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A Failed Just-So Story — LessWrong

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Followup to: Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism, Evolving to Extinction Perhaps the real reason that evolutionary "just-so stories" got a bad name is that so many attempted stories are prima facie absurdities to serious students of the field. As an example, consider a hypothesis I've heard a few times (though I didn't manage to dig up an example). The one says: Where does religion come from? It appears to be a human universal, and to have its own emotion backing it - the emotion of religious faith. Religion often involves costly sacrifices, even in hunter-gatherer tribes - why does it persist? What selection pressure could there possibly be for religion? So, the one concludes, religion must have evolved because it bound tribes closer together, and enabled them to defeat other tribes that didn't have religion. This, of course, is a group selection argument - an individual sacrifice for a group benefit - and see the referenced posts if you're not fa

x A Failed Just-So Story — LessWrong Evolution Evolutionary Psychology Rationalization Personal Blog 29 A Failed Just-So Story by Eliezer Yudkowsky 5th Jan 2008 2 min read 49 29 Followup to : Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych , The Tragedy of Group Selectionism , Evolving to Extinction Perhaps the real reason that evolutionary " just-so stories " got a bad name is that so many attempted stories are prima facie absurdities to serious students of the field. As an example, consider a hypothesis I've heard a few times (though I didn't manage to dig up an example). The one says: Where does religion

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