Since misconceptions bug me, I figure a reasonable way to fix them is to point them out when I see them. Most of these are probably misconceptions I once held, which explains why I am sensitive to them.
“Yong also includes a nice discussion of the misconception of “ancestral” or “more ancient” as applied to microbial diversity:
“”Hold on, though. The Hadza and the Matses are not ancient people, and their microbes are not “ancient bacteria”, as one headline stated. They are modern people, carrying modern microbes, living in today’s world, and practicing traditional lifestyles. It would be misleading to romanticise them and to automatically assume that their microbiomes are healthier ones.””
Hawk also notes, “A naive prediction from community ecology would be that a harmful element disrupting the microbiome should restrict its diversity, not increase it. But from the view of the microbes, the parasites add nutrients to the gut system by extracting more energy from the host, creating opportunities for microbial niches that may not be there in a healthy gut. Your microbiome is not all about you, after all.”
Look, I like the Paleo Diet as much as you do–maybe even more than you do. After all, I didn’t name this blog Evolutionist X because I haven’t been reading about paleolithic peoples.
The basic idea of the Paleo Diet–in case you’ve been living under a rock–is that you will be healthier if you eat only veggies, fruit, and meat (no grains or milk products,)–the diet your Paleolithic ancestors evolved to eat.
The problem with the Paleo Diet is that evolution did not stop 10,000 years ago. Evolution is constant. It doesn’t stop. You are not a caveman in a suit. You are a modern person. Unless your grandparents were hunter-gatherers, chances are good that your ancestors have been under significant evolutionary pressure to adapt to agriculture for thousands of years.
For example, Lactase Persistence evolved in dairying populations entirely within the last 10,000 years. Today, 80% of Europeans and European-descended people have the gene for lactase persistence. Outside of traditionally dairying areas, this trait is rare. It has spread entirely in response to the development of dairying–which means that if your ancestors have been raising animals for their milk for the past few thousand years, there is a very good chance that you are adapted to drinking milk well after infancy.
Of course, you’re probably not going to hurt yourself drinking water instead.
Likewise for wheat; if your ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years, you can probably digest it okay. If your ancestors haven’t been eating wheat for thousands of years, then you might want to avoid it–a Vietnamese friend of mine gets stomach aches from eating wheat (especially whole wheat, which contains more of the irritating chemicals from the external part of of the grain, designed to inspire your stomach to pass out the seed within without digesting it). Their ancestors ate rice, not wheat, so this is hardly surprising. (They also are lactose intolerant, since their ancestors did not keep dairy cows.) However, they have no difficulties digesting rice–a food they are adapted to eat.
If you aren’t adapted to wheat, wheat will give you a stomach ache. If wheat gives you a stomach ache, avoid it! But if your ancestors ate wheat and it doesn’t give you a stomach ache, you’ll probably be safe eating it.
It is reasonable to ask whether there are long-term bad effects from eating wheat or drinking milk–some disease that doesn’t kick in until you’re in your 70s, for example, would be difficult to develop adaptations to combat because it kills you after you’ve already had all of your kids. On this count, I would love to see more research.
Also, there may be some people who, like the 20% or so of Europeans who lack lactase persistence, are particularly sensitive to various foods. People with the ApoE4 gene (the “Alzheimer’s Gene”) may benefit from specific dietary modifications.
However, there’s no particular reason to believe that you are all that well-adapted to eating a diet your ancestors haven’t eaten in thousands of years.
The habit of treating culture like some totally independent variable in considering human outcomes is the sort of thinking that makes me want to bang my head on the keyboard. Every time someone says, “[Person] isn’t really [negative trait], they just come from a [negative trait] background that made them act [negative trait],” I want to yell, “Where the hell do you think that background came from? The magical culture fairy?” You get [negative trait] cultures because they are full of people who have those traits. (And they might even think those are positive traits, btw.)
Hilariously, people from highly organized cultures seem compelled to create organizations wherever they go. The converse, unfortunately, is also true.
It is perfectly easy to find people who treat the Constitution with a reverence oddly reminiscent of the way other folks treat the Bible–cultural meme-plexes don’t have to involve deities. It just helps, because, “Wash your hands because God says so,” is more effective than, “Wash your hands because it says so in this document.”
Without a strong sense of ethnicity, religious identity disappears.
This is part 3 of a series on the Rise of Atheism. Parts 1 and 2 are here.
Different religions exist because different cultures exist. (Culture, of course, is just another word for ethnicity.)
There’s not a whole lot of difference between what Jews, Christians, and Muslims officially believe–we’re talking about a couple of prophets and whether or not one guy is the Messiah. Heck, some Jews think/thought Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah, but no one considers these folks not Jewish. Mormons are polytheistic, but they still consider themselves Christian.
There’s no particular reason–theologically speaking–to consider the three separate religions at all. We only do so because the adherents of these religions insist on it. In fact, just try suggesting to a Jew or Muslim that their religion is practically indistinguishable from the other’s and see how they react. While you are at it, try suggesting to a Pakistani that Urdu is actually just a dialect of Hindi.
The big difference between Muslims, Jews, and Christians is that they are different ethnic groups–Muslims marry Muslims, Christians marry Christians, and Jews–actually, Jews are marrying non-Jews at a tremendous rate, but I bet that’s mostly atheist Jews. Religious Jews still favor other Jews.
Catholics marry other Catholics and Lutherans marry other Lutherans under the assumption that there is something that it means to be a Catholic instead of a Lutheran. If you regard Catholics and Lutherans as basically identical, then you have no particular reason to marry one or another or even identify as one or another. You just become a generalized “Christian.” And if you stop seeing much difference between Christians and other god-believing folks, then why bother with that distinction? Aren’t you all just theists?
Next thing you know, you’re attending the Unitarian Universalist church, being preached to by an explicitly atheist minister about the wonders of global harmony. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing.
Note that in the graph a posted a few weeks ago:
Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’
Protestants, Evangelicals, and Catholics have all lost a third to half their members over the generations, but Historically Black Churches have not. Blacks still see themselves as a coherent ethnic group, with strong church affiliation. Whites with some form of ethnic identity also still tend to attend church (or synagogue.) But whites who have effectively lost their ethnic identity do not.
I myself am descended from 12 or 13 different ethnic groups, and have to go back to the early 1700s before I find an immigrant in my family tree. (And since some of my ancestors were Indians, I can take the “American” line back as far as science will let me.) Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some other immigrants in the 1800s, but I haven’t yet–despite a fair amount of research, reading family histories compiled by my grandparents, etc. At this point, the most accurate thing I can say is that my ancestors came from the American South.
Without any strong ethnic identity, people stop identifying with any particular church. And the endpoint of that is atheism.
People go to church because they have kids. It happens almost mechanistically. People go to church when they are little kids, because their parents force them to. Then they move out of the house and stop attending–even the devout ones. A decade later or so, they have kids of their own and start feeling the yearn for some sort of religion in their childrens’ lives–something to teach their kids the ethical norms, values, and traditions of their culture–and so they head back to the church of their childhood.
Remember, religion isn’t just a bunch of factual statements about god. If it were that, there wouldn’t be a lot to say. It’s not something people logically believe, because if they did, the children of Muslims in Pakistan would be just as likely to turn out Christian as Muslim. Religion is about culture/ethnicity–it’s a specific subset of culture/ethnicity that happens to sometimes involve a deity. That is, Pakistanis like Allah just like Finns like Deathmetal.
People want to teach their kids to be good people, to be good members of their communities and follow the values of their ancestors, and this is where religion comes in. People go to church specifically for the purpose of getting someone else to spend half an hour trying to cram civilization into their kids teach their children morality, culture, etc. Heck, we even invent extra deities (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny,) to reward and punish children, just to get them to behave.
The fewer children people have, the less need they feel for church. People who have no children have little need for it at all–after their period of non-church attendance as young adults, they will most likely continue not attending church for the rest of their lives. People with one kid feel some slight need for church, but can survive without it. People with multiple children are eager to send them off to Sunday school for a half hour while they go enjoy the relative peace and quiet of a nice little worship service.
But with birthrates dwindling, smaller households become increasingly atheistic over the generations.
Of course, you may object that there is an obvious causality in the other direction–some religions are explicitly natalist. Mormons, Hasidic Jews, Quiverfull Christians, and Muslims come immediately to mind. However, these groups are a minority among Americans; they can’t explain the overall tendency of religious Americans to have more children. Thus, it seems more likely to me that either the kinds of people who want lots of children also happen to be the kind of people who want to go to church, or that having lots of children actually drives people to go to church.
Stay tuned for Part 3, Religious Identity is Ethnic Identity.
