Las penas del Agente Smith

Leía el otro día un artículo en Scientific American titulado Is Religion Adaptive? It’s Complicated, en el que se exponían varias hipótesis acerca del origen o la utilidad de la religión. Hay para todos los gustos:

As the resident psychologist, I reiterated my empirically based argument that belief in the afterlife is more or less an inevitable byproduct of human consciousness. Since we cannot conceptualize the absence of consciousness, even non-believers are susceptible to visions of the hereafter.

Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members.

Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health.

Y el último:

And Westmont College biologist Jeff Schloss, who has worked extensively on the theological implications of Darwinism, gently compelled us to consider what these scientific developments in the study of religion will ultimately mean philosophically.

Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual Question” at Edge, the data suggest that God is actually just a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?

Gran parte del artículo está aquí resumido. En la segunda página encontré un enlace a un curioso proyecto: Explaining Religion Project, una iniciativa de investigación que pretende:

1. Caracterizar los elementos principales del repertorio religioso universal y sus variaciones.
2. Establecer las causas principales de esas distintas religiones.
3. Encontrar las variaciones en el grado de elaboración (y énfasis) de cada elemento en cada tradición religiosa diferente, históricas y contemporáneas.
4. Desarrollar modelos para simular las futuras transformaciones en determinados sistemas religiosos.

Como se ve, los objetivos son ambiciosos. Pero estaría bien encontrar una explicación para esa afección que sufre tanta gente.

(Nota al margen: estaré fuera durante este fin de semana. A la hora de escribir esto, aún no sé si me va a dar tiempo a programar un par de entradas para el sábado y el domingo. Si puedo, guay. Si no, les devuelvo el dinero. Pásenlo bien.)