Evolution

Computer simulations suggest how religions might emerge

samrose — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:58:39 -0700

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

"If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community," says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program – called Evogod (download the code here).

Dow is by no means the first scientist to take a stab at explaining how religion emerged. Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that religion is a mental artefact, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.

"Sometime between 100,000 years ago to the point where writing was invented, maybe about 7000 BC, we begin to have records of people's supernatural beliefs," Dow says.

To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.

"What people are adapting to is other people," he says.

The Neuroscience of Moral Decision-Making

gjones — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:52:06 -0700

I read a post on Mind Hacks today (http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/09/radiolab_on_the_scie.html) that lead me to an episode (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/28) of WNYC RadioLab dealing with the psychology and neuroscience of morality. The show is not new, but if you haven't heard it, it's well worth downloading the MP3 for a listen during commute. The first part of the show features Marc Hauser and Josh Greene, psychologists from Harvard, and my friend and colleague, Frans de Waal, the primatologist from Emory's Yerkes Primate Center here in Atlanta. Hauser and Greene's fMRI studies of moral decision-making (in such philosophical thought experiments as the trolley problem) and Frans' ideas about the role of empathy in cooperation among his monkeys offer some insights into evolved mechanisms that are at the very core of what it means to be social beings.

The Evolution of Cooperation among Other-Regarding Agents

gjones — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:16:11 -0700

Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have a new review of game theoretic models of cooperation which is to appear in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, to be published next year. Bowles and Gintis begin with dyadic interactions among self-regarding agents showing that cooperation can be maintained with such mechanisms as retribution, where cooperation is withheld from previously defecting agents (tit-for-tat) and reputation maintenance, where "mental models" of previous cooperation behavior are important to overcome the problem of infrequent interactions with a large number of partners. Among others, the standing model of Sugden, the indirect reciprocity model of Panchanathan and Boyd and the image scoring model of Nowak and Sigmund are considered. Next, they examine the Folk Theorem in large groups of self-regarding agents operating under imperfect information, observing that the intuitions of the dyadic model do not extend to contexts involving larger group size and higher error rates. Finally, they explore cooperation in large groups of other-regarding agents, asking "how such altruistic behavior could have become common, given that bearing costs to support the benefits of others reduces payoffs, and both cultural and genetic updating of behaviors is likely to favor traits with higher payoffs." Citing a number of recent studies, they conclude that cooperation can be sustained in groups of substantial size where agents with social preferences are more likely than random to interact with other agents with social preferences (an idea akin to Brian Skyrms' notion of correlated association). They further conclude that the long term evolution of such social preferences is plausible. Newcomers to game theoretic models of cooperation would do well to start with this excellent review. An advance version of the paper is available here.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Cooperation, in the The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Eds. L. Blume and S. Durlauf. MacMillan (forthcoming, 2008).

Welcome to the New Cooperation Commons

JimBenson — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:17:22 -0700

Welcome! Cooperation Commons has switched platforms. Plone required too much maintenance and was unable to deal with the spam that a popular web site unfortunately attracts. Please look around and join the new Cooperation Commons and help us continue! Jim Benson