(no subject)

[theweaselking]

"The God Fossil" - researchers show that consistently, across cultures, belief in life after death is a trait children are mroe likely to have the younger they are. They're attempting to prove that religion is, in fact, a product of the evolution of the human brain.

It's interesting stuff.

Comments

[jerril]

On the other hand, how do you distinguish between a child who believes in "life after death" and a child who doesn't realize "death" isn't just a passing sickness/status ailment?

The afterlife seems to me to be very different from expecting your dead cat/gerbil/grandpa to come back in a week.

[aberrantangels]

The afterlife seems to me to be very different from expecting your dead cat/gerbil/grandpa to come back in a week.

Not exactly what I was thinking, but close enough. On the other hand, the article says (and gives some examples) that "The same pattern repeated throughout the experiment and over different groups of children — younger kids understood the physical reality of death [italics mine] but were more apt to believe that sensory perceptions and feelings existed after life ceased."

And when the fuck did Stephen Jay Gould say that there's nothing wrong with simultaneously believing in the literal truth of the Genesis account(s) and believing in the Burgess Shale account? If he actually did, someone needs to dig up his corpse and do terrible things to it on purpose.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

He never said it was literally compatible.

He said that there's nothing stopping you from taking evolution and saying "And God Did It", and taking Genesis as a metaphorical account, it's jsut that science doesn't support it.

Or, at least, I assume he said that, since as I recall he wasn't an idiot.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Little kids also believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy, did they have a point?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: That belief in the supernatural is inherent to childhood.
#2: That childhood belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage.
#3: That, thus, evolution has selected for belief in the supernatural, and hence the belief in the supernatural is itself a product of nature.

They've got a lot of work to do to prove those, obviously, but I think that's the thrust of their argument and hence the target of their research.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Belief in all kinds of stupid shit is inherent to being young and ignorant. Some of them get older, but never get less ignorant, it would seem.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes, but they're trying to study WHY believing all kinds of stupid shit is inherent to being young.

Grad students have gotta do something.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I usually refer to it as gullibility born of a lack of experience and knowledge, but what the fuck do I know?

This passed the line into stupid territory, and didn't even slow down to look at it.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered if religion was a sort of modeling process, though that might be my constructivist side speaking.

Bjorklund's name sounds familiar, though I can't think where I might have encountered him before. Will have to look for their study.

[gothpanda.livejournal.com]

The fact that religion, or belief in the supernatural, is so wide-spread in humans suggests that it must be an evolutionary advantage in the same way that music is one.

There is the possibility, however, that belief in the supernatural is simply a bi-product of our huge brains, which simultaneously are curious about the entire world and everything in it, but are unable to hold all the available information (think about creationists--they simply cannot accept evidence that the earth is billions of years old, in large part because our minds simply cannot grasp "billions" of anything). Or, perhaps, we developed the ability to excuse things we couldn't immediately explain because otherwise we would be overwhelmed--so it's sort of a coping mechanism.

At any rate, religion is very likely related to evolution, just like most phenomenon that are observed cross-culturally.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Some magical thinking definitely seems to be an attempt at pattern-matching while lacking the necessary evidence to come up with a correct understanding. I recently did a research project on cunning folk (folk healers, curse breakers, and the like in the British Isles) and a lot of the extant examples of their spells and procedures demonstrate this kind of thinking. Even when there was a theoretical basis for what they were doing, they often didn't know what it was.

By and large, these weren't stupid people (though a lot of them were quite obviously con artists), but they lived in a time and place when the state of human knowledge was a lot less advanced that it is now.

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

Some magical thinking definitely seems to be an attempt at pattern-matching while lacking the necessary evidence to come up with a correct understanding.

Makes sense. It's not like they had quantum physics avaible back in those days.

[gothpanda.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Sounds like an interesting research project.

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

I'm skeptical about it being an advantage. More likely an accidental by-product of animal psychology (which isn't exactly what you'd call based on rationalism), in my opinion. Not every evolutionary trait in every organism came into being simply because it's advantagious.

[gothpanda.livejournal.com]

This is true. It is very possible that it could be an evolutionary bi-product of our need to classify and explain everything, without the resources to do so (mentally or otherwise). I'm inclined to say that, although belief in the supernatural was probably not an advantage in the evolutionary environment, religion probably was, so the ability to believe in the supernatural may have been inadvertantly selected for.

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

But that disbelief would falter in moments of intense pain. "If you were to ask her why this illness happened," Bering says now, five years later, "she wouldn't talk about a god. But nevertheless, when she was suffering..." he trails off.

The power of wishful thinking? It couldn't possibly!

If I were in her situation, I'd be hoping for a miracle too. There aren't any mysteries here, long and painful deaths are a bitch.