I think that’s very likely, although…
In my understanding of biology, truly universal behavioral tendencies evolve only because they improve the chances of survival and reproduction.

It’s true an evolved tendency can become maladaptive if there is an abrupt change in the environment, causing a mismatch between the organism and its context, but evolution is incapable of creating universal, maladaptive tendencies from scratch. They get discarded long before they can become universal.

And, when evolutionary mismatch does occur, it is not an automatic death sentence. For humans at least, and to a lesser extent probably some other species, counterbalancing behaviors can emerge quickly enough to avoid extinction.

Our universal capacity to generate complex culture, including “religion” in the broadest, anthropological sense, appears to me to be just such a corrective mechanism. It can evolve much more rapidly than can biology, thereby delivering a timely counterbalance to abrupt environmental change that would otherwise spell imminent extinction.

If intelligent species universally go extinct, which might well be the case, it would not be because they had corrective flexibility - it would be because their corrective mechanisms just weren’t flexible enough or universal enough.

@skado The process of evolution is to weed out destructive or strategies that do not allow further evolution. There are many such ways to further evolution for a species and it has been said there are many that we humans have gone through in the past. But, an article on Existential Risk Analysis, which I previously submitted) mention that at one level all beings fall into the trap of religion. This trap can lead to a furthering of extinction due to the infighting within the species. In the world of humans that infighting involves nuclear weapons, Climate Change and a myriad of other things that will lead to our extinction. It is leading to the extinction of thousands of non-human species.

@jackjr
I haven't seen the article but I suspect the author has conflated religion with tribalism, which is an understandable error because the two are so often seen together. But their centers of gravity are very different.

Tribalism is ingrained at the genetic level as a specific reflex of the emotional instincts. It can attach itself to religious ideas, political ideas, ethnicity, community, location, fashion, or any identity marker. It is extremely difficult-to-impossible to eradicate from behavior, and could, very conceivably, serve as an extinction guarantor.

Religion, on the other hand, is less specifically genetic. It is an expression of a larger genetic predisposition toward complex culture. And that expression has much more malleability. Indeed, its malleability is its main feature. It can be relatively quickly (in evolutionary terms) modified to offset the much slower moving biological adaptations.

So while tribalism rages on as directed by the persistence of biology, historically, culture has found ways to modify and counterbalance those persistent instincts to accommodate the demands of civilized life.

This pattern is so consistent as to be predictable. The “Thou shalt nots” of Christianity for example, are the very embodiment of corrective admonishment against following certain instinctual impulses which might otherwise be disruptive of an orderly society.

And these particular admonishments don’t reach very far back into our evolutionary past. They are recent modifications of our malleable capacity for culture, designed (by cultural evolution) to ease the transition from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles, which could otherwise itself have precipitated our extinction, as something similar did for every one of our genus Homo cousins.

Everything that is wrong with religion today is a signal that it’s way past time to modify it once again to meet the new extinction threats on the horizon, rather than throwing that baby out with the bathwater.

Wherever biology is resisted by culture, biology will try every trick in its very large book to infiltrate and revert the mechanisms of culture back to the demands of biology. So it is no mystery that religion will always, given time, look more and more like tribalism.

This is why religion always has and will continue to need to be refreshed and revitalized as the only tool in H.sapiens kit that can mount such a resistance species-wide. A small minority of humans can do it through rational means, but our continued existence is dependent on that 80% or more who can’t.

@skado The article was a report of studies done on existential risk analysis. It is a series of courses being taught at some of the top universities here and abroad. This field has been around for several decades and started with a computer program at Stanford University. Basically all intelligent beings devolve into tribalism and religion is always a part of that tribalism.
[universalfuture.org].

@jackjr
When I follow the link I get “Page not found 404”. I did a search on that site for “existential risk analysis” and it took me to this article: [medium.com]
Is it the article you referenced?

@jackjr
Now it looks like my own link is going to 404 also. Not sure how to get around that.

@jackjr
OK, apologies, I'm on the laptop now and your link works on the laptop. The phone didn't like it for some reason. And your link is the one I had found.

Great article! Thanks for that. It really hits all the nails squarely on the head.
I haven't found anything in it that claims religion is part of the problem or a "destructive force".

It's remarkable how similar the article is to what I said above. Where I said: "Tribalism is ingrained at the genetic level as a specific reflex of the emotional instincts. It can attach itself to religious ideas, political ideas, ethnicity, community, location, fashion, or any identity marker." the Medium article says: "Later on, when transportation and communication tools enabled more intensive contacts, the concept of “tribal” gradually evolved into its contemporary dimensions based not only on ethnicity but also on religion, nation-state, ideology, corporation identity, etc."

It says, as I did, that tribalism rides on the back of any identity marker available. Nowhere does the article suggest that religion itself, or ethnicity or political ideology are destructive forces in and of themselves, only that tribalism uses them as a vehicle. And if not those, it would use whatever else might be available.

The fact that religion was "present" is no different from the fact that politics, business, college football teams or Coke vs Pepsi were present. Tribalism will use what's there.

If you know of an article that claims "all beings fall into the trap of religion" I would love to read it, thanks.

@skado Glad you found it. There was no mention of it being a problem or a destructive force (we can see that for ourselves). Only that it was a universal trend.

@jackjr
Humans have evolved a negativity bias. It is completely natural for our attention to fixate on problems, while we are oblivious to benefits. We can naturally see for ourselves the damage done by literal translations of allegorical wisdom traditions. It requires extra effort to see how the more authentic translations serve our survival.