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Author Topic:   Can Evolution explain this? (Re: The biological evolution of religious belief)
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 6 of 91 (160717)
11-17-2004 7:50 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by jar
11-17-2004 7:16 PM


Re: Some of your assumptions may be wrong.
The changes that happen are totally random. They are not directed or moving towards some goal or solution. They chance of eyes developing in a world with no light is exactly the same as in a world with light.
eh, no, i don't think that's the case. it's not that there has to be some advantage in having eyes. there just has not be any disadvantage compared to not having eyes. this would be the case in total darkness, neither option would have any more advantage over the other.
however, a stimulating factor (such as electromagnetic radiation) would have to increase the advantages in having eyes of some sort over not having eyes, if only slightly and only in some creatures. and if being able to see is good for catching prey, then it's good for not becoming it as well, increasing the disadvantage in not having eyes. that would help, over time, to increase the percentage of things with eyes, right?
so i would not say the probability is exactly the same at all.
but i could imagine you could make the opposite case too.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 11-17-2004 07:52 PM

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 Message 3 by jar, posted 11-17-2004 7:16 PM jar has replied

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 8 of 91 (160720)
11-17-2004 7:56 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by SalineSage05
11-17-2004 5:21 PM


It is an overwhelming majority. The argument I am making is that if there is no creator(s)as some suggest then why would man even sense or long for a creator. According to evolution as I understand it this couldn't happen since there never was a creator.
you should read "the origin of conciousness in the breakdown of the bichameral mind" by julian jaynes. he suggests a very good (evolutionary) origin for belief in god. there may have been an advantage in religion. he suggests it as something like a memory device.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 9 of 91 (160721)
11-17-2004 7:57 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by jar
11-17-2004 7:55 PM


Re: Some of your assumptions may be wrong.
yes yes, agreed.
curious puzzle, this one.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 20 of 91 (160828)
11-18-2004 12:37 AM
Reply to: Message 11 by Ben!
11-17-2004 9:10 PM


My overwhelming belief is that it is derivative. No animals are religious (I'm serious! And no MANTIS jokes ), and (from what I've read AND INTERPRETED) higher cognition (< 100,000 yrs old) is much more recent than our social structure.
how do you know that no animals are religious? or that religion is related to higher cognition?
a favorite reply to my posts here is that "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" while true, i'd like the share the following anecdote.
my family has always owned cats. at one point we had as many as five, but now we only have two. they're both male, brothers actually, and one looks exactly like purpledawn's avatar. we tend to raise our cats to be outdoors cats, and so these two learned to hunt. they're tiny cats, but they take down some pretty big pigeons and crows, as well as some gigantic rats.
we toss them out at night, because they get into stuff. but when they get the impression that we're ANGRY at them, because we were yelling at them when we threw them out, sometimes they'll bring us a dead animal. or sometimes they'd do it when we did something especially nice for them too. at first, they used to just leave it, wait for us to see it, poking at it proudly. like a gift, kind of. but since we started yelling at them when they did this, they'd start eating more and more of the animal before we got to it. now we just find feathers and various distasteful organs.
but the thought occurred to me one day: are they sacrificing animals to us? i mean, we provide them with more than enough food. it's not an action motivated by hunger. and they always leave it right in front of the one door we use in the house.
i've read the early bits of the bible, and the attitude of the people to god seems to be sort of like my cats: nonchalant, sometimes bothered, sometimes loving. but when something really good or bad happens, they kill an animal in a ceremonial fashion, and eat it.
is it possible that religion actually evolved out of something more animalistic and natural than higher thought? afterall, when more abstract thoughts of god entered the hebrew religion, the sacrifices quited down, and some later biblical writing indicates that they came to think god didn't even like sacrifices...

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 Message 24 by Ben!, posted 11-18-2004 2:12 AM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 21 of 91 (160830)
11-18-2004 12:48 AM
Reply to: Message 17 by lfen
11-17-2004 11:24 PM


Re: Julian Jaynes etc
I loved that book. It was such a cross discpline tour de force full of insight but I have no idea how it could be falsified let alone proved.
herein lies the problem.
it's hypothetical, and can't really be shown to any degree of certainty. i do not think he's right per se, but probably on the right track.
If others were interested it would be great to see a thread devoted to it.
i would too, but i would likely sit out of it. i haven't had the opportunity to read the book myself (thought i've heard all about from my evangelical athiest mother). that and it makes me a little nervous, faith wise. just a little. i know i'm not crazy (in this regard anyways).
I recall understanding him to say that the gods were the way initial consciousness experienced thinking coming from the other brain hemisphere before a self image emerged that could be a reference for taking action in the world. He brilliantly explained the Illiad and prophecy.
i asked a psych prof about him once, and she explained that he was very much on the fringe of the discipline and that the data does not totally support his idea.
for instance, when we damage or sever a modern corpus collosum, we very rarely get incidents of patients with religious visions, etc. they just have problems naming things they reckognize and reckognizing things they can name, depending on which eye sees the image. there also no evidence than earlier forms of life would have such a separation in the brain.
the other problem is that jaynes is dealing with biologically modern human beings. he's talking about the equivalent of a very rapid evolutionary shift in brain development, and i just don't see it happening. societal changes, environmental changes, sure. but i don't think brain anatomy has been altered that much in the last 5000 years.
i could be wrong of course, and i won't by any means stake anything on these claims. as i said, not an area where i am well educated.
however, it seems to me that the best way to cause religious visions in the modern brain is temporal lobe damage.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 32 of 91 (161188)
11-18-2004 4:23 PM
Reply to: Message 24 by Ben!
11-18-2004 2:12 AM


well, like I said in an earlier post, this aspect of evolution (the one where we wildly speculate about something) is so unscientific, anecdotal information is as good as any.
well, no, see that's just a hypothesis. it's supported by information. i haven't done any scientific study, collected real data, or done tests. it's an idea.
and besides, it's an idea relating to psychology. if creationists really wanted to take down a branch of science, they could probably do psych pretty easily, along with sociology. neither is a science, per se. with psych you can do double blind tests, but you can never actually get into the mind of the subject to know for sure.
i will never know if my cats worship me as a god.
Personally, I, like many others, think of religion stemming from a need to explain. This view of religion is certainly based on higher-level cognition.
this is a rather common view of religion. and there's a lot in the bible to support it. much of genesis and exodus is composed of individually framed stories which end in "and this is why... " etc. genesis 2 is a prime example, the whole story explain why people get married.
however, if we look at that for long enough, we realize that person who wrote to explain why people get married lived in a time when people already were getting married. seems like a rather small logical step, i know, but let me phrase it like this: the reasons are built on top of already existing conventions and religious rites.
for instance, in the exodus story, we are told why the people of israel observe passover, and slaughter a lamb, and why they hold a feast of unlevened bread. but they must have been already doing this at the time story was devised to explain it. the rituals themselves show other origins: fertility and harvest festivals.
But that doesn't necessarily explain its roots; maybe that's simply how it is used now.
yes, i think it actually makes more sense that although OUR forms of religion are higher-level functions and explanatory, it's rooted in lower-level, primitive beliefs.
Still, in order to attribute religion to your cats, I think you have to give them some mental apparatus (such as intentional states [that they want to do something] and a theory of mind [that doing this thing will make you happy]) that I'm not really prepared to do.
well, i doubt my cats are religious in all actuality. i was just suggesting that religion comes from similar practices. i'm not an abstract god to them, i'm a very real being. but if you've every owned cats, you know that some of them certainly have higher-level brain functions.
Of course, what you've said is possible. And it's also possible that it is just perception due to our tendency to 'personalize' pretty much anything--from cats to robots to clouds. We seem to naturally attribute intentional states to anything.
also true. but i don't think that's what i'm doing.
If we really wanted to discuss it, I think we'd have to get an agreement of what is religion.
well i'm not really trying to quibble about that, i'm just arguing that possibly it was a gradual onset from more animalistic practices.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 33 of 91 (161192)
11-18-2004 4:29 PM
Reply to: Message 29 by contracycle
11-18-2004 6:51 AM


Arachnophilia, here is a sort of counter to the idea that your cats are sacrificing to you. Dogs do this too, and dogs are pack animals - admittedly, cats less so. So it may be that they are wired to bring some of the prey back to the pack, or back to the pack leader.
this is a good point as well.
but look at levitical sacrifice practices, and the purpose they hold. the levites eat the sacrifices, except for under very specific circumstances. it's so that the levites can work at something else (religion) and not have to tend sheep, or hunt.
basically, sacrifices ARE bringing some prey back to the rest of the pack. i'm just suggesting that religious reasons were put on top of existing practices.
the rest of your post is also very interesting, and i agree. that's more or less exactly what i'm getting at. religion makes perfect evolutionary sense.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 34 of 91 (161197)
11-18-2004 4:33 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Dr Jack
11-18-2004 6:54 AM


The probable explanation for cats returning food to you is that they are trying to teach you to hunt. The behaviour of a cat bringing you live or dead prey is very similar to the behaviour of a mother cat bringing her kittens practice prey.
so you're saying that basically the cats think they're superior to us?
...i guess that makes sense, actually.
but i think they are perfectly well aware that we don't need to hunt, and we are not going hungry. afterall, we feed them in abundance. the behaviour itself doesn't seem to be related to food at all, though it may be the result of hard-wiring for bringing something back, as contracycle suggested.

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 Message 48 by nator, posted 12-13-2004 8:44 PM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 49 of 91 (168371)
12-15-2004 1:16 AM
Reply to: Message 48 by nator
12-13-2004 8:44 PM


yes, a good point. hadn't really thought of it that way.
i don't think it goes against what i'm saying though. they also do not need to hunt (we feed them). so fun, instinct, whatever, i think it's practices like this that probably originate religion.

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