I believe that many cultural behaviors exist because there was some sort of evolutionary advantage to them. What do you guys think was the evolutionary advantage to religion and do you believe that advantage still exists? Or do you disagree with my opinion of evolution shaping culture?

I disagree with "anything" being advantage because what the hell does that mean in terms on a life species? To prolong life? Is that what you mean? To make life more comfortable? So that we are top of the food chain? Why do bother with that, didn't anyone tell you that you die at the end of it?

So my question would be advantage for what and why?

Robin I am putting you on ignore because of your tendency to shoe horn your particularly depressive perspective into threads where it's entirely unnecessary.

Good for you dereds.

You're right. I'll change that to I think a great many things are shaped by evolution.

Religion in and of itself dosnt need to provide an evolutionary advantage, provided the attributes that lead to religion beliefs provide an advantage

Do you think any of those attributes provide an advantage?

could influence behavior and leader to a larger, more connected pack mentality where in-members offer more protection/support to other members. group-oriented people produce more group-oriented people, that sort of thing

also, one could argue that religion can help one lead a happier life, which has various effects on health outcomes, which could produce more opportunities to breed and pass on a predisposition to finding happiness thru religion

or something

I'm not sure that there needs to be a specific advantage.

I think religion is more likely a by-product of having evolved consciousness.

Once we became self aware as a species, I think it is a natural step to then wonder how we got here.

Religion helps form moral codes which help species grow and exist longer

Yes, but in a rather vacuous way. All of our attributes are the product of evolution, so of course these ones are too. Just speaking in terms of "advantages" is a bit too simplistic, btw, but sure.

One can try and speak to specific things about humans that promote religious belief and try to come up with specific ways those might provide advantages. For instance, one could speak to how a rational mind that tries to assign agency as causes for events in the physical world could be useful for hunting or whatever but also lead to one trying to assign agency to the existence of the world. Most of these are sort of just so stories, but perhaps some people have decent theories i dunno.

jokerthief said he was interested in the evolutionary advantage offered by religion. That should answer all your questions: Greater reproductive success, not directly, no, no, no, irrelevant.

I was trying to establish what it is meant by evolutionary advantage. I still don't know what it means.

To say that something provides an evolutionary advantage is to say that it increases the likelihood of reproductive success for its bearers.


In this context, it means that people or groups that are religious have a greater chance of passing their genes on to later generations than those who are not religious.

so it's not an evolutionary advantage to be gay? why would that occur in humans as an evolutionary trait?

This is distracting from the main topic. Original Position defined evolutionary advantage correctly, and this isn't up for debate (you can find this same definition elsewhere if you'd like).

But since you're asking, being gay makes it less likely that you pass on your genes, yet we see homosexuality in a large variety of species. We do know that homosexuality has a genetic component. How can this be? Well, there are several theories all based on the fact that this is actually more complicated than we usually like to simplify it to. To quote wiki:

I'm not debating anything what I'm trying to understand is what is the definition of evolutionary advantage. And I agree with what you and Original Position have said. Now I am trying to understand why there would be a gay gene or gay people or whatever way you want to say it as it makes no sense to me to even have such a thing.

so if I'm understanding correctly being heterosexual with gay genes helps with the mating process but not actually in the reproductive success? How can this be?

Firstly, this is not a proven theory, AFAIK (I'm admittedly not really reading it). Secondly, he's suggesting that the genes that confer homosexuality, when present in heterosexuals (either because there are other genes lacking or environmental factors that keep this person hetero) would increase reproductive success/help with the mating process. Those are the same thing.

No mating process is not the same thing. Human mating is the process whereby an individual seeks out another individual with the intention of forming a long-term relationship.

Reproductive success is IMO just having sex with no intention (or with intention) of having a long term partner. Point here is the more times one has sex with the opposite sex to increase the reproductive success that's different from a mating process IMO.

In other words its the difference between "Oh I think of you more like a big sister I would never actually sleep with you" than "****ING DO ME AGAIN BIG BOY"

To clarify and expand on this a bit, there are two main views in evolutionary psychology of religion. Some people think that religion is an adaptation. This is the view that jokerthief is stating here--that religion provides some kind of evolutionary advantage to either specific humans or human populations.

Metsandfinsfan's claim that religion "helps form moral codes which help species grow and exist longer" is an example of this kind of view. It says that religion provides an evolutionary advantage to the religious through the formation and adherence to moral codes. Metsandfinsfans doesn't really say how religion does this, but one theory says that religious rituals act as hard-to-fake signals to other members of the religious group that you can be trusted to act cooperatively, thus increasing pro-social activities. Richard Sosis is a prominent anthropologist arguing in support of this view.

The other view says that religion is not itself adaptative, but rather is the result of cognitive processes that are themselves adaptative (this is known as the byproduct view of religion). For instance, some psychologists have claimed that it is advantageous for humans to develop the ability to over-detect agency--identifying incorrectly that a predator is nearby is less costly than not identifying correctly that a predator is nearby--and that this can lead to some of the basics of religious ideas (this pdf article is a good summary)

Agree. Darwinism can only explain things to a certain point.

Ya, nice expansion.

On Sosis' view, I think it might be somewhat hard to distinguish the sort of inherently religious part from larger social behaviour. As in, he is likely correct that having social constructs of acceptable behaviours like "don't murder" (one way of thinking of what morality is) is advantageous to groups and that having social signalling of adherence to such social constructs is advantageous to individuals. But it seems there are often both secular and religious versions of this. For instance, chivalry or bushido (the samauri equivalent)* are such constructs that presumably "helped" their corresponding societies function well, and had many things one could do to signal allegiance to the respective social codes. So I think it is fairly likely that one can view a religious moral code in a similar light, but I am not so sure I know what the "religious" part does to help this. My guess is that this advantage manifests in a variety of ways and when their is a religion in the culture it may manifest itself in a very religious way. So to be convinced I would like to see some arguments that a religious moral system was advantageous in a way that generic moral systems were not, otherwise I don't see the religious part being a principle driver. Perhaps Sosis goes into this I have no idea.

*incidentally the modern honour system in gambling can be viewed very similarly.

Dawkins wrote something about religious belief possibly being a parasitic trait that isn't in itself socially or biologically beneficial, but that spreads through strong parent/child bonds which are.

Dawkins had his genome sequenced in one of his TV shows (which I haven't seen broadcast in the US, only on Netflix), I think he might have been the first member of the public to have it done. When his results came back, there were some really interesting bits of info that help show how different behaviors and predictions etc can be based on unexpected data. One cool example was a predictor of a certain lung cancer (don't remember the details), but it wasn't due to a biological predisposition, but rather that if you were a smoker with this gene, you were more likely to smoke using long and deep inhalations, rather than shallower puffs.

Even if I got the details wrong, it does show that there are not necessarily genes "for" some specific trait or disease, but some quite unexpected and fascinating results.

The advantage is related to the prisoner's dilemma. When both "irrationally" cooperate because they are scared of God they both do better.