Religious evolutionMAY 27 2008

Continuing on the theme of a self-sustaining belief system, a computer scientist is studying the uptake of religious belief, in an evolutionary computer model. From the New Scientist:

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out, perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

"If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community," says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program, called Evogod.

Update: Pohl and Rob righted me on that one. There's no typo, I don't think.