prize.

So I was pondering why some faiths seem to be so bland and others so ferocious, and I had to think that, at least in Western countries, a period as a state religion had to have some moderating effect. My Swedish forebears, for instance, were mostly Catholic in the 15th century, and switched to Lutheran in the 16th. Why? Because they had the principle that whatever the faith of the king, that was the faith of the nation. That’s a concept that’s a little weird to people who have it dunned into them that their particular faith is the one true path to God and heaven, since apparently which faith is the right one can be changed over the course of a coronation. Sweden went through that switch, and not only that, but shortly afterwards Gustavus Adolphus hands people pikes and muskets, marches them off to Germany, and has them killing and being killed for their new version of God (and for mercantile interests in the Baltic states, but that probably wasn’t played up among the troops much).

It had to instill a little cynicism in the people.

Anyway, I was just thinking that it sure would be nice if the US had an official state religion, just because it would be such an effective way of making religion irrelevant. However, we couldn’t do it the old Swedish way, and make the religion of the president the state religion — our political campaigns are already too pious, and the thought of turning them into religious wars that made faith even more important was too much to bear. The big obstacle to establishing an American state religion (besides the first amendment, and the Republicans don’t care about that anyway) is deciding which religion it would be. And that’s where I had an epiphany.

Let’s pick the official US state religion with a game show. Sure, it would be shallow, loud, flashy, and would pander to the lowest common denominator of the population…but can you imagine anything more American? And it would make money! Even more American!

We’d do it in a program that would air over the course of several months. In the first phase, we’d collect entrants; the larger sects, the Catholics, the Southern Baptists, the Mormons, the Episcopalians, etc., would of course get a spot just because of their numbers and popularity, but to be truly representative, a wide selection of smaller, edgier religions ought to get a shot, too. A panel of celebrity judges would travel to major American cities and have auditions, in which representatives of various faiths in the region would show up and give a brief spiel about their beliefs and put on a demonstration of what’s so cool about their particular practices. They would be judged on entertainment value and local color, and only the best show would move on to the next level.

The celebrity judges would be important. The panel should consist of a curmudgeonly atheist who believes in nothing, a ditzy, New Agey bit of fluff who believes in everything, and some wobbly agnostic who doesn’t know what to think. Christopher Hitchens must be the atheist judge; someone like Robert Wright or Ariana Huffington can be the ditz judge (Huffington would be excellent just for the accent); and the agnostic judge would be tougher, since they tend to be much more low profile, but perhaps we can just trawl a few bars for unemployed Ph.D.s in philosophy. All he has to do is bawl, “Why am I here?” now and then, so those qualifications should do.

The main competition would consist of multiple televised rounds. There would be a division of skills, so one round might be musical, with demonstrations of their singing or dancing or babbling ability; another might be on dogma, with succinct summaries of what their religion can do for and demands of the practitioner; there could be gladiatorial rounds, where top athletes of each religion pray for god’s aid in sporting events, and the loser drops out and goes home. Some rounds would be judged by the celebrity panel, while others could be judged by call-in votes.

We could also have tests of power. At the beginning of the competition, each religion could be assigned by chance a dying child, and the adherents would be expected to pray mightily for their kid. This could lead to more drama — we might have occasional interruptions, as the announcer intones, “We are sorry to report that little Timmy Robinson has died. The Methodists have no power here, and will be going home.” Conversely, if one of the children has a miraculous remission, the prayer team for that child could be automatically advanced to the next round.

You might argue that the atheists would have an edge, because instead of prayer they’d be sending money to the best doctors and hospitals and getting the child the best medical care possible. Atheism is not a religion, however, so they won’t be in the competition.

Another concern you might have is that there is no way the contestants could be judged objectively. One property of religion is that it encourages tribal loyalty, so even if the gospel stylings of the African-American Baptist church have even the godless dancing in the aisles, all of the Catholics will still vote for the droning off-key old hymns of their congregation. That’s OK! We should expect some bias in favor of the numerically superior dogmas, and it’s fair that the more numerous faiths have an edge in becoming America’s next religion. That’s because the main competition will only serve to winnow down the contestants to a dozen or two, and the final winner will be determined entirely by a lottery. Knowing the American people, charismatic underdogs will make it to the final round alongside the stable favorites.

Think of the excitement, and the ratings, that the final show will get! Chits, each with the name and religious symbol of the surviving contestants, will tumble about in a basket, and then an attractive starlet with very large breasts will reach in, pull out one, and hand it to a bronzed macho star with very large teeth, who will make the final announcement: “America, we are a SCIENTOLOGY NATION!”, or whatever religion wins.

Note that since we are a nation tolerant of many faiths, American citizens will not be required to convert to that faith. It just means that on all official pronouncements and legal documents, the government will declare itself officially an X nation, where X is whatever religion won. All opening prayers to congress will be delivered by a representative of that religion; all military chaplains will be required to be practitioners. You will also be able to sue all politicians and pundits who declare that America is a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation without specifying the winning faith, because obviously that is a slight to that triumphant religion.

There will also be a monetary gain. The winning religion should be granted a substantial sum of money, say $100 million dollars, to be used freely in any way they see fit: it can be used to repair decaying churches, buy air time for proselytizing ads, pay off lawsuits to parents of molested children, or even buy wetsuits and dildoes for the entire priesthood. We won’t care, we won’t pay any attention, it’s simply their fairly earned winnings. Most importantly, as the official state religion, all of their activities will be tax exempt.

Oh, that was the sneaky part. All the loser religions will no longer be recognized by the government, and will lose all their tax exemptions. That’s where we make the big profits off this scheme.

Just to be generous, though, there will be an easy loophole. Churches can freely convert to the new official religion and gain the tax exemption back. All those churches with only the vaguest theological foundation, and which are really just placeholders to service their leaders, will not be harmed in any way; Joel Osteen and Rick Warren will continue to rake in the moolah, even if it is as the Saddleback Church of the Sub-genius or as Lubavitcher Rabbi Joel Osteen.

Now wait! I’m not done! I had another epiphany that turns this whole idea into a major revelation of brilliant genius that will change the whole future of humanity.

We do this every year.

This is not a one shot deal that establishes one official American church for ever and ever. It’s a process that we will go through every year. We will regularly change our state religion. No faith can slack off; they all have to muster their best game to serve their congregations and gather the talent and the votes to be competitive. It will all be very Darwinian.

But there’s another cunning bit to the scheme. This is not a contest that will simply be won by whoever has the largest membership, so it won’t lead to a single religion simply dominating every year, and strengthening its grip with each win. Because this is going through the most frivolous of media, making an appeal to popularity on the basis of short-attention-span glitz, there will be a definite edge given to novelty. The Red Queen hypothesis will apply, and we’ll be churning through lots of religions, one after the other.

It’s going to be great. We’ll either turn religion into a trivia question, or we will select the most virulently appealing faith of all time into existence. Either way is going to be much more interesting than what we’ve got now.

We just have to persuade the government to try it.

Oh, God, we are afflicted with a leadership of idiots

Here’s what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.

(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)