Religion
In reply to the discussion: Our brains have evolved to look for patterns and assign meaning, even when none exist. [View all]SamG
(535 posts)Over the last 20 or so thousand years of human life on Earth, (the historical time where we have actual evidence of funeral ceremonies, etc, indicating a belief in a higher power, or a spiritual observance of some sort), reproductive advantage has had more to do with environmental factors, (geography, natural resources for health, etc.) than any particular thinking habits, (pattern recognition,etc.) which might provide some marginal advantage to living long enough to reproduce, but not provide the major advantages that clean water, food, favorable climate, etc. would.
The mere fact that there are thousands of religions and some of them have been vastly different than others, and that Christianity and a couple other major ones have survived to procreate in large numbers is more a factor of the geographic advantage to the locations where those religions originated and thrived for hundreds of years, Rome, Europe in general, some places in China, India, the Middle East. Those places enabled large numbers of offspring, relatively better survival to adulthood advantage than in, say, the arctic, or several places in South and Central and Southwestern North America, where severe drought, or cold, diet, or other factors reduced the chances of long-living progeny.
Indeed, the Native American, to take one example, probably recognized the patterns of natural phenomena better than many immigrating western Europeans. Native Americans were extremely well accustomed to the threats and natural dangers within their environment, yet their pattern recognition did little to ward off their lack of immunity to many western European illnesses, nor to the firearm, both of which killed them off in staggering numbers. It wasn't the religions of Native Americans, nor their advantage in recognition of patterns in nature that caused their demise, it was a simple case of introduction of alien illness and a sense of manifest destiny, (and the firearms), among the Europeans that killed the Native Americans off.