On 4/1/2017 11:55 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Am 01.04.2017 um 23:50 schrieb Brent Meeker:
On 4/1/2017 12:39 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
I would like to note that in the paper that I have referenced
discusses a completely different question. Provided that one could
explain religion in the framework of evolutionary advantages, the
question arises whether one should also try to explain atheism in
the same framework.
In the paper there are references to empirical studies that show
that atheists have lower birthrates.
It's also true that atheists have a higher proportion of their
children survive to adulthood. These are simply correlates: in
technological, educated societies people have fewer children and have
fewer of them die young - and they are less superstitious.
It might be good to check if this statement complies with empirical
findings.
Just compare statistics for a nation with lots of non-believers, e.g
France or Sweden, to those with a high proportion of believers, e.g.
Afghanistan or Ethiopia. Which is not to say it's a cause/effect
relationship. Where life is hard and medical services are sparse people
cling to religion and their children often die - so they have more
children to compensate...and having more children contributes to their
poverty. All the major religions encourage fertility. Religion as a
political force aims to win by demographics.
Brent
Dominic Johnson tries to explain this empirical fact in
evolutionary terms.
I looked up Johnson's papers. Thanks for pointing him out. Some
the theories in "The Elephant in the Room" apply equally to current
politics, e.g. in section 3e:
Indeed, Johnson has a paper
Dominic D. P. Johnson, Bradley A. Thayer, The evolution of offensive
realism: Survival under anarchy from the Pleistocene to the present,
Politics and the Life Sciences, v. 35, N 1, p. 1 — 26, 2016.
that is pretty similar.
Evgenii
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
