From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Sep 06 2002 - 17:44:53 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Sep 2002 Artillo5@cs.com, in response to loreetg@yahoo.com
> wrote:
>
>> Come now, don't start confusing genetics with religious beliefs! As
>> far as I know, there has been no "religion" gene identified...
>
> Actually, E. O. Wilson might disagree -- I think it was the Atlantic
> article on Consilience (I think Anders posted the URL) that convinced
> me that humans have a need to "believe" in explanations for unknown
> phenomena. There may not be a "religion" gene, but there may be a
> "rationalization" gene. Some rationalizations turn into religions. As
> soon as you have a rationalization for why bad things happen (e.g.
> people get sick because the gods cast a spell on them) then you soon
> have a religion because people want to influence the gods.
From http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
> In fact, evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics are animated by
> two radically different questions:
>
> 1. What is the universal, evolved architecture that we all share by
> virtue of being humans? (evolutionary psychology) 2. Given a large
> population of people in a specific environment, to what extent can
> differences between these people be accounted for by differences in
> their genes? (behavior genetics)
It seems likely to me that Artillo, speaking of no gene having been
identified, was speaking in the second sense.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:48 MST