MonDie

The Skinner experiment might be a good contribution to the thread that this thread was split from, although I don't have a problem with it being here, and it is relevant here.

EDIT: Also, I don't know the meaning of "adventitious reinforcement" as it is used in the Wikipedia article.

Not that it's thread relevant, but brain size isn't always the best indicator because it ignores brain structure, convolution, fissuring, and function (maybe another thread).

I don't have any clue about how all the different factors come together, and you already seem to know more about the nature of brain folding than I do. All I know is that relative brain size is accurate enough to place humans and dolphins at the top, although I'm assuming that the idea of dolphins holding second place wasn't based on their relative brain size in the first place. Because relative brain size is accurate enough in its placement of humans and dolphins, I thought it would be accurate enough for the argument.

EDIT: Also relevant to my argument:

The brain sizes of early human ancestors [...] also fall along the brain-to-body size curve of other primates until about 2-3 million years ago, when [Homo] brain sizes begin to deviate from the primate pattern by becoming larger, relative to their body size, than those of other primates (Strier 40).

 

Strier, Karen. Primate Behavioral Ecology. 3rd ed. Allyn and Bacon, 2007. Print.

According to Wikipedia, neanderthals lived 0.6-0.03 mya, so they [ED: probably] would have possessed this unusually large brain.

More on that

 

http://animal.discov...1/elephant.html

 

 

 

 

Sorry , no intent to go off topic.

EDIT: Although sentimentality probably wouldn't drive them to examine remains because the remains are nothing like the living elephant was.

Also, I misread iNow's first response as "Not Now that it's thread relevant."

Can you give some examples and describe what aspects of religion they're analogous to?

EDIT: Typed before Moontanman's post.

EDIT: Cannibalism, which was suspected to be religious, was/is present in chimps and a particular Hominin. I'll have to review the evidence since I wasn't as focused on school when I took Anthropology 101.

Interesting. I guess this is where the gene/meme admixture makes things complicated. A couple of objections though. It is unclear whether apes will go on to develop human-level intelligence, and if they do what their 'beliefs', if any, would be. If they do, just because apes followed one evolutionary path to this end, it does not follow that humans followed the same path. And (sorry to any anthropologists), this type of research cannot be as tightly controlled as the physical sciences, and so will never have the same level of accuracy. It can only ever be suggestive, rarely reaching firm conclusions from which predictions can be made.

 

I agree, when reasoning and religion conflict, we should follow reason. I'm not a religious apologist. But what is at issue here is what is, not what should be.

Did I say "early examples of religion?" Ehh, I meant examples of religion in our relatives. I'm having a brain malfunction day.

I was thinking about comparing Relative Brain Size of neanderthals and chimps since the former might have had some form of religion, but the prospect looks perilous already. I might come back to this argument if I learn anything applicable.

In itself that's fine. If a majority of people had heart failure, we'd still call them sick. However, this is slightly different. If everyone had sickle cell disease, would we still call them sick? No, it'd be a norm, something we just grew up with (as a species), but lowers our chance of catching malaria, i.e. an evolutionary trait. We have evolved to believe in god, whether it be by genes or memes (now that'd be an interesting discussion). For better or worse it's a human trait, for now. It was, and still is, the norm. Broken suggests deviation from this norm. Broken suggests we once had reason, then lost it.

But it seems that reasoning predates religion in our evolutionary history. There is no clear evidence of religion in apes, although some people speculate (e.g. "Chuck Blanchard"), and you might find some inter-specific (across species) examples of religion if you bend the definition. In contrast, we now know that apes can reason and have some surprising mental skills (e.g. chimp eidetic memory), and it's obvious that these mental skills, including reasoning, were advantageous. Thus, it seems obvious that, when reasoning and religion conflict, we should follow reason.

In conclusion, religion shouldn't impede reasoning because, whatever adaptive functionality religion had or has, reasoning clearly has more adaptive functionality.

Perhaps the vague OP is the reason for the circling nature of this thread. It would have been nice if different arguments were labeled as they appeared, then all subsequent posts concerning labeled arguments contained the respective labels.

http://mnichopolis.h...ieve-in-gravity

I don't think acceptance of public science (I know it's odd terminology) is an acceptance of every single claim made by any scientist. Everybody knows that scientists have disagreements. Acceptance of public science is at least partially because the claims of scientists are often right, so we would do good to utilize them, whereas religious claims are often wrong, so we wouldn't do good to sell all our possessions in repentance every "doomsday."

Are you saying that individual responses to the environment are more effectively 'implemented' through conditioning rather than reasoning?

Conditioning can help something respond to what might be about to happen, but logic can help something manipulate what is about to happen.

I mentioned mortality salience's relationship to religious belief before. I thought I should review the source I used and present the information here. I'm using the quote box since my paraphrasing is largely made up of direct quotes.

The authors explain that, to cope with threats to self-esteem, "we may compare ourselves with others less fortunate, derogate those who give us negative feedback, and so forth (e.g., Dunning, Leuenberger, & Sherman, 1995; Kernis et al., 1993; Wood, Giordano-Beech, & Ducharme, 1999)." Explained later, research has shown that thoughts about death can be a cause of the self serving bias, and this is consistent with the hypothesis that death presents a threat to the self-image. Some researchers "further propose that, because it's frightening to own up to the fact that we are mortal and will eventually die, we adopt spiritual and cultural views that provide additional meaning to our lives (and sometimes even suggest the possibility of a heavenly immortality)." The authors cite a study in which Christian students were separated into experimental and control groups. Participants were given almost identical questionnaires, but the members of the experimental group "were asked to write about what will happen to them as they die and how they feel about thinking about their own death. [...] Later, all [participants] provided their impressions of a previously unknown person presented as either Christian or Jewish. Consistent with the hypothesis, this person was evaluated more favorably when Christian than when Jewish [...] but only by those subjects made aware of their own mortality (Greenberg et al., 1990)." (Kenrick et al. 91-2)

 

Works Cited

Kenrick, Douglas T., Steven L. Neuberg, and Robert B. Cialdini. Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2010. Print.

Additionally, here is a related Wikipedia link that others can check out.

http://en.wikipedia....nagement_Theory

Wonderful, that is the purpose of science and philosophy. Go for it.

 

And for the rest of your demands. Hail Hitler, you would have made a perfect NAZI. And if anyone objects to this statement, read my above post, and clarify your objection.

I don't know what "the rest of [his] demands" are, but you appear to be making the Guilt By Association Ad Hominem fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Guilt_by_association

Wow! I hope you do understand that attacking those that question your assertions does not support those assertions, it helps to invalidate them. Thank you for the helping hand.

Wouldn't either be an ad hominem fallacy?

This is a false dilemma. Both of your two alternatives are false. The rules of logic are not random, and there is no such thing as a logic gene. There is a third choice to your false dilemma, learned knowledge. That learned knowledge is imparted rather than inherited.

How do you know there aren't genes that influence the course of one's attempts at logical thinking?

I agree that individuals learn logic to a certain extent, but I thought each side might have some backing.

Also consider the dimensions of space. Could it be that we evolved to reason about a three dimensional physical world because it was simpler? Maybe vertebrates would have evolved to understand space differently if they were traveling at super high speeds, and we would understand space that way even if we were raised moving at low speeds.

EDIT: How is it that a person can know proper logic when it is shown to them? For example, if I made up a phony logical rule, you would be able to tell that it was phony. Is that because you judge whether it fits your observations, or is it because you have a genetic predisposition for identifying proper logic?

Was everything made by something else for its maker's purposes? Was everything not made by something else for its maker's purposes? I don't know if the former is true, but I do know the latter is false. I also know that everything either was or wasn't made by something else for its particular maker's purposes. Let me restate that more clearly.

every

(individual) thing

either was or wasn't

made by something else

for its particular maker's purposes.

A baby tiger was made by its mother for its mother's purpose. A hammer was made by a human for that human's purpose. Indeed,

each of those things

were

made by something else

for their particular makers' purposes.

So when somebody says, "Everything was made by something else for its particular maker's purposes," what are they saying? Just go back to the first bolded text above and replace "either was or wasn't" with "was." This statement isn't a claim of an ultimate maker.

The creator of the creator paradox comes in when somebody claims that the sum of all things was made by something else for that maker's purposes.

"The sum of all things" always refers to a specific thing, but what it specifically refers to is dependent on what things there are. For example, when you say the sum of all things was created by something else, you must change your definition of "the sum of all things" to incorporate this "something else." Thus, whatever "something else" originally referred to is now part of the sum of all things, so "something else" is now redefined as well. This constitutes the linguistic-based paradox, which results from the usage of words that can mean different things in different contexts.

However, the Big Bang Theory does not make this logical paradox because it clearly states what was made by what. Therefore, logically, it could be true.

Aha! I don't need to learn the details of relativity because it's been contemplated already! (see my last post)

From Zeno's point of view, the classical concept of absolute time was not logically sound, and special relativity (or something like it) is a logical necessity, not just an empirical fact. It's even been suggested that if people had taken Zeno's paradoxes more seriously they might have arrived at something like special relativity centuries ago, just on logical grounds.

 

mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm

If my question hasn't been answered, it might be interesting to other people who can apply their knowledge to it. If it has been answered, that answer will be interesting to me.

I'll elaborate on the title. Humans can understand the scientific method, and evolution obviously enabled this understanding in some way. However, did random mutation endow random rules of logic until it endowed the correct rules of logic, or did evolution give individuals the capacity to learn the correct rules of logic? One thing I think of is the way babies are taking in so much information.

Perhaps this thread would have been best for an interdisciplinary forum including both evolution and developmental psychology, but there is no such forum, so I chose genetics as a compromise.

The moved posts were dispersed throughout this thread on the basis of the date-of-posting. I'll find out the proper methods of contacting the moderators, and I'll inform them of this.

Here is the interaction between Athena and I. Athena's next post that was moved, which was a response to iNow, is #36.

I really think this depends on how one defines god, and my opinion of those who do not understand this is extremely low.

 

I understand the bible as mythology and would argue this understanding of God is no better than Zeus, however, I very much respect the benefits of believing in this god, that seem so lacking in those who do not have religion, or a philosophy, or some kind of framework of principles to live by. Going through life basing our decisions on our feelings, is not a good way to go! I would say, the people who are broken are more apt to be those who do not have religion, or any other frame work of principles to live by.

 

If we returned to liberal education and education for good moral judgment and citizenship we would not have the problems that we have. Amoral education for a technological society with unknown values, means not only a lot of broken people, but possibly a very unpleasant future as well. Capitalism with morals is self destructive. Science without morals is very dangerous. I think we are head for big trouble and don't even have the concepts essential to reasoning our way out out this.

Athena, I don't know of any evidence that religion causes morality or even well-being.

Also, as I realized while making posts prior to this, religion isn't all that easy to define. When religion starts to include otherwise secular concepts, such as helping others as valuable behavior, where is the boundary between religion and general culture?

EDIT: Furthermore, there is the issue of cause-and-effect because people who join religion-based community service groups might do it out of a desire to be helpful, not out of religiosity.

EDIT: However, that same idea can be applied to the evils committed in the name of religion. Do people who murder homosexuals truly do it out of religiosity?

For sure religion causes morality. It works like this, human populations are much larger than animal populations because we create our social world with language and representations. Civilizations are held together with ideas of rights, duties, obligations and responsibility.

 

It is religion that makes our huge populations possible. The alternative to religion is democracy when all the concepts of democracy are known. Being one nation under God is very, very important, however, we need a believable God, and religion is always based on myth, not science and logic. Democracy, however, can give us God and morals without religion, when all the concepts are understood, and if we don't get over our hangups about God, and bridge this gap between the secular and religion, what do you think will hold civilizations together? Anything without morals is self destructive. Capitalism without morals is self destructing. Government without morals self destructs and humans without morals self destruct.

 

I am witnessing all the self destruction happening right now, and doing my best to put back into our consciousness, awareness of why education for good moral judgment is essential. The US had education for good moral judgment without religion, from the beginning, until 1958. We called this liberal education and the foundation of it was Greek and Roman classics, and religion, especially Christianity, and seasoned with mythology and history from around the world. Amoral education for a technological society focused almost exclusively on technology, is manifesting a society with unknown values. This is breaking down all systems that manifest civilization. It is now not just individuals who are broken, but our institutions and then our civilization.

 

Edit, I like the way you did that.

 

EDIT: Furthermore, there is the issue of cause-and-effect because people who join religion-based community service groups might do it out of a desire to be helpful, not out of religiosity.

 

There are benefits to morality set by religion, and disadvantages. A benefit is, being good simply because one learned a rule about being good. But then a problem comes up when this is associated with superstition instead of reason. When it is associated with superstition, people can wrongly believe they can get away with doing the wrong thing, if they sacrifice to a God, or burn candles and pray. When morality is a matter of reason, we know there is no supernatural power that is going to step in and save our ass. What happens is the consequence of what we think and do, because that is how things work. I am highly motivated to be moral, because I don't believe there is a supernatural force that can alter the consequences of what I do. By the way, this also means I am highly motivated to do all I can so everyone understands morals, because I don't think there is a supernatural force that is going to safe us, and I want my grandchildren and their children to have good lives. This won't happen if we don't start talking morals real fast.

 

Another problem with being reliant on religion instead of reason, is morality based in the passed, includes assuming slaves and kings, and doesn't work so well for modern moral questions. Google explains complete violation of our privacy as a means of giving us better individualized service. I don't think you will open a holy book and find the moral rule for this.

 

EDIT: However, that same idea can be applied to the evils committed in the name of religion. Do people who murder homosexuals truly do it out of religiosity?

 

How about taking your moral questions to the philosophy thread about "morals". It would make the thread much more interesting on on subject. Not all people who murder homosexuals do so because of religion, however, religion does lead to much killing, including killing one's own daughter, or selling her into slavery.

P.P.S. I've just gotta give a shout out to bdwilson1000's video intro to the

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That would be a fascinating discovery and it would answer the question of the thread. Belief in God could be the remnant of an instinct that is no longer functional... literally "broken".

Yes, it might provide some good answers, but the genetic basis for religion would probably be a complex pattern of genes, and we couldn't just rule out all of those genes as obsolete. The processes that lead to religion might be very fundamental, although they probably aren't as fundamental as reasoning since other apes have reason, but maybe not religion.

These are what I have thought of as possible adaptive functions.

Considering the existing evidence showing that contemplation of death reinforces religious beliefs, religion might have somehow given people more will to continue living.

Also, it might have played a role in relieving stress during illness because death wouldn't seem as bad if one thought they were going to an afterlife. It might have relieved the stress of losing loved ones too. For this concept, religion might have arisen from nurturing instincts.

Did I forget to utilize the emoticons again?

EDIT:

I just thought of an interesting idea, thanks to Athena.

Obviously, humans have a genetic predisposition toward using the scientific method because there are other organisms with little or no capacity to think as we do. We could consider that humans also have a genetic predisposition toward believing in a god or gods, and it might have even been an adaption to environmental stresses. Evidence could be found by identifying individuals who inherit religious tendencies or by showing that religion developed even in isolated or prototype cultures.

EDIT: caffeine-induced speculations removed

Knowledge is power. And power corrupts. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely.

Refutation: The United States had a president who not only did cocaine and got a DUI, but was a solid C student at Yale.

I think you need to more clearly define "knowledge" and "power" as they were used in that context.

When you, Inow, feel you are doing something for the good of society, you do it with little regard for how the members of society feel about your actions and thoughts. You are doing it "on your own" based on what you think is best for everyone. Where, scientifically speaking, are you getting this strength and certainty from? How do YOU know this thing? Is it a knowledge based on millenia of humans interacting with each other and developing rules of behavior together? No, you throw out anything that is over 200 years old, and anything that smells even a little like religion. So where do you get this "objective truth". Does it exist outside your head anywhere? Can it be tested? Can it be falsified? Where in the universe, do you find Scientific Method itself?

 

It seems to me that you only find it in the hearts and minds of those that hold it, as a belief. And only see the results of it being put into practice. Never does "Scientific Method" itself, ever pay us a visit. We can not find it under rocks. Well I don't know that for sure, but I have not found it under any rocks that I have ever picked up. And anyone that claims they can find it under rocks, is pretending that they know something they don't know. Because "Scientific Method" does not actually exist. Not as something real. It is supernatural in character and has no place in the mind of a rational man or women. Society would be so much better off, if we showed these foolish people who believe only in the superiority of their individual intellect, logic, consistency and mathematical prowess, how silly their belief in such things as real, existing things we should all let guide our existence, is, in reality.

If you truly don't believe in the scientific method, stop using it.

Next time you want to use your car, and your wife wonders "why isn't it starting," just respond, "I don't know if it will start because I haven't put the key in yet." When she asks, "Hasn't it reliably started at previous instances when you turned the key," you can respond, "Yes, but that doesn't mean it will start when I turn the key this time. I think I'll just walk today, honey."

While you're at it, stop pushing things with your hands with the expectation that they will move.

EDIT: The scientific method isn't something that people just imagined, it's a collection of rules that almost everyone begins deriving from their observations of the physical world when they're babies.

Mondays Assignment: Die, the arguments in my post #822 are not baseless assertions, I'm coming from the proto Indo-Iranian religions which was a branch of proto Indo-European religions and similarities can be seen in later periods of religions which predated Christianity, there are religions older than that.

I don't know about the Indo-European religions.

Such similarities between religions might be due to cultural diffusion, in which case, I wouldn't see those spiritual ideas as exceptions.

If you want to show that the better explanation is that the similarities are due to the reality of those spiritual beings, you need to show some evidence against the alternative explanations.

For example, you would have to show evidence against cultural diffusion determining their spiritual ideas. Lack of evidence for cultural diffusion would not be evidence, the evidence would have to show that the cultures couldn't have come into contact in a way that could have facilitated the similarities in spiritual ideas, e.g. a physical barrier.

EDIT: However, there might still be other explanations. For example, anthropologists can explain cultural similarities as adaptions to similar environments.

Athena, I don't know of any evidence that religion causes morality or even well-being.

Also, as I realized while making posts prior to this, religion isn't all that easy to define. When religion starts to include otherwise secular concepts, such as helping others as valuable behavior, where is the boundary between religion and general culture?

EDIT: Furthermore, there is the issue of cause-and-effect because people who join religion-based community service groups might do it out of a desire to be helpful, not out of religiosity.

EDIT: However, that same idea can be applied to the evils committed in the name of religion. Do people who murder homosexuals truly do it out of religiosity?

Considering one interesting concept as potentially possible [math]\ne[/math] pretending to know something you do not know.

Furthermore, as with all imaginary concepts, each guess incorporated into the concept has its own chances of being true or false unless it's somehow impossible.

Imagine asking a psychic when you will meet your wife. The psychic has much better odds if they say, "sometime within the next three years," rather than, "five months from now on a steamboat on the Mississippi river." But the latter speculation is akin to what religion is doing.

I'll take up one particular issue. Religions might have seemed more plausible in the past because they crafted god to be human-like. This is part of the concept, and it justifies man's abuse of nature. What are the chances that both of the following are true; there is an origin for our universe, and that thing (origin of our universe) happens to be human-like? Consider that it took nearly four billion years for us to evolve, and that there are millions or hundreds of millions of species.

Actually, the chances become so small that one might even say we KNOW the christian god doesn't exist.

Immortal, if god gives us emotions, who gives god emotions?

/snip

The use of the 'not' phrase after a comma to exemplify a false alternative seems perfect to me. Some people might call for a semi-colon; however, I would use a semi-colon only when the phrase could stand alone as a sentence.

 

Skitt's law will almost certainly apply.

Thanks,

I found an English forum post about comma+not. Apparently the comma replaces an "and."