:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 ::

Religion on the brain
I'm reading a book right now by Pascal Boyer called Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.


I came across something interesting; he's talking about the question of whether religion is innate in the genes. He says the question is meaningless; he uses the example of catching colds, and remembering melodies. Basically it runs like this--human beings can catch colds, we have respiratory organs that provide a site for tons of pathogens including those of the commons cold; we remember tunes cause part of our brain can store series of sounds and easily remember relative pitch and duration. But there are no common colds in our genes and no melodies in our genes either.

What is in the genes is a tremendously complex set of chemical recipes for the building of normal organisms with respiratory organs and a complex set of connections between brain areas. Normal genes in a normal milieu will give you a pair of lungs and an organized auditory cortex, and with these the dispositions to acquire both colds and tunes.

So having a normal brain means you have the ability to aquire religion.

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 07:53:00 PM [+] ::
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