Religion and Cognitive Adaptations of the Brain

It still seems to me this may be approached mor prosaically. I can see the virtue of the memetic analysis, but still see severe problems with it: notably, and underlying set of consumerist assumptions.That is, this model is still proceding from the assumption/assertion that people seek or accept religion. The model therefore seeks to explicate how and why religion and may be valuable to the individual.Question: WHICH individual?I think that religion can indeed provide tremendous "fitness" benefits to SOME individuals. If the religion gets your lots of wives, for example, and functions to validate the acquisition of multiple wives, then for the man validated by the religion, it is a powerful boost to the spread of your progeny. They have become de facto fitter through social formation. OTOH, if you are the individual being sacrificed on a stone block, then your capacity to pass on your genes has been severely curtailed.I repeat my question: which individual? I submit that the question wholly changes when we view religion as something *perpetrated* by people on people, rather than as a natural and emergent property of the human intellect. I submit it is only emergent and natural inasmuch as coercion and inter-human violence is also emergent and natural, and is IMO properly seen as a specific subset of dominance techniques.And incidentally, this argument I feel giuves us a better feel for the protraction of religion into this essentially secualr age. The benefits a dominator derives from their dominance are cretainly just as significant today as they were thousands of years ago.

I haven't read much about memes, so I speak under correction. As far as I can tell its not about passing on genes. The idea (meme) 'seaks' to promelgate itself and not the genes of the people who subscribe to the meme.------------------
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Actually, I don't think that's true. We are asking why religion exists at all. It wouldn't have arisen or continued without some survival benefit, not necessarily to all individuals or to any particular individual. You did address that, too, but we're certainly not trying to prove the value of religion to all individuals.Shoot, I'm a very religious person, and even I don't think religion is necessarily of value to all people.I thought Comp expressed the meme idea pretty well. I'm no expert on memes, nor on about anything covered on this board, but I thought his post expressed the focus on why religion exists, not on its value to all, or even any, individuals.

I can buy meme sets; in fact I think the whole memetic analysis has been quite useful in thinking about social systems and their characteristics.But memetics employs a viral analogy; the meme exists independantly of the host carrying the meme, and can be transmitted unconsciously. The memetic analysis is thus, it seems to me, starting from the observation that people are hosts to the religious meme and, on proceding to ask how and why this meme arises and remains viable. But as I said above, my concern here is that it is treating people as essentially passive hosts of the meme, rather than active proponents and deliberate architects of the meme.So from my perspective, this analysis is backwards - it starts from the general assumption that religiosity is a natural human property and conceptualises how or why this might occur. that work is not invalid. I only suggest that if we see the initiation of the meme as having a good probably of direct benefit to the initiator, and also see a differential benefit to be derived from the meme, then we can claim to observe a social form which exists IN ORDER to propagate the meme FOR THE BENEFIT of the propagating host. It may not be to the benefit of the people to whom that meme is disseminated.

Why does religion have to have some sort of fitness benefit, surely it can simply be a byproduct of one or more traits that do confer a fitness benefit. For instance the capacity to be shit scared by lightning and the more abstract thinking processes which allow us to anthropomorphosise among other things.

Could be. To my mind though, an explanation of religion will only be convincing if it provides some fitness benefit somewhere; otherwise, why has it not been selected out? In fact I would make the converse point: given the wide spread of religion, the fitness benefit SHOULD be easy to see.I concede it could be argued that it is accidental byproduct; I would merely find this "inelegant", not necessarily wrong.

Actually, we all do this. We all rely on past experience to enable us to predict future events. I don't know how we would be able to survive if we didn't. In fact, this is one of several arguments against supernatural or divine interference. Consider: I trust that if I look through a microscope today, because of the laws of optics my microscope will work exactly the same way tomorrow. If there were entities which could, on a whim, distort the laws of physics or change "reality", I would be completely unable to rely on my microscope. Some of the more "interventionist" cults claim precisely that. You can even see it on this board: buzzsaw for one claims that radioactive decay constants and the velocity of light in a vacuum aren't constant - that the processes we see today were radically different in the (recent) past - light moved faster and radioactive decay was orders of magnitude faster a few thousand years ago. Hence modern dating based on those constants are in error. I would say this would be what was expected IF a supernatural, interventionist deity existed.Now before you get upset, I am well aware you don't hold the YEC views on radioactive decay, etc. However, you DO believe that prayer is efficacious, and that axiomatically there is some entity that receives and answers them thus enabling your healing and other manifestations. To me the two conceptualizations are functionally equivalent (although I admit to finding yours more palatable because more subtle, I suppose): you are postulating ("believe in") the existence of a non-natural entity that is capable of manipulating physical reality in defiance of (or at least by subverting or bypassing) "natural" laws - at the very least macroscale action-at-a-distance. My microscope might NOT work the same way tomorrow if you're correct, because the relationships of cause and effect have been suborned. You're better off postulating an "unknown property of the mind" like the ESP types do - that at least presupposes a natural, albeit unknown (and thus far apparently untestable), phenomenon. Right, I understand that. That's not exactly what I meant by analysis. Since you only know your "hunch" is correct ex post facto, you might find it interesting to really examine - in a "naturalistic mode" as a thought experiment if nothing else - afterwards how your mind derived its probabilities. It might not be possible, but sometimes it is, and can be quite illuminating if so. I will say that both the bus and long drive examples are easily explanable. In the first, as you noted, you may quite easily have picked up environmental cues without being fully conscious of them. As I noted in my essay, "Perception is not a passive gathering of information, it's an active construction of a representation of what is going on around us, built from information received by our senses. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment." Sometimes we do it quite subconsciously - and sometimes those associations are erroneous.As to the second, I am quite comfortable attributing the event to pure coincidence. After all, you only had two choices, and there was a p=1.0 that you would pick one or the other. Coincidence is quite explanable - essentially random events happen all the time. Again, as I noted in my essay, correlation doesn't equate to causation. You only infer that there was a connection because you are predisposed to accept that explanation - again as I noted in my paragraph about associative memory. We all do this. The main difference is I simply recognize that I shouldn't completely trust my automatic inferences about co-occurrance and causality, because I recognize that my brain can "play tricks on me". BTW: Don't get me wrong - I am a firm "believer" in the value of intuition or hunches. However, I recognize where they come from... Heh - it is pretty basic psychology. I certainly didn't invent the concept. And yes, it is basically the distinction between inductive (probablistic) and deductive thought. Both of which have their place. If you have access to a decent library, you might find the article I referenced of interest. It isn't my intent to make you question your beliefs. I merely tried to answer the original question of "whence religion?". There is nothing to be afraid of in natural explanations for natural phenomena. If you choose to hold a spiritual belief, and it works for you, then more power to you. For me, I am quite happy with uncertainty - my last Myers-Briggs indicated an almost pathological ( ) comfort level with uncertainty. I don't require anything more... (Although another aspect of my personality - insatiable curiosity - keeps me going more than anything else. Must be a short attention span... )

I'm not sure that this is necessarily the case. I don't think memetics claims individuals are "passive" where the transmission of a meme or meme complex like religion is concerned. Both "infection" and "transmission" are generally considered to require active participation in some form. We may be exposed to a new meme, but to accept it (i.e., to use a really unfortunate analogy, "become infected"), is problematic if it conflicts with already existing memes. This is one reason why religious meme complexes are so easily transmitted - we are pre-adapted to accept them based on the "magical thinking" (or "religiosity", if you prefer) property of our brains (as outlined in my first post on this thread).It might help to think of a meme complex like religion in pop gen rather than epidemiology terms, although both analogies fall apart rather quickly. Meme complexes more or less work like suites of traits in a population: becoming fixed, drifting, being selected against, etc. Cultural selection vice natural selection.

I do see the utility in the viral metaphor... but what I meant by passive is that the propogator carries out their propogation unconsciously. So, if I sneeze I may be propagating a virus, but I am not doing so deliberately, but inadvertantly.

quote:

---

This is one reason why religious meme complexes are so easily transmitted - we are pre-adapted to accept them based on the "magical thinking" (or "religiosity", if you prefer) property of our brains (as outlined in my first post on this thread).

---

Ah but that is exactly the component of the argument I reject; I don't accept the existence of a predeliction for "magical thinking", certainly not at a biological level. I suggest that a meme complex may be imposed by direct coercion instead.Frex, I have alluded to the following work above: To Become God - Cosmology, Sacrifice and Self-Divinization in Early China - Michael J. Puett. Puett argues that there is no inherent, magical thinking, certainly not in Early China anyway. His argument is that the Chinese process initiated with an argument along the following lines:The world is apparantly chaotic or whimsical; perhaps our own dead spirits can interact with the "will-full" entities driving the wind and rain. Therefore, if we celebrate our dead and construct a heirarchy of spritis in the non-material world, perhaps those spirits can intervene with nature on our behalf.Thus, this is really an extension of the idea of domestication to a notional spirit world. This does not appear to me to be anything like "magical" thinking; barring certain underlying assumptions about the nature of the world, this is entirely logical rather than magical thought.As another comment, note the extraordinarily existentialist conclusion to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Having been frustrated in his quest for immortality, Gilgamesh bemoans his fate, death, and declares that the only true immortality lies in the memory of people.So, I have extreme doubts about a claim to our "insitnctive" attraction to "magical" thought; I donlt think that was what was going on in early human societies. What was going on was a form of primitive but rational inquiry, which later, IMO, was translated into an ideological claim that manifests as Faith.

Hello, sorry it took so long but i have finished with the paper and I'd like to point out some things that maybe I didn't make completely clear in my posts and to help people understand the argument I am trying to make. If I could I'd just cut and paste the paper on the board but I think that just wouldn't be the greatest idea . Rather I'll try to tone it down and hope it answers some questions. I am also trying to point out the adaptiveness of religion as well, from an historical perspective.For the purpose of this paper, religion is defined as a set of beliefs and patterned behaviors (rituals) in the context of myths concerned with natural and supernatural beings and forces. The myth’s move supernatural powers according to our wishes and mobilize transformations to change. They are validated by our belief systems and myth’s.It is my contention that religion or rather (the propensity for religiosity) is, like language, an evolutionary adaptation by the brain. The behavior of supernatural belief is the expression of a set of gene’s similar to that that controls our ability to communicate. The expression of that genetic adaptation is the propensity for supernatural belief’s, ritualism, and/or religiosity. Much of the argument that will be made is for the reasoning of how the gene’s for ritualistic/ religious behavior is or used to be adaptive. The danger is in dividing human ability into strict genetic factors and falling into the trap of eugenics.Religiosities’ adaptability, the reason it hasn’t been selected out, is not only because of our species young age, but also because of the benefits it still accrues. Religiosity provides outlets for reciprocal altruism for which obeying or following rules of behavior leads to a future expectancy of benefits most notably in some form of after life. In addition it also provides a sense of belonging and thus a tendency to form group cohesion/coalitions. In its attempt to place order into the world it helps humans confront everyday life stresses, grief and grievances, and maintains that sense of hope and/or security the brain needs to survive through hardships and emotional experiences. Religiosity is the manifestation of that inclination. Humans want the world to make sense and be understood.Supernaturalism: We and our ancestors use culture in order to adapt to environmental conditions and for survival. Language, with its’ partitions in the brain is most definitely genetically defined and most definitely is linked with culture. The propensity for religiosity is a manifestation of our brains attempt to reconcile its world view with reality. Ritualistic burial of the dead, sacred art forms such as earth mother/Venus figurines, specially built centers for gatherings, have been shown to be prevalent as far back at least as 50 kya and recent evidence supports ritualistic burial as far back as ca. 150 kya. Rituals such as those in religion are a way of passing along and down information, like language, generationally and a way of providing social controls. Humans are habitual creatures. Rituals are infused with habitual/ritualistic behavioralisms. Our ancestors must have had some curiosity about the world around them and what happens after death. Even though the relationship between Homo Sapiens Neaderthalensis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens seems to be one of replacement and there is little data for the gradual transformation of Neanderthals into Homo Sapiens Sapiens, they share some similarities not limited to large brain size. There is evidence of ritualistic behavior that Neanderthals observed, such as the ritual handling of the deceased and of cave bears. The burials of the deceased seem to have been intentional with various offerings and the graves covered with heavy flat stones. Cave bear remains especially the skulls were found to have been carefully arranged in caves, packed together in chests of stone or mounted on niches in the walls (Wallace, 1966: 225-7). This burial of the dead shows some form of belief in the after life, and possibly as with the arrangement of cave bear skulls an attempt to absorbing or controlling their power.Contemporaneous in time were Cro-Magnon, who were most likely ancestral to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and also shared ritualistic behaviors with Neanderthals. They also buried their dead and arranged the bodies carefully. The bodies were also sometimes buried with a red ochre paint covering their bodies along with grave offerings and personal ornaments, such as shallow cups and ornamental shells and bone remains like teeth or fish vertebrae. Again, though we can not know for sure the meaning behind the care provided for the deceased, we can infer some belief in an idea of an after life. Grave goods and ornaments appear to be for the use of the dead in an after life (Wallace, 1966:227-8).Curiosity is a hallmark of the brain and the brain strives to understand the unknown in the face of uncertainty. This concept is mentioned in Scott Atran’s book In Gods We Trust (2002), suggesting that the word of god is accepted as fact because it cannot be proven false. Thus, he states that In all cultures, supernatural agents are readily conjured up because natural selection has trip-wired cognitive schema for agency detection in the face of uncertainty (Atran, 2002: 71). Rituals are considered to function as rites of passage in people, as expressed rituals are associated with birth, puberty, marriage, and death as well as with exalted occupations and natural or social change (Pandian, 1991:167).Supernatural ideas provide an escape for the brain when faced with the unknown and tragic events. Moreover, rituals dealing with ideas of the afterlife can be seen everywhere around the world. There are societies that have elaborate rituals emphasizing dead kin members. For instance, The Konyak Nagas of the India-Burma region have a custom of placing the corpse specially built platform (near the houses) for it to decay. Food offerings are made to the corpse; on the sixth day, the skull is wrenched from the body, and the putrefying brain is removed. The cleaned skull is kept in the house, and the skull-less corpse is left on the platform to decompose. The skull is periodically given food for three years (Pandian, 1991:175). There has been found relationships between chemical and structural aspects of emotion and mental aspects. Most religious rituals address our brains not only at the level of the cortex. Burning incense or a candle, with its specific smell and light, may well evoke memories as smell reach into the limbic system. The regular pattern of liturgy with the repetition of well-known words may also appeal to deeper structures in our brains (Dress, 1996:177).Understanding the world: Our species has not had time to develop a totally rational worldview intellectually. We are a still a young species. The Belief in supernatural events, life after death, and religiosity, help to explain events that seem unexplainable, or hard to understand. It gives meaning to unexplainable events, such as why a family member died. Belief in the supernatural help relieve anxiety by displacing life crisis’s onto a supernatural being or event. Ritual may also help to relieve anxiety in preparation for dangerous activities, such as big game hunting or for moving over a relatively long distance in search of food or shelter. It functions as a way of increasing the confidence of the community participating in the rituals, reducing fear, focusing their attention on the task, and relieving anxiety in preparation for the act or acts. This is also seen when an individual prays for strength in times of great stress or pain. Rituals or prayer help motivate an individual or individuals and prepare them to execute their task with maximum efficiency. Theoretically, at least, such solitary rituals, whether conventional or bizarrely regressive, are effective in preserving the individual from disablement brought on by prolonged and excessive anxiety (Wallace 1966:234).Memory: The brain is quite capable of using ritualistic/habitual behavior as a memory aid. As a tool for passing down sequences of actions that humans believe will work in their favor or that will negate the actions of nature or other humans, ritualistic behavior is paramount. Jacob Pandian posits that ethological studies of rituals performed on animals indicate that humans are genetically able to have repetitive and stereotypic behavior in social communication (Pandian, 1991:150). Done frequently rituals become routine and routine become ingrained in the memory. Robert McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson argue that performance of religious rituals is a powerful conditioning tool. When participants perform ritual routinely, their actions become part of a script. That means, among other things, that they become habitual and automatic. Their memory for carrying out these action sequences is largely procedural (rather than declarative). They continue with the idea that participants’ knowledge of these rituals becomes implicit memory, that they retain in memory how to perform but lose some sense of what they are doing. The relative stability of many religious rituals results, at least in part, from the accurate memory that results from their frequent performance. (McCauley, Lawson, 2002: 49).Group Solidarity/ Group cohesion: The importance of group connection enable people to express their common identity in an emotionally charged environment forming strong social bonds among people who share the experiences of religious beliefs, practices and rituals. Thus, religion strengthens a person’s sense of group identity and belonging. The use of religion as a form of kin selection allows for greater group cohesion. The importance of kin selection is in defining the roles and relationships between individuals and groups. It is an integral factor in the organization of social structures.Religion is a strong force that exemplifies the need to assist others, such as the phrase of loving your neighbor as you love yourself. For example, Over time, religions have made larger societies possible, even when genetic kinship was not sufficient to sustain cooperation (Drees, 1996:212). Symbolic use of kin names, such as brother, sister or father, take a new meaning within their religious context. Through the belief that a community is made up of The People or that through a religious text can be traced lineages descendant from a single ancestral pair Adam and Eve, the group views itself as a cohesive unit sharing familial ties through implied spiritual ties.Social control: In addition, the belief in the power of the supernatural sanctions determines the level of conformity to socially prescribed behavior such as the consequences of violating the Ten Commandments. As stated myths have often been interpreted as allegories or parables that convey information about eternal truths and righteous action and function to regulate proper behavior; myths validate and prescribe right conduct (Pandian, 1991:132).Conflict Resolution: It reduces stress and frustrations that often leads to social conflict. It also uses religion as way of diffusing the anger and hostility that might otherwise be directed against the total social system. Therefore, religion serves to decrease conflict by diverting resentment away from the wider power structure and concentrating on certain religious rituals designed to protect against outside malevolence and forms a societal mechanism to minimize conflict between differing economic subgroups.Much of what was stated above deals with the adaptive behavior of religiosity. It is an attempt to show that religiosity contains behaviors which would lead to preferential reproductive success. Kin selection, reciprocal altruism, intrinsic fitness are examples of behaviors within religiosity. There have also been studies that show some of what we view as magical thinking or supernatural events are actually related to brain chemistry or brain damage.
Studies on epileptic seizures have correlated seizures with various psychoses such as circumstantiality and hyper religiosity. In a study called The Interictal Behavior Syndrome of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy., SG Waxman and N. Geschwind state that A distinct syndrome of interictal behavior changes occurs in many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These changes include alterations in sexual behavior, religiosity [my italics, bold], and a tendency toward extensive, and in some cases compulsive, writing and drawing (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...)Obviously there is a part of the brain dealing with religious/supernaturalness that is being affected. Brain damage can have the same affect on language skills. The correlation being that religion like language has its own part of the brain. One link to religiosity with brain chemistry is the idea of out of body experiences. Neurologists have recently discovered some kind of causal relationship between electrical impulses and out of body experiences. According to researchers in Switzerland who were treating a lady for epilepsy, they found that she would describe experiencing the feeling of floating above her body, as a part of her brain was stimulated with an electrode. It was only the electrode on the angular gyrus which caused the sensation and she had about 100 other electrodes implanted in her brain.Religion is just a manifestation of an adaptive strategy. The propensity for language like religion is inherent in the brain. The brain does not hold a certain language ready for use when it is born, but uses its propensity to develop its language skills to various degrees. The brains propensity for supernatural explanations and ritualistic behavior is inherent as well. This belief in a supernatural power or magical curse is hard to let go. In the absence of scientific rationalism, humans revert easily to magic and supernatural powers within themselves and about the natural surroundings. Even though these beliefs may seem to be mal-adaptive in reference to today’s technology they assist the brain in dealing with many of the anxieties of human life and allow us to form altruistic bonds through kin selection. The brain also seems to have specific portions of itself dedicated to supernatural belief.Atran, Scott. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscapes of
Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Drees, Willem., B. (1996). Religion, Science and Naturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCauley, Robert., N., & Lawson, Thomas., E. (2002). Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pandian, Jacob. (1991). Culture, Religion, and the Sacred Self: A Critical Introduction to the Anthropological Study of Religion. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Wallace, Anthony., F.C. (1966). Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House, Inc.{Shortened display form of URL, to restore page width to normal - Adminnemooseus}[This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 06-23-2003]

Hi Quetzal. I didn't know I had a reply in this thread. Sorry for bailing out on you. I wouldn't get upset. I guess either you didn't catch, out of not expecting it, or I didn't make it clear that I was conceding in advance that I couldn't make any case for the efficacy of healing prayer. Really, that was sort of my point, which was to say I don't just accept all evidence--for example, I wouldn't postulate that prayer heals and expect anyone to believe it, because my test says I don't even really trust it. However, I do think "hunches" have a lot of evidence.Basically, I've not been discussing anything beyond hunches/intuition in this thread. Actually you have to grant me a lot more difficult odds than that. I've been going to that bank the back way since June of 2000, so approximately 36 times. I've gone the short way maybe three of those times, each of the other times because I had an errand in town. This was the one time in those 36 times I thought, "I really should not go the way I'm going."I did take some probability courses in college. If I hadn't quit, I'd have been a statistics major, but I don't know how to compute the odds of that happening on a day when it would confer some benefit noticeable enough to make me attribute it to supernatural intervention. But I think I get 1/36 times whatever that probability of a noticeable benefit is as the odds of it happening.Still well within Richard Dawkins figures, who suggests that anything with more than a 1 in 6 billion chance of happening will likely happen to at least one person. I don't attribute it to chance, and I can live with you attributing to chance, but only if you give it proper odds. Surely I get at least 1/36 * 1/3 or 1:108 probabilities.It doesn't seem like we disagree on anything else, really. I just think my story deserves a better long shot than 50/50.