I mean, if you accept natural selection as the driving force behind our evolution, it's pretty damn hard to assert that religion has no use, at least evolutionarily. At the very least, religion's positive effects must match the negatives (leading to genetic drift), and since the negatives are so readily available (as you'll find whenever you get into one of these debates), it follows that there must be quite a few positives. The way I look at it is that religion likely developed in a manner similar to homosexuality. There's this theory in evolutionary biology called the "gay uncle" hypothesis that basically posits that relatively late in human evolution, when we had already formed tribes of some sort, some tribe or another happened to have (by way of mutation, crossing over, autc.) a few homosexual members. These members, since they had no children of their own, were able to contribute to the development of others' children, leading to greater success (2 parents + "gay uncle" > 2 parents) and therefore greater reproduction. So this tribe as a whole flourished, and the homosexual gene which was present in some members of the tribe with it. As I see it, there's no reason religion couldn't have developed in a similar manner. Religion encourages people to be altruistic (generally), so people were altruistic towards those in close proximity to them (other members of their tribe), leading to a greater average standing and the spread of the religious gene. So that's my purely utilitarian explanation. As to whether religion is objectively a good phenomenon? I still haven't fully developed my own opinion on that matter.
You're a little all over the place, homeslice, and while you're butting up next to some good ideas, you need to do a bit more digging around. Your analogy is pretty wonky, but it's because you have a misunderstanding of the underlying concepts. This is a bit personal, being as I am someone who works as a biologist and is queer, but homosexuality and heterosexuality are not exactly a binary, nor have they EVER been, and this doesn't exactly lend itself well to tersely-linked allele studies, which is why many of them have had some many problems with reproducibility. Sexual and romantic desire are the result of complex interactions between social and innate factors. Trying to directly tie this to a freakin gene, which may provide some preference via developmental avenues (which hasn't exactly been, you know, proven) has no deterministic tie to a complex behavior such as homosexuality, much less it's current iteration, it just provides a nice avenue for some researchers bear upon it with their field of interest and should be taken with a spoonful of salt. While some researchers do model the spread of ideas/concepts as memes in the same fashion as others study population genetics, the biggest problem is it is highly questionable how empirical you can really get. What it means to have religious belief varies wildly throughout history, and tying any moral center (including altruism) is really misstating what the nature of religion is, namely, metaphysical arguments for the intent and purpose of humanity's existence and explanations of the natural world. Or at least, that's my conception of it.
Absolutely. Looking back I realize I sort of implied that the hypothesis was widely accepted, but I understand that it remains just a hypothesis; I brought it up purely for the sake of explaining my own theory regarding the development of religion. That's fair, I guess I just intended to address the altruistic aspects of major religions. I've actually written in the past about separating religion as moral code from religion as belief about the supernatural, if you're interested I could repost it here (the subreddit where I originally posted went private).This is a bit personal, being as I am someone who works as a biologist and is queer, but homosexuality and heterosexuality are not exactly a binary, nor have they EVER been, and this doesn't exactly lend itself well to tersely-linked allele studies, which is why many of them have had some many problems with reproducibility. Sexual and romantic desire are the result of complex interactions between social and innate factors. Trying to directly tie this to a freakin gene, which may provide some preference via developmental avenues (which hasn't exactly been, you know, proven) has no deterministic tie to a complex behavior such as homosexuality, much less it's current iteration, it just provides a nice avenue for some researchers bear upon it with their field of interest and should be taken with a spoonful of salt.
What it means to have religious belief varies wildly throughout history, and tying any moral center (including altruism) is really misstating what the nature of religion is, namely, metaphysical arguments for the intent and purpose of humanity's existence and explanations of the natural world. Or at least, that's my conception of it.
Totes, there's actually a lot of hypothesis that will remain just that but are interesting thought experiments, like this paper tying schizophrenic phenotypes to shamanism. Wholly unprovable and most likely wrong, but interesting regardless. It just gets a little hairy when making some pretty seemingly secure presumptions about something as complex and personal as sexuality or religious belief. Sure, repost it here, it makes sense, but trying to parse the two is going to be quite difficult, as I think they are directly intertwined.
Fair warning, it's a bit long: I'll start with a definition of Christian Atheism. This is probably not totally accurate, but it'll serve for the purposes of this post. Essentially, my personal brand of CA holds that the Bible is relatively true, but God is just a metaphor for inherent goodness, and Jesus was either just another part of that metaphor, or part of that metaphor which was conflated with an unusually wise teacher. There are a couple other aspects like heaven being just the state of having lived a good life, but those are the basics. I find such a simple definition is useful because it allows CA to co-exist with whatever one's beliefs about the rest of Christianity are. For more on the separation of Christianity's belief system from its morality, check out Peter Rollins's description of one thing he feels the church as a whole gets wrong from his AMA here. [Note - removed link because the AMA took place in a private subreddit] OK, now that that's done, a little about the evolution of religion. I find arguments for God that claim a belief in a higher power couldn't have developed via natural selection entirely unconvincing. Morally speaking, religion is advantageous because of group selection. Basically some theories of group selection hold that while egoistic individuals outperform altruistic individuals, altruistic groups do better in the long run. As a result, groups ended up with belief systems that held altruism in high regard. For more on the debate, see the IEP's page on Altruism and Group Selection. Further, in terms of non-moral beliefs about the afterlife, religion is advantageous because, as Ernest Becker argues in his seminal work The Denial of Death, if we hadn't developed ways of dealing with our awareness of our own mortality, we would likely all go mad. So we developed systems that allowed us to deny death, including religion. While it's debatable whether we would actually all go mad if it wasn't for death-denial, it's much less controversial to claim that simply denying our death religiously (pun absolutely intended) is much less resource-intense (mentally) than coming to a place of acceptance of our death, and this is all that's necessary for death-denial to be selected. The important things to recognize here are that a.) religion as an ethical system need not be irrational just because belief in a higher power / afterlife is and b.) these two aspects of religion are independent in terms of their evolutionary benefits, and don't necessarily need to be part of the same system (i.e. religion). This is where CA comes in. In accepting the moral systems of Christianity but rejecting its (arguably irrational) beliefs in God and an afterlife, CA separates these two evolutionary aspects, allowing for (arguably) a more rational form of religion. Christianity's beliefs in God and an afterlife are irrational and make unfounded (and fundamentally unprovable) claims about the world, so it makes sense to reject them and find another way to deal with death-awareness. However, the moral/ethical system Christianity espouses is generally advantageous because it allows society to function more effectively (through loving/forgiving one another, giving to the less fortunate, etc), so there's no reason to reject the latter aspect just because the former is irrational. TL;DR Christian atheism is useful because it separates Christianity's moral/ethical system from its death-denial, two distinct evolutionarily useful aspects which happen to have been conflated into one system.Note - this post will contain my basic thoughts about Christian Atheism, the evolution of religion (i.e. via natural selection), and the connection between them. The connection between parts 1 and 2 may not be immediately evident, but stick with it and I promise it'll make sense (probably). TL;DR near the end.
I'm not sure I understand, why does someone having just one gay child preclude the effect? Evolution isn't certain of anything. It's not like a conscious entity that decides what happens, it's just the combined effect of natural selection and random genetic anomalies on a population. It's certainly possible you'd only have gay children, but the more children you have, the greater the chance that that "streak", as it were, disappears.
Are you sure about that? Minsky said Is there really anything concrete that distinguishes intelligence from evolution, other than speed? Evolution certainly acts like a languid form of intelligence. Perhaps even consciousness? </meta-tangent>Evolution isn't certain of anything. It's not like a conscious entity that decides what happens
Speed is what distinguishes intelligence
No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that–where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed
I think the distinguishing factor there is that evolution works exclusively through random chance and essentially trial-and-error, whereas intelligence generally involves the use of reason to determine what will probably be effective. But you're right, there's certainly a comparison to be made, and one could argue that intelligence just works through theoretical trial and error, making it sort of a small-scale evolution.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. What I mean is, if a father with the gene had one gay child, and then fell out a tree and died, the gay child wouldn't reproduce and the gene would die. So that gene would be more succesful if all the other genes insured pre-mature deaths didn't happen, perhaps suggesting it originated from well-off tribes.
Gayness is a cultural phenomenon, and quite a young one. It's impact on the spread of genes probably has had zero effect on the gene pool. Until recently, homosexual sex didn't preclude one from having a family. Nobody identified as "gay" until very recently in evolutionary terms, even though males have been having sex with males since long before the dawn of man. For a measurable effect on inheritance, we'll have to wait a lot longer than a handful of generations.