Jeez -- I had virtually this exact conversation with The Eight Year Old tonight!

talkorigins.org has a wonderful collection of evidence of jury-rigging in nature that is hard to square with the notion of a perfect, intelligent designer.

"Principal"

*****************

I've always thought the appendix was Exhibit Number One for the anti-"ID" forces ...

Sigh. A hundred and fifty years after Darwin, fifty years after Watson n' Crick, we're *still* having this debate?

We're still having these arguments, and we'll continue to have them until homo sapiens is extinct, because the reason people object to evolution is the same reason they keep kosher or visit Mecca or bathe in the water of the Ganga.

It's a signalling mechanism. Every religion requires people to do some apparently pointless and irrational things, so that members of the religion can more easily identify other members, and to discourage free-riders from claiming the benefits of membership without jumping through the hoops. Some American evangelicals deny evolution as a way of signalling their membership in the evangelical community and their apartness from mainstream opinion.

So... you're saying that the non-functional aspects of religion are an argument in favor of evolution... I guess I agree.

It's not "nonfunctional" like sexual selection for peacock tails, because people are foresighted. It's an intelligent, reasoned response.

Suppose that you have a religion that encourages people to help other members of the religious community -- creates an altruistic social network. This creates a potential free-rider problem, because nonbelievers will be tempted to masquerade as believers and accept charity without giving any in return. So how do you keep the free riders out? You can't simply charge for each act of charity because the transaction costs are too high, but you need to do something that acts as a barrier to keep out nonbelievers. This is where the "nonfunctional" codes like dietary restrictions, dress codes, and public avowals of faith come in. The costs of conforming drive away free riders, which enables the altruistic social network to work efficiently.

Now, unless you are a biologist, your (un)belief in evolution has no impact on your ability to earn a living -- it just affects your social standing. So rejecting evolution in favor of the Wednesday night church social is a rational response to incentives. We don't assume that an auto worker or sugar farmer who claims to oppose free trade as a matter of principle is just a stupid ignoramous, nor do we simply take their claims at face value. I think we should extend the same critical stance towards religious beliefs as well.

I see what you're saying-- in this sort of analysis, as ever, there's a question of what is identified as a 'cost' and who, exactly, is paying it-- but that's the usual state of affairs.

In most societies, though, religion is not a free choice for an individual. And, it seems to me undeniable that some kinds of beliefs are 'nonfunctional' for a society that's part of a larger world that may not hold those beliefs.

I am always troubled by these kind of group selectionist arguments. The frontiers of groups are often hard to police, not withstanding the use of signals. Costly signals are hard to come by.

Roland, I've only heard the phrase "group selection" used in the context of evolution, about traits that increase the fitness of a group but lower the fitness of individuals. My argument is a rational-choice argument focused entirely on the individual self-interest, so I don't think it counts as a group selection argument. If you mean something else, I'd be very interested in hearing you expand your comments further.

Matt, you make a very good point about established, official, religions being a different case than an open market in belief. Adam Smith, as I recall, opposed establishing an official church on the grounds that having a monopoly would enourage the clergy to grow fat and lazy, and David Hume supported establishment for precisely the same reasons. :) Today, religious belief is a lot more common in the US than in Western Europe; perhaps American churches are more vigorous because they had to continually compete with one another for believers..?

@ Neel

>Today, religious belief is a lot more common in >the US than in Western Europe; perhaps American >churches are more vigorous because they had to >continually compete with one another for >believers..?

I think the story is likely a bit more complicated and much more related to social experiences and historical developments. Religious affiliation is still very high in Southern Europe where the Roman Catholic chuch clearly has an almost-continent-wide monopoly. Things are different in the Oligopolistic states of Europe where after centuries of tensions between rival factions the dogmatic justifications for those tensions have lost salience.
But most religious organisations, even in a religiously heterogeneous environmment, do have some sort of spiritual monopoly as people aren't eclectic in matters of faith. You might question what you have been socialised in, but only a small percentage of those with doubts and partial disagreement will change teams, as the spiritual and social transaction costs are clearly extraordinarily high. Thus, I don't think the difference in religious attitudes in the US and Western Europe can be mostly attributed to competition and religious heterogeneity. I am not sure, but I think the more important part of the explanation would be the embeddedness of Religion in "the American (hi)story".

>So rejecting evolution in favor of the >Wednesday night church social is a rational >response to incentives.

Am I reading this correctly? Are you implying that a person is rationally picking his beliefs because he would otherwise be bored on Wednesday evening? Wouldn't this imply he somehow knew the truth (no epistemology here...) but chose to forget about it for a better time with his supposedly less knowledgeable friends, who, in all likelyhood, went through the same process, so revealing the truth becomes a dilemma of collective action? Is that probable?

I don't think people can pick their beliefs (but, of course, there are self reinforcing processes of selection and self selection). However, ignorance can hardly be rational with respect to beliefs, as they're the individual basis for the understanding of rationality.

I wrote:
> So rejecting evolution in favor of the
> Wednesday night church social is a rational
> response to incentives.

and Tobias replied:
>>> Am I reading this correctly? Are you implying that a person is rationally picking his beliefs because he would otherwise be bored on Wednesday evening? <<<

It seems this is a reference that was more obscure than I intended. I grew up in South Carolina, where religion was very strong, and one of the main functions of the church was to connect people to potential mates, employers, neighbors, new friends, and so on. I used "Wednesday night church social" as a metonym for this (very large!) fund of social capital.

>>> Wouldn't this imply he somehow knew the truth (no epistemology here...) but chose to forget about it for a better time with his supposedly less knowledgeable friends, who, in all likelyhood, went through the same process, so revealing the truth becomes a dilemma of collective action? Is that probable? <<<

I think the act of openly denying evolution has a social function as a signal about group affiliation, and isn't a statement of essential belief. I mean, if you demonstrated evolution in the lab or the wild to a creationist, I expect he or she would remain Christian afterwards.

I will happily concede your point about Southern Europe; my main goal was to dredge up the exchange between Smith and Hume, which I find really funny. ("Establishment will destroy religious belief!" "That's exactly why we should support it!")

Neel,

I think this is one of the things that accounts for the fact that the more liberal denominations are dying out in the U.S., while the more conservative evangelicals are thriving - the episcopal church (which I was raised in) doesn't really require you to believe anything at all (except maybe for some mushy "universal brotherhood" blather...) Eventually, people figure, "Why bother?", and sleep in on Sundays...

Don't forget the amygdala! :-)

Goosebumps, hipbones and wings are indeed very suggestive, but are not the only relevant data. There is also the dipole of water, the relationship between strong and weak forces, and a host of other extremely curious constants in the universe that are fine-tuned to life (i.e., a percent or two off, and poof, no life of any kind). There is also the profound difficulty of coming up with a solid, non-handwaving theory of how one species actually evolves into another ... or how various biochemical pathways could have evolved ... without help.

Either way, there is a degree of faith involved. Science does not resolve the issue.