пожилая фрейдистка из далласа
занималась семантикой фаллоса
но фрейдизм для техаса
дело низшего класса
и ей ничего не досталося

[завершено после 12 лет творческой импотенции благодаря плодотворной дискуссии с уважаемым ymi_an_island]

On the origin and evolution of religion

A slippery subject but somehow I cannot help thinking about it. I am no expert but these are thoughts of an evolutionary biologist.  Of course, these thoughts are strictly rationalist, to start with.

So essentially there seems to be two fundamental ideas on the origin and evolution of religion:

i)                  Religion is thought to confer selective advantage to its adepts in developing human communities  - religion was the force that kept the groups viable by encouraging/enforcing altruism or, more precisely, self-sacrifice for the good of the community – the idea that goes back to Emile Durkheim ("God is society, writ large.").

ii)                 Religion is viewed as a collection of selfish, virus-like memes, a position that is propounded in the recent but already famous book of Dawkins.

I suggest that the prominence and persistence of religion in the course of human history are so unparalleled that none of these frameworks alone would be able to explain its origin and evolution.  Rather, these factors could and, I suppose, should be considered complementary so that both are necessary for the survival and spread of religion. 

Religion could have emerged as an adaptive mechanism, namely, a mechanism that enables group selection and that was a pre-requisite of the consolidation of large communities.  More precisely, the emergence of religion can be tentatively mapped to the transition stage from kin selection within families that routinely occurs in other animals (sacrificing your life for your brother’s family is justified because this results in propagation of your alleles) to group selection in larger assemblies of individuals that is not a mechanism considered feasible in animals (giving up your life for a group of strangers is a no go). Religion is mechanism that promotes such sacrifice and hence consolidates and preserves communities. In other words, applying weak anthropic reasoning, the fact that we live in a civilization is predicated on the emergence of religion at an early stage of the evolution of human communities – if not for religion, there would be no civilization.  To turn this into a prediction, if we ever encounter an unrelated civilization, they definitely will have religion.

However, I posit that, to be as successful as it is, religion, in addition to its adaptive value, must have acquired the properties of a selfish replicator (see Dawkins). In this dimension, I believe that the best biological analogy is not even a virus but an addiction toxin-antitoxin (TA) module of the kind that is common in bacteria and archaea. A TA module consists of two genes one of which encodes a toxin (e.g., a nuclease) that, if unleashed, kills the cell, and the other one encodes an antitoxin, a protein that binds the toxin and reversibly inactivates it. The antitoxin has a much shorter half-life than the toxin, so the toxin can be kept in check only if the antitoxin is constantly produced. Hence prokaryotes become addicted to plasmids that carry TA modules: only those cells survive that carry the plasmid ensuring ongoing production of both the toxin and the antitoxin whereas those cells that lose the plasmid are promptly destroyed by the released toxin (see Gerdes et al. Prokaryotic toxin-antitoxin stress response loci. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2005 May;3(5):371). It is tempting to think that human societies are similarly addicted to religion that combines memes of destruction (killing infidels etc) with those that keep them in check. Attempts to eliminate religion forcefully lead to the destruction memes being  unleashed (case in point: the USSR), hence the persistence of religion. It does not mean, of course, that addictive modules are indestructible in principle: they can be eliminated if the toxin gene perishes first. The same could apply to religion (possible case in point: modern Europe).

An interesting point is whether or not religion has any adaptive value in modern societies, where the state has taken over many regulatory functions, or does religion survive solely owing to its selfish properties? Dawkins insists that religion, at least, in our day, is entirely selfish. I have my doubts and suspect that both evolutionary forces remain relevant.

Such are some loose thoughts…