to be more evolutionarily precise, i'm saying that propensity to religion might be a correlated response of selection for other traits. e.g., agency detection and theory of mind. these are very nifty tools which we humans are pretty strongly hard-wired for. but i think there's a good deal of circumstantial evidence that they breed in us a tendency to imagine spooks all over the place.

people mean different things things by religion. also, for those looking up the arguments, david s. wilson is the major proponent of group selection-functionalism right now. scott atran and pascal boyer are the major proponents of the cognitive byproduct thesis. i tend to favor the latter. not only do i (and they) think it is a byproduct, but i suspect that religion is produced by the functional constraints of modal human psychology, just like a running engine produces heat. you can stop the heat production if it is bothersome...by turning off the engine. also, i don't think that the byproduct thesis precludes some element of functionalism overlain on top of it...but part of the issue here is that i think religion in terms of cognitive operation is a very different entity than religion as a set of beliefs hooked into an institutional framework.

God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes. If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from murdering each other left and right?

many (most officially i believe) believe that we are justified by faith alone and that divine grace comes without our own action. this is why calvinists generally accept predestination. there are some really byzantine logics which allow believers in this to still live lives which accept a de facto element of free will, but the point is that officially most protestants belief that your place in heaven or hell is not contingent upon your moral behavior, but rather your face in the savior.

now, there is a difference between the "official" party line, and how people act and process their ideas. but a rational attempt to discuss this probably needs to start with explicit concepts.

He wrote as if the entire Williams revolution had never occurred! Gould attacked, as if they were still current views, romantic notions that no serious biologist had put forth since the 1960s.

he pulled the same trick with mismeasure of man.

But some readers may have to take my word for this, since the names of eminent scientists are often less well-known to the general public than the names of fast-talking scoundrels such as Uri Geller or Stephen J. Gould.

actually, two things: 1) do a literature citation search.

2) appeal to another authority of some note, e.g., paul krugman saying the exact same thing re: gould & j.m. smith.

This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."

i am generally skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but we are probably on the cusp of a renaissance in this area. it will be spearheaded by e.o. wilson, who has always been a "believer," but who now believes that group selection (or at least multi-level selection) has the empirical and analytical firepower to make a comeback. i am cautiously skeptical, but in the interests of honesty i think that "ancient and thoroughly discredited" is probably a better description for group selection circa 1995 than 2007. most evolutionary biologists are probably pretty skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but in large part it is because the models presented (which tend to avoid the pitfalls of the earlier arguments) are hard to test and seem analytically intractable beyond the simplest formulations.

Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all.

this is means that the allele (genetic variant) increase fitness by a factor of 1.8. this is not a "species level" benefit in anything but a tautological way. higher levels of selection or dynamic processes are only interesting if they can not be reduced down to a lower level. e.g., you can increase the fitness of the group by simply increasing the fitness of individuals which compose the group. this increases the fitness of the group, but it is easily reduced toward increasing the fitness of individuals. in other cases you can not decompose the group fitness to individuals and so there is grounds for saying that the excess fitness which is gained by having a group, or evaluating a group, is something that is "for the good of the group."

to use a sports analogy, if you brought together an all-star team you'd get a better team, not because of the team dynamics but because the individual players are so much better. in contrast, ther are teams which are very good because of group dynamics where utility players can specialize in their roles and synergistically perform far better than they might as individuals.