Is Evolution Responsible for Religion?

Posted by Chris Jensen | May. 27, 2008 06:17AM PST | 271 views | 0 comments

FILED UNDER: News. Science, Tech.

James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, has written a computer program called Evogod that attempts to answer this fundamental question: How did religion evolve? The question in and of itself is sure to irritate many, but for those of us who lack religious thoughts, it's a very important query.

From the Abstract:

Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.

Be sure to read the full report, as it is chock-full of interesting insight, not the least of which is that non-believers in religious thought have actually helped religion flourish.

(Source: James Dow)

Tags god, evolution