one finds a banner for Richard Dawkins:
http://www.toddkshackelford.com/Since Dawkins has in recent years made himself a new career by proclaiming repeatedly that religion is a major source of the world's ills, the Dawkins banner on Shackelford's webpage might say worlds about Shackelford's POV and his reasons for publishing Gregory Paul's paper
Shackelford's webpage also contains a definition of "evolutionary psychology." But Gregory Paul's paper (published in Shackelford's journal "Evolutionary Psychology") seems to have curiously little to do with either evolution, psychology, or "evolutionary psychology" as defined on Shackelford's webpage: it is an attempt to draw causal conclusions from supposed correlations between "popular religion" and socioeconomic conditions. No evolutionary ideas appear in the paper; the discussion involves gross cross-cultural comparisons, without reference to any detailed psycholoogical ideas. The notion "popular religion," as used in the paper, to judge by the charts, is essentially coincident with "creationist" -- which the charts oppose to "pro-evolutionist." The problem of defining "religion," of course, is well-known (and unsolved), so one might doubt whether the author's creationist-evolutionist proxy provides a useful assessment of what constitutes "religiosity" in America:
http://pewforum.org.nyud.net:8090/newassets/images/graphics/evolution/evolution.gifReligious Differences on the Question of Evolution
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=392The graphic shows, for example, a majority of Catholics accept evolution, and that Catholics are more likely than Americans-at-large to accept evolution
The failure to consider (and possibly eliminate) alternative explanations of the low socioeconomic scores (given by the author to American society) is a major weakness of the paper. There is, for example, no comparison of the educational or health care systems in the various countries; nor is there any examination of the role played by media in promoting various ideas in the different cultures. A natural conclusion might be that this shoddy piece of work is mere axe-grinding and is published simply because it coincides with the editor's social prejudices
"Evolutionary psychology" seems an interesting and potentially fruitful field of study -- and one should like to see it explored with (say) the detailed dedication that Piaget showed when investigating the psychological development of children by studying the ability to understand specific ideas. The problem, with grandiose notions such as "religiosity," is that the notions are too ill-defined and culture-bound to be useful. It is also important to recognize the possibility that particular ideas may not represent what we naively think they represent: beliefs in instrumental "magic," for example, are beliefs that
the world can be manipulated if one simply does the right thing, and exactly the same idea that
the world can be manipulated if one simply does the right thing underlies all modern science; there may thus be a considerable evolutionary advantage to believing
the world can be manipulated if one simply does the right thing, and selective pressure for this belief might occur because cultures transmit, not only strange notions, but substantial amounts of useful information also
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