A. Question: Why is There Religion? Answer: Religion is a Specialized Tool for Species Survival and Perpetuation of the Human Gene Pool
"'The God Spot Revisited: Spirituality as Evolved Brain'
by Nigel Barber
20 August 2012
"[There is] . . . importance [in] findings suggesting that spiritual experiences have a brain basis. . . . [A]n evolved capacity for self-transcendence fits in well with what we know about the evolutionary role and function of religion.
"The Evolution of Religion
"Religious beliefs and rituals are found in every society studied by anthropologists. This implies that religious/spiritual experience is a universal characteristic of human beings just as the capacity to see in color is.
"Religion could not have evolved and could not have affected the lives of the majority of the world's human inhabitants if it had not helped them to solve the problems of surviving adversity and of raising children successfully who would propagate their supernatural belief systems after they had died.
"So it makes sense that the brain might be specialized for religious experiences. Indeed, an evolutionary perspective on religion implies that humans are inherently susceptible to religious views.
This view is bolstered by evidence that spiritual experiences (including religious experiences) have a neural basis. Although there is no single 'God spot' in the brain, feelings of self-transcendence are associated with reduced electrical activity in the right parietal lobe, a structure located above the right ear.
"Self-transcendence, or a sense of the otherworldly, is the opposite of being self-focused and is a convenient definition of spirituality and/or religious sensibility used by researchers. This perception is generated by many experiences in addition to religion, including brain trauma, drug states and epileptic seizures.
"Spiritual experiences use many different parts of the brain: the God spot is functional rather than anatomical. So what are the likely benefits of having such neural mechanisms for spiritual experiences?
"So what is the God spot used for?
". . . [A] primary function of religious beliefs and rituals is as a form of emotion-focused coping with the difficulties of life. It functions rather like the security blanket that a small child employs to soothe itself when distressed.
"The security blanket concept of religion has a lot going for it. It explains why people pray during a crisis, and why people living in the most miserable places on earth are universally religious. On the other hand, in societies that experience a good quality of life, religion loses its importance, and atheism breaks out. This is what is happening in the social democracies of the world from Sweden to Japan.
"Such 'comfortable' modern societies are an anomaly, of course. Prior to the emergence of such uniquely favorable conditions, life was always full of difficulties. That is why religion is a human universal. It is also the reason that our religious sensibilities are served by specialized functions of the brain. These snap us out of the self-absorption otherwise induced by misery and produce self-transcendence or a feeling of other worldliness.
"This is not exactly a God spot because it is neither localized as a spot, nor peculiar to experiences related to a deity. Yet it adds a dimension to our understanding of religious experience and explains why even people in secular countries remain deeply spiritual."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-barber/the-god-spot-revisited-spirituality-as-evolved-brain-function_b_1779667.html_____
B. Question: How Has Religion Come to Be? Answer: Religion Has Emerged in Human Society through the Processes of Evolutionary Adaptation
"How Do We Explain The Evolution Of Religion?
by Barbara J. King
18 April2014
"Religion is a cross-cultural universal, even though not every human being professes faith in God or some other supernatural being. Those of us who are atheist or agnostic make up 6 percent of the American population. A further 14 percent say they are not affiliated with any particular religion.
"But religiosity is found in every human culture and biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists keenly debate how it arose. Just like language, technology and bipedalism, religion too evolved over time. But how did that happen?
"In a new paper published online in the journal 'Animal Behaviour'
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347214000980 ], biologists Bernard Crespi and Kyle Summers ask a specific version of this question:
"'How did religion actually originate and evolve, step by small step, with Darwinian continuity and explicable selective pressures mediating each stage?'
"The answer Crespi and Summers favor is grounded in kin selection theory, as posited in 1964 by W.D. Hamilton. Kin selection turns on the concept of inclusive fitness, the idea that an organism's biological fitness derives not only from the direct production of offspring, but also from aiding the reproduction of its other relatives.
"Copies of some percentage of our genes reside in our relatives' bodies: 50% for our parents, children and sibs, 25% for grandparents, and so on. When, under certain conditions, we help our relatives, we may boost our own genetic legacy. ( You can read up on kin selection and inclusive fitness in the 'Encyclopedia of Ecology,' at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=6IQY8Uh1aA0C&pg=PA2058&lpg=PA2058&dq=kin+selection+theory+%2B+encyclopedia&source=bl&ots=sGcCi7ghcn&sig=IIS9IDPZnefm3rnmTDTtzlu-Ocw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eERMU5uEH6W58AGuqIDIDA&ved=0CG0Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=kin%20selection%20theory%20%2B%20encyclopedia&f=false )
"Crespi and Summers' hypothesis is this:
"'Religion and the concept of God originated and are maintained in the context of maximizing inclusive fitness through serving the interests of one's circle of kin and one's larger-scale social and cultural groups.'
"In other words, serving God and serving the 'circle' of people to whom one is psychologically (and sometimes genetically) tied becomes, in Crespi and Summers' formulation, synonymous.
"Crespi and Summers define religion as 'a sociocultural belief and behavior system involving both supernatural ideas and morality.' Definitions of institutions as complex as religiosity are always arguable; I'd have preferred a more explicit emphasis on practice, on specifically what people do. In fact I think Crespi and Summers do, as they lay out their hypothesis, rely heavily on practice rather than only beliefs, more so than their definition suggests. We see this in the initial stage of their proposed evolutionary trajectory, which focuses on the biological family:
"'Grandparents and parents should seek to inculcate prosocial, mutualistic and altruistic behavior among their descendants, over whom they exert pervasive psychological influences during early child development.'
The grandparents and parents themselves would directly benefit from this transmission of values — that is, from the practices resulting from such transmission — Crespi and Summers note.
"Over time, the 'circle of kin' expands to include more and more non-relatives, as within-group ties are strengthened by shared practices and beliefs. A key step in this process involves the onset of belief in the supernatural, which Crespi and Summers see as beginning when the influence of the ancestors was felt in the group even after their death:
"'Initially it was ancestors who apparently became the first supernatural agents and gods: they were absent, of human form, morally powerful, immutable, and mysterious yet comforting by virtue of warm, supportive bonds of kinship. Religious rituals focused on ancestors also necessarily strengthen kinship links and foster cooperation more generally ... . Ancestors, and other kinship figure gods, may serve to unify groups through psychological kinship at increasingly higher levels as human populations increase.'
"While this hypothesis is rooted in cooperation, it doesn't ignore competition — especially between groups. Competition of this nature may be driven by differences in religious ideology, as we see all too readily in the modern world. Religion, the authors recognize, 'generates new conflicts as well as suppressing previous ones.'
"Crespi and Summers offer more nuance in their evolutionary thinking than I can convey here and some of their thinking I just don't buy.
"They are quite taken with a significant role for oxytocin in priming religious tendencies, to take but one example. As the science writer Ed Yong has noted, wild claims for oxytocin are not uncommon. [
https://storify.com/RFelt/schmoxytocin-with-ed-yong?utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&awesm=sfy.co_d0lt&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter ] But far from being the hormone of love and cooperation as often advertised, oxytocin works in ways heavily dependent on context. In certain situations, oxytocin is associated with greater dishonesty, as Yong reports. [
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39595/title/Oxytocin-Boosts-Dishonesty / ]
"When, seven years ago, my book /Evolving God' was published and I gave interviews based on it such as this one at 'Salon,' [
http://www.salon.com/2007/01/31/king_38/ ] grappled with the same basic questions that preoccupy Crespi and Summers. I went in a different direction by emphasizing that human religiosity was primed by the meaning-making, imagination, empathy and rule-following of other primates (primates with whom we shared a common ancestor in the past, or those common ancestors themselves). Religious imagination flowered later, in the hominin lineage, as our brains were increasingly selected over time to think beyond the here-and-now.
"My framework back then focused more on preconditions for human religiosity than Crespi and Summers' does, and also on attempting to pinpoint the roots of religion in the archaeologically visible behavior of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. But I see the two core sets of ideas as basically complementary.
"Crespi and Summers' hypothesis invites thought — about the relative roles of cooperation and competition, and the intergenerational transfer of practices as well as ideas — in the growing literature on the evolution of religion.
"While we work to explain the evolution of religion, another question arises: How do we explain the equally pervasive and persistent existence of atheism? I wonder what research is being done to explain this phenomenon."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/04/18/304156771/how-do-we-explain-the-evolution-of-religion*****
Related RfM thread:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1564277Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2015 09:52PM by steve benson.