Ah yes, Jesus Christ and Muhammed: paragons of cooperation with the Roman/Byzantine authorities and Jewish and Meccan elites. Randomness seems a better explanation of the genesis of these religions, with prosocial cooperation benefits being the reason they spread after they actually get off the ground. Thoughts? Alternatively maybe these two are just exceptions to more ancient moralizing pantheons, but if that's the case, they're pretty large exceptions...
Interesting observation. I'm inclined to think in those cases that they really were pushed to promote within-group cooperation (and to create new kinds of cooperative groups), even if such cooperation was in conflict with authorities and pre-existing social systems. However, they weren't only pushed to promote cooperation - those who pushed and embraced them of course had lots of motives, including less more competitive and less prosocial ones, which they go into in the paper.
Interesting. I agree that once the groups are formed, the continued pushing of the beliefs can strengthen within-group cooperation, but I'm more concerned with the mechanism for the genesis of the religions rather than the continuation of them. It seems hard to believe that Jesus and Muhammed as individuals would have decided that the best way to foster cooperation would be to found a destabilizing set of beliefs. In hindsight both religions have led to lots of cooperation, but at the time of their founding, the founders would have had to believe that despite an initial unknown period of severe persecution or warfare, that eventually these beliefs would lead to more cooperation than the already fairly cooperative societies they were replacing.
That belief seems like a stretch, with the more likely scenario that the only reason an individual would launch such a destabilizing campaign would be because they truly believe they are doing something bigger than themselves. I think this latter belief has more explanatory power than arguing these two founders consciously believed the best way to promote cooperation for an in-group that doesn't exist yet would be to rebel against the existing cooperative society. Admittedly, my argument is weaker for Muhammed who did end up unifying large parts of Saudi Arabia prior to his death, but for Jesus, who died humiliated and without power or money, a genuine belief in something larger than just cooperation definitely seems to have motivated him.
Either way, super interesting articles. Thanks for posting!
Oh I see what you mean. Yes, I agree actually. I don't know what drove those individual figures, of course, but there's still the question of why others (followers, proseltysers, etc.,) were so motivated to instrumentalise the ideas and spread the religion and so on. But yes, even there there was no doubt lots of sincere people - not merely cooperative propaganda, as it were.
But while this paper has some useful framing, like the “lenses of distortion” that go disappointingly unexplored, it has the same flaw as the Altay paper: it completely ignores all of the qualitative literature describing how information gets distorted as it traverses our contemporary information ecosystem
If you are going to take an evolutionary approach you don't need to explain why 'many aspects of religions appear to be designed to promote cooperation' in the same way you don't have to explain why living organisms are so well-adapted to their environments that they appear designed for them. You let the religions promote everything under the sun, and compete with each other for adherents. The good ones survive. The bad ones go extinct. ('good' here means 'good at surviving', nothing more. Promoting cooperation is one way you could be 'good'.)
Ah yes, Jesus Christ and Muhammed: paragons of cooperation with the Roman/Byzantine authorities and Jewish and Meccan elites. Randomness seems a better explanation of the genesis of these religions, with prosocial cooperation benefits being the reason they spread after they actually get off the ground. Thoughts? Alternatively maybe these two are just exceptions to more ancient moralizing pantheons, but if that's the case, they're pretty large exceptions...
Interesting observation. I'm inclined to think in those cases that they really were pushed to promote within-group cooperation (and to create new kinds of cooperative groups), even if such cooperation was in conflict with authorities and pre-existing social systems. However, they weren't only pushed to promote cooperation - those who pushed and embraced them of course had lots of motives, including less more competitive and less prosocial ones, which they go into in the paper.
Interesting. I agree that once the groups are formed, the continued pushing of the beliefs can strengthen within-group cooperation, but I'm more concerned with the mechanism for the genesis of the religions rather than the continuation of them. It seems hard to believe that Jesus and Muhammed as individuals would have decided that the best way to foster cooperation would be to found a destabilizing set of beliefs. In hindsight both religions have led to lots of cooperation, but at the time of their founding, the founders would have had to believe that despite an initial unknown period of severe persecution or warfare, that eventually these beliefs would lead to more cooperation than the already fairly cooperative societies they were replacing.
That belief seems like a stretch, with the more likely scenario that the only reason an individual would launch such a destabilizing campaign would be because they truly believe they are doing something bigger than themselves. I think this latter belief has more explanatory power than arguing these two founders consciously believed the best way to promote cooperation for an in-group that doesn't exist yet would be to rebel against the existing cooperative society. Admittedly, my argument is weaker for Muhammed who did end up unifying large parts of Saudi Arabia prior to his death, but for Jesus, who died humiliated and without power or money, a genuine belief in something larger than just cooperation definitely seems to have motivated him.
Either way, super interesting articles. Thanks for posting!
Oh I see what you mean. Yes, I agree actually. I don't know what drove those individual figures, of course, but there's still the question of why others (followers, proseltysers, etc.,) were so motivated to instrumentalise the ideas and spread the religion and so on. But yes, even there there was no doubt lots of sincere people - not merely cooperative propaganda, as it were.
We always tend to like the papers that agree with our worldview.
Yep!
If you liked Altay’s paper you’ll like this one:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916221141344
But while this paper has some useful framing, like the “lenses of distortion” that go disappointingly unexplored, it has the same flaw as the Altay paper: it completely ignores all of the qualitative literature describing how information gets distorted as it traverses our contemporary information ecosystem
Interesting - thanks. I'll check it out.
If you are going to take an evolutionary approach you don't need to explain why 'many aspects of religions appear to be designed to promote cooperation' in the same way you don't have to explain why living organisms are so well-adapted to their environments that they appear designed for them. You let the religions promote everything under the sun, and compete with each other for adherents. The good ones survive. The bad ones go extinct. ('good' here means 'good at surviving', nothing more. Promoting cooperation is one way you could be 'good'.)