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Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

#88: Sept. - Oct. 2010 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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I recommend the review that geo pointed us to (see above). It's very comprehensive and excellent criticism. It appears from the later chapters of the book that Robert Wright might be a materialist searching or longing for something more.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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DWill wrote:I recommend the review that geo pointed us to (see above). It's very comprehensive and excellent criticism. It appears from the later chapters of the book that Robert Wright might be a materialist searching or longing for something more.
I think your guess about Wright is correct. If you listen to or watch the interview I post that he did with Christa Tippet that is what he seems to be saying about himself. BTW the interview is quite good.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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I hope this post fits here. As I've begun to read The Evolution of God two other people’s ideas came to mind. The first is Riane Eisler, she is described as a cultural historian and an evolutionary theorist. Her main work is the book The Chalice and The Blade in which she puts forth her idea that societies can be categorized in one of two ways Dominator or Partnership culture. Eisler says that these categorizations explain/describe better how all of the parts (institutions, beliefs, morays, etc.) of a culture work and fit together. How this connects, at least in my mind, to Wright is that he is saying that the development of the concept of God (I am referring specifically to the fluctuating degree of tolerance or "mood" of God at any particular time in history -- angry and punitive or loving and forgiving) has been influenced over time by how the folks on the ground viewed other groups with whom they have contact. If they see advantage to getting along (forgive my simplification) then the other group's religion (god) is tolerated. However, if seen as a threat or of no value then the other group's religion is denounced as invalid. This seems a bit like Eisler's idea of partnership and domination.

The second person is Jane McGonigal. She directs game R&D at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit forecasting firm. I watched her online do a TEDtalk. She is using the non zero-sum idea in her talk. After reading the first chapter of The Evolution of God, I wondered if she was familiar with Wright -- I think she must be.
Here is a link to her talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal ... world.html

While looking for Jane McGonigal I found Wright's TEDtalk -- The Evolution of Compassion:
http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_wright_ ... ssion.html

edit in:
I almost forgot -- the point. All three, Wright, McGonigal and Eisler have in common is similar vision of what would solve or maybe it is better to say, what is needed to solve the problems in the world today and all three say it is already part of our repertoire of basic human behaviors.
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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An assumption in Wright's book is the common one that culture, which includes religion, should be seen as evolving in a manner similar to that of the animal and plant kingdoms. Having this basic frame for culture gets us out of the mindset that most adherents to faiths would have, that their religion emerged de novo and doesn't owe anything to ancestry. There are different views on just how far to go with the analogy between physical and cultural evolution. Is it more than an analogy in fact? I've argued before that it's really not more. Wright makes a claim that needs to be understood as analogy but not equivalence. He writes, "These interpretive divergences [i.e., variations in primitive theology] form the raw material of cultural evolution, just as biological mutations create the diverse traits that feed genetic evolution" (p. 18). Biological mutations are understood to be totally random in occurrence, while changes worked on cultural materials result from at least some degree of intent and direction by people. I would agree, though, that each process is similar in that it's completely unpredictable where it will lead.
Last edited by DWill on Wed Aug 25, 2010 7:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Mutation is random but natural selection is directional, towards increased complexity. There is a 'window of evolution', a set of possible mutations that can survive in competition with the existing genome. Worse mutations generally die, so the only incremental changes are those that cause the species to continually evolve through cumulative adaptation. This model of natural selection applies equally to genes and memes. Evolutionary progress based on precedent is a universal process of incremental change, with the long incremental stable periods punctuated by the occasional catastrophe. Evolution is not 'totally unpredictable'; if you put fish in a dark cave for many generations their eyesight will get worse.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Robert Tulip wrote:Mutation is random but natural selection is directional, towards increased complexity.
I am not so sure about natural selection as directional toward increased complexity. I think the only direction to natural selection is toward what ever increases survival rate of the most and healthiest young. Increasing complexity is not always the end result of the evolutionary process. The change in color of a moth is not a change toward complexity. In fact, I suspect that complexity is risky for organisms.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Saffron wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Mutation is random but natural selection is directional, towards increased complexity.
I am not so sure about natural selection as directional toward increased complexity. I think the only direction to natural selection is toward what ever increases survival rate of the most and healthiest young. Increasing complexity is not always the end result of the evolutionary process. The change in color of a moth is not a change toward complexity. In fact, I suspect that complexity is risky for organisms.
The overall direction of evolution from microbes to humans has seen a steady punctuated increase in complexity of life on earth. Camouflaged moths are more complex than uncamouflaged moths because a feature of their environment has inserted itself into the genome through selective pressure. Yes, complexity can be risky when an isolated ecosystem evolves into high stable complexity such as a rainforest and is then vulnerable to depredation by external factors. However, other things being equal, such as stability of predation and climate, natural living systems do gradually tend to become more complex, containing more varied organisms that are more sensitively attuned to the signals of nature.

Wright describes a steady increase in the complexity of religious thought from animism to polytheism to monotheism. In one sense, monotheism may seem simpler than polytheism because it has just one God instead of many. However, this reading masks an actual increase in complexity, with monotheism subsuming the earlier beliefs into a new synthesis with greater apparent explanatory power.

Where complexity does reduce is with a breakdown of the complex system, as occurred at the ends of geological periods such as the Permian and the Cretaceous. However, these catastrophes are the exception rather than the rule, punctuation marks in the long sentences of evolutionary grammar. Most of the time things are getting more complex.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Thanks y'all for this fantastic discussion.

I was wondering about this complexity question myself. I know many organisms start to resemble a sort of patchwork amalgamation of traits that lead to better compatibility with their environment, but maybe aren't necessarily more complex. Sometimes an organism starts down a certain path it gets stuck with some of the design elements, even if those elements are no longer quite optimal for their survival. But other traits emerge which compensate for the less-than-optimal structure. Look at the flounder with its eyes on its side. It's kind of a mess, but it does the job.

I think the answer is that natural selection doesn't necessarily move towards greater complexity but towards an enhanced ability to adapt to differing environmental conditions. The brown bear, for example, when it became geographically isolated in a colder environment, had built-in adaptive traits that were expressed in the colder climate. In a relatively short period of time, 20,000 years, it developed white fur and its molar teeth changed substantially so that the bear--now a polar bear--could survive in this colder world it now inhabits.

This web site explains this concept pretty well.

An excerpt:
Evolution is the time-cost advantage gained through the discovery of state-space paths that account for a greater number of possible states in that space. The emergence of the ability to innovate is the crux of evolution.

Just as entropy implies the dispersal of energy, evolution implies an increase in diversity as a greater number of possible states are occupied or accounted for. This increase in diversity is the essence of evolution. Increased diversity may mean increased complexity, but diversity and complexity are not the same.
http://www.sklatch.net/what-is-life/complexity.html
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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My son-in-law, who is an archaeologist, came home today with this comment from a professor/colleague: in the cradle of civilisation, it was necessary to man to be smaller (nutrional economy) run faster and have skin that was not sensitive to the sun and environment, but as he left and moved on, these physical attributes were no longer as vitally necessary, especially in what is now Europe. The focus turned to tools and using the mind.
A rather simplistic, in-a-nutshell comment, but it does have something.
Gods and spirits are parasitic--Pascal Boyer

Religion is the only force in the world that lets a person have his prejudice or hatred and feel good about it --S C Hitchcock

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. --André Gide

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. --Julian Barnes
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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I hope no one will mind if I suggest that this fine discussion of physical vs. cultural evolution, or the directionality (if any) of evolution be moved to "the parking lot." Sometimes the best conversations end up out there. It might help us to focus on Wright's chapter if we do this whenever we've got onto something that we might not be relating closely to the material. Thanks.

Did anybody find something regarding morality that Wright omitted from his overview? He tells us that in the religion of primitive cultures, there is generally no need for a god to as the source of moral precepts. The society incorporates the rules regarding moral behavior as a matter of course, in order to continue as a functioning social group. So the message is that morality needs no boost from gods, who in any event, judging by their antics, show no interest in moral behavior.

But Wright doesn't mention an area that we would consider important, and that is whether specific cultural practices are moral by our standards. Here I'd be referring to such things as human sacrifice, infanticide, methods of capital punishment, treatment of women, and others. What makes a society work and continue does not necessarily make it a moral one. I'm not saying that such practices are always hallmarks of basic cultures, but surely they sometimes are. These practices are already within the moral circle of the group, so how does it work that those customs become unacceptable over time? It wouldn't seem to be a matter of expanding the moral circle to others outside the group, but of reforming the existing culture.
Last edited by DWill on Thu Aug 26, 2010 9:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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