Am 01.04.2017 um 10:45 schrieb Russell Standish:
Maybe we can think along the lines of why the "gay gene" persists.
Gay people make attentive uncles, improving the fitness of their
near relatives, or so the "just-so" story goes.
Maybe atheists are freer thinkers, able to think outside the box to
come up with solutions to important social problems. But presumably
society doesn't want too many free-thinkers, limiting the number of
atheists in society. Something like that.
Though how to explain that atheism in practice is probably the
dominant "religion" in Australia. And even more so amongst young
people, it appears. My son, who went to a nominally christian
school, said he only knew of two overtly christian boys amongst the
180-odd in his cohort.
Food for thought.
Yes, in the paper there are different hypotheses to explain evolutionary
advantages for atheists. I especially like:
7. Catalyst
Presence of atheists facilitates adaptive advantages of belief
"The presence of atheists may indirectly improve the fitness of
believers by catalyzing their beneficial interactions."
"atheists might, on the contrary, increase the benefits of religion to
the group."
"This hypothesis is already implicit in some existing evolutionary
theories of religion, which postulate advantages for believers that
depend on the co-existence of other individuals with different beliefs."
Well, in Johnson's paper there are no mathematical models. To this end, see
Robert Rowthorn, Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance
model, Proc. R. Soc. B 2011 278 2519-2527.
Evgenii
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