Dawkins on the Late Late Show

mathias

No more ludicrous than suggestnig our beliefs are what have madre us so successful and the dominant species on the planet it.

Definitely less ludicrous than making such a claim without backing it up with an argument to establish its credibility.

The Golden Bough , James George Frazier

bonkey

mathias wrote:

our genetic make up determines to a large extent our behaviour ,

This has never been scientifically established.

I would go further and say that for anything that is human-unique (i.e. a trait we do not share with animals), nurture is at least as strong a candidate for eplanation as nature if not moreso.

The only possible way this wouldnt be the case , was if there was a method of removing or modifying genes predisposing us to these traits , and there most definitely is not!

First, one would have to establish that it was a genetic trait. Don't get ahead of yourself.

Whether you like it or not , the DNA you have now , you have for life , nothing can change that ,your traits will be passed to your offspring for generations to come.

Genetic traits, yes. So your kids will have eye-colour derived from yours. Some of their immuno system will be derived from yours.

However, if you come from a tribe which practice the most brutal of male-dominant sexist practices, but your children are raised by foreigners in a foreign nation, then the vast vast majority of their behavioural traits will be associated with their adoptive parents and not you.

This has been both observed and tested. Jared Diamond deals with it in quite good detail in "Third Chimpanzee".

spacecoyote

Zillah wrote:

This is actually something that has erked me about Dawkins. He seems to rely on the meme theory for religious belief far more than any genetic predisposition towards religion.

From my own understanding of evolution it seem inevitable to conclude that humanity has a leaning towards religious belief as a genetic trait (social glue), and yet Dawkins seems to shun this approach entirely.

I haven't read the God Dellusion yet so I don't know if he addresses this.

i'm a bit fuzzy on the memory stakes right now, but i'm pretty sure Dawkins does address religion as an evolutionary by-product in the book.

He can be a little extreme in the book at times, but it is a very interesting read, and as early posts addressed it, i think that probable is an appropriate word. He doesn't use the word probably in the book, more so the terms probable & improbable, which are proper statistical terms and so are apt imo.

and as to other posters arguing that without religion we have no reason to have morals and might as well do as we please, Dawkins deals with this subject in the book too.

Zombrex

mathias wrote:

the "predispostion to behave" in a certain way is in your genes

That is true. You cannot "turn off" the biological systems that form your emotions and other biological systems that evolution uses to attempt to make you act a certain way in certain situations.

You can defy them.

And as bonkey has just pointed out culture plays a much more important role in deciding how these initial emotional constructs actually develop into social/cultural systems. All humans experience, say, the emotion of jealousy, but how that actually shapes behaviour in a social situation is dependent on the culture of the society and the history of cultural development. 3000 years ago stoning your wife because she slept with another man was acceptable outlet for jealousy. Today it would be totally unacceptable. The emotion is still there, but how it develops into social systems has changed completely.

Unlike most other animals human have developed a quite marvellous brain that has the ability to ignore or act in defiance of evolutionary instinct. That trait is actually what is responsible for our rise to the dominant species on the planet.

mathias wrote:

You cannot get over your genetic make up.

You can get over the instincts that these genes instill in all of us. In fact we have been doing this for tens of thousands of years.

mathias wrote:

We ( the human race ) will group together into communities with belief systems

And...?

Why do these systems need to be based around religion?

Religious superstition is simply one method that the human brain constructs to view and understand the world around it. It can, quite easily, be replaced by other better systems, as has been going on for the last 4000 years. Pretty much all the roles that religion used to provide to society have been replaced by better systems, from science to the rule of law.

bonkey

mathias wrote:

The Golden Bough , James George Frazier

Discusses the ties of modern religion to the beliefs of early cultures. It does not establish that those early cultures formed because of their beliefs.

And again...how early is early? i'm willing to bet that agriculture predates any culture discussed in the referenced work.

mathias

Why do these systems need to be based around religion?

They dont ! But I believe the reason that most are religions is the system needs to do some basic things , It needs to instill a sense of right and wrong , it also needs to instill a sense of good and evil , and it needs a system of crime and punishment and a sense of Justice.

So far , religions have done this spectacularly well. But of course you are right , it doesnt have to be a religion , a behavioural code something along the lines of confuscianism would be just as good , but religion we have and religion we are stuck with.

If it ever does come down to getting rid of religion , it will have to be replaced with a system that has the barest essentials above at least , because regardless of how much credit you want to give human nature , you know that without these at least , there would be chaos !!

mathias

Discusses the ties of modern religion to the beliefs of early cultures. It does not establish that those early cultures formed because of their beliefs.

And again...how early is early? i'm willing to bet that agriculture predates any culture discussed in the referenced work.

Now your just being pedantic , that work establishes the importance of magic and religion to all human cultures wherever there is evidence they have existed , all you can go by is evidence we have , not speculate about cultures we have no evidence of.

Anywhere there is a history , there has been a religion , as the golden bough points out , even remote tribes , wherever they have been found , have a rudimentary magical system or religion , no kind of civilisation has ever been found without one.

Show me one case where it has ?

judomick

that was seriously disturbing, the conversation between the guy talking about death darwinism was hilarious

Daniel Dennetts book Breaking the Spell deals with religion as a natural phenomenon, how it forms naturally within societies, a very good read on why religion exists

Dades

mathias wrote:

If it ever does come down to getting rid of religion , it will have to be replaced with a system that has the barest essentials above at least , because regardless of how much credit you want to give human nature , you know that without these at least , there would be chaos !!

That system already exists - it's called legislation.
It covers everything religion did cover.

Zombrex

mathias wrote:

So far , religions have done this spectacularly well. But of course you are right , it doesnt have to be a religion , a behavioural code something along the lines of confuscianism would be just as good , but religion we have and religion we are stuck with.

You are (kinda) making sense up to this point (highlighted in bold).

Why are we "stuck" with it, if as you seem to agree, it is just one cultural system that can be used.

For example, most of the things you mention are actually found in society as secular concepts, such as the law. All these systems you mention would (and do) still exist in a secular society, and in an atheist society.

So why the need of religion.

What exactly do you think religion does that cannot be done equally well in a non-religious society?

mathias

Were stuck because its now entrenched and entrenched very deeply , I believe we need a belief system , I believe there is a genetic need for us as a group to believe something ! ,
I agree that it does not necessarily have to be a god , or a religion , but once either of these is established in a society or group , its hard to remove ,except by invasion or some other large catastrophe for that society , as is evident from history !

muesli_offire

We have rationalised ourselves out of having to be slaves to that particular evolutionary control system

This is semi-compelling (the rationalisation bit), but it is also the perfect explanation for the non-evolutionary character of purification rights (which you must include in connexion with 'virginity' rights, etc.), many of which need not be classed as religious anyway.

Originally Posted By bonkey:
so on what grounds do you think our beliefs are what has made us succesful?

This is a fair question.

Consider that the oldest religious roots we can identifty goes back to maybe 6,000 BC. Thats just over 1.5% of the timespan that Homo Sapiens has been around ( approx. 500,000 years),

This is trivial and unimaginative. Why bother obsessing over the empiricals of a religious 'turn'? What do you hope to achieve?

Originally Posted By mathias:
The Golden Bough , James George Frazier

It's a good yarn, but I prefer The Lord of The Rings.

Zombrex

mathias wrote:

Were stuck because its now entrenched and entrenched very deeply , I believe we need a belief system , I believe there is a genetic need for us as a group to believe something ! ,
I agree that it does not necessarily have to be a god , or a religion , but once either of these is established in a society or group , its hard to remove ,except by invasion or some other large catastrophe for that society , as is evident from history !

But the details of these religions have actually been being removed from society for the last 500 years.

How many people for example still take the Bible, particularly the old testament, seriously? How many people believe that the world was created in 6 days?

Yes there are the fundamentalists who do actually believe that stuff, but they (thankfully) are in the small minority.

Even look at Ireland over the last 50 years, and how much of the religious dogma has been abandoned.

Zombrex

muesli_offire wrote:

This is semi-compelling (the rationalisation bit), but it is also the perfect explanation for the non-evolutionary character of purification rights (which you must include in connexion with 'virginity' rights, etc.), many of which need not be classed as religious anyway.

You are right, it is (if I understand the sentence properly, lots of big words and all )... though I'm not sure of your point?

muesli_offire wrote:

This is trivial and unimaginative. Why bother obsessing over the empiricals of a religious 'turn'? What do you hope to achieve?

I would imagine he hopes to achieve the understand in mathias that we "made it" long before we developed religion, and religion is a by-product of us making it, not something that allowed us to rise to the dominiate species on Earth.

Dades

mathias wrote:

I believe we need a belief system , I believe there is a genetic need for us as a group to believe something

I believe there is a desire in people to believe something, and that is why the majority of the world are still religious. But it's not a need that can't be overcome like you are suggesting.

muesli_offire

Originally Posted By Wicknight:
not sure of your point?

Originally Posted By Muesli_offire:
it is also the perfect explanation for the non-evolutionary character of purification rights

.

Zombrex

muesli_offire wrote:

.

Ok....

It is kinda the explination for everything humans do that isn't based on instinct, including all social and cultural phenomena. It was the "but" bit in the sentence, as if this point was some how contradicting something I had stated which confused me.

bonkey

mathias wrote:

Now your just being pedantic

I'm being accurate. Its generally considered a good trait when one is discussing issues which fall under the auspices of science.

If you see that as pedantry, then I apologise for not allowing in accuracies to slip by because I believe that the more inaccuracies you ignore, the less solid your conclusion can be.

, that work establishes the importance of magic and religion to all human cultures wherever there is evidence they have existed ,

Not so. We have information about cultures sufficient to allow us to know that they existed, but little else. Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures have been identified, but there is precious little we can say about them. Even neolithic cultures such as the Funnel Beaker culture are identifiable in many regards, but not in sufficient detail to draw conclusions about many aspects of their existence.

If you want to say that there are common religious practices evident in all identified human societies from a certain timepoint forward, then thats a completely different argument. If you wish to argue that because we've seen it as a widespread phenomenon since the Neolithic then it must have also existed in the Meso and Paleolithic periods, however, then I would suggest you are maknig a case without evidence.

You are examining the end of the timeline, and saying that traits we can identify in this time period are the reason for us having gotten there. The earliest culture that you can identify post dates our coming to dominance as a species. And yet, you are arguing that it is these beliefs that brought us there!! Its a logical non-sequitor.

all you can go by is evidence we have , not speculate about cultures we have no evidence of.

Thats pretty-much what my allegedly-pedantic objection is. You don't have evidence for the conclusion that you are making. We were the dominant species long before any evidence you may have to say that belief-structures existed....but you are concluding that these very structures led us to this dominance.

Anywhere there is a history , there has been a religion ,

So, given that we agree we cannot speculate, we can conclude that religion predates recorded history. Anything more than that is speculation unless we find a non-speculative argument....which you have yet to provide.

As a parallel, consider that anywhere there is a history, there is also agriculture (or the knowledge of agricultuer, even if not practiced on a large scale). Does this suggest that agriculture has always been there, or merely that its origins predate our history?

I would argue the latter...as I am doing with religion. That I can go further with agriculture, and say with confidence that we were already dominant as a species before agriculture only serves to strengthen my argument that it is by no means logical to associate something that is prevalent through recorded history and something that was responsible for our species coming to dominance in the first place as you have done.

as the golden bough points out , even remote tribes , wherever they have been found , have a rudimentary magical system or religion , no kind of civilisation has ever been found without one.

Frazer's conclusions are not universally held to be true.

While groundbreaking in their day, modern anthropologists do not accept the absolute truth behind the argument of "the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times".

Also, please note that your statement is confusing correlation and causation. Even if you can prove that every civilisation has a belief system or religion, you haven't established the causality that I originally questioned - that the belief system is what led us to our success. Perhaps religion / belief is an artefact of civilisation rather than being a driving force. But until someone makes a compelling, non-speculative case as to why it is one, the other, or neither, then I will argue that anyone (such as yourself) who insists that it is so is making speculative assumptions and presentnig unproven conclusions are being far more certain than they are.

Scofflaw

bonkey wrote:

Frazer's conclusions are not universally held to be true.

While groundbreaking in their day, modern anthropologists do not accept the absolute truth behind the argument of "the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times".

I think Fraser's work is now generally regarded as an "imaginative tour de force".

bonkey wrote:

Also, please note that your statement is confusing correlation and causation. Even if you can prove that every civilisation has a belief system or religion, you haven't established the causality that I originally questioned - that the belief system is what led us to our success. Perhaps religion / belief is an artefact of civilisation rather than being a driving force. But until someone makes a compelling, non-speculative case as to why it is one, the other, or neither, then I will argue that anyone (such as yourself) who insists that it is so is making speculative assumptions and presentnig unproven conclusions are being far more certain than they are.

I agree. Religion may be a side-effect of some other characteristic - and I suspect a reasonably compelling case could be made for that hypothesis.

cordially,
Scofflaw

robindch

> Religion may be a side-effect of some other characteristic

This is basically Dawkin's conclusion too. His reasoning is that the evolutionary benefits conferred by religion -- sense of belonging, assuaging of fear etc -- simply can't account for the considerable biological costs of being religious. Hence, there must be another reason and he advocates the "it's a by-product of something else" explanation in The God Delusion (TGD?).

Zillah

robindch wrote:

This is basically Dawkin's conclusion too. His reasoning is that the evolutionary benefits conferred by religion -- sense of belonging, assuaging of fear etc -- simply can't account for the considerable biological costs of being religious. Hence, there must be another reason and he advocates the "it's a by-product of something else" explanation in The God Delusion (TGD?).

That doesn't really make much sense to me. That assumes that the trait of belief/religion exists as a singular trait in isolation. Which just isn't true. You can see it across the world in non developed states that religion acts like a complex glue between many different aspects of society. Its a blend of social control backed up by Godly authority. Crime and punishment, marital rights, day to day morality, politics and education all linked up through the God nonesense. It gives a cohesive identity to it.

EDIT:

Just to be clear, I'm not saying all those things need religion, by any means, but that is the role religion has played during our species development.

5uspect

Zillah you're essentially saying the same thing as Robin. Religion exists not because it is just religion but because it was (and still is) a good social glue.

Zillah

Uh, I don't think so. He seems to be saying religion is a relatively useless (evolutionarily) trait that has piggy backed on other things.

Not quite what I was saying.

Son Goku

Isn't the standard line that religion is a by-product of the imperfection in higher primates "theory of the mind" trait?
Something like religion is a very specific and expensive modification for something which produces very little benefits relative to its cost, so I think they usually conjecture that its existence is a historical question, the formation of it possibly being due to the above "theory of the mind".

Zillah

Son Goku wrote:

Something like religion is a very specific and expensive modification for something which produces very little benefits relative to its cost

I'd be very hesistant to say that. I'd say religion would be an incredibly useful trait for primitive societies. It acts as a coordinating force for their bureacracy, gives a recognisable identity (crucial for our catagorise-happy mind set), and gives a sense of higher authority and structure to beings that could otherwise see little sense in obedience.

Aside from that, imagine the penalty of NOT being religious when others are...

Son Goku

Zillah wrote:

I'd be very hesistant to say that. I'd say religion would be an incredibly useful trait for primitive societies. It acts as a coordinating force for their bureacracy, gives a recognisable identity (crucial for our catagorise-happy mind set), and gives a sense of higher authority and structure to beings that could otherwise see little sense in obedience.

Aside from that, imagine the penalty of NOT being religious when others are...

It would be useful, in fact exceedingly so. However the cost of creating it single-handedly from the genomes that handle brain structure would be enormous with very little value during the transitional years before its completion. I think, most consider it to have arisen after we had a society (which obviously took place after we possessed theory of the mind) as the most prominent and powerful of a collection of overarching societal memes, which themselves resulted from flaws in our theory of mind. In this sense it wouldn't be an evolutionary trait at all, if it was it would be useless. It could only have arisen in the post society era of our development.

Zillah

I fail to see why a predisposition for religion couldn't have developed hand in hand with other societal traits. As soon as a human has the capacity to comprehend such a notion, why couldn't the alpha male rule by the will of the Sky-God as much as by his physical prowess?

However the cost of creating it single-handedly from the genomes that handle brain structure would be enormous with very little value during the transitional years before its completion.

To what cost are you referring to exactly?

Son Goku

Zillah wrote:

I fail to see why a predisposition for religion couldn't have developed hand in hand with other societal traits. As soon as a human has the capacity to comprehend such a notion, why couldn't the alpha male rule by the will of the Sky-God as much as by his physical prowess?

Yes, but then it wouldn't have developed literally. This alpha-male would have been the alpha-male in some pre-existent society (the existence of which would be contingent of theory of mind), then he would have said he rules by the will of the Sky God and because of several imperfections in our theory of mind nothing prevented that idea from spreading and modifying itself. In essence many doubt that religion is built into us, it arose because it was a socially successful idea whose propagation worked due to evolutionary flaws, but it doesn't have anything to do with evolution per se.

Zillah wrote:

To what cost are you referring to exactly?

The kind introduced by Dr. John Smith, University of Sussex; mostly. The ratio of quality of progeny to reduction of the number of progeny, in vague terms. There is also biological costs such as increase in metabolism, e.t.c.

Zillah

You seem to think that society is a binary phenomenon, that is to say, either existant or not. Surely society is a scale? Every lifeform has interactions with other members of its species. Bacteria make colonies, dogs form packs, and humans make nations. Surely its all the same phenomenon, just with an increasing scale of complexity?

Dave!

Lads we wanna keep this centered around Mr Dawkins, his role in Atheism, whether he's helping or hindering it, how he's performing in debates and so on... Ye'r discussion would probably warrant another thread if ye're interested!