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''The Evolution of God'' is a 2009 book by Robert Wright that explores the history of the concept of God in the three Abrahamic religions through a variety of means, including archeology, history, theology, and evolutionary psychology. The patterns which link Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the ways in which they have changed their concepts over time are explored as one of the central themes. One of the conclusions of the book that Wright tries to make is a reconciliation between science and religion. The future of the concept of "God" is also prognosticated by Wright, who attempts to do so through a historical lens. ==Evolutionary Biology== Among other things, Wright discusses the role of evolutionary biology in the development of religion. Geneticist Dean Hamer hypothesized that some people have a specific gene that makes them prone to religious belief, which he calls the God gene, and that over time natural selection has favored these people because their spirituality leads to optimism. Wright, however, thinks the tendency towards religious belief is not an adaptive trait influenced by natural selection, but rather a spandrel - a trait that happens to be supported by adaptations originally selected for other purposes. Wright states that the human brain approaches religious belief based on how it adapted to survive and reproduce in early hunter-gatherer societies. He points out four key traits of religion that align with the human brain's survival adaptations: *Its claims can be surprising, strange, and even counterintuitive. *It claims to show what causes good and bad things to happen. *It tells people that they can control these causes and increase the ratio of good to bad results. *It is hard to falsify or disprove. Humans have adapted to pay attention to surprising and confusing information, because it could make the difference between life and death. (For instance, if a person left the campsite and mysteriously never returned, it would be wise for the others to be on guard for a predator or some other danger.) Understanding and controlling cause and effect also takes top priority in the human brain, since humans live in complex social groups where predicting and influencing the actions and thoughts of others gains them allies, status, and access to resources. As human cognitive abilities and curiosity expanded over the centuries, their investigation of cause and effect expanded from the strictly social context out into the world at large, opening the doors for religions to explain things like weather and disease. Though some of these explanations were strange and perhaps dubious, the fact that they could not be completely disproven lent them credibility; it was better to be cautious than dead. Wright uses an example from the Haida people, indigenous to the northwest coast of North America, who would try to appease killer whale deities to calm storms out at sea; they would pour fresh water into the ocean or tie tobacco or deer tallow to the end of a paddle. While some people certainly died despite these offerings, those who survived were a testament to the ritual's possible efficacy. Mysterious and unproven beliefs can also persist in a culture because human brains have adapted to agree with the group consensus even if it goes against one's better judgment or personal beliefs, since a person alienated from the group loses protection, food, and mates. Wright cites the Asch conformity experiments and even posits that Stockholm syndrome is not so much a syndrome as a natural product of evolution, the brain's way of ensuring that a person accepts and is accepted by his or her new social group. In addition, beliefs can persist because once a person publicly announces a belief, social psychologists have found that he or she is inclined to focus on evidence supporting that belief while conveniently ignoring evidence contradicting it, a logical fallacy known as cherry picking. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Evolution of God」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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