If they find God - make the jerk apologise !

Quoting rayilynlee <[log in to unmask]>:

> I selected this article because there is a paragraph about Parkinson's
> disease and religiosity. A study showed people with PD were more secular
> than healthy people.
> Ray
> Where angels no longer fear to tread
> Mar 19th 2008
> From The Economist print edition
> Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has
> decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the
> latter
> BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, ?2m ($3.1m) is not a
> huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human
> perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the
> European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of
> CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later
> this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson-an object that has been
> dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The ?2m, by
> contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself-or, rather, for the
> biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in
> general.
> "Explaining Religion", as the project is known, is the largest-ever
> scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three
>
> years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines
>
> from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a
>
> growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.
> Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous
> phenomenon-arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens-but a
> puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of
> humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources.
> Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements.
> Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology
>
> of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it
> communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope
> as well.
> I have no need of that hypothesis
> Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it
> will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to
> represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a
> "surveillance-camera" God might improve reproductive success to an
> individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's
> reputation-for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are
> more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to
> establish whether different religions foster different levels of
> co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings
> collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside
> it.
>
> *This is it:
> It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have blazed
>
> a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the Evolutionary
> Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of Medicine. He
> works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease. This illness is
> caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called dopamine in certain
> parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr McNamara discovered that
> those with Parkinson's had lower levels of religiosity than healthy
> individuals, and that the difference seemed to correlate with the disease's
> severity. He therefore suspects a link with dopamine levels and is now
> conducting a follow-up involving some patients who are taking
> dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are not.
>
> Such neurochemical work, though preliminary, may tie in with scanning
> studies conducted to try to find out which parts of the brain are involved
> in religious experience. Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of
> Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the
> brains of religious people. She used positron emission tomography (PET) to
> measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six
> non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The Christians all said that
> reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helped them enter a religious
> state of mind, so both groups were scanned in six different sets of
> circumstances: while reading the first verse of the 23rd psalm, while
> reciting it out loud, while reading a happy story (a well-known German
> children's rhyme), while reciting that story out loud, while reading a
> neutral text (how to use a calling card) and while at rest.
> Dr Azari was expecting to see activity in the limbic systems of the
> Christians when they recited the psalm. Previous research had suggested that
>
> this part of the brain (which regulates emotion) is an important centre of
> religious activity. In fact what happened was increased activity in three
> areas of the frontal and parietal cortex, some of which are better known for
>
> their involvement in rational thought. The control group did not show
> activity in these parts of their brains when listening to the psalm. And,
> intriguingly, the only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group
> was reading the happy story.
> Dr Azari's PET study, together with one by Andrew Newberg of the University
> of Pennsylvania, which used single-photon emission computed tomography done
> on Buddhist monks, and another by Mario Beauregard of the University of
> Montreal, which put Carmelite nuns in a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine,
> all suggest that religious activity is spread across many parts of the
> brain. That conflicts not only with the limbic-system theory but also with
> earlier reports of a so-called God Spot that derived partly from work
> conducted on epileptics. These reports suggested that religiosity originates
>
> specifically in the brain's temporal lobe, and that religious visions are
> the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain.
> Though there is clearly still a long way to go, this sort of imaging should
> eventually tie down the circuitry of religious experience and that, combined
>
> with work on messenger molecules of the sort that Dr McNamara is doing, will
>
> illuminate how the brain generates and processes religious experiences. Dr
> Azari, however, is sceptical that such work will say much about religion's
> evolution and function. For this, other methods are needed.
> Dr McNamara, for example, plans to analyse a database called the
> Ethnographic Atlas to see if he can find any correlations between the amount
>
> of cultural co-operation found in a society and the intensity of its
> religious rituals. And Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of
>
> Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the
> long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it
>
> imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods,
> fasting and so on.
> Leviticus's children
> On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should
> persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The
> splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show
> which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of
> religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable
> signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to
> that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the
> advantages of group membership.
> To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group
> co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr
> Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in
> 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for
>
> his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include
>
> the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose
> ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to
> dissolve in any given year.
> A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric
> Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes
> (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived
> correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the
> behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food
> consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication,
> rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.
> As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune
> placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the
> grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes,
> where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual
> constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a
> community-what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are
> sanctified.
> Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel.
> Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the
> principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within
> religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups
> of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to
> observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the
> behaviour of men and women.
> To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion
>
> University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a
> kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the
> common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a
> pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the
> version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was
> told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and
> 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the
> envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither
> got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100
>
> shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased
>
> by 50% and split between them.
> Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the
> communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over
>
> things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis
> was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus
> would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would
> take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.
> Big father is watching you
> Dr Sosis is not the only researcher to employ economic games to investigate
> the nature and possible advantages of religion. Ara Norenzayan, an
> experimental psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in
> Vancouver, has conducted experiments using what is known as the dictator
> game. This, too, is a well-established test used to gauge altruistic
> behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money-Dr Norenzayan set it at
> $10-and are asked if they would like to share it with another player. The
> dictator game thus differs from another familiar economic game in which one
> person divides the money and the other decides whether to accept or reject
> that division.
> As might be expected, in the simple version of the dictator game most people
>
> take most or all of the money. However, Dr Norenzayan and his graduate
> student Azim Shariff tried to tweak the game by introducing the idea of God.
>
> They did this by priming half of their volunteers to think about religion by
>
> getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God,
>
> spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of
> $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.
> Exactly what Dr Norenzayan has discovered here is not clear. A follow-up
> experiment which primed people with secular words that might, nevertheless,
> have prompted them to behave in an altruistic manner (civic, jury, court,
> police and contract) had similar effects, so it may be that he has touched
> on a general question of morality, rather than a specific one of religion.
> However, an experiment carried out by Jesse Bering, of Queen's University in
>
> Belfast, showed quite specifically that the perceived presence of a
> supernatural being can affect a person's behaviour-although in this case the
>
> being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person.
> Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by
> promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to
> rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like
> slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and
>
> police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a
> supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in
> such beings would prevent what he called "dangerous risk miscalculations"
> that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.
> One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch of
> undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer
> among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer
> program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused
>
> the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were
> therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word "Answer"
> appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test
> results were fair.
> The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a
> note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did
> not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the
> experimenter that the student's ghost had sometimes been seen in the room.
> The other group was not given this suggestion.
> The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering
> measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion.
>
> He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged
> the other four. He found that those who had been told the ghost story were
> much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not. They did so in
> an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had
> only read the note about the student's death and 7.2 for those who had not
> heard any of the story concerning the dead student. In short, awareness of a
>
> ghost-a supernatural agent-made people less likely to cheat.
> Who is my neighbour?
> It all sounds very Darwinian. But there is a catch. The American communes,
> the kibbutzim, the students of the University of British Columbia and even
> the supernatural self-censorship observed by Dr Bering all seem to involve
> behaviour that promotes the group over the individual. That is the opposite
> of Darwinism as conventionally understood. But it might be explained by an
> idea that most Darwinians dropped in the 1960s-group selection.
> The idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire
> groups of organisms, rather than just of individuals, was rejected because
> it is mathematically implausible. But it has been revived recently, in
> particular by David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, in New York, as a
>
> way of explaining the evolution of human morality in the context of
> inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous that groups whose
> members fail to collaborate in an individually self-sacrificial way may be
> wiped out entirely. This negates the benefits of selfish behaviour within a
> group. Morality and religion are often closely connected, of course (as Dr
> Norenzayan's work confirms), so what holds for the one might be expected to
> hold for the other, too.
> Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and
>
> religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in
> question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most
> fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a
> condition for the security which comes from membership of a group. He is
> also interested in what some religions hold out as the ultimate reward for
> good behaviour-life after death. That can promote any amount of
> self-sacrifice in a believer, up to and including suicidal behaviour-as
> recent events in the Islamic world have emphasised. However, belief in an
> afterlife is not equally well developed in all religions, and he suspects
> the differences may be illuminating.
> That does not mean there are no explanations for religion that are based on
> individual selection. For example, Jason Slone, a professor of religious
> studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people who are
> religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to help in
> parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as mates. He
> plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether this is so. And,
> slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that "secularism is very
> maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two
> kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't smoking and drinking, and are
>
> living longer and having the health benefits."
> That quip, though, makes an intriguing point. Evolutionary biologists tend
> to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific investigation
> of religion did not end up supporting their point of view. But if a
> propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved trait, then they have
>
> talked themselves into a position where they cannot benefit from it, much as
>
> a sceptic cannot benefit from the placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe,
> therefore, it is God who will have the last laugh after all-whether He
> actually exists or not.
>
>
> Rayilyn Brown
> Board Member AZNPF
> Arizona Chapter National Parkinson's Foundation
> [log in to unmask]
>
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