Sapolsky on the Biology Religion: http://blip.tv/file/2204956/

Very interesting. I'm only in the middle of it at the moment, but it seems incredibly relevant for the forum.

...as I was watching it just stopped spontaneously around the middle...

Good, although I think some of his ideas are more speculative than he seems to admit...

That was an excellent lecture thank you very much for posting it.

His ideas are not speculative. Many of the things he is saying are being backed up by biological data. They are also not all his own ideas which he also states at the end of the lecture. Many of these ideas I have read about before such as the association of shamans with schizoid type personalities.

My computer crashed about 15min in restarted and watched it all 3am sun night. One of the most interesting things I have seen in a long time Thanks for that!
So it would appear humanans have a biological/genetic predesposition to have relegious beleifs that have ensured our survival allowing us to dominate the planet above all other species. I wonder if human violence/war has a similar connection if so its a horrible catch 22. The war will never end because it somehows serves as positive force in human evolution. This is not what I beleive but spectulation that come to mind after seeing the peice.
It almost makes we want to go back to school at age 44 and study psychology that was my fist intrest but I was on my own at 18 with two years of electronics training. It was time to work and party not a decade of school with no funding.

Who knowns if I can not get off the grid maybe I will go back to school. I hope I can get off the grid for good this time....

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges illustrates just this:



I've felt for some time that there is a strong spiritual element to warfare that is often overlooked, for good or for ill.

Religion is a by product of our cognitive abilities. So in that sense we are pre-disposed to having ideas think, those ideas lead to religion. Our cognitive abilities is what ensured our survival not necessarily our religious beliefs.



How is war good for evolution? I didn't get that from the lecture. War tends to kill off a large percentage of people who are ripe at breeding age leaving behind older people who already had kids and younger people with less parents.

How is war good for evolution? I didn't get that from the lecture. War tends to kill off a large percentage of people who are ripe at breeding age leaving behind older people who already had kids and younger people with less parents.

As I said I wonder. I hope it does not, possibly something like the leamings going off the cliff every so often wich of course is also a myth/science story and not entirely true. If I come up with anything I will post it.

I liken it to the waves on water, or even the ripplies that the spice helps us see. All the ideas and concepts string together with similar ones to form waves with momentum, and war is a byproduct found in the crests of some of the highest waves. In this way they bring with them some great ideas, that may have otherwise great intentions, but also like a wider spreading solvent impure ideas that are not so good. Ultimately, they will all be solved out when equilibrium is reached - but this is an active wave-pool constantly churning. In this way these larger waves, resulting in war overpower our smaller waves trying to bring peace and help to the world. In this way these larger waves engulf mass physical materials as in the first two World Wars and crush even vaster psychological and immaterial reserves such as in our modern day with the wars on drugs and terrorism(or whatever it was renamed to) and such, crushing the very hope of eventual victory that war once promised. The waves that involved Hitler and Stalin did much harm, but also much good and teaching. I view it that they were unfortunately necessary - everything is happening exactly as it has to. I am a programmer of video games, and looking at just the Red Alert series itself, and many of the real time strategy games in general, and you can see how their stories all require the specific makeup of everything that happened just as it did. Sorry for that aside into such odd territory, but that serves as a good example of how even deep cracks in the most fringe-est of things was deeply affected. So this wave too is bringing good and bad, and is a wave with War present in its makeup. The war cannot exist without the good and bad ideas that provide it a foundation to form under, but it is presumable we can try and minimize the bad and maximize the good. The War itself manifests in violence and death it seems, and we can see how mankind has tried every possibility - from random killings, to willingly lining up, to sacrificing our own so that noone else must suffer (say a volcano God will get angry, to follow a common stereotype), to anything else. We've managed now to hem it in to an amazing point that we ALL accept will never end - similar to the sacrificing ourselves, but at massive costs to ourselves and maybe our entire collective - as technology has allowed us to amplify these waves to absurd amounts. As someone else mentioned, our society is heading to the realm of where it is sanctimonius, a rite of passage to do your part in fighting the unnamed foe that variable Other is chosen to represent by our opaque masters. That is the key difference, the old masters were transparent - I wonder if during some sacrifices many substances and religious miracles maybe even were happening - what if that was some way to restart life into a slightly better one, another, more physically real, sense of being born again. It would be obvious that this knowledge would be lost once the collective belief in cyclical and reincarnative ideas were lost. I'm not condoning sacrifices or anything, just saying the technology for any meager sense of the reality of those presents is irretrievable. You could have ten people write about an event, but as we can see ourselves transparently through the spice, those events will merely be shadows of the truth. Each observer who wrote, the subjects they wrote about, and every other witness all experienced realities of what we can only presume were the exact same if not moreso intense reality that we experience in the phenomena of being alive. The whole idea of the natural earth's gauss field being stronger then might even actually have some interesting weight to it then?

I'm just ranting, dunno where I'm going with this. I think my point is that war IS good for evolution, but in a sense that is evolutionarily-based itself. It is a similar phenomena to us and everything else, an essential byproduct of reality. For such good to exist, we need the bad of war. If we never died, and were invulnerable, then here's a quick slightly unrealistic stretch: Two people meet each other, one stabs the other with a sword, the other slices his axe into the other's chest, they burst out laughing - but they experience the exact same as if two people in our world embraced each other in a hug. Since death is no factor, nor pain, then penetration of their body is also no factor, and could even be attributed to humor if nothing else, for the same reason that humans have that constant humorous eye that sees something odd, which has proven itself still existing in our consumerism consumed world in the form of mass produced hats with a fake arrow going through the wearer's head. "Look at me, there is an arrow through my head!"

In less 'trivial' ways, War serves as a printed, stained image on the mind. Watch Grave of the Fireflies, or listen to The Wall. These experiences would only be possible through, mayhaps, a meteor? Which as science as taught us, have interesting abilities to jump-start life in ways that are counter intuitive to what one originally thinks. (Smashing, fire, but there is ice in the makeup!) War gives those in charge more and more hubris and foolishness until they eventually destroy themselves, it is part of the equilibrium system itself, righting things out through whatever means necessary - the only constant that the means is always awe inspiring, assuming it is God, or Us.

Okay I'm done rambling ..again.. damn Alan Watts got me going! Oh and this is all just my two cents, and pretty stream of consciousness, but I'm sure you figured that out by now

Note also this was all based on reading the thread, haven't actually watched the video yet *blush*

Interesting reply Spice Girl you remind me of a friend of mine from long ago. A person I will call QT have you heard of her?

M.V.

Unfortunately no, the name doesn't ring a bell I've been lurking here for a while, on and off for about two years, but I've never actually posted anything I don't think.. glad I brought back good memories of her though!! =)

At least some are. Speculation is ALWAYS involved when we try to explain the evolutionary reason for particular traits to exist. The celebrated evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould referred to such speculations as "just-so stories"--after Rudyard Kipling's book Just So Stories.

At best you can give only a reasonable guess for the reason a gene allele has been maintained in a population. Often the reason is in fact "neutral genetic drift," or some other purpose that is obscured by the passage of time.

The most revealing and chilling video I've ever seen about war is this short video about a group of chimps very quietly and carefully preparing for a murderous raid on another chimp group...

I'm a big fan of that segment. Posted it in the "is violence ever justified" thread a little while back.

We're getting a little bit off-topic, but this is essential: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Burnt wrote How is war good for evolution? I didn't get that from the lecture. War tends to kill off a large percentage of people who are ripe at breeding age leaving behind older people who already had kids and younger people with less parents.

A simple answer the strong kill the week olny the strong survive violence/war to evolve or pass on there genes.

The people who survive a war are not necessarily to best people to breed. But we can't define war as good or bad in an evolutionary sense because there really is no good and bad in evolution. War is bad because it ruins thousands of peoples lives. But yea evolutionarily nothing is good or bad necessarily. I owe my entire existence to world war II. Had my grandmothers first husband had not been shot down by the NAZI's I wouldn't be here. So in that sense WWII was great.

But I think war now is bad. We should try to avoid it unless we have a specific reason to hate a specific group of people but most of the time there isn't such a reason that justifies the death of so many. Peace allows for far more prosperity then war.

We are all the descendants of survivors of thousands of conflicts. It has certainly helped shape humanity.

From that we can speculate endlessly (and pointlessly) that maybe such conflicts have selected for the quick and the clever (positive) or the cruel and the cowardly (negative.) Very hard to frame an experiment here because the genetic underpinnings of such complex character traits are poorly understood. This is all further confounded by the fact that language allows the passage of cultural memes that influence, and are influenced by, these complex genetics.

Conflict may have had a big part in human dispersal out of Africa and around the globe. This is a positive in my book. Dispersal allowed humanity to diversify really rapidly. If humans were a totally peaceful communal animal from the outset there would have been a few local populations that would have been made extinct by dramatic environmental upheaval. Dispersal -> diversification -> long term linneage survival.

Back on topic:
Fascinating lecture. I agree with SF that social evolution is entirely an exercise in speculation. This guy lays out a pretty compelling argument for why schitzotypalism has been maintained in human populations through the millennia.
But here is an alternative: The human brain is complex. It's embryonic development is extremely complex. There is a lot to go wrong. Because the mind is so important to the individuals survival and fitness there are complex layers of feedback and redundancy so even if something fairly profound goes wrong a viable human can be born.

So I could argue that the nature of the brain and it's complex development leads to some frequency of schitzotype personalities and human culture has adapted and found cultural niches for these individuals. This is in contrast to the model where human culture has a defined survival need for schizotypes and has therefore maintained them through positive selection over millinea.

Maybe I can actually make some predictions about this. If my 'inside-out' model of shchizotype maintenance is true then there will be many many different genetic combination that predispose an individual to shizotypalism. If schizotypalism has been maintained in human populations from the earliest times via positive selection then there will be very few and they will be similar across continents.

I would imagine that there are. There are many neurotransmitters and enzymes + receptors that all play a role in schizophrenia and or schizotypalism. Some neurotransmitter systems seem to be more important for various types of schizophrenia for example as far as I know. Comparing a catatonic schizophrenic to lets say a paranoid schizophrenic I bet there are a number of factors that distinguish the two.



To be more clear I meant that he was not speculating much about the idea that shamans were often the fringe members of society. Shamans specifically looked for their son or daughter who was the one who was the most weird like themselves to be the apprentice. But whether or not this was because of a genetic schizotypoid disease is for sure speculation as its in the past. Perhaps we can find patterns among current shaman's but I doubt they would be down for such studies.

I see what you mean about the contrasting models. Was the speaker alluding to one in particular over the other?

Seemed to me like Sapolsky was drawing a direct analogy between things like sickle cell anemia and schizotypalism. Seen through the lens of an evolutionary geneticist this means he is proposing a direct positive selection for (otherwise deleterious) partial schizo genotypes in human populations.

The actual mechanistic causes of schizophrenia and schizhotypalism may not be directly predisposed by genetics in an meaningful way. It is very likely that such personality types are due to definable differences in the brains chemistry and/or neuronal connectivity. But saplonksy seems to present the problem like it is a quantitative genetic trait. That is, one copy of the 'crazy gene' and you're a valuable shaman. Two copies and you're too crazy for the hunt.

My bias is that there is so much going on during nervous system formation and function that some minds will, by chance, be so far beyond the norm that we define them as schizo. These systems are highly regulative and self-correcting and so genetic variation will be expressed in unpredictable ways at the level of human behavior. Put another way: Shchizotypalism is not a quantitative genetic trait. It is a low level occurrence that will occur in any human population regardless of genetic background due to the complexity of nervous system development and function.

We need tons of shaman pedigrees and DNA samples to resolve these issues. Maybe a human geneticist could write a pretty compelling grant on this since these kinds of personality disorders are a huge drain on productivity and quality of life and they are traditionally hard to study.

Are there any indigenous cultures with a strong shamanic tradition and a reliable genealogy/family history tradition?

Good question I see what you mean though.

I often find the traditional mendalian genetics lacking in a lot of explanations about things like behavior and mental illness. Its very environmentally influenced for one. Second many genes can be involved in various traits of various mental illnesses.

There are many types of schizophrenia for example. I think this is both and environmental and genetic difference (as are most things). I would also say its probably not just having one or two genes involved to make you prone to magical thinking and out right psychotic. There are many other factors involved.