Interdisciplinary Applications of Evolutionary Theory

I think a lot of this is going to be rehashing what was said on Thursday, but eh, a blog post is a blog post! I think having a general overview of topics in the first week would be good, and I think more time spent on non-bio topics would also be good. I really liked having the guest lecturers – I know they were a little tricky to get, but it was really nice getting to talk to people about their field of study without it being a straight-up traditional lecture. Administrative stuff kind of got a little nuts, but given that this is the first time this course has been run, it’s not surprising. I feel like a lot of times, people were generally leaning in one direction on a topic, but nobody quite wanted to commit and make a solid decision, which dragged things out a little.

It’s kind of hard to make a straight-up list of facts, but I felt like I learned a lot about Arts-related topics. I’ve taken Ling 100 in the past, but all the stuff we discussed about language acquisition and historical linguistics was totally new to me. I also only knew about memetics in the somewhat unofficial way the term is used on the internet, so all that, as well as the lecture on folklore was totally new to me.

Hm. The thing that pops into my mind first is that we spent a lot of time dealing with administrivia – I know with the fact that this is essentially a brand-new class, and student-directed at that means a lot of it is necessary, but I feel like it takes up more time than it needs to, and it eats into time for discussions and for presentations and guest speakers, all of which I’ve been really enjoying. I’m kind of on the fence about the blog posts – I do feel like they have potential to add a lot, but for some reason I have problems remembering to actually check and post and comment. I’ve been having this problem with the discussion boards for the online classes I’m taking, so…I don’t really know, here.

MURC went…better than anticipated, at least for me. A lot of that is my crippling fear of public speaking – the fact that everything went relatively smoothly was very nice. Plus, I can’t say no to free food. Still, I agree with what others have said – the timing problem really screwed us up. And I think the timing of MURC within the year was bad for the course, too – if this had been a fall course, presenting would be fine, but it’s so early in second term, that I feel like I at least was still trying to figure out where I wanted to go with things when oh, hey, time to throw together a presentation, which sort of detracted on working on the paper and bigger-picture stuff.

Here’s mine – I tried to submit about four times and got ‘error updating database’ each time so…I’m not really sure what to do about that. Also yes, I know, needs more refs.

A Map Out of Eden: How evolutionary theory can be used to trace change in religious ideologies

I am interested in examining whether evolutionary theory can be applied to document the changes in religious institutions and ideals over time. While some work has been done relating evolution and religion, much of it has been in the field of evolutionary psychology, in trying to discern the adaptive role of religion in terms of biology and psychology, rather than examining religions themselves (Sosis and Alcora 2003). A small amount has also been done in the newer field of memetics, treating religious beliefs as a type of meme (Rachlin, 2007), but evolutionary theory hasn’t been directly to religion without the somewhat undefined intermediary of the meme. For example, does the geographic split between the Eastern and Western Orthodox churches represent a form of selection? Can we apply the concept of lateral gene transfer – the idea that genetic information can be transmitted to peers rather than to descendants – to ideas? Given these things, is it then possible to construct phylogenies of religious sects based on when a given theory was accepted or rejected by the sects? To answer these questions, I plan on examining major theological schisms in Christianity and the historical events that lead to them, to see if a historical map of the branchings can be constructed. I am particularly interested in dealing with Christianity as a model, because it’s large, with a long history, and has had a large number of idealogical schisms over that history, resulting in a a multitude of sects which share some central ideals but are otherwise very diverse, to the point of seeming like entirely different religions to outsiders.

Rachlin, Howard. ‘Cui bono? A Review of ‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon’ by Daniel C. Dennett’. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour. 87 (2007): 143–149

Sosis, Richard and Candace Alcora. ‘Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior’ Evolutionary anthropology. 12.6 (2003)

Very brief thoughts for this week, as my brain is off on a different planet due to some personal stuff, so I haven’t really been in the mindset for nice crunchy analytical thinking for the last few days. So I thought I’d share a point that came up in a conversation between Yana and me on the bus to Safeway last Thursday to go pick up drinks. We were discussing the relationship between drift and neutral evolution, as the two ideas are conflated. Drift, in population genetics, is specifically related to the frequency of alleles already established in a population, rather than dealing with novel mutations. We tend to think of evolution as being strictly about novel mutations, but different alleles of a gene are essentially established mutations within a population. In this sense, drift is basically a subset of neutral evolution – change without selection pressure.

Also completely unrelated, but I had a moment of nerdy glee when I was looking for resources for my proposal and found that Koerner has a book called ‘Is there a universal grammar of religion?’. Sadly it is currently checked out, but I’ll get my hands on it eventually!

Hmmm. I feel like I probably don’t have a great deal to contribute in the way of thinky things on the stuff we talked about this week, because as a Biology major, most of what was presented wasn’t new material for me. I found the Dawkins chapter interesting, though – I haven’t read The Selfish Gene (though I’ve heard good things and keep meaning to read it), but the process he goes through in generalizing evolution reminds me a great deal of mathmatics – you can work through a few examples of a given problem type (say, a linear regression), and in doing so generate a simplified formula that applies to all cases of the problem. Dawkins’ replicators are almost equivalent to the variable in a given formula – for evolution, the process holds true no matter what the variable is.

I also apologize for my somewhat flailing attempts at explaining population genetics/drift – I’m not much of a lecturer, although if anyone wants clarification some of that, I can do my best.

Hello, world!