Re: Is there a religion gene?


"Christopher A. Lee" <calee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit dans le message de news:
ritkq4dvoqacck6viqnogq6mnrcsmvm3lc@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 1 Mar 2009 10:25:43 -0000, "Davy" <yelzab9@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Article in last week's Observer by Colin Blakemore

This canard comes up regularly in the newsgroups.

The answer is "no". As shown by the number of atheists here who were
never taught to be theist.

What there is, is the propensity to absorb programming from those
around us in childhood.

Just to take that a little further, there's a little more to it than
nurture, or the memetic effect, if you go along with the theory advanced by
the likes of Dawkins that religion is "an accidental by-product - a
misfiring of something useful". In that respect there are evolutionary
origins to the process.

Not that this implies that it has any useful Darwinian survival value. Just
that there's an underlying psychological propensity, genetically programmed,
potentially useful in other circumstances, that manifests itself in a
certain way. In this case, a propensity to believe in whatever we are taught
by those we are programmed to respect, parents, elders, etc.

So wondering why 100% of a group of religious fundies in a close-knit
community fervently believe, shouldn't make you wonder about the possibility
of there being a specific 'god gene', any more than studying moths at night
in the vicinity of a candle and/or street light should make you wonder if
they possess a 'suicide by repeatedly banging into street light' gene or
'suicide by self-immolation' gene.

Dawkins also draws an IT parallel:

"It is their unquestioning obedience that makes computers vulnerable to
infection by viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says,
"Copy me to every name in any address list that you find on this hard disk"
will simply be obeyed, and then obeyed again by the other computers to which
it is sent, in exponential expansion. It is impossible to design a computer
which is usefully obedient and at the same time immune to infection.

If I have done my softening up work well, you will already have completed
the argument about child brains and religion. Natural selection builds child
brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders
tell them. And this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to
infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains need
to trust parents, and trust elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An
automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good
advice from bad. The child cannot tell that "If you swim in the river you'll
be eaten by crocodiles" is good advice but "If you don't sacrifice a goat at
the time of the full moon, the crops will fail" is bad advice. They both
sound the same. They are both advice from a trusted source, both delivered
with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience.

The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about
morality, and about human nature. And, of course, when the child grows up
and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her
own children, using the same impressive gravitas of manner...."

http://richarddawkins.net/article,124,What-use-is-Religion-Part-2,Richard-Dawkins

Some of us throw off that programming more easily than others, some as CAL
suggest are fortunate not to be brainwashed in the first place and have
nothing to throw off.

pg


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