No one who has ever kept rats as pets (as I have) will be surprised by a study that appeared in yesterday’s Science and is getting major media coverage. In “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats,” the authors report:
Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether [...]
Tags:altruism·cooperation·group size·Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal·Jean Decety·non-human primates·Peggy Mason·primates·prosocial behavior·rats·reciprocal altruism·religion as evolved adaptation
There are a number of scholars who claim that “religion” evolved as an adaptation. What kind of adaptation? A group level adaptation. The story usually goes like this: at some unknown time during the middle or upper Paleolithic, certain groups of hominins developed proto-religious beliefs. These beliefs, which are rarely if ever specified, somehow gave [...]
Tags:altruism·baboons·chimpanzees·cohesion·competition·cooperation·David Sloan Wilson·ecology·evolution of religion·foraging unit·group agonism·group level selection·group size·hominids·hominins·hunter-gatherers·inclusive fitness·intergroup competition·Joseph Bulbulia·kinship·language·Matt Rossano·Nicholas Wade·Paleolithic·primates·Richard Sosis·ritual·technology·tools
Over at LiveScience, Stephanie Pappas reports on a study which shows that while religious people generally are more satisfied with their lives, this satisfaction is linked to the social networking and circles of friends that many develop as a result of participating in religious activities. The satisfaction does not appear to be linked in any significant [...]
Tags:Chaeyoon Lim·Facebook·happiness·life satisfaction·primates·Robert Putnam·sociality·Stephanie Pappas·theology
Several months ago, many of us were shocked when it appeared that Jurgen Habermas, one of the world’s leading philosophers and social theorists, set up a Twitter account and opened with this tweet: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” Alas, it was a [...]
Tags:communication·Durkheim·Eduardo Mendieta·emancipation·ethics·Freud·Habermas and Religion·Jurgen Habermas·metaphysics·morals·primates·rationalization·religious grammar·religious syntax·The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere·The Theory of Communicative Action·Twitter·Weber
Over at The Stone, the primatologist Frans de Waal asks whether we can act “morally” without being “religious.” I quote-bracket these terms because they are not without complication, and we should be careful about using them in the context of such discussions. Regardless, de Waal poses some questions for which we have historical answers. For [...]
Tags:altruistic·Bart Ehrman·chimpanzees·Christianity·ethics·ethnohistory·evolution of morality·Frans de Waal·implicit ethics·Islam·Judaism·Misquoting Jesus·monotheism·Morals Without God·Native Americans·norms·polytheism·primates·primatologist·prosocial·religions of the book·right conduct
Incredibly, there are three articles over at HuffPo Religion that I have recently bookmarked for brief discussion here. There are of course about ten others which reflect the liberal, progressive, ecumenical, and mystical view of religion adhered to by a tiny minority of people, and which will be of interest mostly to the highly educated [...]
Tags:Buddhist history·Christianity as state religion·Constantine·Constantine's conversion·Darwinism and the Moral Argument for God·Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche·early Christianity·empire·evolved morality·foragers·Fran de Waal·hunter-gatherers·Is Buddhism a Religion·Marc Hauser·Michael Ruse·moral code·morality·natural morality·non-religious morality·Paul Wagler·primates·privatization of religious belief·proto-morality·Rodney Stark·secular·Siddhartha·Talal Asad·westernized Buddhism
