I’m sure they are quite serious. Religion is mostly about how humans deal with other humans and with themselves, not bears. I don’t know a lot about the social scientists’ methodologies but the results they are getting seem to be internally consistent as well as consistent with what is emerging in other fields.

@skado Unless you want to back that up with facts I'll stick with what I got.
To theorize the survival of the species was enhanced by evolution--nature "selecting" more socially-adept individuals, thus maximizing tribal cohesion, seems reasonable.
BUT to then make the leap to an unsupportable claim this enhanced social bonding was enabled, at least in part, by a genetically-induced development of a cerebral capacity for religiousity, strikes me as junk science. Seriously, how is something like that provable? I don't think it is.

@Storm1752
I don’t have much motivation to change anybody’s worldview. I’m just reporting what I read in the science journals. If anybody finds it interesting they have the same access to Google I do.

@skado True. I have moderate interest so maybe I'll take a look.

@Storm1752
A real one-stop-shopping way to get a solid sense of how it most likely works is to read biologist John Wathey’s very well researched and documented book on the subject. It’s a fairly broad and complex thing to understand but he does a nice, professional, thoroughly scientific job of it. Otherwise, there are articles to be found by searching for “is religion adaptive” etc.
Wathey’s book:
[amazon.com]

@skado Maybe it's not so much about religiousity, per se, but about any philosophy, ideology, cult, belief system in general, which serves to bind individuals to a group...
THAT I might buy.

@Storm1752
I think that’s exactly right. In this particular situation the content isn’t as important as the form, so there’s no reason we couldn’t replace superstition with science and keep on moving.

For example...?

@skado By way of example, the assumption that the simulation has anything in common with observable phenomena. Also, from the article "Perhaps their gods are truly at work" is another such assumption, begging as it does the question of which gods. Even worse from the article " It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information" makes the assumption that there are such things as real and unreal information. I find even the abstract to hold as much water as a colander.

@anglophone
You don’t think untrue information exists?

@skado Information exists. To think of information as being true or false bring into consideration the nature truth. It is observable that different people have different and mutually incompatible truths. The notion of "true information" in the context of this paper is a nonsense.

@anglophone
Do you think this paper is the only one that regards religion as adaptive? Seems to me your objections are mostly about semantics rather than about the substance. I’m sincerely trying to understand why the people who claim to prefer the scientific method over faith are quite ready to cherry-pick their science when it starts to say something they don’t like. When I go looking for the scientific consensus on this subject, most of it seems to lean in this direction. Are all the scientists wrong about this?

@skado I have no position as regards the papers that you mention. Substance relies the semantics of language. If a semantic analysis produces nothing but nonsense then the substance of the paper must be regarded as being equally nonsense.

I make no comment about people cherry picking their science. I will observe that I find science produces models of the natural world that I find to be far more useful to me than the models produced by religion.

I make no comment about scientists being wrong.

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures is a 2009 book about the evolution of religious behavior by New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, in which the author argues that religious behaviours have evolved through natural selection. Wade argues that religious behaviour, through shared gods and beliefs, creates social solidarity, which is the driving force in making groups of people who are not related to each other by family, comply with and enforce shared norms and rules for social behaviour, that are not beneficial on an individual level, but beneficial for the tribe as a whole. Wade argues that the selection for religious behaviour began at least 50,000 years ago between African tribes, where tribes that benefited more from the unifying power of shared gods and beliefs, music and dance, outcompeted rivals and thus left more survivors, whereby genes underlying a brain-based “faith instinct” proliferated, which caused religious tendencies to be ingrained in the human brain.

Or perhaps just a capacity for woo.

@jlynn37 government or viewing some aspects of religion are about giving social order among large groups of people or a segment of society.

Yes, some people can think the many laws of government are "woo" and should not force people into things like taxation and capital slavery.

I could not possibly agree more.
Very well stated.

@KKGator I am honored!

Eloquently explained what has always been just my gut feeling.