Category: MURC proposals

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)

(my submitted MURC proposal)

Academic disciplines tend to focus on elite groups of particularly charismatic topics. Evolutionary biology traditionally favoured animals – a particularly bizarre offshoot in the world vastly dominated by unicellular lifeforms, thereby not particularly representative of the general mechanisms of evolution. The integration of microbial and molecular evolution has brought some paradigm shifts to biology, such as the neutral theory of evolution (Ohta 1992 Annu Rev Ecol Syst). However, the popularized version used outside biology remains predominantly zoocentric.

Much of ‘traditional’ evolutionary theory, as applied outside biology, tends to focus on heavily selectionist explanations, especially for instances of increased complexity. In evolutionary biology, it is becoming evident that not all increased complexity is adaptive (eg. Stoltzfus 1999 J Mol Evol; Lynch 2007 PNAS), and it would be interesting to extend this paradigm shift to areas of applied evolutionary theory, such as linguistic and cultural evolution.

For example, it has been known in biology that the effective population size impacts the selective ‘tolerance’ in a system, placing heavier pressure on efficiency when these populations are larger, as in prokaryotes, and exhibiting greater lenience in smaller populations, promoting the evolution of cumbersome lifeforms such as mammals (Lynch 2007 PNAS). A recent study (Lupyan & Dale 2010 PLoS ONE) found a tendency for small isolated (esoteric) languages to exhibit higher morphological complexity than their exoteric counterparts. I would like to explore this phenomenon using effective population size, in conjunction with or as a replacement of some explanations offered in the paper, such as simplification by bilingual speakers.

I intend to examine these and other case studies in attempt to examine whether the application of neutral evolutionary models can aid our understanding of non-biological evolution. It is evident that strictly selectionist explanations are insufficient to explain non-biological evolutionary phenomena, which may benefic greatly from a more pluralistic approach.

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Exam tomorrow morning, so this is all I’m gonna care about. But do leave comments and criticise the hell out of it — will try to get around to this after the break.

Btw, let’s make these drafts suffice for this week’s weekly blog post. Also, would you guys like to make an extra ‘bonus post’ during the reading break to make up for a missing one either from the past or in the future? Would that be fair?

PS: ahhh the fallbacks of being an admin: ALMOST accidentally posted this as a ‘page’ rather than a ‘post’… >_>