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Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous? 
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Post Re: Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?
Robert Tulip wrote:
Causality in culture is too complex for us to understand, but this does not imply there are no causal determining processes in operation. These causal processes of culture are what we can call memes. I would not argue that memes are utterly fatalistic in a way that pre-ordains all decisions, rather that memes incline but do not compel our decisions. A more adaptive meme is one that has greatest potential for success in its cultural context, while its less adaptive rival will tend to die out.[/quote}
Not that I woudn't have an argument about some of what you say in the rest of this post, but just reminding you that originally the topic was the focused one of whether neo-Darwinian natural selection accounts for culture/history. Causality veers off this topic. If you are still saying that culture/history is selected naturally, then taken to its logical extreme, everything that has happened in culture and history, including the particular humans involved, has been selected. Another big need I see in this discussion is for it to take emergence into account. Emergence is currently a challenge for the scientific paradigm. But understanding how it works in is necessary if we are to ever do anything more than post-mortems of questionable value on whatever has already happened.
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In The Evolution of God, Wright uses the memetic framework of natural selection of cultural formations to explain why religion evolved from animism through polytheism to monotheism. The evolutionary advantage of belief in God is primarily memetic, with those Gods that draw together a larger and more powerful community tending to prove more resilient. The larger communities, whether in Israel, Persia or Rome, all require a divine mandate that enables their rulers to assert a sacred basis for statecraft.

Let's wait and see how this idea plays out when we get to those chapters. To me the question is whether the thread is implicit or not really there.
Sat Sep 04, 2010 12:09 pm
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