Evo-Bio of Religion: Overshoot Hypotheses, Continued

Evo-Bio of Religion: Overshoot Hypotheses, Continued

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From David Barash at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog:

When it comes to evolution and human beings, what we don’t know is if anything more interesting than what we do. Among these mysteries, of course, is religion, and among the reasonable hypotheses thus far adduced, there are several based on what I call “overshoot.” The basic idea is that natural selection can favor a given trait, which under certain circumstances ends up being maladapative or at best nonadaptive. Applied to religion, numerous possibilities emerge in addition to Hyperactive Agent Detection Devices (HADD), which is concerned with the adaptive human tendency to seek “agency” outside ourselves.