Video: Evolution, religion, schizophrenia...

[Whitney]

Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality

This video is worth the time it takes to watch:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/06/ev ... ion-s.html

Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.

[Will]

I know what I'm doing for the next 90 minutes!

This is really quite incredible. Big summary:

Certain genetic traits which are considered to be maladaptive, such as Sickle cell, can in a less dominant genotype be beneficial (in the case of Sickle cell, it means a stronger immunity to malaria).

Schizophrenia caused by genetics in it's pure form is dangerous, but the deluded form, schizotypal personality disorder, it can be beneficial because of religion and other metamagical social constructs. Religion (and cultism, and UFOism, and superstition, and other supernatural social phenomena) offers schizotypals a valued place in society, which greatly increases the passing on of the schizotypal genes. The detrimental occasional schizophrenic is ultimately outweighed by the benefit of the schizotypal on society.

All human cultures traditionally have metamagical individuals, which are honored and these individuals (with the exception of rare celibate holy people) are likely to reproduce.

You all know the stats:
25% of Americans believe in ghosts
36% of Americans believe in mental telepathy
47% of Americans believe in UFOs
50% of Americans believe in the Devils influence

We are permeated by irrationality and the cause is the veneration and institutionalized authority of individuals with schizotypal personality disorder.

Another subtype! Obsessive compulsive disorder is a negative, but the minor version can help you! In times of anxiety, you check and recheck and recheck things, in order to ensure the outcome is desired. Moreover when you're feeling anxiety you often fixate on something repetitive (ever get a song stuck in your head? ever count your steps?); we impose an arbitrary and useless structure to provide the illusion of a successful structure in lieu of a real successful structure. OCD is where this happens all the time and destroys lives. It's a pathological attempt, through things like fixed action pattern, to impose control in a world of uncertainty. You do this to, only to a lesser degree. You eat that sliver of pizza so that there are only whole pieces. Getting to the point: often throughout history religious leaders are the best at doing the rituals; the Brahman has a very specific 6 hour cleansing ritual, the Orthodox Jews have a ton of laws around food preparation and ingestion and don't forget numerology, Orthodox Islam also has food rules and numerology, and Orthodox Christianity with magic numbers, tons and tons of rules about rituals. Freud, 100 years ago, said OCD was an individual religion, and religion is a universal obsessional neurosis. The interesting thing is that religion has tried to weed out the compulsive religiosity: people are attacked for not paying attention to content, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all talk about thinking about content and not simply be involved in ritual. Why? The ritual is a threat to the religion. More serious cases of OCD are weeded out and less serious cases are rewarded. When those OCD people weren't weeded out, they made long lists of things the church was doing wrong and author a 95 thesis. That man is Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism. And it gets interestinger!

When a society tolerates a religion that involves a great deal of ritual, for every priest that is spending all day blessing bread or a shaman dancing around a fire there is a peasant that has to make bread for two. This leads to a society being less productive overall and being less likely to progress socially, governmentally, and technologically.

So why do different obsessive rituals seem to be the same? Cleansing of the body, food, entering and leaving, and numerology are very common among ritual systems that aren't even remotely connected. It's OCD! You can link back kosher and halal to OCD.

Almost the last one! Superstitious pigeons: apparently when hungry pigeons are given food without having to do anything, especially randomly, the pigeon has a strong need to come up with an attribution. Why is this food here? If the pigeon is hungry enough and the reward strong enough, the pigeon assumes it's last behavior resulted in the food. This creates superstition. If you do this with many pigeons over a period of time, the pigeons all develop their own superstitions. Why do we have a societal need for religious leaders? We have a need to establish causal links that can be stronger than our ability to discover the reality of the links. We accept correlative links even when causal links cannot be established.

Temporal lobe personality, something caused by temporal epileptic seizures, means that a person becomes serious and humorless, develops neophobia, develops hypergraphia, and become obsessively interested in religious philosophy (regardless of whether or not they're religious). Guess who had all the symptoms of temporal epilepsy? St. fucking Paul!

Shorter summary: There is a parallelism between people that have schizotypal personality disorder and religious leaders, there is a parallelism between people that have obsessive compulsive tenancies and religious ritualism. These parallels are actually demonstrable links and they explain the continuing presence of what would otherwise be maladaptive traits. Society favors these things because they seek causal relationships in nature that they cannot intellectually attain.

[Sophus]

Temporal lobe personality, something caused by temporal epileptic seizures, means that a person becomes serious and humorless, develops neophobia, develops hypergraphia, and become obsessively interested in religious philosophy (regardless of whether or not they're religious). Guess who had all the symptoms of temporal epilepsy? St. fucking Paul!

St Paul? Neophobia? Didn't he leave all that he knew to preach the gospel in different cities?

[Will]

St Paul? Neophobia? Didn't he leave all that he knew to preach the gospel in different cities?

Neophobia wouldn't necessarily manifest in the same way as xenophobia. According to historical record, Saul/Paul was already someone that moved around a bit (persecuting Christians requires travel), so he may have been just fine with travel.

[Sophus]

St Paul? Neophobia? Didn't he leave all that he knew to preach the gospel in different cities?

Neophobia wouldn't necessarily manifest in the same way as xenophobia. According to historical record, Saul/Paul was already someone that moved around a bit (persecuting Christians requires travel), so he may have been just fine with travel.

Ah I gotchya. Just curious is there something I can read on Paul that you think relate to his temporal epilepsy? Thanks Will! Great summary too.