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The evolution of God
It's a popular topic these days. Here's the manifesto of a new Website-cum-scholarly-project (The Evolution of Religion) that asks the question: are there selective advantages to believing in a supernatural deity?
Religious believers incur significant costs in terms of time, energy and resources that could be spent elsewhere. Religion therefore poses a major puzzle for disciplines that explain behavior on the basis of individual costs and benefits -- in particular economics and evolutionary biology. … The aim of our project is to conduct a scientific examination of exactly the opposite hypothesis -- that religious beliefs and behavior confer adaptive advantages to individual believers, and were therefore favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. In other words, religion may have evolved.
Dominic Johnson, whose "Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions" I wrote about three years ago, is one of the scholars behind the project, which is funded by -- guess who? -- the Templeton Foundation. They're everywhere!
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contributors
Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard English department, and an Instructor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.
