And speaking of evolution and religion... "According to Nicholas Wade (How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures) religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.
Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene..."
What does he mean, "we"? And what's so great about being bound into a group, when your group is small and exclusive? But that's Robert Wright's point: our groups are expanding, "evolving," becoming more inclusive. But "we" are still killing one another over our different religious commitments. That's Christopher Hitchens' point. They're all correct. So who's right? And who's really dyspeptic?
Charles Darwin (
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