Model predicts 'religiosity gene' will dominate society
Rowthorn has developed a model that shows that the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion are currently “hitchhiking” on the back of the religious cultural practice of high fertility rates. Even if some of the people who are born to religious parents defect from religion and become secular, the religious genes they carry (which encompass other personality traits, such as obedience and conservativism) will still spread throughout society, according to the model’s numerical simulations.
...it's impossible to diagnose a problem correctly if the actual cause is not a member of the approved boogieman list, and one is committed to only blaming members of the approved list (having "ideological blinders" or what Eric Raymond called "historical baggage").
Question: "Why do you keep hitting that nail when what you have to do is tighten the screw?" Answer: "I hate nails. I'd rather be hitting nails than screwing." Yep there are folks out there like that. Almost all of them in fact.
Different flavors of moral fraud may be equally irrational, but they are not equally harmful. By analogy, smallpox and cowpox are both diseases, but smallpox is very often fatal, whereas cowpox almost never is. Furthermore, cowpox provides immunity from smallpox, just as, to a lesser extent, I claimed above that different flavors of moral fraud (ie. various flavors associated with Christianity and Socialism) tend to compete with one another (conservation of irrationality). Mencius Moldbug describes "Revelationist" Christianity as a "counterparasite" for "Universalism" (the modern Left).
I'd rather live without parasites (dogma). But that is just me. Evidently most people can't live without them.
Q. ...why don't you embrace Christianity?
A. Do you mean "embrace" in terms of me joining a Christian church, or "embrace" in terms of applauding the spread of Christianity? I am relieved to hear reports of evangelical Christianity spreading in China and Latin America. Also, as a living religion, Christianity continues to evolve, so I think it's possible that some new versions of it will make a major comeback in the first world. But as it stands, Western intellectuals have had plenty of exposure to it, and they have turned their noses up at it. And it is the rich, powerful West, where I live, that I most care about. So I do embrace Christianity in the sense of wishing there were more "skeptical enlightenment" Christians in the West, and fewer "radical enlightenment" types, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, I don't really trust Christianity in any of its many versions not to revert to its romantic roots, which historically is where much of the impetus of the American "progressive" movement came from (Jonah Goldberg documents this in Liberal Fascism, for example pp. 215-220). In other words, the Christian "cowpox" doesn't provide reliable enough immunity to the Socialist "smallpox."
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
MSimon wrote:Very nice that we have a dogma gene: i.e. do this no matter how stupid.
No, there's no such gene noted. This is merely a model saying that if we had such a gene, here is how it would be passed down.
It's all smoke and mirrors. Anyone familiar with history, mortality rates, especially infant mortality rates and the distinctions between preindustrial ages where children where hands to work, and industrial ages where children are mouths to feed; understands why all the world's major religions teach childbearing/rearing is important. In pre-industrial cultures, they are in fact the prime source of cheap labor and relative wealth. In industrial and post industrial cultures like our own, children never pay for themselves--they cost more to rear than they contribute back financially-and so do not provide economic benefit.
The "model" above is just silly nonsense. There's no "gene" observed.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
In industrial and post industrial cultures like our own, children never pay for themselves--they cost more to rear than they contribute back financially-and so do not provide economic benefit.
To be fair, most children do indeed pay for themselves eventually, just not necessarily directly to their parents. That becomes more a factor of social and economic structuring than the individuals' ability to contribute to a family.
Baby boomers most certainly paid back their parents... through Social Security. Indeed, it's very likely that in that case the parents will cost more than their children can afford.
If the economy is expanding then the children are producing more than their parents did, either because the population as a whole is more productive (increasing population, decreasing or static individual production), or because each individual becomes more productive (static or decreasing population, increasing individual production). So far most economies are still expanding, even in the face of the recession. Those that aren't expanding are in that state because of past behavior where they were already consuming more than they were producing.
