Is Religion an Evolutionary Adpaptation

[Touchstone]

Ahhh but what if God had evolved - or ‘produced’ would be another way of putting it - this brain to be able to grasp his existence?

I mean, why make a brain capable of grasping God when we would exist just fine like all the other animals without it?

A brain that is capable of imaging things like God, and many of the other superstitions that man is inclined toward is a huge selective advantage. In order to entertain and articulate such superstitions, that brain needs an advanced “theory of mind”, a meta-representational facility for complex and abstract forms of intentionality.

That means, the brain that has the horsepower to indulge in imaginations of gods and faeries and demons, etc. is a brain that is also capable of developing and applying models of design and intentionality for real things in the world, and this is an advantage that is so huge, it’s hard to overstate in terms of its evolutionary value. If you can imagine abstract relationships like sacrificing a child as propitiation for the “rain god”, you are necessarily capable of thinking in abstract ways about strategies for successful crops in the coming growing season. It’s tragic for the kids that may get butchered in a mistaken perception about killing and future rewards, but that, overall, is a trifling cost compared to what a brain like that can do when it isn’t wandering so far from reasoning and disciplined thinking.

Or, if you reverse it, it’s very hard to imagine a brain that has the evolutionary adaptations that ours do that would not produce superstitions as a matter of course. Superstitions are for the most part low cost/low risk in terms of evolutionary success. They are a trivial tax to pay for having a brain that can plan, identify plans, contrast plans and adjust plans, and identify complex and subtle patterns that are crucial to survival and fecundity. A brain that will dominate the planet will be a brain given to a good amount of superstition, for the same reason a deer lineage that survives to the present day will be very nervous and skittish – bugging out of the meadow even when no practical threat obtains: false positives, in the natural scheme of things, are a great bargain compared to suffering a false negative.

-TS

 

[Snerticus]

A brain that is capable of imaging things like God, and many of the other superstitions that man is inclined toward is a huge selective advantage. In order to entertain and articulate such superstitions, that brain needs an advanced “theory of mind”, a meta-representational facility for complex and abstract forms of intentionality.

That means, the brain that has the horsepower to indulge in imaginations of gods and faeries and demons, etc. is a brain that is also capable of developing and applying models of design and intentionality for real things in the world, and this is an advantage that is so huge, it’s hard to overstate in terms of its evolutionary value. If you can imagine abstract relationships like sacrificing a child as propitiation for the “rain god”, you are necessarily capable of thinking in abstract ways about strategies for successful crops in the coming growing season. It’s tragic for the kids that may get butchered in a mistaken perception about killing and future rewards, but that, overall, is a trifling cost compared to what a brain like that can do when it isn’t wandering so far from reasoning and disciplined thinking.

Or, if you reverse it, it’s very hard to imagine a brain that has the evolutionary adaptations that ours do that would not produce superstitions as a matter of course. Superstitions are for the most part low cost/low risk in terms of evolutionary success. They are a trivial tax to pay for having a brain that can plan, identify plans, contrast plans and adjust plans, and identify complex and subtle patterns that are crucial to survival and fecundity. A brain that will dominate the planet will be a brain given to a good amount of superstition, for the same reason a deer lineage that survives to the present day will be very nervous and skittish – bugging out of the meadow even when no practical threat obtains: false positives, in the natural scheme of things, are a great bargain compared to suffering a false negative.

-TS

But that brings me to my point - why do humans have this and no other animal? There should, even by chance, be another brain capable of doing this. How many other life forms with brains are on the earth? And only humans can do this?

 

[Touchstone]

But that brings me to my point - why do humans have this and no other animal? There should, even by chance, be another brain capable of doing this. How many other life forms with brains are on the earth? And only humans can do this?

Well, one of the evolutionary benefits of encephalization along the lines of what happened in *homo *is that you kill off your nearby competitors by pressing your cognitive advantage. There aren’t any more Neanderthals around, right? There aren’t any Neanderthal fossil skulls that show endocranial volumes like humans have (1200-1400cm^3), but they were way above the basis line for animal encephalization, too – on the path, but bumped of the more cunning and adept humans, so far as we can tell.

But that observation aside – some animal is going to have the biggest, most sophisticated brain, right? If so many species exist, one of them will peg highest on the chart, no matter what method you use. Why that one? I think the why can on one hand be “unasked” in the sense that nature doesn’t indicate any basis for a “why” in the telic sense – this is how the process unfolded, the outcome of innumerable interacting variables, some of which aren’t just statistical processes, but stochastic in nature.

On the other hand, the environment is a landscape that the search functions of evolution explore, and because the environment has a particular configuration, particular adaptations will be eventually found as local maxima. That means, the nature of the environment is amenable to animals with big brains (which are very expensive in terms of energy and other demands), and so eventually the search winds up on that configuration, and “hits the jackpot”, so to speak. The genetic variation(s) that conspired to build big, plastic brains may have been random events, but once they occurred in such a way as to become fixated in the population, the ascent of big-brained mammals to a dominant position in the environment was a predictable, probable outcome.

-TS

P.S. humans are the only species with a “full-blown” language capability, and a meta-representational form of cognition, chimps and gorillas (and some birds, too, IIRC), do show a rudimentary “theory of mind”. For example, if you walk into a room with a chimp, and make an obvious gesture of looking up at the ceiling, the chimp will look up at the ceiling, too. The chimp understands, in some basic way, that you have “attention”, if not “mind” (that might be presumptive), and it can see that you have focused your attention by training your eyes on the ceiling, so it focuses its attention where you have, presumably on the expectation that your basis for focusing attention there may be of interest to the chimp as well. Not all animals show this behavior, or at least not in obvious ways, or ways we’ve been able to isolate with clever experiments thus far.

Some birds, I understand, are adept at “stealing” food based on timing their moves on when some animal guarding the food has turned its attention elsewhere, understanding that the guardian may be “distracted”, and the “coast is clear”, so to speak, for an attempt to snag some snacks.

-TS

 

[grannymh]

I think there is some truth to what he says, though i see religion more as a by product of a big brain struggling to answer questions that at the time were unanswerable, however this ties in with evolution of societies.

When you say 'big brain", are your referring to that gray matter in one’s cranium? If so, chimpanzees have brains somewhat similar and certainly we know how evolution has affected their group nature, i.e., societies. How come they haven’t found answers to those unanswerable questions?

Blessings,
granny

All human life is sacred.

 

[grannymh]

Well, one of the evolutionary benefits of encephalization along the lines of what happened in *homo *is that you kill off your nearby competitors by pressing your cognitive advantage.

– some animal is going to have the biggest, most sophisticated brain, right? show a rudimentary “theory of mind”. -TS

There are many interesting ideas here. But being a pooh bear with a very little brain, I wonder why – if all the nearby competitors of the homo line of evolution killed off their competitors with their cognitive advantage – why would there be any necessity for a more sophisticated brain?

 

[Cleanthes]

All of these questions about the evolutionary origins of religious belief are a collosal red herring. If naturalism is correct and the theistic proofs fail, then these sorts of evolutionary accounts are simply redundant. On the other hand, if the theistic proofs succeed then these evolutionary accounts show at most that no supernatural mechanisms were needed in order for humans to have acquired the capacity to form true beliefs about the supernatural domain. That said, a few other remarks are in order. First, even if it was a settled fact that “theory of mind” is the correct general account of how we detect other minds, it has no bearing on the question of whether God exists. The question we should care about is whether the space of intentional systems includes disembodied minds like God’s. Simply pointing out that TOM enables us to project mentalistic explanations onto non-mental objects is simply irrelevant. If God exists, then the flexibility of TOM enables us to detect at least one disembodied mind. If he doesn’t, then TOM inclines us to overdeploy mentalistic explanations in a way that leads us into errors.

 

[edwest2]

I would like to point out that the “science which is silent about God and the supernatural,” once again attempts to demonstrate things it cannot study.

Peace,
Ed