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Cnidaria posted:While the OP is dumb, evolution can occur and does occur on very small timescales even in humans. The best example in humans is heterozygotes for sickle cell anemia being selected for in Africa due to malaria. Another example would be the evolution of a variety of genes that contribute to alcohol processing. We can trace the evolution of those back about 10,000 years, to the development of agriculture. There's been a lot of evolution in humans that's occurred well after the migration out of Africa. Anyways, evolution really just requires a phenotype that affects reproductive success and has a heritable component. If a trait can increase or decrease the likelihood of producing successful offspring, and it can be passed down to those offspring, the heritable component can be acted upon. Evolution even applies on a group scale. You could argue that groups that carry genes which cause them to care for each others offspring are more likely to succeed, even if individuals within the group may not necessarily produce children. The heritable component is, traditionally, genetic. It's not too farfetched to argue, though, that through communication ideas themselves are a heritable element that can evolve. When children look to their parents to learn what to eat or how to respond to various events, like encountering a predator, ideas are being passed down that affect the viability of offspring. There is certainly a genetic component to this as well, the very fact that children attempt to learn from their parents is likely due to genetics. Much of our behavior, especially emotional response, is likely due to genetics and therefore affected by evolution. So basically, I'd argue that emotions, instinct, and even learned behavior affect how we respond to sense experiences, and all three of those have evolved over millions of years such that we have a better chance of surviving said sense experience. A belief as described by the OP can be either a way to interpret the sense experience and response to it after the fact, or can be knowledge that is passed down from an original experience/response to offspring to improve their chances of surviving a similar experience. There's nothing supernatural about it.
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Aug 16, 2015 05:08
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:09 |
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OwlFancier posted:Belief informs behaviour, the veracity of a belief correlates positively with the evolutionary utility of the behaviour (I believe I can eat X, I actually can eat X, therefore I will eat X and not die, more beneficial than not believing I can eat X) this forms the basis of the truth-determining mechanism. Obviously it requires correct connections to be drawn between correct observations and correct behaviours, which people may not consistently do, but it is more likely to form a correct behaviour from a correct belief than from an incorrect one, as no matter the reasoning ability, incorrect infromation is unlikely to lead to a correct conclusion. There's also the process of hitchhiking. If a culture has a lot of good beliefs that help them survive as well as some neutral or dumb ones, they're all probably going to be propagated together. Beliefs themselves are a way to mark people as part of a group, and figuring out who's in your group and who isn't is behavior that almost certainly has a strong biological component. In this sense, the very act of having a set of beliefs could be biological, regardless of what those beliefs actually are.
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Aug 16, 2015 06:33
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