Evolution of the God Gene

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[Jaime from Wasilla]

From the NY Time Week in Review:

The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade

Code:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/12wade.html?_r=1

IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

Oooooh! This is going to upset some of Scarah P's base!

[daMamma]

Human beings by their very nature are creatures of curiosity.  We also have a desire or need to explain everything.  Nature, by its very nature is powerful and unpredictable.  Even for an advanced, educated mind much in nature is difficult to explain or understand.  So for primitive minds, the desire / need to explain / understand nature had to be filled somehow. 

Thus the invention of spirits or deities.  These unseen entities must control all things.  While the belief in such things can calm the soul and give comfort it does nothing to alleviate the "fear" of the unknown.  In turn, the fear of alienating or angering the spirit deity can stifle the human's natural desire for curiosity.  Thus leaving some cultures in a primitive state and stalling others for great periods of time.  It can also turn great civilizations backwards towards a more devolved position through its fear and desperate need for control.

<and that's my take on why we have religion>

[futurexpat?]

I always thought it had to be hard wired by natural selection (mini amateur in all things archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, etc.,) because it is everywhere and has been for a very long, long time in our history (read evolution).

[Jaime from Wasilla]

I just love the following sentence:

Religion evolved. 

[daMamma]

I just love the following sentence:

Religion evolved. 

can you say Oxymoron?   

[futurexpat?]

I just love the following sentence:

Religion evolved. 

can you say Oxymoron?   

 

[Sister Artemis]

I just love the following sentence:

Religion evolved. 

can you say Oxymoron?   

 

Can we get that in a bumpersticker?