On 01 Apr 2017, at 16:09, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Am 01.04.2017 um 10:45 schrieb Russell Standish:
Maybe we can think along the lines of why the "gay gene" persists.
Gay people make attentive uncles, improving the fitness of their
near relatives, or so the "just-so" story goes.
Maybe atheists are freer thinkers, able to think outside the box to
come up with solutions to important social problems. But presumably
society doesn't want too many free-thinkers, limiting the number of
atheists in society. Something like that.
Though how to explain that atheism in practice is probably the
dominant "religion" in Australia. And even more so amongst young
people, it appears. My son, who went to a nominally christian
school, said he only knew of two overtly christian boys amongst the
180-odd in his cohort.
Food for thought.
Yes, in the paper there are different hypotheses to explain
evolutionary advantages for atheists. I especially like:
If atheism is "absence of belief" in God, you don't need evolution to
explain it. Stones are born atheists. You don't need complex neural
nets to not believe in something, zero neurons is already enough.
If atheism is "belief in no God", then it is ambiguous, given that
"God" is almost by definition, a very vague term. At the start it
meant "reason of our existence", and it started the research.
Its fairy-tale "official" personification has been based on humans
interested in exploiting the fears and credulity of others, which
indeed can be explained partially by evolution.
7. Catalyst
Presence of atheists facilitates adaptive advantages of belief
OK, in the large sense of atheist, because this is recognition of
ignorance. But this is not just evolution: all machine get it soon or
later. Evolution has just sped-up the mammals recognition of their
ignorance. Löbianity, that is self-refential correctness and
elementary reasoning ability (with induction) confer a tremendous
advantage, indeed. Unfortunately, once Löbian, you get also the
ability to lie, and lying has some evolutionnary advantage, and truth
remains what most people fears the most.
"The presence of atheists may indirectly improve the fitness of
believers by catalyzing their beneficial interactions."
"atheists might, on the contrary, increase the benefits of religion
to the group."
"This hypothesis is already implicit in some existing evolutionary
theories of religion, which postulate advantages for believers that
depend on the co-existence of other individuals with different
beliefs."
Well, in Johnson's paper there are no mathematical models. To this
end, see
Robert Rowthorn, Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance
model, Proc. R. Soc. B 2011 278 2519-2527.
Of course such analysis seems to neglect the very content of the
spiritual experiences, and its relation to Reality. here I sort of
agree that theology is anti-biological. We would be born with the
spiritual truth, we might not evolve at all. It would be like spoiling
a thriller movie. A part of theology has to remain secret, for logical
reason. That is part axiomatized by the G* minus G logics and their
intensional variants.
Bruno
Evgenii
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