Are Atheists genetic mutants - A product of recent evolution

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http://www.unz.com/article/are-atheists ... evolution/

Worth reading the whole thing, some highlights:

Until the Industrial Revolution, we were under harsh conditions of Darwinian Selection, meaning that about 40% of children died before they reached adulthood. These children would have been those who had mutant genes, leading to poor immune systems and death from childhood diseases. But they would also have had mutant genes affecting the mind. This is because the brain, home to 84% of the genome, is extraordinarily sensitive to mutation, so mental and physical mutation robustly correlate. If these children had grown up, they might have had autism, schizophrenia, depression… but they had poor immune systems, so they never had the chance.

Under these conditions, prevalent until the nineteenth century, we were individually selected for but we were also “group selected” for. Ethnic groups are simply a genetic extended family and some groups fared better against the environment and enemy groups than others did, due to the kind of partly genetic psychological adaptations they developed.

Among these, the authors argue, was a very specific kind of religiosity which developed in all complex societies: the collective worship of gods concerned with morality. Belief in these kinds of gods was selected for, they maintain, because once we developed cities we had to deal with strangers—people who weren’t part of our extended family. By conceiving of a god who demanded moral behaviour towards other believers, people were compelled to cooperate with these strangers, meaning that large, highly cooperative groups could develop.

Computer models have proven that the more internally cooperative group—which is also hostile to infidel outsiders—wins the battle of group selection [The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation by Max Hartshorn, June 2013]. This very specific kind of religiousness was selected for and, indeed, it correlates with positive and negative ethnocentrism even today.

The authors demonstrate that this kind of religiousness has clearly been selected for in itself. It is about 40% genetic according to twin studies, it is associated with strongly elevated fertility, it can be traced to activity in specific regions of the brain, and it is associated with elevated health: all the key markers that something has been selected for.

And it is from here that the authors make the leap that has made SJW blood boil. Drawing on research by Michael Woodley of Menie and his team (see here and here)they argue that conditions of Darwinian selection have now massively weakened, leading to a huge rise in people with damaging mutations. This is evidenced in increasing rates of autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality, sex-dysmorphia, left-handedness, asymmetrical bodies and much else. These are all indicators of mutant genes.

...

It’s generally believed that religiousness makes you healthier because it makes you worry less and elevates your mood, but they turn this view on its head, showing that religious worshippers are more likely to carry gene forms associated with being low in anxiety. Schizophrenia, they show, is associated with extreme and anti-social religiosity, rather than collective worship. Similarly, belief in the paranormal is predicted by schizophrenia, and this is a marker of genetic mutation.

Next, they test autism, another widely accepted marker of mutation, as evidenced by the fact that it’s more common among the children of older men, whose fathers are prone to mutant sperm. Autism predicts atheism.

...

Dutton & Co.’s research is so incendiary because it is presenting the SJWs with what they really are: mutants; maladapted people who undermine carefully evolved, evolutionarily useful structures—such as religion—meaning they make even non-carriers maladapted; discouraging them from breeding or from defending their ethnic group.

Under normal Darwinian conditions, prevalent until the Industrial Revolution, these mutants would simply never have been born. They are, just like the mutant mice, people whose influence will ultimately lead to the collapse of society, as intelligence declines, and we return to a new Dark Age in which people are likely to be very religious indeed.

But perhaps there is some good news. It’s quite clear from the Mouse Utopia experiments that if the mutants are removed, then the society will recover.

Atheism came about because of the beginnings of a reliance on the Scientific Method----circa Enlightenment.

Perhaps recent history is being seen from the wrong side of the tapestry.

Before the Enlightenment, it seemed as if atheism was something which was inconceivable. A belief in a divine being was intertwined like chromosomes are intertwined.

And the argument put forward is that this story may parallel a genetic shift. Read the article or the studies linked.

I guess this could be conceivable on the basis of "natural selection."

But I believe it was more a "state of mind" adopted in a person's life, and enabled by more leisure.

Highly religious person claiming the end of world is nigh, and wanting to cast out or kill unbelievers, how original!

That would require a belief that the mind is totally separate from its genetic blueprint, no?

So...Darwinian selection forced us all to ...doubt things that don't involve God, like....Darwinian selection?

But once we were freed of the tyranny of Darwinian selection we were free to ...accept the reality of things like...Darwinian selection?

Not sure what to make of that.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 29 May 2018, 9:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

I believe in the notion that Genetics provides the "skeleton," but that Experience provides most of the substance of the "body."

Yes.....we are genetically-programmed. But...I believe in Piaget on this: we emanate from schemas. You are born in a schema. It's your reaction to the schema----a "free will" reaction---which helps you to advance up to different schemas. And then you react to those schemas....and so on down the line.

The rift between Darwinian evolution and religious belief is overstated. Using the article's own terminology, you might assign the anti-Science Christians as belonging to the schitzophrenic faction, themselves genetic mutants in the same way as the atheist "undesirables".

Reading Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy I couldn't help but notice his shots as Socrates and realize he had a point - ie. that Socrates was something like a 4th century BC equivalent of a modern skeptic; tone-deafness to music and art included. He also suggested, and this might be a stretch, that Socrates was so alienated from his own instinctual nature that his famous daemon might have quite literally been that - the right hemisphere or instinctive nature that he took full flight from and could only see as a secondary being. If that's the case I'd say Shermer, Dawkins, and Dennett look relatively mild in comparison.

I think each generation's values probably do alter what you get more of, but I don't think anything particularly new is coming about. Also I would think that far more hard-nosed rationalists are adapted as such environmentally more than genetically. There might be a few more people with the genes for that to just be them but it's probably not as many as it might appear in the current climate. The very occurence of so many of Sam Harris's fans falling in love with Jung for the first time thanks to Jordan Peterson seems to indicate as well that it was simply the best thing many of them had going, and now they're starting to look around for more comprehensive ideas where even if still materialistic they're trying to find a more sophisticated account of the subjective and how it ties into politics, philosophy, and life in general.

My own inside joke on this - in five years time half these guys and girls might be on EA Koeting's 'Become a Living God' forum. It isn't a big thing yet but it wouldn't shock me at all of it that sort of thing is the next shoe to drop culturally.

Except Epicurus, who came up with atomism somewhere around 400B.C and while his writings were destroyed at the end of antiquity, the Roman text "on the nature of things" from 400AD on Epicurean philosophy survived. Atheism is not a new genetic aberration. It's somethong that happens when no one threatens people to burn them on a stake or chop their heads off.

[opinion=mine]

While I do not believe that atheists are mutants, I do believe that they are products of evolution. After all, the ability to reason is a high-order mental function that is found in more highly-evolved animals, and reason seems to be behind the (non-)beliefs expressed by atheists.

[/opinion]

For the record, I am not an atheist - I just don't like religion.

I bet atheists have always been around. There may be more now than ever before, but that's due to we can explain things like the sun, rain, eclipses, droughts, etc.. We no longer have to rely on supernatural reasons for them.

Diagoras of Melos (5th century BC) was a Greek poet and sophist known as the Atheist of Melos, who declared that there were no Gods.

Last edited by Syd on 01 Jun 2018, 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.