Jeff Schweitzer: The Fallacy of the God Gene
Jeff Schweitzer: The Fallacy of the God Gene:
“Two major newspapers did what all mainstream media do best: Get the story wrong. The New York Times published "The Evolution of the God Gene" by Nicholas Wade in which we are told that, "religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning it exists because it was favored by natural selection." We are further informed that religion is "universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland."As a neurobiologist specializing in evolutionary biology these twin assertions about natural selection and the brain caught my attention. Both claims are wrong. But they are made so frequently as to have become conventional wisdom, like the canard that we only use 10 percent of our brains. Such folklore is a powerful force so these claims largely go unchallenged no matter how false.”
Comments
It strikes me that this is much like those that see pyramids in Asia, egypt, and central america and assume that aliens must have built them. A common trait can be caused by a commun problem leading to the most obvious solution. It does not need to be caused by a designer or a gene.
This reminds me of Dan Dennett's Pig-in-a-poke God, which each person has their own peek at, but none can peek at any other's . The concept of "God" is so vague and protean, it has to be the HIV of cultural viruses.
The more confused on is the more "per cent" of one's brain one uses, in a desperate scurry-hunt/shot-gun blast approach, Mental Masters, "Einsteins", zero in on just the right vanishingly small point "in the brain, using less, not more.
The Mind fills up 100% of the universe (Now here = No where). "Goswami"
("pig")
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