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Showing posts from December, 2009

Religion as a Product of Evolution?

A new book exploring religious behavior has appeared, with a most interesting approach to its explanation. The book is The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009) and it is edited by Jay R. Feierman, M.D., a retired Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. The volume is a collection of essays addressing various dimensions of religious behavior examined from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The various contributions are held together by a basic contention: religious behavior, i.e., “behavior associated with the communicated acceptance of a supernatural claim,” (244) is the product of biological evolution by natural selection in which the structural features of religious behavior either evolved directly by conferring benefit to individuals, or were adapted from something other than religion. A major premise of the work here is that since religious behaviors are observable and there