Reddit reviews Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
We found 6 Reddit comments about Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
First - don't promote your website here, mysticpolitics, especially after copying an article from another site (obviously you want hits - fuck you). At least change your screen name for practical purposes. And this isn't a mystical matter, nor politics.
Next:
For someone with so much experience in the field, I am surprised by Nigel Barber's lack of understanding of this subject. Then again, the article is such a cursory run at addressing this issue, and provides nothing new, or well-informed, to a point that I think he just shot out a shit article for the sake of vomiting his thoughts somewhere. Adaptionist theories of religious cognition, as opposed to theories of its being a by-product (exaptation), have bore little evidence in both anthropological and psychological literature. Furthermore, this God spot has not been observed to have any natural onset of its function other than that identified via artificial stimulation. Even then, something having such a relevant function doesn't mean it was selected for; Was susceptibility to psychoactives selected for? Was the ability to play the chocking game selected for due to the nature of some people's dreams? How about sleep paralysis? It is just as likely that systems built to process other minds are inadvertently activated by other processes, as they take such a primary role in our thought.
Can we also remember that for something to be selected, alternative genetic structures must die off or fail to reproduce. Also, mutations aren't robust, they don't overnight become autonomous modules like this 'God spot'. So, you're saying people who didn't have slight variation in their ability to randomly have spiritual insight either (a) died off from threatening causes, or (b) were not attractive to mates? Are you fucking kidding me? You study evolutionary psychology, man, come on. Read some damn evolutionary biology for a change.
—Regardless of arguments though, I just want to point out that this is a shit article, I looked at the rest of his work - solid stuff. Don't put this crap out there, don't make such huge claims before reading background literature, especially if you're in the field.
Now, some fun resources for everyone to go be happy and read about what I'd call the most exciting corner of research outside of empathy! Goodies for everyone (buy the first three books, they'll change your lives):
Religion Explained (exaptation/by-product cognitive view)
Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (more concise cognitive view, very accessible to the non-psychologist, very short)
Darwin's Cathedral (Adaptionist, group selection view)
Adaptations, Exaptations, & Spandrels
Is atheism caused by high mutational load? The Industrial Revolution removed all Darwinian selection in the West. (Infant mortality used to be 40%.)
Religiosity was actively selected for over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. See Darwin's Cathedral and The Faith Instinct.
Nobody is saying that beliefs of type X being selected for entails their metaphysical truth. Dutton wants to explain the maladaptive contagion of r/atheism in terms of evo-bio, rather than a sudden enlightenment courtesy of Hitchens & Dawkins (LOL!)
A Response to Dutton
You know, I started reading Joseph Campbell's stuff years ago. I really quite enjoyed it and I'm sure that some of what I read seeped into my subconscious and likely informed my work indirectly. For reasons that are lost in the dim recesses of my memory, though, I don't think finished reading any of his work and I haven't drawn on any of it directly.
I don't know of any books currently out there that tackle sacred stories head on from an evolutionary perspective. The final chapter of my dissertation looks at sacred texts as being like the chromosomes and genes of genetic evolution, which is related to your question about cultural borrowing but isn't directly on point. Plus, you know, it's a dissertation so--boring!
That said, if you're interested in books that look at religion from an evolutionary perspective there are some good ones out there. The first one that I'm aware of, and that in many ways started me on this journey is Darwin's Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson. More recent books include a new one by Dominic Johnson, God is Watching You and a closely related book by Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. There are others as well, but those are the three that first popped into my mind.
Religions absolutely do evolve, as part of a larger concept called cultural evolution. In fact, both Christianity and Islam evolved from earlier religions, Judaism in particular, and those religions evolved from even earlier ones like Zoroastrianism.
Furthermore, there have been many forms to evolve from the original Christian and Islamic religions (Methodist, Calvinism, Sufism, etc). Fundamentalism is usually just one of these evolved forms (e.g., Wahhabism). There is actually a great book on this topic by David Sloan Wilson, called Darwin's Cathedral.
Anyways, your argument about the Quran and Western values being at odds is true, but it is just as true about the Bible. Whether it makes sense or not for people to reconcile religion and secular/humanist values, your argument basically implies that there are pretty much no actual Christians in the Western world.
Also check out DS Wilsom's "Darwin's Cathedral"
https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Cathedral-Evolution-Religion-Society/dp/0226901351
Religions are successful because the line up exceedingly well with the facts of reality. They line up better than atheistic views. The problem is that you have to be a consequentialist to see it.
My argument assumes a few basic things:
>And what's most interesting is that when you ask people what it is they do with this false information or false predictions, they claim that it helps them learn. The wrong information is useful.
Wrong information can often be useful. Is right information always useful? If you are an automaton... if free will doesn't exist... is it helpful for you to know this??? No. It's an un-necessary psychological burden.
The key is understanding that there is explicit and implicit truth. Atheists often have more explicit truths (and value them more highly) while believers hold more implicit truths (and value them more highly).
The greatest implicit truth that religions offer is that life is a struggle, and that alignment with a tribe or nation is valuable to an individual. Atheists see religions as hypocritical because religions often assert that we are all one, or all children of god, or whatever, but then act as vehicles of war and dominance. From an evolutionary perspective this is not hypocritical. It's exactly what you would expect. This "hypocritical" reality is just an intrinsic condition of life itself.
Many sociobiologists are now making headway studying religion through this lens. E.O. Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, and David Sloan Wilson are the figureheads.
http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Cathedral-Evolution-Religion-Society/dp/0226901351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453669510&sr=8-1&keywords=darwins+cathedral