Nature on sociobiology and god

The leading weekly science journal Nature has taken it upon itself to publish a series of articles on what science has to say about being human.  The first contribution, published this week, is on religion, and I am going to quote a little from it.

First, though, here is a quote from the editorial that announced the series.  It talks about the difficulties for evolutionary scientists of:-

… being objective about a topic as philosophically, politically and ethically charged as human nature. Take the sociobiology wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Left-wing scholars rejected biological explanations for phenomena such as gender roles, religion, homosexuality and xenophobia, largely because they feared such explanations would be used to justify a continuation of existing inequalities on genetic grounds. The resulting debates became hugely political.

The combustibility of the interface between science and society is one major reason for the extraordinary fragmentation of research that tackles human behaviour. In part because of the sociobiology battle, most social scientists still steer clear of using evolutionary hypotheses. And even researchers who do work under the unifying framework of evolution tend to fall into distinct camps such as gene–culture co-evolution or human behavioural ecology — their practitioners divided by differences of opinion on, say, the relative importance of culture versus genes.

Alright, this guy - obviously an eminent science writer - can’t say that the “sociobiology wars” were really an ethnically-motivated attack on good science by Jewish race warriors.  We understand that he has to have a job to go to tomorrow morning.

But I was quite amazed that, in this genomic age, it is still necessary to call those monsters “scholars” and to portray their motives as “fear” of justifying inequalities.  Why so?  Gould and Co agitated for anti-science.  If, on the contrary, sociobiology had demonstrated some aspect of human nature in a way favourable to Jewish ethnic interests, they would have been praising it from the rooftops.  They were liars.  They were wrong.  They were divisive.  They were destructive to careers.

Can’t the editor of Nature plainly state that anti-science is not what is expected of supposed men of science?  In the very next paragraph he regrets the damage done by these creatures.  He could call for an end to fear, an end to division.  But he doesn’t.

Anyway, to move on to the piece on evolution and religion, by the memory specialist Pascal Boyer.  He has this to say:-

So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than ‘religion’ in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities.

Religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources, as do music, visual art, cuisine, politics, economic institutions and fashion. This hijacking occurs simply because religion provides some form of what psychologists would call super stimuli. Just as visual art is more symmetrical and its colours more saturated than what is generally found in nature, religious agents are highly simplified versions of absent human agents, and religious rituals are highly stylized versions of precautionary procedures. Hijacking also occurs because religions facilitate the expression of certain behaviours. This is the case for commitment to a group, which is made all the more credible when it is phrased as the acceptance of bizarre or non-obvious beliefs.

We should not try to pinpoint the unique origin of religious belief, because there is no unique domain for religion in human minds. Different cognitive systems handle representations of supernatural agents, of ritualized behaviours, of group commitment and so on, just as colour and shape are handled by different parts of the visual system. In other words, what makes a god-concept convincing is not what makes a ritual intuitively compelling or what makes a moral norm self-evident. Most modern, organized religions present themselves as a package that integrates all these disparate elements (ritual, morality, metaphysics, social identity) into one consistent doctrine and practice. But this is pure advertising. These domains remain separated in human cognition. The evidence shows that the mind has no single belief network, but myriad distinct networks that contribute to making religious claims quite natural to many people.

The findings emerging from this cognitive-evolutionary approach challenge two central tenets of most established religions. First, the notion that their particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths; second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape. On the contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

There is something of the pop psychologist about this guy.  He imputes control over the mind by products of the mind, but evidently he doesn’t ask himself about the passivity or quality of consciousness.  I await the day when someone with a doctorate in psychology will pop up and say, “Erm ... actually the thinking mind can seem captured by external stimulii like a catchy tune because ordinary waking consciousness easily devolves into mechanical mental processes.  The more mechanical processing going on, the more absent is the subject, and the closer to a sleep state.  But no matter, because consciousness is intentional, and it is even possible for a time to eliminate mechanical processing altogether.”

Another way of putting this is that if he had a theory of consciousness, Mr Boyer would find that “ritual, morality, metaphysics, social identity” were much more interesting in themselves from the psychological perspective, and the physical areas of the brain which process them much less.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 10:39 PM in Science & Technology
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