Our book:
Defensive Design for the Web: How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points
Available Now ($16.99)
Most Popular (last 15 days)
Looking for old posts?
37signals Mailing List
37signals Services
Syndicate
G-Thang
27 Dec 2002 by Matthew Linderman
In The Origin of Religions, From a Distinctly Darwinian View (N.Y. Times) Dr. David Sloan Wilson argues that religions evolved much like gangs; They helped make groups of humans comparatively more cooperative and thus able to present a formidable front against bands of less organized adversaries.
I think that religion has been very good at rearranging the nonreligious furniture of our mind into a coherent whole. It takes things like faith, which is what allows you to keep going even in the absence of information, evidence or immediate gratification, and which everybody needs, and it takes forgiveness, which is what you ask for when you transgress, and it reworks these modules, to put it crudely, and tries to set them in a permanent “on” position.
8 comments so far (Post a Comment)
27 Dec 2002 | Darrel said...
Aren't religious groups and gangs pretty much the same thing? Groups of like minded people with like minded purposes and like minded values?
27 Dec 2002 | merman said...
Release the Krakken!
27 Dec 2002 | alisha said...
all I know is that I did not spring forth from somebodys rib and the origin of the word "adam" means "human", not "male".
28 Dec 2002 | ~bc said...
Or maybe religion is like a parasitic disease, which evolved to transmit itself like the AIDS virus, and isn't good for any of its hosts but gets passed on anyway.
Not something to say casually at your next party. Props for the guts to have that printed in the NYT next to his own name.
29 Dec 2002 | Sean said...
Considering that many super-religious Christians don't buy into biological evolutionary theory I have to wonder how they'll regard religious evolutionary theory.
30 Dec 2002 | Cade Roux said...
I'm about halfway into his book (Darwin's Cathedral - I had it on my Amazon wish list and got it for Christmas).
We're still wading through multi-level natural selection (individuals and groups and when different types of selection are valid), but it's a very interesting book.
30 Dec 2002 | nicholas said...
sounds like a restatement of the thesis of "non zero." that evolution favors better forms of organization, particularly when it increases trade and interaction. i believe he covered similar ground in "the moral animal."
13 Dec 2003 | bali said...
i'd inform the site in
bali travel,
bali hotel,
bali
island
information,
bali golf
thanks
