#48. Science and Proto-science [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Why does religion continue to be so popular in today's supposedly enlightened age? In what category of things should we place religion for purposes of analysis? This is a very important question. The least bad answer that I have come up with is: "Religion is the last protoscience." (By this I mean "classical protoscience"; a contemporary field of study, string theory, has also been labelled "protoscience," a result I base on a DuckDuckGo search on "Is string theory a protoscience?" on 20 Feb, 2022.)

Protoscience is most easily defined by a few well-known examples: alchemy and astrology. These disciplines can be thought of as crude, primordial versions of chemistry and astronomy, respectively, and unable to quickly divest themselves of laughably bad theories, due to an over-reliance on aesthetics as a way to truth.

If religion is a protoscience, that then, is the corresponding science? Will religion someday transform into some kind of super-science, marvelous beyond all prior imagining, and capable of robustly duplicating all the miracles of Christ, just for starters?

08-03-2020: Formerly at this location, now deprecated: Religion is the protoscience of origins and Darwin's theory its successor via the clergyman Malthus. Malthus was one of Darwin's influences, as attested explicitly in the writings of the latter.

07-26-2020: The science that could replace the protoscience religion is likely to be the study of adaptive, distributed, and unconscious behavioral effects in human populations. <07-30-2020: This will be a division within sociobiology focused on human swarm intelligence acting on an historical time scale.> From my own examined experience, I have reason to believe that such things exist. I called them "macro-homeostatic effects" in the post "The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse."

Alchemy is thought to have become chemistry with the isolation of oxygen in pure form by Priestly, followed in short order by its recognition as an element by Lavoisier, who had met Priestly in Paris and learned of the new "air" direct from the discoverer. This clue led Lavoisier to a correct theory of the nature of combustion. Priestly published his discovery of oxygen (Lavoisier's term), which he called "dephlogisticated air" (an alchemical term), in letter form, in 1775.

06-28-2019: The corresponding intellectual hand-off from astrology to astronomy seems to have been from Tycho Brae (1546-1601), who seems to have been much involved with astrology, to his onetime assistant Johannes Kepler (1571-1630; "The Legislator of the Heavens"), who derived three famous mathematical laws of planetary motion from Brae's data.

While the former astrology continues to this day as basically a form of amusement and favorite whipping-boy of sophomores everywhere who are just discovering the use of their brains, and the former alchemy has utterly perished (as theory, not practice), religion continues to pay its way down the time stream as a purveyor of a useful approximate theory.

An approximate theory is useful to have if all you need is a quick and dirty answer. The theory that the Earth is flat is an approximate theory that we use every time we take a step. The corresponding exact theory, that the Earth is spherical and gravitating, is only needed for challenging projects such as travelling to the moon.

03-13-2020: Thus, the God hypothesis is the theory of natural selection seen "through a glass darkly." However, the experiences contributing to the formulation of the God hypothesis would have been due to any cause of seemingly miraculous events over the horizon or beyond the reach of individual memory. This would comprise a mixture of the fastest effects of evolution and the slowest effects of synaptic plasticity/learning (e.g., developmental sensitive periods). However, the capacity for learning is itself due to natural selection and learning is, like natural selection, a trial-and-error process. Thus, the two sources of biological order hinting at the existence of God should usually be pulling in the same direction but perhaps with different levels of detail. Modern skepticism about religion seems to be directed at the intellectual anchor point: the God hypothesis. Since I believe that they are best de-faithed who are least de-faithed, let us simply shift the anchor to natural selection and carry on.

I think it premature to abandon classical religion as a source of moral guidance before evolutionary psychology is better developed, and given the usefulness of approximate theories, complete abandonment may never be practical. However, in our day, humanity is beset with many pressing problems, and although atheism appears to be in the ascendent, it may be time to reconcile religion with science, so as not to throw out any babies with the bathwater.

The modes of worship in use in many modern religions may well confer psychological benefits on the pious not yet suspected or articulated by mainstream science. Scientific investigation of the modes of worship that many religions have in common seems in order, especially since they amount to folk wisdom, which is sometimes on the money. Examples of common practices that seem to have potential for inducing neurophysiological changes are prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, incense-burning, and even simple congregating.

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

#19. Explaining Science-religion Antipathy also Explains Religion [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

I will be arguing here that the Darwinian selective advantage to humans of having a propensity for religion is that it regulates the pace of introduction of new technology, which is necessitated by the disruptive side effects of new technology.

If this sounds like a weak argument, perhaps people have been chronically underestimating the costs to society of the harmful side effects of new technology, ever since there have been people. Take the downside of the taming of fire, for instance. You can bet that the first use would have been military, just as in the case of nuclear energy. Remember that everything was covered in forests in those days; there must have been an appalling time of fire until kin selection slowly put a stop to it. The lake-bottom charcoal deposits will still be there, if anyone cares to look for them. (Shades of Asimov's story "Nightfall.")

The sedimentary record does not seem to support the idea that the smoke from such a time of fire caused a planetary cooling event sufficient to trigger the last ice age. However, the mere possibility helps to drive home the point, namely that prehistoric, evolutionary-milieu technology was not necessarily too feckless to produce enough disruption to constitute a source of selection pressure.

Natural selection could have built a rate-of-innovation controller by exaggerating people's pleasure at discovering a new, unexplored phenomenon, until they bog down in rapture at that moment and never progress to the next step of actually experimenting or exploring. The latter activities would be just upstream of the nominally controlled process, the introduction of new technology. People's tendency for "rapture capture" would be causally linked via genetically specified neural pathways to the kinds of hardships caused by technological side effects, thereby completing a negative feedback loop that would work like a steam engine governor.

I conjecture that all present-day religions are built on this phenomenon of "rapture capture." This may explain why the most innovative country, the USA, is also the most religiose, according to Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion." An Einsteinian sense of wonder at the cosmos that, according to Dawkins, most scientists feel, could be a mild, non-capturing version of the same thing. The unlikely traits attributed to God, omnipotence, omni this and that, could have instrumental value in intensifying the rapture.

Another possible name for what I have been calling rapture could be "arcanaphilia." A basic insight for me here was that religion is fundamentally hedonistic. I do not seem to be straying too far from Marx's statement that "Religion is the opiate of the people."

These ideas help to explain why some sciences such as astronomy and chemistry began as inefficient protosciences (e.g., astrology, alchemy): they were inhibited from the start by an excessive sense of wonder, until harder heads eventually prevailed (Galileo, Lavoisier). Seen as a protoscience, the Abrahamic religions could originally have been sparked by evidence that "someone is looking out for us" found in records of historical events such as those the ancient Israelites compiled (of which the Dead Sea Scrolls are a surviving example). That "someone" would in reality be various forms of generation-time compensation, one of which I have been calling the "intermind" in these pages. Perhaps when the subject of study is in reality a powerful aspect of ourselves as populations, the stimulus for rapture capture will be especially effective, explaining why religion has yet to become an experimental science.

By the way, there is usually no insurmountable difficulty in experimenting on humans so long as the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki are observed: volunteer basis only; controlled, randomized, double-blind study; experiment thoroughly explained to volunteers before enrollment; written consent obtained from all volunteers before enrollment; approval of the experimental design obtained in advance from the appropriate institutional ethics committee; and the experiment registered online with the appropriate registry.

Religions seem to be characterized by an unmistakable style made up of little touches that exaggerate the practitioner's sense of wonder and mystery, thus, their arcanaphilic "high." I refer to unnecessarily high ceilings in places of worship, use of enigmatic symbols, putting gold leaf on things, songs with Italian phrases in the score, such as "maestoso," wearing colorful costumes, etc. I shall refer to all the elements of this style collectively as "bractea," Latin for tinsel or gold leaf. I propose the presence of bractea as a field mark for recognizing religions in the wild. By this criterion, psychiatry is not a religion, but science fiction is.

It seems to me that bractea use can easily graduate into the creation of formal works of art, such as canticles, stained glass windows, statues of the Buddha, and the covers of science fiction magazines. Exposure to concentrations of excessive creativity in places of worship can be expected to drive down the creativity of the worshipers by a negative feedback process evolved to regulate the diversity of the species memeplex, already alluded to in my post titled, "The Intermind: Engine of History?"

This effect should indirectly reduce the rate of introduction of new technology, thereby feeding into the biological mission of religion. Religion could be the epi-evolutionary solution, and the artistic feedback could be the evolutionary solution, to the disorders caused by creativity. Bractea would represent a synergy between the two.

#1. Intro [evolutionary psychology, evolution]

This is the sort of thing I write:

EP       EV      

Red, theory; black, fact.

EP

Religion is the last proto-science (e.g., alchemy, astrology). 
(Parts cut to Deprecated page, Part 2.)

***

EV

The eukaryotic cell arose from a clonal array of prokaryotes that selectively lost some of its internal partition walls while following the colony path to complexity. The remaining partitions gave rise to the internal membrane systems of present-day eukaryotes. Those prokaryote colonists specializing in chemiosmotic processes such as oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis could not lose any of their delimiting walls because of the need to maintain concentration gradients, so they remain bacterium-like in morphology to this day. This is an alternative to the phagocytotic theory of the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts. Modern blue-green algae genetically resemble the DNA in chloroplasts, and modern aerobic bacteria have genetic resemblances to the DNA in mitochondria, but this is not necessarily differential support for the phagocytosis theory. The resemblances can be accounted for by convergent evolution or by the existence of an ancestor common to the modern organisms and the ancient colony formers I suppose here.

11-15-2017

These prokaryote colonies would have originally reproduced by sporulation, not mitosis, which would have come later. The "spores" would be actively-metabolizing prokaryotes and before growing into further colonies, would be subject to natural selection. In the spore phase, the rapid evolvability of typical prokaryotes would have been recovered, allowing the formation of large, slow-growing colonies without sacrifice of the high evolvability of the original solitary prokaryotes. Modern-day eukaryotes often secrete tiny bodies called exosomes containing all the macromolecules of life. Exosomes may be the evolutionary vestige of the sporulation phase of the original eukaryotes.