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For the life of me, I never understood why evolutionary biologists engage in such ridiculous behavior. Instead of explaining religion from a scientific point of

by FD3SA 13y ago

For the life of me, I never understood why evolutionary biologists engage in such ridiculous behavior. Instead of explaining religion from a scientific point of view, they instead debate nonsense as if it is on equal footing with empirically validated science. Richard Dawkins, who taught me biology through his incredible books, has wasted a majority of his life following this foolish path. I still don't understand why. Religious beliefs result in adaptive behaviors proven to increase fitness in certain environments. That is, these behaviors enhance the fitness of the genes which make one predisposed to religiosity. This has been hypothesized many times, and is the only rational explanation for the vast and fervent religious behaviors we witness today. In brief, religious behaviors cause individuals to engage in cooperative exchanges which are mutually beneficial to both parties. Iterated over many interactions, in a large population, with reputation, it becomes obvious that these behaviors are adaptive. What biologists must emphasize is that religious behaviors are distinct from religious mythology. It is the behaviors we are interested in as scientists, not the literary masterpieces that constitute such works as the Bible, Quran, Torah, etc. Although they are linked, from an empirical point of view it is meaningless to analyze the philosophy of religion. We must instead look at the behaviors and their resultant consequences. For those interested, there is a massive amount of knowledge on this subject. I would recommend beginning with Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene, and intuitively working through the corollaries thereafter. Further reading can be found here [1]. 1. http://evolution-of-religion.com/ http://evolution-of-religion.com/ EDIT: Removed Wikipedia link as it wasn't very useful upon closer inspection. The research group linked instead is a much better resource. Also reworded for clarity as per comments below.

pjscott 13y ago
Interesting that you bring up Richard Dawkins, as he seems to be adamantly in agreement: http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/119-why-i-won-39-t-debate-creationists http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/119-why-i-won-39-t-de...
- FD3SA 13y ago
  Unfortunately, by releasing the God Delusion, he engaged creationists as equals in an intellectual debate. He would have been better served by supporting research on the evolutionary psychology of religion, while staying very far away from debating creationists, which has sadly become a hobby of his. That being said, I have yet to read a book which so elegantly describes evolution as The Selfish Gene. This includes Darwin's own works. It is an absolute masterpiece, and was the foundation of my lifelong passion for biology. I consider Dawkins the most influential man in my life. That is why it hurts me to see him behave in such a counter-productive manner.
  - tokipin 13y ago
    I'm not very into the whole atheism/religion scene, but I think there are many people who basically don't care one way or the other about "the great questions", but when asked might have said that they're religious or spiritual in vague terms. I think it's these people that Dawkins has been helping, by essentially letting them know that 'unbelief' is a totally OK category for them to fall into.
  - yew 13y ago
    I agree that formal debates over evolution are counterproductive - they give the impression that evolution and creationism should be taken equally seriously, and anyway they're more about who's a better presenter than who has the better evidence. I appreciate Dawkins' writing, though. If nothing else, it contributed significantly to my shift away from evangelical fundamentalism. One of the benefits of Dawkins' choice of material is that it can communicate new ideas to the very religious (not "always does" but "has the capacity to"), whereas arguments about historical accuracy or studies of religious behaviour can't - because, from a fundamentalist perspective, that sort of evidence is necessarily secondary to communication directly from God. For me, Dawkins first presented the idea that it might be possible for evidence to be more meaningful than faith, that everyone who wasn't a fundamentalist might not be lying or deceived. I consider that a justification for his work, though perhaps I'm wrong about its effectiveness (though I was a fairly strong believer when I read it). I don't know on what criteria you're basing your own judgement. (Of course, I'm speaking here from my own experience and observation just of the community where I grew up. I'm glad that he existed at that time, but this is ultimately just an anecdote with a limited perspective.)
dragonwriter 13y ago
> What biologists must emphasize is that religious dogma (i.e. behaviors) are distinct from religious theology (i.e. mythology). You know that these are distinctly non-standard (to the point of not having any resemblance to the usual ones) definitions of "dogma" and "theology", right? If you mean "behaviors" and "mythology", then just say that, rather than saying "dogma" and "theology" with those others in parenthesis, when "dogma" doesn't mean "behavior" and "theology" does not mean "mythology".
- FD3SA 13y ago
  Agreed and amended. I henceforth swear to never again employ religious vocabulary in scientific discourse.
pg 13y ago
"these behaviors enhance the fitness of the genes which make one predisposed to religiosity. This has been hypothesized many times, and is the only rational explanation for the vast and fervent religious behaviors we witness today." It's certainly not the only possible explanation.
- FD3SA 13y ago
  Please share your thoughts. I honestly love this subject, and am willing to waste an inordinate amount of time discussing all possibilities.
  - Retric 13y ago
    It's also possible that religion is a net negative just not a significant net negative, aka it's a thought virus. Viruses have a lot more pressure to avoid being a huge negative like killing there host quickly than they do helping their host, but as long as they can spread it's ok to be lethal as long as it's not rapidly lethal. EX: Religions who's priests avoid reproduction are clearly a net negative on the individual level at least from an evolutionary standpoint.
    - FD3SA 13y ago
      Quite possibly, though that begets one more question: Why are certain religions much more successful than others? @herbig >Certain religions are more successful than others for the same reason that other organisms are more successful: they adapt more quickly to their environment. Precisely! @lutusp Absolutely. But we have to remember that religious behaviors act through humans. As such, they become just like any other behavior which is selected by evolution through natural selection at the genetic level. Am I correct in assuming that you were thinking of bees and ants, which display behaviors which may not be individually adaptive, but genetically so? If that's the case, you may find this paper [1] interesting. 1. http://www.fasebj.org/content/24/5/1301.long http://www.fasebj.org/content/24/5/1301.long @pjscott Perfect, now let's look at every single one of these factors through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist. You will find that almost each one has a direct analogue in evolution, and the behaviors become indistinguishable from those seen across a wide variety of species. They are just much more nuanced versions of the same tactics employed by every living creature.
herbig 13y ago
Dawkins has made an awful lot of money following this foolish path.
- waps 13y ago
  I do truly wonder. I mean do you guys give absolutely zero consideration to the massive psychological difference in message ? What does evolution say ? Well, if one were to be really blunt, here's the message : First of all, the natural laws generally referred to as "conservation laws", mean that there is a finite carrying capacity of our planet. And even if we find more ... well this explains it far more eloquently than I ever could : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ . Second, evolution can only work with a high growth rate and a high rate of natural selection. Natural selection means you and your family/friends/... die. Translation : whatever level of comfort, safety and survivability you currently have, evolution means that outside of very short exceptional periods (like the one we're in now : the oil/fossil fuel age, as it will be called when historians finally see the need for sane naming) it will go down. A large portion of humans will die without offspring, and if you allow for a few generations, most people (>90%) will not have any great grandchildren at all. The chances of you dieing without offspring, and without energy to keep you warm and without food to eat, are in reality over 30%. This is masked by currently being in an oil age, in a rich country. Evolution means that it will run out though. The scientific view on this (which almost no-one accepts as true, especially the fact that evolution MUST stretch resources to the breaking point and the inevitable consequences of doing that) is accepted by almost nobody. I'm willing to bet you'll see plenty of evidence of that in replies to this post. But, for example, if evolution is true, global warming is unstoppable until oil/coal run out or get replaced. That's a trivial consequence of evolution, but nobody accepts it. Oh and the correct reaction to global warming is to make it worse, as fast as possible. Any economics textbook about nash equilibria will tell you why, as will running computer simulations of actors surviving on limited resources. Other things are that are beyond obvious make much more sense if viewed in the frame of evolution. Rationality, for example. Aside from the fact that it cannot exist (see your nearest philosophy of logic course, or read a course about the "failure of the AI project"), humans are not rational, they think along evolutionary lines. What does our mind do ? It looks for ideas, ways of doing things, what to do, how to behave. It changes the ones it finds a little bit, then executes them. If you look at the architecture of the human brain, I find it rather obvious that you do not have original thoughts. Some ideas' origins are really hard to trace, because they are a combination of what someone did in a tv show plus something you saw a squirrel do, and slightly modified, making it incredibly hard to see the connection between the "new" idea and the originals, but the same goes for genes. And yes, there are "new" ideas that you saw in a random pattern, but keeping in mind how fast human generations work, there would be no more than 1 of those per year for the entire human population, if that. This of course means that no matter how convinced you are of the opposite, you are NOT thinking rationally. There is plenty of proof that this is how it works. For example, kids that get raised by animals (it happens sometimes) do not walk on 2 legs (well except those raised by chimps and even then, I wouldn't call their gaits 2 legged), despite obviously still having a body that's built for walking on 2 legs. There are fun experiments. Even the very signals we use to control our bodily functions are not actually generated by our brain. Our brain simply finds ways to process it's inputs to generate the correct signal to send, e.g. to your legs to walk. So if you give your brain an overwhelming signal that's explicitly designed to make processing it really hard then you can make the human brain sabotage it's own body because it can't reconfigure the external signal fast enough to make it useful. Result : human incapacitated (heart attack happens after ~2 minutes as was discovered by accident. Note that that figure is based on 2 accidental experiments and is probably not very accurate, but nobody's about to do more testing) [3] And then you have the other side : Christianity : good news ! Jesus will save you (and we will help you make the best of it in the meantime). You live in misery anyway ? That's God testing you. Invite more misery and help others and it will help you too[1]. Islam : that's may or may not be true, but you can fight and take richess (and -slaves-) from dar-al-harb (everyone else), in fact that's what those other guys' "God", henceforth called allah, wants you to do to earn your salvation. Oh you live in misery despite fighting ? Well either you're a traitor, or it's the enemy's fault. Judaism : we have a contract with God, and as long as you follow these 613 rules to the letter, that will not happen. And don't worry, they sound insane, sure, but you can read them a million different ways. It happened anyway ? Look, you violated interpretation 5 of rule 328, you deserve it ! Buddhism : you will live in misery, true, salvation lies in accepting it and making the worst of it. Socialism : that is true, but if we all pull together and follow the little red book/this charter/hitler/... we can make life comfortable for everyone through research, working together, building everything up, ... [2]. Didn't solve your misery problem ? Must be the bourgoisie/spies/traitors/... screwing it up ! Let's kill them. I don't mean to be rude, but is anyone truly in doubt why atheism can never win ? Hell, I don't want it to win. If I ever am in real trouble, then I'd like to find a group of Christians in my path if you don't mind. Despite knowing more than 99.9% of hacker news about evolution and how the human mind works. [1] I would argue that that last part is the essence of our modern states. [2] I don't mean to make it sound so ridiculous, but it worked for large parts of the world for quite a while in the sense that it improved their situation considerably for up to half a century, so please don't think it can never work. This way of thinking got the first human to space, and collected pretty much the only information we have about the inner solar system. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_Incapacitator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_Incapacitator
kkowalczyk 13y ago
There is no gene for religion. There is a very simple explanation for religion: most people conform to the culture of their surrounding. That's why most people growing up in Muslim country become Muslims, most people growing up in Mormon area become Mormons, most people growing up in atheist countries are atheist and Germany (yes, I'll go there) had a surge of Natzis-ism. Cultural norm is a powerful thing. But hey, I'm open to changing my mind given some evidence. Why don't you sequence a few deceased atheists and a few deceased religious folks and by way of simple diff isolate the "religion" gene. There might be a Nobel prize in it.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > Why don't you sequence a few deceased atheists and a few deceased religious folks and by way of simple diff isolate the "religion" gene. There might be a Nobel prize in it. It's been established that there's no single religion gene, and there's no single stupidity gene. But I repeat myself.

by FD3SA 13y ago

pjscott 13y ago

Interesting that you bring up Richard Dawkins, as he seems to be adamantly in agreement: http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/119-why-i-won-39-t-debate-creationists http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/119-why-i-won-39-t-de...

FD3SA 13y ago
Unfortunately, by releasing the God Delusion, he engaged creationists as equals in an intellectual debate. He would have been better served by supporting research on the evolutionary psychology of religion, while staying very far away from debating creationists, which has sadly become a hobby of his. That being said, I have yet to read a book which so elegantly describes evolution as The Selfish Gene. This includes Darwin's own works. It is an absolute masterpiece, and was the foundation of my lifelong passion for biology. I consider Dawkins the most influential man in my life. That is why it hurts me to see him behave in such a counter-productive manner.
- tokipin 13y ago
  I'm not very into the whole atheism/religion scene, but I think there are many people who basically don't care one way or the other about "the great questions", but when asked might have said that they're religious or spiritual in vague terms. I think it's these people that Dawkins has been helping, by essentially letting them know that 'unbelief' is a totally OK category for them to fall into.
- yew 13y ago
  I agree that formal debates over evolution are counterproductive - they give the impression that evolution and creationism should be taken equally seriously, and anyway they're more about who's a better presenter than who has the better evidence. I appreciate Dawkins' writing, though. If nothing else, it contributed significantly to my shift away from evangelical fundamentalism. One of the benefits of Dawkins' choice of material is that it can communicate new ideas to the very religious (not "always does" but "has the capacity to"), whereas arguments about historical accuracy or studies of religious behaviour can't - because, from a fundamentalist perspective, that sort of evidence is necessarily secondary to communication directly from God. For me, Dawkins first presented the idea that it might be possible for evidence to be more meaningful than faith, that everyone who wasn't a fundamentalist might not be lying or deceived. I consider that a justification for his work, though perhaps I'm wrong about its effectiveness (though I was a fairly strong believer when I read it). I don't know on what criteria you're basing your own judgement. (Of course, I'm speaking here from my own experience and observation just of the community where I grew up. I'm glad that he existed at that time, but this is ultimately just an anecdote with a limited perspective.)

dragonwriter 13y ago

> What biologists must emphasize is that religious dogma (i.e. behaviors) are distinct from religious theology (i.e. mythology). You know that these are distinctly non-standard (to the point of not having any resemblance to the usual ones) definitions of "dogma" and "theology", right? If you mean "behaviors" and "mythology", then just say that, rather than saying "dogma" and "theology" with those others in parenthesis, when "dogma" doesn't mean "behavior" and "theology" does not mean "mythology".

FD3SA 13y ago
Agreed and amended. I henceforth swear to never again employ religious vocabulary in scientific discourse.

pg 13y ago

"these behaviors enhance the fitness of the genes which make one predisposed to religiosity. This has been hypothesized many times, and is the only rational explanation for the vast and fervent religious behaviors we witness today." It's certainly not the only possible explanation.

FD3SA 13y ago
Please share your thoughts. I honestly love this subject, and am willing to waste an inordinate amount of time discussing all possibilities.
- Retric 13y ago
  It's also possible that religion is a net negative just not a significant net negative, aka it's a thought virus. Viruses have a lot more pressure to avoid being a huge negative like killing there host quickly than they do helping their host, but as long as they can spread it's ok to be lethal as long as it's not rapidly lethal. EX: Religions who's priests avoid reproduction are clearly a net negative on the individual level at least from an evolutionary standpoint.
  - FD3SA 13y ago
    Quite possibly, though that begets one more question: Why are certain religions much more successful than others? @herbig >Certain religions are more successful than others for the same reason that other organisms are more successful: they adapt more quickly to their environment. Precisely! @lutusp Absolutely. But we have to remember that religious behaviors act through humans. As such, they become just like any other behavior which is selected by evolution through natural selection at the genetic level. Am I correct in assuming that you were thinking of bees and ants, which display behaviors which may not be individually adaptive, but genetically so? If that's the case, you may find this paper [1] interesting. 1. http://www.fasebj.org/content/24/5/1301.long http://www.fasebj.org/content/24/5/1301.long @pjscott Perfect, now let's look at every single one of these factors through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist. You will find that almost each one has a direct analogue in evolution, and the behaviors become indistinguishable from those seen across a wide variety of species. They are just much more nuanced versions of the same tactics employed by every living creature.

herbig 13y ago

Dawkins has made an awful lot of money following this foolish path.

waps 13y ago
I do truly wonder. I mean do you guys give absolutely zero consideration to the massive psychological difference in message ? What does evolution say ? Well, if one were to be really blunt, here's the message : First of all, the natural laws generally referred to as "conservation laws", mean that there is a finite carrying capacity of our planet. And even if we find more ... well this explains it far more eloquently than I ever could : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ . Second, evolution can only work with a high growth rate and a high rate of natural selection. Natural selection means you and your family/friends/... die. Translation : whatever level of comfort, safety and survivability you currently have, evolution means that outside of very short exceptional periods (like the one we're in now : the oil/fossil fuel age, as it will be called when historians finally see the need for sane naming) it will go down. A large portion of humans will die without offspring, and if you allow for a few generations, most people (>90%) will not have any great grandchildren at all. The chances of you dieing without offspring, and without energy to keep you warm and without food to eat, are in reality over 30%. This is masked by currently being in an oil age, in a rich country. Evolution means that it will run out though. The scientific view on this (which almost no-one accepts as true, especially the fact that evolution MUST stretch resources to the breaking point and the inevitable consequences of doing that) is accepted by almost nobody. I'm willing to bet you'll see plenty of evidence of that in replies to this post. But, for example, if evolution is true, global warming is unstoppable until oil/coal run out or get replaced. That's a trivial consequence of evolution, but nobody accepts it. Oh and the correct reaction to global warming is to make it worse, as fast as possible. Any economics textbook about nash equilibria will tell you why, as will running computer simulations of actors surviving on limited resources. Other things are that are beyond obvious make much more sense if viewed in the frame of evolution. Rationality, for example. Aside from the fact that it cannot exist (see your nearest philosophy of logic course, or read a course about the "failure of the AI project"), humans are not rational, they think along evolutionary lines. What does our mind do ? It looks for ideas, ways of doing things, what to do, how to behave. It changes the ones it finds a little bit, then executes them. If you look at the architecture of the human brain, I find it rather obvious that you do not have original thoughts. Some ideas' origins are really hard to trace, because they are a combination of what someone did in a tv show plus something you saw a squirrel do, and slightly modified, making it incredibly hard to see the connection between the "new" idea and the originals, but the same goes for genes. And yes, there are "new" ideas that you saw in a random pattern, but keeping in mind how fast human generations work, there would be no more than 1 of those per year for the entire human population, if that. This of course means that no matter how convinced you are of the opposite, you are NOT thinking rationally. There is plenty of proof that this is how it works. For example, kids that get raised by animals (it happens sometimes) do not walk on 2 legs (well except those raised by chimps and even then, I wouldn't call their gaits 2 legged), despite obviously still having a body that's built for walking on 2 legs. There are fun experiments. Even the very signals we use to control our bodily functions are not actually generated by our brain. Our brain simply finds ways to process it's inputs to generate the correct signal to send, e.g. to your legs to walk. So if you give your brain an overwhelming signal that's explicitly designed to make processing it really hard then you can make the human brain sabotage it's own body because it can't reconfigure the external signal fast enough to make it useful. Result : human incapacitated (heart attack happens after ~2 minutes as was discovered by accident. Note that that figure is based on 2 accidental experiments and is probably not very accurate, but nobody's about to do more testing) [3] And then you have the other side : Christianity : good news ! Jesus will save you (and we will help you make the best of it in the meantime). You live in misery anyway ? That's God testing you. Invite more misery and help others and it will help you too[1]. Islam : that's may or may not be true, but you can fight and take richess (and -slaves-) from dar-al-harb (everyone else), in fact that's what those other guys' "God", henceforth called allah, wants you to do to earn your salvation. Oh you live in misery despite fighting ? Well either you're a traitor, or it's the enemy's fault. Judaism : we have a contract with God, and as long as you follow these 613 rules to the letter, that will not happen. And don't worry, they sound insane, sure, but you can read them a million different ways. It happened anyway ? Look, you violated interpretation 5 of rule 328, you deserve it ! Buddhism : you will live in misery, true, salvation lies in accepting it and making the worst of it. Socialism : that is true, but if we all pull together and follow the little red book/this charter/hitler/... we can make life comfortable for everyone through research, working together, building everything up, ... [2]. Didn't solve your misery problem ? Must be the bourgoisie/spies/traitors/... screwing it up ! Let's kill them. I don't mean to be rude, but is anyone truly in doubt why atheism can never win ? Hell, I don't want it to win. If I ever am in real trouble, then I'd like to find a group of Christians in my path if you don't mind. Despite knowing more than 99.9% of hacker news about evolution and how the human mind works. [1] I would argue that that last part is the essence of our modern states. [2] I don't mean to make it sound so ridiculous, but it worked for large parts of the world for quite a while in the sense that it improved their situation considerably for up to half a century, so please don't think it can never work. This way of thinking got the first human to space, and collected pretty much the only information we have about the inner solar system. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_Incapacitator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_Incapacitator

kkowalczyk 13y ago

There is no gene for religion. There is a very simple explanation for religion: most people conform to the culture of their surrounding. That's why most people growing up in Muslim country become Muslims, most people growing up in Mormon area become Mormons, most people growing up in atheist countries are atheist and Germany (yes, I'll go there) had a surge of Natzis-ism. Cultural norm is a powerful thing. But hey, I'm open to changing my mind given some evidence. Why don't you sequence a few deceased atheists and a few deceased religious folks and by way of simple diff isolate the "religion" gene. There might be a Nobel prize in it.

lutusp 13y ago
> Why don't you sequence a few deceased atheists and a few deceased religious folks and by way of simple diff isolate the "religion" gene. There might be a Nobel prize in it. It's been established that there's no single religion gene, and there's no single stupidity gene. But I repeat myself.