The sleep of
reason produces
monsters
Goya, Francisco
Caprichos
May common Sense and Reason
prevail
Evolutionary psychology of religion and
the reign of science
Richard Dawkins – an introduction
Primer to Dawkins
BBC programmes
The Root of all Evil
The Enemies of Reason.
Slaves to superstition
00.-30
The Virus of faith
REASON and
IRRATIONALITY
Disclaimer: my religion: Harry Potterism
Hermione Granger & the Resurrection Stone
Bertrand Russell: the Holy flying China Teapot
in Orbit around the Sun RoE 44.50
Hermione, ". 'But that's - I'm sorry, but that's
completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it
doesn't exist? .. you could claim that anything's
real if the only basis for believing in it is that
nobody's proved it doesn't exist!‘
Too small to be spotted by telescope – we are
all teapot-agnostics
Fairies, goblins, giants,
Dawkins: We’re all atheists about most of the
Gods that societies have ever believed in –
some of us just go one God further.
Disclaimer: my religion: Harry Potterism
Severus Snapism
Hermione Granger & the Resurrection Stone
Hermione, ". 'But that's - I'm sorry, but that's
completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it
doesn't exist? .. you could claim that anything's
real if the only basis for believing in it is that
nobody's proved it doesn't exist!‘
Bertrand Russell: the Holy flying China Teapot
in Orbit around the Sun RoE 44.50
Too small to be spotted by telescope – we
are all teapot-agnostics
Fairies, goblins, giants, Thor, Aphrodite
Dawkins: We’re all atheists about most of the
Gods that societies have ever believed in –
some of us just go one God further.
On evolution
A chicken is just an egg's way of making
more eggs.
Charles Darwin
Premise 1: Struggle for survival
Premise 2: Variability
Premise 3: Heritability
Premise 4: Fitness
CONCLUSION : NATURAL
SELECTION
•He observed breeders and different naturally evolving
species
•Charles Babbage: God = programmer of laws
Evolutionary psychology
The Human Animal (Sociobiology)
Adaptationism
Originally applied to biological organs – the most
well-known is the eye
Extensions: the brain is a biological organ
Supposition: the brain produces behaviour and
consciousness
Therefore: behaviour and consciousness is formed by
evolution just as the biological body is
Problems with evolutionary psychology
Level of selection (individual, gene, group)
Question of fitness & adaptation
Small designs that lead to a higher reproduction of a trait
CIRCULARITY: How do you recognize fitness?
Just-so stories (Rudyard Kipling)
The Panglossian Paradox
George Jackson Mivart - what do you do with 5% of a wing?
Blind adaptationism (by Pinker)
Gould: exaptations
Physical constraints – Gould: spandrels in the cathedral
Genetic Determinism… nature-nurture debate…
The Swiss-army-knife model of evolution
Xenophobia, colour of bones, form of earlobes
Pinker, Tooby and Cosmides, Buss
Massive modularity
Modern-day phrenology
Dawkins’s views
An ardent opponent to creationism
and proponent of evolution - earning
him the title of Darwin’s Rottweiler
The Blind Watchmaker – focuses on
how evolution could create
marvellous structures – like the eye
William Paley – a watch presupposes
intelligent design because of its
complexity
The Weasel problem
Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in
shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Based on the infinite monkey theorem
A monkey bashing away at random on a
typewriter – given enough time he would type
the entire works of Shakespeare
how long would it take him to produce the
sentence ‘Methinks it is like a weasel.’?
The Weasel problem
Methinks it is like a weasel
This is 28 characters
Using 26 letters – only capitals and a space
bar
Probability?
2728 = 1040 = infinity, or at least much longer
than milliseconds from the existence of the
universe (13,73 billion = 13,73 * 109 years =
7,22 * 1018 milliseconds)
Sir Frederick Hoyle
„approximately the same order of
magnitude as the probability that a
hurricane could sweep through a
junkyard and randomly assemble a
Boeing 747.”
solar system full of blind men solving
Rubik's Cube simultaneously.
The simplest bacterium needs 1040,000
permutations, while the number of the
atoms in the universe is „only” 1080,
the chance is the same as throwing 50 000
sixes in a row with a die
Sir Frederick Hoyle
Astronomer and sci-fi writer
He opposed the Big Bang theory –
because it needs a cause Steady
State theory
He also opposed natural
abiogenesis!
Intelligent design- Evolution from
Space
Hoyle’s fallacy
You don’t need 28 letters. You start with say 3.
They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than
simultaneous trials.
They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern"
protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins,
by random events.
This is not the abiogenesis theory at all – it starts with VERY
SIMPLE organisms
They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed
sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
Changing one at a time – mutations are rare but do not exclude
each other
They seriously underestimate the number of functional
enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences
– only one good solution fallacy
The Weasel problem
Cumulative selections instead of a single step selection
Two differences in his model:
Copying mechanism – it retains previous states
There is an inherent goal – any change that occurs towards
methinks it is a weasel is kept, others are discarded
Generation 1: WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P
Generation 2: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P
Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P
Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL
Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL
Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL
Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Fitness or adaptive
landscapes – genetic
variation is pushed to the
direction of the arrows
Waddington – epigenetic
landscape – curiously posits a
rolling, not a climbing ball
Saddle points in
mathematics as non-optimal
solutions
The circular argumentation problem
Inherent goal – often evokes attacks of circular
argumentation
The effects strive towards the goal
The goal preexists (who invented the goal?)
How do you know this was the goal?
Answer – evolutionary forces
Because it is reached!
Mary Midgley: Evolution as a Religion
Buss: the moral phallacy (Dawkins examines it as well.)
On evolution and religion
The Four Horsemen of the antiApocalypse
*The end of Faith: Harris
*The God Delusion: Dawkins
*god is not Great: Hitchens
*Breaking the Spell: Dennett
Would you like the
Churches empty?
The Bible as a literary
piece = Harry Potter
Evolutionary accounts of religion
Richard Dawkins
Openly attacking religion –
derogatory of believers
Supporter of the Brights movement
Bright – Paul Geisert’s umbrella term
Daniel C. Denett
More of a compromise
Restricts himself to the argument
that religion can and should be
studied by science
Daniel Clement Dennett
Philosopher
With an interesting history (father spy, self-education)
Darwin’s dangerous Idea
Consciousness Explained (at least not religion..)
No Cartesian theatre
bundle of semi-independent agencies
content-fixation
Denett on religion
An argument towards the scientific study of
religion – terrorist attempts 9/11
Explanation given on the basis of meme
theory (by Dawkins)
Evaluation of good and bad aspects
Denett on religion
Part I: Opening Pandora's Box
Relationship of science and religion
Part II: The Evolution of Religion
Part III: Religion Today
What should be done to stop religious
fanatics
There is reason in unreasonable behaviour
– somewhere, if you look long enough
The story of the suicidal ant and the lancet
fluke (a small worm)
There are many ideas to die for protecting
ideologies
(other animals protect food, cubs or habitat only)
The curious example of the dog (domestication)
Ideas are not intelligent themselves- why
should they cause others to kill
Neither are lancet flukes and the wings of
butterflies
What is religion for Dennett?
Religion
Social systems
Participants avow belief
In supernatural agents OR
Agents whose approval is to be sought
Elvis Presley fan club is not one
Need not be anthropomorphic
Jehova exists in real-time according to some accounts
and not real.time according to others
If prayer is a symbolic activity, not addressed to
anyone, it is not part of religion
Maybe this is the origin of religion
Some rituals can pass to non-religious (Santa Claus or
Halloween)
Private religions – spiritual in his terms, not religious
Black magic and satanist cults
They are not religions, because no one thinks so??
Buddhism & Confucianism (again a contradiction)
Breaking which spell?
Breaking the spell – of religion
The analogy of the men with a cell phone in the
room
Religion as a potentially evil spell – sharin
gas attack, 9/11
Other ones mentioned:
Drugs
Gambling
Alcohol
Child pornography
Addiction? – life without it is not worth living
Excessive physical or psychological dependence
(conversation? Communication?)
Breaking which spell? The fear of knowing
Wouldn’t an extensive and invasive
examination destroy the phenomenon itself?
Nobody knows the answer – incl.Denett
Endangered species – often become extinct
because of capturing them to breed – which
they don’t in captivity
Isolated people are often changed if studied
by anthropologists
Cadavres were prohibited to study – medicine
started off, when they did
Alfred Kinsey’s study of Human sexual
behaviour – myths dispelled – it improved sex
life
although consider „free love”
Breaking which spell?
Reformulating the category names
Gays and straights (and not glum)
Bright and … supers? (from supernatural)
Mind Philip Tetlock’s sacred values
You’re money or your life!
I’m thinking, I’m thinking!
Aside – mugging becomes lucrative..
Breaking which spell?
Religion is a natural phenomena
Not an opposition of culture
Of course it is cultural
Not an opposition of supernatural either
It is in the nature of the homo sapiens to create
religious memes
New myths
What about a Harry Potter day?
A new pretext to recieve presents!
Would you be in favour of inventing it?
Santa Claus - 1985
Some questions about science
Basically the same argument as Dawkins’ –
and Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria
again
It is possible to be neutral to religion
The gap between mind sciences
(Geistwissenschaften) and nature sciences
(Naturwissenschaften) is narrowing (though
not yet disappeared)
Some questions about science
Homo sapiens – the power of the source of prediction
We can minimalize damages by preventing them – no
other species has been observed to do that (collecting
food is a general answer to periodic changes)
Epidemics
Economical crisis
Hurricanes
Can we prevent the next 9/11 by studying religion?
What if music is bad for you?
It can’t feed anyone or cure the ill…
All he asks for is to study religion – if it turns out to be
bad, we need to think if it turns out to be good, atheist
attacks can be silenced
Why Good things happen
Because of evolution…
Footprints of coyotes and dogs
Why do coyotes howl?
The homo sapiens sugar industry
Tons of sugar and its counterpart – obesity
clinics, toothpaste
Co
- evolution of plant strategies to spread and
homo s. strategies to find energy source
The free-floating rationale
It is perfectly rational as a mechanism, but
nobody – including the participants – is
aware, not conscious
i.e. you don’t need to understand it for it to
work
Why Good things happen
The CUI BONO obsession
No free luch – somebody has to benefit
„Evolution is remarkably efficient in
sweeping pointless accidents off the
scene”
Remember the lancet fluke
And the toxoplasma gondii
Which lives in rats, drives them reckless, so they
get eaten by cats, which is the only place they
can reproduce
Sexual reproduction vs asexual –
making offspring more inscrutable to parasites –
actually adaptation in general
Parasites are in an arms race with hosts
Why Good things happen
The Good Trick obsession
Anything that enhances fitness is a Good Trick
Flight and eyes were invented repeatedly over the
course of evolution
Religion takes time & energy, both valuable and
finite resources -> it must be a Good Trick ->
cui bono?
Free-floating rationale works with culture too –
that is a meme
You don’t have to understand the shape of the
boat in terms of biodynamics - it it is a tradition
(N.B. is this true for modern science ?)
Why Good things happen
The CUI BONO of religion
The sweet tooth theory
Religion is good for us – just as sugar is –
and we have developed a taste for it
And just as sugar – saccharine – it can be
cheated
The Symbiont Theories
The lancet fluke theory
Primarily it is not the Homo S that religion is
good for
Mutualists
Commensals
Parasites
Hundred trillion cells – 90%
not human cells
Why Good things happen
The CUI BONO of religion
Sexual selection
The Peacock’s tail theory
Runaway selection
Fitness indicator
Not a whim a sign of health
Faithfulness
Intelligence – music
Group selection
A whim of females?
People with religion were more altruistic in
necessary cases – better survival in rough times
The pearl theory – spandrels in a cathedral
A beautiful by-product
Does not enhance anything, it is an objet trouvé
The roots of religion
Historians „There have always been
religion”
Dennett: that only means religion is more
ancient than history writing
The CARGO cults & Melanesians –
shows the formation of new religions
The John Frum cult
The Pomio Kivung cult
The roots of religion
Formation of new religions goes at an
astounding pace
2-3 created every day
Average lifetime is less than a decade
Religions – as known today – are relatively
young historically compared to other cultural
phenomena
Christianity – cca. 2,000 years
Judaism – cca. 4,000 years
Writing – cca. 5,000 years
Agriculture – cca. 40,000
Language – cca. 35,000 - ?
The roots of religion
Psychological explanations – raisons
d’être
1.
2.
3.
To confort
To explain the unexplainable
Encourage group cohesion
Premature curiosity satisfaction (Dennett
– the hows and whys)
Pascal Boyer
1.
2.
3.
Most of relevant
machinery is not
consciously available
Religion is based on
modules that are part
of ordinary cognition
Mental Modules
combined
Pascal Boyer
What mental modules are
combined?
Hyperactive Agent Detector
Memes as supernormal
stimuli– right ratio of
irrational in the ordinary
Full Access Agent (access
to strategical information)
off-line social interaction
Divination – decision
making
Explanation
Ritualistic behaviour
Healing
Decision making
Social bonding
Theory of mind
Agency detection
Contagion avoidance
Social exchange
http://astro.temple.edu/~tshipley/mocap/dotMovie.html
http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html
•Useful if you need to find agentive
entities in a noisy background
Biological motion
• based on a few dots
• it does not work upside
down
• pattern of activity
• gender!
The roots of religion
HADD – Hyperactive Agent Detector
Device (Justin Barrett)
Signal detection theory and game theory
combined
Is this noise a tiger?
I think it is
tiger
rustling
tiger
Hit
Miss
rustling
False alarm
Correct
rejection
It really is
The roots of religion
HADD – Hyperactive Agent Detector
Device (Justin Barrett)
Better safe than sorry
Missing a signal is more expensive than a
false alarm
Animism
Children
Adults??
the sun smiles at you
There are spirits in every tree
My computer hates me…
The less predictable something is, the more
you tend to attribute intentions to it
The roots of religion
Practical animism – flowers and river
Rain dances – impractical animism
(at least without proper meteorological
knowledge)
Skinner, B.F.
Pigeon superstition
Random reinforcement
Elaborate dances
The Enemies of Reason
SS. 33.19
The roots of religion
Successful memes
Some counterintuitive ideas are more
interesting than others
Successful?
Invisible person?
Living dead?
Invisible axe with no handle?
Axe made of cheese?
Contradict only one or two biases – but in
other ways they fot the schema
Often concerned with animacy
Proto
- meme – obsessional thought
Do not miss the circular argument –
again…
Pascal Boyer – Religion Explained
Concepts of the supernatural = legends, myths,
folktales, fantasy & Harry Potter!
Domain concepts (person, living thing,
artefacts)
They retain some expectations held as default true of
that domain
Yet specific features violate these default
expecations
The roots of religion
Supernormal stimuli – success?
Tinbergen – the gull and the orange spot
Humans love to surround theselves with
supernormal stimuli
Music – rather pure sounds than noise
Pure vowels – melody
Pure consonants – rhythm
Pure coloured pictures - art
Bilateral symmetry
It is only characteristic when the other faces
you
Sign of health!
The roots of religion
„But the bogeyman under your bed is not yet religion”
Non-referential names abound
Cinderella
Unicorns
Harry Potter
– sorry! Severus Snape
Flying carpets
Pudus
You need to believe that they exist! BELIEF
Knowledge vs belief battle - Rationality and irrationality? 4hMApoc
intertwined everywhere (lucky charms, rituals [my bag])
Contradictory knowledge and belief? [ghosts]
Hypertrophic social intelligence
Strategic information = theory of mind =
intentional stance
Homo s. obsessed with societal relationships
and other minds (remember their group size!)
Stories – learn about the intentions and beliefs
of others = gossip
A Full Access Agent?
In traditions it is often ancestral figures
Parents seem like that to children
Freud – Father Figure mythic struggles
Not necessarily omniscient – if you lost your
knife vs. You left it at the crime scene (strategic
information only)
They became omniscient later on (Boyer)
The roots of religion
Why are parents like full access
agents?
Precocial species
less prone to epigenetic effects
Altricial species
Prolonged paternal care & training – extended
information transmission
Informational superhighways
Genes
is everything needed to be coded in the genome?
Presupposed regularities
Gravity, salinity, electromagnetic wave spectrum,
composition of atmosphere
Instructional pathyway
imprinting
The roots of religion
Coevolution of cuteness – altricial species
Humans
Dinosaurs - fossils
Mickey Mouse
The roots of religion
Coevolution of honest information teaching
It is in the best interest of parents to inform and
not misinform
It is in the best interests of children to listen and
be obedient
Authority figures often have hypnotical
powers
analgesia
The roots of religion
Suppose there is a Full Access Agent – you need a
link to know what he knows
Divination!
Flip a coin –
More serious rituals
take away the responsability – and the acrimony of bad
decisions
Numerology
Astrology
Clouds
Cards
Tea leaves
Melted wax pored into water
Jaynes
exopsycic methods of decision making
The idea of randomness is relatively new
The roots of religion
Decision making and consciousness
Maybe people just need a placebo effect of
support from their ancestors – (remember what
we said about the consciousness of decision
making!)
Skeptics are spoiling the fun
The roots of religion
Shamans and rituals – it actually works
Jared Diamond – we have discovered all edible
plants (even if preparation needed) and most
medical plants
Ritual healing : Psychological/hypnotic effect –
usually called placebo today
Shamanic treatment is correlated with patient
hypnotizability
Childbirth! Direct connection to evolution
The roots of religion
Why are we susceptible to hypnotizing
effects at all?
Humphrey (2002) economic resource management
Body has its own cures : fever, vomiting, pain,
immune system
However this is costly
Stress reduces the possibility of these responses –
energy is needed for immediate defense against
something else
Only works if there is hope of curing
Hypnosis creates both!
Shamanic healing – ancient health insurance!
The roots of religion
Rituals – functions
Divination
Shamanistic healing
Multilexing – creating a common memory
store to preserve knowledge
The more people know sg the less likely it is
that it is forgotten – repeating all over
Evans-Pritchard – shamans typically try to
enlist people from a young age to these rituals
Cultural evolution of religion
A new perspective
Stewardship
Practitioners of folk religions do not go about
convincing each other of the existence of the spirits
– no more than we go about convincing each other
of the existence of germs, atoms, oxigens or gravity
How do you know? Best to rely on others about
knowledge
Conducting R&D is expensive
Neolithic – agricultural revolution and population boom
– no time to theorize
Separation of proto-science and proto-religion
Unable to refute
Invisible- cannot
Explicit instructions not to
Stewardship
Of sheep and men
Religion meme and its shepherds
Domestication – caused a population growth in
both species
Clear case of symbiosis
Teachers and priests keep religious and calculus
memes alive
The memes keep them alive
Dawkins’s idea on kleptocracy
the entertwining of the political and religious
Threat of an Ultimate Being
Richard Dawkins
Ethologist and evolutionary biologist
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype
The Blind Watchmaker
Climbing Mount Improbable
The God Delusion – Root of all Evil 00.-1.00
The elephant called religion – the process of nonthinking called faith.
The God Delusion
The book was a best-seller
sold over 1,5 million copies and translated to 31
languages
„If this book works as I intend, religious readers who
open it will be atheists when they put it down. What
presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool
faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance
built up over years of childhood indoctrination using
methods that took centuries to mature (whether by
evolution or design).”
„But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people
out there:”
Conversely it raised sales of spiritual books by
50% and the sales of the Bible by 120%
(amazon.com)
The God hypothesis
„Curiously universal” –
evolutionary
„theory of religion as an
accidental by-product – a
misfiring of something useful”
The intentional stance
Memes
The God hypothesis
Morals
would you commit murder, rape or
robbery if you knew that no God
existed?
Kant : categorical imperatives
Dawkins : altruistic genes selected
for by evolution creating natural
empathy
Strongy against the religious
indoctrination of children - EoRVoF
Should all cultural practices be
banned then?
May Holy Reason reign above ALL
Cold-reading (vs hot reading)
Mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, mediums
Communicating with the dead
The Forer-effect (Bertram R. Forer)
Barnum effect
Personal validation fallacy – subjective validation
Horoscopes EoR SS 6.05
Positive traits
Authority
Particularity
Horoscope
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet
you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some
personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate
for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have
not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on
the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made
the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain
amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when
hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself
as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements
without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too
frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted,
affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted,
wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather
unrealistic.
Vive la raison, vive le science! Mors
Derrida et les monstres!
Science is wonderful
The enemies of reason SS. 41.00
The Crisis of reason 1.
Evidence vs experience (private feelings)
Ugly post-modern relativist agenda (Mors Derrida!)
Philip Tetlock: Sacred Value Protection
Model
Secular and sacred values – trade-offs incommesurable
Does it make a difference between science and
religion?